MIKHAIL BLUMENKRANTZ

FROM NIMROD TO THE GRAND INQUISITOR: THE PROBLEM OF THE DEMONISATION OF FREEDOM IN THE WORK OF DOSTOEVSKIJ

KEY WORDS: Freedom, Dostoevskij, Christian World View, Stavrogin, Kierkegaard

A cultural crisis begins with the necrosis of the spirit and its degeneration into a hard-set system of dogmas; it ends with the destruction of the hierarchical vertical and its replacement by the historical horizontal of collectively or individually chosen values whose characteristics are wholly conditioned by social norms and practice. Tillich clearly saw the danger of this in relation to the present
era:

civilisationopted in favour of s~ularisation. That was a great and very necessary decision.Itdethroned the Church- the Church having establisheditself by the might of oppression and prejudice. It sanctifiedand filledwith meaning our d~ly life and labour; but it repudiated those profound things symbolised by religion:the feeling of the inexhaustiblemystcaT of life,the penetration into the ultimate meaning of existence and the invincible power of unconditional devotion. Such things should not be repudiated. If we turn them away in their godly forms, they will return in satanic forms: and so now, in the declining century of our s~ularise~lworld, we have become witnesses to the most monstrous nlanifestationsof those demonic forms; we have seen further into the depths of evil San most previous generations.... I

Denial of the hierarchical principle in accordance with Sartre's thesis "there are as many truths as there are people," or the supplanting of the cosmic hierarchy by the false hierarchy of popular ideology, leads to the demonisation of human existence and the destruction of the spiritual basis of culture. "Man does not attain personal virtue by a 'move forwards,' but by rising above that plane where one moves 'forwards' or 'backwards.' Forward movement is possible even in darkness, and it may be that the darkness entices us by the very supplanting of true 'attainments' by movement back and forth. ''z At the very beginning of this century Buber warned of the threat of the demonic reincarnation of contemporary culture:
Studies in East European Thought 48: 231-254, 1996. ~) 1996 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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"Every great culture which envelops a nation is based on some initial event-encounter- on an answer having sometime been heard from the source addressed as 'Thou' ( G o d - M.B.), on an existential act of the spirit. This act, reinforced by the unwaverng efforts of following generations, creates, within the spirit, its own specific concept of the cosmos; only through this act is man able constantly to attain the cosmos. The process-relationship at the core of any culture should be more living and constantly regenerating; otherwise that culture becomes paralysed and turns into the It-world where the acts of the rare spirit-bearers so seldom volcanically erupt. The spirit itself is not in I, but in between I and Thou. It is not like the blood which flows within you, but like the air in which you breathe. Man lives in the spirit when he can respond to his Thou. ''3 This is where that ancient temptation lies in wait for man; the temptation of intoxication by spiritual freedom, by titanic power; by the striving to supplant Thou with I; by the longing to make oneself the absolute measure for the whole universe, in other words to turn the air by which you breathe into the blood which flows within you. There are two possible ways in which man can realise his freedom. Freedom as the urge to create strives to "be"; in this freedom the will for incarnation triumphs. Freedom as the urge to assert oneself strives to "possess"; in this freedom the will for disincarnation and death emerges. If one searches for the key symbol of contemporary culture, it is not to be found in the classical legend of Prometheus, but rather in the Old Testament legend of Nimrod. 4 Contemporary man, examining himself and his relationship to living nature, to other beings, to other nations, to other men, and finally to God, always finds in the depths of his own soul the Old Testament Nimrod. Everywhere he is at once the aggressor and the victim of aggression. Tirelessly, by the sweat of his brow, over and over again, he builds his earthly house - the tumbling Tower of Babel - in a vain attempt to seize the Kingdom of Heaven; and he is incapable of understanding that this is not the way it will be seized. Continually he issues challenges to his own higher nature and, being continually rejected, he looks for an answer in vengeance instead of penitence, in hatred instead of love, in damnation instead of forgiveness. He flees into the thunderous clanging of the world of machines, into the clashing of metal and the rhythms of a burdened

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destiny, hoping, for at least a moment, to find relief from the torment which life brings him, and he does not understand that his suffering will be healed not by noise but by quiet, not by screaming but by remaining silent. In the legend of Nimrod we have access to the innermost depths and the origin of that supplanting, and also to that ground, as ancient as Creation itself, from which the deadly shoots of dark, demonic freedom sprouted and ripened. Adam was the first to separate himself from the oneness to which he belonged. His fall lay in his discovery of freedom as his separateness. He was cast catastrophically into freedom, into himself, into the selfhood which lay gaping before him. Then he became ashamed of his nakedness as of a fall from a primordial heaven, where his T had been merged in oneness with the whole universe. His shame, as a recognition of his own selfhood, was the beginning of history. According to Fichte freedom is the essence of self-awareness. It is also, as Kant suggested, the essence of history. Hegel saw the crux of the world's historical process in the gradual increase in the scope of freedom in history. But what is freedom? What is that freedom for which man so often passionately strives, only to run away finally in fear when he finds it? Christ taught: "Know the Truth, and the Truth shall set you free." But is it not so, that having tasted the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam lost his freedom and by the same token discovered for the first time freedom to be his own existential potential? Until then Adam had not known freedom, for he was free, in that his existence was one with that of the universe. Only having lost his freedom, being tom from the immediacy in which he was subsumed, from the as yet non-conceptualised flow of etemal being, was Adam cast into freedom, as into the universal tragedy of his apostasy. For there is freedom in being everything in One, and there is freedom in being one apart from all others. There is freedom of communion and there is freedom of despair, or, as Augustine wrote: "There is freedom in good, and there is freedom in the choice between good and evil." Adam's guilt lay in that in the final analysis, be it unconsciously, he chose the latter freedom. Hierarchically he preferred the lower to the higher.

