Justified True Belief

(●) The convict novelist who wrote the nineteenth century’s hardest case against God, and then spent the rest of his last novel answering it. + Most attacks on Christian faith are written by people who want the faith to fail. The most powerful one in modern literature was written by a man who went to church, kept a New Testament from a prison camp on his desk for thirty years, and wrote in the notebook for his last novel that his own hosanna, his own shout of praise, had come to him through a great furnace of doubt. Fyodor Dostoevsky put the case against God into the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, and he did not weaken it to make the answer easier. Ivan does not deny that God exists. He says that a world where children are tortured is not a world he will accept a ticket to, whatever glorious harmony is promised at the end of it, whatever explanation is one day given for the tears, and he says it with a stack of newspaper clippings about real Russian cruelty in his hand. Christian philosophers have been quoting Ivan ever since, not to knock him down cheaply but because nobody has stated the problem of evil more honestly. Then there is the fact a reader will remember. Dostoevsky wrote almost all of it in a hurry, under contracts he had already spent the advances on, at desks in rented rooms in cities he had fled to because of his creditors, between epileptic seizures, and after four years of hard labour in Siberia where the only book he was permitted to own was a copy of the New Testament.

(●) 1821 AD: Born on the grounds of a Moscow hospital for the destitute, where his father was the doctor. + Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky was born in Moscow on 11 November 1821 by the modern calendar (30 October by the Julian calendar Russia still used, which is why older books give a different day). His father Mikhail was a staff physician at the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor, and the family lived in a cramped apartment in one wing of it. Out of the windows of his childhood the boy could watch the patients: the beggars, the abandoned, the ones nobody claimed. He was told not to talk to them, and he talked to them. His mother Maria taught him to read from a book of Bible stories, and he could recite the story of Job as an old man. She died of tuberculosis in 1837, when he was fifteen. His father, a hard and increasingly heavy-drinking man, sent Fyodor and his older brother Mikhail to St Petersburg to become military engineers, a respectable profession the boy had no interest in whatsoever. In June 1839 word came that his father was dead on the small estate he had bought at Darovoe. A story ran through the family, and later through a century of biographies, that his own serfs had murdered him for his cruelty. A serf was a peasant bound by law to the land he worked, and until the emancipation of 1861 he was handed on with the estate when it changed owners, which is why a landowner who was hated was hated by people who could not simply leave. The district court investigated and found an apoplectic stroke, and Joseph Frank, whose five-volume biography is the standard life in English, argued from those court papers, recovered from the archives in the 1970s, that the stroke is the likelier account. What matters for the novels is that a rumour of a hated father killed by his own people was in the family air from the time Dostoevsky was seventeen, and forty years later he built The Brothers Karamazov on exactly that situation.

(●) 1846 AD: His first short novel made him famous overnight, and his second one destroyed the reputation within a year. + He finished his engineering course, took a commission, drew fortifications for about a year, and resigned in 1844 to write. He was twenty-two, penniless by choice, and he had a manuscript. Poor Folk is a novel told entirely in letters between a shabby middle-aged clerk and the poor young woman across the courtyard whom he loves and cannot help. In 1845 his flatmate Dmitry Grigorovich showed it to the poet Nikolai Nekrasov, who sat up all night reading it and went at four in the morning, with Grigorovich, to bang on Dostoevsky’s door and tell him what he had done. Nekrasov carried it to Vissarion Belinsky, the most feared critic in Russia, announcing that a new Gogol had appeared. Nikolai Gogol was the reigning master of Russian prose, so that was the largest claim anyone could make about a writer, and Belinsky had heard it before. He said dryly that with Nekrasov, Gogols sprang up like mushrooms. Then he read it, and sent for the author to tell him he had written something whose worth he did not yet understand himself. The change in his life was as sudden as anything he ever put in a novel. A twenty-four-year-old nobody was suddenly the coming man of Russian letters, invited everywhere, and by his own later account insufferable about it. Then he published The Double, a strange story about a clerk who meets his own double walking the streets of Petersburg, and the same critics who had crowned him took the crown back. Belinsky cooled. The salons laughed. Dostoevsky spent the next three years writing well and being condescended to, and he never entirely lost the wound.

