[St_Thomas_Aquinas]

-— Fyodor Dostoevsky said (speaking of Marx, revolutionaries) they are not the devil but are of a mind with his mind. -—

Is that from “The Devils”?

I’d like to get an exact quote, if I can.

[spirited irish]

No, not from The Devils but Ellis Sandoz's "Political Apocalypse: A Study of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor." In his penetrating study, Sandoz reveals the Grand Inquisitor (in this case Marx) to be a god-man who has usurped the throne of God. He is a conscious swindler, a Big Liar who knows that God revealed through Jesus Christ exists, yet perversely chooses to rebel against and conceptually murder Him despite that he knows his own life is by the grace of the personal God of life and revelation. Sandoz writes that when Marx found himself compelled to negate his own being (inner person, soul/spirit, self) because of his perverse desire to show that "man owes his existence (only) to man," and to establish that the "entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the creation of man," he virtually recapitulated Aquinas' argument for the existence of God:

"A being only considers himself independent when he stands on his own feet; and he only stands on his own feet when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the grace of another regards himself as a dependent being (and) I live completely by the grace of another if I owe him not only the maintenance of my life, but if he has, moreover, created my life---if he is the source of my life. When it is not of my own creation, my life has necessarily a source of this kind outside of it. The creation is therefore an idea very difficult to dislodge from popular consciousness. The fact that nature and man exist in their own account is incomprehensible to it, because it contradicts everything tangible in practical life."(pp. 113-114)