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The theme of freedom is central to the Christian worldview. It is the Faustian theme of the European soul. Kierkegaard, one of the most profound investigators of the existential dialectic between freedom and truth, considered that: "Truth cannot be cognised. In truth one can only be or not be. ''5 This has something in common with Christ's reply in the Gospel: "I am the Truth." Does this not mean that essentially the Truth is ontological and cannot be revealed within the framework of a purely gnosiological approach? That truth is more a state of the spirit than the result of the constant exertions of the mind? In which case, the attainment of truth is indissolubly tied to the attainment of inner freedom. Cain's path to freedom is reflected in the legend of Nimrod: the path to freedom having become the touchstone of contemporary civilisation, free will and theomachy. Cain's murder of Abel is the first act of aggression in human history aimed directly against God. According to the authors of The Problems of Terrorism, Camus identifies two types of revolt in his essay "L'homme revolt6": historical revolt, which is basically a protest against oppression and inequality; and metaphysical revolt, "against the very conditions of human existence - injustice, evil and death - and most of all against God the Creator as the maker of this world order. The metaphysical rebel is not necessarily an atheist, but is always either a blasphemer or a theomachist." The suffering hero can feel himself "alive only in the brief moment of destruction," expressing the spiritual state of total revolt. This is why terrorism "has similar traits to those of a deeply frustrated religious movement. Moreover, terrorism is capable of becoming a surrogate for religion. ''6 M. Zeltser, writing about the psychology of contemporary terrorism, focuses on the same aspect of the problem: the leitmotif of terrorism, as he sees it, is not the urge to destroy, but the dulling and inconstancy of feelings . . . . In order to feel themselves 'alive', the terrorists need extraordinary stimuli which, however, do not produce the desired result. The constant pursuit of new experiences is the other aspect of the pathological inabilty to dedicate oneself to anything. This dulling of the sensitivity is a spiritual illness considerably more dangerous than the simple boredom caused by the monotony of bourgeois life . . . . In an atmosphere where everything

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is obtainable and everything is disposable, an individual exposes himself to irreversible dissipation. An excerpt from Hesse's novel Steppenwolf, quoted in the diaries of Baader Meinhoff terrorists, seems totally in the spirit of Stavrogin: "I am consumed by a wild longing for strong emotions and mindblowing sensations, by a rabid rage against this dull hum-drum, sterile life, by a frenzied need to smash something to pieces - a shop, for instance, or a church, or m y s e l f - to do something gratuitously evil and stupid, to tear the wigs from venerated idols, to supply rebellious schoolchildren with the tickets to Hamburg they so long for, to seduce a young girl, to wring several bourgeois necks." Bakunin, the romantic revolutionary, thought that "Evil is a satanic revolt against God's power, in which we find, however, the fertile seeds of all forms of human emancipation." Camus tries to trace the genesis of this revolt from the Marquis de Sade to Hegel. Camus calls the Marquis de Sade "the first and most radical ideologist of the New Age revolt." If God acts in this way toward man, thought de Sade, then there is no fundamental reason for man to act in any other way towards his fellow man. De Sade rejected God in the name of Nature. This in itself was in the course of current thinking. However, de Sade differs from his contemporaries in that he advocates a freedom of impulse rather than a freedom of principles. The blind force of sexual impulse is, for him, the highest expression of human nature, which cannot be subdued and is directed towards the torture and subordination of others. Rousseau's Social Contract was to alter the foundation of law, having become the gospel of the new revolutionary religion, whose God was reason, identified here as human nature itself. The new mystical entity called 'the People' henceforth proclaimed themselves the foundation of authority and law . . . . If man is by his nature good, and his nature is rational (which, as Camus pointed out, is an ideology, like all ideologies, in direct contradiction to human psychology), then his will is always infallible. Punishment is the treatment for those who are not able to understand their own goodness. This makes Rousseau the forefather of modem totalitarianism. Rousseau and Saint-Juste's universal abstract reason was changed by Hegel into the less artificial but considerably more ambiguous concrete universal reason. Since then, reason has no longer drifted

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above the world of phenomena, but has joined the stream of historical events, revealing itself completely at the end of the historical process. Reason and truth no longer inform action, having now become an end in themselves. There are no longer any values able to indicate how to reach these ends. Furthermore, a considerable part of the Hegelian tradition is intent on proving that moral consciousness is so 'banal', that it can only hinder the ultimate triumph of reason. An historical act must not be informed by principles, but by a calculation whose only criterion must be its future success. By this kind of supplanting, the historical act itself becomes identified with the Spirit's impulse towards incarnation. In the artistic world of Dostoevskij the problem of freedom is articulated in fundamentally different terms from these. In the very mystery of human freedom he perceives the mysteries of the human spirit, the laws of its being. There is an inexplicable strangeness inherent in most of Dostoevskij's 'liberated' heroes. Some deep mystery surrounds the figures of Stavrogin, Ver~ilov and Kirillov. They have been seduced by freedom. Having thereby been cursed, they have stared into the abyss and the abyss has been reflected in them; they are simultaneously attractive and repugnant. In them some dark, forbidden knowledge is made flesh. Nikolai Stavrogin is dark; the world of the novel is dark, densely packed with the rantings of 'us' and 'them'. A gigantic shadow, arisen from the deep, from the abyss, has covered the town and its inhabitants. They are no longer people but the possessed; it is not life, but a phantasmagoria. And above all this, as a centre, as a focus, is the aloof figure of Stavrogin with his mask-like face. He watches entranced as a red spider slides across a geranium leaf in the oblique rays of the sunset. Meanwhile, the possessed dance an increasingly fast and frenzied round. Dostoevskij gives a niggardly, cursory account of Stavrogin's earlier life. He appears in the novel virtually at the end of his life's journey. Here he acts out his riotous and rapid finale. As if it were of little significance, everything that we learn about his childhood, his life, basically, takes place off the stage of the novel. However, one fact does not escape the notice of the reader:that the insensitive Stavrogin, in his childhood, was characterised by extreme sensitivity

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(the result of Stepan Trofimovich's system of tuition). And here, unclearly at first, as in a piece of music, the theme of the hero's inner fate is introduced:
Stepan Trofimovich was able to reach deep into the heart of his friend and rouse the first still vague sensation of that eternal sacred anguish which any other chosen soul, having tasted it and known it, could never then have exchanged for cheap gratification. (There are some who would treasure that anguish more than the most total gratification, if such were possible.) Be that as it may, it was a good thing that the tutor and his pupil were eventually separated. 7

