If people understood their true advantage, they would never act badly — so education and science will build a perfect society, the Crystal Palace. Dostoevsky’s The Underground Man replies that man’s most advantageous advantage is to act according to his own stupid will, even against his interest, just to prove he is not a piano key.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Russian novelist of the abyss — crime, faith, freedom, suffering — whose characters argue philosophy with their lives. Nietzsche called him the only psychologist he had anything to learn from.
Rodion Raskolnikov
Impoverished ex-student who murders a pawnbroker to prove he is an “extraordinary man” beyond morality — and is broken and reborn by his conscience.
Russian Nihilism
The 1860s movement of young Russian radicals who rejected tradition, religion, art and authority in the name of science, utility and the people.
Dayānanda Sarasvatī
The Gujarati ascetic (1824–1883) who founded the Ārya Samāj with the cry “Back to the Vedas!” — rejecting idol-worship, caste by birth, and the Purāṇas, and calling for a rational Vedic religion, education for women and the reconversion of those who had left Hinduism.
Summa Theologiae
Aquinas’s unfinished masterpiece — a systematic theology in some 3,000 articles, each a model of fair argument, synthesizing Aristotle and Christian revelation.
Sonya Reads Lazarus
In her bare room, by a candle-end, the prostitute Sonya reads the murderer Raskolnikov the Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus.