At the heart of Russian literary thought about the family in the 1860s and 1870s – in particular Dostoevskii's thought – stands Ivan Turgenev's 1862 novel Fathers and Sons. Although that work is ostensibly about chaos and destruction, as embodied in the 'nihilist' Bazarov, both the family structures depicted in it and the structure of the novel itself are remarkably harmonious and stable. Not only does Bazarov's callow friend Arkadii have a loving and devoted father and uncle, but Bazarov himself has salt-of-the-earth parents who worship the ground he walks on. The novel is built on the classic structure of comedy: by the end, the disruptive character who calls the social order into question (Bazarov) has been neutralised (by typhus), and an idyllic family group, which has incorporated the peasant mistress and her illegitimate son as lady of the manor and young master, gathers to celebrate a new patriarchal order presided over by the just-married son Arkadii.

In the summer of 1862, Dostoevskii made his first trip to Western Europe. In his account of this journey,Winter Notes on Summer Impressions (1863), he first broaches the problem of science in connection with his visit to the World Exhibition in London. The Exhibition was devoted to celebrating the achievements of science and technology and was sited in the Crystal Palace, an enormous glass and iron structure, itself a feat of engineering. Victorian Britain was the world centre of industrial development and technological invention. This was the period of heroic materialism, the heyday of faith in material progress and human improvement driven by scientific discovery. The age-old dream of conquering Nature and perfecting human nature and society would now, thanks to science, be achievable on earth. Dostoevskii found the Exhibition 'staggering'; there was nothing remotely like it in backward Russia.

Satisfactory definitions of the Russian terms intelligentsiia and intelligent or intelligentka (as the individual male and female members of the group are respectively known) are elusive. For one thing the terms are somewhat anachronistic. Although it now seems that the word intelligentsiia occurs at least as early as 1836, when it appears in a diary entry by the poet Zhukovskii, it was evidently not used in the mid-nineteenth century by or about the group which is now commonly described as the intelligentsia. It therefore does not occur in Dostoevskii's works of the period 1861-2, which are examined here, although it does appear to have come into common use slightly later as Dostoevskii's novelistic career blossomed. A further difficulty lies in the fact that the term does not really denote a distinct social group but rather a collection of deracinated individuals from various social backgrounds who share certain attitudes, including an aspiration to create a new identity based on their cultural and political role in society rather than on their economic position. Nor, given the uncertainty about what precisely the term denotes, can there be complete agreement as to when the force which we now call the intelligentsia came into being.

Dostoevskii was a Christian novelist. Some readers will regard this as a simple statement of an obvious truth, while others may regard it as a denial of all that is modern and of enduring importance in his work. On one thing both camps will agree, however. Dostoevskii, and his novels, take the claims of religion seriously on its own terms: religion does not occupy the peripheral place that it does in most notable English novels of the period. Moreover, Christianity, both in his life and his work, was engaged in pitched battle with the most desolate atheism. In Dostoevskii, neither is of that untroubled, optimistic variety which is often held to be characteristic of the Victorian age. Only towards the end of his life, while writing The Brothers Karamazov, was he able to comment in his notebook with some semblance of tranquillity that he had reached faith ('moia osanna') through a furnace of doubt ('gornilo somnenii') (xxvii, 86). Awaiting his own execution on the Semenovskii Square in 1849, he had murmured the words: 'Nous serons avec le Christ' (We shall be with Christ). His companion, the atheist Speshnev, had rejoined dryly: 'un peu de poussière' (specks of dust). Whatever thoughts on life and death had passed through Dostoevskii's mind before this moment, the burden of Speshnev's words, in one form or another, refused thereafter to go away.

You had to be there

You had to be there: when do we say this? It is usually when we narrate an incident that is just like a story even though there was no author. It really happened! If the professor had planned the rude student's interruption, he would not have created the same experience of life actually turning out like a story. Such events are striking because events happen as if already narrated and so evoke the eerie suspicion that we are like fictional characters.