(●) 1849 AD: Arrested for reading a banned letter aloud, he was condemned to be shot and reprieved on the scaffold. + From 1847 he had been going to Friday evenings at the house of Mikhail Petrashevsky, where young men read forbidden French socialist writers and talked about the abolition of serfdom. Nicholas I, watching revolutions break out across Europe in 1848, was in no mood for discussion circles. On 23 April 1849 the police came for the whole group before dawn, and Dostoevsky spent eight months in the Peter and Paul Fortress. The chief charge against him was that he had read aloud, twice, Belinsky’s banned open letter to Gogol, which called the Russian church a servant of the state, and that he had not reported the men who had let him read it. On 22 December 1849 the prisoners were driven to Semyonovsky Square, stood on a scaffold in the snow in their shirts, and heard themselves sentenced to death by firing squad. A priest offered the cross. The first three men, one of them Petrashevsky, were tied to the stakes and hooded, and the soldiers raised their rifles. Dostoevsky was in the second group, standing a few feet behind them, and he had perhaps a minute to live. Then a rider came across the square with a reprieve. The whole thing, hoods and rifles included, had been scripted in advance on the tsar’s own instructions, with the commutation written before the men ever left their cells. One of the prisoners, Nikolai Grigoryev, lost his reason on the spot and never recovered it. Dostoevsky went back to his cell and wrote to his brother that same day that life is a gift, life is happiness, that every minute could have been an eternity of bliss, and that if he could turn his life to the good, not one instant of it would be wasted. He was twenty-eight. He had four years of Siberia in front of him, and he had just learned the thing he would write about for the rest of his life: what a human being finds out about himself in the last minute before the end.

(●) 1850 AD: Four years of hard labour in Siberia left him with one book, a lifelong illness, and a faith he had to rebuild from the ground. + In January 1850, on the way to the camp, the convicts were held at Tobolsk, and there something happened that shaped everything after it. The wives of the Decembrists, noblewomen who had followed their husbands into Siberian exile a quarter of a century earlier after the failed rising of 1825, obtained permission to see the prisoners. They gave each man food, clothing, and a copy of the New Testament with a ten-rouble note hidden in the binding. It was the only book a convict was allowed to own. For the next four years it was the only book Dostoevsky read, and he kept that copy, marked in pencil, on his desk until the day he died. One of those women, Natalya Fonvizina, became his correspondent, and it is to her that he wrote the sentence about Christ and the truth that people have argued about ever since (Q, after T5). The camp at Omsk was a wooden stockade holding about two hundred and fifty convicts, who slept on plank beds in barracks that leaked, wore leg irons that were never removed, and worked at brickmaking and river labour. He was a nobleman among peasant convicts, which meant that for four years he was hated by the men he lived with. He was also, for the first time, living with the Russian people rather than reading about them, and what he found there overturned the imported French socialism of the Petrashevsky evenings. He describes the discovery in Notes from the House of the Dead: murderers who could be gentle, thieves with a sense of honour, and buried under the filth of the worst of them something that was not filth. His epilepsy, which had shown warning signs earlier, became unmistakable in Siberia and never left him. He lived the rest of his life with seizures that could arrive weeks apart or twice in a night, and with the strange few seconds before one that he described as a happiness worth years of life. Doctors call that warning moment an aura, the sensation that tells an epileptic what is coming, and he later handed his own to Prince Myshkin in The Idiot. Released from the stockade in 1854, he still owed years as a private soldier at Semipalatinsk on the Kazakh steppe. There he fell in love with Maria Isaeva, the wife of a drunken customs official. She was consumptive, which is to say tubercular, the illness that had killed his mother, and he married her in 1857 after the man died. It was not a happy marriage. He was thirty-eight before the authorities let him come home.