There are depths into which a young unfortified soul, with no experience of good and evil and without having undergone the trial of freedom, should not, for the time being, look. There are stages in the development of an individual which nobody can get around with impunity. Without having been burned, without having received the necessary tempering in the fire of adversity and suffering, the soul cannot accommodate that kind of knowledge which Nietzsche called "the tragic perception which kills the soul." The hypertrophy of sensitivity, when not reinforced by maturity of sensibility, forebodes spiritual hedonism. Premature intellectual development, ahead of moral development, frequently leads not to wisdom but to nothing more than intellectualisation. There is such a thing as the love of knowledge, but there is also the lust for knowledge. In metaphysical anguish, there is also the temptation of metaphysical voluptuousness. The complexity of an individual's development does not alter the wholeness of their development. Unaware of this, Stepan Trofimovich awoke in his pupil a langour of spirit at a time when the latter's soul was not yet sufficiently strong to be able to take in this premature spiritual experience without damage. This led to the sharper working of the consciousness, to the awakening of an obsessive interest in the subtlest nuances of passions slumbering in the depths of his being. As Dostoevskij appositely noted, "to be too aware is an illness." In human nature there are deep impulses whose strength lies in the fact that they are subconscious and cannot be subordinated by the strict control of reason. The fixation of these impulses gradually leads to the breakdown of the individual, to a conflict with the organic basis of life, to the blocking of spiritual sources. Thereafter, "whatever happened to Nikolaj Vsevolodovich, whatever unthinkable circumstances he found himself in, he would always preserve his prodigious ability to contemplate any move-

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ment of the soul with the lustful curiosity and deadly sang-froid of a detached observer." Even his suicide testified by its cool efficiency and premeditation to the degree of alienation of his soul. This detachment is to a certain extent usual in an introspective nature. But Stavrogin's introspection is quite particular: it is not immediate, but calculated and purposeful, and that is where its essential difference lies. It has not welled up spontaneously, but is a consciously invoked 'bifurcation' of the soul. From one point of view, this 'bifurcation' is a torment but, at the same time, it is for Stavrogin a secret source of delight, a necessary precondition for the acrobatic antics of freedom. Introspection, confined to the sphere of one's living and spiritual experience, appears, rather, to be a positive factor in spiritual development. It allows one to see an event from different angles and so helps one to avoid biased judgement. But barely does introspection start to penetrate the area of the sacral, and barely does cold analysis invade the kingdom of spiritual values whose axiomatic character is based on faith not knowledge, than introspection necessarily becomes destructive. Herein lies temptation: having freed spiritual energy and directed it exclusively towards negativity, this introspection will at some point intoxicate one with the illusions of freedom and creative power, which temporarily obscure the ruin that lies at the end of the chosen path. All of Dostoevskij's 'dark' heroes are experimentors. The objects of their experiments are all different, but in the final outcome the inevitable victim of their trials is their own soul. And all the same it could be said that not one of these protagonists exposed their own soul to as much pure aggression as did Nikolaj Vsevolodovich Stavrogin. All who run into Stavrogin unanimously confirm the exceptional quality of his nature: he senses limitless strength within himself and at the same time he is like the dried-up fig tree, cursed for its fruitlessness. After hearing Stavrogin's confession Tikhon says "I was horrified by the great wasted force spent deliberately on abomination." The word 'deliberately' is not stressed by Dostoevskij, but is nevertheless essentially loaded with meaning and proves the psychological astuteness of Tikhon. The theme of Stavrogin is the theme of freedom. He is attracted to evil not as an aim in itself, but as the condition for his realization of

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freedom; that is why his actions are deliberately evil. Evil here has a spiritual source. Augustine spoke of two freedoms: the freedom to choose between good and evil, and the freedom within good. Stavrogin is totally obsessed by the former. He is not concerned with the result, the final outcome, but only the moment of choice, the point where "I can." I can stop the vile outrage against Matryosha at any time; so is it then worth stopping? I can bite the governor's ear, I can bear a slap from Shatov, without losing my composure or giving vent to my anger. Because "if I can contain my anger at this, then I will experience a pleasure greater than anything imaginable." This acknowledgement by Stavrogin is surprisingly similar to the advice given by Krishnamurti in his Bombay Conversations. "I do not know whether you have ever tried the experiment where you try to subject your body and soul to your own control; if you have, then you will know that total lordship over oneself is extraordinarily gratifying. Such lordship gives the acute gratification of power - a significantly more intense gratification than that gained from holding a high office. ''8 However, that which Stavrogin has in mind and that which Krishanmurti teaches are essentially at the opposite poles of life and the coincidence of their psychological stances only underlines their different character. Here the two Augustinian freedoms come face to face - or, rather, freedom and self-will confront each other. For Krishnamurti the aim of self-control is to achieve a higher level of meditation. For Stavrogin - a higher level of voluptuousness. The former is enlightened as the 'baser' element is restrained; the latter is demonised as the 'baser' element is concentrated. Shatov called Stavrogin "an idle, shaky squireling" with a penchant for "moral voluptuousness." "Is it true, he challenges Stavrogin, that you are really convinced that you cannot differentiate between the beauty of a dissolute, beastly thing and the heroic beauty of, say, the sacrifice of one's life for humanity? Is it true that you have found beauty and pleasure equally at both extremes?" An attack on the spirit, an attack on God, just like an affirmation of God and the spirit, are perceived by the voluptuary as the highest level of freedom, as an intoxicationg flight of arrogance. The pleasure of the flight is what is important; the voluptuary is not concerned whether he flies upwards or downwards. In his very fall "he starts a hymn," then interrupts it with that "baseness perfected on the moon"

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(the motif in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man and for Stavrogin in The Devils). "Do you know, notes Prince Myshkin, that in the awareness of one's own insignificance and weakness, there is a limit beyond which one cannot go and from which point one begins to feel tremendous gratification in the shame itself. ''9 This relates directly to Stavrogin's admisson: "I did not love the vileness (there my reasoning was always perfect), but I enjoyed the ecstasy of the tormenting awareness of baseness." (The lower the fall, the freer the flight, and the stronger the temptation.) The tormenting awareness and the ecstasy of it! Stavrogin is distinctly aware and soberly evaluates each manifestation of his vileness as it occurs. And this monstrous ability encourages him to perpetrate more. In the conscious choice of evil, in the degradation of the spirit, the hero experiences the intoxication of freedom, self-assertion over God. This feeling is ruinous for the soul and yet gives rise to a gloomy ecstasy. Stavrogin's voluptuousness recalls the moment when his freedom turned into self-will. Kirillov accurately discerns that the godly attribute of a man-god is precisely self-will. Psychologically, self-will and voluptuousness are internally connected, linked. Voluptuousness testifies to the extreme degree to which the 'I' isolates itself from the world, when the world appears to the subject to be something distinctly separate which he longs to control, to include in his individuality, to subject to his power. For the voluptuary, others exist not as themselves, but only as a means to satisfy his lust. The overcoming of voluptuousness presupposes the discovery in the object of a subject, that is to say the revealing of its inner selfworth. But such a realisation necessarily supposes a limit to self-will where the inner pathos is in the opposition of 'I' to the world. The chief protagonist of The Devils is incapable of overcoming voluptuousness in this way. Self-will destroys the bases of the spirit and leads to ruin. Stavrogin is sufficiently intelligent to understand this: Then, seated at tea and chatting with them about something or other, I put the following state of affairs to myself, in these exact terms and for the very first time in my life: I neither know, nor feel good and evil; not only have I lost any sense of what these might be, indeed there is no such thing as good and evil (itself a source of pleasure to me). They constitute no more than a prejudice. Further, I felt that I

