In a forthcoming book of public letters exchanged by Bernard-Henri Lévy and Michel Houellebecq, I ran across this quote from The Brothers Karamazov: “People talk to you a great deal about your education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man carries many such memories with him into life, he is safe to the end of his days, and if one has only one good memory left in one’s heart, even that may sometime be the means of saving us.”

We often discuss the mystery of evil; this comment from Dostoevsky challenges us to investigate the even more profound mystery of good. I don’t think the author was indulging in our own age’s cloying romanticization of childhood; I think he was pointing to the striking fact that somewhere, deep in our memories, almost at the vanishing point, there is an image of things being as they should be. Examine the human condition — fear, hatred, envy, struggle, war, heartbreak, disease, death — and you will soon realize how unusual and counterintuitive this sense of the existence of good really is.  And yet, even in the condition the Calvinists unflinchingly describe as Total Depravity — the capital T in the Reformed TULIP — this sense persists.

It is the source of religion and love, and of the idea that transcending our state of war is not impossible.