The Brothers Karamazov

by Fyodor Dostoevsky

In the majority of instances human beings, even the evil-doers among them, are far more naïve and straightforward than we suppose. And that includes ourselves.

Never be daunted by your own lack of courage in the attainment of love, nor be over-daunted even by your bad actions in this regard.

‘Where would an excommunicant go, I ask you? After all, then he would have to forsake not only his fellows, but Christ as well. You see, by his crime he would have risen in rebellion not only against his fellows, but against the Church of Christ. This is, of course, in the strict sense true even now, except that it is not publicly stated, and the conscience of the present-day criminal very often, exceedingly so, in fact, enters into bargains with itself, as if to say: “I may have committed theft, but I have no quarrel with the Church, I am no enemy of Christ.” That is what the present-day criminal quite frequently says to himself; well, and when the Church will have supplanted the State, then it will be difficult for him to say this without going against the whole of the Church over all the earth, as though he were to declare: “Everyone is wrong, everyone has strayed, everyone is a part of the false Church, and I alone, the murderer and thief, am the true Christian Church.”

And it transpires that, consequently, society is not safeguarded at all, for though one unhealthy limb is mechanically amputated and deported far away, out of sight, in its place there at once appears another criminal, and possibly even two. If there is anything that will safeguard society even in a time such as ours and will reform the criminal, making him evolve into a new person, it is again solely the law of Christ, manifesting itself in an awareness of one’s own conscience. Only in perceiving his guilt as a son of a Christian society – the Church, in other words – will he also perceive his guilt before society itself, before the Church, that is to say.

There are among them, however, though they are not many, a number of peculiar characters: these are people who believe in God and are Christians, yet are at the same time socialists. Now they are the ones who give us the worst headaches, they are a fearsome bunch! The socialist who is a Christian is more worthy of fear than the socialist who is an atheist.”

In a case like that, if a man falls in love with some beauty, with a female body, or even with a mere part of a female body (a voluptuary may understand what I mean), and then for her sake he’ll give up his own children, he’ll sell his own father and mother, Russia and the fatherland; where he was honest, now he’ll go thieving; where he was gentle, now he will kill, where he was faithful, now he’ll betray.