The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (687 page)

 
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(1641–1707).
Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem from 1669. His best-known achievement was the Synod of
Jerusalem
convened in 1672 to resist Protestant influence in the Greek Church. The decrees of the Synod are also known as the ‘Confession of Dositheus’, and form an important Orthodox dogmatic text.

 
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(Sino-Jap.,
d
, ‘way’, +
so
, ‘ancestor’, +
jin
, ‘deity’). A Japanese folk deity, especially associated with crossroads, mountain passes, and village entrances, attested from medieval times to the present, and having a complex syncretistic history. The name D
sojin seems to come partly from this Shinto tradition (road or path deities) and partly from Chinese folk belief in ancestral influence upon the health and prosperity of subsequent generations. Stones carved with human couples and labelled ‘D
sojin’ can still be found in Japan and are thought to be guardians of marital harmony and fecundity.

 
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(1821–81).
Russian novelist. In 1849, he was arrested for suspected revolutionary activity and condemned to death (or at least was taken to the scaffold and to the last moments before execution before the true sentence of four years in prison and four years as a private in the Siberian army was read out). He was released from the army in 1858. The immediate fruit of this experience was his remarkable
House of the Dead
(1861). Other novels followed which display a profound understanding of the depths of the human soul.
Notes from the Underground
(1864) sets rational egoism (which proffers reasons for treating others as instruments) against irrational selfishness which treats others as enemies.
Crime and Punishment
(1866),
The Idiot
(1868), and
The Devils
(also translated as
The Possessed
, 1871) led up to his great achievement,
The Brothers Karamazov
(completed in 1880). With the Slavophils, Dostoevsky venerated the
Orthodox Church
, and was deeply impressed by
Staretz
Amvrosy whom he visited at Optina. But his sense of goodness was neither facile nor naïve. He saw human freedom as something so awesome that most people are ready to relinquish it. This is epitomized in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. In his speech accepting the Nobel Prize for Literature,
Solzhenitsyn
quoted Dostoevsky, ‘Beauty will save the world.’ But the Church, in contrast, has continued, as Dostoevsky feared to the last that it would, on its path of authority and control.

 
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