Karol Ivanov Dikensky

     Touchstone reader and correspondent Fran Presley has sent me a fascinating interview of Vera Ivanovna, a Russian Orthodox philosopher who lived through the years of Lenin and Stalin and did her share of time in Siberia.  The interview, printed in a 2000 issue of the Orthodox journal Road to Emmaus, is on Charles Dickens as a quintessentially Orthodox writer.  (The whole article can be accessed at http://www.roadtoemmaus.net/Dickens.pdf.)

     Well, Dickens was emphatically not Orthodox, if by that you mean that he understood the centrality of the Trinity to the Christian faith, or even the hypostatic union of the human and the divine natures in Christ.  He was about the worst metaphysician you could imagine -- and in fact his aversion to metaphysical thought probably spared him from becoming the sort of political or economic theorist that the continent and even beefeating England were producing, devising utopias for human beings such as had never existed and never would.  And Dickens detested what he thought were arbitrary restrictions placed upon human passions -- I do not mean moral restrictions, but those imposed by ascetical discipline.  He had no use for, or understanding of, monks of any kind.

     But that's not what they mean by Dickens' Orthodoxy -- or, as I would more simply put it, his deep Christianity.  They understand that in Dickens we have a man who is in love with goodness, but who also, strangely enough, loves his wicked characters, too.  That is, he does not simply portray a Scrooge or a Smallweed or a Pecksniff or a Bradley Headstone; he becomes them.  He somehow cares what a pickpocket or a cutthroat may be thinking.  How rare that is among authors, the reader may pause to consider; but with Dickens, as Ivanovna and her interviewer shrewdly point out, that care is inseparable from a kind of Christian democracy.  Since Sir Leicester Dedlock is a man -- "Sir Arrogant Numbskull," as his ebullient neighbor calls him -- we must care about his thoughts, even if for the most part they are vain, silly, misinformed, and selfish.  He may be redeemed; he may be, as it is put in A Tale of Two Cities, "recalled to life".

     One part of the interview especially piqued my interest: Ivanovna dispenses with the charge that Dickens engaged in sentimentality.  What students of Dickens often hear is that the man portrayed quite unrealistic models of feminine virtue -- there just are no such people as Agnes Wickfield, or Lucie Darnay, or Esther Summerson, or Lizzie Hexam.  But the answer to this objection is an appeal to observable fact: there are such women, even if your culture happens not to produce them.  Myself, I know at least one Esther Summerson; but Ivanovna claims that in Russia there are many girls (and boys) whose lives are stories of self-sacrifice and all-enduring love, even when the love is spent on an unworthy or ungrateful object.  When Dostoyevsky -- for whom Dickens was simply the greatest novelist in the world -- created the character of Sonia in Crime and Punishment, he was but recognizing the virtue in such women as already walked the streets of Saint Petersburg.

     This evaluation rings true to me.  We could, for experiment, take the words and habits and extraordinary deeds of any number of historical figures, write them up into a narrative, change the names and places, and see if the result would strike the modern reader as utterly implausible or sentimental.  For we judge by what we are.  With regard to some virtues (chastity, for instance; also modesty, manliness, womanliness, loyalty, obedience) we may be able somehow or other to distinguish the virtue from its parodical vice (prudishness, timorousness, machismo, cattiness, jingoism, and capitulation), but for the most part it's all a drab gray.  Some people are color blind; we are virtue-blind.  So we think that because we have never seen the bright green of a field in spring, nobody has; or because we have never known a woman whose chastity could overcome more than any "empowered" harlotry can, such women do not exist.  Shakespeare puts it nicely: "He that is giddy thinks the world goes round."

Comments

[Beth]

I hated _Great Expectations_ when I was "taught" it in high school, and avoided Dickens afterwards until a Victorian Lit class in grad school. My loss, certainly, though perhaps I wasn't really ready for him until then. Now I am in love with his characters, and you've given why here: the good ones are people of virtue who both show us how we ought to live and remind us of those we know who live that way, and the bad ones remind us of what we sometimes/often are and could choose not to be.