(●) 1864 AD: In three months he lost his wife and his brother, and the debts that followed drove him to the roulette tables. + Back in St Petersburg he and his brother Mikhail founded a monthly journal, Vremya (Time), which was doing well until the censors closed it in 1863 over an article about Poland. They started a second, Epokha (Epoch), on borrowed money. In April 1864 Maria died of tuberculosis. In July Mikhail died suddenly, leaving a widow, four children, and the journal’s debts, which Dostoevsky took on himself although he was not legally obliged to. Epokha failed in 1865. He was left supporting his brother’s family and his late wife’s son, and being chased by creditors who could have had him imprisoned for debt. Out of that same terrible year came Notes from Underground, a hundred pages narrated by a spiteful retired clerk in a cellar, written to demolish the confident idea of the day that once people understand their real interests they will behave well (T1). Then the gambling. In the German spa towns of Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden he lost, repeatedly and catastrophically, at roulette, pawning his overcoat and his young wife’s wedding ring, writing letters of abject apology and going back the next evening. He knew exactly what he was doing and could not stop, which is why The Gambler reads the way it does. That the short novel exists at all is down to a contract. A publisher named Stellovsky had bought him with terms stating that if a new novel was not delivered by 1 November 1866, Stellovsky would own the rights to everything Dostoevsky wrote for the next nine years. With four weeks left and Crime and Punishment still unfinished, friends persuaded him to hire a stenographer, someone trained to take dictation in shorthand as fast as a man can talk. Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, aged twenty, took the whole novel down in twenty-six days. Stellovsky then made himself unavailable on the last day, so Dostoevsky lodged the manuscript with a police officer in the man’s own district and took a receipt for it. The rest of it happened quickly, and it saved him. Within a few weeks he had asked her to marry him, they were married in February 1867, and the disorder of his life quietly ended. She ran the household, then the finances, and eventually the publishing of his books, and the gambling stopped for good in 1871.

(●) 1867 AD: Four years abroad with his new wife, running from creditors, cost him a daughter and produced two of his novels. + Two months after the wedding the couple left Russia to escape his creditors, and stayed away four years, moving between Dresden, Baden-Baden, Geneva, Milan and Florence. Anna’s diary of those years is the closest thing we have to a daily record of him: the writing, the seizures, the pawn shops, the tenderness, the quarrels. Their first child, Sonya, was born in Geneva in March 1868 and died three months later. He wrote to a friend that the little creature had known him, had begun to smile at him, and that people were telling him he would have other children and this was somehow supposed to console him. He was writing The Idiot at the time, the novel about a Christlike epileptic prince set loose in Petersburg society, which is perhaps why the book is as sad as it is. The next thing to reach him came out of the newspapers. In November 1869 a student named Ivan Ivanov was lured into a park in Moscow and killed by Sergei Nechaev and four members of his revolutionary cell, because Ivanov had begun to defy him and because a murder they all shared would bind the rest to him for good. Dostoevsky read the reports abroad and saw the shape of everything he feared. Demons, which he began the next year, takes that murder as its centre and follows the logic down: what men become when a political idea is allowed to occupy the space that God has left. The family came home in July 1871, a week before Anna gave birth to their son Fyodor.

(●) 1878 AD: He buried a two-year-old son, went to a monastery for comfort, came home to write The Brothers Karamazov, and died within three months of finishing it. + The last decade was the settled one. From 1873 he wrote A Writer’s Diary, at first a column in a weekly he was editing and from 1876 a monthly he produced single-handed. It mixed reportage, court cases, short fiction and opinion in whatever proportion the month suggested, and it turned a novelist into a public conscience. At its height it had six or seven thousand subscribers, and strangers wrote to him asking what they should do with their lives. On 16 May 1878 his son Alyosha died of an epileptic seizure at two years and nine months old, of the illness he had inherited from his father. Dostoevsky did not recover from it in any ordinary sense. In June, at Anna’s urging, he travelled with the young philosopher Vladimir Solovyov to Optina Pustyn, the monastery south of Moscow where the tradition of spiritual elders was strongest, and spent two days there. An elder was a monk whose holiness was widely enough trusted that people came from across Russia to lay their troubles in front of him and do what he said. He saw the elder Ambrose three times, twice alone. What Ambrose said to him is not recorded, but Anna reports that he came back changed, and that the words of consolation the elder gave him went almost unaltered into the mouth of Father Zosima, who in the novel consoles a peasant woman who has lost a three-year-old boy. The Brothers Karamazov came out in instalments through 1879 and 1880: four sons, a murdered father, and a trial, carrying the argument between belief and unbelief that he had been circling for thirty years. He gave the dead child’s name to the youngest brother. In June 1880 he gave a speech on Pushkin in Moscow that reduced a hall full of quarrelling factions to weeping and embracing strangers, and for one afternoon he was the most loved man in Russia. He finished the novel in November. On 28 January 1881 by the Russian calendar, 9 February by ours, a pulmonary haemorrhage killed him at fifty-nine, under three months after the last instalment. Contemporary estimates put the crowd at his funeral at tens of thousands, students and workers and society ladies walking behind the coffin to the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, and the schools closed for it.