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myself could be free of any prejudice, but if I were to attain that freedom, then I would perish.

He does, in the end, attain that freedom, and duly perishes. In the letter he writes to Dasha just before his death he writes:
I have tested my strength everywhere. You advised me to do so that I may learn 'to know myself'. On my own and before others, I have proved that my strength is limitless, as it always has been . . . . But what to use that strength for - that is what I could never see and still cannot see . . . . Even now, I still sometimes wish to do something good and I derive pleasure from that fact; but alongside that I wish to do something evil and that also gives me pleasure. But both these feelings are always very mild, never strong enough. My desires are too weak; they cannot guide me. l~

In the Chandogya Upanishad, Indra says "to be free of everything is to become nothing. ''ll To become nothing here means to be everything, to reject one's illusory selfhood and to blend into the Absolute, in fact to become a unified whole with it. This is the path to spiritual perfection as understood in the Indian tradition of religious philosophy. For Stavrogin, to be free means just that - to be free for the sake of freedom. Not a denial of one's selfhood, but on the contrary total self-assertion. Even if it is not immortal, is selfhood such a bad thing, that is, proud awareness of the value of one's own personal 'I', in a century when to be an individual is itself an act of heroism, when in order to preserve his individuality man is constantly required to have a steadfastness of character and strength of will which, in another era, would have been more than enough for a hundred righteous people, when the levelling-down of consciousness and the impoverishment of spiritual sources make mere happiness a normal condition of the soul? "When the arteries are tied up, wrote Herzen, the blood flows through the capillaries. ''12 What Herzen had in mind was that individualism is the natural reaction of a person when it becomes impossible for them to attain normal realisation in the sphere of their social life. Dostoevskij looked at this question in another way: for him the roots of the problem of individualism are not in the social, but in the spiritual existence of man; individualism is itself testimony to the grave crisis which the irreligious consciousness has undergone. In his Notes from the Underground, a work which introduced a new stage in the writer's development, Dostoevskij defined two

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themes he considered essential: one is the individual's revolt against attempts to build worldwide happiness on the basis of 'realised necessity', understood as freedom, i.e. against the reduction of mankind to 'piano keys'; the other is the death of the individual on the paths of self-will, as he attempts to live by revolt alone. In Dostoevskij's later novels both themes come to light in their dialectical unity, showing the indissoluble link between the individuality and the fate of the hero in revolt. In a world where moral and spiritual values are in crisis, signalling the death of Christian culture, Dostoevskij's heroes rush about in search of positive principles which are not liable to be destroyed. But it is not possible to find certainty anywhere other than in the spirit. For only the spirit is life-giving. However, it is possible to be tempted even having chosen the spiritual path. The spirit can only really be tempted by spirit, not by flesh. The damned Karamazovs are tormented by questions in their ailing souls; theirs is an illness of magnitude. The important thing is not, like the hero of Notes from the Underground, to "fall in love with one's tooth-ache because there is nothing else to love." If the soul starts to find a natural aesthetic pleasure in spiritual torment, if this becomes an aim in itself, then instead of experiencing the salutary agony of the awareness of its selfhood, the soul experiences the voluptuous ecstasy of that selfhood and loses itself far from God. Then these tormenting questions destroy the very fabric of the soul and, turning the mind in on itself, lead to the demonisation of the spirit which, having been tempted by the freedom of the soul, now enjoys self-assertion and self-destruction. Shatov accuses Stavrogin of having converted him to a faith in which he himself did not believe. Moreover, at the same time Stavrogin had poisoned the mind of Kirillov with ideas directly contrary to those he had led him, Shatov, to believe. "I was not joking with you and then, as I was convincing you, I was perhaps more concerned with myself than with you," answered Stavrogin. 13 He is totally sincere: he was not joking, as, generally speaking, Dostoevskij's heroes are not inclined to joke when the matter concerns ideas. This psychological riddle is linked on one hand to the duality of thoughts in Dostoevskij's novels, and on the other hand to the theme of the impotence of freedom and the spiritual impos-

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ture of Stavrogin. The latter theme is the most essential one for understanding the spiritual make-up of the hero. There is a tradition of looking at the question of freedom exclusively as the problem of the contradiction between freedom and self-will. Insofar as freedom appears to be freedom in God, it is deemed to be good. "Love God and do as you will. ''14 If you truly loved, you would never use your freedom for evil. But just as freedom starts to usurp God's place in your soul and becomes an aim in itself, it will necessarily turn into self-will, i.e. evil. However is there not, according to legend, a test within God's freedom to tempt even the highest of angels to fall from Him? Paradoxically, is it not possible for an individual to be seduced by freedom and fall under its charm, despite any amount of self-will? One of the most daring 'aeronauts of the spirit', Kierkegaard, warned of the existence of this danger. "Can yo/~ imagine any d6nouement worse than when man's essence falls into a thousand pieces and scatters like a thousand banished demons, because it has lost his most cherished, his most sacred, his only, essential 'I'? 'q5 This was not said about Stavrogin. This is how one of Kierkegaard's characters, Judge Wilhelm, describes his friend the aestheticist. This description could equally be applied to the Dostoevskian hero. Kierkegaard's aestheticist sometimes shows signs of being remarkably similar to 'Prince Harry'. 16 This is quite appropriate, as in both cases we are dealing with manifestations of the same illness. At the moment of his spiritual awakening, an individual is aware of the wealth of his potential; but here lurks danger. The sense of completeness and power brought on by the awakening of spiritual strength can lead to intoxication by that power and to the demonic illusion of freedom. Then there is no higher gratification than the ecstatic awareness that 'I can', a unique kind of demiurge complex. The temptation is demonic; it is the temptation of illusory integrity, of perhaps even integrity with a minus sign, but above all and at any price - integrity. The soul is striving to find itself and at the same time endlessly running away from itself; and freedom turns into impotence. According to Kierkegaard, the danger lies in the fact that "the demonic shares the same sign as the godly, but more particularly in that a single individual can enter into an absolute relationship with
it."17

