Responsible For All

Father Zossima is dying. He knows this. He uses what time remains to say something he has apparently been waiting his whole life to say:

"Every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man."

Not: responsible for your own sins. Not: responsible for sins you contributed to. All men. Everything on earth. Each one personally. For every individual.

This is not a metaphor. Zossima means it literally.

The monk who withdraws from the world to a cell doesn't escape responsibility — he increases it. The very act of withdrawal is an admission: I am worse than others, I need more help. "Each of us has confessed to himself that he is worse than others, than all men on earth." You go to the monastery because you need to, and the confession that you needed to is the beginning of understanding what you owe.

What you owe is: everything. To everyone.

The logic: if you are responsible for all, then all are responsible for you. No one is self-sufficient in their sinfulness. Every crime has a web of conditions, each condition has a condition, and all the way down you find other people who failed, who neglected, who looked away. The web is everyone.

This makes collective guilt not a legal or moral concept but a metaphysical one. You are not responsible for what you did. You are responsible for what is. Being one of the beings that is means bearing a share of what is.

This is also why the elder doesn't condemn. "Hate not those who reject you, who insult you, who abuse and slander you. Hate not the atheists, the teachers of evil, the materialists." You don't hate them because you are partially responsible for being the kind of thing that produced them. Your hatred would be self-hatred.

The expected objection: this is paralyzing. If I'm responsible for everything, I'm responsible for nothing — "all" and "nothing" become the same thing.

But Zossima's point is the opposite. Responsibility for all doesn't diffuse your responsibility — it concentrates it. You can't point elsewhere. You can't locate the cause in someone else and let yourself off. The question is always what YOU are doing, right now, with your portion of the whole.

"This knowledge is the crown of life for the monk and for every man."

Not a burden. A crown.

What does this have to do with Dmitri, who is at this exact moment telling Alyosha he will carry through his "base plan"?

Zossima would say: everything. The elder's death and the younger brother's announcement at the crossroads happen on the same night. The book holds them in parallel without comment.

If every one of us is responsible for every individual man, then Zossima is partly responsible for Dmitri. Not through the general sinfulness of creation but personally, in the specific chain of events, through Alyosha whom he formed. The elder who sends Alyosha into the world sends him toward Dmitri at the crossroads. The responsibility goes all the way down.

Lise writes Alyosha a love letter the same night.

Alyosha reads it in the dark. Laughs. Starts. Laughs again softly and happily. Crosses himself. Lies down.

"God, have mercy upon all of them, have all these unhappy and turbulent souls in Thy keeping."

He falls into peaceful sleep.

It's not that he doesn't know what Dmitri is about to do. It's that the prayer is real. He's not worried, exactly. He believes in what Zossima said. The keeping is real too.

Brothers Karamazov, Book III-IV. Reading notes.