What He Taught

(T1) A human being is not a piano key, and he will hurt himself to prove it. + Imagine a friend who has been offered the better job, the kinder spouse, the sensible mortgage, everything a reasonable person would want, and who walks away from all of it for no reason he can explain, and afterwards is not even sorry. You have met this person. You have probably been this person on a smaller scale, over something you refused to apologise for. The confident social thinkers of Dostoevsky’s day held that this was a temporary problem. Their view, sometimes called rational egoism, was that people do wrong only because they miscalculate: show a man where his real advantage lies, arrange society scientifically, and virtue follows as arithmetic follows. Nikolai Chernyshevsky had put the whole programme into a wildly popular novel, What Is to Be Done?, in 1863, and a generation of Russian students took it as a manual. Notes from Underground was the answer, and it is not a polite one. Its narrator, a bitter minor official living in a cellar, points out that a man has one advantage more precious than all the calculated ones, which is the freedom to act against his own interest, and that he will burn his happiness down in front of you to demonstrate that he is a person and not a key on a piano being pressed by the laws of nature. The image of the piano key is his, and it is aimed at determinism, the view that every human choice is simply the last link in a chain of physical causes and could not have been otherwise. Reason, he says, is only one twentieth of a man’s capacity for living, and a life run entirely off its tables would not be life at all but the extraction of square roots. Christian readers have always found this useful, and not because the underground man is admirable. He is petty, cruel to a woman who tries to love him, and finally ridiculous. That is the point. Dostoevsky is showing what freedom looks like when it has nothing left to be free for, which is exactly the human condition Scripture calls sin: not a failure of calculation but a will bent in on itself. The novel diagnoses; it does not cure.

(Q) "What man wants is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead." + Source: Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, Part I, chapter VII (Constance Garnett translation). The narrator has just granted that reason is a fine thing and satisfies about a twentieth of what a person is. Then he asks how the reformers know that what a man wants is a rationally advantageous choice, and answers his own question with this sentence. Garnett italicises "independent."

(T2) Take away God and immortality, and nothing whatever is forbidden. + In The Brothers Karamazov the middle brother, Ivan, is a clever young intellectual who has published an article on church courts and has a theory that shocks a dinner party. The theory is not that God does not exist. It is a claim about what follows if he does not: that there is no natural law obliging anyone to love his neighbour, that whatever love has existed on earth so far has rested on the belief that the soul outlives the body, and that if you remove that belief from mankind then nothing at all is immoral and everything is permitted. Dostoevsky then does something no essayist can do. He runs the experiment. Ivan says the theory out loud in front of the household servant Smerdyakov, who is illegitimate, resentful, and listening far more carefully than anyone notices. Smerdyakov murders their father, and when he confesses it to Ivan he explains that he was only acting on Ivan’s own principle, since if there is no everlasting God there is no such thing as virtue and no need of it, and that Ivan is therefore the real murderer. Ivan, who is honest, cannot find the flaw in this, and it destroys his mind. Philosophers call this the moral argument, and it comes in two strengths. The weak version says atheists cannot be good people, which is plainly false and which Dostoevsky never claims: Ivan is generous, and the novel’s worst hypocrite is a monk. The strong version, which is Ivan’s, asks a different question. If human beings are matter arranged by chance, what exactly is the difference between a moral obligation and a strong preference? A preference can be overruled by a stronger one. An obligation binds you when you do not want it to, and it is not obvious what could do that binding in a universe with nobody in it. Notice too what the argument does not settle. It is a claim about what moral facts would need in order to be facts, not proof that God exists, and unbelieving philosophers have offered serious answers to it for a century and a half.

(Q) "Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be lawful, even cannibalism." + Source: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book II, chapter VI, "Why Is Such a Man Alive?" (Constance Garnett translation). Pyotr Miusov is repeating to a room full of monks what Ivan said five days earlier at a gathering of ladies: that there is no law of nature that man should love mankind, that whatever love there has been on earth came from belief in immortality, and that destroying that belief would dry up every living force that maintains the life of the world. Dmitri, the eldest brother, hears it and says only, "I’ll remember it." He does.

