Page 237 - Orthodoxy Zizioulas

becomes the place of human dignity.
Yet he is not a pessimist. His thought culminates not in
despair but in resurrection. The deepest problem is death, and
no future is possible unless death itself is overcome. Death is
bound to sin; to overcome one is to overcome the other. In The
Brothers Karamazov, through Father Zosima and Alyosha,
Dostoevsky reaches his final affirmation: life is already para-
dise if we have eyes to see it, and the destiny of man is the
resurrection of the body. His final word is not negation but
hope: “Certainly we shall rise again; certainly we shall see each
other again.”
Thus Dostoevsky’s vision is profoundly Christian. He be-
gins in the abyss of freedom and suffering, but ends in the
hope of resurrection. His anthropology cannot be understood
apart from Christ. If he is right about freedom, then man is
inconceivable without Christ, for only in Christ can freedom,
suffering, and life beyond death be held together. In this sense,
Dostoevsky is not only a novelist or prophet, but truly a theo-
logian.
In Dostoevsky, the crisis of modern man found prophetic
expression. Theology in the twentieth century would confront
the same crisis more explicitly, seeking again the language by
which Orthodox faith could address the fractured conscious-
ness of the modern world.