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Tolerance and the Persecution-Resentment Dynamic: René Girard and Dostoevsky

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The Crisis of Contemporary Liberal Tolerance

The necessity of toleration as a prudent practice is pressingly obvious in world increasingly characterized by the tense proximity of diverse religious cultures, not only within the “global community” but within the same neighborhood. While liberal democracies have their panoply of legal weapons (for instance, “hate crime” laws) for enforcing the toleration of differences, legislation is always a blunt and limited instrument, in need of supplementation. Contemporary liberal political thought wants, justifiably, to associate the practice of tolerance (or “toleration”) with an inner attitude and corresponding set of habitual practices that would strengthen it, with the virtue of “tolerance.” Yet although it might be considered the cornerstone of modern liberalism, tolerance is at the same time an elusive sort of virtue, which becomes all too evident from any survey of contemporary liberal thought on the subject. The most thoughtful liberal discourse itself is well aware of the theoretical weakness of its own concept of tolerance. As Allan Levine acknowledges: “Toleration is a cornerstone of liberalism … and in general is the predominant ethos of all moral civilizations in the modern world….The problem is that while toleration has never been more widely applied than in the Western world today, the traditional grounds upon which it has been defended are becoming difficult to justify philosophically.”[1] A survey of the current liberal discussion about tolerance yields a striking incongruity: on one hand, the sense of urgency about getting tolerance right if liberal democracy (and therefore civilization) is to survive in a world increasingly given over to a potentially fractious pluralism; and on the other hand, the highly abstract, inconclusive nature of the discussion. It seems rather like Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

In order to avoid losing my own way in abstractions in this reflection on tolerance, I will simplify (without, I hope, oversimplifying) the question by focusing on what seems most fundamentally to be at stake. I conceive the question generally as one of how we treat each other when we are faced with religious difference. (I emphasize religious because that is the most pressing of the differences that now animate the discourse about multiculturalism, and because the modern notion of tolerance itself was always in its origins primarily about religion.) To conceive the question of tolerance more specifically: it is about refraining from responding to religious difference by coercion or persecution within a context of unequal power.

Framing the question of tolerance in close relation to persecution actually reaches back to the original sources of modern liberalism. Early liberal philosophers such as Locke and Rousseau developed their arguments for tolerance out of their concerns about persecution; Rousseau, for instance, expressed the heart of the matter in this way: “Religion never arouses disturbances in a State except when the dominant party wants to torment the weak party, or when the weak party, intolerant by principle, cannot live in peace with anyone at all.”[2] It is important to note also that the inclination to persecution is not blamed on religious faith itself—both Locke and Rousseau regarded Christianity as essentially non-violent[3]—but on human passions that become associated with religious faith without being its origin. Locke identified this passion as dominandi libidine (the desire to dominate), Rousseau as amour-propre (prideful self-love).[4] The emphasis might differ slightly, but the fundamental insight is the same: the problem of religious violence is not a problem of religion in itself but of human passion intensified, while often being masked, by religion. The insistence of both Locke and Rousseau on separating the religious from the political, the church from the state, was a prophylactic measure designed to keep the potential persecutors and their passions as far away as possible from the political instruments of power and violence

 If “persecution” seems too extreme a word to be used now, in late modernity, it should be kept in mind that coercion need not always involve physical violence, that coercion and indeed violence itself can take a variety of forms (some far more subtle than inquisitions and burnings of heretics). If tolerance as refraining from persecution seems too minimal a way of expressing the virtue, it can be pointed out that it would be too minimal only if we have already gone beyond the need for such a virtue. But I am not convinced that even our enlightened liberal society has “gone beyond” the temptation to persecution, given the real possibility (as René Girard has impressed upon us) that every historical society we know of relies on a persecution mechanism, whether its existence is acknowledged or not. Finally, if tolerance as refraining from persecution of what is different seems too negative a definition, I would argue that the more positive-sounding definition of tolerance as the acceptance of difference is finally implied in the former; one will voluntarily not persecute others precisely because one accepts—one could also say “respects” or even “loves” (in the agapic sense)—others in their difference. Such acceptance, respect, or love must, however, be a long way in its realism from the celebration of difference for its own sake that is encouraged by the more naïve apologists for multiculturalism.

In the light of the framing of the question of tolerance I have just proposed, what is most striking about the contemporary liberal discussion (even as compared with early liberals such as Locke and Rousseau) is the absence of any convincing diagnosis of the human inclination to persecute others, and any convincing prescription for overcoming this inclination. Just how flimsy a weapon the liberal concept of tolerance proves to be against the contemporary threat of religious violence is nicely captured by Ian Buruma’s description of liberal democratic Holland’s encounter with revolutionary Islam in the murder of Theo van Gogh; especially his account, for instance, of the ironic spectacle of some Dutch Muslims accusing the government of cowardice in failing to defend vigorously enough the values of the Enlightenment.[5] Although we can likely expect a growth of such “Enlightenment fundamentalism” in response to religious violence, we might also hope for something like the opposite and more thoughtful response: that given the elusive nature of the modern liberal virtue of tolerance, there will be some concerted effort to seek support, perhaps in theory and certainly in practice, for this virtue by looking outside the presuppositions of modernity itself, to the very religious traditions that are at issue. But standing in the way of this possibility is the liberal story of the origins of tolerance, according to which it is precisely the solution to the problem of violence engendered by religion. Contemporary liberal discourse (with very few exceptions) takes for granted a dramatic story about the past in which the leading character is the “Wars of Religion.” Here is theologian William Cavanaugh’s summary of the story: “The story is a simple one. When the religious consensus of civil society was shattered by the Reformation, the passions excited by religion as such were loosed, and Catholics and newly minted Protestants began killing each other in the name of doctrinal loyalties. ‘Transubstantiation, I say!’ shouts the Catholic, jabbing his pike at the Lutheran heretic. ‘Consubstantiation, damn you!’ responds the Lutheran, firing a volley of lead at the papist deviant.”[6] The same historical story, expressed only slightly more judiciously, informs the commentary of eminent liberal theorists, such as Judith Shklar: “Liberalism … was born out of the cruelties of the religious civil wars, which forever rendered the claims of Christian charity a rebuke to all religious institutions and parties”; or Michael Walzer: “The point of separating church and state in the modern regimes is to deny political power to all religious authorities on the realistic assumption that all of them are at least potentially intolerant.”[7]

Is there room for subjecting the typical liberal story of the Wars of Religion to some correction in the interest of giving a real hearing to Christian theology in the public discourse about how to think and practice tolerance? William Cavanaugh’s intention is to show that the story is a fable, not only because political and economic motives also played a huge role, but because “what was at issue in these wars was the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance.”[8] Cavanaugh’s provocative revisionism has the great strength of focusing attention on the early liberal agenda of subordinating the religious to the political by separating them entirely, according to the highly dubious argument that the Church should be exclusively concerned with the “other world,” while what happens in this world is the concern of the State. Its weakness, however, is that it glosses over the undeniable element of truth in the liberal story: Christianity did act as a persecuting religion—even if less often and less directly than the popularly accepted story (“less” in these matters is still too much)—not only during the Reformation era but long before (in the extermination of the Cathars, to cite one of the most egregious instances).

