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Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), Part II. Book 5. Chapter 4, p. 245. All subsequent references to the novel are from this translation.
For the sake of brevity, the focus here is limited to Dostoyevsky’s last and most thoroughgoing attempt at a theodicy in The Brothers Karamazov (1880). He died in January of 1881 only months after completing the proofs. My interest in the problem of evil in Dostoyevsky originated in individual and class discussions with the philosopher Allen Wood at Yale several years ago. The interpretation of theistic and atheistic belief in Dostoyevsky developed in Section III of this article is strongly indebted to him. Parallel to my committing the ideas here for publication, and after presenting them in various courses, I had the pleasure of advising an undergraduate thesis on this topic by Laura Henderson, “The Problem of Evil in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov” (Senior thesis, Washington College, 2004). I found particularly helpful her perceptive remarks on Dostoyevsky’s use of the personalities of his characters in getting important themes across to the reader.
BK, II.5.4, p. 245.
A savage and preconscious ambivalence toward his father, for example, emerges in BK, II.5.7, pp. 275–281. Note also his unconcealed rage at Smerdyakov in the previous chapter, with whose parricidal impulses Ivan unconsciously identifies. The chapter featuring Ivan’s rebellion begins with Ivan revealingly admitting, “It’s still possible to love one’s neighbor abstractly, and even occasionally from a distance, but hardly ever up close.” BK, II.5.4, p. 237. His observation is in keeping with his tendency to dabble in ideas about progressive social arrangements while putting individuals at arm’s length.
BK, II.5.4, p. 237.
Dostoyevsky’s use of children to mirror adult situations is ably discussed by Laura Henderson, “The Problem of Evil in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov” (Senior thesis, Washington College, 2004), pp. 16–20.
Fr. Zosima comforts a woman over the death of her son at age two in BK, I.2.3, pp. 48–49. The servant Grigory and his wife Marfa are reported in the novel as having lost a child in BK, I.3.1, p. 95. Ivan’s monologue relates the story of Turkish soldiers killing babies and also that of the sadistic landowner having his serf boy being torn apart by dogs, BK, II.5.4, p. 238 and pp. 242–243. Fr. Zosima as a child loses his brother Markel to tuberculosis in BK, II.6.2, pp. 287–290. There is a poignant reference to the biblical figure Job concerning the death of his children in BK, II.6.2, p. 292. The novel concludes with the funeral of the child Ilyusha in BK, Epilogue 3, pp. 768–776.
BK, I. 2.3, pp. 48–49.
BK, II.5.4, p. 244.
Ibid., p. 242.
Ibid., p. 243.
Ibid., p. 244.
Ibid., p. 245. Ivan’s demand for some form of redemption is well noted in Alexander Gibson’s The Religion of Dostoyevsky (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), pp. 179–181.
BK, II.5.4, p. 244.
Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid., p. 245. Fr. Zosima, who often speaks for Dostoyevsky’s own version of Christianity, is skeptical that there exists a literal hell-fire, but he appears to hold that some people do wind up in a state of unending spiritual torment, in BK I.6.3, p. 323.
BK, II.5.4, p. 244.
Ibid., p. 245.
Ibid., p. 246.
Ibid., p. 244.
Ibid., p. 245.
Peter Geach, Logic Matters (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972), p. 305.
Fr. Brian Davies suggests that a popular misconception that the divine nature is a person gives the problem of evil much of its modern impetus. If God is thought to be a person much like a human being, then, Davies notes, it is an easy step to assuming God is subject to the same moral standards as mortal persons. Thus, God can be called to account for permitting evil, just as persons are held responsible for terrible events they reasonably could have prevented. Davies argues that it is simply a mistake to assume God is a person and therefore that God is subject to human standards of justice. God is the standard of what ought to be, not a being subject to an external set of rules the way moral agents are. Putting the deity on trial for what should and should not be rests on a category mistake. Fr. Davies develops this critique of the problem of evil in Chapter 3 of his An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Oxford University Press, 1982). The seeds of this defense, that God is not accountable to human standards of justice, are implicit in the concluding chapters of The Book of Job when God speaks from the tempest.
