Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Argument

Dostoevsky is the novelist who most fully inhabits the terrain that literary apologetics exists to explore. He was a man who lost his faith, stood before a firing squad, recovered his faith in the years of Siberian imprisonment that followed, and then spent the rest of his life writing novels that test that faith against the hardest arguments available to him. He gave the best lines to the atheists because he wanted to know if Christianity could survive them.

The Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov is the most powerful literary argument against Christianity ever written, and it is written by a Christian novelist who puts it in the mouth of a character whose position he ultimately rejects. Ivan's argument is not refuted by logic. It is answered by Alyosha's kiss — by the presence of love that the argument cannot account for. This is Dostoevsky's method: he lets the argument run until it exhausts itself, and then he shows what the argument cannot contain.

For literary apologetics, Dostoevsky is the master. He understood that the great questions — about suffering, about freedom, about the existence of God — cannot be settled by argument alone. They must be lived through. His novels are not illustrations of theological positions. They are theological positions, arrived at through the full pressure of imagined experience.