Christians today can be forgiven for pointing out that their mea culpa in regard to the past has been expressed often enough. Nevertheless, it is still worth noting that there is an enormous difference between regretting the persecutory violence of “Constantinian” Christianity and really understanding what is to be learned from it in a way that will enable Christianity to contribute to the discussion about tolerance on its own terms rather than in pale imitation of the liberal approach.   

In the midst of our current crisis of actual and threatened religious violence, liberalism has deprived itself of those resources that might be available in religious teachings and practices for overcoming the human passions of pride and power that result in violence, preferring instead to rely on the limited violence of the state to control the threat of greater violence. This is to join in the oldest game of all, the attempted expulsion of power by means of power, or in the words of René Girard the attempted “satanic expulsion of Satan.”[9] 

The Possibility of a Religious Basis for Religious Tolerance: René Girard

I quote Girard above in acknowledgement of the indispensable insight that his thought offers on the current crisis of the liberal virtue of tolerance. To those who see that it is now well past time to revisit the question of the possibility of a religious basis for religious tolerance, Girard’s thought is a welcome opportunity.

While Girard has undertaken the daring enterprise of restoring tolerance to what he considers its originary Biblical roots, this is not to say that his argument is entirely incompatible with Enlightenment liberalism. Indeed, there are some important affinities. Girard, too, interprets the problem of tolerance as one that must be approached within the context of violent persecution so as not to lose itself in abstraction. His emphasis on the “true principle of demystification” of violence being stated most fully in one religious tradition—the Christian[10]—is at least in accord with the view of Locke and Rousseau that “true” Christianity rejects violence. And his claim that a social scientific vindication of the Biblical insight into violence is demonstrably possible reflects his sharing of the Enlightenment commitment to the persuasive power of rational thought. Yet another significant point of affinity between Girard and Enlightenment liberal thought is his commitment to criticism, in Foucault’s terms, to the critique of “mechanisms of power that appeal to a truth.”[11] A vindication and reaffirmation of religious tradition which fails to acknowledge any value in the Enlightenment critique of religious dogmatism runs the risk of making another Enlightenment both necessary and welcome. Can a vindication of the “intellectual power” of the western religious tradition be at the same time sufficiently critical of that tradition? Girard’s critique of the sacrificial reading of the Gospel that has dominated the Christian tradition reflects a profound awareness that any “recovery of the theological”[12] must at the same entail a rethinking of Christianity to its very roots. He does not evade the requirement that a Christian critique of the Enlightenment must be made from the standpoint of a Christianity that has fully addressed the contradiction between its teaching of love and its practice of violence. Girard might be rejecting “the whole post-Enlightenment culture of naïve contempt for our Judeo-Christian heritage,” but he is doing it in a way that only that intellectual culture would appreciate (that is, if it speaks honestly about its aims and methods).[13]

The final point of agreement between Girard and Enlightenment liberal thinkers such as Rousseau, and the point on which I will now focus, is that the problem of religious violence is primarily a problem of human passion, for which religion acts secondarily as a vehicle (and Girard would add, also as a control). Placed side-by-side, however, it seems clear that Girard’s work offers a far more complete account of the interrelations among human passion, religion and violence than is to be found in the political psychology of liberal thought.

At the heart of Girard’s account of religious persecution is his analysis of the “scapegoating” or “victimage” mechanism operating in all human societies. Since this analysis is developed largely out of his remarkable exegesis of texts, sacred and literary, it would be fitting to outline its main elements with reference to his interpretation of two contrasting ancient texts concerned with the stoning of an innocent victim: one from the Life of Apollonius of Tyana by a second-century pagan Greek writer, Flavius Philostratus; the other from the Gospel of John (8:3-11).[14]

The stoning in the first story is set within the context of the “miracle” of healing performed by Apollonius in the plague-stricken city of Ephesus . The Ephesians, who have tried various remedies to combat the plague turn in desperation to Apollonius, who leads the entire populace of the city to theatre, where he happens upon an old beggar, who had “ragged clothing and a grizzled face,” and who seems to be blind, “craftily blinking his eyes” Here is Philostratus’ account of what then transpires:

Apollonius made the Ephesians encircle the man, and said, “Stone this accursed wretch, but first collect as many stone as possible.” The Ephesians were puzzled by his meaning and shocked at the thought of killing someone who was a visitor and so destitute, and who was pleading with them, and saying such pitiable things. But Apollonius was relentless, urging the Ephesians to crush him without pity. Some of them began to lob stones at him when, after seeming to blink, he suddenly glared and showed his eyes full of fire. The Ephesians realized it was a demon and stoned it so thoroughly as to raise a pile of stones on it.

After a while Apollonius told them to remove the stones and see what animal they had killed. When the supposed target of their stones was uncovered, he had vanished, and instead there appeared a dog, like some Molossian hound in shape but the size of the largest lion, crushed by the stones and spewing foam as maniacs do. The statue of the Averter, who is Hercules, stands near the spot where the phantom was stoned.[15]

Indeed, a strange and, as Girard notes, a “horrible” miracle! This text enjoys only a minor status among classical writings, but it offers one of the most unconcealed examples of what we now recognize as “persecution texts.” Two millennia of Biblical impact on our culture have taught us to focus, unlike the text’s author, on the blind beggar as a probable victim rather than a demon. The act of stoning is especially emblematic of the persecution of difference, and this short account by Philostratus illustrates the essential elements of Girard’s analysis of the persecution mechanism. Let us rehearse these briefly. 1) There is, first, the presence of the plague, which Girard interprets as a term of convenience in such texts, standing for any number of possible social problems, not excluding medical ones entirely, but all of which betray an unmanageable crisis of social order. The roots of the crises of order to which human societies are prone lie in the conflict generated by mimetic desire—desire “learned” or “borrowed” by the imitation of models (virtually all desire, according to Girard, which is not attributable to basic biological instinct). When the imitated models become obstacle-rivals to the acquisition of the objects of desire, a situation made inevitable both by the mutually reinforcing dynamics of the model-imitator relationship and by the fact of scarcity, rivalrous conflict ensues. When the competition “spreads” beyond a few to engulf an entire group in a competitive tension, the situation of social “scandal” becomes a potentially deadly war of “all against all.”

