Faith, Doubt, and Fyodor Dostoevsky

Fyodor Dostoevsky—the 19th-century Russian novelist best known for works like Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov—was a devout and practicing Christian, and yet many of his greatest characters are proud atheists. In The Brothers Karamazov, for example, Dostoevsky gives Ivan a fantastic speech about the injustice of the world, questioning how there can possibly be a benevolent God if children suffer and die.

In the course of that speech, Ivan manages to reject something like eight different explanations for how an omnipotent and benevolent God could allow all this suffering. Is it because we have free will? Because suffering makes life interesting? Because there’s an afterlife where God rewards the good and punishes the wicked? None of the above! “I need retribution,” says Ivan; “not somewhere and sometime in infinity, but here and now, on earth.”

Meanwhile, the pious Karamazov kid, Alyosha, is sweet and all, but he’s a bit of a nonentity. Ivan’s the one who’s got it going on. Sometimes it seems as though all the interesting characters in Dostoevsky’s novels are unbelievers! It’s no wonder the French existentialists loved him so much.

So how do we square all this with Dostoevsky’s Christianity? One way would be to say that Dostoevsky was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it,” as Blake said of Milton, writing the atheist position so well that he inadvertently ended up making a case for it. Maybe he wanted to write good Christian novels, where piety wins out and skeptics are miserable, but his writerly talent got the better of him.

But that analysis could make Dostoevsky out to be something a fool, someone whose writerly talent makes him worse at writing persuasively than if he didn’t have it. So here’s a second hypothesis: he wanted to make a strong case for the opposite view just so he could destroy it, like in a good philosophy book. If you want to persuade your sophisticated atheist contemporaries that Christianity is true, you can’t just write a book where there’s a bunch of Christians talking about how great it is to be a Christian. You have to make the case for atheism, and then show why it doesn’t hold up.

But then the original problem comes back: he does too good a job of making the case for atheism. So here’s what we think was really going on: Dostoevsky was a doubting believer. He was a genuine Christian, but he also doubted his own Christianity. And he didn’t feel bad about that, but instead saw it as the essence of a genuine life of faith. And that’s why a novel like The Brothers Karamazov makes us divide our loyalty between Alyosha the believer and Ivan the skeptic. A novel like that isn’t telling us what to think; instead it is providing an incredibly sophisticated model for life. A model for a doubting faith.

How likely is this theory? Well, we do at least have evidence that, surprisingly, Dostoevsky considered himself a doubter, even while being a Christian. “I am a child of the age, a child of nonbelief and doubt,” wrote Dostoevsky in a letter from 1854. “Even until my coffin closes.”

And if Dostoevsky believed that the combination of faith and doubt is the essence of true Christianity, he wouldn’t have been alone in his cultural moment. It was also the position of Søren Kierkegaard, who was writing at roughly the same time. For Kierkegaard, the very best kind of Christianity is the one where you doubt. (“The merit of the religious discourse is in making the way difficult,” says one of Kierkegaard’s personae, “because the way is the decisive thing.”) Without doubt, you can’t have faith—and faith is what Christianity is all about.

So finally we have an explanation for what’s going on in The Brothers Karamazov. If we take only Alyosha, it’s a Christian novel. If we take only Ivan, it’s an atheist novel. But if we take everything together, it’s a novel that embodies doubting faith. It’s a model for how to live a truly Christian life—not just one where you never interrogate your faith.

We’ll see if our guest agrees with us. It’s Garry Hagberg from Bard College, author of several terrific articles on Dostoevsky and many fabulous books on philosophy and literature.