God, Dostoevsky, and Suffering
Einstein himself called it “the most wonderful book that I have ever laid my hands on.” And with good reason. Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoevsky, is one of the crowning achievements of world literature. Set in the fictional Russian town of Skotoprigonyevsk in the 1870s, it is a story that deals with many of the questions posed in the modern age. The story features the three sons of Fyodor Karamazov, a wealthy and vulgar man from the town: Dmitri, the passionate and volatile but deep down kind-hearted eldest son; Ivan, the brilliant but cynical middle child; and Alyosha, the spiritual and compassionate youngest child. The novel ties together the spiritual conflicts of Alyosha and Ivan, the story of a murder, and many other parallel stories. It is a long book that cannot be read in one sitting, but seeing how it all ties together shows the genius of Dostoevsky.
Ivan Fyodorovitch, the middle child of Fyodor Pavlovitch, typifies that cold rationalism. He asks very insightful questions about God, some of which come in the form of anecdotes he himself invents. In one story, Christ returns to 16th-century Seville during the Spanish Inquisition, performs miracles, and is immediately arrested by the Grand Inquisitor, who argues that by giving humanity freedom, Christ demanded more than people can bear, whereas the Church has chosen to give them security, authority, and miracles instead. Christ answers none of the Inquisitor’s accusations; He simply kisses the old man. Shaken but unrepentant, the Inquisitor releases Christ and tells Him never to return. Ivan is poking at a common existentialist doubt: why were humans given the burden of freedom? We are free to choose if we will live for God or not. The Inquisition took that away: serve God or perish. Sometimes not having a choice can make life easier, or, at least, simpler.
Ivan also asks the most common of all questions: why do we suffer. More specifically, why do children suffer? He compiles a list of stories from the newspapers of child abuse and neglect. He refuses to believe that God would allow any of that to happen. Even if there were a reason for all this suffering, Ivan claims he would refuse to submit to God. The price of children suffering is too high for anything to justify it.
And Ivan struggles to love. Perhaps because of the burden of freedom and suffering, which stem from an abstract and universal love for humanity, he struggles to love the humans he encounters in his daily life. He recounts a story from St. John the Merciful. “A hungry, freezing beggar came to the saint. John took him into his own bed, embraced him, and even breathed into the beggar’s mouth, though it was foul-smelling because of a terrible disease.” But Ivan doesn’t believe this was from love. It was a fulfillment of a religious duty, an act of self-flagellation, not motivated by love. In his bitterness, he stopped believing it is possible to love someone. You may love abstractly, generally but not a specific human being, not when they show their face, their weakness, their humanity.
But in spite of his intelligence, or perhaps because of it, Ivan’s doubts lead to emotional tensions, not merely intellectual problems. Because he cannot see the logic of creation — of freedom, suffering, and human life — he refuses to assent to it. He refuses to acknowledge that perhaps his rationality is insufficient to comprehend it. Alyosha diagnoses his state: “‘The anguish of a proud determination. An earnest conscience!’ God, in Whom he disbelieved, and His truth were gaining mastery over his heart, which still refused to submit…’He will either rise up in the light of truth, or … he’ll perish in hate, revenging on himself and on every one his having served the cause he does not believe in,’ Alyosha added bitterly, and again he prayed for Ivan.” In his stories, he realizes that God is calling to Him. Deep down, he knows that Christ loves Him. Even if he can’t understand it all, he can’t get rid of the call of God. His stories show that–the kiss Christ gives the Inquisitor is the kiss Christ gives Ivan in the midst of his troubles. Perhaps no story of Ivan’s better shows this than that of the philosopher. A philosopher dies, discovers that heaven is real, but refuses to accept it because he had denied immortality during his life. As a consequence, he is told that before entering heaven he must walk an unimaginably vast distance — trillions (or, in some translations, billions of billions) of miles — and he initially lies down in protest for what seems like ages before finally deciding to make the journey. After completing it and entering heaven, he declares that a single moment of eternal joy is worth all the suffering and distance he endured, illustrating Ivan’s paradoxical realization that infinite fulfillment could justify even an almost inconceivable cost, while also mocking human pride, skepticism, and stubbornness.
