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I'm impressed, W. That was extremely well written.

It sounds like Dostoevsky wasn't really sure if he himself was good or evil. Sort of like Schroedinger's cat: without absolute knowledge, he wasn't good or evil, but half good and half evil. But since absolute knowledge is not possible in this life, these dualities will remain unresolved.

Dostoevsky understood the particular pleasure people felt when comitting acts of cruelty; the sheer frenzy and feeling of power it produced. It is a feeling not unlike that felt by the Al-Qaeda in the moments when the WTC collapsed. It is a feeling not unlike that which many have felt, delivering that one extra wallop on a beaten opponent; that one extra twist of the heel in the fallen foe's face. He understood this because he was a gambler and debauch who haunted low places.

Yet he also understood, partly from his underground days, how the impulse to the good and even the sublime can coexist in the same person. Dostoevsky famously said that man's soul is the battleground between God and the Devil; and knew this for a fact, because he had looked, without blinkers, into his own heart.

It is now fashionable to turn away from that sight; to regard it as irrelevant. We put our trust in diplomatic pieces of paper. We see the smiling face of Yasser Arafat, but avert our gaze from his soul. An irrelevancy.

But Robert Oppenheimer understood, moments after the Trinity Test, that although we had mastered physical nature, we had not tamed the beast within; that given a chance, the beast would emerge, seize our wonderous tools and turn it on ourselves.

Somewhere in Iraq, Saddam Hussein is turning on the lights in a warehouse that contains thousands of tons of anthrax pathogen, or something like it. Is he smiling or troubled? In the war between God and the Devil, the battlefield is the human heart.

One of the things you take away from The Grand Inquisitor is how strong Dostoevsky's faith must have been after all. The critique Ivan levels at Christianity is one that not many faithful people can deal with, let alone conceive and put on the page.