Ep. 316: Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”: PEL Live in NYC (Part One)

0:00 Introducer: Please welcome to the stage the Partially Examined Life. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Tonight we are live, all in the same room on the same stage at the Caveat on the island of Manhattan. We've come out tonight to enable universal happiness with our miracles, our mystery, our authority. Our question for tonight's discussion, which is episode 316, is something like, how can we reconcile ourselves to the existence of evil and suffering? Our text is The Brothers Karamazov from Fyodor Dostoevsky, published in 1880. My name is Mark Linsenmayer, loving life, regardless of logic.

0:54 Seth: My name is Seth Paskin and my ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple hearted faith. And this is the absolute truth.

1:05 Wes: This is Wes Alwan and I am holding out for the higher harmony.

1:10 Dylan: And I'm Dylan Casey, holding out an onion for anyone to grab after the show.

1:17 Introducer: Thank you for coming.

1:18 Dylan: Thank you.

1:18 Seth: Yes. Thank you so much.

1:21 Introducer: This is very nice. Very nice.

1:24 Mark: People.

1:25 Introducer: There are people. Do you know people exist?

1:27 Wes: Apparently they do.

1:28 Dylan: Besides you.

1:28 Introducer: Four.

1:29 Dylan: Three. Three. I usually see four on the screen.

1:33 Introducer: Yeah, but we're only sure of our own selves when the other three are on the screen. It's a simulacrum.

1:38 Dylan: Sure.

1:39 Wes: We podcast, therefore we are. So did everyone do the reading? We were going to do something shorter, like a 20 page paper, and then Seth said he wouldn't come unless we did something that was at least 1,000 pages. We got up to 800, but he came anyway. Out of the kindness of his heart.

1:57 Seth: That's right.

1:58 Introducer: We are not going to assume that you have read the book or really have any familiarity with us who has not listened to the show ever. That's a good percentage.

2:06 Dylan: That's awesome.

2:07 Seth: Excellent. All right.

2:08 Introducer: It's all his fault. Everything that goes wrong is Seth's fault. We're going to try to minimize the name dropping. You know, we'll do a separate recording later on comparing Dostoevsky to every other existentialist, but not right now. And we will do our best to make our points clear and cogent. Or alternately, worth a chuckle. Wes, do you want to start us off?

2:27 Wes: Was that the rules? Were you gonna.

2:29 Introducer: That was the rules. That was the short rules.

2:31 Wes: You know, obviously we don't have time to give a full synopsis. Hopefully people are familiar with the plot. It's worth noting that this novel combines a murder mystery with some pretty heavy reflections on God and faith and Love and nihilism. And they're intertwined in some really interesting ways. But we will focus probably the most on two chapters in book five. One is called Rebellion. The other one is called the Grand Inquisitor. And these focus on Ivan's arguments against theodicy, basically, or against attempts to justify the ways of God to men, attempts to explain how.

Why it is that there's evil in a world that's created by a good and omnipotent God. We'll also talk about Ivan's idea that there's no such thing as morality if there is no God and no afterlife, immortality of the soul. And then we'll touch on the ways in which the book is a response to those ideas, where the response involves something to do with faith as a form of active love in the world. And so those will be the things that we. Well, we might end up focusing on and we might just get off track and medieval. You never know. But that's the intention.

3:44 Introducer: And you mentioned a character name. I think Seth wanted to introduce some character or whatever you want to say.

3:50 Seth: Oh, no, I didn't want to. You assigned it to me. All right, so first off, preface. For those of you who think that this is the greatest novel ever written and the greatest philosophical novel ever written. Let me apologize in advance if anything I say over the next hour does not confirm your bias. But Dostoevsky is a master writer, and he's a master at creating odious characters who engage in engrossing and often repellent dialogue. Lots and lots and lots of dialogue. So here is your playbill for tonight's conversation. Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, who is the scion of the family, is dissolute, vindictive, petty, grotesque, lecherous, and the father of the titular brothers.

