Dostoevsky: Without God, Everything Is Permitted

Original Text

— Без бога-то и без будущей жизни? Ведь это, стало быть, теперь всё позволено, всё можно делать?

— Фёдор Достоевский, Братья Карамазовы, книга XI, глава 4 («Гимн и секрет»). The words belong to Dmitri Karamazov, who is retelling, for Alyosha, his conversation with Rakitin; the doctrine itself originates with Ivan Karamazov.

Translation

"But how will man be after that? Without God and the future life? It means everything is permitted now, one can do anything?"

— Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Book XI, Chapter 4, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990).

Constance Garnett's classic translation renders the same exchange: "But what will become of men then? ... without God and immortal life? All things are lawful then, they can do what they like?" — "Didn't you know?" he said laughing, "a clever man can do what he likes." Where Garnett uses "lawful," Pevear and Volokhonsky use "permitted"; the Russian word позволено (pozvoleno) means "permitted" or "allowed." The often-quoted summary "If God does not exist, everything is permitted" is a paraphrase, not a sentence found verbatim in the novel; the closest wording is the dialogue quoted here, in which the idea is attributed to the influence of Ivan.

Context

The passage occurs in Part IV, Book XI, Chapter 4, in the prison where Dmitri Karamazov awaits trial for the murder of his father, Fyodor Pavlovich. He has just endured a visit from Rakitin, a cynical seminarian turned journalist, who has been lecturing him in the fashionable nihilism of the 1870s. Retelling the conversation to Alyosha, Mitya recalls pressing Rakitin on the consequences of atheism: if there is no God and no future life, then everything is permitted — "one can do anything." Rakitin's laughing reply — that everything is permitted to the intelligent man, and that Mitya has merely been stupid enough to get caught — sends Mitya into a fury, not because he disagrees but because he feels the truth of it pressing on him. The scene is one of several in which the novel makes the "everything is permitted" doctrine concrete: Ivan had first articulated it in his philosophical conversations with Alyosha (Book V, "Pro and Contra"), arguing that without immortality there is no virtue; the Grand Inquisitor's legend, which Ivan recites in the same book, dramatizes the human terror of freedom in a world where God is absent; and at the novel's climax (Book XI, Chapter 8), the servant Smerdyakov reveals that he murdered Fyodor Pavlovich precisely because Ivan's doctrine — "everything is permitted" — told him he could, and that Ivan secretly wished it. The phrase thus moves through the novel from theory (Ivan) to satire (Rakitin) to catastrophe (Smerdyakov), and Mitya's prison outburst is the hinge between them: the moment when the idea is spoken out loud, in its naked form, by a man who is about to be condemned.

Meaning

The meaning of the passage is inseparable from its dramatic function. On the surface, it states a moral thesis: if there is no God and no immortality, then no transcendent ground remains for moral obligation, and "everything is permitted." Dostoevsky takes this thesis with deadly seriousness. He does not treat it as a mere intellectual puzzle: the entire structure of the novel — Ivan's rebellion against a God who permits the suffering of innocent children, the Grand Inquisitor's argument that human beings prefer bread and authority to freedom, Raskolnikov's murder in the earlier Crime and Punishment, Kirillov's self-willed suicide in Demons — is designed to show what happens when the thesis is actually lived. The passage's second meaning is dramatic and ironic. It is spoken by Mitya, the least intellectual of the brothers, who is not an atheist at all but a passionate believer; and it is answered by Rakitin, who is not an "intelligent man" in any deep sense but a careerist hiding nihilism behind fashion. The conversation shows the idea in circulation, degraded from Ivan's tragic rebellion into a journalist's cynicism — and it foreshadows Smerdyakov, the fourth brother, who will take the degraded idea literally and act on it. The passage is therefore not only a statement of the problem of morality without God; it is a demonstration of how ideas pass from philosophy into life, and of Dostoevsky's conviction that the ideas men think become the acts men commit.

Philosophical Interpretation

The "everything is permitted" doctrine is the point at which Dostoevsky's novel becomes a philosophical event. In the history of existentialism, the passage stands behind some of the movement's central claims: Jean-Paul Sartre's insistence that, if God does not exist, man is "condemned to be free" and must invent his own values without excuse, and Albert Camus's analysis, in The Myth of Sisyphus and The Rebel, of the ethical consequences of the death of God. Camus read Dostoevsky closely: his The Rebel devotes sustained attention to Ivan Karamazov's rebellion and to the logic that leads from "everything is permitted" to the justification of murder — the very logic he saw at work in the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century. Nietzsche, who discovered Dostoevsky in 1887, recognized in the underground man a psychology of the will he felt was kin to his own, though Nietzsche drew the opposite conclusion: where Dostoevsky saw the denial of God as the destruction of morality, Nietzsche saw the "death of God" as the opportunity for the revaluation of all values. The philosophical stake of the passage is therefore double. On the one hand, it poses the question of moral foundations: if obligation has no transcendent ground, can it survive at all? On the other hand, it dramatizes the psychology of the answer: the man who says "everything is permitted" is not liberated but condemned — condemned to act without a standard and to be judged by a law he has abolished. Dostoevsky's own answer, given through Father Zosima and Alyosha, is that the only morality that can survive the death of the old guarantees is love — active, concrete, self-sacrificing love — which, unlike the "everything is permitted" of the intellect, is a force that binds rather than dissolves. The passage thus contains in miniature the entire debate that later existentialism would inherit: the question of whether meaning, faith, and suffering can survive the loss of their traditional grounds.

Related Concepts

• The Death of God: the premise of the passage and of modern nihilism — the absence of a transcendent ground of meaning and obligation.
• Everything Is Permitted: the formula, attributed to Ivan, for the moral consequence of atheism; it becomes real in Smerdyakov's murder.
• The Grand Inquisitor: Ivan's prose poem on freedom versus happiness, in which the Church corrects Christ by relieving men of the burden of freedom.
• Rebellion: Ivan's protest against a world in which innocent children suffer — the "returning of the ticket" to God.
• Freedom: the human capacity that makes both faith and sin possible, and that the Inquisitor says men cannot bear.
• Suffering as Purification: Dostoevsky's counter-thesis, that suffering is the soil of meaning and the path of redemption.

Related Learning Path

To understand the passage in context, read Book V of The Brothers Karamazov ("Pro and Contra"), which contains Ivan's "Rebellion" and the legend of the Grand Inquisitor, and then Book XI, Chapters 4–8. For the philosophical afterlife of the doctrine, see Camus's treatment of Ivan in The Rebel and of Kirillov in The Myth of Sisyphus, and compare Sartre's "existentialism is a humanism." In this archive, the existentialism topic, the existentialist wisdom and meaning and suffering collections, and the pages on faith, meaning, and suffering provide further orientation, together with the companion analysis of Dostoevsky on suffering.