Paying Attention To The Sky

Father Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who was martyred during the Bolshevik purges of the 1930s. Russian gulag files in 1933.

DONALD SHEEHAN, Ph.D, teaches writing at Dartmouth University, and he is also the director of the Robert Frost Place in Franconia, NH. Professor Sheehan is an ordained Sub-Deacon in the Eastern Orthodox Church, serving at a small mission parish in mid-Vermont. In this lecture, he connects the final scene of Dostoevsky’s The Brother’s Karamazov to the funeral service in the Eastern Orthodox Church, in order to explore the nature of personhood in both Dostoevsky and the Orthodox faith. The complete lecture is here.

Memory Eternal
The Orthodox Christian funeral hymn, “Memory Eternal” concludes Dostoevsky’s great, final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, when, following the funeral of the boy whom Alyosha Karamazov (and the circle of schoolboys around Alyosha) had deeply loved, Alyosha speaks to the boys about the funeral and about the meaning of the resurrection, with this brief song as their steady focus.

Being Remembered by the Lord
We can best approach the meaning of this song through following the connection between the Orthodox funeral services and the crucifixion of Christ. Fr. Pavel Florensky, recently canonized by the Church in Russia, articulated the connnection by first asking, “What did the wise thief ask for on the cross?” and then answering by quoting from St. Luke’s Gospel: “Lord, remember me when Thou comest in Thy kingdom.”  Florensky then continues:

“And in answer, in satisfaction of his wish, his wish to be remembered, the Lord witnesses: ‘Verily, I say unto thee, Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise.’ In other words, “to be remembered” by the Lord is the same thing as “to be in Paradise.” “To be in Paradise” is to be in eternal memory and, consequently, to have eternal existence and therefore an eternal memory of God. Without remembrance of God we die, but our remembrance of God is possible only through God’s remembrance of us.

The Relational Reality Of All Personhood
We are persons, says the Orthodox Church, because we fulfill the three conditions of all existence. These three conditions were articulated in the third century A.D. by the Orthodox Fathers known as the Cappadocians. They are summed up in this way by J. D. Zizioulas in his wonderful essay called “The Contribution of Cappadocia to Christian Thought”:

We are persons because we know ourselves as foundationally free, under not even the tiniest bondage to, or limitation of, either earthly history or the material world – a freedom even prior to and greater than the Church herself because (as Zizioulas says) such freedom “constitutes the ‘way of being’ of God Himself.”

We are persons because we can give ourselves freely and entirely to another in self – emptying love; that is, we can voluntarily surrender all our selfhood entirely into the hands of another in the action of loving that other. Zizioulas puts it beautifully: “Love is a relationship, it is the free coming out of one’s self, the breaking of one’s will, a free submission to the will of another.”

We are persons when we understand ourselves as wholly unique, as entirely unrepeatable and forever irreplaceable. As members of a species we are merely replaceable and countable individuals in a set: biological, historical, or sociopolitical. As members of a set (or sets), we can be compelled to serve extrinsic, even hostile, purposes; we can, that is, be treated as things. But as persons, we are unique and unrepeatable; hence, we cannot (as Zizioulas says) “be composed or decomposed, combined or used for any objective whatsoever”(35).

These three conditions of personhood – foundational freedom, self-emptying love, and absolute uniqueness – shed great light on what the Orthodox Church – and Dostoevsky – mean by the phrase “Memory Eternal.” It means this: in the same way that the wise thief achieves personhood by entering into loving Christ freely (and this freedom is emphasized in the crucifixion scene as everyone else mocking Christ while the thief freely and deliberately chooses to love), just so we become persons in freely surrendering our own will, in an action of love, into the hands of another.

Personhood In The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky gives beautiful expression to this Orthodox understanding of personhood early in The Brothers Karamazov when he describes the relation between Alyosha Karamazov and his spiritual father, the Elder Zosima. “What, then,” asks the narrator, “is an elder?” He answers:

An elder is one who takes your soul, your will into his soul and into his will. Having chosen an elder, you renounce your will and give it under total obedience and with total self-renunciation. A man who dooms himself to this trial, this terrible school of life, does so voluntarily, in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, self-mastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life’s obedience, attain to perfect freedom – that is, freedom from himself – and avoid the lot of those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in themselves.