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The first reaction of an individual to infinity may be the rejection of infinity and the demonic striving to overcome it in order to attain that particular spiritual gratification gained from living as a challenge and being continually at the limit of one's power. Life becomes a peculiar game in which, sometimes by turns but more often simultaneously, the 'I' itself lives on through a series of unconnected individuals. Each transfer from one existential potential to another is like a new birth, carrying novelty and artistry into existence. However these sensations very soon cede their place to a feeling of emptiness and exhaustion. After the forbidden games, the spirit is rewarded with barrenness, with the loss of the one and only 'I' which is the real essence of the individual. Like Kierkegaard's aestheticist, Stavrogin did not strive towards sensual gratification: "I tried great dissipation and found strength in it, but I do not like and did not want dissipation . . . . " he admitted in his letter to Dasha. Stavrogin is attracted to the sensual not per se, but because it is the opposite of the spiritual. As the antipode of the spirit, sensuality acquires a negative-spiritual value. Hence in his confession Stavrogin writes: "I am certain that I could have lived my whole life as a monk, in spite of the bestial voluptuousness." (Chapter: At Tikhon's) The link with the Absolute is a defining characteristic of both Dostoevskij's hero and Kierkegaard's aestheticist. The nature of that link is immaterial. Moreover, its negative nature is most prevalent inasmuch as disinterested evil often appears more attractive from the aestheticist point of view than disinterested good (the aesthetics of 'singed wings'). That is how Christianity is transfigured into bestiality, Christ into the antichrist. The theme of Stavrogin's suggested imposture was introduced earlier by the atheist P~tr Verkhovensky as the theme of religious imposture: "Russia is getting lost in the fog, the earth cries out for its old gods ... Well, let them have this one! ... Who? ... You, Ivan Tsa(evich, you! ... We will say that he 'is hiding' ... Do you know what that means, 'hiding'? But he will come, he will come. ''18 Schelling clearly defined the metaphysical basis of spiritual imposture in his explanation of the power-seeking character: "The root of sin i s . . . that man abandons his true being for non-being, truth for lie, light for darkness, in order that he may become a creative

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principle and, by virtue of the self-determining energy which he contains within himself, he may rule over all things. For whosoever has distanced himself from the source of energy still retains the feeling that he w a s everything and all things, in God and with God; therefore he now wishes to become the same again, but no longer in God in his own right. From here springs the hunger of self-love, which becomes more scant and poor, and consequently thirsty, greedy and venomous, the more it foresakes the whole and the oneness. The inconsistency which is inherent in evil and which devours itself and constantly reduces everything to nought results in evil aspiring to become created, whilst at the same time denying the link with createdness, and falling into non-being, because in its arrogance, it wants to be everything". ~9 "Ladia" turns out to be a "withered dame," "Ivan Tsarevich" - an "idle, bumbling oaf." Possessed by the "cult of darkness, as a creative force ''2~ capable of reconstructing the world, P~tr Verkhovensky is hypnotised by Stavrogin's terrifiying, final act of freedom, and he does not realise that this freedom is in its nature as suicidal as darkness deprived of a creative basis. A demonic principle is always destructive, and not only for those against whom the destruction is directly aimed; the victim usually turns out to be the destroyer himself. Demonism, giving the illusion of creative power, throws the deceptive shadow of titanic fire over souls where all is already scorched and there is nothing left to burn. And even though "the urge to destroy is a creative urge", 2~ it is doomed to the torment of barrenness. Stavrogin is repaid with spiritual barrenness. No wonder he is so tormented by the epistle to the angel of the Laodicean church: "... I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spew thee out of my mouth. ''22 It is significant that, unlike Dostoevskij's other ideologist heroes, Stavrogin uses his ideas to torment other people, rather than himself. Like a cuckoo surreptitiously putting its offspring into other birds' nests. Shatov, Kirillov and Verkhovensky, aiming to realise one of Stavrogin's ideas, all want to limit the extent of his will, to give it a defined direction. But for Stavrogin playing freely with the infinite is an aim in itself. He does not need any positive idea: the

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god-bearing people, G o d m a n h o o d o r the social revolution. W h a t attracts Stavrogin is pure negativity, the continual experience o f his o w n f r e e d o m as the p o w e r o f time. A n d h e r e a fantastical m e t a m o r phosis takes place: Stavrogin w h o usually displays extraordinary self-possession and rare strength o f will in situations o f crisis, suddenly behaves in a w a y which testifies to his complete loss o f will and self-possession: he starts to act just like a c l o c k w o r k doll. During the scandalous scene with Gaganov, onlookers notice that Stavrogin during the brief operation was almost abstracted. As if he was not in his fight mind. ... The next moment, when he must have known perfectly well what he was doing, he showed no sign of embarrassment, but on the contrary smiled wickedly and cheerily.... There was a terrific uproar; he was surrounded. Nikolaj Vsevolodovich turned and looked around, answering no-one, curiously scrntinising the astonished faces. Finally, as if he had plunged suddenly into thought again, he scowled, went firmly up to the offended Pavel Petrovich and, speaking very fast with visible regret, he muttered: "You will, of course, forgive me . . . . Truly, I don't know why, I suddenly wanted to . . . . It was stupid... -23 (author's italics). Everything in this scene points towards the extent o f the alienation o f his soul. S o m e t h i n g similar happens to Stavrogin in the episode with Liputin's wife and in the scene with the Governor. The impression given is that it is not Stavrogin w h o is acting, but s o m e o n e else through him. Bulgakov c o m m e n t s on this p h e n o m e n o n in the following manner: A religious nature cannot tolerate emptiness. Once a soul has awakened to God, if it does not have the strength to be reborn into a new life, or to find in God its true 'I', it makes of itself a plaything of the force of evil. In this case the soul loses its essential equlibrium which nature had instinctively upheld until its awakening. Like the possessed Gadarene swine, it "lives, not in a house, but in the tombs," racked with the torment and frenzy of revolt. The soul becomes the medium for the force of evil; and not being itself evil, nor convinced by evil, but compelled into submissiveness. Bulgakov considers that Stavrogin's m o s t important trait is that "he is possessed, a m e d i u m o f black grace, o f evil power. ''24 A c c o r d i n g to Bulgakov, the d e m o n i c takes possession o f the h e r o ' s soul as an outside e l e m e n t turning the m a n into its obedient puppet. H o w e v e r if this is a seizure, it is not by an external but an internal element, lying at the v e r y depths o f the hero's spirit. It is a glimpse o f a godless Eternity. There is a particular state o f conscious-