(T3) No harmony at the end of history is worth the tears of one tortured child. + This is the chapter called "Rebellion," and it is the reason philosophers who have never read a novel in their lives know Dostoevsky’s name. Ivan, over tea in a tavern with his younger brother Alyosha, who is a novice at the monastery, opens a folder of newspaper cuttings. A Russian girl of five whose parents, worthy and respectable people by Ivan’s account, beat her and locked her overnight in a freezing outhouse, her face smeared with her own filth, praying to dear kind God to help her. A general who sets his hounds on an eight-year-old serf boy in front of the boy’s mother because the child threw a stone that hurt a dog’s paw. These are not invented; Dostoevsky took them from the Russian press and from court reporting, and Ivan hands them across the table one at a time. Then he makes his move, and it is subtler than most versions of the problem of evil. He grants the whole Christian story for the sake of argument. Suppose there really is a final harmony in which every wrong is explained and the mother embraces the man who threw her son to the dogs and everyone cries that God was just. Ivan says the price is too high and he will not pay it. He does not deny God; he returns his entrance ticket. He also puts his finger on the piece that no theory of the greater good can supply, which is the standing to forgive: the mother may forgive the general for her own suffering, but she has no right to forgive him for her child’s. That is where Alyosha answers, and the answer is not an argument that the suffering was worth it. He says there is one Being who has the right to forgive everything, for all and for everything, because he gave his innocent blood for all and everything. It is the only reply the novel offers to Ivan, and it is worth seeing what kind of reply it is. It does not explain the outhouse. It says that God has not stayed outside the problem issuing verdicts about it, but has come in and taken the worst of it into himself, which is what the cross means. Whether that satisfies is a question every reader has to answer, and Dostoevsky knew it. He told his editor that his answer to Ivan would not be a point-by-point refutation but the whole sixth book of the novel, the life of a holy man, and he admitted to Konstantin Pobedonostsev that he was afraid it would not be enough.

(Q) "Besides, too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it. And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket. It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket." + Source: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, chapter IV, "Rebellion" (Constance Garnett translation). Between the second and third sentences the original adds that an honest man is bound to give the ticket back as soon as possible, and that Ivan is doing so; those words are omitted. Ivan has just said that he would rather be left with his unavenged suffering than accept a harmony bought at that price, even if he turns out to be wrong to feel so. Alyosha’s only comment, looking down, is that this is rebellion.

(T4) People will hand over their freedom for bread and certainty, and Christ refused to take it from them. + Immediately after the rebellion chapter Ivan tells Alyosha a story he has composed in his head. Christ returns to Seville at the height of the Inquisition, is recognised in the street, and is arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, an old man of almost ninety, who comes to his cell at night to explain why he will burn him in the morning. The Inquisitor’s case is built on the three temptations in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1–11), which he reads as the deepest questions ever put to the human race. Turn stones into bread, and men will follow you like a grateful flock. Throw yourself from the temple and be caught by angels, and they will have the miracle they crave. Take the kingdoms of the world, and they will have one authority to end their quarrelling. Christ refused all three, because obedience bought with bread is not love and a faith compelled by miracle is not faith. The Inquisitor says that in refusing, Christ overestimated humanity: he judged people by the few strong ones who can carry freedom, and left the millions of weak ones with an unbearable burden. So the church has quietly corrected his work, taken up the three powers he rejected, which the Inquisitor names miracle, mystery and authority, and given the weak the happiness of obedience. They will be children, they will be fed, they will be allowed their sins, and only their keepers will know it was all a lie. The speech is aimed at more than one target. Dostoevsky, Russian Orthodox and no friend of Rome, put it in a Catholic setting, and Roman Catholic readers have answered him ever since that this is a caricature of a church that has always taught the freedom of the act of faith. But the deeper aim is not confessional. He is describing the permanent temptation of every institution that has people in its care, religious or political, to trade their freedom for their comfort, and the twentieth century read the chapter as prophecy. What stops the speech from being simply an attack on faith is the ending. Christ says nothing at all. He listens to the whole indictment and kisses the old man on his bloodless lips, and the Inquisitor lets him out into the dark streets and sticks to his idea, and the kiss goes on glowing in his heart.

(Q) "Instead of taking possession of men’s freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings for ever. Thou didst desire man’s free love, that he should follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee." + Source: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book V, chapter V, "The Grand Inquisitor" (Constance Garnett translation). The Inquisitor means it as an accusation, and a Christian reader can take the same words as a creed. A few lines earlier he has stated his premise flatly: nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.