This profound dilemma culminates in his collapse. He encounters Satan, who uses Ivan’s own arguments against him. Satan appears not as a horned devil, but as a middle-aged gentleman. Such is his cunning that he recounts a story which Ivan himself had written as a child. This immediately convinces Ivan that the Satan he sees is just an apparition, a product of his own sub-conscious. Satan then replies, “I told you your anecdote you’d forgotten, on purpose, so as to destroy your faith in me completely…I lead you to belief and disbelief by turns, and I have my motive in it. It’s the new method.” Satan used the wrestling to destroy him. The existential crisis has taken a toll on him.
But there is another path. It is the path of Father Zossima. Once a passionate young military officer who nearly fought a duel, but after the humble forgiveness of his servant whom he had slapped in the face and the example of his saintly brother Markel, he experienced a profound conversion, abandoned his career, and entered a monastery. He became a beloved elder renowned for his wisdom and compassion. After his death, many expected his body to remain miraculously incorrupt, but instead it decayed quickly, another test of faith before decay and death in nature. Zosima teaches that every person bears responsibility for everyone else, and that healing begins when we freely confess our own sins instead of blaming others. Genuine faith is lived through active, sacrificial love, humility, forgiveness, and joyful service, for it is in loving concrete people — not humanity in the abstract — that one comes to know God. His is a philosophy of joy in creation. “Here is a commandment for you,” he says. “Seek happiness in sorrow.” And again, “Love all God’s creation, the whole of it and every grain of sand in it. Love every leaf, every ray of God’s light. Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things.” It is the antithesis to the philosophy of Ivan. Rather than bitter rejection and resistance, it is humble assent to the created order.
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Parallel to these philosophical wrestlings is a story. The story of a murder. The father of the three brothers, Fyodor, one night waits at home believing that his lover Grushenka may secretly come to visit him. Unknown to him, his servant Pavel Smerdyakov has carefully orchestrated events: he feigns an epileptic seizure to remove suspicion from himself and leaves the house seemingly incapacitated. Later, after Dmitri has already come and gone, Smerdyakov enters Fyodor’s room, murders Fyodor, steals an envelope containing 3,000 rubles, and stages the scene as a robbery. He later confesses the crime privately to Ivan, insisting that Ivan’s nihilistic philosophy (“everything is permitted”) morally enabled him to commit it. All the evidence pointed against Dmitri:
- He had repeatedly threatened to kill his father, publicly and in front of numerous witnesses.
- He had a powerful motive: he believed Fyodor had cheated him out of his inheritance and was also competing with him for Grushenka’s love.
- He was seen carrying a heavy brass pestle, which could have been used as the murder weapon.
- He rushed to Fyodor’s house that night, scaling the garden fence and entering the property.
- He struck the servant Grigory in the head with the pestle while escaping, leaving Grigory unconscious and himself covered in blood.
- Witnesses heard Grigory cry “Parricide!” as Dmitri fled.
- Immediately afterward Dmitri suddenly possessed thousands of rubles, despite having been desperately seeking money only hours before.
- The exact sum missing from Fyodor’s room was 3,000 rubles, apparently matching Dmitri’s newfound wealth.
- He fled instead of reporting what had happened, reinforcing suspicion.
- He behaved wildly and irrationally, spending lavishly at Mokroye on food, drink, musicians, and gambling immediately after the murder.
- He wrote a drunken letter beforehand declaring that if he could not obtain money by other means, he would kill his father and take the money — a devastating piece of evidence introduced at trial by Katerina.
And yet, Dmitri didn’t do it. The true story is quite different. Only Alyosha and a few others are able to see that. Even Ivan, after initially disbelieving it because of the facts (which to him are like a geometric proof) later humbles himself and admits that his brother didn’t do it. Even though this story seems to have nothing to do with the philosophical questions raised by the book, it is crucial. The jurors have some facts, but not all the facts. They don’t know everything. Their limited facts prevent them from understanding the truth. So it is with us. Humans have a limited database. Not only as individuals, but collectively as a species, there is much we don’t know, much we know but don’t understand, and much we don’t even know enough to be asking questions about. Our post-Enlightenment assumption that if there were reasons for Creation to be the way it is, we would know them, is unfounded. How could finite creatures have the arrogance to assume that the plans of the omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent God are easy to understand, free to know? No. “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end” Solomon says in Ecclesiastes 3:11–12. But we need not react to that with bitterness. Humility and love can triumph. “I perceived that there is nothing better for them [humans] than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil — this is God’s gift to man” Ecclesiastes 3:13. There is no better example of this than Job, another figure important to the book.
