Abstract

The article analyzes Hannah Arendt's views on the apolitical nature of the Christian worldview and uses them as a conceptual framework for interpreting Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot. In the first part of the article, the author reveals the main points concerning the opposition between the private and the public in Arendt's theory and points out the contradictory status of Christianity in its relation to the field of the political realm. On the one hand, the philosopher uses the reference to the book of Genesis as an argument for the conditionality of action by man's original being in the multitude and considers the teaching of Jesus as a special interpretation of faith as the beginning of action and the miracle that constitutes its principle. On the other hand, Arendt draws attention to the worldlessness (apoliticality) of Christianity due to the eschatological expectation of the end of the world as well as the emphasis of certain personalities (St. Paul, Aurelius Augustine) on the solitude of the created man. In its most explicit form, this ambivalence is expressed in the concept of the active good, an act whose necessary inclusion in the world is accompanied by a demand for radical concealment. In the second part of the article, the author demonstrates this contradiction using the example of Prince Myshkin, a hero whose orientation combines key features of the Christian worldview: the negativity of the author of the action in relation to the world, and the interruption of the consequences of the action, achieved by its cancellation in an act of forgiveness.