(T5) The answer to unbelief is not a better argument but a life: love in action, and each of us answerable for all. + Having built the case against God as strongly as he could, Dostoevsky had to answer it, and he refused to do it with a counter-argument. What he wrote instead was a portrait: Father Zosima, the dying elder of the monastery, drawn partly from the elder Ambrose he had met at Optina Pustyn in the year he began the book, and from the eighteenth-century Russian bishop Tikhon of Zadonsk. The Russian word for such an elder is starets: a monk of proven holiness to whom other people submit their consciences voluntarily, telling him everything and taking his direction. The practice was old in the Eastern church and controversial in the Russian church of the 1870s, which is why the novel bothers to explain it before it introduces one. Zosima’s teaching has two halves, and both are practical rather than theoretical. The first is that love is work. A wealthy society woman comes to him in distress: she thinks she believes in God but cannot be certain, and she wonders whether she could become a sister of mercy. He tells her that if she takes it up in order to be admired for it she will collapse the first time a patient is ungrateful, because love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Then he says the thing that makes the passage more than a scolding: if you honestly try to love, and find yourself getting further from your goal instead of nearer, that is the very moment you will reach it. It is the same distinction the apostle John draws between loving in words and loving in deeds (1 John 3:18). The second half is stranger, and it is the real answer to Ivan. Zosima teaches that each of us is responsible for everyone and for everything, personally, not merely as a member of a fallen race. Ivan stood outside the world’s suffering and demanded that its architect explain himself. Zosima steps inside it and takes the guilt on himself, and Dostoevsky evidently thought that the second position is the only one from which anything ever changes. A modern reader may object that this is not an answer to the problem of evil, and that is fair. It is not offered as one. It is the claim that the problem of evil is not solved in the head, and that a person who has actually been loved this way by someone stops asking the question in the form Ivan asks it.

(Q) "For know, dear ones, that every one of us is undoubtedly responsible for all men and everything on earth, not merely through the general sinfulness of creation, but each one personally for all mankind and every individual man." + Source: Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book IV, chapter I, "Father Ferapont" (Constance Garnett translation). Zosima is speaking to his fellow monks a few days before his death, and he adds that monks are not a special sort of men but only what all men ought to be.

(Q) "If anyone could prove to me that Christ is outside the truth, and if the truth really did exclude Christ, I should prefer to stay with Christ and not with truth." + Source: Fyodor Dostoevsky, letter to Natalya Fonvizina, Omsk, early 1854 (Ethel Colburn Mayne translation, 1914; Mayne dates it to the beginning of March). This is Dostoevsky in his own voice, weeks out of the prison camp, writing to the Decembrist wife who had given him his New Testament at Tobolsk four years earlier. He has just described himself as a child of unbelief and doubt who will probably remain one to the end of his life, tormented by a longing for faith that grows stronger the more arguments he finds against it. Then he sets down his creed, that there is nothing lovelier, deeper, more sympathetic, more rational, more manly or more perfect than Christ, and follows it with this sentence. It has been read two ways. Taken as a claim about truth it is indefensible, and Christians who care about evidence should say so, since the faith rests on something having happened. Taken as what it is, a man telling a friend where he would stand if the universe turned out to be a place where goodness itself were false, it is a confession of love, and the whole argument of Ivan and Zosima is already latent in it.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) Russia read him as a theologian who happened to write novels. + Vladimir Solovyov, the philosopher who travelled with him to Optina Pustyn and who is one of the models for Alyosha, delivered three addresses in his memory in the years after the funeral, presenting him not as a novelist with religious themes but as a thinker whose subject was the reconciliation of a divided humanity in Christ. That set the pattern for a whole tradition. Vasily Rozanov went further still. His book-length study of a single chapter, The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, came out in a journal in 1891 and as a volume in 1894, and he was among the first Russian critics to treat a dozen pages of a novel as a theological text to be expounded line by line. Nikolai Berdyaev, writing from exile after the Bolshevik revolution had made Demons look like reportage, called Dostoevsky the source of his own philosophy of freedom, and the theologian Sergei Bulgakov and the philosopher Semyon Frank worked the same soil. The line these writers drew is straightforward: Zosima and Alyosha are not decoration, they are the argument, and the novels are the closest thing modern Russia produced to a systematic theology. Orthodox reception has not been uncritical. Konstantin Leontiev, a fierce traditionalist who lived his last years at Optina and was tonsured a monk there in 1891 (tonsure is the cutting of the hair that seals monastic vows), complained in an essay of 1882 on the new Christians that Zosima’s religion was too warm and too optimistic, a rose-coloured Christianity of universal love with the fear of God taken out of it, and that no real elder talked that way. The complaint is worth recording because it comes from inside the tradition Dostoevsky was drawing on, from a man who knew what the monasteries were actually like.

