At the end of the day Myshkin is not the Russian Christ, ...

At the end of the day Myshkin is not the Russian Christ, as some readers have wished to see him - he succeeds in 'resurrecting' no one - and he is scarcely a traditional saint. Although he embodies to an unusual degree those features which Dostoevskii associates with the Christian personality (compassion, insight, humility, sensitivity to beauty, tenderness of heart, forgiveness) and shares Dostoevskii's own glimpse of paradise through the aura of an epileptic fit, this glimpse is followed by a sense of utter desolation.

Epilepsy. Quotes from Revelations: ���time will be no more���. Ecstatic vision of a state beyond time and so beyond choice and action. Some sense in which this ecstatic vision of harmony is bound up with death. For all the compelling beauty of what is experience and the overpowering feeling of having really grasped the nature of things, the outcome is destructive.

Notes on Rowan Williams's book on Dostoevsky