Father Lazarus Abboud
John Climacus and Dostoevsky belong to two complementary worlds: the first is the world of the spirit and the second the world of the soul, and together they form the earthly face of man (Dostoevsky) and his transfigured icon (John). The Christian man who wishes to soar in the world of divine realities must take two wings — the right one: spiritual literature, and the second: human literature. He who longs to soar cannot but dive deep, just as Christ is of two natures, human and divine; so too, for him who wishes to taste the sweetness of the transfiguration, he must ascend the ladder in the company of Dostoevsky and John.
((A young man aspiring to monasticism went to Mount Athos. The young man said: Father, my heart burns for the spiritual life, for asceticism, for constant communion and union with God, for obedience to a spiritual father — guide me, holy father, that I may advance spiritually. The abbot went and brought the book David Copperfield by the author Charles Dickens and said: My son, read this book. The troubled young man objected: But father, this is a sentimental, imaginative novel from the Victorian era, a product of Western enslavement; this is not a spiritual book, nor even an Orthodox one. I need writings that teach me spirituality. The abbot smiled and said: Unless you first cultivate in yourself natural Christian and human sentiments, and learn to see life as little Davy saw it — simply, sweetly, warmly, with forgiveness — then all the Orthodox spirituality and the teachings of the fathers will be of no use to you, but will turn you into a spiritual monster and destroy your soul))(1).
Spiritual knowledge does not lead us to God by itself; rather, in reality it may cast us into a different world and in a completely opposite direction, for we may surrender to temptation and imagine that, by reason of the breadth of our knowledge, we have become the privileged ones with God, and thereby join the choir of the Pharisees. And there is no doubt that drowning in it alone leads us to fundamentalism, rigidity, and religious fanaticism.
The problem of many of the religiously devout is contentment with spiritual literature alone, and this is a mistaken path, which the ancient man trod when the sons of the gods married the daughters of men and begot (giants). Neither can one be content with human literature alone, for this path leads him to despair and pessimism and even to nihilism. Abiding in human literature is a diving into the depths and a wandering in the weary, despairing human reality and a collision with its tragedies, and it makes the reader turn in a world from which there is no exit; whereas spiritual literature rescues the second from his hell, that is, from the closed world of humanity.
We must balance the two and set out from our world on a firm foundation, as Christ said: the wise man is he who builds his house on the rock. The Church fought the heresy of the one nature of Christ, and this exactly leads us to have two wings with which man soars. What is not taken up is not saved, and what is not known is not made manifest. We must ask: what are we going to save? Dostoevsky answers us here and tells us about human nature. And how do we save? John Climacus answers us (let the ladder teach you), because man, in the end, works at healing his human nature (whose struggle Dostoevsky reveals), so he cannot dispense with knowing it, and climbs the ladder lest he die.
What is the world of Climacus? It is the world of the archetype: ”in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). As Metropolitan Paul says: “An ascending movement and a ladder by which we advance by degrees from the earthly to the heavenly, and the ascent is a return and a progression toward human dignity and the true human worth of our being, as God gave it of energies and willed it in the loftiness of its dignity… And in this movement we build from our human being a human, Christian being in which Christ is formed… This path is a path of passing over from one state to another; it is the building of a state of transformation, or a new building within an old structure; it is the planting of the spiritual life in a material human structure” (see Metropolitan Paul’s homily, The Fast — the Divine Ladder).
Whereas Dostoevsky’s world is the world of the image: “in our image, after our likeness” (Gen. 1:26). Dostoevsky was fascinated by man — “man is a mystery” — for he took up his complexities and poured all his literary concern into describing the natures of people, showing their differences, and drowning in the depths of their souls, drawing a complete picture of the various forms of their lives, thoughts, and feelings. He seeks to explore man’s behavior as an irrational being, whose dreams, fears, and pains are affected by various forms that follow no clear logic or single path.