(†) The West adopted his unbeliever’s case as the standard statement of the problem of evil. + Something unusual happened to Ivan Karamazov. He escaped his novel. Open almost any serious modern treatment of the problem of evil, by a Christian or an atheist, and Ivan is there. The reason is that he supplies what philosophical statements of the problem usually lack. Abstract formulations talk about gratuitous suffering, meaning suffering that serves no purpose whatever; Ivan puts a girl of five in a freezing outhouse and makes the reader look at her. He also refuses the move that most theodicies quietly rely on. A theodicy is an attempt to say what good reason God might have for permitting a particular evil, and the usual attempt weighs the suffering against some future good and calls the account balanced. Ivan will not let the books be balanced, and Christian philosophers use him precisely because he is unanswerable at the level he chooses to fight on. Marilyn McCord Adams built her account of horrendous evils around the recognition that no external good can defeat a horror suffered by a particular person, which is Ivan’s point turned toward the incarnation. Alvin Plantinga makes the same admission in the drier language of analytic philosophy, distinguishing a defense, which shows only that belief in God holds together with the evil we actually see, from a theodicy, which claims to know what God’s reasons are. The novels reached theology by another road as well. Karl Barth and his friend Eduard Thurneysen spent the years around the First World War reading their way out of liberal Protestantism, the confident nineteenth-century theology that had made Christianity largely a matter of morals and religious feeling, and while they did it Dostoevsky lay on the table beside the Epistle to the Romans. In the preface to the second edition of his commentary on Romans, in 1922, Barth named him beside Kierkegaard as a writer he had been mining for the reading of the New Testament, and gave Thurneysen the credit for the hint. Thurneysen’s own book on him had appeared the year before. What they took was the sense of a gulf between God and human religiousness that no amount of moral improvement crosses. Even the opposition paid him the compliment. Nietzsche, who called Christianity a slave morality, wrote in Twilight of the Idols that Dostoevsky was the only psychologist from whom he had anything to learn, and Albert Camus, working out his own atheism in The Rebel, treated Ivan’s refusal as the founding gesture of modern revolt. Both of them understood that the man who had written the case against God had not been pretending.

(†) Where his own record fails: a Russian messianism, and an ugly chapter about the Jews. + The novels are not the whole of what he wrote, and A Writer’s Diary is signed with his own name and argues in his own voice. Two things in it have to be said plainly. - The God-bearing people. Dostoevsky held that the Russian people carried the true Christ, that Europe had lost him, and that Russia’s destiny was to bring him back to the world; the Diary presses on into a call for Constantinople to become Russian and enthusiasm for the war with Turkey in 1877. Shatov, a character in Demons, states the doctrine and is asked in the same breath whether he actually believes in God, which suggests Dostoevsky could see the danger from the inside. It is still a nation put where the church belongs. The gospel knows no such nation: "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus" (Galatians 3:28), and the first thing Peter learned in the house of a Roman officer was that God shows no partiality (Acts 10:34–35). - The March 1877 chapter. In a section of the Diary headed "The Jewish Question" he recycled the standard slanders of the Russian right, that the Jews of the empire were exploiting the newly freed peasants and pursuing a scheme of domination, while protesting that he had no hatred for the Jewish people and calling for full civil equality. The protest does not undo the passage. He was answering a Jewish correspondent, Arkady Kovner, who had written to him from prison, and the reply is worse for being addressed to a real person. The charge is a libel; the men and women it was aimed at were the neighbours the commandment names, and the same Scripture that abolishes Greek and Jew in Christ condemns it. Neither point is a reason to stop reading him, and neither is a discovery of later critics: both are in his own published pages, which is where a ledger of a man’s work has to look. The writer who saw more clearly than anyone that an idea can eat a man alive did not see it in himself here.