He is essentially the material embodiment of sin. His eldest son, Dimitri, AKA Mitya, son by his first wife. He is most like his father, that is, he is the sinner of the book, but he represents a soul who could possibly be redeemed. Spoiler. No. Okay. The second son, Ivan, also. Sorry, the first son by his second wife. He is the honorary member of the Partially Examined Life. He's the atheist, philosopher and skeptic. He is European, rational, modern. And he is the counterpoint to Alexei, AKA Alyosha, who is the youngest legitimate son, arguably the protagonist of the book.

He is the counterpoint to his father. He is pious, beatific, kind, forgiving, compassionate. He represents not just faith versus Ivan's rationality, but also Russian Orthodox Christianity, which, as we know from the Grand Inquisitor section, is not the same thing as Christianity, or at least not Jesuit Christianity. Right. And then we have two other characters that are worth mentioning for this conversation. Smerdyakov, who's the illegitimate son of Fyodor by a mute, disabled girl that he raped, allegedly. I think I used the word odious earlier.

There's a reason why who died this woman giving birth to Smerdyakov, and Feodor was kind enough to give Smerdyakov to his servant Therese, and then he, in turn becomes Fyodor's servant later on. He, in my mind anyway, represents kind of the simmering revolutionary spirit that could be in the peasantry, which could be turned either by the atheistic socialism that we see represented by Ivan, or by the brotherly faith that's represented by Alexei. And then finally, you have Zosima, who is Alyosha's mentor and teacher, if you like. He's the Christ figure of the book, unlike Alyosha, he who adopts faith early and never wavers.

Zosima has an Augustinian path to his saintliness. That's called a name drop, by the way. And he represents a counterpoint to Fyodor.

6:41 Introducer: All right, that's going to be on the test. All the names.

6:43 Seth: That's right.

6:44 Introducer: All right, so why are we reading. This is a novel, but it's a philosophical novel. So Dostoevsky is known as an early existentialist, writing around the same time as Nietzsche, a little bit after Kierkegaard. Not going to talk any more about those people as a live show topic. I mean, this is one that was on our list for a long time because it's so important, and we thought maybe a lot of people would be excited about hearing it. But it's also very much a religious tract, which is not the kind of thing that we, you know, I don't know some of the ways that we could have put the opening question, you know, is the world redeemed by suffering? There's a lot of Christian language that could go into even, how you say,

7:20 Wes: suffering be redeemed by faith.

7:21 Introducer: There you go. That was Wes's question that was rejected. But he's not just defending traditional religion. He's doing that. Yes, traditional Russian religion, but he is a religious existentialist. So he's going to focus on how a religious attitude is a reaction that we could choose to have to the apparent absurdity of life. If there is no God, anything is permitted. It's all absurd. This is kind of the social thing that he had in mind, the whole reason he wrote the book. So Ivan. Ivan voices this absurdity in the couple of arguments that we're gonna spend most of our time on.

And even though it's not Dostoevsky's view, Dostoevsky is taking the thing that he thinks is wrong with the kids today and putting it in the mouth of this character. But it's sort of known as being a frighteningly good argument and often just published by itself and maybe much stronger. Even Dostoevsky was worried about this than his own responses to it.

8:14 Dylan: He thought it was irrefutable.

8:16 Introducer: Yep.

8:16 Dylan: So, as I said, as has been said, this is a really big book and if beautiful and captivating. I'll also add that it was originally serialized and monthly, part of two years, and that Dostoevsky got paid for every page. I myself, I keep coming back when I read this book, to freedom as a curse and as a manifestation of our most authentic humanity. So in the Grand Inquisitor, who's a character we just mentioned and we'll talk more about in the story that concludes Ivan's argument, he castigates Jesus over the insufficiency of freedom to satisfy our needs, saying, nothing has ever been more unsupportable for a man and a human society than freedom.

Yet as we go through the book and in the Russian Monk, which is the following chapter, free acts, particularly acts embodied in love, are the true manifestation of our authentic selves. When we aren't loving, our acts are inauthentic, insincere, and cause us and others pain. When we are, we are redeemed. It's also the case that all those free acts are fundamentally aren't reasonable, though they are, it seems, what makes us most ourselves, which I think is a way of saying what the response is to our Grand Inquisitor.

