When I was eleven years old, God and I fell out of touch. I had just left my Jewish day school, which I loathed, and began bat mitzvah practice, which was even worse. Around the same time, a large tub, several cubic feet in volume and filled to the brim with my father’s old Superman comics, appeared in my home. I was tasked with rooting through them and seeing if they had any value. While most of them had negative inflation-adjusted retail profits, they were positively brimming with the type of moral value I craved.
Volumes of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels appeared on my bookshelf, too. They were from my mother’s collection, following her own interest in Russian literature during high school. Perhaps she sensed that I was struggling—we’d talked about God as we walked back to our car after synagogue one Saturday. She was the first person to tell me that it was okay for me to not believe in God. While I eventually returned to Judaism, the lessons of Superman, Dostoevsky, and my parents haven’t left me.
Like Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, the question at the heart of many Superman comics is how to be good in the face of the sins of your father. For some time now, I have been wrestling with the question of how to be good generally. I am familiar with all of God’s proscriptions on those matters, but I have, at one time or another, found them unsatisfying. The religious doubts of The Brothers Karamazov resonate with me. Basically, I find it hard to take advice on being good from the guy that did all that to Job. Instead, my moral models came from elsewhere: the planet Krypton, with help from the Karamazovs.
Dostoevsky began writing The Brothers Karamazov in the beginning of 1878. He wished to write a novel about children and childhood. “I am studying them, I have been studying them all my life, and love them very much, I have some of my own,” he wrote to writer V. V. Mikhailov. Two months later, his son Alyosha died of an epileptic seizure. His epilepsy was genetic—Dostoevsky suffered from it, too. The book languished while Dostoevsky grieved, though it was eventually published in full two years later. It was still a novel about children, but it was also a novel about suffering and God.
The Brothers Karamazov takes place in a world where God is obscured from view. Heaven is unattainable and mysterious, meaning that there is no promised reward for being good. In the same vein, Superman is punished for being good more often than he is rewarded. The Karamazovs and Superman get off to bad starts, punished for the sins of their fathers both metaphorically and literally. Still, they find motivation to climb out of their moral gutters—to do good because it means that somewhere, something good is happening to someone.
In Book V of the novel, Ivan Karamazov explains why he does not believe in God. He knows intellectually, per Christian belief, that children must suffer, but he doesn’t understand why. It is a truth of some other world, incomprehensible to the human heart. “If everyone must suffer in order with their suffering to purchase eternal harmony, what do young children have to do with it, tell me, please?” he begs his brother Alyosha. Why have children “ended up as raw material … the manure for someone else’s future harmony?” He concludes that it is impossible to accept or believe in a God who hears the cries of suffering children but does not listen, let alone all other innocents. He is too compassionate to believe that a compassionate God exists.
In every one of the comics in my father’s collection, people are cruel to Superman. In every one of them, Superman saves the world. To his detractors, Superman is a perpetual outsider who will never assimilate fully into human culture. His worst enemy, Lex Luthor, exemplifies this philosophy in his barrages against the hero—he sees that Superman is not only inhuman, but better than humanity, which he feels makes human achievement look comparatively paltry and stupid. But again and again, Superman rescues people who do not trust him, who do not believe that someone with such great power could observe humanity from the outside in all its cruelty and still maintain this great compassion.
Yet Superman’s boundless compassion is entirely of this world. His kindness can be almost solely attributed to his adoptive parents, Jonathan and Martha Kent. They saw a suffering child, took him in, raised him, and loved him. They became his model for goodness. Because of them, Superman cannot hate humanity. He has seen its worst, and he feels it pales in comparison to its best. There is cruelty to children, but also kindness. A child might suffer for the sins of his father, but he can also thrive because of the virtues of his father.
The sins of Superman’s other father, Jor-El, often come back to haunt him. In the 2025 Superman film, Jor-El insists that Superman conquer Earth and take many wives to continue the Kryptonian race after the planet’s destruction. In this incarnation, Jor-El is like the Karamazov patriarch, Fyodor, an evil and lustful man, uncaring towards humanity at large. In the novel, these characteristics are described as “Karamazovian.”
Jean-Paul Sartre, in his lecture Existentialism Is A Humanism, quotes Ivan from Book V: “Dostoyevsky once wrote ‘If God did not exist, everything would be permitted;’ and that, for existentialism, is the starting point.” Human morality hinges on the idea of an immortal soul: people are only good because of their desire for future pleasure in the afterlife. If God does not exist, the soul is mortal, and therefore, there’s no reason to be good any longer. People can do whatever they want with no regard for morality. Similarly, Ivan believes that nobody bears any responsibility for any actions but their own, an idea that perpetually disturbs him. He doesn’t like that it can be used as justification for his father’s hedonistic lifestyle. He wants to accept that there is some definition of goodness that excludes his father’s behavior, but he cannot find it. Because of his father’s Karamazovian nature and his own unshakable intellectualism, Ivan is torn apart by doubt of what parts of human morality are natural, if any. He voluntarily makes himself an outsider, keeping everyone at a distance. Ivan feels something like Superman’s compassion for humanity, but he cannot tell whether mankind is capable of goodness, so he feels unable to act on that compassion. He loves a woman who is beautiful and intelligent and kind. He never tells her.
