Crime and Punishment

In Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’, the protagonist, Raskolnikov, a 23 year old former student in St Petersburg commits the murder of an old woman (a pawnbroker) and her sister. This begins a downward spiral into his own conscience.

The harm he has caused is partially resultant from a need to break out of a life of poverty, a poverty which grinds down him and all those around him, bar a handful of well-healed individuals. It is predicated upon his sense of nihilism, that life is meaningless to the point of being un-godly Thus, his wrong-doing stems from his false belief that he is free to do as he likes and without consequence.

No matter how much he tries to reconcile his error, the effect on his spiritual, mental and physical well-being is wholly negative. He spirals further into a mental fog of confusion and contradictory feelings until he gradually enters a preliminary state of remorse. His remorse begins to take form in the brow-beaten but unbowed, Sonya: a young woman some 5 years his junior.

He confesses his crime to her and, at her behest, he eventually turns himself in to the police. His trial is swift and, because of his open and detailed confession, he receives a more lenient punishment: 8 years detention in a Siberian prison.

It is through the love of Sonya, who follows him to live in Siberia, that he achieves his redemption. It is her feminine presence that draws out the poison of his crime and, through her humble yet divine love for hm, he passes through his repentance to be forgiven and redeemed. Thus, the power of love is shown to be all-conquering and he is from then on in an upward spiral that, God willing, will deliver him to a place of wisdom and harmony.

Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece begins in a black sea of nihilism, travels through the sewers of dark canals of criminality to eventually babble along the purifying streams and rivers of repentance which flow into the blue seas of the divine. It is the affirmation of God’s Law and his love that leads him to forgiveness.

When one extrapolates Raskolnikov’s nihilism, which is essentially anti-life (and thus, anti-Christ) and draws parallels with the genocidal machinations of the dark overlords of our realm, the nature of the satanic/evil of these eugenists is crystal clear. They are so far removed from whatever vestiges of humanity they may have once had, that I doubt whether they are at all capable of facing the soul-damage they have caused, not only to millions of people, but to themselves. However, that is between them and the creator.

Raskolnikov’s redemption is by way of his remorse and the forgiveness he receives as a consequence of his repentance:

They tried to speak, but were unable to. There were tears in their eyes. Both of them looked pale and thin; but in these ill, pale faces there now gleamed the dawn of a renewed future, a complete recovery to a new life. What had revived them was love, the heart of the one containing an infinite source of life for the heart of the other.

Raskolnikov reaches a point where he has to surrender to the moment and that moment is, quite simply, one of infiinite love,

He thought about her. He recalled the way he had constantly tormented her, preying upon the emotions of her heart; he remembered her pale, thin little face, but now these memories caused him hardly any pain: he was aware of the infinite love with which he would make up for those sufferings now.

 

In any case, what were they, all those torments of the past, all of them? The whole thing, even his crime, even his sentence and exile, now seemed to him, on this first impulse, now seemed to him something alien and external, as though none of it had ever happened to him.”

To receive the blessing of redemption, Raskolnikov, like each and everyone of us, has to learn to simply be. To be at one in the moment, to be in his heart and to be with the love he experiences in these moments. That, I would posit, may be termed the profound truth of our lives.

Fear is the opposite of love. Fear exists in remembrances of moments that have gone and in anxious projections of what is to come. It therefore exists in the past and the future. Literally, it cannot exist in the present without our mindless compliance to its tyrannical diktats. Fear thus takes us away from the sublime moments of our lives, it stifles us and lowers our natural divine rhythms and loving vibratory states.

Until we root out and release those fears that have come to be installed within us and are able to slip into our natural state of love, then nothing will change, even when the parasitical elites have been removed. For, after all, are ‘they’ not but a projection, a soul-manipulating manifestation of the unacknowledged fears that exist in the heart of every man?

Our salvation is love: we exist for the love of God, as manifest in the Christ, by truth and through courage.

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