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

“He began to understand Ivan’s illness. ‘The torments of a proud decision, a deep
conscience!’ God, in whom he disbelieved, and his truth were overcoming his heart,
which still did not want to submit. ‘Yes,’ it passed through Alyosha’s head, which was
already lying on the pillow, ‘yes, with Smerdyakov dead, no one will believe Ivan’s
testimony; but he will go and testify!’ Alyosha smiled gently. ‘God will conquer!’ he
thought. ‘He will either rise into the light of truth, or… perish in hatred, taking revenge
on himself and on everyone his having served something he does not believe in,’ Alyosha
added bitterly, and again he prayed for Ivan.” 58
Alyosha is again shown to be a realist: he knows that no one will believe Ivan. That
“God will conquer!” is by no means assured, as Alyosha recognizes himself, but this does seem
to be the issue upon which the fate of Ivan’s sanity rests. We leave Ivan after the trial, suffering
from brain fever, his ultimate fate unknown. His fate, and that of Alyosha and Dmitri might
have been resolved in the second part of the novel that Dostoevsky did not live to write.
II.
Evil may well be the privation of the good, but most of us can no more accept this
statement than accept the notions of a theodicy. In many ways, the reification of evil is precisely
the failure of theodicy to convince. To accept either one would be to declare that “God will
conquer!” – and not even Alyosha is sure that He will. And how could Alyosha, or anyone else,
be sure? The evidence all seems against it: the devil seems real, and God seems absent.
Contrary to these appearances is Thomistic realism 59 : the view of God as Being, and hence, the
Real – in fact, reality itself, and in a higher degree than all other being, which only participates
God’s being. But like the apostle Thomas, we see only once we believe. Rather than seeing God
as the real, we reify the devil.
What is so unusual, so startling and original about Dostoevsky’s 60 devil is that he is such
a complete non-entity: a nothing, a nobody, a dork, dweeb, dufus, schlemiel. The diminutive
devils of Dostoevsky and Mann bear a striking resemblance to what Hannah Arendt described in
Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 61 The man she saw on trial was an
utter mediocrity – an efficient, albeit high-level, bureaucrat, who ran the workings of the
holocaust as just another job. Like Eichmann (in Arendt’s view), the devils of Dostoevsky and
Mann are Augustinian: they are evil by virtue of the privation of being and goodness. Contrast