 2) This brings us to the second main element of Girard’s analysis: the great discovery of which Apollonius avails himself, but which predates him by millennia, going back to the very origins of human culture, that the potential for violence in the crisis of “all against all” can be averted, or better, “vented,” by transforming the situation into “all against one.”  It is a matter of “letting off steam” through directing the overt or underlying violence against a “scapegoat.” As in the original Biblical account (Leviticus 16) of the goat selected during the festival of Atonement to bear away through banishment or death the sins of the entire nation of Israel , the individual or group selected for persecution bears away the violence infecting an entire society. In this case, the scapegoat is a blind beggar and a foreigner; in other cases, it could be anyone at hand who stands out from the social norm, who is made different by extreme poverty (or extreme wealth), by religion, ethnicity or race, disability, and so on. Girard identifies two essential though more often than not coincident moments in the scapegoating process: the selection of the victim and the “demonization” of the victim, usually through accusations of unspeakable crimes—such as parricide, infanticide, incest, cannibalism, blasphemy—that strike at the heart of social order. In this case, the demonization is literally on the surface, as the Ephesians recognize that the blind beggar is really a demon because of the fiery look he gives them once they start throwing the stones. Indeed, he also morphs into a “wild animal” resembling a mad dog or a lion—anything but a human being.

This ancient Ephesian episode, illuminated by Girard’s reading, points us to the heart of the problem of religious intolerance: the existence in human societies, ancient and modern, of a mechanism of persecution as a response to social crises, which operates by the selection and demonization of innocent individuals or groups on the basis of difference.   

Let us now consider the contrasting story in the Gospel of John (8: 1-11), the story of the woman “taken in adultery” and brought before Jesus by the “scribes and Pharisees” as a sort of elaborate test of his orthodoxy: will he support the Mosaic Law against adultery, punishable by stoning? Here is John’s account of Jesus’ response to the situation: “Jesus bent down and wrote with his finger on the ground. When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them, ‘Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.’ And once again he bent down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they went away, one by one, beginning with the elders; and Jesus was left alone with the woman standing before him.” (NRSV)

It is obvious why Girard regards the Gospel text as a counter to the Philostratus text. In the latter, Apollonius makes great efforts (successful) to bring about a stoning, “urging the Ephesians to crush him without pity,” while in the former, Jesus strives (also successfully) to stop a stoning. The story of the adulterous woman is one of many instances in the Bible (both Hebrew and Christian) identified by Girard as examples of a Biblical defense of innocent victims against the persecution mechanism that crushes or threatens to crush them. The Biblical exposure and condemnation of a scapegoating mechanism often well-concealed beneath religious pieties and “reasons of state” (for instance, Caiaphas’ “it is expedient that one man should die for the people”) achieves its culmination in the Gospel accounts of the persecution and execution of Jesus himself. In his exegesis of the Passion and Crucifixion accounts in the Gospels, Girard makes it abundantly clear, as no other modern writer I know of (with the possible exception of Tolstoy), why Christianity betrays itself utterly whenever it participates in the same violent mechanism that victimized Jesus. And he understands such participation to be exemplified not only in the obvious practical episodes of Christian history—the crusades, suppression of heresies, “wars of religion”—but also in the sort of theological doctrines of atonement that, ironically, endorse Caiaphas’ statement.[16]

In his exegesis of the two texts under discussion, Girard’s particular focus is on the decisive moment of the first stone, recognized by both Philostratus-Apollonius and John-Jesus as decisive in precipitating or defusing violent persecution. He notes that the first stone could not have been thrown by the Ephesians were it not for the demonization that transforms the beggar into a scapegoat. However, he does not explore further the dynamics of this crucial demonization, beyond noting that in the fiery look of the beggar which confirms his demonic status, the crowd is actually seeing its own anger mirrored as defiance.

Let us reflect further on this all-important look, on how it is perceived by the crowd and what it might actually reveal. It is with this look that the beggar actually enters into the persecutory situation as something more than a passive object of selection. To note this engagement of the beggar in the situation is not in any way to question his fundamental innocence of any crimes (such as being a demon responsible for the plague) imputed to him by the scapegoating crowd. It is merely to emphasize that the persecutory situation involves both persecutors and victims, locked in a dance of demonization and being-demonized—with all the consequences attendant upon the latter experience, especially the feeling of resentment. The ensuing dance is mutual in the sense that the dynamic can move back and forth in a perpetual interplay of mirroring, projection and transference. For instance, the persecutor does perceive in the look of the persecuted his own anger, as Girard notes—but I would add that he likely perceives also a real anger (or more precisely, a smoldering resentment) actually there, a resentment which if ever acted on would make the persecutor a victim; while the persecuted, who has been demonized quite naturally demonizes his tormentors in turn, thereby adding fuel to his already justifiable resentment, which cannot be entirely concealed behind his look.  

The Literary Revelation of the Dynamic of Persecution: Dostoevsky

Girard has often acknowledged the indebtedness of his theory of the essentially imitative nature of the self and its desires to his reading of Dostoevsky, whom he considers “the greatest modern revealer of [mediated] desire.”[17] Dostoevsky does not (rather surprisingly) play so prominent a role in Girard’s later analysis of the victimage mechanism that arises from mimetic desire, though this, too, is a pervasive thematic in all his great novels. Indeed, we find in Dostoevsky’s art also stoning episodes, which play a key symbolic role in the novels where they are found. In The Idiot, Prince Myshkin is pelted with stones by a band of schoolchildren when he intervenes to protect an impoverished young woman, Marie, who has become the target of an entire village’s censure (including the pastor who preaches against her) because she has been seduced by a “French traveling salesman” (an echo of the “woman taken in adultery”?). Another stoning episode occurs in The Brothers Karamazov, when Alyosha intervenes to stop a band of schoolchildren from throwing stones at one of their classmates, Ilyusha, who has become their target in large part because his father, the drunken “retired Captain Snegiryov,” has been publicly humiliated. The symbolic weight of such stoning episodes becomes obvious when one considers that Myshkin, who is the “idiot” of the novel’s title, and Alyosha, who is introduced by the narrator as the “hero” of The Brothers Karamazov, are both represented as imitators of Christ in a world given over to violence.

