What is the essence of Christ’s ministry? He teaches men “not to commit stupidities.” All of Tolstoy’s brutal empiricism and aristocratic impatience resound in that extraordinary answer. The Dostoevskyan Christ, on the contrary, teaches men to commit the gravest stupidities. What is wisdom in His eyes may be idiocy in the eyes of the world.
–George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in the Old Criticism, 254