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ness where man's soul experiences an almost cosmic alienation from what is happening to him. His perspective changes, people appear pathetic, swarming about like small insects, so miserable that it is ridiculous to take them seriously. Hence the feeling that these are no more than cranked up mechanisms, living dummies. It is in this state of consciousness that Stavrogin acts, giving onlookers the impression of sudden insanity.
The next moment, when he must have known perfectly well what he was doing" his soul assumes that very "cold evil" which differentiates Stavrogin from Lunin and Pechorin, and it seems as if a dark shadow is covering his previously soaring soul. But the soul itself casts this shadow and at the same time is afraid of it. Just as Stavrogin is mortally afraid after he has assaulted Matryosha. He cannot understand why he feels f e a r - he has never experienced it before. He consequently castigates himself for this disgraceful weakness, and this is one of the main motives for his marriage to the Lame Onei, The cause of the fear is more meta,~hysical than concrete. The hero is perplexed: It was not Siberia I was afraid of. 25

For all his testing of existing ethical norms, Stavrogin had never yet gone so far in his challenge to God, had never before approached the final limit of rejection. And although he is inclined to believe that there are worse sins on his conscience than his actions towards Matryosha (he remembers the woman who died as a result of his treatment of her)- there is nothing worse. It is not by chance that the strongest argument against the existence of God for Dostoevskij's heores is the suffering of children. The dialectical genius of Kierkegaard helps us to understand the sources of Stavrogin's fear. According to Kierkegaard, fear is primordially linked to freedom. "Fear is womanish impotence in which freedom becomes impotent." But at the same time "fear is something more selfish (Selbstische)." So impotence is a form of manifestation of selfhood. "Fear, notes Kierkegaard, is the vertigo from freedom, which arises whenever a spirit wants to propose a synthesis, and freedom looks at its own ability and snatches at the finite in order to hold its ground. ''26 Kierkegaard thinks that fear is the first, immediate reaction of consciousness, plunged wholly into the natural world in contiguity with the spiritual world. Since the spiritual, as opposed to the natural, is not given to man in the subject-sensual form, fear (Angst), as opposed to fright (Furcht), is revealed as fear in the face of nothingness. So for children the first awakening of self-awareness is the feeling of selfhood associated with fear and panic which they experience before things we consider most normal. This is how a

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child is spiritually born: it encounters nothingness and is instilled with fear. 27 Later, in the process of growing up, that encounter with nothingness is recognised as the problem of death. In this way, the feelings of selfhood, impotence and freedom are psychologically linked to the moment of spiritual realisation of the individual. Kierkegaard, referring to the Biblical legend of the Fall, writes:
In the theory that prohibition causes desire, there is an assumption of knowledge rather than ignorance, for Adam must have the knowledge of freedom, in order to desire it. But that will be explained later. Prohibition frightens him, because prohibition arouses in him the possibility of freedom. That which happened in the state of innocence, like the nothingness he fears, thenceforth entered into him and now there is again some nothingness- the frightening potential in what he c a n do. He has no idea exactly what he has the potential to do. To suppose the contrary, as is usually done, is to presuppose the occurrence which is to happen later, i.e. the separation of good and evil. Now all there is is his potential - as a higher form of ignorance, as a higher expression of fear, because, in the higher meaning it both is and is not, because Adam both loves it and runs from it in the higher sense of the word. 28

Man is afraid of his potential because it confronts him with his selfhood, but at the same time his selfhood entices him by opening up the horizon of freedom. Arkadij Dolgorukij, the hero of the novel A Raw Youth, proclaims this 'potential': "And, you know, I need all my depraved will power just to prove to myself that I have the strength to refuse it" (author's italics). Stavrogin does not refuse it because he convinces himself he is capable of refusing it every time. For Stavrogin, like for Kierkegaard's aestheticist, the pure possibility, the temptation of 'I can', gives rise to an ambivalent feeling of fear and attraction. 29 It is significant that he admits that at such moments he catches his breath. At such moments there is no such thing as good or evil for him - there is only 'potential'. That is the highest form of ignorance. Good and evil appear later, as the result of a willful act. They are absent from Stavrogin's consciousness at the moment of committing the act and realising his freedom. But nevertheless they do exist: they are part of the act of choice, as a realisable possibility. Also, as Kierkegaard notes: "from the psychological viewpoint, a fall always happens in a state of weakness." For the choice was made long before the act of choice and potentially changes nothing since a spiritually awakened individual, whether

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he desires to or not, by not choosing to be ethical, cannot avoid choosing to be aesthetical. Stavrogin admits: "Whenever in my life I have found myself in an extremely shameful, immeasurably humiliating, base and, importantly, absurd situation, I have felt, as well as immeasurable anger, incredible gratification." Turning his attention to Nero, Kierkegaard gives a profound analysis of the consciousness of the aetheticist:
Nero struggles to break through his own immediacy, and in vain he strives to discover a different, higher form of earthly existence for himself.... He does not have the moral strength to do so and he grasps desperately at gratification. The whole world must cultivate its imagination so that it may constantly suggest new forms of gratification for him; if his gratification is curtailed, he will suffocate from lassitude. The consciousness, amongst other things, has always striven to free itself from the burden it carries, but without success: it is always deceived by gratification. Then the consciousness becomes clouded, the soul is filled with rage which turns into trepidation, not abating even in the moment of gratification.3~