Dostoevsky’s novel is the novel of human solitude; in the expression of “Alberes,” it is an expression of the disturbance, the lack of cohesion, and the grief that man feels at being alone in an existence not made for him. His novel does not carry an answer to this eternal anxiety, but only tries to create another turning point for the tragedy. Under the weight of sorrow, man feels that he belongs to a race other than the human race, trying to find another importance for his actions besides the interpretations the world gives them. In this way the heavenly and the earthly mingle in the novel, until it rests finally upon rejecting the illusion of the independence of everything earthly from what is beyond it(2).
Dostoevsky shows man in his deepest decline becoming an insect (the novel Notes from Underground), and John shows man in his greatest transfigurations becoming a god. This is no contradiction, but rather the reality of man, who either descends into the deepest depths of stuntedness or rises to the stature of God. The first explains the reality of our souls and writes what we wish to say and do not know how to express, saying for example “the most dreadful thing in life is manifest in the intense awareness of one’s own inadequacy, and consequently you are not only unable to change yourself, but you cannot do anything at all,” or saying “I cannot forgive anyone, for he who strikes me is driven by the influence of the natural laws which man cannot forgive, and I cannot forget, for the blow is an insult in any case.”
John comes to set up for us a ladder standing upright in the midst of Dostoevsky’s bitterness, to complete for him his inadequacy and his impotence through the divine grace that completes man, and to bring us out of the pressure of the natural laws into the divine folly where the blow becomes a new door to a more transfigured world.
Dostoevsky helps us not only to understand ourselves, but to understand that man — every man — passes through a bitter inner struggle, and we, especially those entrusted with salvation, must understand (whom do we save?) — Dostoevsky expressed this — and (how do we save?) — through Climacus. For every man is a unique being, and every human uniqueness has its remedy and its malady, its darknesses and its radiances, its longing and its passions. Climacus says: “The very same food sometimes arouses the appetite of some and at other times produces loathing in others; attention must be paid to the time, the place, the kind, and the quantity of what we sow in those who have come to receive the planting(3).
He who ascends with John without understanding the essence of human nature, its daily impasses, and its questions, reaches the summit of a mountain thinking that he has soared, while he is still upon the dust of the earth. But he who has fully understood human nature soars in the world of spirits in complete freedom like an eagle, because he has grasped his nature and so healed it, and dived into it and so grasped its meaning, and grasped the human tragedy in his heart, and so knew where to place the ladder, at what depth and in what direction. At that point he becomes a spiritual father and a healing physician to his children, knowing the souls of each one of them and what stirs in their hearts. For the physician who gives all his patients the same medicine becomes a criminal.
In the end, man cannot be transfigured in the world of the spirit unless he drowns in the world of the soul. For soaring in Climacus’s world begins with a diving into Dostoevsky’s world, and its end is radiances with God. And the answer missing in Dostoevsky you reach in Climacus, and what you wish to heal in Climacus you discover in Dostoevsky.
He who ascends the ladder must carry human literature as provision, for he who is not formed by literature is not realized in the spirit. Human literature is sight, and sight is the vision of the mind; spiritual literature is insight, and insight is the vision of the heart. Human knowledge is the apprehension of the human soul and its image as it is, and in that in which it abides, in itself; and spiritual literature is the apprehension of the soul and its archetype as it is in God and in that into which it becomes.
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Note: I do not restrict literature to Dostoevsky, nor spiritual teachings to Climacus; I took them as two models, whereas man must plunge into wandering and tasting all the literature, poetry, art, beauty, and music that man has created.
References
1. The Mountain of Silence (A Search for Orthodox Spirituality), Kyriacos Markides, translated into Arabic by Dina Fam Antonius, Publications of the Monastery of the Dormition of the Mother of God — Hamatoura, 2013, pp. 383-384.
2. Article “Dostoevsky’s Literature.. Margins on Pain, Anger, and Estrangement,” Rufayda Taha, 27/1/2017, Al Jazeera website.
3. John Climacus of Sinai, The Ladder of Heaven, Monastery of the Intercessor, al-Hara al-Harsh, Deba, 2011, pp. 418-419