The Brothers Karamazov (43 page)

“Yes, and for true Russian people, problems such as the existence of God and the immortality of the soul, or those other questions that approach these matters from another angle, as you put it, are the most important, and that’s exactly what they should be,” Alyosha said, looking intently at his brother with his gently probing smile.

“Well, Alyosha, I don’t see anything so wonderful about being a Russian, and it’s really hard to imagine a more stupid occupation than the one in which Russian boys are so immersed these days. Nevertheless, I’m extremely fond of one of those Russian boys.”

“You managed to bring that in very cleverly,” Alyosha said, laughing.

“All right, then, place your order. Where shall I begin? You decide. What about starting with God? Does God exist or not—shall I start there?”

“Start wherever you like, attack the question ‘from another angle,’ if you wish, since yesterday at father’s you flatly stated there was no God,” Alyosha said, looking at his brother.

“I said that at the table yesterday just to tease you, and I saw how your eyes were shining. But now I don’t at all mind discussing it with you, and I’m quite serious. I’d like us to get to know each other better. I have no friends and I’m curious to see what it’s like to have one. Well then, just imagine, perhaps I, too, accept God,” Ivan said laughingly. “Why, does that surprise you?”

“It does, indeed—unless you’re joking.”

“Joking! That’s what they said to me at the elder’s yesterday—‘You’re joking,’ they said. You know that old sinner of the eighteenth century who said that if God didn’t exist He would have to be invented—
s’il n’existait pas Dieu il faudrait l’inventer
. And true enough, man has invented God. What is so strange and extraordinary is not that God really exists but that such a thought—the very idea of the necessity of God—should have occurred to a vicious wild animal like man, for that concept is so holy, so touching, and so wise that it does man too much honor. For my part, I’ve long since stopped worrying about who invented whom—God man or man God. I won’t, of course, bother to repeat to you all the fashionable axioms accepted by our Russian boys—all of them derived from hypotheses formulated by Europeans—because what to a European is a mere hypothesis is at once accepted as an axiom by a Russian boy; and, alas, not only by the boy, but also often by his professor, because a Russian professor nowadays is very often just another Russian boy. And so, I’ll ignore all those hypotheses for the time being. For what is the purpose of this conversation between us? Its purpose, as I understand it, is for me to explain to you, as briefly as possible, what I am—that is, what sort of a man I am, what I believe in, and what I hope for. And so I will just state here plainly and briefly that I accept God. But I must point out one thing: if God does exist and if He really created the world, then, as we well know. He created it according to the principles of Euclidean geometry and made the human brain capable of grasping only three dimensions of space. Yet there have been and still are mathematicians and philosophers—among them some of the most outstanding—who doubt that the whole universe or, to put it more generally, all existence was created to fit Euclidean geometry; they even dare to conceive that two parallel lines that, according to Euclid, never meet on earth do, in fact, meet somewhere in infinity. And so, my dear boy, I’ve decided that since I’m incapable of understanding even that much, I cannot possibly understand about God. I humbly admit that I have no special talent for coping with such problems, that my brain is an earthly, Euclidean brain, and that therefore I’m not properly equipped to deal with matters that are not of this world. And I would advise you too, Alyosha, never to worry about these matters, least of all about God—whether He exists or not. All such problems are quite unsuitable for a mind created to conceive only three dimensions. And so not only do I readily accept God, but I also accept His wisdom and His purpose, of which we really know absolutely nothing, the divine order of things, the meaning of life, and the eternal harmony into which we are all to be fused. I believe in His Word, toward which the universe is striving, the Word that itself was ‘with God’ and that, indeed, is God—well, and so on and so on and on, to eternity; so much has been said on that subject. Well then, it looks as if I were on the right path, doesn’t it? Well, let me tell you this: in the final analysis, I do not accept this God-made world and, although I know it exists, I absolutely refuse to admit its existence. I want you to understand that it is not God that I refuse to accept, but the world that He has created—what I do not accept and cannot accept is the God-created world. However, let me make it clear that, like a babe, I trust that the wounds will heal, the scars will vanish, that the sorry and ridiculous spectacle of man’s disagreements and clashes will disappear like a pitiful mirage, like the sordid invention of a puny, microscopic, Euclidean, human brain, and that, in the end, in the universal finale, at the moment universal harmony is achieved, something so magnificent will take place that it will satisfy every human heart, allay all indignation, pay for all human crimes, for all the blood shed by men, and enable everyone not only to forgive everything but also to justify everything that has happened to men. Well, that day may come; all this may come to pass—but I personally still do not accept this world. I refuse to accept it! Even if I see the parallel lines meet myself, I’ll look at them and say they have met, but I still won’t accept it. That’s the way I am, Alyosha, this is where I stand. And this time, I mean what I say seriously. I deliberately started this conversation as stupidly as I could, but I’ve ended up by making a clean breast of my opinions, because that was what you really wanted of me. You didn’t want to hear about God from me. You simply wanted to find out what your dear brother lives by, and now I’ve told you.”