9:30 Wes: Yeah, so why don't we get started with. Let's talk about the chapter on rebellion, where Ivan is going to talk a lot about the suffering of children. And his goal in that chapter is to challenge the idea that one can appeal to quote unquote, higher harmony to justify the existence of evil in the world. And this is an idea that comes from St. Augustine. It's there in Aquinas as well. So good name drop, Seth. I'm going to do it again. And Augustine's idea is that there really isn't, from a bird's eye view or a God's eye view, there really isn't such a thing as evil.

It's from our limited or what Ivan calls a Euclidean perspective that we think that there's evil. He says Euclidean because he's contrasting it to Lobachevskian geometry, where the rules are entirely different. And so, for instance, Augustine will even say so. Some of the justifications get very deep. Like, we couldn't even have a world. We couldn't have events. There couldn't be becoming without negation. Becoming is just being plus negation. And what we call evil just is negation. So nothing could even exist without what we think of as evil.

The idea is that if you kind of zoom out and you look at the whole, it's good, it's as good as can be. And evil, in a sense, is an illusion. And critical to that argument is this idea of freedom. If God had made the universe so that there was no such thing as evil, we wouldn't be able to make any choices, right? There's evil because we make. Primarily because we make bad choices. So that is the idea. Freedom is worth it. And Ivan is going to say, actually, I have an argument against that. You can't just talk about this view from nowhere with God.

There's something that even from our limited perspective needs to be explained if we are going to justify the ways of God to human beings.

11:14 Dylan: Well, it's the suffering of children, right?

11:16 Wes: So, I mean, obviously.

11:18 Dylan: Well, he characterizes it as. I could come up with a whole bunch of different examples, but I'm just going to pick the easy example. Right. Children are clearly innocent. They are not. In fact, he characterizes they haven't fallen. Okay? So because they're innocent, the fact that they suffer is both an abomination, but also a refutation of this. He then goes on to tell several very, very harrowing stories, all of which are taken from actual newspaper accounts that Dostoyevsky kept track of. One is.

11:50 Wes: Shall we read a little bit? Do we want to spare. Spare people the details?

11:56 Dylan: Well, we should pick some details.

11:58 Mark: Yeah.

11:58 Seth: Give him a flavor of it.

12:00 Wes: So he. I don't know that I.

12:02 Dylan: Do you want to do the Hound or do you want to do the.

12:04 Introducer: Oh, God.

12:06 Wes: Just do a little. Just get to the end where the hound dives in.

12:10 Introducer: Just to preface this. So a prominent scholar that I listened to talking about this, Ivan says he collects these stories. He collects them to be indignant about them. According to this prominent scholar that I will not name, he uses them. He's entertained by them and is most likely actually engaged in some sort of joyful abuse of children himself. I'm not going to take responsibility for that.

12:32 Dylan: Oh, that Ivan Does.

12:33 Introducer: Yes.

12:34 Dylan: And by proxy, Dostoevsky.

12:36 Introducer: No. No.

12:36 Dylan: Okay.

12:37 Seth: All right. So he's talking about. I met a Bulgarian lately in Moscow who told me about crimes committed by the Turks. They burned villages, murdered outraged women and children, nailed their prisoners by ears to the fences, left them till morning. All the sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and an insult to the beasts. A beast can never be so cruel as a man and so artistically cruel. So he talks about cutting unborn children from the mother's womb and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of bayonets before their mother's eyes. This Ivan takes as proof as something that, I guess, proof that this kind of suffering is irredeemable. There's no justification, in faith or otherwise, for these kinds of acts.

13:22 Dylan: Yeah. And the last example that's used is a boy who steals right from a general. And the general is enraged and has the boy stripped naked and then hunted down by his dogs in front of his mother. So he drags the mother out and has him hunted down and eaten alive by the dogs. One of the things that Ivan characterizes in this, at the end, it's also in terms of how can this be forgiven? Who has the authority to do this? He says, that's just not possible. There can't be an act to forgive such a thing.

14:00 Wes: Yeah, well, the mother can't forgive on behalf of the child.

14:03 Dylan: Of the child, yes.

