responsible for all

Ivanov views Myshkin as “a soul that has plunged from ‘that place beyond the skies’ (epouránios topos) described by Plato, where, with gods, men unborn contemplate the forms of eternal beauty.” He goes on to say that “this preponderance of the Platonic anamnesis over the sense of reality is just what makes [Myshkin] at once a fool and a wise seer amongst men.”

In that place, as in Eden (according to the John Paul II’s Theology of the Body), being and the good are convertible. The responsibility of a man toward other men is implicit in his dwelling among them in the light of the good or under the aspect of God. Dmitri Karamazov is willing to accept a punishment that he does not deserve because he is vouchsafed a glimpse of this being-related: “we are all responsible for all.” This echoes the words of Zosima’s brother, Markel, who, approaching death, also becomes a “wise seer among men”: “Life is paradise, and we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it, if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day” (emphasis mine).

Much is made of the fact that Myshkin arrives from nowhere or that he comes down from the mountains, and that he is, therefore, unable to truly dwell among men. Rowan Williams persuasively argues that he is incapable of making adult decisions. But is it the case that the adults in the novel are any more at home than Myshkin? (I don’t know that Rowan Williams argues that they are – more that Myshkin misses opportunities to effect a more “convertible” kind of dwelling). In fact, The Idiot is almost entirely about the “adult” choices people make with respect to their acquaintances and neighbors — about who their acquaintances are and under what conditions they can become acquainted. Myshkin seems to arrive “from nowhere” because he does not arrive with anyone or with any preconditions regarding who he ought to know. There is no “information” about him with the exception of Lebedev’s reference to his “historical” name. Unlike Alyosha, he is not widely recognized and liked in any village. Nor is he practically a monk. He is as capable of being a clerk as a millionaire.

What if both this capacity and this lack of information is not necessarily negative. What if Myshkin, rather than being a total failure socially, is, in effect, choosing not to choose? What if the weight of his anamnetic experience is not too heavy for the “sense of reality,” but too heavy for a social ethic built almost entirely around the choosing of one’s neighbor (and therefore the choice to alienate oneself from one’s homeland)? He is almost saying “I don’t believe it” in the face of man’s tragic existence, in the face of man condemned, not just to death, but to making choices with inadequate information.

“I don’t believe it” is also not necessarily negative. It is almost like a psalm.

To quote Pseudonoma once more:

In the throes of ancient piety, an ethical dimension was inextricable from hierophany. In other words, the divinities were not a landscape which some diviners had the luxury to gaze upon. Nor were they in some perhaps more mysterious way removed from their witnesses. They were rather the homeland itself, in the sense that they arose from and coyly inhabited the habitual haunts, the familiar ways and by-ways of the people, the ἤθος. Such an inhabiting made itself known in and as the ἤθος; the gods flashed in the sense of demanding prayer, sacrifice, and even housing (whether housing in myth under the roof of the mouth, or in the sacred precinct under the roof of the temple). In this way the pre-commitment of ancient piety necessarily entailed an ethical obedience which was itself entirely pre-reflective and unamenable to later conceptual elucidation. It was obeyed without being decided on or ‘cognitively’ known. It is important to recognize that on account of this ethical intimacy, even a man who was ‘impious’ was not a man who denied the pre-givenness of the gods, but a man who wished to supersede or resist their interventions or aims.

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