Psychologically, the gratification experienced by Stavrogin can be related to that of Nero. The lassitude which grips the Roman Caesar's soul is also known to the soul of Prince Harry. He experiences the immeasurable rage and the unbelievable gratification; his clouded soul senses the unabating trepidation which poisons all the gratification to which the soul is desperately clinging. This cold demonic trepidation of a deceived and devastated soul is in direct opposition to that holy trepidaton described by Kierkegaard in his poem about Abraham. The fear and trepidation endured by the aestheticist and the fear and trepidation of the "Knight of Truth" are the heights and depths which the soul has reached. In a strange way, on the edge of non-existence and on the threshold of eternal existence, the consciousness is seized with a mixture of despair and delight - that deathly shiver which runs through the soul as it comes in contact with the infinite. In both instances man finds himself standing on the far side of good and evil. But the principal difference is that in the first instance the problem of good and evil loses its ethical pathos since it is evaluated by the consciousness only according to aesthetics; whereas in the second instance it does not exist as a problem since it cannot exist for a believer who has separated himself from the Absolute, it cannot survive outside the Oneness in which all forms of incompleteness are removed. "The mood of the aestheticist is always eccentric because his life centre is on the periphery. An individual's centre should always be

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within himself, therefore one who has not found himself is always eccentric," notes Kierkegaard. 31 This is definitely appropriate with regard to Nero: he is certainly eccentric. Stavrogin has an undeniable and famous penchant for eccentric escapades. However Stavrogin's eccentricity is different from Nero's type of aesthetic because of the latter's immediacy. Somehow Stavrogin's eccentricity is absurd, artificial, cerebral. It is more a dissipation of the spirit than of character. The difference is that Kierkegaard's Nero is immediate, unable to break out of the confines of his primordial immediacy. Stavrogin is devoid of immediacy: his position is mediated like the aesthetical position, as opposed to the ethical. Quite different from Nero's type of aesthetic. What is the cause of his fear? Like Nero, Stavrogin experiences fear in the face of nothingness, a fear which any individual issuing a challenge feels, irrespective of his spiritual experience. This is the fear which Don Juan tasted at the stony handshake of the Commander. Abraham is inwardly full, having experienced fear and trepidation upon contact with a higher spiritual reality; the aesthetecist is inwardly empty.The former felt fear and trepidation as a confirmation of his soul in the Absolute; the latter - as a fall from the Absolute. Psychologically, maximum proximity has initially the same impact as maximum distance. Both are touching the limits. Both create a desert around man. 32 Kirillov, the other hero of The Devils, is also hounded by fear. His suicide is more depressing than a nightmare. There is something ethereal about it - flashes of insight into 'other worlds'. Even the cynical Verkhovensky is struck by the awesome mysticism of the scene. Kirillov himself is driven by fear into a state that could no longer be called human. He identifies the sources of that fear himself: "I am terribly unhappy because I am terribly afraid. Fear is the curse of man... For three years I searched for the attribute of my godliness, only to find it is self-will! That is the only way I can show my unruliness and my terrifying freedom. For it is indeed most terrifying. I am killing myself to prove my unruliness and my terrifying freedom ''33 (author's italics). This admission by Kirillov is reminiscent of Kierkegaard's definition: "Suicide is the negative form of infinite freedom." But infinite freedom gives rise to infinite fear. The fascination of freedom is that it is a representation of

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spirit. The mystery of freedom is in its spiritual foundation. This is why during Stavrogin's confession Tikhon could suddenly say to him: "God forgives you your unbelief, for you have honoured the Holy Spirit, though you know Him not." There is no spirit outside freedom. However, as soon as freedom becomes a means to individual self-assertion ("Am I a trembling creature, or do I have the right"; "Anything goes"), it unavoidably leads to spiritual failure. Freedom cannot be only the means; nevertheless, it is also not an end in itself. Truth, Good, Beauty, Freedom are hypostatically in the Spirit. Indivisibly. Each discloses a path to the Kingdom of the Spirit. But the absolutisation of any one hypostasis is a supplanting: it is a part supplanting the whole. This destroys harmony and demonises that principle which has become the usurper. Truth dies into dogma; Good is fettered; Beauty is lured to Sodom; Freedom is transformed into arbitrariness. The very formulation of the question of freedom proves the extent of non-freedom. The problem of freedom arises when there is any loss of freedom. In an era of general cultural crisis, the question of freedom finds itself brought into sharper focus than ever for a philosophical consciousness: in antiquity for the stoics and cynics; in the Christian era for the philosophers of romanticism. At such times, spiritual integrity is lost and in the disintegrating world, in a vain attempt to keep his balance, an individual grasps at the values which were until recently immovable - Freedom, Good and Beauty. However, the sense of oneness is already lost and as the individual asserts himself through one of these principles, he comes into unavoidable conflict with the other principles and only aggravates the disunion and dissension that rule the world. Tillich comments bitterly on the spiritual condition of our time: "Prior to the outer historical and social tragedy, there exists the tragedy of selfhood, of its primordial sinful separation from the whole, its inevitable schism from any other self, and moreover its schism within itself. ''34 Despite their different temporal and cultural contexts, the legend of Nimrod and the legend of the Grand Inquisitor both have the same underlying spiritual point. They are two means by which the individual usurps God's freedom, two kinds of subrogation on the path to truth, two forms of spiritual imposture, and they both arise from

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the same essence. From the point of view of the Grand Inquisitor, in order to give mankind happiness, first it must be deprived of freedom. Nimrod's form of existence is the absolute realisation of individual freedom - freedom as arbitrariness. For the former, freedom is but a means; for the latter, it is an aim in itself. In both cases, freedom is only the object taken possession of as a result of the individual's willful effort, and absolutely not the essence of being of the individual, or the means whereby he exists. Therefore, instead of finding the desired wholeness on the way to possessing freedom, there is further necrosis and disintegration of the spiritual structure of the individual, occasioned by the subrogation of the inner directive 'to be' by the outer directive 'to possess'; freedom, truth, good or beauty - it is all the same. The living breath of life has already frozen in the hands of a dead thing. Midas' gift was able to give him power over the world, but could not alleviate the torment of his hunger or his thirst. Taken as the Absolute, freedom inevitably destroys any form in which its primary aim is self-realisation because, as Nietzsche so rightly put it: " Will without direction remains free and squanders itself on the infinite.''35 Freedom, taken as an aim in itself, becomes obsessed with, on one side, tile urge to absorb all Eternity into itself; and on the other side the urge to incarnate itself in an "eighteen~stone merchant's wife" as a symbol of the finite in its most fertile, earthly aspect. In the end this path must lead to the suicide of freedom and the realisation of man's secret striving for pure potentiality which comprises within itself existence and nothingness in their primordial conjugation, i.e. the possibility of conditioned, pre-existential potential which has never been confined by any act of individual choice.