Outside Russia it is the philosophical, moral, psychological and political problems in Dostoevskii's work that have fascinated readers, not its possible folkloric connections. Even in Russia for several decades the question of the writer's relationship to the folk heritage was barely posed – somewhat surprisingly, since Dostoevskii was writing when the mainly illiterate peasantry, numerically by far the largest social group, depended on an oral culture that shaped and expressed their world-view. Furthermore, the writer himself came to see the religious and moral ideals of ordinary Russians, which were embodied in their oral culture, as the key to Russia's salvation. That oral culture was also appearing in print in great quantities in the 1860s and 1870s when the major novels were being written: not only the standard collection of folktales (1855-63) and proverbs (1862), but also Christian legends (1859) and all kinds of sung poetry, especially the epic (bylina) and songs about Russian history (1861-7 and 1873), as well as folk-poetic laments (1872), and spiritual songs (dukhovnye stikhi) (1860 and 1861-4). These were accompanied by the continuing publication of accounts of peasant rituals, beliefs and superstitions. The reason for this lack of interest is not so much the undeniable importance of the larger philosophical issues in the novels as Dostoevskii's creative method. Whereas most Russian writers who draw on folklore make their source clear, whether through quotation, imitation or parallels, Dostoevskii tended to rework folkloric material, to integrate it into an image, a character, an incident or even his method of narration along with material from other sources, all subjected to his controlling vision. In particular, he was fond of interweaving motifs drawn from the Bible or official Orthodoxy with those from folk Christianity, though other combinations with philosophical concepts, literature, discussion of contemporary social and political issues and so on are common.

Dostoevskii's fictional world is dominated by money. One critic has identified it, along with epilepsy, as 'the ruling power in Dostoyevsky's creative environment'. It confronts his characters at every step and their awareness of it is often articulated. Dmitrii in The Brothers Karamazov reflects ruefully: 'without money you can't take a step in any direction' (xiv, 344; Bk 8, Sec. 3). Makar Ivanovich, the wise old peasant in A Raw Youth, says: 'Even if money is not God - it is at least a demi-god' (xiii, 311; Pt 3, Ch. 3). Aleksei puts it even more strongly in The Gambler, when he states categorically: 'Money is everything!' (v, 229; Ch. 5)

Painfully sensitive to the significance of money in human affairs, Dostoevskii was fully conscious of its ability to function as a medium in literary communication. But money as theme and message is also central to his writing. He recognises that money is power and its unequal distribution a cause of massive suffering and conflict. The close examination of social hardship is one of his primary concerns as a novelist. Rejecting the option of forcible redistribution of wealth through revolution and bloodshed, he nevertheless opposes strongly the frenzied pursuit of money by fair means or foul and the unprincipled use of money-based power. He presents money above all as a touchstone, a moral challenge, and his concern is how individuals obtain it, spend it and live with it.

Dostoevskii's correspondence of the 1840s, and in particular the letters sent to his brother Mikhail, to whom he was especially close both emotionally and intellectually, disclose an individual acutely sensitive to his role as a budding author. On the most immediate level the letters reveal Dostoevskii's keen awareness of the economic realities of the profession he has decided to adopt. References to money, indebtedness and publishers' advances are everywhere, alongside the occasional and not entirely convincing assertion that he writes primarily for money: 'What's the point of fame here, when I'm writing to earn a crust?' (xxviii/1, 106; letter of 24 March 1845). He describes the writer's relationship to the publisher as that of a slave to his master (xxviii/1, 128; 7 October 1846) and even draws attention to the alarming number of German poets who have died of hunger and cold or have ended up in asylums (xxviii/1, 108; 24 March 1845). Behind these details we can discern Dostoevskii's emerging awareness of himself as a figure in an established literary tradition. He constantly refers to and compares himself to other writers, both European and Russian: he relates his financial hardship to that experienced by Pushkin and Gogol before their fame was secure (xxviii/1, 107; 24 March 1845); in revising for the umpteenth time his drafts of Poor Folk, he justifies himself by reference to the writing and rewriting practices of Chateaubriand, Pushkin, Gogol and Laurence Sterne (xxviii/1, 108; 4 May 1845); he draws comfort from the fact that the hostility aroused in some quarters by his novel is no worse than that experienced by Pushkin and Gogol; and he is sensitive to the fact that he is in competition with several other new writers such as Goncharov and Herzen (xxviii/1, 120; 1 April 1846). With the success of Poor Folk he also becomes extravagantly aware of his own fame and pre-eminence in contemporary Russian literature.

