Reflections on Human Salvation and Deification in Russian Orthodox Culture and Dostoevsky's Religiosity: Centering on The Brothers Karamazov
Authors:   Asia-Europe Perspective Association, Lee Kyong-Wan 
Published: June 2018

This paper aims at reflecting the relationship between Russian Orthodoxy and Dostoevsky's religiosity from the biblical viewpoint. The viewpoint might be identified as a complicated evangelical perspective, acknowledging the absolute authority of the Bible on the one hand and admitting diversity and incompleteness of human apprehension on the other hand.
From the biblical viewpoint, the Russian Orthodox culture is very idiosyncratic. The one reason may be the historic fact that it has been formulated under heterogeneous religions, philosophies, politics, ecosystem, historic vicissitudes, etc. The Russian Orthodoxy includes the universal Orthodox ideas of Jesus' Crucifixion and Resurrection, human salvation and deification and the national elements of its dual belief structure with pre-Christian slavic paganism, nationalism, messianism. Among them there are several ambiguous ideas which have exerted a great influence on the Russian Orthodox culture: collective and general salvation, which are not in accordance with the biblical ideas of personal salvation according to individual's choice; the idea of human deification.
Comparatively in the Bible, human salvation by repentance and baptism is put in the word “justify,” and successive spiritual growth in the word “sanctify.” Humans are saved only by personal unit and granted the Holy Spirit. Afterwards, redeemed people should take the successive stage of being sanctified by the Holy Spirit and the Bible, unable to reach the completeness.
On the other hand, Russian Orthodoxy does not provide with time order and mechanism between human salvation and deification. In the idea of deification the range and level of the Holy Spirit's intervention to humans are considerably restricted, while the inner intuition and ascetic self-abnegation are emphasized s main agents of deification. The theological foundation of this dogma is laid on Dionysius the Areopagite's apophaticism, which manifests that men could approach the Absolute nearer in negative way than in positive way. According to this negative theology, men can reach a unity with the divine by self-abnegation in this world, which accounts for the cult of many saints and icons. In the Eastern Orthodoxy the idea of Jesus Christ as Savior is ambiguously related to that of Jesus as the archetype of transfiguration, and the relationship between the dogma of human salvation and deification is ambiguous. Additionally the Russian Orthodoxy emphasizes the joy of Jesus' Resurrection than His birth or suffering. And in the process of introduction of the Byzantine Orthodoxy, its original mystic tendency contributes to the formulation of a complicated dual belief system with pantheistic slavic paganism.
The Russian Orthodox culture is in a dynamic interrelationship to Dostoevsky's religiosity. Dostoevsky tried to represent his new Orthodoxy-based religiosity aesthetically, integrating Russian Orthodoxy with his own modernized humanistic ideas and pantheistic Pochvennichestvo in the form of “minimal religion.”
Dostoevksy's religiosity is more closely interrelated with the Orthodox Church than the biblical understanding in respect of the relationship between human salvation and deification, and Jesus Christ's status and functions. In his new landscape, the dogma of salvation through Christ' Crucifixion and Resurrection and the dogma of human deification, grafted with mystic “pochvennichestvo”(Return to the Soil) are overlapped, which is the case of the Russian Orthodoxy. In his idea of salvation is repeated the Orthodox ideas of the kenosis(self-abnegation) and the general and collective salvation. And the Orthodox orientation toward transformation through mystic immersion into the Divine and moral self-completion is more intensified.