Lev Nikolaevich Myshkin is introduced to us, having left Switzerland, a recovering epileptic patient surrounded by snow which is bright and pure, little children whom he loves, and nature dappled by green and quiet. His benefactor, Pavlishtchev, who once had a child like him, found Myshkin years ago and took compassion on the dumb creature. But after four years in Switzerland, Pavlishtchev had died and Myshkin is sent unprepared into the world of exodus on business which will bring him all the troubles of navigating the impositions of the natural law—money, social entanglements, pity, love, confusion, and death. Everything in The Idiot is exodus and each sub-story mirrors others throughout. Myshkin begins his journey on a third-class train face to face with Parfyon Rogozhin, the very man who, because of their shared agony—their all-consuming entanglement with Nastassya Filippovna, another alter Christus—will return him to Switzerland, to his epilepsy, but deliver him lost.
In one of the third-class carriages, right by the window, two passengers had, from early dawn, been sitting facing one another—both were young people, both traveled light, both were unfashionably dressed, both had rather remarkable faces, and both expressed, at last, a desire to start a conversation. If they had both known, one about the other, in what way they were especially remarkable in that moment, they would naturally have wondered that chance had so strangely placed them face to face in a third-class carriage of the Warsaw–Petersburg train. One of them was a short man about twenty-seven, with almost black curly hair and small but fiery gray eyes. His nose was broad and flat, his cheekbones high; his thin lips continually curved into a sort of insolent, mocking and even malicious smile; but the high and well-shaped forehead redeemed the ignoble lines of the lower part of the face. What was particularly striking about the young man’s face was its deathly pallor, which lent him an exhausted look in spite of his fairly sturdy build, and at the same time something passionate to the point of suffering, which did not harmonize with his insolent and coarse smile and his sharp and self-satisfied gaze. He was warmly dressed in a full, black, sheepskin-lined overcoat, and had not felt the cold at night, while his neighbor had been forced to endure all the pleasures of a damp Russian November night, for which he was evidently unprepared.54
If post-fall man were to return to Eden and look up into the skies with those before the fall, he would neither see nor hear nor breathe what was loved by the latter. No matter where post-fall man resides, inside or outside the gates, he is in exodus, always somewhere east of Eden. Myshkin will return to Switzerland unable to survive exodus. Roghozin throughout never denies this even when he completes his end, and the one each loves, Nastassya, understands the impossible balance between the two. These two faces on a train, one an unknowing holy innocent and the other always in exodus but in a knowing exodus—differentiating him from the rest—both communicate what is and is not Christ. The Idiot is a meditation on the return to the place preceding exodus, as exile in a world deconstructed from any enduring narrative. This meditation illuminates what comes before, mostly by mocking our originary praxis but never without longing for its return. Every movement of the story finds a companion movement or sub-story, but no companion is a bedfellow, none can bring the other meaning, all fall into futility. It is a story of competing fatalisms and of what a soul must be in order to survive and love its fate, thereby making fate the highest form of freedom.55
Saint Thomas’s demonstrations are for those racing towards their fate, cast into exodus and living only, if at all, by the prescriptive imposition of the natural law. It is not a demonstration for those who abide by what is but for those enmeshed in futurity by condition. It is a language game of seeing what is there to be seen, but which is rarely seen at all: the divine presence. Like the characters in The Idiot, these are The Ways, given to those who have forgotten by condition the un-reflexive love, so that futurity cannot be liberation but only the fatal flaw, the hamartia which casts a long shadow:
Things are now as they are;
they will be fulfilled in what is fated;
neither burnt sacrifice nor libation
of offerings without fire
will soothe intense anger away.56
With the exceptions of Roghozin and Nastassya who race towards it in knowledge, every other character attempts “to avoid the unavoidable fatalism—the inevitable inevitability of narrative.”57 Only Myshkin for a time is freed from the need for demonstration, from the need to accept that God is not self-evident. As a demonstration catering to the fatal soul, to those retired to the secondary act of the natural law and its futurity, the demonstrations provide a reminding certainty of God’s presence, and a certainty of their own dispossession within the mystery.
The Five Ways demonstrate God because they show that the stretching forth of the will requires union, and requires it to return to what has been forgotten when it first claimed its own im-positional supernaturality. When this imposition occurs, that imprint of the eternal law is then understood to us in a “general and confused way.”58 We are in but not of the world by way of alienation and the weight lies in that “not-of” without reference to the in union with the world. How we are “not-of” the world cannot be illuminated until we recover what places us in. Our placement in the world is not accidental and thus it too must offer something more than a mere starting block to our supernatural status, left behind as we ascend and aspire to our nature, where at best we become coaches but not players, little gods but no longer “divine playthings.”59 For all those aspirations and ascensions are the makings of missing the mark. Only the idiot does not commit Oedipus’s error in believing that because “nothing can make me other than I am,” that this amounts to knowing what and who you are, as if reflection constitutes the soul:
Let the storm burst, my fixed resolve still holds,
To learn my lineage, be it ne’er so low.
It may be she with all a woman’s pride
Thinks scorn of my base parentage. But I
Who rank myself as Fortune’s favorite child,
The giver of good gifts, shall not be shamed.
She is my mother and the changing moons
My brethren, and with them I wax and wane.
Thus sprung why should I fear to trace my birth?
Nothing can make me other than I am. 60
Saint Anselm’s Thicket of Perfection:
That Which Rises Up against Death
For how great is that light from which shines every truth that gives light to the rational mind? How great is that truth in which is everything that is true, and outside which is only nothingness and the false? How boundless is the truth which sees at one glance whatsoever has been made, and by whom, and through whom, and how it has been made from nothing? What purity, what certainty, what splendor where it is? Assuredly more than a creature can conceive.61
The Dumb Ox recognizes the delicate position of the Five Ways: he must demonstrate God beyond a reasonable doubt but must also demonstrate the mystery, the incommunicability, the dramatic difference-as-such, which can be viewed by the secondary ethic but can only be accessed by our originary praxis, the childhood of a bodily soul. And to do this, the Ways must primarily invoke the longer way of the natural law as imposition, and then leave open the door to the immediacy of the Anselmian logic of perfection. Saint Thomas must turn away from the self-evidence of God so as to return to it in its proper place.
For Anselm, the idea of the perfect Being is the perfect idea. Whatever else the argument may or may not demonstrate, it does demonstrate that I cannot think of God without thinking of him as existing, if I am thinking of him as quo maius. And once I think of him as that than which nothing greater can be thought, thus recognizing the