What happens to and especially within the victims of persecution—the Ilyushas and Snegiryovs of the world—is one of Dostoevsky’s special themes. In order to further our understanding of dynamic of persecution, it is therefore worth our while to reflect at some length on the revelation of the victim in his work.

Girard’s demystifying analysis of the persecution mechanism points us towards a double dynamic: the failure of the persecutor to perceive the victim as fully human and the reality of what is transpiring within the victim. It is my view that the literary art of Dostoevsky can take us yet further in the direction pointed out by Girard, by meeting two needs. 1) First, the need for a way of correcting the perception of the persecutor (and we must remember that for Girard the persecutor is potentially any one of us) through encouraging an act of imaginative empathy for the different other, which counters the tendency to demonize. Is Christ not trying to evoke such imaginative empathy when he says “let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw the stone,” thereby compelling the crowd to recognize their common bond of imperfect humanity with the adulterous woman? Bringing about imaginative empathy, or what I would also call an “enlivening of perception” is the special province of literature—and indeed, if Dostoevsky is to be believed,  the modern secular novel in particular, which has taken over the Biblical defense of the victim through its concern with  “raising the lowly.”[18] Great literature can accomplish this needed enlivening of perception by actually showing us what is in the soul of the victim. And there is yet more: as we shall see, Dostoevsky’s understanding of literature’s task of “raising the lowly” addressed also the other side of the dynamic, and therefore the need 2) to correct the perception of the victim, or more suitably, to point the way to the overcoming of the victim’s resentment.

While both 1) and 2) were of great concern to Dostoevsky, the weight of his analysis falls on the resentment of the victim rather than on the perception of the persecutor. This is not, it cannot be overemphasized, because the victim is to blame, but because the possibility of truly perceiving the victim depends on what is actually taking place within the victim, and also because the victim is the key to any possibility of breaking apart what I have called the “double dynamic” of demonizing perception and vengeful resentment.

It is imperative to begin by dissociating Dostoevsky’s revelation from the all too common tendency in contemporary culture to sentimentalize the victim. Dostoevsky avoids sentimentalization by giving due weight to the real force of resentment and the way that it can come to define the victim’s inner life. If we are going to dwell for a moment on this question of the victim’s resentment, we might as well do so under the direction of Nietzsche, who has come to be generally regarded as the preeminent revealer of ressentiment (he himself preferred to use the French word, as more subtly conveying the notion of a reaction frequently lacking a direct or immediate outlet).

Nietzsche had the intellectual honesty to draw out clearly the implications of his teaching that there are no moral phenomena, only moral interpretations of phenomena. Here is his account of what we should perceive when we encounter the phenomenon of the oppressed victim and that victim’s claim to dignity:

When the oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: “let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good … who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like us, the patient, humble, and just”—this, listened to calmly and without previous bias, really amounts to no more than: “we weak ones are, after all, weak; it would be good if we did nothing for which we are not strong enough”.... They are miserable, no doubt of it, all these mutterers and nook counterfeiters, although they crouch warmly together—but they tell me their misery is a sign of being chosen by God; one beats the dogs one likes best…. Attend to them! These cellar rodents full of vengefulness and hatred—what have they made of revenge and hatred? Have you heard these words uttered? If you trusted simply to their words, would you suspect you were among men of ressentiment?... “We good men—we are the just—what they desire they call not retaliation, but ‘the triumph of justice’; what they hate is not their enemy, no! They hate ‘injustice,’ they hate ‘godlessness’; what they believe in and hope for is not the hope of revenge (--‘sweeter than honey’ Homer called it), but the victory of God, of the just God, over the godless… [19]

 Nietzsche doubtless learned much about the revenge of victims from his careful reading of Dostoevsky (especially Notes from Underground), whom he acknowledged as the only “psychologist” who had taught him anything significant. For Nietzsche, the impulse to revenge is not a choice of mood but the almost inevitable reaction of the whole being to a situation of dominance or “violation” by a stronger power. The reaction might sometimes be direct, in the form of a violent deed, but given the superiority of the dominating power and therefore the dire consequences of direct defiance, the more usual reaction is indirect, a suppressing and turning inward of the desire to retaliate; this is “the ressentiment of natures that are denied the true reaction, that of deeds, and compensate themselves with an imaginary revenge. It is at this point that ressentiment can become creative and, here also Nietzsche’s own psychological analysis becomes a more interesting tool of historical-cultural interpretation, as he develops a “genealogy” of the entire Judeao-Christian moral tradition, exposing it as a ressentiment-driven morality of the former slaves of the Roman Empire . Indeed, in his hands, the explanatory force of ressentiment goes beyond the moral into the metaphysical, as he interprets all philosophical-religious (for instance, Platonic/Judeao-Christian/Kantian) notions of “a higher reality,” the “beyond,” “timeless eternal” as an elaborate taking of revenge on temporal life itself by those who have suffered from it. To apply Nietzsche’s analysis to this reflection directly, insofar as the virtue of tolerance (whether religious or secular) is inseparable from a concern for the victims of historical power, it belongs to the “slave morality” of ressentiment.  

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche invites the reader who wants to understand how moral “ideals are made on earth” to enter with him into the “corners” and “nooks” inhabited by the victims of history.[20]  However, he himself does not stay there very long (crying “enough!” after a few paragraphs)—perhaps his disdain is too great? Our truly committed guide into this world of victims is Dostoevsky, who knew everything Nietzsche knew about ressentiment…and perhaps more.

            Like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky knew that the violent cycle of oppression and resentment pervades human life. His art can be read as an incredibly rich series of variations on a scene he witnessed and never forgot when he was a youth on his way from Moscow to university in St. Petersburg: at a rest stop for horses along the route, a government courier arrived in great haste, went into the inn, quickly downed  some vodka while the horses were changed, jumped back into his seat beside the peasant-driver—and then repeatedly beat the driver on the back of the neck to urge him on, while the driver, to the same violent rhythm, brought his whip down on the backs of the horses.