The belief that God has complete foreknowledge of events is a staple of classical theism. A recent article in the Washington Post reports on a small, embattled group of Evangelical Christian theologians who reject divine foreknowledge in order to mitigate the problem of evil. Bill Broadway, “Redefining Omniscience,” Washington Post, 8 November 2003, sec. B.
Hume proposes: “A being, therefore, who knows the secret springs of the universe might easily... render the whole world happy, without discovering himself in any operation.... Some small touches to Caligula’s brain in his infancy might have converted him into a Trajan. One wave, a little higher than all the rest, by burying Caesar and his fortune in the bottom of the ocean, might have restored liberty to a considerable part of mankind.” in Part IX of Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, ed. R. Popkin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980), p. 70.
The “free will defense” as an argument for why God permits moral evil states that it is impossible for God to create free creatures and guarantee they will not do evil. It is found in thinkers as early as Saint Augustine, particularly in Book 3 of his De libero arbitrio (On Free Choice of the Will). Additionally, the free will defense has enjoyed a renaissance among present day analytic philosophers of religion courtesy of authors such as John Hick, Alvin Plantinga, and Richard Swindburne. See Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, revised edition (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), Plantinga’s God, Freedom, and Evil (New York: Harper and Row, 1974), and Chapter 11 of Swindburne’s The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). Nicholas Wolterstorff, a key figure behind the flourishing of analytic philosophy of religion in recent decades, provides a very notable contrast to those trying to answer the problem of evil in the philosophical literature. His Lament for a Son (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. Ederdmans, 1987) is a marvelously sensitive and thought provoking meditation on the loss of his son in a mountain climbing accident. Wolterstorff rejects the search for reasons from God in the case of suffering and tragedy.
A combination of using the free will defense to explain moral evil and the appeal to “soul building” to explain natural evil is found in John Hick’s Evil and the God of Love, revised (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Hick argues that God creates human beings with free will in order for human choices to be meaningful. The purpose of life is to reach salvation, and becoming full and virtuous human beings requires struggling against temptation and adversity. The possibility of freely chosen spiritual development, according to Hick, thus seems to require that God permit both natural evil and moral evil. A critique of Hick’s line of reasoning appears in Edward Madden and Peter Hare’s Evil and the Concept of God (Springfield, IL: Charles Thomas, 1968), pp. 83–90, 102–103.
This is well articulated by C. S. Lewis in Chapter 2 of his The Problem of Pain (London: Geoffrey Bless, 1940).
Alexander Gibson notes that Dostoyevsky probably adopts this point of view from his sometime intellectual mentor and older friend, V. I. Belinsky. Belinsky was a Russian critic and political theorist influential in the progressive circles Dostoyevsky frequented as a young man. In the context of speaking about collectivist social arrangements (not theology), Belinsky rejects a universal harmony obtained at the expense of the happiness of some individuals. Critiquing the absolute idealism of Hegel, Belinsky writes: “I will not have happiness if you give it to me gratis unless I feel assured of every one of my blood brothers, the bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh. Disharmony is said to be the condition of harmony: that may be profitable and pleasant for megalomaniacs, but certainly not for those whose fates are destined to express the idea of disharmony.” Letter to V. P. Botkin, 1 March 1841, in Belinsky’s Selected Philosophical Works, English trans. (Moscow, 1948), p. 150, quoted in Alexander Gibson, The Religion of Dostoyevsky (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), p. 11, note 10.
Letter to N. A. Lyubimov, 10 May 1879, Selected Letters of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Frank and David Goldstein (ed.), Andrew MacAndrew (trans.) (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 464–465.
The relevant passage reads: “The thing is, the book in question [Book Five], called “Pro and Contra,” is the culminating point of my novel, and the theme of that book is blasphemy and the refutation of blasphemy.... I have come to grips with the blasphemy... precisely as it manifests itself now in Russia among (almost) our entire upper crust, and principally among the younger generation, i.e., the scientific and philosophical refutation of the existence of God having been already discarded, the present day serious socialists no longer bother with it (as they used to throughout the last century and the first half of the present one). Instead, they vehemently deny God’s creation, God’s world and its significance. It is only this that contemporary civilization finds nonsensical.... The refutation (not a direct one, i.e., not in a face-to-face argument) will come as the last words of the dying elder.” Letter to K. P. Pobedonostsev, 19 May 1879, Selected Letters, p. 467.
