The Battlefield of the Human Heart: Love and Forgiveness in The Brothers Karamazov

Andy Foust

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In 1999 Japanese pharmaceutical corporations hit upon a unique way to market depression medication to a population unacquainted with psychology: the advertising slogan “your kokoro can catch cold,” kokoro translating to ‘soul.’1 Søren Kierkegaard, the theological philosopher of nineteenth-century Denmark, could have served as their spokesman, having defined depression as a sickness of the soul, a persistent condition of despair which only Christianity could heal. ‘Søren Kierkegaard’ is not a household name today. Of far wider repute is Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky, a literary visionary who, though in no way influenced by Kierkegaard, created perfect literary illustrations of this ‘religious existentialist’ concept of despair. In fact, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov deserves acclaim not only as a hallmark of modern literature but as a medical textbook, for it is both a diagnostic explanation and a philosophical cure for the spiritual sickness with which this world seems stricken.

Dmitri Karamazov, one of the three Karamazov siblings, confesses:

I can’t bear it that some man, even with a lofty heart and the highest mind, should start from the ideal of the Madonna and end with the ideal of Sodom. It’s even more fearful when someone who already has the idea of Sodom in his soul does not deny the idea of the Madonna either. Here the devil is struggling with God, and the battlefield is the human heart.2

Kierkegaard would agree: the human self is forever struggling to define itself by balancing its reality with its potential. In Dostoyevsky’s novel, this takes the shape of conflict between the earthly and the heavenly. To be sure, the novel is ostensibly a murder mystery. Dmitri and his selfish father quarrel over money until the father is killed by his illegitimate son Smerdyakov and Dmitri is unjustly arrested. But peppered throughout the novel are nuggets of theology, especially as Dmitri and his brothers Ivan and Alyosha must grapple with the stain of their family’s worldly and licentious history. Dmitri himself follows the path of least resistance, attempting to forget his despair in the joys of the world only to periodically bare his conflicted soul in tear-filled confessions to God.

Plato taught that the soul could only be purified by an absolute separation of lofty, pure ideas from worldly, concrete action.3 This is the goal toward which Ivan aspires. Ivan lives in a place where ideals exist apart from the corporeal world. In distancing himself from the banal, physical world Ivan attempts to embody those ideals, unaware that abstract virtues such as benevolence must be actualized in real life by benevolent action. Ivan says, “For anyone to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”4 Once a person’s face is viewed, Ivan must acknowledge that he is performing some action within a world that is corrupt and transient and not in his abstract and eternal world of ideals. This creates a bridge he is unable to cross for fear of contaminating the ideal world.

The murder of Ivan’s father poses a direct challenge to this philosophy of virtue-in-abstinence. Ivan feels that all actions are acceptable in the absence of God. This inspires his half-brother Smerdyakov to kill the old man, frame Dmitri and believe himself justified by both the will and the ethics of Ivan, who is to him a kind of god. Ivan regards his self-constructed virtues as the highest arbiters of his conduct. This pride—surely the deadliest of all sins—removes any possibility of external forgiveness should Ivan ever consider himself to have sinned against his own abstract ideals. Once the self is disillusioned, there can be no salvation.

Such becomes the case with Ivan. Dimly aware of Smerdyakov’s plans, he leaves town, a ‘sign’ later cited by Smerdyakov as the catalyst to murder. Once Ivan realizes his culpability his veneer is cracked, for despite his intentions he has committed murder. Failing to live up to the impossible standard he has set for himself, Ivan can look to no one—least of all to himself—for forgiveness. At best he can turn himself over to the law, confess his crime, be sent to Siberia and hope for surrogate forgiveness through legal punishment.