14:04 Wes: The idea is that if you really want to do theodicy, you are going to have to talk about how suffering can be atoned for. What is going to balance that out? Well, nothing really balances that out. It doesn't matter if you get to the afterlife and you say, rah, rah, rah, everything's great now. And look at this from this wider perspective. Everything looks good. That doesn't change the fact that that suffering happened, that horrible thing happened to those children. So this is the way Ivan puts it. And so I renounce the higher harmony altogether.

It is not worth the tears of that one tortured child that beat itself on the breast with its little fist and prayed in its stinking outhouse. That's another story with its unexpiated tears to dear, kind God. It's not worth it because those tears are unatoned for they must be atoned for, or there can be no harmony. But how? How are you going to atone for them? Is it possible by their being avenged? But what do I care for Avenging them. What do I care for hell or oppressors? What good can hell do since those children have already been tortured?

15:03 Dylan: This is all in a conversation with his brother. And his brother's been listening to him, and he is captivated, but his soul is hurting. And Alyosha, in terms of characterizing this, Ivan says, you know, if this is the cost of going to heaven, I'm going to return my ticket. I will not take that ticket. He says, I most respectfully return to God that ticket. And Alyosha says, well, that's rebellion. He says, rebellion. I wouldn't want such a word from you. One can hardly live in rebellion. And I want to live. Tell me straight out. I call, you answer.

Imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the goal of making people happy in the end, giving them peace and rest at last. But for that, it was necessary and unavoidable to torture just one tiny little creation, that same little child who was beating herself on the chest with her little fist and found this edifice on her unavenged tears. Would you agree to be the architect under such a condition? Tell me, and don't lie. And Alyosha, the most pious one, says, no, I wouldn't agree.

16:09 Wes: And Alyosha is at this point training to become a monk and is very devout, but is bowled over by that argument. And by the way, when Ivan says he wants to return his ticket, that's one of his ways of saying, I'm going to commit suicide. The ticket is to existence. And Ivan says, no, no, thank you. It's not worth it.

16:28 Dylan: So this is actually an interesting question, right, Is why doesn't he. Right, because this goes to his spiritedness. Ivan says he's going to die when he's 30. Right. But he's 24. Right. And he's insisting that I can't help it. I can't help wanting to live. I love the blue sky, the sticky leaves. Right. That's your opening, right? Or was. Yeah, Right.

16:49 Introducer: And that sort of builds in. This is what the solution is going to be. The traditional theological problem of evil. Bad things happen. And actually, I should add, the reason that we'd want to spell out, everybody knows bad things happen and bad things happen to children. But the reason it's useful to read those examples is because the perpetrators were absolutely aware of what they were doing and they were treating their victims as human beings. Whereas I find it most comforting to think of, you know, how did the Nazis do what they did? Well, because they dehumanized, they Said the Jews are not real people.

They're just like animals. We're treating them like you would if you ran a slaughterhouse. But the Augustinian, the people actually have sin in them view that Dostoevsky is running with is no, they actually want to have the mother there watching this child. They want to have the child right in front of them and do this and not sanitize it in any way, because people take delight in that.

17:43 Wes: Yeah, this is very much like a Nietzschean critique that points out that there's kind of an element of sadism in this whole picture. Right. If it includes hell and punishment. But, you know, mark the point you're making, Ivan will even say this is universal to humanity, even if we don't know it. We all have these unsavory, aggressive and sadistic impulses, even if we haven't acted on them and we're not conscious of them. So he'll say, there are people who are very fond of tormenting children, even fond of children themselves in that sense. It's just their defenselessness that tempts the tormentor.

Just the angelic confidence of the child who has no refuge and no appeal, that sets his vile blood on fire. In every man, of course, a demon lies hidden, the demon of rage, the demon of lustful heat. At the screams of the tortured victim, the demon of lawlessness, let off the chain, the demon of diseases that follow on, vice, gout, kidney disease, and so on. And if you want to plead innocent to that, you should reflect on the way you treat yourself, because this is kind of one of the themes of the book is that even if you're not taking that sadism out on other people, we tend to be masochists.

We tend to take that out on ourselves, which is what Ivan does, which is what Katerina and Lisa does. Dostoevsky calls this lacerations.

18:54 Seth: Well, let me say first, I didn't expect for us to get a Nazi reference so early on in the. But we haven't even gotten to the Grand Inquisitor.

