Some people think Hell provides an answer to the problem of evil. The parents who tortured their 5-year old child will be punished with eternal damnation for their crime. Does that make it right? What is hell? It is only divine vengeance? Some people believe in vengeance. Ivan didn’t. Neither do I. Even if the vengeance is levied by God. Vengeance brings no justice. It heals nothing. It makes nothing right.
As Ivan asks of the hideously cruel parents who made their 5-year-old girl stay in the freezing cold stinking outhouse all night, begging gentle Jesus for help, what good does it to do put them in hell. Ivan asks this question: “What good would it do to send the monsters to hell after they have inflicted their suffering on children? How can their being in hell put things right?” That’s not the help the little girl was praying for from gentle Jesus. She wanted Jesus to stop the pain. And he failed at that.
Ivan asks another good question
“Besides, what sort of harmony can there be as long as there is a hell? To me harmony means forgiving and embracing everybody and I don’t want anyone to suffer any more. And if the suffering of little children is needed to complete the sum total of suffering to pay for the truth, I don’t want that truth, and I declare in advance that all the truth in the world is not worth the price!…No I want no part of any harmony; I don’t want it. I don’t want it out of love for mankind. I prefer to remain with my unavenged suffering and my unappeased anger—even if I happen to be wrong.
That is the truly amazing part of Ivan’s rebellion. Even if he is wrong and God provides a satisfactory answer for why he permitted children to suffer so cruelly, Ivan wants no part of that, even if he is wrong!
Unlike all the modern terrorists, or revolutionaries, he does not look for some harmony in the future to justify the pain. Nothing justifies the pain of that 5-year-old girl. “Such harmony is rather overpriced,” says Ivan.
Ivan tells his brother Alyosha that he is returning the ticket from God. Echoing, Albert Camus, Alyosha says “that is rebellion. Ivan finishes this discussion by asking Alyosha another question:
“…let’s assume that you were called upon to build the edifice of human destiny so that men would finally be happy and would find peace and tranquility. If you knew that in order to attain this, you would have to torture one single little creature, let’s say the little girl who beat her chest so desperately in the outhouse, and that on her unavenged tears you could have built that edifice would you agree to it?”
And Alyosha replied, “No I would not.” Even the one truly deeply religious and most saintly of the Karamazovs would not accept such a price.
As moral philosophers would say, that end does not justify that means!
And of course, neither Alyosha nor Ivan is like God—all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving. God should have been able to find a better way. Why didn’t he?
None of the Karamazovs are able to answer that question.