Crime And Punishment - The Orthodox Version

Reading a novel can often get you out of yourself and into another's world for a while. Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment was greeted by shock and horror at the time and readers were warned off by contemporary newspaper reviewers. The student Raskolnikev's murder of an old woman for the sake of a robbery was regarded as too shocking a crime to contemplate. Surely society could not be so morally and socially bankrupt. The novel explores the world of Raskolnikov and the psychic springs of this motives and incentives. Could he ever be forgiven?

The recent destruction of the World Trade Centre buildings, the Pentagon, the planes and thousands of innocent people has us running to the word "evil". The fact that the pilots were overcome with household razor blades fixed to credit cards, the audaciously obvious use of a passenger jet loaded with fuel as a bomb fit to such a stunningly simple plot that it symbolises pure "evil". Because the perpetrators killed themselves deliberately in the process motives are even harder to contemplate. It wasn't money or sex, but being prepared to die and sacrifice themselves and take so many others into death with them that is so shocking. If nothing else their psychotic actions were a testimony to strongly held beliefs. The 'banality of evil' in ordinary simple everyday actions gives way to worrying debates on perverted religious commitment dying for a faith.

To try and make some sense of it, I re-read Crime and Punishment. At the end, in hospital Raskolnikov recalls his bad dreams:

In his illness he had dreamt that the entire world had fallen victim to some strange, unheard of and unprecedented plague that was spreading from the depths of Asia into Europe. Everyone was to perish, apart from the chosen few, a very few. Entire centres of population, entire cities and peoples became smitten and went mad. All were in a state of anxiety and no one could understand anyone else, each person thought that he alone possessed the truth and suffered agony as he looked at the others beating his breast, weeping and wringing his hands. No one knew who to make subject of judgement, or law to go about it no one could agree about what should be considered evil and who good. No one knew who to blame and who to acquit. People killed one another in a kind of senseless anger. Whole armies were ranged against one another, but no sooner had these armies been
mobilised than they suddenly began to tear themselves to pieces, all day in the cities the alarm was sounded, everyone was being summoned together, but who was calling them and for what reason no one knew, but all were in a state of anxiety.

It is Sonia, the prostitute from a broken, destroyed home that saves Raskolnikov from his nightmare Armageddon and restores him to the community of mankind.

But not without suffering and the Cross Dostoyevsky described it as his 'Orthodox' novel in the tradition of Russian orthodox theology. Berdyear asserted that "the existence of evil is the proof of God's existence. If the world consisted solely and exclusively of goodness and justice, God would not be necessary, for then the world itself would be God. God exists because evil exists. And this means that God exists because freedom exists". As the philosopher Vasily Rozanov who admired Dostoyevsky put it:

"The darker the night - the brighter the stars
The deeper the grief - the closer is God"

In the darkness of history we can find the hope of light.