Dostoyevsky: the role of the Church and the State

Matt Damore

In Book 2, Chapter 5 of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece The Brother’s Karamasov called ‘So be it! So be it!’, we find a very interesting debate between Ivan Karamasov and Father Zosima. Ivan is very intelligent and is the vile Fyodor’s second son, between Dimitri and Alyosha. Father Zosima is the very wise and renown mentor and teacher of Alyosha, who presides over a monastery as an elder. The setting is the monastery, where Fyodor, Alyosha, Ivan, Miusov (Fyodor’s cousin), the monks, Father Zosima, and Dimitri (who is running late) are going to attend.

Ivan, Dimitri, and Fyodor have chosen the monastery as a possible place to settle a dispute that has arisen between Fyodor and Dimitri. Dimitri’s mother had left him an inheritance and yet Fyodor has stolen it and claimed it as his own. What I want to focus on is not the hopeless dispute, but a debate that begins when Zosima leaves the monastery to meet with the townsfolk, continues after his return, and is finally resolved. The debate is spurred on by an article Ivan had written on whether the Church should subsume the State and take on the role of punishing crime and making laws.

Ivan’s reasoning is that if citizens knew they were not just disrupting the harmony of society but offending God as well, there would be more deterrence. In other words, Ivan doesn’t believe in the separation of Church and State. The Church should be able to cast criminals out of society. According to this theory, crime would begin dwindle more and more. Miusov retorts by calling Ivan’s position Ultramontanism (literally ‘beyond the mountains’), the position that the Pope has ultimate power. But one of the monks points out that Miusov has it backwards: it’s not that the church becomes the state (Rome), but that the state becomes the church.

Zosima disagrees, though, with Ivan’s reasoning. Remember, Ivan’s thesis is put forward because he thinks it’ll deter more effectively. The criminal is less likely to steal, say, if he knows he steals from God rather than from the State. But Zosima underlines the notion that conscience is the only real deterrent. This leads to another one of Ivan’s points.

Without immortality everything is permissible. The reasoning is this: if man didn’t believe he was going to live forever, his criminal acts in the here and now would have less condemnation from his conscience. But if he believed in an afterlife, that his acts here and now have consequences there and then, man might have less reason to break laws and be criminals. What is interesting about this debate is the way Zosima - skilled psychologist as he is - probes into Ivan’s heart and motives for why he puts forth the thesis he does. Ivan believes things with the head instead of his heart; inside, he is a man with deep problems about the idea of faith, and Zosima even suspects that Ivan is using his intellect to put forth a thesis he doesn’t believe himself to be ironical.

We come to see that not only is Zosima a spiritual mystic and an elder at a monastery, but that his mind has been trained to debate Ivan on his own ground. The spiritual man is to be attuned in all his faculties because of his faith and his knowledge of his self because of his love for God and his neighbor. If the state became the Church, Zosima argues, the physical part of man is excommunicated or punished; but true reformation can’t happen unless the individual conscience is stung by a person’s sense of sin. This is Zosima’s counter-thesis: the individual conscience is the best deterrent. By the end of the civil debate, Ivan respects the elder and receives his blessing. While Ivan is admittedly intelligent, it extends only to the head and abstract principles. Zosima’s intelligence extends throughout his soul from a lifetime of faith, with an extensive knowledge of human nature due to his own soul-searching and his obedience to God’s commands: to love God and his neighbor.

To love is to know. That is the mystery of knowing the things of the spirit.