Smerdyakov, however, hating Ivan for ‘ordering’ the murder and then repudiating the instrument of his will, has killed himself to ensure that Ivan’s confession will never be believed. In the existentialist-Christian framework this should not matter. If Ivan had Christian faith he could believe that his soul might again be cleansed, that God would remake his soul if he would but acknowledge his sin and beg forgiveness. But Ivan does not believe this, having closed himself to the possibility of a loving God. The ultimate despair of guilt without hope of forgiveness means he must punish himself to uphold his rigorous ethic. This despair of self-loathing leaves him perpetually “at death’s door.”5

The word ‘despair’ is French for ‘lack of hope,’ and were Dmitri and Ivan the only brothers despair might well be man’s fate in The Brothers Karamazov. Fortunately, there is a third philosophy at work. While certain Greek philosophy agrees with Ivan that the soul and body must be separate and isolated, the Judeo-Christian tradition maintains that soul and body are one,6 just as Christ was wholly spirit and wholly matter. Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky, a Lutheran and Russian Orthodox respectively, base their philosophies within this tradition, concluding that love, unconditional and divine, is the bridge between the temporal and the divine.

Dostoyevsky illustrates this with an anecdote from Father Zossima, one of the most spiritual figures in the text. Once, a prominent visitor came to him and confessed a great crime, the undetected murder of a lover.7 Years had passed; the Visitor had married, sired children and undertaken arduous community service, “Hoping that by entering on a new life and scrupulously doing his duty to his wife and children he would escape from the old memories altogether.”8

This attempt to become a new self fails in light of his inability to disassociate himself from the crime. Since he was at that moment a murderer, he cannot help but see every action of his life as the action of a murderer. This is Dostoyevsky’s Hell, the state of being incapable of loving and being genuinely loved: “My wife loves me—but what if she knew. How dare I love [my children], teach and educate them, how can I talk to them of virtue?”9

He has but one recourse: confess everything, admit that he is only a murderer at heart, and resign himself to the judgment of his community. His confession brings with it great disgrace. “My wife, my children! My wife may die of grief, my children…they’ll be a convict’s children—forever! And what a memory, what a memory of me I shall leave in their hearts!”11 Yet Zossima encourages him to confess all, that in so doing he must have trust in the love of God as reciprocated through his brethren, that “all will understand your sacrifice if not at once, they will understand later; for you have served truth, the higher truth, not of the Earth…Your children will understand the nobility of your resolution.”12

This is Dostoyevsky’s existentialist vision of true faith: seeing one’s despair, acknowledging it, submitting to it and admitting that one has absolutely no hope at all, save the unfathomable intervening possibility of God’s love. Ivan had no faith in a similar situation and suffered for it, but faith this Visitor has. His confession is delivered yet not believed, his relations to his wife and children are unharmed and in fact improved. The Visitor was prepared to sacrifice their love for him so that he might prove his love for them, but now God has given him back both the love he risked and a genuine love he can impute to his family. After all these years, he can say, “I dare to love my children and kiss them.”13

Almost immediately after this revelation, the monk Zossima succumbs to illness and dies, leaving behind an odor of decay which, to Russian Orthodox monks, is a sign of an unholy life.14 Alyosha, who has struggled to align the spiritual and the worldly Karamazov sides of his self, is crushed. 15 The spiritual aspect of Zossima’s holiness failed to correspond to its physical nature. Disillusioned and cynical, Alyosha is granted a vision of Father Zossima presiding at the Wedding of Cana.16 This miracle is more than a mere family favor; it is an illustration of Christ’s pouring of new holy wine into corrupt earthen vessels, the Divine mixing with the lowly through the simple faith of Christ’s mother.

The earthly and the heavenly are to be combined, not as they pertain to miracles as signs of piety but as they pertain to the ideal of living a holy life on earth, of taking the impermanence of this earthly life and associating it with the love of God. This love gives all things a measure of the eternal and Zossima exhorts the monks to love everyone and everything unconditionally. By giving ourselves wholly to God we re-interpret all that is earthly through the dictates of His love and so grant earthly things eternity in our minds. Alyosha leaves, having achieved within himself the formula for synthesis:

 

The silence of earth seemed to melt into the silence of the heavens. The mystery of the Earth was one with the mystery of the stars, [he] vowed passionately to love [the earth], to love it forever and ever. ‘Water the earth with the tears of your joy and love those tears’ echoed in his mind.17

 

When Christ washed the feet of harlots, cleansed the lepers and brought wine to a relative’s wedding, He did so out of His supreme love. Actions as temporal occurrences were made eternal by God’s love. The name Karamazov as a designator of worldliness has been embraced by Dmitri and ineffectively spurned by Ivan. Only Alyosha has succeeded in cleansing the name by taking this worldliness and transforming it into a desire to serve God. This is the only successful synthesis.

