The Brothers Karamazov and the Problem of Faith, A Kierkegaardian Perspective

In this paper, I give an interpretation of the question of faith as it shows up in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, through a development and application of Kierkegaard’s stages on life’s way to the relationship between Alyosha and Ivan Karamazov. After developing Kierkegaard’s account in an original direction, in conversation with both Friedrich Nietzsche and René Girard, I argue that, when applied to the relationship between the brothers, this hermeneutic reveals the fundamental option Dostoevsky presents to us in his novel. Once it has been revealed to us that the world we live in functions according to the mimetic cycle in which the innocent suffer for the sake of some communal good (Girard), we must either (a) embrace in faith the possibility of active love and resurrection, which is to say we leap into the religious and embrace the possibility redemption; or (b) we must reject this possibility, thus collapsing the religious and the ethical back into the aesthetic, which results in a Nietzschean flavored nihilism that ends in suicide (Smerdyakov). Ivan Karamazov is stuck between these options and therefore represents well Kierkegaard’s Knight of Infinite Resignation, unable to rest in either the aesthetic or the ethical, but unable to embrace the religious. For Ivan rejects the world that runs according to the mimetic cycle as absurd. Thus, he finds himself unable to stand with the late Nietzsche, who rejects the religious, collapses the ethical into the aesthetic, and embraces this world, even to the point of justifying human sacrifice. On the other hand, Ivan cannot embrace in faith the possibility of active love, which leads to resurrection and so redeems the world. This rejection, in the end, undermines even his very own grounds for rejecting suffering as absurd, which are rooted in the ethical. To put this in a single sentence, because he rejects both the world as it is and the possibility of active love—because he can neither become an Übermensch nor take the leap of faith—Ivan finds himself both unable to embrace the world and unable to embrace the reality of a love that would redeem it, and so he “returns his ticket.” The comparison with his brother Alyosha becomes important here, because the fundamental difference between them is not that Ivan thinks the world as it appears is absurd and Alyosha does not. For Alyosha admits otherwise. The difference lies in the leap of faith, which Alyosha makes and Ivan does not, and which for Dostoevsky is faith in the active love that redeems the world.