Dostoevskii’s background in psychology

In Dostoevskii's time, the boundary between science and philosophy was as indistinct as it had been before Socrates, and the study of the psyche merged inseparably with that of religion, politics and all of nature. As a man of his times, Dostoevskii knew a number of psychological systems: some entered his imagery and his cultural awareness; some shaped the way he described his characters; and the struggle between two of these systems interacted with his most basic social ideas. He knew the Renaissance theory of the four humours, for example, which ascribed human character, behaviour and state of mind to the balance or imbalance of four fluids in the body: choler, phlegm, bile and black bile, which made humans choleric, phlegmatic, bilious or atrabilious, and may directly or indirectly explain why the hero's liver is referred to as diseased at the start of Notes from Underground (v, 99; Pt 1, Sec. 1). Dostoevskii had also encountered the ancient science of physiognomy, which discovered character in facial features, and Franz Joseph Gall's (1758-1828) popular theory of phrenology, which traced our character to the anatomy of the brain as reflected in protruding or sunken regions of the skull. He knew the Pythagorean and Asian theory of transmigrating souls, and Plato's theory of the tripartite soul, with reason, passion and appetite competing for control. But like most of his contemporaries, he drew his central psychological doctrines from two great traditions, both thousands of years old, but both growing directly out of eighteenth-century thinking: the tradition of the neurologists, and that of the alienists.

When the idea for a Cambridge Companion to Dostoevskii was first mooted it was recognised, first, that Dostoevskii had been extremely well served over many years by his critical commentators, in the West as well as in Russia, and, secondly, that the need for a further volume designed to introduce this author to yet another generation of students and more general readers was not self-evident and perhaps required some justification. To acknowledge this latter point is not at all the same as to imply that Dostoevskii's star is somehow on the wane or that the immense popularity his work has enjoyed is in decline. At the start of the twenty-first century his work is as widely admired as it has ever been, and its impact continues to resonate in cultural activity throughout the world more than a century after his death. Moreover, this resonance has been felt not just in the 'higher' or 'élite' manifestations of literary activity, but is also discernible in more popular forms of fiction such as the detective novel. Put simply, Dostoevskii seems unwilling to settle into the role of venerable classic, that of an author admired for the way his work once spoke loudly to his contemporaries, but whose impact in the present is more akin to that of a whisper. To employ an over-used term, Dostoevskii's novels still seem pressingly 'relevant' to the most immediate concerns of the present age in a way that those of his contemporaries perhaps do not. The world depicted in, say, Crime and Punishment or The Devils, despite its chronological and social remoteness, looks so much more like the world we live in than any described by Tolstoi or Turgenev. George Steiner's challenging assertion that 'Dostoevsky has penetrated more deeply than Tolstoy into the fabric of contemporary thought', having done more than any other writer of the nineteenth century to set the agenda and determine the 'shape and psychology' of modern fiction, does not seem over-extravagant. Nor does Alex de Jonge's claim that, along with Proust, Dostoevskii was the artist 'supremely representative' not only of his own age, but also of ours, a nineteenth-century novelist who has continued to provoke strong reactions in his subsequent readership.

INTRODUCTION

Eschatology is, to define the word etymologically, 'the study of the eschaton', a Greek word meaning 'the furthest end', and usually translated in its theological sense as the 'last days' or, more loosely, the 'end of time'. So, eschatology traditionally has been understood within Christianity as the study of the 'Last Things', particularly in the areas of death, judgment, heaven, and hell, associated in the New Testament with the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. These 'Last Things' have been seen as apocalyptic, retributive, restorative, and, above all, transformative. The one thing that all visions of humanity's and creation's future have had in common is the belief that our future reality will be radically different from our present reality: 'new heavens and a new earth' (Isaiah 6517). In sum, for most of Christianity's history, eschatology has been speculation about the ultimate end of humanity and of creation - the advent of the Kingdom of God.

Not too long ago, I sat in a gathering of feminist theologians. The topic was 'diversity'; numerous complaints about lack of diversity were being voiced, but it was clear that lack of diversity among the Christians, not absence of religious diversity, was being protested. I pointed out that the diversity among Christians represented was far greater than the diversity among religions, and that the discussion presumed a Christian context which I, a non-Christian, found problematic. The conversation paused momentarily to allow me to make my comment, then returned to its previous direction, as if I had never spoken. I felt as if I had momentarily surfaced from underwater in some giant ocean, only to have the waters submerge me again immediately. I also noted that I had felt this way before. In earlier days, it had not been uncommon for men to treat women's observations about religious studies or theology in the same way. One of the few other non- Christian feminists locked eyes with me and whispered, 'They just don't get it, do they?' How many times had we said this about men when trying to explain to them what feminism is and why it matters? This was a profoundly discouraging moment for me, a non-Christian pioneer in the feminist study of religion who has spent my life and career as a feminist theologian and scholar of religions involved almost equally in feminist issues and in issues surrounding religious diversity.

