What does it mean to believe something? Is it possible for a person to profess an idea sincerely, yet discover that he never really believed it? If a man’s actions contradict his beliefs, is he necessarily a hypocrite, or might both the actions and the beliefs be sincere? Which, in that case, does he really believe? How does self-deception work? If a man understands an idea to be false, how can he arrange to believe it? Can he will himself to believe what he doubts? These and many questions haunt the Russian tradition. Explored by the great thinkers and novelists, they have led to insights about the human condition that are one of Russian literature’s great gifts to the world.
These questions occur to the fictional characters of Dostoevsky. But he posed them in his own agonized quest for faith as well. His faith was precisely that: a quest for faith, a process. In what sense?
In the Gospel of Mark, the father of a boy possessed by an evil spirit implores Jesus to cure him. The disciples have already tried and failed. When Jesus asks how long the child has suffered, the father answers that, ever since childhood, the spirit possessing the boy has tried to destroy him by casting him into the fire or the waters. “If thou canst do anything,” he pleads, “have compassion on us, and help us.” When Jesus replies that “all things are possible to him that believeth,” the father replies in tears: “Lord, I believe; help thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:24).
This reply seems paradoxical. One might suppose that the father either believes or doesn’t. How can he, as a believer, implore Jesus to contend with his not being a believer? In the Pensées, Pascal repeatedly returns to this contradictory state of mind. He mentions David’s asking God to “incline my heart to thy testimonies”—that is, believing that he should believe. These paradoxical formulations anticipate Dostoevsky’s letter to Natalya Fonvizina, perhaps the best known missive in Russian literature.
When Dostoevsky was being led out to Siberia after being convicted of treasonous involvement in an anti-Tsarist organization, Fonvizina gave him a copy of the New Testament, the only book prisoners were allowed to have. Five years later, when she was deeply depressed, he wrote his famous letter to console her.
Dostoevsky tells Fonvizina that he, too, has suffered from despair, and that “at such moments one thirsts for faith like ‘parched grass,’ and one finds it at last because the truth becomes evident in unhappiness.” Dostoevsky later chose as the epigraph to The Brothers Karamazov: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone; but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit” (John 12:24)—which seems to suggest that faith can be achieved only through great suffering.
Dostoevsky’s letter continues: “I will tell you that I am a child of the [materialist nineteenth] century, a child of disbelief and doubt, I am that today and (I know) will be one to the grave.” In this respect, he resembles his later creation Ivan Karamazov, who struggles with contradictory beliefs. As a student of natural science, Ivan knows that the world is governed by natural laws. Those laws describe what is, not what should be, and therefore have no moral value. If people are material objects like any other, as the materialists assert, it follows that good and evil have no objective basis. They are nothing more than social conventions, which vary arbitrarily from time to time and place to place.
Rakitin, a cynical seminarian, tells Dmitri Karamazov something similar. The elder Karamazov brother paraphrases in his typically frenetic tone: “What is goodness? Answer me that. Goodness is one thing to me and another to a Chinese person, so it’s a relative thing. Or isn’t it? Is it not relative? A treacherous question! You won’t laugh if I tell you it’s kept me up two nights. I only wonder how people can live and think nothing about it.” If moral laws have no basis beyond social convention, Rakitin reasons, they may overawe the superstitious, but educated people know that “all is permitted.”
But Ivan also believes the very opposite. He knows, just knows, that torturing children is morally wrong, regardless of social conventions. When Cain murders Abel, the voice of Abel’s blood cries out from the ground (Gen. 4:10), and Ivan hears the cries of all those innocent little victims as if they were being abused in his presence. In “Rebellion,” he recites his “collection of facts”—one horrendous case of child abuse after another—to show that, whatever any theory might say, evil exists. (Curiously, he offers no such examples of indubitable goodness.)
Absolute immoralism and extreme moralism: Ivan cannot honestly reject either one, and the contradiction tears him apart. As that profound psychologist Father Zossima instructs him,
the question is still fretting your heart, and not answered. But the martyr likes sometimes to divert himself with his despair, as it were, driven to it by despair itself. Meanwhile, in your despair, you, too, divert yourself with magazine articles, though you don’t believe your own arguments and mock at them inwardly.
