The reflection of Spinoza-Leibniz theodicy debate in Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”

In Dostoevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”, Ivan Karamazov refutes Leibniz's theodicy by claiming that knowledge of good and evil is not worth a single tear of the tormented child. Instead Ivan proposes the idea of “Grand Inquisitor,” which would relieve humans from cognition of good and evil in exchange for their freedom. Dostoevsky shows that there are only two ways to justify freedom in the classical theodicy – you either exercise your radical freedom and take all the sins of humanity upon yourself, as Dostoevsky himself proposes, or demolish the freedom of will completely, and erase with it the whole category of moral responsibility – as the Grand Inquisitor does. The second solution is very similar to Spinoza’s ethics, where natural necessity depriving people of free will also cancels their moral notions. What Dostoevsky has represented as an antitheodicy resulting from the immorality of philosophy of his century was already proposed two centuries before by Spinoza. In this respect, Spinoza’s criticism of anthropomorphic morality, taken purely on the normative grounds, can be seen as one of the most radical responses to the problem of evil in his history of philosophy.