THE CONTEXT

African Christian theology is decidedly contextual, and this contribution on Jesus by an African woman will stay in that mode and reflect the faith of African Christian women in the African context. Jesus Christ yesterday, today, and tomorrow requires that each generation declares its faith in relation to its today. It is, therefore, natural that the Christologies African women were fed should reflect the faith of those who brought Christianity to Africa and the African men who did most of the interpretation and transmission. Having heard all this, African women today can announce in their own words the one in whom they have believed.

The intention of this chapter is to survey the language of African Christian women about Jesus and, through that, to build up a profile of the Jesus in their Christianity. We begin with a note on sources, as the expected ‘library study’ of this subject will yield very little that is of the provenance of women. We then sample the oral Christology which is our key source, as most of what is written by African women began as oral contributions to study groups and conferences. The third section is this writer’s assessment of what is being said about Jesus and why.

In her Dialogue with God, St Catherine of Siena opens a window onto the encounter of a human soul with the divine. By all accounts a woman of considerable independence of mind and forthright courage, involved both in caring for poor and sick people in Siena and in personal interventions in the complex political and ecclesiastical crises that marked fourteenthcentury Italy, she was also from an early age deeply informed by prayer. It is not surprising, then, that this sustained prayer handed down to us, among the first texts of Western Europe to be written and printed in the vernacular, should indicate an inseparable relation of action with thought, of work with contemplation. Our interest here, however, is not in the details of her life, for in any case these are often difficult to disentangle from fervent accounts of good works embellished with pious stories. Reading the lives and texts of saints is a hermeneutic exercise of considerable sophistication in itself. Rather our attention is drawn to a pattern of reflection that unfolds in the Dialogue, a pattern that is at once so familiar and so strange to contemporary hearing that one might easily miss what it has to say to us. Yet in this pattern something about the distinctiveness of ethics and something about the nature of redemption is disclosed, and together these things may shed light on the desires and the projects of contemporary feminist ethics. So it is my intention here, not to try to figure out the life of St Catherine, but rather to let her figure us out, and so to let her prayer inform what the ethical life of woman might yet become.

In this chapter, I will trace the emergence and development of feminist theology in Christianity. I start by asking what counts as feminism, what counts as feminist theology, and what social and cultural conditions allow it to emerge. Feminist theology is not just women doing theology, for women have done theology that does not question the masculinist paradigms of theology. Nor is feminist theology simply the affirmation of 'feminine' themes in theology. What has been called 'feminine' in Western thought has been constructed to complement the construction of masculinity. Thus, the adding of feminine to masculine themes in theology mostly enforces the dominant gender paradigm.

Feminism is a critical stance that challenges the patriarchal gender paradigm that associates males with human characteristics defined as superior and dominant (rationality, power) and females with those defined as inferior and auxiliary (intuition, passivity). Most feminists reconstruct the gender paradigm in order to include women in full and equal humanity. A few feminists reverse it, making females morally superior and males prone to evil, revalorising traditional male and female traits. Very few feminists have been consistently female-dominant in their views; more often there has been a mix of egalitarian and feminine superiority themes. I take the egalitarian impulse of feminism to be the normative stance, but recognise the reversal patterns as part of the difficulty of imagining a new paradigm of gender relations which is not based on hierarchy of values.

The word 'dogmatic' may seem an odd choice for the title of this consideration of feminist theology. It could fairly be argued that feminists have themselves not been particularly favourable towards things dogmatic, sharing with the wider ethos of Western thought a modern suspicion of that which is handed down from some other place than here, and which does not bear thinking about but is only to be taken as read. Not only have feminists participated happily in the shredding of previously reputable dogmas with the use of critical reason, but many of their writings also reveal a hesitancy about being dogmatic in turn, an apology for what might appear to be so, even a self-effacement from making what might be taken as dogmatic claims. Nevertheless there is an important sense in which feminist theology undertaken by Christian women has been and continues to be dogmatic. It is to investigate the senses in which this is so that this chapter is written.