The Brothers Karamazov: Part 1: Book 2, Chapter 5 Summary & Analysis

Zosima has been absent from his cell for about twenty-five minutes. Dmitri still hasn’t arrived. When the monk reenters, he finds that his guests are engaged in lively conversation, led mainly by Ivan and the two hieromonks (monks who are also priests), Father Iosif and Father Paissy. Fyodor asks Pyotr Alexandrovich why he’s consented to remain in what Pyotr calls “unseemly company.” He suspects that Pyotr is only staying so that he can display his intelligence. Fyodor picks at Pyotr until the elder’s return. As Zosima sits, Alexei notices how tired and pale the old monk looks. Father Iosif tells Zosima that they’ve been talking about Ivan’s article about ecclesiastical courts and “the scope of their rights.” Zosima has heard about the article.

Father Iosif says that Ivan “completely rejects the separation of Church and state,” which the hieromonk finds “curious.” Ivan explains that a compromise “between the state and the Church on such questions as courts” is “impossible.” Ivan thinks, therefore, that the Church should contain the whole state. Father Paissy agrees, but Pyotr Alexandrovich doesn’t. Father Paissy goes on to say that “the Church ought to be transforming itself into the state…so as to disappear eventually, making way for science, the spirit of the age, and civilization.” Yet, according to the Russian view, the state “should end by being accounted worthy of becoming only the Church alone, and nothing else but that.”

Ivan says that, if the Church takes over completely, it would “excommunicate the criminal and the disobedient and cut off their heads.” The excommunicated man would then have to not only go away from men but also from Christ. Zosima says that the Church is the only entity that can exact “real punishment” on the criminal. Hard labor and floggings don’t reform anyone. Also, after a criminal is cut off, another one takes his place. It is, therefore, only “Christ’s law” that forces one to acknowledge one’s own conscience. The criminal is capable of acknowledging guilt only before the Church, not the state. However, the Church now has “no active jurisdiction,” only the power of moral condemnation.

Zosima contemplates what would happen to the criminal if the Church turned on him, too. Excommunicated, the criminal would be “in despair.” Society, in league with the Church, would also turn on the criminal. So, “if the whole of society turned into the Church alone,” it’s likely, the monk thinks, that crimes would starkly diminish. The Church could even bring those it excommunicated back into its fold.

Pyotr Alexandrovich is outraged, prompting Father Paissy to remind him, sternly, that it’s not the Church that turns into the state but the state that “rises up to the Church and becomes the Church over all the earth.” The notion of the Church turning into the state is the dream of those in Rome. However, the state rising to the Church is “the great destiny of Orthodoxy on earth.” Father Paissy thinks that the “star will show forth from the East.”

In response, Pyotr Alexandrovich relates a story that a man told him in Paris, after the December revolution. They were talking about socialist revolutionaries who were being prosecuted. The man said that the people weren’t afraid of “socialists, anarchists, atheists, and revolutionaries” but of socialist Christians who are “terrible people” and “more dangerous” than socialist atheists. Father Paissy asks if Pyotr sees them as socialists. Before he replies, the door opens and Dmitri enters.