In the Epilogue Alyosha presides over a troop of boys attending the funeral of a classmate, an initially spiteful boy they once ridiculed but came to love once they understood him. That love and forgiveness enabled the boy to die at peace with himself and the world.18 Alyosha gives a speech exhorting the boys to remember, to create an unchanging recollection in their minds of “how good it was once here, when we were all together, united by a good and kind feeling which made us, for the time we were loving that poor boy, better perhaps than we are.”19

Dostoyevsky has taken the love of the individual-God relationship and used it to bind a congregation of twelve disciples through agape (unconditional) love, a modern vision of the apostolic Church based upon a sacred memory of shared unity in love.20 Later on the boys might be tempted to lose themselves, to fall into despair, to act wickedly and think such wickedness is their fate. But if this occurs, they can look back to this funeral where they embodied the love of God and were uplifted by it. Verily this is Dostoyevsky’s meaning of ‘sacred:’ a moment of self-actualization which, though steeped in mortality, will give meaning to the rest of one’s life and thus become eternal:21

You must know that there is nothing higher and stronger and more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially a memory of childhood, of home…Since if a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us….Who, if not [Aloysha], the good boy, the dear boy, precious to us forever! Let us never forget him. May his memory live forever in our hearts from this time forth!22

A story in the novel is told in which a wicked woman dies, but not before giving an onion to a beggar in charity. She is sent to Hell, but the onion is lowered down to her by an angel. She grabs hold and begins to be lifted up but, feeling the weight of other sinners trying to grab onto her salvation, she yells that the onion is hers. Instantly it breaks, and she is eternally damned. More than any other passage, this parable reveals the vision of salvation in The Brothers Karamazov. An onion is held up to God for blessing before it is given to a beggar, or in the case of Alyosha, a terminally-ill boy is comforted in his final days. Seeing this effort, others join in with the original onion-bearer; in this, case little boys assist Alyosha in his efforts. This fellowship is not to be spurned but welcomed, for it forms a memory of a spiritual event which can later be considered sacred, an event which gives purpose to one’s whole life.

Modern Christianity seems fascinated with drawing doctrinal dialectics: ‘faith versus works’ has today given way to ‘service vs. contemplation,’ ‘missions vs. morality,’ ‘community vs. communion,’ ‘orthodox vs. liberal’ et cetera. Yet with all the discord it seems the true dialectic has been ignored. Mankind’s kokoro is indeed sick, and perhaps the answer lies in something as simple as an onion.


  1. Kathryn Schulz, “Did Antidepressants Depress Japan?” The New York Times, August 22, 2004.
  2. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Random House, 1950), 108.
  3. Richard Dreyfus, “Existentialism in Literature and Film: Brothers Karamazov, Part I” (lecture from Philosophy 7 class, University of California, Berkeley, February 27, 2006).
  4. Brothers Karamazov, 281.
  5. Ibid., 937.
  6. “Existentialism, Part I.”
  7. Brothers Karamazov, 365.
  8. Ibid., 367.
  9. Ibid., 367.
  10. “And I’ve been punished by my sufferings for the blood I shed. Need I confess, need I? I am ready to go on suffering all my life for the blood I have shed, if only my wife and children may be spared.” Brothers Karamazov, 370.
  11. Brothers Karamazov, 373.
  12. Ibid., 369.
  13. Ibid.
  14. Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Gospel in Dostoyevsky, ed. Malcolm Muggeridge (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1988), 207.
  15. “Existentialism, Part I.”
  16. Brothers Karamazov, Part Three Book VII chapter 4. The vision concerned is found in John 2:1-11.
  17. Brothers Karamazov, 436.
  18. Ibid., 938
  19. Ibid., 938.
  20. “Existentialism, Conclusion.”
  21. Ibid.
  22. Brothers Karamazov, 938-9.

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