This article compares Dostoevsky’s reverent depiction of the human yearning for belief with Henry Miller’s scathing rejection of it. While Miller sees the search for meaning as self-deceiving, Dostoevsky honours it as a vital and dignified part of being human. The piece argues that, despite the pull of nihilism, the refusal to stop seeking meaning reveals something essential about the human spirit.
Something is disquieting about reading two writers who see straight into the abyss but come away with opposite verdicts on what it means to be human. Fyodor Dostoevsky and Henry Miller both understood that people will go to great lengths to escape the harsh reality of suffering. Yet where Miller scorns this impulse, Dostoevsky treats it as a tragic necessity, even a sign of grace.
It is a comparison worth making, because it illuminates the tension that has never left modern life: the impulse to strip meaning away and the refusal to live without it.
Not Two Spirits, But Three
In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov’s turmoil is not a tidy debate between faith and doubt. He says to his interlocutor:
“Not two, sir, but three spirits contend within me. The first is the spirit of reason and disbelief. The second is faith. And the third… the third is that longing, irrational and irresistible, to believe anyway, to believe in miracles even when I know they are impossible.”
There is no neat dualism. Ivan perceives the human heart as a theatre of conflicting actors, each with its claim. His rational mind cannot accept the existence of a loving God when children are tortured and the innocent are crushed. His religious conscience feels the unbearable loss of meaning if God is declared dead. And the third spirit is perhaps the most human of all: the wish to believe despite everything, to reach for a purpose that can reconcile all the cruelty with some unseen design.
Dostoevsky does not pretend this conflict can be resolved. He shows it as the very substance of spiritual life, the pain that proves we are alive to the question of what is good and true.
The Hunger for Roses
Henry Miller, in Tropic of Cancer, looks on this same yearning with a cold eye. He writes:
“The monstrous thing is not that men have created roses out of this dung heap, but that, for some reason or other, they should want roses. For some reason or other man looks for the miracle, and to accomplish it he will wade through blood. He will debauch himself with ideas, he will reduce himself to a shadow if for only one second of his life he can close his eyes to the hideousness of reality. Everything is endured, disgrace, humiliation, poverty, war, crime, ennui, in the belief that overnight something will occur, a miracle, which will render life tolerable.”
There is no sympathy in this observation, only a hard disgust. Miller sees the hunger for beauty and meaning as a form of self-abasement. The very fact that people keep reaching for roses is to him a sign of weakness, a refusal to look plainly at the dung heap and call it by its name.
His tone is not only critical but almost triumphant in its exposure of the illusion. If the miracle is never coming, then the game is up, and at least one can walk unburdened by hope.
At the Edge of Nihilism
It is tempting to admire Miller’s candour. After all, there is real courage in refusing to prettify existence. He is not wrong that people will endure every degradation if it keeps alive the possibility of some final redemption.
Yet there is something incomplete in this verdict. If the search for the miracle is nothing more than a delusion, one must still account for its universality. Why do even the most rational minds harbour the third spirit Ivan names? Why do people keep looking for roses in the dung heap, century after century?
Miller would say it is weakness, the last refuge of frightened animals. Dostoevsky would say it is proof that we are more than animals. The inability to accept a world without grace is not merely a defect in human reasoning. It is a sign of the soul’s refusal to be satisfied by explanations that end in nothing.
The Refusal to Settle
This is where Dostoevsky stands apart. He is willing to go to the edge of nihilism but never quite crosses it. The yearning that Miller calls monstrous is, to Dostoevsky, the most essential thing about us.
To want roses in a dung heap is not absurd. It is a declaration that the heart knows something the intellect cannot demonstrate. However contradictory it may seem, this longing is not just a private fantasy. It is what has built cathedrals, inspired acts of compassion, and kept people alive through darkness that would flatten any merely rational creature.
Conclusion: The Dignity of Yearning
In the end, the contrast between these two visions leaves us with no final answer. Perhaps that is the point. There is a real clarity in Miller’s refusal to pretend, but there is also a real poverty in it. To declare the search for miracles a fool’s errand is to deny something basic and irreplaceable in the human spirit.
Dostoevsky, for all his anguish, recognises that this search is not a sickness to be cured. It is an essential, dignified part of what makes us human. The yearning to find meaning, to hope that the darkness is not the final word, is not merely a consolation. It is the heart’s way of declaring that the world must be more than it seems.
Whether that is true in the end is a question that no philosophy can settle. But to keep asking it is perhaps the most human act of all.
It is an essential, dignified part of what makes us human.
In the words of Bill:
Russian novels are like: let’s go and find God. But the only thing we can actually find on earth is earth, because God is detached from it. Still, we believe in God regardless… because, deep down, we’re beautiful people. I think there’s hope in the despair, and that’s quite Catholic. You can’t have beauty without sin always just around the corner. Maybe that’s a subjective illusion, but I still find it rather pretty.