19:04 Dylan: This is the next step.

19:05 Wes: Right. We better get moving.

19:07 Seth: No, no, I just. I'm already convinced. Right. So you all know this is sort of my view on. If you look at the history of human behavior, it certainly seems that there's a lot more evidence in favor of Ivan's point of view about how human beings are constructed and the kinds of actions they take and how they feel about. But there's a connection here between what you were talking about with the children are one example. But the view extends to the World and nature. It's not accidental that we talked the beasts and bestiality is because when we get to Zosima's response, right, there's this. It's an attitude that you have towards the world, not just towards other individuals or children. It's having some respect for creation and nature, and it's not just simply limited to that.

19:50 Dylan: Well, love, right?

19:51 Mark: Yes.

19:52 Dylan: You're supposed to love the birds.

19:53 Seth: Yeah.

19:53 Introducer: To finish, the point I was starting before is that the traditional problem of evil is put out as sort of a logical puzzle, right? If there's God, God can control everything, could prevent suffering, clearly doesn't. But God is completely good. It seems like there's a contradiction among those things. And that's usually taken as an argument against the existence of God. Dostoevsky is putting this. Weirdly, if Ivan is generally characterized as, ooh, this is the atheist point of view. But he's saying, I'll accept that God exists. I just don't accept his world.

So it's a religious existentialist point, which, if you know about existentialism, it's all about freedom. So we've got this situation, you know, that you could focus on all the horrible things in the world and you could just clench your fist. It's a matter of taking an attitude, as Seth was just saying, or you could take a different attitude of love. And whether that's entirely free, you could just decide to do. I mean, there's obviously much more to that. And Dostoevsky has a very sophisticated account of the psychology of sort of how other people play in.

This is not something that you just do by yourself. Like, there's an inescapably social element, I help you, that gives you a sense of love. You spread it around. And so it ends up being a practical solution. So it's right there in what Ivan says, like that I recognize this is terrible. I recognize I should want to check out, but I just. I love life. And that is Alyosha's solution that he says right there, it's just love life, regardless of logic. Just you're not going to solve the logical puzzle of the problem of evil. It is just something you have to solve through your life behavior.

21:23 Wes: That love turns out to be very complicated, Right. It's connected to the whole Karamazov, earthy, lustful type of character. And it can be hard to disentangle those two types of love, Right? So the thing that's keeping Ivan around is a Karamazov quality. But the way it manifests itself in the Father is as something very dark. So part of the purpose of the book is to tease apart. How is it that we maintain that kind of visceral connection to the world as part of the answer of love without it going the wrong way?

21:54 Dylan: This is perfect to. We should move to the Grand Inquisitor,

21:57 Wes: hurry through it, because we'll never get to love if we don't. It's going to be all darkness and no love.

22:03 Dylan: We've been laying the trail of love. So, Grand Inquisitor, at the end of the section we were just talking about rebellion, Ivan says, okay, you know, I know I've upset you, but look, I've been thinking about this. I have this poem that I wrote, and it really just crystallizes this argument. Okay, I'm going to convince you. Okay. And he doesn't really believe. He's going to convince Alyosha. Do you think he's being a sadistic in trying to bring this in front of Alyosha, or do you think it's. Yeah, so he's like, there's an element. There's an element of it.

22:32 Wes: He's taking an innocent kid and trying to corrupt him. Yes, he's the devil to Alyosha.

22:38 Dylan: That's right. That's right.

22:38 Introducer: Yeah.

22:39 Dylan: That's very good. Right, because we might not get to this, but one feature of the devil is the devil will reason you to death. Right. And the Grand Inquisitor is an example of this kind of this nihilistic end of reason, which ends up also being a problem in the Grand Inquisitor of a transcendent view of religion. So the Grand Inquisitor is. Story starts off, wants to do the short version.

23:05 Wes: I can try. Unless someone else wants to. Seth, you look like you were eager to do the short version.

23:11 Seth: Yeah, the short version. So the short version of the story, without getting into the. Is that he sets the story in the time of the Spanish Inquisition. The Grand Inquisitor is the head of the Spanish Inquisition. And Christ actually comes back to earth and is walking the streets of Seville, Seville, Seville, and is performing miracles. And people are going crazy. Everybody. He doesn't say anything. Christ doesn't say anything. But everybody recognizes that it's him. He just has that.