Zossima is referring to the article that the visitors to his monastic cell have just been discussing. Readers have already been told that Ivan signs his articles “the observer”—that is, one who looks on but does not participate—and that the article in question is so ambiguous that some readers take him to be supporting one position and others the opposite. At last, some “sagacious people” conclude that Ivan has written not a serious argument but “an impudent satirical burlesque.”
Ivan’s perplexing article concerns an issue seemingly of no interest to a student of natural science: the jurisdiction of church (as opposed to state) courts. What Zossima, and only Zossima, grasps is that Ivan has formulated his argument esoterically so that he can entertain the questions tormenting him while holding them at a distance. The fundamental, encoded issue is: Why should one not commit crimes? With “state courts,” Ivan signifies an essentially amoral answer: because one might get caught and punished. With “church courts,” he proposes: because crime is wrong, whether one gets caught or not.
The amoral, utilitarian approach is very much with us. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Gary Becker argued that, since all human behavior consists of maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain, the decision to commit or refrain from a crime depends entirely on one’s weighing of the benefit against the “expected punishment”—that is, the severity of the punishment multiplied by the likelihood of being caught. The less likely a criminal is to be caught, the greater the punishment must be to deter him. According to Becker, “some persons become ‘criminals,’ therefore, not because their basic motivation differs from that of other persons, but because their benefits and costs differ.” The scare quotes around “criminals” underscore the idea that disturbs Ivan: that there are no crimes (in the moral sense), just violations of arbitrary laws.
Ivan’s article poses in disguised form the question he cannot resolve. He wants to believe in good and evil, but he cannot will himself to forget what he knows about social norms. (To use William James’s example, I cannot will myself to think that Abraham Lincoln did not exist, no matter how much happier that might make me.) It might even be easier for Ivan to become like his dissolute father and deny the existence of good and evil. But Ivan’s honorable conscience will not allow him to do this. The question whether good and evil exist, explains Father Zossima, “is your great grief, for it clamors for an answer.” “But can it be answered by me? Answered in the affirmative?” Ivan asks. Zossima replies: “If it can’t be decided in the affirmative, it will never be decided in the negative. You know that is the peculiarity of your heart, and all its suffering is due to that. But thank the Creator who has given you a lofty heart capable of such suffering; of thinking and seeking higher things, for our dwelling is in the heavens.”
Zossima means that Ivan will either come to believe in good and evil or go on searching; he will never sink like his father into complacent amoralism. If he does not find faith, he will retain his faith in seeking faith. And that was true of Dostoevsky, as well.
“How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me and costs me even now, which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I find against it,” continues Dostoevsky’s letter to Fonvizina. The more clearly the oasis is a mirage, the more he wants to reach it. Might the thirst itself be of value?
Even as his struggle for faith intensifies, “God sends me moments when I am completely calm. At those instants I love and I feel loved by others.” At one such moment, Dostoevsky formulated his “credo”: There is nothing more beautiful, profound, sympathetic, and perfect than Christ, “and I tell myself with a jealous love not only that there is nothing but that there could be nothing.” Set aside the fact that this credo does not coincide with that of the Orthodox Church or any other church. Consider how odd is the confession of “jealous love”: As Dostoevsky knew and showed in his fiction, jealousy blinds a person. Othello misperceived. To believe from jealousy, a self-regarding emotion, is to offer dubious testimony. Moreover, what Dostoevsky affirms here is not the existence but the beauty of Christ. Atheists have affirmed as much.
Dostoevsky’s most famous statement on faith follows: “Even more, if someone proved to me that Christ is outside the truth, and that in reality the truth were outside Christ, I should prefer to remain with Christ rather than the truth.” What can this statement possibly mean? Dostoevsky seems to say that he will believe in Christ even if he knows that belief to be not just groundless but actually false. But “to believe” means to regard something as true. To know something is false but believe it is true would seem to make no sense. Like Ivan, Dostoevsky is a master of paradoxes—perhaps literature’s greatest.
To elucidate what Dostoevsky might mean, Joseph Frank cites Kierkegaard, who attempts to define one kind of faith: “Whether I have faith can never be ascertained by me with immediate certainty—for faith is precisely this dialectical hovering, which is unceasingly in fear and trembling but never in despair; faith is exactly this never-ending worry about oneself, which keeps one alert and ready to risk everything; this worry about oneself as to whether one truly has faith—and look! precisely this worry about oneself is faith.”
