Alasdair MacIntyre concludes his groundbreaking, 1981 book After Virtue by playing on the title of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot. We are awaiting, MacIntyre famously (and cheekily) says, not Godot, but another St. Benedict, whose monastic, communal, and formative practices might form a virtuous people who have character amid the moral wreckage and fragmentation of modernity.
With all due respect to St. Benedict, the ominous shadow of AI and rapid technological transformations of human life have made me long for another saintly figure to arise: an Alyosha. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Ivan launches into a fiery tirade against the plausibility of Christian faith, especially in light of the unfathomable suffering of innocent children. The antiphonal response Dostoevsky provides to Ivan’s arguments is not a discursive but rather a narratival refutation: the elder Zosima and Ivan’s brother Alyosha dramatize a way of being in the world that is determined by participation in the grace of God. Ultimately, mercy abides, while Ivan’s atheistic libertinism and nihilism end in self-destructive madness.
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