This perfectly expresses the Orthodox understanding of the relational reality of personhood. And the whole of The Brothers Karamazov can usefully be read as a vast commentary on this single passage. At age 19, Alyosha Karamazov struggles to achieve the “perfect freedom” found only in loving obedience to his spiritual father, the Elder Zosima. At age 28, Dmitri at first rejects the Orthodox way of personhood by plunging into a life of entirely autonomous desires and their endlessly self-willed fulfillment. But then, in the course of the novel, he discovers a profounder and more directly Orthodox experience when he discovers the relational reality of personhood through his love of Grushenka. The middle brother, Ivan, age 24, rejects the ways of both his brothers in the name of a still more terrifying autonomy: not the passional autonomy his older brother Dmitri attempts but a spiritual autonomy, one wherein he asserts his own will as more perfective than God’s will in creating the world. Ivan’s spiritual and psychic agony in the novel’s final 100 pages stands as Dostoevsky’s revelation of what inevitably happens to those who attempt to deny or unmake the Orthodox reality of relational personhood. It is the attempt to unmake Memory Eternal through self-willed oblivion.

Dmitri’s Revelatory Speech
Consider that astonishing moment in the novel when Dmitri, having been falsely arrested and imprisoned for two months for the murder of his father (and about to be wrongly convicted of it), says this to his brother Alyosha who visits him in prison:

“Rakitin wouldn’t understand this,” he began, all in a sort of rapture, as it were, “but you, you will understand everything. That’s why I’ve been thirsting for you. . . . Brother, in these past two months I’ve sensed a new man in me, a new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he never would have appeared. Frightening! What do I care if I spend twenty years pounding out iron ore in the mines, I’m not afraid of that at all, but I’m afraid of something else now: that this risen man not depart from me! Even there, in the mines, underground, you can find a human heart in the convict and murderer standing next to you, and you can be close to him, because there, too, it’s possible to live, and love, and suffer! You can revive and resurrect the frozen heart in this convict, you can look after him for years, and finally bring up from the cave into the light a soul that is lofty now, a suffering consciousness. You can revive an angel, resurrect a hero! And there are many of them, there are hundreds, and we’re all guilty for them! Why did I have a dream about a ‘wee one’ at such a moment? ‘Why is the wee one poor?’ It was a prophecy to me at that moment! It’s for the ‘wee one’ that I will go. Because everyone is guilty for everyone else. For all the ‘wee ones,’ because there are little children and big children. All people are ‘wee ones.’ And I’ll go for all of them, because there must be someone who will go for all of them. I didn’t kill father, but I must go. I accept! All of this came to me here . . . Within these peeling walls. And there are many, there are hundreds of them, underground, with hammers in their hands. Oh, yes, we’ll be in chains, and there will be no freedom, but then, in our great grief, we will arise once more into joy, without which it’s not possible for man to live, or for God to be, for God gives joy, it’s his prerogative, a great one. . . .”

Three strands from this complex and revelatory speech:

1. The first strand occurs when Dmitri says: “A new man has arisen in me! He was shut up inside me, but if it weren’t for this thunderbolt, he would never have appeared.” This newly risen (or resurrected) self is, above all, a remembered self; that is, it is a self that was always “shut up inside” him but that could only be made manifest – i.e., be remembered – by the “thunderbolt” of relationality let loose by his father’s death.
2. Hence, the second strand: “I didn’t kill father, but I must go. I accept!” The walls of autonomy are here fully breached as Dmitri voluntarily accepts the Orthodox reality wherein “everyone is guilty for everyone else” because each person possesses personhood only relationally. The result in Dmitri is the rush of understanding that, as the false freedom of self-willed autonomy vanishes, genuine joy arrives.
3. Here is the third strand: “Oh, yes, we’ll be in chains, and there will be no freedom, but then, in our great grief, we will arise once more into joy, without which it’s not possible for man to live, or for God to be. . . .” This third strand explicitly links the arrival of real joy to the ending of false freedom, a joy that is essential, Dmitri says, to both human life and divine being. Together, these three strands – the resurrected self; the relational self; and the joyful self – are the three defining aspects of personhood in The Brothers Karamazov. And all three aspects can be best understood – in Dostoevsky and in Orthodox Christendom – as aspects of the meaning of Memory Eternal.

Pavel Florensky [Father Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky was a Russian Orthodox priest, theologian, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who was martyred during the Bolshevik purges of the 1930s.] opens yet another dimension of this meaning when he says: “‘My eternal memory’ means both God’s ‘eternal memory’ of me and my ‘eternal memory’ of God. In other words, it is the eternal memory of the Church, in which God and man converge.”