Dostoevsky certainly describes a state of “dialectical hovering,” but it cannot be said that he is “never in despair.” Quite the contrary. In contrast to Kierkegaard, he describes not a worry about whether he has faith but a struggle with unbelief. Kierkegaard yearns for faith in his faith, Dostoevsky for faith itself.
We will understand Dostoevsky’s letter better by considering his concern with process. Dostoevsky describes the search for faith as a form of faith in itself, one that may be especially suited to a person of his century (or ours). Such faith is not a state but a process, perhaps a never-ending one. It is not a possession but a quest. The devil who visits Ivan Karamazov alludes to this difference when he regrets living in a world of “indeterminate equations” and dreams “of becoming incarnate once for all and irrevocably in the form of some merchant’s wife weighing eighteen stone, and of believing all she believes. My ideal is to go to church and offer a candle in simple-hearted faith.” Simple-hearted faith is no longer available to educated people. But processual faith may be.
Time and again, Dostoevsky argued that what is usually taken to be a state is really a process. This distinction goes to the heart of Dostoevsky’s thought. Consider his articles on the Kairova case, a trial described in his Writer’s Diary. Having discovered that her lover, a married man, was sleeping with his wife in Kairova’s own apartment, she purchased a razor. After waiting outside for a while, she entered the apartment, approached the sleeping couple, and began to slash her rival, but the awakened couple restrained her. Kairova was charged with attempted murder. The jury was asked whether Kairova, had she not been restrained, would have committed murder—whether this was her intention. Dostoevsky argues that the question cannot be answered, not for lack of information but because it presumes something untrue about intentions.
We usually think of intentions as John Locke described them. All actions derive from a prior intention, Locke argued. Intentions may of course be changed, and we may “hold our wills undetermined until we examine” a situation, but if we are to act at all we must arrive at an intention. Unless external obstacles intervene, “what follows after that follows in a chain of circumstances, linked one to another, all depending on the last determination of the will.”
For Dostoevsky, what Locke describes is only one sort of intention. Kairova’s intention may not have been fixed or complete prior to her action. It may instead have evolved, step by step, along with her action. When she bought the razor, Kairova might not have known whether she would use it. She was angry, murderously angry, and perhaps she armed herself just in case she should decide to murder her rival. Perhaps she was keeping her options open, even as she attacked the couple in her rage.
Dostoevsky had already described this state of mind. Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment, murders the old pawnbroker without having decided to do so! At every stage of the process he declines to foreclose the possibility that he might commit the murder. He finds the possibility comforting because it gives him a sense of power amid an otherwise hopeless state of affairs. All he wants is to keep his options open. “And indeed,” the narrator explains, “if it had ever happened that everything to the least point could have been considered and finally settled, and no uncertainty of any kind had remained, he would, it seems, have renounced it all as something absurd, monstrous, and impossible. But a whole mass of unsettled points and uncertainties remained.”
Raskolnikov lives in the territory between adopting and renouncing his plan to murder. But as that territory shrinks to a vanishing point, he finds himself at the murder scene, axe in hand. At last he can keep the possibility of murder open only by committing it—still without having decided to do so. That is why he behaves “almost mechanically: as if someone had taken him by the hand and pulled him along irresistibly, blindly, with unnatural force . . . as if a piece of his clothing had been caught in the cogs of a machine and he [had been] dragged in.” He is “almost unconscious of his body.” I imagine that no one before Dostoevsky ever described a murder in this way.
Dostoevsky supposes that Kairova reacted to each moment without deciding what she would do in the next, much less whether she would kill her lover’s wife:
Most likely she hadn’t the slightest idea of this when sitting on the steps with the razor in her hand, while just behind her, on her own bed, lay her lover and her rival. . . . Moreover, even though it may seem absurd, I can state that even when she had begun slashing her rival she might still not have known whether she wanted to kill her or not and whether this was her purpose in slashing her.
Nothing is final. Time is always open. This is what Dostoevsky understands by the concept of process. A true process is not a mere unfolding of predetermined steps, such as Locke imagined, but a sequence with multiple possibilities at each moment. Had she not been restrained, Dostoevsky explains, Kairova might have passed the razor over her rival’s throat “and then cried out, shuddered, and run off as fast as she could.” Or she might have turned the razor on herself. Or she might have been inflamed by the sight of blood and not only murdered her rival but then begun “to abuse her body, cutting off the head, the nose, the lips; and only later, suddenly, when someone took that head away from her, . . . realized what she had done.”