23:38 Dylan: He raises a girl from the dead.

23:39 Seth: He raises a girl from the dead, which would be, I mean, pretty good evidence. But even before that, everybody just in seeing Christ, who he is, knows that it's him. So the Grand Inquisitor just happens to come by in a coach, sees Christ, knows that it's him, immediately has him arrested and taken to jail. And then the story is essentially him, the Grand Inquisitor, telling a monologue to Christ about how the freedom that he brought to earth needs to be rectified as damaging and hurtful and needs to be redeemed. And that the Grand Inquisitor himself is redeeming the work of Christ by taking away freedom from most people.

24:17 Wes: Right. So what he means by that is that the Catholic Church, by basically turning itself into the state, becoming an enormous political power, and by controlling people, is basically doing the work of turning stones into bread. So the argument is basically for socialism. This is something that also preoccupied Dostoevsky. But the idea is that Christ had the chance to feed people and to kind of create a paradise on earth. And bread is not just feeding, but it's any. You know, it's really representative of any solution to suffering. And Christ didn't do that.

So the three temptations that Christ was subject to were, you know, the devil came to Christ in the desert, said, turn stones into bread. Christ refused and said, throw yourself from the temple and let the angels lift you up before you hit the ground. That'll be a miracle that proves you are who you say you are. And then the third one is he showed Christ the kingdoms of the earth and said, this could all be yours. You could have the power. So this, according to the Grand Inquisitor, all of it is about this idea that Christ could have fixed everything in the beginning, even if it meant robbing them of freedom.

It doesn't seem, on the face of it, like a response to what's come before, because what's come before is Alyosha has responded to Ivan's stories about children with, well, there's this figure, Christ, he can atone. He can forgive anyone. And then the Grand Inquisitor is supposed to be a response to that sense in which it's a response is the sense in which he's trying to disabuse us of the idea that freedom is a good reason to allow suffering in the world, because freedom is not something that human beings are even capable of properly exercising.

26:00 Introducer: Yes, we all run from freedom as fast as we possibly can. And the effect, according to the Inquisitor of Jesus's teachings is that only the elect can face the evil in the world and continue to have faith that everybody else will become atheists. You know, they will flock to someone who tells them, we have the answers. We're giving accounts of miracles, things that you don't have to have faith. You can just believe because we have spelled out these very, very clear things that you can just fall into line with other people. Right. And it's not even just having the security and surety of somebody giving you the answers, but the need to believe what other people believe.

He says. So this is what supposedly the Catholic Church, as represented by the Inquisitor, provides to people. And that stands in direct opposition to a different take on Christianity, which we could debate whether it in fact is Dostoevsky's or not, but is represented by Jesus in this. Again, not a dialogue. It is the Grand Inquisitor talking to a silent Jesus. And the only thing Jesus does at the end, the Grand Inquisitor says, and that's why I'm gonna kill you. What do you think of that? Jesus kisses him on the lips. And Inquisitor is so boggled by this, he just lets him go.

But, you know, he gets to carry out his Inquisition. Jesus removes himself from the scene.

27:18 Wes: Well, he starts by saying he's gonna have Jesus burned. Burned at an auto-da-fé. And then he does relent at the end. So should we give them a little bit of a flavor of this? Because it's really almost apocalyptic the way. Well, it is explicitly apocalyptic paradise on Earth is described. Right.

27:36 Dylan: But that apocalyptic part's important because it's part of the framing of the saving of the world as a question of preventing an apocalypse. That is one of the problems of the Grand Inquisitor is that everything has those highest stakes.

27:52 Wes: Yeah. So instead of getting harmony in the afterlife and from an otherworldly perspective, we get it on Earth. The church becomes the universal state.

28:02 Dylan: Authority and mystery. Authority, bread and mystery.

28:05 Introducer: So miracles is the general thing for bread that, you know.

28:09 Dylan: Yeah. But interestingly uses the word mystery, which ends up, again, being important to the solution of the Grand Inquisitor problem.

