Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Struggle With Faith, by Gary Saul Morson (Northwestern):
The Russian novelist accepted the idea that belief includes doubt and embraces wonder.
As Fyodor Dostoevsky was taken to Siberia as a political prisoner in 1850, Natalya Fonvizina gave him a copy of the New Testament, the only book prisoners were allowed to have. It sustained him in adversity and led him to faith. Five years later, when Fonvizina was deeply depressed, Dostoevsky consoled her in what is doubtless the best-known letter in Russian literature.
Recalling his own days of despair, Dostoevsky explained that “at such moments one thirsts for faith like ‘parched grass,’ and one finds it at last because the truth becomes evident in unhappiness.” The faith Dostoevsky found resembled not an unshakable conviction but a struggle with doubt. “I will tell you that I am a child of this century, a child of disbelief and doubt,” he wrote. “I am that today and (I know) will remain so until the grave.”
Since the rise of modern science, educated people have often found it difficult to believe with calm certainty the ideal of their medieval predecessors. Like Dostoevsky, they experience a painful internal conflict. “How much terrible torture this thirst for faith has cost me even now, which is all the stronger in my soul the more arguments I find against it,” Dostoevsky wrote.
Readers of “The Brothers Karamazov” will recognize this same tortured struggle in its intellectual hero, Ivan.
To be sure, Dostoevsky writes to Fonvizina, God sometimes sends blissful moments when “I love and feel loved by others.” Then he affirms his own “credo”: Nothing is “more beautiful, profound, sympathetic . . . and more perfect than Christ.” …
This peculiar kind of faith, which consists partly of doubt, has become Dostoevsky’s trademark and explains why he has brought so many people to God. It is hard to imagine educated Westerners converted by Dante or Milton, for whom God’s existence was a simple fact. Dostoevsky’s idea that the essence of faith lies in the process of searching for it speaks to those who are also children of “disbelief and doubt.” …
Tolstoy once criticized Dostoevsky as “all struggle,” but it is that characteristic that explains why his ideas resonate with so many. Those who can’t view life with fashionable complacency, who understand that uncertainty can be a blessing and that no scientific discovery will ever reveal life’s meaning, find inspiration in Dostoevsky’s supremely paradoxical idea that true faith includes doubt and embraces wonder.
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