The Reification of Evil and The Failure of Theodicy: The Devil in ...

“The visitor spoke, obviously carried away by his own eloquence, raising his voice more
and more, glancing sidelong at his host; but he did not manage to finish: Ivan suddenly
snatched a glass from the table and flung it at the orator.
“‘Ah, mais c’est bête enfin,’ cried the latter, jumping up from the sofa and shaking
the spatters of tea off himself. ‘He remembers Luther’s inkstand! He considers me a
dream and he throws glasses at a dream!’” 52
Luther, at least, had the dull consistency of throwing his inkstand at something he believed to be
real. But Ivan throws things at the devil, as he also rails against the God in which he sometimes
seems not to believe. The conversation ends when Alyosha comes to Ivan’s room to tell him that
Smerdyakov has hanged himself. The appearance of the devil in Ivan’s chamber coincides
temporally with the death of Smerdyakov; and the devil has the same mocking, supercilious
attitude towards Ivan and dialectical subtlety that Smerdyakov had. Dostoevsky thus suggests
that Smerdyakov has somehow been transmogrified into the figure of the devil. The motivation
for Smerdyakov’s suicide is not stated, but the event is not really surprising, and seems to
coincide with Ivan’s long-postponed but final and decisive rejection of him. 53 Although Ivan
could not have known about Smerdyakov’s suicide, he nevertheless claims to have known:
“‘It’s a good that you’ve come,’ said Ivan, thoughtfully, as it were, seeming not to
have heard Alyosha’s exclamation. ‘I knew he had hanged himself.’
“‘From whom?’
“‘I don’t know from whom. But I knew. Did I know? Yes, he told me. He was
just telling me.’” 54
Alyosha is frightened by Ivan’s appearance and disorientation, and his words could hardly have
been reassuring. But what are we to think of this? Ivan sees that “no glass of tea had moved
from its place on the table, nor was there any nagging visitor sitting on the sofa facing him.”
Thus, Dostoevsky seems to reassure us that the devil was only part of Ivan’s dream. But the
matter is left unsettled. If the devil was not there and is not ontologically real, how does Ivan
know that Smerdyakov had killed himself? Ivan claims to know this, and while we can dismiss
this claim as a part of his incipient madness, there is some basis for this claim. When Ivan says,
“Yes, he told me”, the word “he” is ambiguous: it could mean “the devil” or “Smerdyakov”. The
devil did not literally tell Ivan about Smerdyakov’s suicide, but he did say something similar:
“But hesitation, suspense, conflict between belief and disbelief – is sometimes such torture to a
conscientious man, such as you are, that it’s better to hang oneself at once.” Thus, the devil’s
statement mentions not only suicide, but also the method that Smerdyakov used to commit