How, then, could the jury possibly determine what Kairova “intended” to do? All these outcomes “could have happened and could have been done by this very same woman and sprung from the very same soul, in the very same mood, and under the very same circumstances.” If this is the case, then determinism is false, because determinism holds that at any given moment one and only one thing can happen. Each moment is exhaustively specified by prior moments; there is no free play in the system, no wiggle room.
But for Dostoevsky, whatever happens, something else might have. We live in a processual world, a world always shadowed by that “something else,” a world in which, to understand what has taken place, one must imagine alternatives. There are always other choices that could have been made. If that were not so, human freedom would be an illusion.
In Dostoevsky’s view, not only would determinism destroy moral responsibility, it would deprive us of meaningful selfhood. After all, we form ourselves through our choices. Without real alternatives, we would lose our humanness and become automatons or, as the hero of Dostoevsky’s novella Notes from Underground puts it, piano keys or organ stops played upon by the laws of nature. If social scientists could—at least in principle—predict our actions as surely as astronomers can plot the orbit of Mars, life would be drained of significance. “If we concede that human life can be governed by reason,” declared Tolstoy in War and Peace, “the possibility of life is destroyed.”
Dostoevsky understood faith processually because he understood human life processually. People make choices that cannot be known in advance. They are always becoming. That is what it means to be human.
In The Brothers Karamazov, Dmitri seizes a pestle much as Kairova had seized a razor. At his trial, the prosecutor offers that action as proof of a prior intention to kill, but it is no such thing. Like Kairova, Dmitri was murderously angry but did not know what he would do. That, indeed, is one way anger works: It envisages violent possibilities. But even when we are angry, we are free. Dmitri has told Alyosha that there may come a moment when he does not know whether he would restrain himself from killing Fyodor Pavlovich. In the event, Dmitri does not kill his father, but it was possible up to the last moment that he would. In much the same way, the destitute Snegiryov did not know that he would trample on the money Alyosha offered, until he did so. His intention was not prior to the act, but coincident with it. One reason Dostoevsky creates extremely suspenseful scenes, in which he makes the instant palpable, is that he wants readers to sense that things could go either way. We feel the throb of choice in process.
One problem with utopians, Dostoevsky repeatedly argued, is that they posit a goal for human life, a final state of bliss, and thus misunderstand the nature of life as people live it. In our experience of time, no moment is complete in itself. We always live into an uncertain future. If we did not, if everything were predetermined, then risk, achievement, and striving would disappear. But human life is striving, and so to give people everything they desire is to deprive them of humanness. That is what Dostoevsky meant when he referred to socialist society as an “antheap.” Ants do what they are born to do, but people are always becoming. Satisfy every possible human wish, and
people would suddenly see that they had no more life left, that they had no freedom of spirit, no will, no personality, that someone had stolen all this from them; they would see that their human image had disappeared and that the brutish image of a slave had emerged, the image of an animal, with the single difference that a beast does not realize that it is a beast, but a human would realize that he had become a beast. . . . People would realize that there is no happiness in inactivity, that the mind which does not labor will wither, that it is not possible to love one’s neighbor without sacrificing to him of one’s own labor . . . and that happiness lies not in happiness but only in the attempt to achieve it.
Anyone who knows Dostoevsky’s works will recall how frequently he voices variations on this theme. In The Idiot, Ippolit famously concludes that “Columbus was not happy when he had discovered America but while he was discovering it. . . . It’s life that matters, nothing but life, the everlasting and perpetual process, and not the goal at all.”
Contemplating the body of his just-deceased first wife, Dostoevsky recorded his thoughts: “Masha is lying on the table. Will I meet again with Masha?” He reflects: Atheists question why, if Christianity is true, there isn’t paradise on earth. “Why does man suffer to this day and not join in brotherhood?” The answer is that, so long as people live on earth, they are in process. If they attained “the final goal of humanity . . . it would no longer be necessary to develop, to attain, to struggle, to glimpse the ideal through all one’s falls and eternally strive toward it—consequently it would not be necessary to live. . . . Thus on earth man is only a developing creature, consequently one not completed but transitional.” As the Russian thinker Mikhail Bakhtin was to say, we are “unfinalizable.”
Life is continual becoming. It consists of choices made in uncertainty and, by its very nature, entails doubt. Everything Christ said or did presumed that “man is in a transitory state” and that “life here on earth is developing.” That is why Christian faith is itself processual.