Ivan finished his long explanation with strange emotion.

“But why did you have to start as stupidly as you could, as you put it?” Alyosha asked, looking thoughtfully at his brother.

“First of all, to make it sound really Russian: Russian discussions of this subject are conducted in the most stupid manner conceivable. And secondly, because the more stupidly we talk about these things, the closer we come to the point. The stupider, the clearer. Stupidity is brief and straightforward, while intelligence is tortuous and sneaky. Intelligence is crooked, while stupidity is honest. I’ve carried my argument to the point of despair, and the more stupidly I present it, the more to my advantage that will be.”

“Will you explain to me why you won’t accept the world?”

“Of course I will. It’s no secret. I was coming to that. Ah, my dear little brother, I’m not trying to corrupt you, to destroy the foundations on which your beliefs are based. Rather, I’m trying to make use of you as a way of healing myself.”

Ivan smiled. He suddenly looked like a gentle little boy. Alyosha had never seen that sort of child-like smile on his face before.

Chapter 4: Rebellion

I  MUST ADMIT,” Ivan began, “I have never been able to understand how it was possible to love one’s neighbors. And I mean precisely one’s neighbors, because I can conceive of the possibility of loving those who are far away. I read somewhere about a saint, John the Merciful, who, when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him and asked him to warm him, lay down with him, put his arms around him, and breathed into the man’s reeking mouth that was festering with the sores of some horrible disease. I’m convinced that he did so in a state of frenzy, that it was a false gesture, that this act of love was dictated by some self-imposed penance. If I must love my fellow man, he had better hide himself, for no sooner do I see his face than there’s an end to my love for him.”

“Elder Zosima has often discussed that,” Alyosha remarked. “He also said that a man’s face often prevents those inexperienced in love from loving him. But then there is much love in men, almost Christ-like love, I know that myself, Ivan . . .”

“Well, I for one know nothing about it yet. I cannot understand it, and there are masses of people just like me. The question is, then, whether this is because people are bad or because that is their nature. In my opinion, Christ’s love for human beings was an impossible miracle on earth. But He was God. And we are no gods. Suppose, for instance, that I am in great pain. Someone else cannot possibly know how much it hurts me, because he is someone else and not me. Besides, a man is seldom willing to acknowledge another’s suffering, as if suffering placed one in a superior position. And why won’t he acknowledge it? Perhaps because the other fellow doesn’t smell right, or because he has a stupid face, or because once upon a time he may have stepped on his toe. Moreover, there are many kinds of suffering. There are humiliating ways of suffering, such as hunger, with which a benefactor may still be able to credit the man he feeds, but very rarely will a man accept a slightly more refined form, such as, say, suffering for an ideal, in another man, because he may take a look at his face and declare that it’s not the face of one suffering for that particular ideal, or, at least, it’s not the way he imagines such a face should look. So he’ll deprive him of his sympathy and help, and not necessarily because he’s evil. Beggars, particularly well-born beggars, should never show themselves in person, but should do their begging exclusively through newspaper advertisements. The idea of loving one’s neighbor is possible only as an abstraction: it may be conceivable to love one’s fellow man at a distance, but it is almost never possible to love him at close quarters. If life were like the theater, the ballet, where the beggars come out in silken rags and beg while they perform the graceful steps of a ballet, then I suppose we could enjoy looking at them. But even then, to enjoy looking at someone is still not the same thing as loving him. But enough of that for now. I was simply trying to make you look at things from where I stand. And, although I had originally thought of talking to you about human suffering in general, I have now decided to talk to you only about the suffering of children.

