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Literature: Two Dionysians

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In his book on Dostoevsky, Nicholas Berdyaev sets up a series of comparisons and contrasts between Dostoevsky and Nietzsche. Both recognize that man as he has been conceived in earlier ages is dead. Both know that man is “terrible free.” Both know that Humanism has self-destructed precisely in its deification of man – the creation of the man-god, counter to the God-man of orthodoxy. Both, in fact are Dionysians.

But Dostoevsky is a Christian Dionysian, and that makes all the difference. Berdyaev writes:

“For Nietzsche there was neither God nor man but only this unknown man-god. For Dostoievsky [sic] there was both God and man: the God who does not devour man and the man who is not dissolved in God but remains himself throughout all eternity. It is there that Dostoievsky shows himself to be Christian in the deepest sense of the word.”

Dostoevsky thus offers a new anthropology, a Dionysian Christianity and a Christian Dionysian. For Dostoevsky, man is all about dynamism; there is no smooth glass at the bottom of the soul, but a volcano ready to blow. All is flux. Dostoevsky is the most Heraclitean of writers. But, unlike Nietzsche and other Dionysians, Dostoevsky does not dissolve personality: “He was exclusively dionysiac, but the human person was affirmed with all the more strength in the heart of his exaltation; man, with all his dynamism and contradictions, remained himself all through, indestructible man.”

In this way, Dostoevsky surpassed not only Greek Dionysianism but also the “mysticism of many Christians for whom man vanished and left only the divine. Man has a part in eternity, and when Dostoievsky explored the deep places of life he came upon those of God as well. All his work is a plea for man. He was in radical opposition to the monophysite spirit: he recognized not one single nature, human or divine, but two natures, human and divine. He took such a strong line on this point that, compared with his, the Eastern Orthodox and Catholic conception seems almost to smack of monophysism, to suggest an inclination to absorb the human in the divine nature.”

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Saturday, June 5, 2010 at 11:10 am

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Literature: Two Dionysians

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