Translatedfrom the Russian by Lucy Daniels

NOTES I p. Tillich, Dynamics of faith, in Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, New York 1961, p. 383. 2 A. Mayer, Religija i kul'tura [Religion and Culture], Paris 1984, p. 418. 3 M. Buber, Ich undDu, in Werke, Bd. 1, Mtinchen-Heidelberg 1961, p. 83. 4 "Nimrod. In the Old Testament, Nimrod is a warrior and a hunter. He is the son of Kush and the grand-son of Ham. In the book of Genesis it is said "Like Nimrod,

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a mighty warrior before the Lord." Etymologically, the name Nimrod is linked with 'to rise up' and 'to revolt'. Hence, in the Haggadic tradition, his name is associated with "and all the people rose up against JAHWE" where he represents the first hunter and the first to go into battle against other nations. His success at hunting is due to the leather clothes he wears which were sewn by God for Adam and Eve to hide their nakedness. Seeing these clothes, the wild animals fall to their knees before him and he kills them, whereupon the people proclaim him to be their ruler. Nimrod is a fervent idolater and leads the construction of the Tower of Babel - "Nimrod's house." In Muslim tradition, Nimrod is the personification of aggression . . . . Having failed in his attempt to build the Tower of Babel, Nimrod tries to fly to heaven in a box attached to 4 eagles reared on meat. Once out of sight of the earth, Nimrod fires arrows into the sky; the angel Gabriel, covered in blood, returns them to him and Nimrod thinks he has wounded God himself. Nimrod continues to live impiously for another 400 years. When an angel suggests he repent of his sins, Nimrod challenges God to a fight. Nimrod is overcome by a swarm of mosquitoes, one of which flies up his nose into his brain. This he suffered for 40 years, only ever getting any relief when hit with a hammer." Mify narodov mira [Myths of the peoples of the World], Moscow 1982, vol. 2, ~p. 218-219. S. Kierkegaard, Der BegriffAngst, Berlin 1965, p. 61. 6 Problemy Terrorisma [The Problems of Terrorism], The Academy of Sciences of the USSR, Issue no. 2, Moscow 1986, pp. 34-37. 7 F.M. Dostoevskij, Pol. Sob. Soch., cit., vol. 10, p. 35. 8 j. Krishnamurti, Kommentarii k zhizni [Commentaries on Life], in Otkrytiye lndii. Filosofskiye i esteticheskiye vozzreniya v Indii XX veka [Discovering India. Philosophical and Aesthetic Views in XX century India], Moscow 1987, pp. 523549. 9 EM. Dostoevskij, Pol. Sob. Soch., cit., vol. 8, p. 343. l0 Ibid., vol. 10, p. 514. I I S. Radhakrishnan, Indiiskaya filosofiya [Indian Philosophy], vol. 1, Moscow 1956, p. 128. 12 A.I. Herzen, S togo berega [From the Far Shore], in Sochineniya, vol. 1-2, Moscow 1986, vol. 1, p. 54. 13 F.M. Dostoevskij, Pol. Sob. Soch., cit., vol. 10, p. 197. 14 St. Augustine, Confession, p. 167. 15 S. Kierkegaard, Naslazhdeniye i dolg [Gratification and Duty], St Petersburg 1894, pp. 226-227. 16 I.e. to Stavrogin. 17 S. Kierkegaard, Furcht und Zittern, Frankfurt am Main und Hamburg 1958, p. 178. 18 However, the aforementioned imposture as an historical phenomenon has always had a religious/eschatological character in Russia. Its moral pathos lies in the chiliastic aspirations of people's souls, expecting the millennial kingdom today, here and now. That is why the soul is so easily taken in by the subrogation. 19 F. Schelling, Filosofskoje issledovanje o sugcnosti (elove?eskoi svobody [Philosophical Research on the Essence of Human Freedom], Saint Petersburg 1908, p. 82. 20 In S.L. Frank's terminology. 21 According to M. Bakunin.

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22 F.M. Dostoevskij, Pol. Sob. Soch., op. cit., vol. 11, p. 11. 23 Ibid., vol. 10, p. 39. 24 S. Bulgakov, Trup krasoty. Po povodu kartin Picasso [The Corpse of Beauty. About the paintings of Picasso], Moscow 1914, p. 9. 15 Like Stavrogin, Raskolnikov experiences fear as he trespasses. But essentially their feelings are different. Raskolnikov destroys one principle in the name of realising others. He is guilty of spiritual ignorance. Stavrogin trespasses in order to trespass. His aim itself is to confront the Absolute. Therefore, at first Raskolnikov's fear has concrete causes: he is afraid he might have left evidence, he is afraid of being exposed. Stavrogin's fear is purely metaphysical. He is not afraid of the possibility of being punished or even of the failure of particular principles (the next stage of Raskolnikov's fear), but he is afraid of that which he does not have the power to recognise and define but whose existence is capable at any moment of being experienced as a threatening, if unknown reality. 26 S. Kierkegaard, Der Begriffe Angst, op. cit. p. 58. 27 There is an analogy with the system of'taboo' in primitive tribes, where almost any subject in the physical world could evoke a metaphysical feeling of fear. 2s S. Kierkegaard, Der Begriffe Angst, op. cit., p. 64. 29 EE Gajdenko makes an interesting analysis of this feeling and Kierkegaard's aestheticist in her Tragediya estetizma [The Tragedy of Aestheticism]. 30 S. Kierkegaard, Naslazhdeniye i dolg, op. cit., p. 259. 31 Ibid., p. 310. 32 Two types of solitude must here be differentiated: Kierkegaard's solitary Abraham and Nietzsche's solitary Zarathustra. They form the positive and the negative links with the infinite. 33 F.M. Dostoevskij, Pol. Sob. Soch., op. cit., vol. 10, p. 410. 34 p. Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, op. cit., p. 391. 35 E Nietzsche, Volya k vlasti [The Will to Power], in Sob. Sochinenii, vol. IX, Moscow 1910, p. 114.

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