Abstract

The concept of the person has had something of a problematic status in modernity. Modern habits of thought have tended to obscure the metaphysical roots of personhood, just as they have emphasized the subtle intricacies of a developed private space and the poetry of the incommensurable. Personal being suffers anguish in the tension between an uncertain ground and demands for authenticity. Yet there is an essential narrativity to the person, remarked by numerous thinkers such as Martha Nussbaum and John Milbank. Thus the effort to articulate the personal in a suitable form may be observed in various literary genres, with the most sustained and probing effort given to the novel. The promise of the novel is set against limitations incurred by the conditions of its origin, particularly a resistance to include eschatological realities within novelistic narrative. Without a broader enveloping context, the individual story is threatened with permanent obscurity. The novel poses the question of whether there is an overarching grand narrative. ;No doubt the most profound exploration of the inner dimensions of the person is to be found in the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky. Notes From the Underground in particular reveals Dostoevsky's acute awareness of the dilemma of personal being. The Underground Man rejects available cultural heroisms, but cannot be satisfied with an unheroic narrative as the final word on his person. Embedded within the Underground Man's account of himself may be discovered a biblical narrative of the redeemed harlot associated with nuptial theology, the archetypal story that can neither be accepted nor discarded utterly in the Underground. In subsequent fictional works, using various types of Anti-Christ figures as images of the displaced self, Dostoevsky tests the viability of this narrative of redemption. He uncovers in characteristic modern heroic figures actions that necessarily distort the meaning of the story witnessed by revelation. In The Brothers Karamazov, he is able to express in a complex and nuanced fashion the shape of an authentic Christian heroism. In this novel Dostoevsky shows that the uniqueness of Christ which sets his mission apart from all others is to be found in a heroism making possible the recognition of personal being. The writings of the twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, having benefited from the depth and penetration of Dostoevsky's portrayals, corroborates his authenticity and extends his insight in another discipline