Literature and the Apotheosis of the Soul

Books have been under assault for a long time. Mass media and television, as Ray Bradbury imagined with dystopian prophecy, was just getting the fire started. Then came the litany of anti-Western critical theories that stormed the universities between the 1960s and 1980s. Now, with the advent of the social media age, why bother reading books at all when dancing and posting pictures online is time better spent instead of journeying through the heart and soul with dead people one has never even heard of? We should read precisely because literature is the great window into the soul, and perhaps none better than Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.

Part of the great richness of our cultural patrimony is literature as a pilgrimage and spiritual, or moral, apotheosis. It goes back to Homer whose Iliad and Odyssey are quintessential pilgrimages of different types. The Iliad concerns itself with the moral metamorphosis of Achilles from rageful killer to forgiving lover. It is an internal transformation with external ramifications. Homer, after all, ended the Iliad on a note of peace—a peace forged by the loving forgiveness Achilles extended Priam. The Odyssey, by contrast, is the more recognizable physical pilgrimage, the journey of Odysseus from his enslavement by Calypso to homestead and filial reunion with Penelope and Telemachus. But both epics have an unmistakable apotheotic character to them and they can both easily be classified as pilgrimages.

The Bible, too, as Christianity has passed down to us, is a book about the pilgrimage of humanity. In its entirety, the Bible is the pilgrimage of the human soul—captive in its bondage to sin and oppression to its transfiguration and liberation in Christ and entry into Paradise and New Life. The Bible is, as such, the very tree of life that touches almost all subsequent Western literature with its themes of sin, transformation, and redemption. That is what ultimately sets the biblical apotheotic tradition apart from the Greek and Roman tradition; Achilles may experience a metamorphosis and Odysseus may find a home, but they will still die and not experience the fragrance of the New Jerusalem though the Christian might see traces of that truth in Achilles and Odysseus through the revelation given by Christ.

Perhaps the most recognizable of apotheotic literature is St. Augustine’s Confessions. The opening lines of Augustine’s spiritual masterpiece informs the reader what the work is about. Confessing to God, Augustine says “You made us for Yourself…Our heart is restless until it rests in Thee.” The reader then follows alongside Augustine, from boyhood to adulthood, as he grows through his spiritual journey, a pilgrimage that takes him from Thagaste to Carthage, and from Carthage to Rome, Milan, Ostia, and back to North Africa. But as Augustine journeys physically, he also journeys morally and spiritually. Augustine’s apotheosis is not a singular moment, it is a work in progress—though we witness two spectacular apotheotic moments, namely in Milan and at Ostia. What Augustine brought to highest fruition is the idea of journey as progressive illumination and progressive improvement. It does not happen all at once, it unfolds—in time and place—and continues to do so until we find that felicitous rest in the New Jerusalem.

Love is the great theme of all great literature. Achilles learns love over the course of the Iliad. Love drives Odysseus to reunite with his family. God’s love sparked creation and that love was so tremendous that He gave His only Son to the world. Augustine’s restless heart burned for love, and slowly—painfully, laboriously—was transformed by love. Out of the crackling and hissing cauldron of loneliness and into the arms of his tender and loving mother by the autobiographical end. Such literature has stood the test of time because it is timeless, since God is Love and God exists outside of time, Love is timeless.

I have always loved Russian literature since being exposed to it in high school. There is a poignant humanism and realism to Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Pasternak that find few rivals elsewhere—though I think John Steinbeck comes close. I may not have understood the depth of Crime and Punishment in eleventh grade when I first read that masterpiece of the soul, but now I more visibly realize why I was so struck by the work as a teenager.

Raskolnikov, as we know, is a poor—bordering on destitute—university dropout. Burning in the hissing cesspool of St. Petersburg we immediately learn of his plight. His landlady is trying to kick him out of his shabby little room because he can’t pay his rent and he turns to a female pawnbroker, Aliona, in his desperation.

Yet we also witness the oscillation of Raskolnikov, the two sides of his nature, as we rapidly churn through the twists and turns of Raskolnikov’s soul as he moves toward murder. When he meets the drunkard Marmeladov and escorts him home to his wife and children, Katherine Marmeladova flies into a rage; Raskolnikov ducks out, but not before leaving what little money he has for the Marmeladova family. Raskolnikov has pity and compassion; that compassionate side of his nature is also revealed to us during his dream of the mob killing the exhausted horse when he was a child before murdering Aliona—a moment that also foreshadows the spirit of death and its wrestling match against compassion and pity.

The letter he receives from his mother is important for setting the stage of Raskolnikov’s journey. Love is the great theme of the letter. Pulcheria loves her son. As does Dunia. As the letter reveals, Dunia has decided to marry into wealth to support her struggling family. Her love causes her to give herself unto others. (As does another young woman whom Raskolnikov is to meet.)

Pulcheria ends the letter by talking about unbelief and prayer; she fears that Raskolnikov has fallen into unbelief and she exhorts him to return to prayers, prayers and the imagery of prayer that reminds her of a happier time. Love and faith are tied to happiness. Distress and unbelief, with misery—and, as we quickly learn by Raskolnikov’s actions, death. The great commandment, “Thou shall not murder,” is broken when Raskolnikov believes himself able to take the step into transcendence through violence, rather than transcendence through suffering love. When Raskolnikov kills Aliona and Lizaveta, the dark side of his soul is revealed; it stands in stark contrast to the compassionate side of his soul we previously became acquainted with through his anonymously helping the Marmeladov family and his dream about the dying horse.

