Profoundly Short

I only have a few minutes today, and I’ve been reading The Brothers Karamazov, so I’m about to do a silly thing. I’m going to attempt to give my answer to Ivan Karamazov’s profound question in just a few words.

Ivan seems to waver on whether he believes in God. At one point he says that he believes in God but rejects his world. His greatest concern is the torture of children. Why would God make a world in which children can be tortured? I couldn’t make such a world, he tells his pious brother Alyosha; I couldn’t make a world with all its beauties and goodness and gratification at the cost of a single little girl being tortured. And then he asks, could you?

Hypothetical questions like this always include one big problem. Someone asks me, if you had just hit 63 home runs in a season and the Yankees offered you a contract, would you take it? I don’t know! I would have to be such a different person with such a different physical constitution and such a different history, I don’t know if my St. Louisian aversion to the Yankees would still hold. Ivan seems to be asking me, If you were God, could you create such a world? My first answer is, how could I possibly know? If I were God, I’d have a radically different mind, and I can’t imagine how that mind works.

But Ivan might actually be asking, Could you as a human being bring about a wonderful situation with happiness for millions if it meant the torture of one child? I don’t know if Alyosha in particular could, but I do know that, sadly, in millions of instances, a human being has tried to buy the happiness of just one person (that human’s self) at the cost of torturing a child. We do this, not God. We commit all the horrible atrocities Ivan mentions and much worse. We beat children senseless because they interrupt our drunken stupor. We drop napalm on Vietnamese children. We starve coal miners’ children to make CEO’s richer. We shoot children in schools. We drop fire bombs and atomic bombs on children in cities.

Ivan Karamazov asks, Could you do this, humanity? Humanity, if it’s honest, can only reply, Yes, Ivan, we do this all the time. The only sensible next step is not to blame God for what we with willing hearts do routinely, but to ask for his forgiveness and restoration and life.

Alyosha’s answer is shorter and simpler. He gets up and kisses his brother and walks away.