28:15 Wes: We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth. This is the. Basically, the Catholic, Jesuit, Catholics. Though hitherto we have not been able to complete our work. But whose fault is that? Oh, the work is only beginning, but it has begun. It has longed to await completion, and the earth has yet much to suffer. But we shall triumph and shall be Caesar's, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of men. But thou mightest have taken even then the sword of Caesar. Why didst thou reject that last gift?

Hadst thou accepted the last counsel of the mighty spirit, which is Satan, thou wouldst have accomplished all that man seeks on earth. That is, someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant heap. For the craving for universal unity is the third and last anguish of men. Mankind as a whole has always striven to organize a universal state. And then he goes on to describe something which looks a lot like a totalitarian regime. And this is not the first time that Dostoevsky has been prescient on this.

In another novel, he basically describes to a T what Russia will actually soon look like. So the idea is that you can organize a universal state that feeds people and solves the problem of suffering, but it involves taking away people's freedom and that actually involves total control of the population.

29:41 Seth: So when we were talking about this prior to the show, I described this section as horrifying. I find this particular passage to just be absolutely horrifying. And, you know, I think of it in terms of. It's like you say, well, for God so loved the world, he sent his only begotten son to get tortured and miss the chance to actually turn this into a paradise and to set us up for eternal suffering and strife and drama. And the argument, the satanic argument, if you will, that it's actually abusive almost or sadistic, as opposed to he could have sent his only begotten son to provide bread, become the universal king of kings around it. You think to yourself, well, yeah, that's a really great question. I mean, like, why? I don't want to say it's like a knockdown, close the door shut argument, but. But it's so powerful that it literally physically makes me ill to think about.

30:37 Dylan: Yeah, well, I was just going to say Dostoevsky, I don't know if he felt ill about it, but he wrote in his notes into letters that for these two sections, he considered these two books pro and contra, which were the section is, and the follow on called the Russian Monk. The absolute core of the book, the Russian Monk, is the section we'll talk about next. I guess that is a response. He understood this being the best possible argument that you could make and that it was airtight in terms of the reasoned way in which you would be an atheist. He was worried, deeply worried, that the response was not going to be satisfactory.

31:17 Wes: Shall we start?

31:18 Introducer: Well, just one more. So you might think, how does this prove atheism? I mean, the Grand Inquisitor is not an atheist, but at least the way that Dostoevsky saw it is that if you're trying to engineer a paradise on earth, whether it's through this caricature of the Roman Catholic Church that is trying to expand itself into A Christian socialist utopia or, you know, the more common. Some of the characters in the book voice these more common revolutionary. You know, the thing that would end up happening in Russia that was explicitly an atheist movement. From a letter that he wrote. If you give people beauty and bread at the same time, then you would deprive man of work, individuality, self sacrifice and the sacrifice of one's good for one's neighbor. In short, all life, the ideal of life would be taken away.

32:06 Wes: This is going to be central to the response, right? Which is that suffering is not as bad as Ivan thinks it is. It's not as much of a standard as Ivan thinks it is. It's necessary in a way. So this is kind of a different sort of theodicy where it's not necessary. You know, it's not the trade off for freedom. Right? Freedom isn't the big prize that we get for doing so much suffering. It's love. And it's not just that love is the trade off, it's that love is suffering. Suffering and love just implicate each other in a very, very deep way. And you don't get love if you don't have suffering.

32:43 Dylan: But it's not a logical balance, right? So that's one of the flaws, right? Is that in the. The horrifying nature of both the rebellion and the kind of balance that you have with the Grand Inquisitor is that that balance is founded on. Well, the horrifying nature, is it a balance that seems to involve unacceptable terms? That's the end of the rebellion. But that balance is also framed in the wrong terms because it's missing love. That's what's going to be the response, right?

33:20 Seth: Well, I was just going to ask to set up the transition. What's the connection between freedom and love? Because when I first read the section, I thought, okay, the freedom he's talking about is the freedom. It's like free will, the freedom to choose. That's how we had that. And then if it's like reading a commentary that said something. No, it's the freedom to believe, which in God's existence, which would somehow connect it more to the rebellion section. But it sounds like we're talking about the freedom to love. Like the freedom to actually overcome and look at suffering differently. As Mark said earlier, take a different perspective.