Faith dwells in possibility and hope, risk and striving. One does not have “faith” in the Pythagorean theorem or in any undeniable fact. Faith, like free will, presupposes doubt. That is the core idea of the most famous chapter Dostoevsky ever wrote, “The Grand Inquisitor,” a story composed by Ivan Karamazov. The Inquisitor accuses Jesus of making people unhappy by leaving them in a world of freedom and uncertainty.
With doubt and choice come guilt and regret. People often realize that they chose wrongly. Would it not be better to have no choice at all? Whatever they may say, the Inquisitor argues, people do not want freedom and the suffering it entails. They want something indubitable to worship. But so long as different people worship different gods, there will be doubt. People are bound to wonder whether they worship as they do only because of the accident of their birthplace. There are truths on this side of the Pyrenees that are falsehoods on the other, mused Pascal. Worship is therefore not enough. People require “community of worship”:
This craving for community of worship is the chief misery of every man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For the sake of community of worship they’ve slain each other with the sword. . . . “Put away your gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!” And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.
Retelling the story of Christ’s temptations, the Inquisitor argues that, to make people happy, Jesus should have accepted what the devil offered. Accepting “bread”—that is, material power—Jesus would have banished doubt, “for nothing is more certain than bread.” I can doubt the Apostle’s creed, but not the bodily pain that material power can inflict. Instead of power, Jesus chose freedom, and so “instead of giving a firm foundation for setting the conscience of man at rest forever, Thou didst choose all that is exceptional, vague, and enigmatic.”
What Jesus wanted, according to the Inquisitor, was not the base worship of the slave, and not the automatic acknowledgment of indubitable fact, but true faith, which presumes uncertainty and doubt. If there were indubitable proof of God, and if right and wrong were always clear, there would be no need for, indeed no possibility of, faith. Unfortunately for humanity, the Inquisitor tells Jesus, “Thou didst desire man’s free love, that he should follow thee freely. . . . Man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only thy image before him as his guide.” An image is not a formula; it does not specify a course of action. We may recall Dostoevsky’s credo, that nothing could be more beautiful than the image of Christ. Beauty attracts, beauty illuminates, beauty “will save the world,” as we read in The Idiot. But beauty does not eliminate uncertainty.
By the same logic, the Inquisitor argues, Jesus should have accepted the second temptation and proven his divinity with a miracle. “Thou didst hope that man, following Thee, would cling to God and not ask for a miracle.” The people taunted Jesus: Come down from the cross and we will believe in you! But “thou wouldst not come down, for again thou wouldst not enslave man with a miracle, didst crave faith freely given, not based on miracle. Thou didst crave for free love and not the base raptures of the slave before the might that has overawed him forever.” Miracles “overawe,” banish doubt, induce a state of “base worship”—the very opposite of the state in which one chooses between live alternatives.
Although religion usually appeals to miracles as a warrant for belief, Dostoevsky maintains the opposite. If you accept God because he split the Red Sea or believe in Jesus because he raised Lazarus from the dead, then you are anything but a Christian. In that case, you worship God as a slave submits to power and accept Jesus as a pagan bows down to an idol. You might as well be worshipping almighty Zeus. For Dostoevsky, a Christian does not believe in Jesus because He performed miracles; he believes in the miracles because he has faith in Jesus.
Alyosha Karamazov suffers tormenting doubt because the miracle he expected does not occur. But when he finds himself engaged in active love in consoling Grushenka, he discovers a faith that is compatible with uncertainty. That is the lesson Father Zossima meant him to learn. Now Alyosha realizes: This is why Zossima sent him from the monastery into “the world,” where he is bound to encounter many troubling tests of his faith. If true faith is the striving for faith, it could be no other way. Alyosha realizes that whatever doubts may assail him, they can be part of, rather than undermining, his newly understood faith. And so “Alyosha stood, gazed, and suddenly threw himself down on the earth. He did not know why he embraced it. He could not have told why he longed so irresistibly to kiss it, to kiss it all.” He does not need to know why. “Within three days, he left the monastery in accordance with the words of his elder, who had bidden him ‘sojourn in the world.’”
Even in the throes of doubt Dostoevsky knew that, for us transitional beings, real faith always dwells in uncertainty. Like happiness, it consists in the striving for it. The goal is in the quest. “Comfort yourself,” wrote Pascal. “You would not seek me if you had not found me.”