“It will reduce the scope of my argument to about a tenth of the total, but I still prefer to restrict myself to the subject of children. Not that that restriction is to my advantage. But, in the first place, it 
is
 possible to love children, at close quarters, even if they are dirty, even if they have ugly faces, although to me a child’s face is never really ugly. In the second place, I also will not speak of adults at the moment, because, besides being disgusting and undeserving of love, they have something to compensate them for their suffering: they have eaten their apple of knowledge, they know about good and evil and are like gods themselves. And they keep eating the apple. But little children haven’t eaten it. They’re not yet guilty of anything. Do you like small children, Alyosha? I know you do and that you’ll understand why I have chosen to speak exclusively of them. Well then, if they suffer here in this world, it’s because they’re paying for the sins of their fathers who ate the apple. But that is the reasoning of another world and it’s incomprehensible to the human heart here on earth. No innocent should be made to suffer for another man’s sins, especially innocents such as these! Doesn’t it surprise you, Alyosha, that I, too, love children? I want you to note, by the way, that cruel, carnivorous, sensual people like the Karamazovs are sometimes very fond of children. Children, as long as they are young, say seven years old, for instance, are very different from adults—entirely different creatures, totally unlike adults in their very essence. In prison I once met a bandit who had often broken into people’s houses at night to rob them, and who had killed entire families, and sometimes children too. But in prison he showed a strange love for children. For instance, he would stand for hours at the window of his cell and watch the children playing in the prison yard. He succeeded somehow in communicating with a little boy, who thereafter would often come and stand under the man’s window, and the two of them became great friends . . . Do you know why I’m telling you all this, Alyosha? I have a sort of headache and I’m feeling sad.”

“You look strange,” Alyosha said worriedly. “You don’t look yourself.”

“By the way, in Moscow not long ago, a Bulgarian told me,” Ivan went on, ignoring Alyosha’s remark, “of the atrocities committed all over his country by Turks and Circassians, who, fearing a general uprising of the Slav population, set villages afire, rape women and children, nail their prisoners to fences by the ears and leave them in that state until morning, when they hang them, and who commit other atrocities that are difficult even to imagine. People often describe such human cruelty as ‘bestial,’ but that’s, of course, unfair to animals, for no beast could ever be as cruel as man, I mean as refinedly and artistically cruel. The tiger simply gnaws and tears his victim to pieces because that’s all he knows. It would never occur to a tiger to nail people to fences by their ears, even if he were able to do it. Those Turks, by the way, seem to derive a voluptuous pleasure from torturing children—they do everything from cutting unborn babes out of their mothers’ wombs with their daggers to tossing infants into the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets as the mothers watch. It’s doing this in front of the mothers that particularly arouses their senses. But, of the things the Bulgarian told me, the following scene particularly caught my attention. Imagine a baby in the arms of his trembling mother, with Turks all around them. The Turks are having a little game: they laugh and tickle the baby to make it laugh too. Finally they succeed and the baby begins to laugh. Then one of the Turks points his pistol at the baby, holding it four inches from the child’s face. The little boy chuckles delightedly and tries to catch the shiny pistol in his tiny hands. Suddenly the artist presses the trigger and fires into the baby’s face, splitting his little head in half . . . Pure art, isn’t it? Incidentally, I understand that Turks are very fond of sweet things.”

“Why are you telling me all this, Ivan?” Alyosha asked.