SACRAMENTAL SPIRITUALITY IN THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV AND WENDELL BERRY’S PORT WILLIAM CHARACTERS Hans S. Gustafson à Abstract This article examines anti-dualism in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, kenotic theo ¯sis in Father Zosima, and the pansacramental vision of Wendell Berry’s Port William Characters, all of which exhibit a spirituality connected to the sensual as mediated through sacramental categories. This yields a sacramental spirituality that results in a way ‘of apprehending the whole of reality’—a new ‘way of seeing’. The strength of employing sacramental language, which can successfully mediate between God and world, allows for the retention of an immanent God that dwells in the world, yet is not reduced to the world as such. The gifted prose of Dostoevsky and Berry assists in articulating this spirituality in a manner that strict philosophy and theology might not otherwise be able to do. I . INTRODUCTION Dostoevsky and Wendell Berry depict one of the foundational Christian claims (for both Eastern and Western traditions) with implications for both theology and spirituality. This is the presence of sacramental spirituality in the human experience of the world. The particular lived religious experience (spirituality) of their literary characters reveals a concretisation of sacramental mediation between theology and spirituality, as well as between God and world. In what follows, I will employ literature as a case study for sacramental spirituality; that is, literature here will serve as a lens through which sacra- mental spirituality might be understood more clearly. Concerning the terms ‘sacramental’ and ‘spirituality’, I use the former to refer to that element of the à Assistant Director of the Jay Phillips Center for Interfaith Learning at the University of St. Thomas (St. Paul, MN) and Saint John’s University (Collegeville, MN), and Adjunct Professor of Theology. Email: hsgustafson@stthomas.edu, hgustafson@csbsju.edu Literature & Theology, 2012, pp. 1–19 doi:10.1093/litthe/frs034 Literature & Theology # The Author 2012. Published by Oxford University Press 2012; all rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Literature and Theology Advance Access published August 20, 2012 at O Shaughnessy Library on August 27, 2015 http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from