The twists and turns of Raskolnikov come through his dreams, psychological torment, and interactions with others. One of the chief moments of the odyssey of Raskolnikov’s soul is in the first interrogation by Inspector Porfiry Petrovich, and when cornered by Porfiry Raskolnikov declares the startling horror of the new man—the great man, modern man—with respect to crime as reflected upon in an article he wrote several months back. The great man is exempt from the moral order because his actions help inaugurate the New Jerusalem, not brought forth by love but by naked power and, in this specific case, criminality—transgression of the moral law for the sake of others. How modern.

There is, of course, a demonic nature to Raskolnikov’s sophistry. He affirms religious ideals for irreligious ends. Porfiry asks, “So you still believe the New Jerusalem?” Raskolnikov gives a cold answer, “I believe.” Except he doesn’t. The New Jerusalem of Raskolnikov, and all the revolutionary great men and intellectuals he attempts to emulate, is a phantasmagoria of his own lust and rationalization. Power takes Raskolnikov into the illusory world that permits anything. Love takes Raskolnikov down the path to real people and witnesses the redemptive allure of suffering.

Christ taught humanity to love their neighbor. Love, as we all know, is difficult. The difficulty of love is precisely why Christ taught what he did. It is much easier to hate than to love, and much easier today to claim love as the veil for one’s hatred. Violence is also the easy road—as so many think, as Raskolnikov did—to solving our problems. But it doesn’t; violence only makes things worse and creates new problems.

Raskolnikov’s story is another triumphant entry into the literature of spiritual and moral apotheosis. Raskolnikov is torn between love and power, the quintessential themes that have long merited extensive discussion by all serious writers and intellectuals. Violence is the path of power. Suffering, the path of love. Raskolnikov suffers. But he has also committed violence. He is split apart by these two forces warring against his soul. Will the violence of power bring the transcendent deliverance he seeks?

Rebirth never occurs alone. It always entails the other. Augustine was not truly reborn in the Garden of Milan. He was alone. Augustine’s true apotheosis is where his autobiography ends: In Ostia when he has a glimpse of the Beatific Vision with his mother, Monica, in his arms. Likewise, Achilles’s metamorphosis is in the arms of Priam as they weep together in love. Odysseus, so alone throughout the Odyssey, makes his way home to Penelope and Telemachus.

Raskolnikov is metaphysically dead. Sonia is alive. Raskolnikov, overcome with the guilt of his crime, prostrates himself before Sonia, weeping, and pleads to have her read the story of the resurrection of Lazarus in the Gospel of St. John. Raskolnikov, who has oscillated between affirming his belief in new life and the New Jerusalem, in this moment admits his unbelief in a moment of honesty. He affirms the secular god: “Freedom and power, but the main thing is power!” Sonia, of course, recoils in horror and terror.

But this moment serves as Raskolnikov’s rebirth. Sonia is the paragon of suffering love. And love will resurrect Raskolnikov and lead him out of the dead-end road of violence, power, and death.

Raskolnikov eventually confesses his crime. The long and painful journey of Raskolnikov comes to end, not alone and in a tomb of death, but with another and in a room of life and love. In Crime and Punishment, we witness the long journey of Raskolnikov’s soul out of the dead-end path of power and violence and onto the life-giving road of love and happiness with others. As Dostoevsky writes, “He loved her infinitely. At long last the moment had come…Tears came. They were both pale and thin; yet in those pale, sickly faces there already glowed the light of the renewed future, resurrection to a new life. Love resurrected them; the heart of one contained infinite sources of life for the heart of the other. They resolved to wait and be patient. There were seven years to go; and until then how much unbearable pain, what infinite happiness! He knew he was born again.”

We read not merely to discover ourselves, we read to save ourselves. Like our heroes and heroines of literature, we find ourselves in a cosmos of rage, resentment, and violence leading to death and destruction. But the story doesn’t end there. There is another cosmos, our great wellspring of culture and literature informs us, offering the waters of new birth.

The assault against our great literature is the rejection of that cosmos dreamt of by Homer, revealed by Christ, and written about by everyone from Augustine to Dante to Dostoevsky. The modern vandal rejects the possibility of our soul’s apotheosis and the redemption of the yearning human heart, and in its place exposits the same ideology that had driven Raskolnikov to commit murder. “Freedom and power, but the main thing is power!” No wonder our world is now bereft of the greater horizon sung of by poets and writers for three millennia.

Conversio, conversion, means reorientation. Raskolnikov was oriented down the path of power and violence. It took love and wisdom incarnate, in the person of Sonia, to help reorient Raskolnikov back onto the path of love and redemption. After all, in Raskolnikov’s conversion—his reorientation—he reaches for the New Testament, the Book of Life.

Raskolnikov’s conversion doesn’t come without pain and punishment. He is constantly tormented through his conversion moment and still punished after he confesses his crime. Yet the new life that awaits him on the other side of the cell is a life of love and happiness, the life that the human soul—and heart—restlessly seeks and seldom finds but remains the enduring theme of “the best that has been said, thought, written, and otherwise expressed about the human experience.” That is why we read and why reading is as important as ever. And this is why a knowledge of the Bible is indispensable to the reading of great works of literature.

Print