Parallel lines extend along the graph
and far as eyes can see draws mystery.
All our lives we wonder if this paragraph
is the final or the first of history.
We see both hell and heaven occupied
and know the perfect judge of all must be
by justice or by mercy glorified—
he sits over both camps sovereign equally.
Unblushing, God seeks not man’s suggestion—
both willing and unwilling tongues will call him Lord.
We are villains all, and thus should question,
“How can he spare even one soul from the sword?”
Somehow, the Euclidian lines will cross;
somehow, He will make sense from senseless loss.
While writing this sonnet I remembered the scene from The Brothers Karamazov in which the devoted Alyosha is presented with the problem of evil by his intellectual atheistic brother Ivan. In that conversation, Ivan rejects the idea of ultimate reconciliation, that there is any future good that could excuse the depths of human suffering in this present age. He refuses to accept the idea that the Euclidean (parallel) lines could cross and he teases Alyosha who is clearly unequipped to answer his elder brother’s philosophical objections to Christian Theism. Ultimately, I believe that Alyosha offered the perfect answer to Ivan’s outcry for justice although it did not seem like much of a rhetorical victory at the time. Referencing a case where a ruthless Aristocrat had a young boy torn to pieces by his hunting dogs, he simply replies, “He should be shot.”
The section from The Brothers Karamazov is in the chapters Pro and Contra and The Grand Inquisitor. I’ve recorded a few especially powerful quotes from Ivan below.
“Listen! I took the case of children only to make my case clearer. Of the other tears of humanity with which the earth is soaked from its crust to its centre, I will say nothing. I have narrowed my subject on purpose. I am a bug, and I recognise in all humility that I cannot understand why the world is arranged as it is. Men are themselves to blame, I suppose; they were given paradise, they wanted freedom, and stole fire from heaven, though they knew they would become unhappy, so there is no need to pity them. With my pitiful, earthly, Euclidian understanding, all I know is that there is suffering and that there are none guilty; that cause follows effect, simply and directly; that everything flows and finds its level—but that’s only Euclidian nonsense, I know that, and I can’t consent to live by it! What comfort is it to me that there are none guilty and that cause follows effect simply and directly, and that I know it?—I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself. I have believed in it. I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair. Surely I haven’t suffered simply that I, my crimes and my sufferings, may manure the soil of the future harmony for somebody else. I want to see with my own eyes the hind lie down with the lion and the victim rise up and embrace his murderer. I want to be there when everyone suddenly understands what it has all been for. All the religions of the world are built on this longing, and I am a believer. But then there are the children, and what am I to do about them? That’s a question I can’t answer.
[…]
Oh, Alyosha, I am not blaspheming! I understand, of course, what an upheaval of the universe it will be when everything in heaven and earth blends in one hymn of praise and everything that lives and has lived cries aloud: ‘Thou art just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed.’ When the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord!’ then, of course, the crown of knowledge will be reached and all will be made clear. But what pulls me up here is that I can’t accept that harmony.