Like Nietzsche, Dostoevsky knew that the resentment rendered inevitable by the relations of dominance and subjugation throughout human reality can manifest itself a) in the active deed of violence or b) in imaginary revenge.

a) His exploration of the former has left us with what probably remains the most penetrating study we have of the phenomenon of revolutionary terrorism. The tendency of Locke and Rousseau to rely on the limited violence of the state to control the violence of persecution (the “satanic expulsion of Satan”) has already been noted. What was not discussed, however, was the flip side of state-controlled violence—the violence of terrorism. From the perspective of the victims the power of the state is generally in the hands of the victimizers, and indeed Rousseau himself validated this sense of things in his account of the historical origins of all actual states (as distinct from the ideal state of the general will). Therefore, if violence is to be wielded against persecution it must be wielded by the persecuted themselves; in this logic, we have the political motivation for revolutionary terrorism. The psycho-spiritual motivation is a rather different matter, and here Dostoevsky’s expertise is pre-eminent. In his discussion of the “revolutionary fantasies” of Mohammed Bouyeri, who murdered Theo van Gogh in the name of Islam, Ian Buruma remarks that such “confused and very resentful young men” can be found in the novels of Dostoevsky; and he asks what turned Mohammed into such a character.[21] The answer is still there, to be gleaned from the careful reading of novels such as Demons and The Brothers Karamazov.

What Dostoevsky discovered about these “very resentful” young people is that whether the particular political ideology is revolutionary socialism (as in Demons) or revolutionary Islam, the politics is ancillary to a motivation that is fundamentally spiritual. According to Dostoevsky’s analysis, these young people are not motivated by calculating self-interest, laziness or cowardice, for then they would be easily tamed. They often possess, on the contrary, a nobility of spirit that makes them especially sensitive to injustice and suffering. But their sensitivity to injustice leads them to cut themselves off from the world rather than enter into it; their rejection of persecution becomes a rejection of the world and eventually of life itself. This movement from a “no” to injustice (a “no” on behalf of others and of life) to a “no” to life itself and to others is for Dostoevsky clearly symptomatic of resentment getting the upper hand; but it is symptomatic also of an increasing isolation from life itself as one stands apart in blameless, self-righteous purity from a world given over to evil. To refer to one instance of this syndrome in Dostoevsky’s art, there is the famous “rebellion” of Ivan Karamazov, who rejects the world God has created because of the tears of human suffering with which it is saturated. Ivan’s depiction of the torment of innocent children is very moving, but it should not blind us to the problematic nature of his stance: his seeking for someone else to blame (in this case, God), rather than engaging with the world by taking active responsibility himself for the evil within it and for the struggle against that evil. Once someone in this spiritual state of self-righteous isolation accepts violence as a means, the result is the killing of others or of oneself, or both.

            b) Dostoevsky’s exploration of imaginary revenge has left us with his penetrating psycho-spiritual portrait of the underground-type. Among other things, the underground-type bears eloquent witness to the nature of the human self—whether we like it or not—as inherently “dialogic” rather than “monologic” The terms are used by Charles Taylor in his analysis of the modern self, and they are inspired by Dostoevsky (as mediated through Bakhtin). According to Taylor, Dostoevsky teaches us that the self’s identity is always negotiated “through dialogue, partly overt, partly internalized, with others,” something demonstrated even in the underground-man’s solitary confession, which reveals itself to be a continual dialogue carried on within himself and between himself and imaginary readers. Taylor argues that our recognition of the inherent dialogism of human selfhood should foster a strong sense of our moral obligation to others.[22] But this seems overly optimistic, especially in light of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground.  

            What happens when the self, fated to be dialogic rather than monologic, encounters the others with whom he must “negotiate” his identity? Consider, for instance, the first of the social adventures recounted by the underground-man: his humiliation by the husky six-foot army officer in a tavern: “I was standing by the billiard table, inadvertently blocking the officer’s way. He grabbed me by the shoulders and, without a word, picked me up and, setting me down a bit further away, passed by as if I didn’t exist. I could’ve forgiven anything, including a beating, but that was too much—to be brushed aside without being noticed!” Filled with resentment towards the officer, and with self-loathing for his own cowardice, the underground-man retreats to his solitary corner, where he imagines scenarios (inspired by his reading of romantic literature) of an elaborate revenge that would at the same time be a reconciliation. For instance, he imagines writing a letter challenging the officer to a duel that would be so nobly sensitive in tone that the officer “would have rushed to his place to offer him eternal friendship. He never sends the letter, and as it turns out, he exacts his revenge almost by accident and “in the simplest way.” While walking down the crowded Nevsky Prospekt, he suddenly saw the officer approaching him: “Suddenly I decided. I closed my eyes and we banged hard against each other, shoulder against shoulder. I didn’t yield an inch and walked past him as an equal! …. Of course, I got the worst of the collision, for he was much heavier. But I didn’t care. What I cared about was that I had accomplished my goal and behaved with dignity.”[23]

            That unyielding collision in a bid for respect is utterly emblematic of Dostoevsky’s realism about “the negotiating of identity in dialogue with others.” Insofar as claiming one’s dignity is a matter of self-assertion, the dialogic self will be enmeshed in the cycle of subjection/domination that Nietzsche saw as the essence of life itself. Every episode recalled in the underground-man’s confession reflects this harsh reality, and not always in a comic vein. His humiliation of the prostitute, Liza, is a bleak depiction of the trumping of “romantic love” by the reality of power: “I couldn’t love her…I couldn’t fall in love because, for me, loving means bullying and dominating.”[24] It is impossible to read Dostoevsky and be sanguine about the prospects of a peaceful “dialogic sphere.” His literary universe is peopled with individuals for whom coexistence with others is a constant process of vigilant self-assertion in response to the self-assertion of others. While the violence of self-assertion is reduced to its crude physical dimension in the episode with the officer, everywhere in Dostoevsky we witness the wielding of more subtle weapons of revenge, especially language, or what Bakhtin calls “word-violence.”

Yet—thankfully—this is not all. While Nietzsche invites us (potential persecutors, be it remembered) to perceive in the victim only the reality of the desire for revenge (in deed or imagination)—a perception not likely to counter demonization—Dostoevsky shows us another possibility, which points to the breaking apart of the relentless cycle. Let us consider, for instance, one of his most lowly characters, retired “captain” Snegiryov in The Brothers Karamazov. We first hear of Snegiryov from another character, Katerina Ivanovna who, for complicated reasons of her own, wants to help him and his family. Her bare, external sketch offered is slightly literary-conventional and perhaps not likely to interest the reader much in getting to know Snegiryov better:

A week ago…Dmitri Fyodorovich committed a rash and unjust act, a very ugly act. There is a bad place here, a tavern. In it he met that retired officer, that captain…. Dmitri Fyodorovich got very angry with that captain for some reason, seized him by the beard in front of everyone, led him outside in that humiliating position, and led him a long way down the street, and they say that the boy, the captain’s son, who goes to the local school, just a child, saw it and went running along beside them, crying loudly and begging for his father, and rushing up to everyone asking them to defend him, but everyone laughed.… I made inquiries about this offended man, and found out that he is very poor. His last name is Snegiryov. He did something wrong in the army and was expelled…and now he and his family, a wretched family of sick children and a wife—who, it seems, is insane—have fallen into abject poverty.[25] 