Anyone with some knowledge of the Old Testament has heard it. Job is a righteous man who suddenly loses his wealth, children, and health after God permits Satan to test his faith. Refusing to curse God yet relentlessly questioning the justice of his suffering, Job is ultimately confronted by God, who reveals the vastness and mystery of divine wisdom without directly explaining his suffering (Job 38–41); Job responds with humility, and God restores his fortunes while affirming that Job had spoken more truthfully than his friends. But Dostoevsky asks an insightful question about Job’s story and the children born to him in old age: “how could he love those new ones when those first children are no more, when he has lost them? Remembering them, how could he be fully happy with those new ones, however dear the new ones might be?” And yet the mystery is: “But he could, he could. It’s the great mystery of human life that old grief passes gradually into quiet, tender joy. The mild serenity of age takes the place of the riotous blood of youth. I bless the rising sun each day, and, as before, my hearts sings to meet it, but now I love even more its setting, its long slanting rays and the soft, tender, gentle memories that come with them, the dear images from the whole of my long, happy life — and over all the Divine Truth, softening, reconciling, forgiving!”
The book culminates in this victory. It is shown in yet another story, that of the young boy Ilyusha. After witnessing his father publicly humiliated by Dmitri Karamazov, Ilyusha becomes angry, withdrawn, and aggressive, even biting Alyosha Karamazov when Alyosha first tries to comfort him. At school, Ilyusha quarrels constantly with the other boys — especially the brilliant Kolya Krasotkin — and is consumed with guilt after encouraging the dog Zhuchka to eat bread containing a pin, believing he has killed the animal; his declining health eventually reveals a terminal illness that softens the hostilities among the boys. As Ilyusha nears death, Alyosha patiently reconciles the children and Kolya returns with a dog that turns out to be Zhuchka alive after all. Ilyusha dies in the end. But that’s not the whole end. Ilyusha’s body has no smell of decay. At his funeral all the boys are gathered. It is a tragic scene. But a memorable one. Ilyusha had brought Alyosha and the boys together. His disease had brought people together. Alyosha tells the boys to treasure his memory and see the beauty in goodness. And he even tells the boys not to be ashamed of eating the pancakes prepared for them after the funeral–which seemed strange to young Kolya, given the circumstances. And yet, it is okay to eat the pancakes just like it was okay for Job to rejoice in his children in his old age and just like we can–must–retain our faith in God and our joy in life in spite of the suffering. Because this existence is not the end.
“Karamazov,” cried Kolya, “can it be true what’s taught us in religion, that we shall all rise again from the dead and shall live and see each other again, all, Ilusha too?”
“Certainly we shall all rise again, certainly we shall see each other and shall tell each other with joy and gladness all that has happened!” Alyosha answered, half laughing, half enthusiastic.”
This is how all the stories of the book tie together. Our human experience is limited. The data we have about the universe is incomplete. There could be other dimensions to the universe we are incapable of comprehending–other events in the past or future, other planets, even, some speculate, other universes. And even the data we have–our experiences, the trees, the rivers, other people–we don’t fully comprehend. Rushing to conclusions is dangerous–just like Ivan condemning his brother just because the facts seemed to point that way. This is the intellectual side of things. But even though few people are willing to admit it, the problem of suffering is more than intellectual. Like Ivan, we might be willing to concede that God has good reasons for suffering. But our hearts are still unwilling to submit to Him. It’s too painful. It breeds too much resentment. The solution to this is love. Christ kisses the Inquisitor to remind him: you may not know why I gave humanity freedom, but you know that I love you, so it was done out of love. We can rejoice. We must rejoice in all the creation. In the birds, the trees, the fields, and each person we encounter. Faith in Christ triumphs over death and suffering. This will triumph over everything, as it did for Job and little Ilyusha.
