Thoughts on Ivan Karamazov and Why Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov is so Deep

  A summary of Ivan Karamazov's thinking from The Brothers Karamazov.  He does not argue that God does not exist. Rather, he argues that even if God exists and even if all suffering is somehow redeemed in the end, he cannot accept a world built at the cost of innocent suffering. He focuses especially on the torture and abuse of children because they cannot be held responsible for their fate. Even if God were to reveal that every tear and every act of cruelty was necessary to achieve a final harmony, Ivan believes that no future happiness or explanation could justify such suffering. A universe purchased at the price of one innocent child's tears is, for him, morally unacceptable. He therefore does not reject God so much as "return the ticket" to creation, refusing to consent to a world whose beauty and order depend upon such a price.

  Ivan is not obviously wrong, which is why Dostoevsky lets him speak at such length. I want to try to make further sense of it here.

      As I have read, I think, in the German Bishops’ Catholic Catechism, the thought that the world cannot be affirmed as it is forces the question on us of whether an afterlife, or some form of ultimate justice and mercy, is necessary if affirmation of the world is to be morally permitted. For if one says that the world as it is, including all the unspeakable horrors, past and present, may still be affirmed as good, this appears to imply that the suffering of its victims is in some way ultimately justified or redeemed. But if there is no final rectification of injustice, then those who were tortured, starved, raped, murdered, or extinguished before they could flourish have simply been irreparably wronged, and their wrong is final. In that case, the judgment that it would have been better never to have been born is not only psychologically intelligible but may be morally justified. To affirm a world in which many have cursed the day they were born for the sake of my loveable life could seem egoistic. Ivan’s refusal would then appear as a rational moral judgment that a world in which radical injustice is finally unredeemed is not worth affirming. If no justice comes, no restoration occurs, no mercy heals, and no life is returned, then the existence of such a world appears morally indefensible from the standpoint of its victims, at least.

      One is then driven toward one of two positions: either affirm the world without redemption, eternal justice, or afterlife, accepting that suffering is final, injustice may be irreversible, and some lives are simply crushed, which is what Nietzsche seems to call for when he calls for affirmation of life as it is; or affirm the world because injustice is not final, mercy may be ultimate, and every tear may yet be answered, which is the eschatological path toward resurrection, restoration, and eternal justice that Dostoevsky presses. Nietzsche’s rejection of the “other world” is not merely an attack on superstition but a refusal to allow affirmation to depend upon redemption beyond this life, whereas the bishops’ position (if memory serves; perhaps I also read that in a book of Hans Küng) is that without the hope of ultimate justice, affirmation becomes a betrayal of the innocent. In this sense, belief in redemption would not be a consolation prize but the condition for loving the world without injustice. To affirm the world as it is may therefore commit one either to Nietzschean tragic affirmation or to eschatological hope, since otherwise the victim’s curse that the day of their birth should perish may stand as morally warranted. This does not yet amount to an argument for an afterlife, but it does imply that love of the world may require the world to be more than it appears to be.

       In The Brothers Karamazov, in the exchange with Alyosha, Ivan rejects creation even on the assumption of ultimate justice in the afterlife, and this is what makes his position especially difficult to answer. He does not argue that the world should be rejected because there is no final justice, but that it should be rejected even if there is. In The Brothers Karamazov, he grants Alyosha the entire eschatological vision, including resurrection, forgiveness, universal reconciliation, the mother embracing the torturer, and all tears wiped away, and still replies that it is not that he does not accept God but that he returns Him the ticket. He therefore rejects Creation even on the assumption of ultimate justice because his objection is not merely that injustice goes unanswered but that it was permitted at all. No future harmony, however complete, can morally justify the torture of a single innocent child.  Even if justice is done, mercy is shown, and suffering is redeemed, Ivan maintains that the price was too high. 

