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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 5 1there is an afterlife or not. Unjustifiable suffering, as described by Ivan, canbe explained either by the fact that the world is ruled by a tyrannical God,nay, by the devil himself, or by the fact that there is no God but only man’sexperience of meaningless suffering. In Ivan’s words, “the order of things”is nothing but “a disorderly, accursed and, possibly, devilish chaos.” 137 Aswe saw, this vision of the world, and the implicit demolition of theodicy, isat the origin of the Machiavellian project of conquering chance in order tohumanize man’s environment. Researches such as that of Hans Blumenberg,in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, have confirmed that the Enlightenment’santhropodicy has drawn its energy and legitimacy from the failureof theodicy, as manifested in the thirteenth-century eruption of theologicalvoluntarism that, Blumenberg argues, has practically transformed the ChristianGod into the malevolent demiurge of the Gnostics, with the differencethat, unlike the latter, the former also had the attribute of omnipotence. 138As an expression of a divided personality that ultimately goes insane, Ivan’sresponse to the collapse of theodicy and to the subsequent revelation of aGod-forsaken world appears contradictory inasmuch as, from a Straussianperspective on modernity, it includes both the initial response of the Enlightenment,originating in the Machiavellian revolution, and the later responseof an Enlightenment that culminates in its own nihilistic denial. Ivan’sresponse recapitulates modernity. On one hand, adding a moral connotationto the otherwise pragmatic and hedonistic project of the Enlightenment, Ivandeclares that he wants justice and the end of suffering “not at some place andsome time in infinity, but here upon earth.” 139 The universal socialist systemof the Grand Inquisitor is the practical response to Ivan’s pseudoeschatologicalexpectation. On the other hand, Ivan realizes that a future earthly bliss,like a future heavenly bliss, cannot possibly justify or redeem the evil that hastaken place, and that is unredeemable because it has already taken place andnothing in the world can change that. Consequently, secular faith in progresscollapses together with traditional faith in redemption, as Ivan comes to theconclusion that a more consistent response to the revelation of meaninglesssuffering in a meaningless world would be “to drown in depravity” and then“dash the cup to the floor” once he “attain[s] the age of thirty.” 140 Finally,137Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 300.138Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1995), 132–39, 142, 154–55, 161–62, 173; see also Michael Allen Gillespie, The TheologicalOrigins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 25–29.139Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 318.140Ibid., 343–44.