In a recent composition on Dostoievsky himself and on his memorable main fictional character from The Idiot, Prince Myshkin—both of whom (Myshkin and Dostoievsky) inimitably saw “the soul of goodness in things evil”—we also considered “a counterrevolution that is also a spiritual affirmation” and then strove to grasp the even deeper meaning of “holiness as counterrevolution.”
Dostoievsky understood well the ideas and enactors of revolution in pre-Bolshevist Russia and he also knew holiness and spiritual childhood and the winsome resistance of purity and moral beauty, and especially in little children and in women of deep goodness. Dostoievsky himself “blessed life and caused others to bless life” and imparted an Orthodox Christian “message of hope.” Such was the power and balm of his affirmation, his own affirmative act of counterrevolution—in response to the anarchists, diabolists, and nihilists of his times of seething revolution. For those of the Catholic Faith today amid many other forms of revolution and dissolution, our own persevering affirmation of the full doctrine of the Incarnation (and its intimately exoteric implications)—as in Hilaire Belloc—will also sustain us with “battle joy,” under divine grace, in our own resourceful forms of counterrevolution, even holiness.
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