(Ivan is one of my favorite characters in literature)
A Letter from Ivan Karamazov
You have written with admirable care, and I do not doubt the
sincerity with which you affirm the goodness of being. You distinguish essence
from the perfections that flow from it. You speak of love as disclosing
goodness. You insist that evil is not a substance but a privation, and that the
horrors of history do not belong to the being of the world but represent
distortions of what ought to be. You allow even that protest may be an act of
fidelity to the good that has been violated.
All of this I understand.
I will even grant it to you.
Let us suppose that being is good. Let us suppose that evil is
parasitic, a failure or a lack. Let us suppose that what is beautiful, fitting,
or lovable in the world reflects a participation in some intelligible order
that exceeds our finite grasp. Let us suppose even that the love of a craftsman
for his wood, or of a farmer for his land, or of a scientist for the
intelligibility of the cosmos, discloses real perfections grounded in what is.
Very well.
But I am not asking you whether the world is metaphysically
intelligible.
I am asking you whether it is morally permitted to love it.
You say that love of the world need not entail approval of all that
has occurred within it. That one may love being while protesting the evils that
obscure it. That to refuse the world would be to refuse also the possibility of
justice or redemption. But here I must interrupt you. For what you call
protest, I call refusal. And I do not see how the two may be reconciled.
You tell me that evil does not constitute the being of the world.
That the torture of a child is a privation, not a substance. Perhaps so. But
the child still screams. And the world in which the child screams is the same
world whose goodness you affirm. You cannot love the one without loving the
other. You cannot will the existence of the whole without willing that it
includes what you would never permit if the choice were yours.
You say that my protest presupposes a love of the innocent whose
suffering I reject. Yes, precisely. My refusal to affirm the world is an act of
love for those who have been crushed within it. I do not deny the beauty of the
tree or the intelligibility of the stars. I deny that these can justify the
tears of a single tortured child. I return the ticket not because I fail to see
the good, but because I see it too clearly to accept its price.
You may tell me that the evils of history are not necessary features
of being. That they are failures of creatures to realize the goods proper to
their nature. But they have occurred. They belong to the world that is, not
merely to some accidental distortion of it. The Atlantic slave trade was not an
abstraction. Auschwitz was not a metaphysical lack. These are facts woven into
the same fabric whose beauty you would have me admire.
And if you reply that to reject the world would be to reject also the
possibility of justice, I answer that a justice which arrives only after
injustice, and which requires the memory of suffering as its condition, is a
strange justice indeed. It may reconcile philosophers. It does not reconcile
the victims.
You speak of love as revealing goodness. Then consider this: what if
love also reveals that some goods are purchased at too great a cost? What if
the refusal to affirm the whole is itself a form of fidelity, not to a lesser
good, but to the good that has been betrayed?
You will say that the forgetfulness of being consists in reducing
what is to its usefulness or its power. I agree. But there is another
forgetfulness: the forgetfulness of the innocent in the name of the whole. A
love that affirms creation too quickly may become a love that forgives what
ought never to be forgiven.
I do not deny your adequation of intellect to being. I deny that the
will must follow where the intellect leads.
Perhaps the divine intellect sees a harmony in which every tear is
redeemed. I do not see it. And until I do, I cannot consent to the existence of
a world in which such tears are shed.
I do not reject your truth.
I reject your affirmation.
Yours sincerely,
Ivan Karamazov
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