            In fulfillment of the mission entrusted to him, Alyosha, brother to the Dmitri Fyodorovich who publicly humiliated Snegiryov, takes Katerina’s money to the retired captain. His initial direct impression of Snegiryov at home is somewhat more interesting, though still hardly appealing:

Alyosha then opened the door and stepped across the threshold. He found himself in a room that was rather spacious but extremely cluttered both with people and with all kinds of domestic chattels.… On the table sat a frying pan with the remains of some fried eggs in it, a bitten piece of bread, and, in addition, a half-pint bottle with the faint remnants of earthly blessings at the bottom.… At the table, finishing the fried eggs, sat a gentleman of about forty-five, small, lean, weakly built, with reddish hair, and a thin red beard rather like an old whiskbroom…. [W]hen Alyosha entered, he all but flew from the bench on which he was sitting at the table, and, hastily wiping his mouth with a tattered napkin, rushed up to Alyosha….

“Allow me to ask…sir…what has urged you, sir, to visit…these depths?” Alyosha looked at him attentively…. There was something angular, hurried, and irritable in him. Although he had obviously just been drinking, he was not drunk. His face expressed a sort of extreme insolence, and at the same time—which was strange—an obvious cowardice. He looked like a man who had been submissive for a long time and suffered much, but has suddenly jumped up and tried to assert himself. Or, better still, like a man who wants terribly to hit you, but is terribly afraid that you are going to hit him. In his speech and the intonations of his rather shrill voice could be heard a sort of crack-brained humour, now spiteful, now timid, faltering, and unable to sustain its tone. The question about “depths” he had asked all atremble, as it were, rolling his eyes, and jumping up to Alyosha, so close that Alyosha mechanically took a step back. (198-99)

            It is already evident from this description that Snegiryov is not to be portrayed in the colours of the idealized poor. Nor is he suddenly transformed for the better when he begins to reveal himself more fully through speech, in the “fresh air” outside his shabby house. What he has to say to Alyosha, and the way he says it, confirms the outward description, especially the “crack-brained” humour—the sort of ironically self-deprecating humour that betrays an acute awareness of his low situation and how it is likely perceived by others. While true to the unprepossessing character introduced to the reader, Snegiryov’s relating of his story is, despite everything, utterly compelling. It is the story of a humiliation that might appear infinitely remote from any possible experience of the reader, and at the same time too ridiculous or trivial a matter to deserve serious attention. Being dragged, half-drunk out of a tavern by one’s beard certainly has no conventionally literary-tragic dimension to it. When Snegiryov relates the episode, however, his focus is entirely on the fact that he was subjected to the beard-dragging before the eyes of his ten-year old son, Ilyusha, who happened to be on the way home from school with some of his classmates. It is precisely the ridiculous aspect of the incident that renders it especially painful to the dignity of the father and the son. It is a humiliation rather than just a physical assault. The father must live with the image of his young son running beside him, alternately trying to pull him away from the offender and begging the offender, while kissing his hand, to forgive his father for whatever he has done and let him go. The son must live with the image of his father in such a demeaning situation, an image about which he is reminded daily by his schoolmates, who taunt him with shouts of “whiskbroom” (in reference to his father’s now less than full beard).

 The Snegiryovs are everywhere in our midst, and they have their story of suffering to tell. For Dostoevsky, the first obligation of human beings to each other is to pay attention, to hear and comprehend, to see and understand.  In Snegiryov, Dostoevsky helps us to see and especially to hear a human being, much as we might prove to be, if circumstances were different. But what effect have these circumstances had on Snegiryov’s humanity? What kind of human being do we discover?

            Snegiryov’s own ironic wisecrack about being one of the “noble” poor only reinforces his already evident lack of nobility. He is certainly no paragon of rational moral virtue, the sort of person Kant would have us imagine, who, if offended, reasons thus: “I cannot consistently will that the maxim not to tolerate any unavenged offence should be taken as a rule for the will of every rational being.”[26] Nor is he a paragon of Christian forgiveness. Because clichés abound in regard to the notion of “Christian forgiveness,” it is worth noting that Dostoevsky’s novel does not support them: the humiliated do take offence, and they do rise up against it, to the extent that they can. Snegiryov is certainly offended, as is his son on his behalf. Little Ilyusha dreams of avenging his father’s insulted honour, and his determined defence of his father leads to his persecution at school. Indeed, it is precisely Ilyusha’s courage in “rising up” against the bitter offence to his own and his father’s honour that Alyosha holds before the other children as a model in his speech after Ilyusha’s death (see 774) Indeed, the tendency to rise up in the face of unjust treatment can be construed as prime evidence of the fundamental dignity of every person. It testifies to our sense that we ought to be treated as ends in ourselves, even if that is not happening.

            Ilyusha would like his father to fight a duel with his offender, but Snegiryov points out that he is too poor to risk death for his honour because his death would plunge the family into absolute destitution. It is clear enough that he is not entirely unhappy with this constraint, since he is something of a coward. He does have his “rising up,” however. After rapturously expressing gratitude for the money given to him as charity by Alyosha at the behest of Katerina Ivanovna, he suddenly and unexpectedly, “in some kind of rage,” throws the ruble notes down into the mud and tramples them underfoot:  “‘There’s your money, sir! There’s your money, sir! There’s your money, sir! There’s your money, sir!’ Suddenly he leaped back and straightened up before Alyosha. His whole figure presented a picture of inexplicable pride. ‘Report to those who sent you that the whiskbroom does not sell his honor, sir!’ he cried out, raising his arm in the air. (211-12).

            Snegiryov’s pride is, however, entirely explicable. Alyosha himself offers the explanation shortly afterwards when relating the episode: “You know…it’s terribly difficult for an offended man when everyone suddenly starts looking like his benefactor” (215). Snegiryov embodies that complex mixture of pride, offence, spite, bursts of desire for reconciliation—the whole syndrome of the “underground”—which Dostoevsky mapped with such precision in his work. Indeed, this analysis by Alyosha Karamazov’s of the retired captain could have been written by Nietzsche: “There are people who feel deeply but are somehow beaten down. Their buffoonery is something like a spiteful irony against those to whom they dare not speak the truth directly because of a long-standing, humiliating timidity before them.” (537).

