Dostoevsky, Atheism, and the Modern World

Dostoevsky was Evdokimov’s lifelong interlocutor: the subject of his 1942 doctorate on the problem of evil, of a second book in 1961 on Gogol and Dostoevsky as a “descent into hell,” and of much of Le Christ dans la pensée russe (1970). Through him Evdokimov worked out his account of modern atheism — not as an intellectual error to be refuted but as a spiritual condition, born of a real scandal, to which the only adequate answer is a transfigured human life.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

The Thesis of 1942

Evdokimov’s doctoral thesis, defended in 1942 and published the same year as Dostoïevski et le problème du mal, was written under the Italian and then the German occupation, while his wife was dying of cancer (see The Student Years and the Dostoevsky Thesis). It was reissued by Éditions de Corlevour in 2014 (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” bibliography). The choice of Dostoevsky as the vehicle for a study of evil is not accidental: no other modern writer had put the case against God with such force, and none had put it in the mouths of characters he so evidently loved.

The centre of gravity is the argument of Ivan Karamazov in The Brothers Karamazov — the “rebellion” chapter, in which Ivan assembles the documented tortures of children and declines, not to believe in God, but to accept His world; and the “Grand Inquisitor,” in which the Church itself is charged with taking from humanity the freedom Christ refused to take. Evdokimov’s reading takes both with complete seriousness. He does not treat Ivan as a straw man, and he does not think the argument can be answered by a theodicy — by any demonstration that the suffering is compensated, instrumental or necessary. The Christian answer, in his reading of Dostoevsky, is not an explanation but a Person: God does not justify the suffering of the innocent, He enters it.

This is the point at which the 1942 thesis already contains the whole later Evdokimov. The vulnerability of God before human freedom — the divine renunciation of coercion, which makes evil possible and makes love possible in the same act — becomes one of the organizing themes of his mature theology (Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov,” which notes that his theology “stressed divine vulnerability before human freedom”). It is also the theological root of his objection to every form of the Grand Inquisitor’s arrangement, ecclesiastical or political.

Gogol et Dostoïevski, ou la descente aux enfers

In 1961 Evdokimov published Gogol et Dostoïevski, ou la descente aux enfers, later reissued by Corlevour (2011); a German version appeared as Der Abstieg in die Hölle: Gogol und Dostojewski (Salzburg: Müller, 1965) (Wikipedia, “Paul Evdokimov,” bibliography). The pairing is instructive. Gogol — the comic writer who ended in a religious terror that consumed him, burning the second part of Dead Souls and starving himself to death under an ascetic regime — is for Evdokimov the case of a descent that does not come back up; Dostoevsky, who went down further, is the case of one who did. The book is about what the descent into hell means and how it is survived.

The theological reference is the Orthodox icon of the Resurrection, which does not show Christ rising from a tomb but shows Him in hell, treading down the gates and pulling Adam and Eve out by the wrists. Evdokimov’s constant point is that the Christian answer to evil has this shape: not avoidance of the abyss but descent into it and a harrowing (see Orthodox Eschatology). For a writer, and for a theologian, this means that the honest way to God passes through the full weight of the objection and not around it.

The Diagnosis of Atheism

Out of this comes Evdokimov’s account of modern unbelief, which is unusual among Orthodox writers of his generation for its sympathy and its refusal of triumphalism. Three features:

First, atheism is taken as a spiritual and not merely an intellectual phenomenon. Modern unbelief, in his reading, is rarely the conclusion of an argument. It is a stance of the whole person, often generated by a real scandal — the suffering of the innocent, the corruption of the churches, the moral failure of believers — and it frequently contains a genuine moral protest that Christians ought to recognize as their own. Ivan Karamazov is not an idiot; he is a man who has looked at something Christians usually look away from.

Second, atheism is a judgement on Christians. Evdokimov’s frequent observation is that the atheist commonly rejects a caricature that the Church has itself supplied — a God who is a heavenly despot, a religion that is social control, a piety that is indifferent to injustice. The answer is not better arguments but a different kind of Christian.

