THE CHURCH AND THE FUTURE OF HUMANITY IN F.M. DOSTOEVSKY’S “THE BROTHERS KARAMAZOV”
Dostoevsky actively expressed his social and political ideas in later years, in particular in the novel The Brothers Karamazov. At the center of Dostoevsky's reflections is the problem of the essence and historical role of the church. The church question is raised in an article by one of the heroes of the novel, Ivan Karamazov, which discusses the question of the church-public court, leading to a more general problem of the role of the church in society and history. Ivan Karamazov puts forward in the article the concept of the church, which expresses Dostoevsky's convictions and coincides with the concept of theocracy of Vladimir Soloviev. According to this concept, the church is the ideal form of communication between people who have achieved perfection in earthly life, that is, who have revealed God in themselves. The church understood in this way does not coincide with the real Orthodox Church and will become possible only in the distant future of mankind. When such an ideal church arises, it will make the state and all traditional church institutions based not on freedom but on the principle of authority unnecessary. In the novel, Ivan Karamazov, as a writer expressing this ideal perspective for the development of mankind, is contrasted with Ivan as a real person who lacked faith in the basic premise without which this theocratic utopia is unattainable; this premise is belief in immortality, in eternal life. This leads Ivan to three serious consequences: the proclamation of the principle "everything is allowed", the impossibility of coming to terms with the evil that is happening in the world, and the recognition of the eternity of the authoritarian form of governing people, expressed in the Poem about the Grand Inquisitor. Dostoevsky believed that the future of humanity does not need the traditional forms of church and state, the only thing that is necessary is the disclosure of God in oneself and the becoming of man as a God-man, but this path is fraught with great risk, since there is always a danger of the subordination of the divine principle in oneself to the lower ones, selfish values, in this case a person will become a man-god. The only reliable criterion for distinguishing these paths and the basis for choosing the right path is faith in eternal life.