ABSTRACT
Father Zossima dramatizes Dostoevsky's continual efforts to make the Word become flesh. In him we recognize the furthest advancement of Dostoevsky's concept of the sacred and the mysterious as ever-present numinal energies in the universe. "I am a frightful hunter after mysteries,"8 Dostoevsky writes of himself. Father Zossima is Dostoevsky's ecstatic conception of the world, the image in which-and the point at which-mystery and miracle, holiness and redemption cohere in presaging the ''subsurface unexpressed future Word." In him the aesthetic, or the secular, element is converted by the spiritual, or the religious element when, Dostoevsky states, "the Holy Spirit is the direct understanding of beauty, the prophetic cognition of harmony and, therefore, a constant striving for it."9 Father Zossima epiphanizes the most mystical dimension of Dostoevsky's spiritual art. Aesthetically and ideologically he becomes the medium of and for the experience of the holy, when the artistic proximity to the divine wondrously approximates the religious experience of the divine. Once again Otto helps us to gauge the intensity and value of the experience, the transfiguration, when he writes:
The point is that the "holy man" or the "prophet" is from the outset, as regards the experience of the circle of his devotees, something more than a "mere man" He is the being of wonder and mystery, who somehow or other is felt to belong to the higher order of things, to the side of the numen itself. It is not that he himself teaches that he is such, but that he is experienced as such.10