Ivan’s surface appeal to Christian precepts is a point underscored by Alexander Gibson, The Religion of Dostoyevsky (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), p. 179.
BK, II.6.3, p. 245.
Richard Pevear notes Dostoyevsky’s preference for interconnecting ideas and personalities in the Preface to his translation of Dostoyevsky’s Demons, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (trans.) (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), pp. xiii–xix.
The main features of these two opposed sets of attitudes were pointed out to me by Allen Wood. Alexander Gibson offers a somewhat similar reading of theism and atheism in The Brothers Karamazov in Chapter 7 of The Religion of Dostoyevsky (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973).
The relevant passage reads: “Your opinion of what you have read of The Karamazovs (about the force and vigor of the writing) flatters me greatly, but then, you raise the absolutely essential question: That thus far I don’t seem to have the answer to all these atheistic arguments, and an answer is indispensable.... For I attempt, as a matter of fact, to give the answer to this whole negative side in Book Six, “A Russian Monk,” which will be coming out on August 31. And that’s why I am trembling over it, wondering whether it will be an adequate answer. What makes it even more difficult is that the answer itself is not a direct one, not really a point-by-point refutation of the ideas formulated earlier... but only an indirect one. What is offered here is a world view that stands in direct opposition to the one that was previously presented, but again the opposition is not made point by point but, so to speak, in the form of an artistic picture.” Letter to K. P. Pobedonostsev, 6 September 1879, Selected Letters, pp. 485–487.
BK, III.7.4, p. 362.
BK, II.6.3, p. 321. Elsewhere Fr. Zosima enjoins, “Love all of God’s creation, both the whole of it and every grain of sand. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love animals, love plants, love each thing.” BK, II.6.3, p. 319.
BK, II.6.3, p. 322.
Ibid., p. 319.
Ibid., p. 56.
Note particularly I John 4:7–21.
BK, II.6.2, p. 289. Elsewhere Zosima advises his brother monks, “Remember especially that you cannot be the judge of anyone. For there can be no judge of a criminal on earth until the judge knows that he, too, is a criminal.... For if I myself were righteous, perhaps there would be no criminal standing before me right now.” BK, II.6.3, pp. 320–321. William Edelglas explores similar views on Dostoyevsky”s ethic of responsibility and suffering in his “Asymmetry and Normativity: Levinas and Dostoyevsky on Desire, Responsibility, and Suffering” in this volume.
BK, II.6.2, p. 308.
Fr. Zosima tells the mother who has lost her young son to “know that your infant, too, surely now stands before the throne of the Lord, rejoicing and being glad, and praying to God for you. Weep, then, but also rejoice.” BK, I.2.3, p. 49.
BK, II.6.3, p. 313.
BK, III.7.1, pp. 334–337.
BK, I.2.2, p. 43. The important role shame plays in the psychology of the characters was pointed out to me by Allen Wood.
BK, I.5.6, pp. 270–274. In a letter to a reader Dostoyevsky holds Ivan responsible for the murder to the extent that Ivan “refrained (deliberately) from talking Smerdyakov out of it during their conversation” and refrained “from expressing clearly and categorically his disapproval of the contemplated crime (which Iv. F___ch clearly visualized and foresaw); thus he, as it were, permitted Smerdyakov to perpetrate it.” Letter to Y. N. Lebedeva, 8 November 1879, Selected Letters, pp. 488–490.
BK, III.7.3, pp. 344–345.
BK, II.6.2, p. 312.
BK, Epilogue, Chapter 3, p. 774.
Ibid.
Ibid.
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Weigel, P. (2005). Dostoyevsky on the Problem of Evil. In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Enigma of Good and Evil; The Moral Sentiment in Literature. Analecta Husserliana, vol 85. Springer, Dordrecht . https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3576-4_38
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