Commonplacing: Rowan Williams on Dostoevsky

Rowan Williams is the Archbishop of Canterbury, basically the Anglican pope, and he is a man that I admire very much, a man attempting in his own delicate way to restrain the Anglican church from a headlong fall into irreligious liberalism. He is also a world-class scholar, reflecting the old adage of the Puritans that the ministers of a congregation be the "best and brightest" in the parish, an adage that has fallen into hard times recently. Dr. Williams wrote a book about Dostoevsky, perhaps my favorite writer of all time, a few years ago for a series sponsored by Baylor University Press, called The Making of the Christian Imagination. The other titles in the series also have me salivating and my wife slightly lamenting my near obsessive love of books. I started reading the Dostoevsky book last night and this is what I encountered on the first page:

"The world we inhabit as readers of his novels is one in which the question of what human beings owe to each other--the question standing behind all these critical contemporary issues--is left painfully and shockingly open, and there seems to be no obvious place to stand from where we can construct a clear moral landscape. Yet at the same time, the novels insistently and unashamedly press home the question of what else might be possible if we--characters and readers--saw the world in another light, the light provided by faith. The novels ask us, in effect, whether we can imagine a human community of language and feeling in which, even if we were incapable of fully realizing it, we knew what was due to each other; whether we could imagine living in the consciousness of a solidity or depth in each other which no amount of failure, suffering, or desolation could eradicate. But in order to put such a challenge, the novels have to invite us to imagine precisely those extremes of failure, suffering, and desolation."

This encapsulates the movement of Dostoevsky's novels, at least the four that I have read, so well. We tend to parcel Dostoevsky out, read him in chunks. The Grand Inquisitor scene from The Brothers Karamazov is routinely excerpted as if it was meant to stand on its own. As if it was not a small part of a larger trajectory. But Dostoevsky never showed us a simple truth, because truth is not simple. It is hidden, yet real, in the interactions and dialogue that shape the world he conjures. And at its heart, is the Christian faith.