Só para quem gosta de Dostoievski

« (…) Roman Catholicism is, in my opinion, worse than Atheism itself. Yes – that is my opinion. Atheism only preaches a negation, but Romanism goes further; it preaches a disfigured, distorted Christ – it preaches Anti-Christ – I assure you, I swear it! This is my own personal conviction, and it has long distressed me. The Roman Catholic believes that the Church on earth cannot stand without universal temporal POWER. He cries ‘non possumus!’ In my opinion the Roman Catholic religion is not a faith at all, but simply a continuation of the Roman Empire, and everything is subordinated to this idea – beginning with faith. The Pope has seized territories an earthly throne, and has held them with the sword. And so the thing has gone on, only that to the sword they have added lying, intrigue, deceit, fanaticism, superstition, swindling;- they have played fast and loose with the most sacred and sincere feelings of men;- they have exchanged everything-everything for money, for base earthy POWER! And is this not the teaching of the Anti-Christ? How could the upshot of all this be other than Atheism? Atheism is the child of Roman Catholicism – it proceeded from these Romans themselves, though perhaps they would not believe it. It grew and fattened on hatred of its parents; it is the progeny of their lies and spiritual feebleness. (…) »

in The Idiot, Dostoevsky

What to make of this?

Eu não fazia ideia da faceta anti-católica de Dostoievski nem que conclusões tirar do discurso que transcrevi, uma vez que tinha sido pronunciado pelo Príncipe Myshkin, o idiota, numa cena em que ele se ridiculariza durante o jantar de formalização do seu noivado. Decidi pesquisar sobre este assunto e deparei-me com a seguinte análise:

“(…) my disappointment at anti-Catholic Orthodox ire is not entirely surprising, for I have routinely been forced to abide it while reading my favorite nineteenth-century novelist, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Now, obviously, Dostoevsky was Russian Orthodox, not Greek, but the depth of his hostility to Rome belongs to a species that might be called pan-Orthodox. Perhaps if we can begin to understand the depth of Dostoevsky’s disdain we can extrapolate from it to understand how, over a century after his death, much of Eastern Christianity is still not on speaking terms with its Western cousins.”

(…)

“(…) Prince Myshkin, the greatest Christ figure in literature since Don Quixote (…)”

(…)

E, respeitando especificamente à citação que me perturbou:

“Prince Myshkin’s harangue is the most withering attack on Catholicism in the entire Dostoevsky canon. What makes the timing of it especially odd is that it was written in 1867-68 while Dostoevsky and his wife were residing for short periods in Dresden, Geneva, Vevey, Milan, and Florence. They must have been aware of the progress of Italian unification, which by the time Dostoevsky was writing The Idiot had stripped the papacy of everything in the Papal States, except a tenuous control of Rome itself, and which, three years later, would make a de-papalized Rome the capital of a united Italy. The Pope would retire to the papal precincts, refuse Italian indemnification, and eventually declare himself a prisoner in the Vatican. It seems a strange time for Dostoevsky to have raised such a polemic over the pitiful remains of papal temporal power, which had not presumed to inject itself seriously into European politics since the Thirty Years War, some two and a half centuries earlier. To see Catholicism in 1867 as "the continuation of the Holy Roman Empire," or the Pope as "a usurper of the earth," would, in the words of Dostoevsky biographer Joseph Frank, "be looked on by the majority of his compatriots with the same rather frightened and pitying incredulity as that displayed by the Epanchins’ guests" in the novel.

One might even entertain the thought, though it may seem bizarre at first, that there was as much for Dostoevsky to approve of as to condemn in Pope Pius IX. True, Ultramontanism was cresting and by 1870 would culminate in Vatican I and the definition of papal infallibility (at the very time that the Pope was politically deposed by Victor Emmanuel). But Pius’ whole career since the revolutions of 1848 had been directed against the same dominations and powers at which Dostoevsky, too, took aim. Shortly before the publication of The Idiot, the Pope had issued the encyclical Quanta Cura, to which was attached the Syllabus of Errors. Eamon Duffy has described it as a "now familiar Vatican Jeremiad" against the notion that "the Roman Pontiff can and should reconcile himself with progress, liberalism, and recent civilizations."

Rodney Delasanta, professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island

The Antichrist, by Lucas Cranach the Elder - 1521. During the time Cranach was under protestant Lutheran influence and therefore portrayed the Antichrist with the papal tiara.