Christianity in Crime and Punishment :: Crime Punishment Essays

Christianity in nuisance and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, If soul succeded in proving to me that Christ was outside the truth, and if, indeed, the truth was outside Christ, then I would so atomic number 53r remain with Christ than with the truth (Frank 68). It was by no mean easy for Dostoyevsky to reach this conclusion. In Dostoyevskys life, one sees that of an intellectual Prodigal Son, returning(a) to the Father In Heaven only after all opposite available systems of belief have been exhausted. Reared in a costly Russian Orthodox home, Dostoyevsky as a young man rebelled against his upbringing and embraced the anarchist (and atheistic) philosophies of the intelligentsia, radical students and middle class intellectuals violently opposed to the status quo in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Morsm 50). Dostoyevsky revolutionary stirrings were not unnoticed by the Tsars secret police, and, in 1849, Dostoyevsky was sentenced to a mock execution followed by ten years hard labor in a Siberian prison (Morsm 50). One critic said It has been public to say that Dostoyevsky re-learnt Christianity in prison. (A Boyce Gibson 19.) There, out of his element and surrounded by rigid criminals, he had plenty of time to contemplate life and read The stark naked Testament (the only book he was allowed). However, it was not until his compulsory forces service that Dostoyevskys faith began to blossom. In the army, Dostoyevsky met a fellow officer and devout Christian named Baron von Vrangel, who befriended the still young Dostoevesky and helped him re-discover the Christian faith (Frank 4). Although a professing Christian for the rest of his life, Dostoyevsky was not a plaster saint. (Until he died, he was plagued by doubts and a passion for gambling.) Instead, Dostoyevsky understood, perhaps better than every other great Christian author, that his faith was created and sustained by one thing only the grace of God. It is of such grace that Dostoyevsky writes in Crime and Punishment. Although most critics agree that Crime and Punishments theme is not as by design Christian as Dostoyevskys latter works, the novels voice is still authentically Christian. write in 1864, shortly after Dostoyevsky lost his first wife, his brother, and a shut out friend (Gibson 32) Crime and Punishment