Thanks for posting this. Much food for thought.

[dilys]

Well, I think the point is that the troublesome characters are more than just bad examples. Perhaps from the position of, as an Orthodox commenter puts it at Pontifications, "in Orthodox theology there is no sin nature or sinful nature. Our nature is good, there is no dialectical opposition here between nature and grace."

As to the point about "your culture," I remember being shocked and warmed when I first encountered our ethnic Orthodox congregation, where so many adult children are caring for ageing parents. They struck me as Living Commandments in Motion, and their situations were less uncomplaining and more joyful. I know, in mainline American culture some people take their elderly parents to church, but the flavor seems different, more matter-of-course. And includes a great many sons, not primarily spinster daughters.

This post stimulates the reflection that modern diversity and individualism have truncated more of the range of our human possibilities than it is comfortable to admit.

[Janet]

"a man who is in love with goodness, but who also, strangely enough, loves his wicked characters, too."

It seems to me that you can see Dickens yearning to redeem Ralph Nickleby. I think he would have wished for Ralph's ordinate feelings for Kate to rescue him, but Ralph persists in his avarice.
AMDG, Janet

[Jendi]

While I agree that modern culture has sadly truncated our ability to imagine certain virtues, one can still question whether the behavior of some Dickens heroines is a _desirable_ ideal even if it is an attainable one. At what point does it become an unhealthy delusion for the abused child or wife to believe that her devoted submission will eventually change his heart? It is ultimately up to Christ to save the abuser and he may well reject salvation no matter how many Nancy Sykeses or Florence Dombeys try to die for his sins.

[Tony Esolen]

Ah Jendi, such people as Nancy and Florence are truly fools.

I'm with the fools.

Dilys: A VERY intriguing comment, that last, about how that phony thing called "multiculturalism," and individualism wrongly understood, truncate the possibilities for human nature.

Janet: I agree; I think he wanted to redeem Ralph Nickleby, as he seems to want to redeem Fagin. But you plays the game, you takes your chances, as they say. Not all of us sinners will be haunted by spirits so obvious on Christmas Eve...

[David Deavel]

Dr. Esolen,

Surely you're familiar with Chesterton's two books on Dickens. Fr. Ian Ker, in his book on the Catholic literary revival, highlights GKC's CHARLES DICKENS as his most Catholic book.

[Jendi]

My problem is not with the magnitude of the sacrifice, but its effectiveness. Devotion takes many forms, one of which is giving up your own desire to be "good" where that desire is enabling an abuser to continue sinning. Not all foolishness is Christian foolishness.

[Mike S.]

"This post stimulates the reflection that modern diversity and individualism have truncated more of the range of our human possibilities than it is comfortable to admit."

Comfortable for whom to admit? The multiculturalists, surely, but how many of the readers of Touchstone, or aficionados of Dr. Esolen's posts, are multiculturists? It seems to me that orthodox Christians have always pointed out the fatuity involved in modern diversity and individualism (if not always as well or as forcefully as they should).

[Tony Esolen]

Jendi:

God gives the increase. But he depends upon the loyal tender of the fields. Nowhere did I say that you remain loyal because that would be effective. You remain loyal because it is your duty.

[Jendi]

I promise this will be my last post on the subject....I don't think the question of loyalty can be separated from effectiveness because if your focus is truly on helping/saving the other person, not simply on the purity of your own motives and actions, you have to ask what form that loyalty should take. In other words, what is really in the other's best interests? God's faithfulness to us is often questioned by characters in the Bible because they don't see that He IS being loyal to us by continuing to thwart our disordered desires - more so than if He had permitted us to run amok with no adverse consequences. The best book I've ever read on this subject from a Christian perspective is "Help: The Original Human Dilemma" by Garret Keizer.

[Tony Esolen]

Jendi,

You can make a distinction between helping someone continue in a vice, and remaining faithful. But what people these days do is use pop psychology to excuse their faintheartedness and desertion. I am not talking about self-protection, either.