This convergence of God and man, a convergence wherein the human person is understood to become like God, is practically unknown in Western Christianity (except in those very rare experiences called ‘mystical’) but is everywhere operative in Eastern Christendom, where the term given it is the Greek word theosis.

In Orthodoxy, theosis is considered to be the normative goal of every person on earth – and not the rare experience of a spiritual elite called ‘mystics.’ What propels the person toward achieving theosis is, very simply, obeying what Christ, in the gospels, calls the first and great commandment: “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind” (Matthew 22:37). In this scene we are examining, Dmitri perfectly illustrates this love when he ends his speech to Alyosha by saying: “And then from the depth of the earth, we, the men underground, will start singing a tragic hymn to God, in whom there is joy! Hail to God and his joy! I love him!”

Here, then, is the engine that moves the process of theosis: the power of loving God. Furthermore, this is also the engine that moves what Christ (in the same passage in St. Matthew) calls the second of the two great commandments: “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself” (Matthew 22:39). In loving the neighbor – that is, loving the one who is always right now before you, ‘nigh’ or near you – in the same way in which you love God, you are directly experiencing the way wherein the Other is always oneself. These two great commandments are, to the Orthodox heart, Christ’s direct injunctions to each of us to enter into the way of theosis. (vocab: participation in the uncreated grace of God. Theosis is identified and connected with the theoria (vision) of the uncreated Light.)

Then Dostoevsky gives us the fullness of theosis when Dmitri says, on the eve of his trial, to Alyosha what Christ Himself says to His disciples on the eve of His arrest and crucifixion: “I am.” Dmitri says:

And it seems to me there’s so much strength in me now that I can overcome everything, all sufferings, only in order to say and tell myself every moment: I am! In a thousand torments – I am; writhing under torture – but I am. Locked up in a tower, but still I exist, I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, still I know it is. And the whole of life is there – in knowing that the sun is.)

Eternal Memory Is A Victory Over Death
This speech, if you will, pure ontological song, one wherein the singer’s affirmation of being (“I am!”) communicates ontological ecstasy to every living thing in such a way that each created thing remains entirely and perfectly itself at the very same moment each thing becomes a single note in the singer’s vast song. In other words, the singer’s love for God converges fully with the love flowing from God to the singer. Thus, the result of entering into ontological song is what can be termed the unceasing aliveness of the state of theosis. For this is an aliveness in which the human person comes to participate through love directly in God’s eternal aliveness. This participation in divine being is what Florensky terms “the eternal memory of the Church in which God and man converge”(144). “And,” Florensky adds, “this eternal memory is a victory over death.“

In the “Talks and Homilies of the Elder Zosima,” assembled by Alyosha Karamazov after his beloved Elder’s death, there occurs this extraordinary passage:

Much on earth is concealed from us, but in place of it we have been granted a secret, mysterious sense of our living bond with the other world, with the higher heavenly world, and the roots of our thoughts and feelings are not here but in other worlds. That is why philosophers say it is impossible on earth to conceive the essence of things. God took seeds from other worlds and saved them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies. Then you become indifferent to life, and even come to hate it. So I think.

This passage is, as Victor Terras rightly says, “the master key to the philosophic interpretation, as well as to the structure,” of the entire Brothers Karamazov. For this passage elucidates two powerful and connected ideas:

1. That we can strongly (albeit obscurely) intuit the way wherein this empirical world of our actual lives is, in fact, rooted in the higher heavenly world of God; and
2. That what bears fruit in this world does so only when we nurture in our lives those three seeds that God has directly sowed in us, a nurturing that occurs when we fall to the ground and die so that these seeds may begin first to bud and then to bear fruit.

These two ideas, then, help us to understand why Dostoevsky chose as the epigraph to his novel this saying of Christ’s: “Truly, truly I say to you, Unless the seed of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abides alone; but if it die, it brings forth much fruit” (John 12:24). What Florensky calls the victory over death is what Christ here describes as the way the seed bears fruit. This way of fruitfulness is the way of Memory Eternal.

Thus, we can see how both the artistic structure and the philosophic significance of the novel are held in these two ideas. We can see the three brothers, throughout the novel, drawing near to enacting these two ideas – or else missing them altogether or (with Ivan) deliberately turning away from them. And what connects these two ideas is, again, Memory Eternal, here understood as the way the seed genetically ‘remembers’ the fruit it springs from and will, if conditions are right, soon become. True remembering is therefore directly connected to – indeed, hardwired into – the process wherein we die so as to enter into fruitfulness. And this process is the one of remembering God and of being remembered by Him.

