252
PARTISAN REVIEW
or pure evil. "The orientation toward the end," as Berdayev
calls
it, mastered the m06t sensitive spirits among them, some predicting
the approach of anti-Christ and others fervently awaiting the
im–
minent erection of the City of Man; and in the intensity of their
longing for an incontrovertible decision they transform the historical
realm into the realm of prophecy and revelation. This is the mood
that Ivan's "rebellion" exemplifies to perfection.
His version of atheism is all the more forceful in that it allows
for God's existence,
if
need be, but not for the justifications of His
world as revealed progressively
in
and
through
history. Ivan proclaims
that no restitution is possible: that the ultimate harmony or reconcil–
iation in the fullness of time could never expiate the suffering of even
a single innocent child, let alone efface the innumerable horrors of
injustice which humanity has endured through the ages. Hence he
refuses God's creation ("returns his entrance ticket") thus proclaim–
ing the right of indifference to the issue of His existence.
Nor does Ivan dispute the ideality and supreme goodness of
Christian teaching. On the contrary, it is this very ideality and good–
ness that he turns into the motive of his dissent from it when he
depicts the Grand Inquisitor upbraiding Christ for thinking much
too highly of man in endeavoring to augment his freedom of choice
between good and evil instead of heeding the counsel of the wise and
dread spirit of the wilderness to strip man of his freedom so that
he might at long last live in peace and brutish happiness. God, con–
fronted by the radical proofs of the meanness of His world, the sense–
less suffering prevailing in
it
and man's congenital inability to enter
the promised spiritual kingdom, is disposed of through His works.
2
But
if
Ivan does not believe in God, neither does he believe in
man. It is true that he loves man-there is no one else left to love
and perhaps there has never actually been anyone else. Yet how can
he believe in man's freedom in the face of the appalling testimony
of history proving his incapacity to achieve
it?
And in what way
2 Dostoevsky appears to have been inordinately proud of Ivan's subversive
intelligence. "Ivan is deep," he wrote in his private notebook; "he is not one
of your present-day atheists whose unbelief demonstrates no more than the
narrowness of their point of view and the obtuseness of their small minds." And
again: "Those thickheads never dreamt of so powerful a negation of God as
that embodied in the Inquisitor and in the preceding chapter, to which the
entire novel serves as an answer. . . . Even
in
Europe there have never been
atheistical expressions of such power."
