TGC

19th Century

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

1821–1881

“Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart.”
Crime and Punishment, Part III

Fyodor Dostoyevsky was a Russian novelist who wrote after imprisonment in Siberia and long political and religious searching. and put the claims of God, freedom, and moral law under pressure from suffering, guilt, and open rebellion. He stages the trial of faith against the suffering of the innocent. Dialogue carries the argument. Later writers take from him the question whether man, without God, may make himself the measure of all things, and whether any answer meets the case of the innocent who suffer.

In the Conversation

7 of the Great Ideas

Ethics

Good and Evil

If God does not exist, then everything is permitted; and if everything is permitted, then the idea of good and evil has lost the footing on which the tradition had placed it.

Happiness

Men will trade their freedom for bread and the soft happiness of the herd; whoever gives them this will be loved as no god has ever been.

Politics

Liberty

Freedom is the burden Christ laid upon man in refusing to do for him what he might have done; and the great temptation of the modern world is to exchange this freedom for the bread, the mystery, and the authority which would relieve man of it.

Theology & Metaphysics

God

The argument for God is tried not in abstraction but against the suffering of children, and the question is whether any answer the tradition can give is adequate to the rebellion such suffering provokes.

Sin

The act of sin separates the sinner from all other men more completely than any external punishment can, and the return from this separation requires not argument but a confession made in the presence of another.

Epistemology

Will

The will is not the servant of reason or of advantage but the capacity to refuse the advantage reason would prescribe, and this refusal, however irrational it may look, is the root of whatever freedom a man may be said to possess.

Philosophy & Practical

Man

The man of the nineteenth century, in his urban and isolated and over-thinking form, is not to be accounted for by the old taxonomies of virtue and vice but must be described in his own terms, as a creature whose inner life has outrun what his conditions can contain.