The Brothers Karamazov

...But Christ is not an idea. This is surely the only way to explain the intellectually nonsensical behavior of Dmitri, who, though innocent, is willing to be guilty for all and before all; or of Father Zosima's advice that we should ask forgiveness "even from the birds;" or of Alyosha's final words, which close the book, about how resurrection does indeed exist: "Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see, and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been!" Such notions have really fallen off the cliff of ideas and into the realm of illogical, beautiful, desperate exhortation. Belief has smothered knowledge. And this exchange - of the unreason of Christianity for the reason of atheism - means finally that there can be no "dialogism" in this novel, either of the kind Bakhtin proposed or of the kind that Dostoevsky so dearly desired. There is neither a circulation of ideas nor an "answering" of atheism by Christianity. For the answer - the unreason of Christian love - no longer belongs to the realm of worldly ideas, and thus no longer belongs to the novel itself. It exists in paradise, and in that other, finally unnovelistic book, the New Testament.

- James Wood, The Irresponsible Self, pg. 74.