Coming from Alyosha, however, these are not words expressive of what Nietzsche would call the clarity of noble distancing; rather, they express the clarity required by a love that wants to help. They can be words of love, because Alyosha knows that in Snegiryov’s place, “we would be the same” (217). This is not merely an exhortation to imagine that what has happened to others could happen to me. Rather, Alyosha appeals to his listener’s capacity to imagine herself as the other—what might be called an “other-centred intentionality”—without the self-regarding anxiety that the other’s fate could easily be her own.

This is not all. We are shown that there is a limit to Snegiryov’s offended pride. He needs to stand on his pride, but his need for the money is even greater, and Alyosha predicts (accurately) that the offer of money will sooner or later be accepted. This greater need is not for material increase in itself, far from it; it is for medical care for Ilyusha who has fallen severely ill since the abuse of his father. Snegiryov’s resentment is overcome by his love for his child. It is not that he consciously puts away his resentment through an act of the rational will, in Kantian fashion. Nor does he consciously forgive his offender. It is, rather, that Snegiryov forgets his resentment in his anxious love for Ilyusha. As the narrator puts it simply: “the captain, overwhelmed with terror at the thought that his boy might die, forgot his former hauteur” (541). It should be emphasized that here “forgetfulness” is not a light-minded lack of concern, but the outcome of a love to the point of self-sacrifice, a love that places the whole value of life in another.

If, as Nietzsche claims, the greatest and most heroic of human “self-overcomings” is the overcoming of the spirit of resentment, does not the lowly Snegiryov, considered with sufficient attention, display just this heroic accomplishment?

            In Snegiryov’s love for his child, Dostoevsky evokes for the reader the vision of a human being whose inner life is not entirely a product of his lowly circumstances. There is bitter resentment indeed, but there is also far more pronouncedly a love that has nothing to do with poverty. This love, moreover, is fully conscious of the incommensurability between its focus on this particular person and the general law that decrees that all things must pass. Faced with the imminent death of his ten-year-old Ilyusha, Snegiryov rejects all consolations (including the one proffered by Ilyusha, “when I die, you get some nice boy, another one”) that will help him to “get over” his loss of this particular child: “‘I don’t want a nice boy! I don’t want another boy!’ he whispered in a wild whisper, clenching his teeth. ‘If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my tongue cleave…’” (562). (This quotation is, by the way, one of several hints that Dostoevsky came close making Snegiryov a Jew, and his persecution an overtly religious persecution). Snegiryov does not finish the quotation from Psalm 137 (“By the rivers of Babylon…”), but he says enough that the reader can understand that despite all that makes him forgettable and unattractive, this is in the most profound sense a person.

In making such a promise, in the face of the abyss of death, to preserve in memory the living personality of one cherished, unique being, does not Snegiryov reveal his own value and claim his own respect from the reader? What claims respect in Snegiryov is not some “innate quality” in or belonging to every human being as such, nor is it simply his status as a creature of God; it is an openness to transformation by love, a love both pointing towards and rooted in eternal love. In the words of Erazim Kohák: “Humans are not only humans…. They are also Persons, capable of fusing eternity and time in the precious, anguished reality of a love that would be eternal amid the concreteness of time…. A person is a being through whom eternity enters time… A person is a being who can cherish—and bear the pain of losing…. A person is a being who meets you as a Thou …both offering and claiming respect”[27]   

Some Theological Conclusions: Dostoevsky’s Kenotic Self

            In Dostoevsky’s artistic world the logic of the underground is pervasive, but this human dynamic of hatred and resentment that breeds violence is not his final word. It can be overcome in the two directions noted earlier, as 1) the potential persecutor is helped to perceive the victim as a person; and 2) from the other side of the dynamic, as the victim is helped through the effect of love to put aside resentment. In the character of Snegiryov, he attempts to show the actual movement in a humiliated person from the resentment of self-assertion to its overcoming in self-forgetfulness or self-surrender, without violating the limits of realism—since Snegiryov is no literary-conventional saint. There are other, perhaps more obviously “saint like” characters, too, like Sonya (Crime and Punishment), Myshkin (The Idiot), Tikhon (Demons), and Alyosha Karamazov, who are the outcome of Dostoevsky’s repeated efforts to meet the incredibly difficult challenge of giving expressive, plausible embodiment to a consciousness that refuses to enter into the power cycle. Such characters are clearly meant to have a certain authority, but the authority is inwardly persuasive rather than imposed from outside. Dostoevsky’s evocation of an authority that does not assert power reaches its extreme degree in the Christ of “The Grand Inquisitor,” who in response to the Inquisitor’s “word-violence” remains completely silent. 

            What is the nature of this self-surrender that Dostoevsky attempts to show, and why is it still possible to speak of finding rather than losing the self in this surrender? The beginning of the answer is that the surrender is not simply to the others, or more precisely to the power of the others. Those in Dostoevsky’s novels who have the special authority of inward persuasion are not humiliated; indeed, they elicit a strange respect from the most self-willed of those near them. For instance, Prince Myshkin in The Idiot is the still point of a turning world of egoistic voices, vying against each other, while all seeking to reveal themselves to him in particular; he does not judge them, but permits them, through his listening presence, to become “illuminated” about themselves.[28] Such characters do not enter the power game even as its victims; they transcend it, or better, they embody an alternative way of being in the world. The possibility arises from the nature of their self-surrender as surrender to a truth beyond the self, a truth accessible and experienced as love.

            Dostoevsky’s appeal to self-surrender as the only way out of the cycle of violence is inseparable from his understanding of Christ. In order to grasp this, we must move outside the bounds of his public literary art to one the most personal and private of his writings. Thanks to the preservation of a remarkable meditation, penned while he kept vigil by the corpse of his first wife (and, it would seem, recalled their unhappy marriage), we can have direct access to his thinking about the nature of self-surrender:

            April 16. Masha is lying on the table. Will I meet again with Masha?

        To love a person as one’s own self according to the commandment of Christ is impossible…. The law of individuality on earth is the constraint, “I” is the stumbling-block…. Meanwhile, after the appearance of Christ, as the idea of man incarnate, it became as clear as day that … the highest, final development of the individual should attain precisely the point … where man might find, recognize and with all the strength of his nature be convinced that the highest use which he can make of his individuality, of the full development of his I, is to seemingly annihilate that I, to give it wholly to each and every one wholeheartedly and selflessly. And this is the greatest happiness. In this way the law of the I merges with the law of humanism, and in the merging both, both the I and the all (in appearance two extreme opposites) mutually annihilated for each other, at the same time … each apart attains the highest goal of his individual development.