Third, the classical proofs are spent. This is the premise behind the formulation that has become his best-known line: that in the modern world the remaining proof of God’s existence is a transfigured human face — not a syllogism but a person in whom something of God has become visible (Encyclopædia Universalis, “Paul Evdokimov,” reporting that he “presented the transfigured human face as the modern world’s primary ‘proof’ of God’s existence”; the theme is developed in L’Amour fou de Dieu, Seuil, 1973, and in the essays gathered in In the World, of the Church, ed. Plekon and Vinogradov, SVS Press, 2001).

It should be seen how tightly this binds to everything else in his work. If the only remaining apologetic is a transfigured life, then the question of how a layman in a factory or a hostel becomes a saint is not a devotional side-issue; it is the central problem of Christian mission. That is interiorized monasticism. And if the visible radiance of a person is the evidence, then the theology of beauty is not an aesthetic appendix but the theory of the case — which is The Art of the Icon and the Theology of Beauty.

Le Christ dans la pensée russe

Evdokimov’s last completed book of this cycle, Le Christ dans la pensée russe (Paris: Cerf, 1970; German, Christus im russischen Denken, Trier: Paulinus-Verlag, 1977; reissued by Cerf, 1986), surveys the figure of Christ across Russian religious thought — from the ancient piety and the icon, through the Slavophiles and Dostoevsky and Soloviev, to the religious philosophers of his own century. It is, among other things, an act of piety toward a tradition that had been destroyed at home and was dispersing in exile, and it is the most direct statement of what Evdokimov thought Russian Christianity had to give: an emphasis on the kenotic Christ, the Christ of the humiliated form, whom the Russian tradition venerated in its own kenotic saints (see Russian Orthodox Theologians).

The Modern World, Not the Modern Church

A final distinction is worth drawing, because Evdokimov is sometimes read as a straightforward “modernizer.” His engagement with the modern world was intense and unafraid: he read Freud, Jung, Marx, Nietzsche, Sartre and de Beauvoir; he wrote about modern art, about the city, about secularization; his late reflections include a piece on the spiritual life in the city (La Vie spirituelle dans la ville, listed among his works in the French bibliography). But the burden of that engagement is almost always the same, and it is not accommodation. His judgement on modern art, in the essay “L’art moderne, ou la Sophia désaffectée,” is that it displays a beauty which has lost its ground — a Wisdom decommissioned. His judgement on the modern city is that it is where the ascetic tradition must now be practised, not where it must be abandoned. And his judgement on the modern world’s triple temptation — consumption, the magical pursuit of power, totalitarianism — is that the answer is the three ancient vows (see The Three Vows and the Royal Priesthood of the Laity).

He wanted the Church to speak to the modern world in a language it could hear. He did not think the Church had anything new to say.

References

Encyclopædia Universalis. “Paul Evdokimov (1901–1970).” (Divine vulnerability before human freedom; the transfigured human face as the modern “proof” of God.)
Evdokimov, Paul. Dostoïevski et le problème du mal. 1942; repr. Éditions de Corlevour, 2014.
Evdokimov, Paul. Gogol et Dostoïevski, ou la descente aux enfers. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1961; repr. Corlevour, 2011. German: Der Abstieg in die Hölle: Gogol und Dostojewski. Salzburg: Müller, 1965.
Evdokimov, Paul. Le Christ dans la pensée russe. Paris: Cerf, 1970; repr. Cerf, 1986. German: Christus im russischen Denken. Trier: Paulinus-Verlag, 1977.
Evdokimov, Paul. L’Amour fou de Dieu. Paris: Seuil, 1973.
Evdokimov, Paul. “L’art moderne, ou la Sophia désaffectée.” Contacts: Revue française de l’Orthodoxie.
Evdokimov, Paul. In the World, of the Church: A Paul Evdokimov Reader. Ed. and trans. Michael Plekon and Alexis Vinogradov. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2001.
Wikipedia. “Paul Evdokimov”; Wikipédia (French), “Paul Evdokimov.” (Bibliography, including La Vie spirituelle dans la ville.)
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Book V (“Rebellion”; “The Grand Inquisitor”).