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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 6 1tradition, it appears that the indifference of the philosopher towards his fellowbeings is what guards him from the path that begins with Job’s lamentationand can end with Ivan’s socialist state as the final and purely immanent historicalsolution to Job’s affliction. Strauss insists on the fact that whereas theclassical tradition was calmly reconciled with the impossibility of surpassingthe evil inherent in human nature, modernity has inherited its belief inman’s power to humanize his environment from Christianity’s eschatologicalexpectation. 173 For this reason, if it is a utopia, Plato’s Republic is not at allutopian in the sense of the word with which we have accustomed ourselvesat least since the French romantic utopian socialism which influenced theyoung Dostoyevsky, and with which Dostoyevsky kept sympathizing evenafter the utopian socialism of his youth had eventually evolved into Christianliturgical socialism. While today we instantly tend to associate utopia withradical democracy, Plato’s Republic is, on the contrary, a hierarchical utopia,articulated in response to the crisis of Athenian democracy, “conveying”at the same time “the broadest and deepest analysis of political idealism,”and therefore of its limits, that was “ever made.” 174 As for Ivan, in whom theconsciousness of the crisis of modernity reaches its culmination, he too isconvinced of the impossibility of overcoming the evil inherent in humannature, but he remains too rooted in the biblical tradition to calmly reconcilehimself to the world as it is. Thus, he is determined to go ahead with hisproject of ending human suffering, even if this means the dehumanizationof man, and to pursue his mutiny, even if he is aware that “one can’t live in astate of mutiny,” “even though,” concludes Ivan, “I am not right.” 175 Ultimately,the decisive element that triggers his psychological collapse and activates thespecter of a universal and perpetual tyranny is the loss of faith (“your Inquisitor,”says Alyosha, “doesn’t believe in God, that’s his whole secret!”) or hisrefusal to accept that the contradictions of this world are solved in “anotherworld”—a world to which the visible world is mysteriously bound in such away that the transfiguration of immanence by transcendence, as manifestedin the mystery of the incarnation, offers the mystical foretaste of the finaleschatological resolution of the problem of evil. 176 This is the Christian theologicalfoundation of Dostoyevsky’s practical response to the problem of eviland of his subsequent critique of modernity.173Tanguay, Leo Strauss, 114.174Strauss, The City and Man, 127; see also “Restatement,” 210.175Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 320.176Ibid., 415.