God’s Guilt: Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov

Three years before Nietzsche’s madman screamed that God is dead, Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov had argued that if there were a God he deserved condemnation, that no moral person could accept the world of suffering that God had created. Refracted through the central plot of The Brothers Karamazov — the murder of Fyodor Karamazov and the trial of his eldest son for parricide — the question of cosmological guilt becomes the question of mortal responsibility. The real consequence of the question of God’s guilt, much as the question of God’s death, is not the overthrowing of an already decayed system of religious beliefs but the necessity of revaluing human action. If God is guilty, can anyone merely human be guilty? If God is ultimately the source of men’s corruption and brutality, what are the viable frameworks for understanding human responsibility?

The indictment of God as the cause of all the world’s suffering in The Brothers Karamazov has been taken by many as unanswerable. Indeed, the chapters that lay out the indictment — “Rebellion” and “The Grand Inquisitor” — have taken on a life of their own, published separately from the novel that is supposed to be their refutation and presenting an ostensibly complete philosophical argument against theodicy. Dostoevsky himself wondered whether the novel could adequately meet the indictment, whether its oblique answer to the challenge of God’s culpability for suffering would be too weak to persuade the novel’s readers. His worry was that readers would find Ivan’s position that ‘everything is permitted’ — that without God or the immortality of the soul, nothing could be forbidden — more compelling than the epiphanic vision of absolute responsibility in the novel’s competing claim that ‘we are all guilty, and I most of all’.    

In our seminar, we will read the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov through the question of the nature of responsibility, its sources, limits, and the possibility of judging its failures. Our seminar will locate the contestation between ‘everything is permitted’ and ‘we are all guilty’ in the modern loss of transcendent sources of goodness. Is the Kantian categorical imperative, which insists on universal rationality rather than God, sufficient to ground morality? Does the Hegelian accounting of consequences end up always deferring the moment of moral judgment, thereby rendering it meaningless? If neither the ideas of God nor the future good provide a foundation for ethical action, are we left with a rarefied Levinasian stance  of personal obligation before the Other — a claim that perhaps cannot take adequate measure of competing claims? We will interrogate the novel’s competing accounts of responsibility from the slogans of cheap social determinism, the biographical imprints of childhood events that seem to indelibly shape personality, the ideological and emotional manipulations that threaten to negate moral autonomy, to the ecstatic claims of universal guilt.