Is there anyone who does not know Dostoyevsky’s often quoted sentence: “The Beautiful will save us”? However, people usually forget that Dostoyevsky is referring here to the redeeming Beauty of Christ. We must learn to see Him. If we know Him, not only in words, but if we are struck by the arrow of his paradoxical beauty, then we will truly know him, and know him not only because we have heard others speak about him. Then we will have found the beauty of Truth, of the Truth that redeems. Nothing can bring us into close contact with the beauty of Christ himself other than the world of beauty created by faith and light that shines out from the faces of the saints, through whom his own light becomes visible.

If humanity is in God’s image, there is something that it is like to be human, something beyond any negotiation or contingency. In this sense, Adam cannot wholly die. Yet if every individual is of incalculable value, a situation in which large numbers of human beings are liable to suffer the obscuring or defacing of the image is an insupportably tragic one. Adam will not wholly die, but this does not mean that the death - morally or spiritually - of any one child of Adam is tolerable. It is still necessary to write, in the effort to bear credible witness to the reality of Adam in a world where he is becoming invisible. It is necessary to go on talking, narrating, in the attempt to discover whether what is said or told can be recognized, which also means that a novel that closed down the possibility of intelligent dissent would have failed.

The novelist attempts what is in one way an obviously impossible task - a self-emptying in respect of the characters of the fiction, a degree of powerlessness in relation to them. Impossible it may be (given that there is only one actual subject - the writer - making choices here), the approach to it or the intimation of it may also be an intimation of the work of a creator who does bring actual separate agents with choices into being.

Dostoevsky in effect challenges the reader to explain exactly what the truth outside or without Christ would be, and stakes the claim that truth about the human world is not going to be possible if faith is removed from the equation. That world without the sacred is not just disenchanted but deprived of some kind of depth - that is, of the sense that what we encounter is already part of a complex of interrelation before it is part of our world of perception.

Human beings may separate things into as many piles as we wish - separating spirit from flesh, sacred from secular, church from world. But we should not be surprised when God does not recognize the distinctions we make between the two. Earth is so thick with divine possibility that it is a wonder we can walk anywhere without cracking our shins on altars.

So blasphemy brings us to see that the holy is manifest in the material world apprehended as transmitting and embodying eternal reality - but doing so in the only way in which eternal reality as Christians see it can be so embodied, that is, in habitually hidden and always questionable form. The labor of image-formation, which for the novelist is the labor of narrative, is to do with following through that embodiment, and so it is itself a risk-laben and vulnerable matter, always open to contest and denial; if it seeks greater clarity or closure, it steps outside the reality of the world in which it is operating - in this instance the ‘world’ of the fiction itself. And in the novelist’s difficult negotiation of authorial presence and kenosis, of a distinctive imaging of the holy and an immersion in the matter and interrelation that is the finite world, it becomes impossible to discern a particular sort of discipleship, an imitatio or imaging in its own right.

We are back once more with the recurrent point that the tension in Dostoevsky is not straighforwardly between belief and unbelief - as if it might be possible for a modified and less straitened form of belief to arise as a resolution of sorts - but between the world in which image, word, and presence are realities that create transformation by addressing the human subject from outside their own frame of reference and one in which there is no such dimension to reality and no such register for speech.