33:56 Dylan: We get a little bit of this earlier than in the Russian Monk. We get this in when we first meet Zosima and some of his interactions. And he's characterizing, for instance, just as an example, he. When we first meet him, he's just out in the community, he's at the end of his life and this woman comes up and asks him about, you know, I'm suffering, you know, I don't have any faith. How do you prove it? And he says, and he agrees with there's no way of proving it, but you can be convinced of it. And she says, well, how can I be convinced of it? And he says, by the experience of active love.

Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigate actively and without tire in as far as you advance in love, you will grow sure of the reality of God and the immortality of the soul. If you attain to perfect self forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt and no doubt can ever possibly enter your soul. This has been tried, this is certain now. It's not exactly a response to the question of how freedom is involved, Seth, but it's the beginning of that. And then in the Russian Monk, when we have the text of Zosima's history from Alyosha, it is one after another, the coming of that.

The act of love is the quintessential free act of a human being.

35:35 Introducer: He doesn't really address, I think, the connection between love and belief that, you know, if you engage in this love, inevitably you're going to buy into this theology. And he, you know, explicitly states a few times that he just doesn't think it's possible. One of the characters, these secular characters, Rakitin, who's presented as small minded and he said, of course, even atheists can come up with morality, of course they can be nice to each other. But Dostoevsky is just, nope, nope.

36:07 Wes: But the nature of belief has changed, right? So this is not transcendental theodicy anymore, it's imminent theodicy. And faith is not about a proof of God and it's not even about anything fancy theological theory. It's an experience, it's not universal. And also it's an act. And I think this is why freedom is important. Faith becomes an action and you gain it by repeating that action and by habituating yourself.

36:36 Dylan: But the faith isn't the action, right? It's not like you repeat the act of faith. It is embodied in repeated acts of love, from loving nature to acts of loving kindness to other people.

36:50 Wes: But yeah, I'm emphasizing action because it's not just a feeling. So it's just.

36:53 Dylan: No, yeah, that's what I mean. It's an act of active. That phrase, active love happens from the very beginning. And that's the way Zosima characterizes it over and over again, right?

37:01 Wes: It's actually doing certain things for people, even though you actually do hate them. So what happens right at this is he's talking to Madame Khokhlakova in this section, an important character in her own right. But this is where we first meet her. And she says, look, I do want to love people and I want to help them. But first of all I want gratitude. And I'm going to be afraid if I don't get the gratitude, then I'm going to be not happy. And also, I really hate people the closer I am to them in proximity. So this is the way she puts it, you know, as soon as anyone is near me, his personality disturbs me my self complacency and restricts my freedom.

In 24 hours, I begin to hate the best of men. One because he's too long over his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I detest men individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity. This is a huge clue because this is the way Ivan actually starts his rebellion section is by saying, we can't really love people up close because they're annoying, someone has a stupid face. Children are not. Children are very cute.

So let me stick with them. And they're. And we'll use that as our litmus test. So what is Zosima's response to this? Well, he says he will start talking about falsehood and truth. And just to sum it up, the gist of what he says to her is, yeah, we all hate people, but at least you know that, right? You can admit that to yourself. You're not just acting on it implicitly. Someone like Ivan doesn't actually know that. He pretends he's pure. He cares about the suffering of children. He's disavowed that aggressive part of himself. And how has it actually manifest itself?

He's supposed to be a bleeding heart, but it comes out as sadism. So this love of humanity in the abstract that he inflicts on poor Alyosha, who actually just wants to love people and to do nice things for them,

38:57 Dylan: which he does over and over again. I mean, this is one of the manifestations. Alyosha, just as an example, is running around through the novel trying to tend to people's worries and tend to people's sorrows, just in fact, by being there over and over again. He goes to visit his brother Dimitri, he goes to visit Ivan, he goes to visit Lady Khokhlakova. He goes to visit.

39:21 Wes: He's literally a messenger running around with messages between an angel, right? And Jenna.

39:26 Introducer: And the other characters are like, oh, you're such an angel. I can't believe it's not.

39:30 Dylan: Except for Grushenka, who tries to corrupt him, but then fails because he wins