      Many theologians think reason is helpless here and one must look toward religion. In the Orthodox tradition, one of the most direct engagements is found in Sergius Bulgakov, especially in The Bride of the Lamb and his writings on theodicy. Bulgakov argues that no future harmony can justify the suffering of the innocent in the sense of making it retrospectively acceptable as a means to an end. He insists that divine justice cannot simply “balance the books.” Instead, he develops the idea that God does not justify suffering but takes it upon Himself in the Cross. The response to Ivan, on this view, is not that evil will be outweighed by a greater good, but that God enters into the history of suffering and bears it. Redemption is not compensation but participation. This shifts the question from whether suffering can be justified to whether it can be transformed through divine solidarity.

      Similarly on the Catholic side, Hans Urs von Balthasar is perhaps the best interlocutor with Ivan. He maintains that God’s response to the world’s suffering is not a theoretical justification but the drama of the Cross, in which God undergoes abandonment and death. Balthasar emphasizes that redemption does not erase the reality of suffering but involves God’s descent into it, which alone could answer Ivan’s moral objection. Likewise, Pope John Paul II in Salvifici Doloris rejects the idea that suffering can be explained away as useful, and instead presents it as a mystery in which God’s love is revealed through solidarity with those who suffer.

      All of these theologians accept Ivan's point about it being impossible to justify the torture of one child by any greater good or final consolation (Heaven). (That is also my position.)  With Ivan they also reject the premise that Creation could only be justified by appeal to future harmony or greater goods, i.e. Heaven. The Christian answer, as they see it, lies not in justifying God's act of Creation despite evil but in the claim that God has entered into the history of suffering and will ultimately overcome it without having willed it as a means. Evil is on us alone. We have wounded Creation and God cannot undo that. But God does not abandon us or the world. Whether this works will depend on whether one finds the idea of divine participation in suffering morally meaningful. But it represents one of the most serious theological attempts to answer Ivan without trivializing his protest.

      I think the death of God on the cross always is a terrible judgment upon world we have made, then and now. If the cross is taken seriously, it means that something has gone terribly wrong: He was in the world, and the world was made by him, and the world knew him not. The murder of innocent children - just today, the girls' school in Iran, Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine - a terrible contradiction between what is and what ought to be, a contradiction that cannot be resolved from within the world. If the world were simply affirmable as it stands, then the incarnation would have been unnecessary, redemption merely pedagogical, and suffering instructive. The crucifixion, however, means that the world, as it is, cannot be affirmed without qualification, not because existence itself is evil, but because the history of the world is marked by a disorder that reaches into its moral and social structures. In this light, the cross may be understood God’s refusal to affirm it as it is, as we have made it. God submits to to the world's violence, suffers under it, and so exposes it as what it is. 

     One possible theological response to Ivan is therefore not that the world is good because it will be redeemed at the end of time, but that the world is not morally affirmable in its present condition, and that God’s own suffering in it is the sign of that. Affirmation, on this view, is not for the world as it is, but for Creation as intended and as promised. Faith affirms not the given order of history, but the possibility that what has been violated will yet be restored (without justifying any evil). This does not prove Ivan wrong, but it allows one to say that the refusal to affirm injustice may itself be shared by God, and that hope is directed not toward justifying suffering but toward overcoming it. This is how I have thought.

     Today, without really having a good reason to think I was wrong, I think differently. Indeed, one of the most famous passages in the New Testament explicitly says: “For God so loved the world….” Once one loves a particular person, such as one’s own child, the question of whether the world is morally affirmable changes from an abstract judgment about the totality of history to a concrete question about whether it is permissible to will that this person not exist. To love one’s children is to will that they exist, that they live, and that they flourish, but their existence is inseparable from the existence of the world in which they were born. Thus it makes sense: if we believe in a God who loves our children, then God must love the world. One cannot coherently will that children exist while also willing that the world not exist, since their being depends upon the world. Love therefore introduces a tension that pure moral protest does not face. Ivan may say that it would have been better had the world never been, but if one loves one’s child, it becomes very difficult to say that it would have been better had she or he never been born. (It is significant that Ivan has no children and experienced no real love from his awful father.) To will their existence is already to affirm the reality in which they exist, not because that reality is morally perfect, but because their being is good. One may still protest that the world contains injustice and innocent suffering, indeed will protest it all the more passionately given the love one bears for one’s children or other people and places - horror could befall them, we know that is a possibility from the start. But one cannot easily will that the whole be undone if that would entail the beloved child's nonexistence. Love does not dissolve the protest against the evils of the world, but it complicates it by making refusal of the world risk becoming a refusal of the beloved child. This does not demonstrate that the world is morally justified, but it does imply that love of particular beings may commit one to affirming a reality that one cannot wholly approve.

