ABSTRACT
Since Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, we have had a century of learning in what Paul Ricoeur has dubbed the "school of suspicion," whose master teachers are Freud and Nietzsche. The critique of religious faith advanced by this school has taught theologians and philosophers of religion to ask: What is the religious meaning of atheism? If we turn to Dostoevsky's literary art—and especially The Brothers Karamazov—in the light of this question, we can see, first, that he anticipated it. Furthermore, what his art has to say about religious faith to our postreligious age might be more clearly heard if there is a shift of focus, away from the usual either-or structuring of the religious problematic to the dialectical nature of the relation between faith and atheism. In other words, we must give serious attention to Dostoevsky's own assertion that his Christian faith was "forged in the crucible of doubt"—an assertion that is not only autobiographical but also theological. 1
