rationalizing as worthless and very often dangerous: suicides and murders.
He truly despises it and mercilessly attacks those sins with all his
strength and his ambiguous words. Zosima’s gives an account of what being
without Christ can do:
They, following science, want to base justice on reason alone, but
not with Christ, as before, and they have already proclaimed that
there is no crime, that there is no sin. And that’s consistent,
for if you have no God what is the meaning of crime? ( Brothers
Karamazov. VI, 3)
This is the danger of Raskolnikov and Ivan’s logic. The society around them
and around Dostoevsky is one which makes children suffer and turns young,
beautiful and wise creatures, like Sonya, into prostitutes. What is the
answer? Is one answer possible to it at all? Can one go on living with the
thought of how much suffering there is ? Does one rebel against the society,
then try to establish a new one, forgetting that society does not come to be
of itself, but is built by human beings: beings imperfect and ready to hurt
and rebel against their fathers, against the idea of “old,” or the society
of the past and present. If that is taken into account the only people who
do make sense out of human existence, which is best showed and expressed
through suffering, are people such as Ilyushka and Sonya. Their argument is
much stronger. They are better for the cause of the improvement of social
issues than the actual orators for the masses. Why? They offer the solution
for peace in one’s soul. They offer it with faith in God, not the rational
path of the Western thinker or with the denial of a Russian nihilist, but
with a leap of faith that charms one against actual, brutal, world. The
tyrants, the intellectuals, the Ivans cannot be prevented, but faith can
defeat them, over and over again. The bow and the kiss have to exist.
Children die, children suffer, society is unjust, people kill for stupid
reasons and base, vile feelings. In a world that is hopelessly destined to
go on like that, faith, God, are the best answers to our despair.
Intellectualism obviously does not bring much advantage or peace–faith and
love do. With God one’s pride can be defeated, one’s responsibility
recognized, one’s active love awakened, one’s soul saved:
By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor
actively and indefatigably. Insofar as you advance in love you
will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of
your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love
of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt, and no
doubt can possibly enter your soul. (Brothers Karamazov. II, 4))
Ivan recognizes that same necessity and usefulness of God. However, he does
not really believe in God, thus he cannot forgive, he cannot forgive
himself, and most importantly he does not believe in the immortality of the
soul and in justice. He does not love. Without a belief in the existence of
justice crime has no meaning. His idea of God is worthless because he is an
atheist, he does not believe. The only way out is not through the lie, with
which the Church for centuries managed its affairs, but through true and
honest belief that things have a purpose and that it does matter to be good
and not to hurt others. One cannot solve society’s problems unless one truly
believes that what is done has a purpose. That is not the way because when
one starts looking at humanity as a whole one will not find many good things
and one will never have any happiness. Only by looking at the individual can
one acquire a moment of happiness and exaltation of the soul, such as
Alyosha’s experiences in the field. Faith is not rational path, but it
equips one with love. Only by having certain values and love for others can
the family as the basic unit of the society survive. Family Karamazov is
certainly a vicious example of what the society may come to if society does
not hold values which produce love: we are all responsible for each other
and we have to forgive each other.
To improve the society and social conditions and to free people from evil on
Earth is impossible. The belief that there is immortality of the soul and
that there is God who takes care of humans is necessary. Dostoevsky goes
further than Voltaire. He believes that you have to have true faith in order
to attain happiness and to create the ground for better life. Intellectual
discussion and the acknowledgment of the necessity for the God as an idea or
a Prime Mover becomes worthless the moment it is meant as a lie. It has to
be the Truth, there has to be faith. If one lives a lie his bitterness that
the dream and the ideal are impossible will only lead to madness, hate, and
ultimately suicide or murder. One has to give active love.
So the ultimate answer to the suffering and the injustice in the world is
love. What higher feeling and more positive there is in human existence?
Again there is no rational way to explain and to really lead one on that
path of faith. The possibility of such belief is real because humans are
able to love. That means that they must be able to suffer for others, they
also must be able to forgive. “Love all men, love everything” are Zosima’s
words. Dostoevsky cannot go further than that.
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