       The Cross can offer comfort by allowing one to affirm the being of the beloved without having to affirm the world as it is. If love for one’s child commits one to willing her existence, and therefore to accepting the reality in which she exists, the Cross prevents that affirmation from becoming a reconciliation with injustice. It acknowledges that the world into which one’s child is born is marked by suffering, disorder, and violence, and that these are not morally acceptable features of creation but wounds within it. In the crucifixion, God does not stand apart from the world’s history of innocent suffering, nor does He justify it by appeal to a greater harmony, but enters into it and undergoes it. This allows one to say that the love which affirms the existence of the child does not require one to bless the conditions that threaten or destroy that existence. The Cross affirms the goodness of being by sharing in its vulnerability and exposes the injustice that distorts it without declaring that distortion necessary. It directs hope not toward the acceptance of suffering as meaningful in itself, but toward the possibility that what has been violated may yet be restored without ever having been justified. In this way, the Cross can sustain a love of the world that remains faithful to the good of the beloved while refusing to reconcile itself to the evils that endanger that good.

  

       If one takes the Cross seriously, the comfort it offers to the victims of the worst forms of human cruelty cannot come from explaining their suffering, justifying it, or showing how it contributes to a greater good. Any such explanation would seem to confirm Ivan’s fear that innocent suffering is permitted as a means to some final harmony. The Cross offers something different. It affirms that God does not stand outside the history of violence as its architect or quiet observer, but enters into it as one who is himself tortured, humiliated, and unjustly killed. The victim is not left alone in suffering, nor is that suffering treated as morally necessary or spiritually useful. Instead, the Cross exposes cruelty as cruelty by undergoing it without retaliation and without endorsing its logic. It declares that what is done to the innocent is not part of a divine plan in the sense of being willed as a means, but a violation of the good by Man that God shares with those who suffer.

     For the victim, this does not remove the pain or restore what has been lost, but it may offer the assurance that their suffering is neither ignored nor justified, and that it is known from within rather than from a distance. The promise of the Cross is not that suffering was necessary, but that it will not have the final word, and that injustice will be judged without being retrospectively declared meaningful. In this way, the Cross may provide comfort not by reconciling the victim to what has been done, but by affirming that the wrong they have suffered is real, that it is condemned rather than explained away, and that the hope for justice and restoration does not depend upon accepting their suffering as deserved or useful.

Perhaps in the end Dostoevsky’s Alyosha makes the best response to Ivan. After Ivan has pushed the argument as far as it can go, there is no further argument that does not risk doing precisely what Ivan fears, which is justifying the suffering of the innocent by fitting it into a larger harmony. Any reply begins to sound like: “yes, but in the end it will all make sense.” And that is what Ivan refuses. So Alyosha does not answer the argument. He kisses him on the forehead. That drives Ivan a bit crazy because it is not a refutation, a justification, or a consolation but an act that affirms Ivan’s moral protest, the dignity of the victim, the goodness of love itself, without reconciling any of them to what has been done. It says, in effect: ‘I will not explain this. I will not justify it. But I will not abandon you or the world to it.’ If the Cross is, as we said, a kind of divine refusal to justify suffering while also refusing to abandon creation, then Alyosha’s silence and kiss may be its human analogue: an affirmation of the beloved and of being that does not pass through theoretical reconciliation. I think I am thinking Dostoevsky’s thoughts here, or trying to understand them at least, a labor that has been going on for decades. Reason may reach an antinomy but Love may remain. And perhaps that is why the last word in that chapter is not an argument, but a gesture.

I am not sure this makes sense. I wish I could ask Dostoevsky what he thinks of it. Or Jesus. 

Of course, if the world is an accident and we are on our own, as people like Carl Sagan and Christopher Hitchens not only believe we are but want us to be, then the whole point is mute.