Regarding The Final Scene In The Novel
We are now able to see something of the lovely shapeliness of the final scene in the novel. In this scene, Alyosha talks to the dozen boys with whom he has just attended the funeral of Ilyusha, the boy they all had come to love in his final days of life. Toward the end of his speech to the boys, Alyosha says this:

Let us first of all and before all be kind, then honest, and then – let us never forget one another. I say it again. I give you my word, gentlemen, that for my part I will never forget any one of you; each face that is looking at me now, I will remember, be it even after thirty years.

This shape is, of course, the Orthodox shape of Memory Eternal: the present seed of actual love is already becoming the unceasing fruitfulness of memory. And this fruitfulness of memory is – in Florensky’s great phrase – “a victory over death,” not at all because we erase the dead in our mind’s oblivion (what secular culture calls ‘getting over it’) but precisely because we keep them so strongly, indeed so brightly present in our love. And Dostoevsky is luminously clear in his Orthodox understanding of Alyosha’s speech. By holding another in our love, we are becoming like God in that we are remembering the seed of God in ourselves at the very instant we are seeing the fully ripened fruitfulness of the other in God. In this way, the other begins to become our very self. Alyosha concludes this way:

You are all dear to me, gentlemen, from now on I shall keep you all in my heart, and I ask you to keep me in your hearts, too! Well, and who has united us in this good, kind feeling, which we will remember and intend to remember always, if not Ilyushechka, that good boy, that kind boy, that boy dear to us unto ages and ages! Let us never forget him, and may his memory be eternal and good in our hearts now and unto ages of ages!

The point is magnificently clear. The fruitfulness of Memory Eternal arises always and solely from an actual person – here, Ilyusha – who unites in love all the Orthodox believers who sing his passing and have taken him into their hearts. Thus, what begins in isolative grief concludes in relational joy. Such is the shape of Memory Eternal in Orthodoxy and in Dostoevsky.

Another Significance Through The Action Of Memory Eternal
And thus emerges still another significance: through the action of Memory Eternal, the person who has died continues to act back into the lives of those who continue to love him or her. In the middle of the novel, in the chapter called “Cana of Galilee,” Alyosha kneels by the coffin of his spiritual father, the Elder Zosima, while the episode in St. John’s Gospel telling of Jesus’ changing water into wine is being read aloud. As the episode is read, Alyosha prays silently, and then he dozes slightly – and then he instantly enters into a vision wherein he sees Father Zosima sitting at the wedding table in Cana where Jesus Himself is sitting. As the Elder catches sight of Alyosha and rises and walks toward him, smiling in beautiful welcome, Alyosha registers perfectly the Orthodox comprehension of what is now occurring: “Why, he is in the coffin. . . . But here, too” (361). That is, Alyosha fully sees how his spiritual father lies dead in the coffin and yet – simultaneously – is standing alive before him. In the actions of Memory Eternal, death on earth is defeated by unceasing aliveness in God.

The scene continues with Alyosha listening to his beloved teacher speaking words of wisdom to him. And then Alyosha, the vision ended, goes out under the immense night sky where, the narrator tells us, “the silence of the earth seemed to merge with the silence of the heavens, the majesty of the earth touched the majesty of the stars”(362). Then Alyosha suddenly falls to earth, weeping in joy and kissing the earth; and the Elder’s voice rings again in Alyosha’s soul: “Water the earth with the tears of your joy, and love those tears . . .”(ibid.). The narrator then says: “It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, ‘touching other worlds’”(ibid.). This last phrase is, of course, the Elder Zosima’s phrase, here remembered by Alyosha, yes, but above all directly given by the Elder to Alyosha in this moment, directly shaping and indeed directly creating this moment. “Never, never in all his life,” the narrator says, “would Alyosha forget that moment”(363). This moment is, for Alyosha, a moment of theosis, one in which he participates fully in divine aliveness, a moment, that is, of Memory Eternal. And this moment, Dostoevsky makes abundantly clear in the chapter, is a moment that is entirely given by the dead to the living in an action of love. The chapter ends this way: “‘Someone visited my soul in that hour,’ Alyosha would say afterward, with firm belief in his word”. In Memory Eternal, the beloved dead act in love directly in the lives of the living.