In 1980’s Superman II, Superman does the opposite. When Lois Lane discovers that mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent is Superman’s alter ego, he decides he doesn’t want to be Superman anymore. He wants to grow old with the woman he loves. He pleads with Jor-El to tell him how to become human. Jor-El tells him he is making a grave mistake, but his mother understands, and guides him through the process of becoming human. The sins of his father come back to haunt him, though. The Kryptonian criminal General Zod, placed in captivity by Jor-El, escapes imprisonment and tries to hunt Superman down. But Superman no longer exists. Zod tears through Washington DC and takes the president hostage. Superman then realizes that humanity is helpless in the face of Zod. He beholds a corrupted mirror of his own Kryptonian might—a metahuman who sees the mass of humanity the way the 2025 Superman film’s Jor-El does, as an anthill to be stepped on—and he realizes that his compassion is nothing without action. He begs his father to help him become superhuman again.
Alyosha Karamazov sits somewhere between Ivan and Superman. While he lacks Superman’s super strength, he has his compassion. He’s also the only religious Karamazov. From the religious sphere he operates within, he gains a positive adoptive father figure to guide him morally: Elder Zosima. Zosima’s beliefs (and therefore Alyosha’s) almost perfectly counter Ivan’s—due to the chain of causality, every person bears at least some responsibility for the sins of others. Humanity’s actions are all so tangled and interwoven that it’s futile to believe that one is only responsible for one’s own morality. Thus, one should practice forgiveness and aim for the redemption of sinners rather than their punishment, as everyone is always a little bit at fault. In following this philosophy, Alyosha becomes the rare human who is rewarded proportionally to his actions. He always acts with kindness towards others, and is met with universal love in response. Alyosha shares his brothers’ distaste for their biological father, but he deeply honors Elder Zosima. By the end of the novel, Alyosha dedicates himself to spreading Zosima’s philosophy to the town’s schoolchildren. They, like everyone else, cannot help but love him.
Nikolai Fyodorov, a contemporary of Dostoevsky, believed that humans had a very literal duty to resurrect their fathers. True social progress could only be brought about by the use of science to enact God’s kingdom on Earth: in essence, making humans immortal. This would be enacted practically by resurrecting your father, who would in turn resurrect his, and so on, until every human who ever lived achieved immortality. The Brothers Karamazov is a novel that centers on the opposite—patricide. This patricide happens both physically and philosophically. The eldest Karamazov, Dmitri, beats Fyodor nearly to death in a quibble over a woman whom Dmitri loves and whom Fyodor lusts for. Fyodor’s illegitimate son Smerdyakov eventually kills him, using the philosophy of “everything is permitted” as justification. Alyosha’s patricide is his refusal to live by his father’s word, rejecting it instead in favor of Zosima’s. Each of Fyodor’s four sons denies him immortality by one measure or another. As David McDuff’s introduction to the Penguin edition of the novel puts it, “the good that lies concealed in the children cannot manifest itself because of the sins of the fathers, and … the fathers cannot be resurrected because of those sins.” Given Zosima’s stance on personal responsibility, though, it’s safe to say that the “sins of the father” that we’re punished for are, in fact, the sins of all humans—thus, the choice of who to resurrect is entirely ours. As long as we carry forward some legacy from somewhere, we bring God’s kingdom to Earth.
In Grant Morrison’s All-Star Superman comic run, there is a time-warping flashback to the end of Superman’s childhood in Smallville, Kansas. A being called the Chronovore rampages through the sleepy farming town, aging everything it touches, propelling things forward in time. A group of Clark Kent’s descendants, Supermen from two, five, and six generations after him, arrive in Smallville to protect their people. It’s a pure realization of Fyodorov’s vision—a father and his sons and their sons doing good together. They won’t let Clark help but Clark forces his way into the fight, restraining the creature for just long enough that the other Supermen can regain control of the battle. While he fights the Chronovore, it eats three minutes off of his life. In those three minutes, his adoptive father Jonathan Kent suffers a fatal heart attack. When Clark realizes he no longer hears his father’s heartbeat, he tears off towards the farm, screaming, “I can save him! I can save everybody!”
This version of Superman is a father whose virtues render him worthy of resurrection—a reverse Karamazov. The line of virtuous fathers begins with Jonathan Kent. At his funeral, he says, “Jonathan Kent taught me that the strong have to stand up for the weak … He taught me that the measure of a man lies not in what he says but what he does. And he showed me by example how to be tough, and how to be kind and how to dream of a better world. Thanks, Pa. Those are lessons I’ll never forget.”
Later in All-Star Superman, Superman sees his death hanging over his head, much like the Karamazov patriarch Fyodor, who is (prior to his murder) always complaining that someone will kill him someday. Unlike Fyodor, Superman chooses to spend his last days doing good. He tugs on the big tapestry of interrelated human responsibility and puts good out into the world, despite the suffering he gets in return. We may not all be as lucky as Alyosha, to have all our good efforts rewarded. We may be like Superman, and do our good deeds and get our faces ground in the dirt for it. Superman shows us explicitly what it looks like to be compassionate in a world without God—there is no formal reward, not even the interpersonal reward Alyosha receives. We are all brothers; we all atone for each other’s sins.
Image: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, The Sacrifice of Isaac, oil on canvas, mid-1750s (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).