Dostoyevsky and Simone Weil: A Response to the Problem of Evil
Israel Centeno
The problem of evil remains the most visceral challenge to belief in God. Ivan Karamazov’s rebellion in The Brothers Karamazov still resonates with those who refuse to accept a world where children suffer, where cruelty appears to be woven into existence itself. Ivan rejects God’s “ticket” to such a world, refusing to justify suffering, even if redemption and eternal harmony are promised in the end. Many today take his position, seeing traditional theodicies as cold abstractions detached from real human anguish.
Dostoyevsky did not shy away from this challenge—he made it central to his work. But neither did Simone Weil, a thinker whose entire life revolved around suffering, grace, and the radical demands of love. If Dostoyevsky provides the literary response to Ivan’s rebellion, Weil offers the philosophical and mystical one. Together, they form a vision of suffering and God that neither justifies nor dismisses evil, but transforms the question itself.
Dostoyevsky’s Warning: What Happens When We Reject God
In the censored final chapter of The Demons (The Possessed), Dostoyevsky unveils what happens when Ivan Karamazov’s rejection of God is put into practice. Stavrogin’s confession of depravity, his eerie detachment, and his final suicide show that rejecting God’s world does not eliminate suffering—it deepens it. Prince Pyotr Verkhovensky’s revolutionary nihilism is a logical extension of Ivan’s intellectual rebellion: if there is no divine order, then all things are permitted, including manipulation, destruction, and mass murder.
Dostoyevsky does not provide an easy justification for evil. Instead, he forces us to look at it unflinchingly. What he offers is not an argument against Ivan’s rejection of God, but a demonstration of where that rejection leads: a world where suffering is not answered by redemption, but by despair.
Simone Weil: Love in the Void
Weil takes Dostoyevsky’s confrontation with suffering even further. She does not reject Ivan’s horror at evil—she shares it. But instead of rejecting God’s ticket, she suggests something radical: that God Himself has already renounced it.
For Weil, the essence of Christianity is decreation—God’s self-emptying, His withdrawal so that creation can exist. Evil is not an intellectual puzzle to be solved but the very condition of a world where God has given space for freedom. Like Dostoyevsky, Weil does not seek to explain suffering; instead, she insists that suffering is where we meet God most fully. She writes:
“The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it.”
This is what Ivan refuses to accept: that suffering is not an argument against God but the place where God is most present. Weil, deeply influenced by the Cross, argues that Christ does not simply suffer for us—He suffers with us.
The Cross: The True Scandal
For both Dostoyevsky and Weil, the real scandal is not evil, but the Incarnation. Ivan rejects God because of suffering, but the Christian response is that God does not merely allow suffering—He enters into it. He does not justify suffering from a distance but takes it upon Himself.
Weil takes this further: she argues that to love as Christ loves, we too must experience decreation. To accept suffering does not mean passivity or resignation, but allowing ourselves to be emptied of ego so that God may dwell in us. In Waiting for God, she writes:
“He who has not God within himself cannot bear suffering without hatred and resentment. He who has God within him can suffer and through his suffering, he increases infinitely his treasure of love.”
This is the answer Dostoyevsky gives in The Brothers Karamazov—not an abstract theodicy, but a personal response. Alyosha, unlike Ivan, does not try to explain suffering. He simply loves. He does not justify suffering—he enters into it, as Christ does.
A Choice: Despair or Transformation
Dostoyevsky and Weil do not try to erase the horror of suffering. They do not justify it in cold logical terms. But they both insist that suffering, instead of proving God’s absence, is the very space where He reveals Himself. The choice before us is the same one presented in The Brothers Karamazov:
• We can take Ivan’s path, rejecting God in the name of justice, but ending in despair.
• Or we can take the path of the Cross, where suffering is not erased but transfigured into love.
For Weil, the greatest act of love is attention—to suffer with others, to enter into their pain as God enters into ours. This is also Dostoyevsky’s vision: love does not eliminate suffering, but it redeems it.
So the problem of evil remains. But perhaps it is not a problem to be solved at all. Perhaps it is an invitation—to look at the Cross, to enter into love, and to meet God where we least expect Him: in the wounds of the world.
