Paul J. Contino's book Dostoevsky's Incarnational Realism––which includes the bonus of an afterword by Caryl Emerson––is a spirited (and inspirited) reading of Fedor Dostoevskii's final novel from a frankly Catholic perspective. Strikingly, for this reviewer (who has spilled ink about this novel from a certain Jewish point-of-view, that of Emmanuel Levinas's radical ethics), Contino's project is partly motivated by the odd confluence of anti-Catholic vitriol in Dostoevkii's work alongside the novelist's profound impact on Catholic readers: see Appendix 1 (211–12) for two pages of blurbs from such luminaries as Martin Sheen, Dorothy Day, and Thomas Merton, an insertion that feels a little bit like Contino is koshering Dostoevskii for a Catholic audience, to mix a metaphor. The beating heart of this book, however, is Contino's claim that Dostoevskii's “fantastic” or “‘higher realism,’ rooted in his Christian faith, sees visible, finite reality as bearing an analogical relationship to an invisible, infinite reality” (7). The “both/and” capaciousness of Contino's analogical––he also calls it Trinitarian and incarnational––approach is particularly well-suited to The Brothers Karamazov, in which Dostoevskii doubles down on his unsettling propensity to blend bathos and pathos, to intermingle everything earthly (indeed, karamazovian), the debased “beauty of Sodom,” the sneering, the ridiculous, sentimental, materialist, obsessively unfree, rebelliously faithless, and self-enclosed, with the “beauty of the Madonna,” the luminous, selfless, open, faith-seeking, insatiably compassionate, ecstatic and freely given and received––often in the same scene, the same character, the same sentence. The result is one of the most conscientious and illuminating close readings of the novel I have ever encountered, precisely because Contino's small-c catholic “both/and” method tends to notice details that contradict each other and convincingly embrace them. The other great strength here is Contino's ability to directly address the “Jesuitical casuistry” associated first with Ivan's Grand Inquisitor and ultimately with Alyosha's plotting to free Mitya (and other ethically canny efforts) at the end of the novel. Contino reminds us that Alyosha's casuistry––the application of moral reasoning on a case-by-case basis––is at the heart of Augustinian and Thomist prudence and of Dostoevskii's own pragmatic views on justice.
To the modest extent that this book has shortcomings, one of them is Contino's propensity to get a little carried away and forget that not all of his readers are already in the choir, so to speak: a certain semantic satiation sets in after so many excited repetitions of terms like incarnational, Trinitarian, kenotic, agape, and Eucharistic. Another shortcoming is the author's ready generosity to apologize for Dostoevskii's virulent anti-Catholicism––a prejudice that strains such novels as The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov even more than his well-documented antisemitism does. Contino sees such reactionary moods as unfortunate and unoriginal, but as I and others have observed over the years, they are perhaps better understood as shadows that contain Dostoevsky's frustration with his “thirst to believe” alongside his inability to do so––a frustration that is projected onto nefarious others. This possible inability is something Contino cannot abide, and it is perhaps why he does not fully engage with Dostoevskii's more anti-religious readers, such as James Rice, for example. But like all of us, Dostoevskii was mired in material conditions of family, health, history, and place. In this dark vein, Contino ignores the possibility that Dostoevskii hated Catholics because his father's family had to drop out of the hereditary Russian Orthodox nobility because their ancestral village of Dostoyevo had fallen into Polish-Lithuanian dominion, whence they became Uniate clergy—a Jesuit accommodation of Orthodox liturgy and pastoral custom, for the sake of papal authority; or that the novelist derides Poles not just for this bit of ancestral humiliation, but also because in the labor camp where he served his sentence, the Polish fellow political prisoners carried themselves like Europeans who did not wish to mingle with Russian convicts like him. Contino does not dwell too much on Dostoevsky's darkness—on his feeling that truth really may be outside Christ––and that his thirst for belief might arise precisely from the intensity of that feeling. Perhaps true freedom truly is the freedom to choose Christ, as Contino's impressive conclave of theologians attest one after the other. But like most commentators except for Levinas, Contino ignores the last part of Markel's maxim: “Each of us is guilty in everything before everyone, and I more than anyone.” This uncannily echoes what the Underground Man says about himself: “It's their sicknesses that everyone takes pride in, and I, perhaps, more than anyone.” To be oneself, to have a self, puts one in mind of Charles Dickens’ Mrs. Gummidge, who feels the same chill as everyone else in a drafty room but protests: “I feel it more!” Dostoevskii, along with Levinas as well as Caryl Emerson in her characteristically brilliant “Afterword: Aloysha, His Life and Afterlives,” arrive at their kenotic ethics honestly and darkly, as hostages to the other. Contino sometimes seems a little too ready to pass through the darkness and into the light of a theological Stockholm syndrome.
