WHITTAKER CHAMBERS
473
lock, stock, and barrel, the entire Dostoevskyean polemic against socialism
as the culminating movement of Western rationalism and secularism,
leading through the rejection of God to the deification of man. He
accuses the radicals of worshiping "Almighty man," just as the
creator of Ivan Karamazov accused them of worshiping the "man–
god," and refuses to distinguish in principle between liberals, socialists,
and party-line communists, whatever the divergences among them.
Regardless of their political practice at any given time, in theory they
are all equally committed to unbelief, to the elevation of man above
God-the supreme act of rebellion converting man into a monster.
That is exactly the approach of Dostoevsky, who also saw no
reason to discriminate among the varieties of free thought. (He did not
hesitate, for instance, to lay the blame for the criminal acts of Nechayev
-the model for the sinister figure of Pyotr Verhovensky in
The Possessed
-not only upon such revolutionary theorists as Belinsky and Herzen but
also upon the far more moderate liberal idealists of the type of
Granovsky, a Moscow professor who taught his students scarcely any–
thing more virulent than that man was a creature endowed with a
mind and that it was his duty to use it.) Science and reason are the
enemy. And what is socialism? According to Dostoevsky it is "not
merely the labor question, it is before all else the atheistic question,
the question of the form taken by atheism today, the question of the
tower of Babel built without God, not to mount from earth to Heaven,
but to set up Heaven on earth." This, indeed, is the
locus classicus.
It
is
the pivotal thought of Chambers' book. But there are other ideas in
Dostoevsky which he entirely ignores; and with good reason, for they
emphatically call into question his view of religion as the one secure
basis of freedom. Perhaps he would not be so certain of their "in–
divisible" union if he had been more attentive to the important his–
torical lesson contained in the legend of the Grand Inquisitor-a lesson
which belies the national-religious thesis of Dostoevsky's work as a
whole and which is a deadly critique of the shallow doctrine that
if
men but believed they would soon enter the promised spiritual king–
dom. In that legend Dostoevsky tells us that religion too, yes, even the
religion of Christ, can be transformed into an instrument of power in
the hands of a self-chosen elite bent on depriving men of their free–
dom and organizing a "universal human antheap." And it is precisely
men's readiness to believe and their irresistible craving for "community
of worship," the principal source of bigotry and intolerance, that in–
duces them to accept the total claims of their rulers.
The Russian writer's influence on Chambers is one-sided but very
