"You see, like you I suffer from the fantastic and therefore I love the realism of the earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here everything is formulated and geometric, while not we have nothing but indeterminate questions!" (said to Ivan from "The Devil", 776) Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Through Ivan, Dostoevsky asks an impossible question that targets the mystery of faith, the mystery of being able, paradoxically, to accept something that defies logic. Ivan desperately wants to believe; he has a strong mystical element in his character, but is tormented at the same time by a bitterly imperative sense of rationality. This duality is his torment, his personal paradoxical hell; his rational mind makes him incapable of accepting the God he so wants to believe in. The complex nature of his character is such that this void is, for him, torture. In his simplest feelings, Ivan wants to believe in God with the same sincere faith as Alyosha. But in his fatal inclination to measure his mysticism with his rationality, he eliminates space for something so enigmatic and incomprehensible, so "indeterminate" as faith. Ivan's difficulty is not that he doesn't believe in God (on the contrary, it is his belief in God that tears his soul apart), but that he cannot accept "God's world". What prevents Ivan from perceiving the comfort of faith is his failure to accept the illogicality of a world that, among other transgressions of reason, would allow children to suffer. Nor can he accept the idea of ​​ultimate harmony in the Kingdom of God if it comes at such a damaging cost as the suffering of even an innocent child. That God would allow such horror defies Ivan's stubborn and severe sense of logic. Ivan struggles, stuck "halfway" between faith and despair. He loves life, but cannot reconcile the fact that he loves it "...regardless of logic..." (274). He cannot affirm or even justify his love for the "...sticky leaves that open in spring..." (273) because it is devoid of reason or rational "meaning". Ivan reveals himself most often not through direct dialogue, (in conversation he is elusive and hidden), but through strange parables and visions. In his account of "The Grand Inquisitor," Ivan reveals the true and tortuous nature of his relationship with God. In his fantastic "poem," Ivan recounts an encounter between the Grand Inquisitor and Christ at the height of the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. . Christ has returned to earth and is mysteriously recognized by all who see him, including the Grand Inquisitor himself, who orders him seized and imprisoned; a "dialogue" follows between the two men. The tale is a representation of the elements that are at war within Ivan. The Inquisitor is Ivan's implacable logical mind, and Christ represents Ivan's faith: silent and unable to answer any questions, but always undeniably, maddeningly present. Ivan's logic is bitterly furious with God, because it is God's existence that is the center of the paradox that tormented him. The Inquisitor rebukes God for condemning man with the freedom that makes him so unhappy. The Inquisitor even mocks God, mocking him, boasting of having made him obsolete: "...and we will have an answer for everyone. And they will be happy to believe our answer, because it will save them from great anxiety and terrible agony that they currently endure in making a free decision for themselves..." (308). Ivan is fatally trapped between faith and reason, and blames God. "The heart has its reasons that reason cannot know." Ivan's dilemma is that he doesn't allow his "heart" - his "reason" to know everythingit made him a man incapable of justifying even the most instinctive of his beliefs; for Ivan as an intellectual, existing without even believing in existence is torture. Father Zossima discerns this torture in Ivan in the "unfortunate meeting" between the elder and the Karamazov family. In this revealing scene, Zossima highlights the paradox that torments Ivan's soul, the eternal paradox of the question of the existence of God: "... the question still torments your heart... in your desperation, even you enjoy the magazine articles and discussions in society, even if you don't believe your own arguments and with a pained heart you mock them inside yourself... That question you haven't answered, and it's your great pain, because it demands an answer. It cannot be decided in the affirmative." (79) By the same brutally rigid sense of logic that prevents Ivan from committing himself to the certainty of God's existence, he can never commit himself to the certainty of His non-existence. However, it is not Ivan's inability to commit to the existence of God that leads to his spiritual and mental collapse, rather his inability to commit to humanity. According to Dostoevsky, faith in God and faith in man are consecutive and interdependent, and for Ivan the lack of one led to the lack of the other. Of the two, it is his lack of faith in humanity that proves more fatal to Ivan. When Smerdjakov confesses to the murder of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, Ivan is forced to recognize his criminal irresponsibility. Ivan's soul is shaken to realize that all those evenings around the dinner table where he talked about empty philosophies and meaningless conclusions, as if life were nothing more than a game of logic, there was someone who took every word for truth, as if it had come from "God Almighty" (737). "For any individual... who does not believe in God or immortality... crime must become not only permissible but also recognized as the inevitable, the most rational and even honorable result of his position. There is no virtue if there is no immortality."(79) It is this absolutism that tears Ivan's soul apart. For Ivan there are only two possibilities: either God does not exist and everything is permissible, or God exists together with Absolute Virtue. There is no middle ground, because giving up the absolute means throwing yourself into the impossible paradox: God exists, but no virtue exists and everything is permissible. But Ivan cannot give up his absolutist logic, and it is because of this profound lack of faith that Ivan speaks and, unconsciously, "... drives [Smerdyakov] to murder..." (751). By visiting Smerdyakov, then, Ivan is facing the embodiment of the evil fruits of his reasoning mind. In his logical scheme of the world, Ivan has neglected to give validity to life and humanity, although he remains a part of life and humanity despite his self-imposed exile in the cold realm of intellect and reason. Listening to Smerdjakov's confession, Ivan must come to terms with the fact that he has not been isolated by the man. He finally understands that "...we are all responsible to everyone and for everyone..." (362), and that he has shamefully shirked his responsibility. Ivan's miserable guilt goes beyond the murder of his father; he understands that he is guilty of invalidating humanity, and his only redemption is to confess his part in his father's murder, and thus begin to accept his acknowledged responsibility. Symbolizing his decision to accept his duty to humanity, Ivan, on the way to his final interview with Smerdyakov, spends an hour helping the farmer he had previously trampled in the snow find warmth and shelter. At this point, Ivan has jumped from the rational extreme to the mystical and human extreme of his fatal absolutism. In a final strange parable, Ivan.