                    This is indeed the paradise of Christ.[29]  

The attitude of self-surrender that Dostoevsky shows as the only way out of the subjection/domination cycle of self-assertion (the “law of individuality”) finds its ultimate model in the kenosis of Christ, who “did not regard equality with God/ as something to be exploited,/ but emptied himself,/taking the form of a slave,/being born in human likeness.” (Philippians 2:6-7). 

            At a decisive point in his analysis of violence, René Girard appeals to a positive mimesis, the imitatio Christi, as the means of release for the “prisoners of violent imitation.”[30] In the kenotic characters of Dostoevsky’s art, who break the cycle of violence by self-surrendering love—as, for instance, the timid prostitute, Sonya, “breaks” the self-willed Raskolnikov by her love (in Crime and Punishment)—we are offered a concrete elaboration of Girard’s hope.  

Our original starting-point was the problem of the close proximity of religious diversity in today’s multicultural world. So let us conclude by returning to that subject, but with the emphasis not on theoretical religious difference, but on common religious practice. In a letter from a Jewish reader of his work, Dostoevsky was told about the recent death of a doctor in her city, a German Protestant, who was committed to helping the poor whatever their religious background. This inspired this description by Dostoevsky in A Writer’s Diary of the funeral of Dr. Hindenburg:

This common man of ours, though he may have been an isolated case, brought the whole city together around his grave. Together those Russian peasant women and poor Jewish women kissed his feet in his coffin; together they crowded around him; together they wept. Fifty-eight  years of service to humanity in this city, fifty-eight years of ceaseless love united them all, if only once, over his coffin in a common rapture and common tears. All the town comes out for his funeral; the bells of all the churches peal; prayers are sung in all the languages. The pastor, in tears, gives his speech over the open grave. The rabbi stands off to one side, waiting, and when the pastor has finished he takes his place and gives his speech and sheds the same tears. Why, at that moment this very “Jewish question” has almost been solved! The pastor and the rabbi were united in common love; why, they almost embraced over this grave in the presence of Christians and Jews. What does it matter that, when the crowd dispersed, each one took up his old prejudices? Drops of water wear away even the stone, as the proverb says, and these “common people” conquer the world by uniting it…. And once you believe that these really are conquerors and that such people truly will “inherit the earth,” you have already almost become united in everything…. They are the ones who inspire ideas; they are the ones who give us faith; they provide a living example, and so a proof as well…. we need very few such people in order to save the world, so powerful are they. And if such is the case, then how can we not hope?[31]  

The “isolated case” of a “common man,” Dr. Hindenburg, is emblematic of Dostoevsky’s hopeful and concrete response to the problem of tolerance. It was Dostoevsky’s hope that the violent cycle of hatred and persecution could be broken apart, but he knew this could not happen through the “rationally limited” violence of the liberal state (and even less the violence of revolutionary terrorism)—but only through a miracle, the sort of miracle represented by Dr. Hindenburg.

            One might assume that this individual, as a member of an ethnic and religious minority (German and Protestant in a Russian city) would have some experience of intolerance. His response was not to separate himself in resentment, but to enter into the world by taking responsibility for others (Dostoevsky’s preferred way of speaking of a kenotic love that is active), regardless of their social or religious differences. This might seem admirable, but at the same time “small” and “isolated” in its implications for the cycle of violence that pervades the world. Yet Dostoevsky speaks of such people “conquering” the world, as small drops of water wear away a stone, or (as he might have said) as the tiny mustard seed grows into “the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade” (Mark 4:32). This conquest of violence by love is the “miracle.” Its possibility lies in the fact that it is not an “isolated case,” since through his “living example,” the doctor instigates an alternative cycle, just as a small stone can generate ripples threw a large body of water.  The doctor therefore is a mediator of the compassionate love that also really exists and circulates within the world; as Dostoevsky emphasizes, “fifty-eight years of ceaseless love united them all,” Russian Christians and Jews. Dostoevsky does not allow himself to fall into mere wishful thinking; he expects that after the funeral, “each one took up his old prejudices.” But the life and impact of this doctor remains nevertheless a living fact rather than an ideological dream, and therefore a kind of “proof,” a basis for hope.

            For Dostoevsky, the doctor mediates the alternative cycle of love that circulates within the world; he does not instigate it. The possibility of his “conquest” is rooted in that of Christ—“In the world you face persecution. But take courage; I have conquered the world” (John 16:33)—who mediates to the world the divine love that enables human beings to love—“We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). The phenomenon of Dr. Hindenburg is ultimately understood by Dostoevsky in a Christian manner, not according to some universal religiosity. But “Christian” here does not mean that he simply identifies the community of people who practice mutual responsibility with the official church (he is, after all, the author of the “Grand Inquisitor”); nor does “Christian” mean, in Tolstoyan fashion, a solitary endeavour to follow Christ’s teachings apart from the church. For Dostoevsky, the church is indispensable as a community of practices that form persons able to take responsibility for others, people capable of not being persecutors and not being imprisoned by resentment if they themselves are persecuted. This idea of the church, expressed in Alyosha’s founding of the community of children in the epilogue to The Brothers Karamazov, is the final word of his final masterpiece.[32]

Dostoevsky makes a point of denying that the doctor is a “universal” man, calling him instead a “common” man.[33] This designation points us towards a helpful conclusion about the question of religious pluralism, the question which always seems to come to the fore in any discussion of tolerance. We must relinquish the Enlightenment theoretical project of articulating some sort of “universal” religion of rational principles (that is, a watered-down theism), and focus instead on the “common” practical project of overcoming the relentless persecution-victimage mechanism pervading the world. For Christians, participation in this common project means becoming not less but more specifically Christian, since the Christian tradition possesses the resources, in the form of teachings and practices, that can form people who live as though “we are all responsible for all.” Is this equally true of other religious traditions? Here an unthinking “yes” is no more helpful to the common project than an unthinking “no.” Discerning judgement is both required and possible, since there is a criterion for that judgement: do the teachings and practices form the people needed to “conquer” the cycle of violence? Since no religious tradition, certainly including the Christian, has always been faithful to this criterion, the judgement will be first and foremost self-judgement, with its salutary humbling effect. As for judging other religions, it seems best to heed Kierkegaard’s observation that being too “conscious of how others relate themselves to God, whether they are happy or not, whether they do God’s commands or not etc.”[34] is little more than a distraction from one’s own participation (as an individual or as a religious community) in the love that is known infallibly by its fruits.