If the theses advanced in the preceding chapters are correct, then the evidence should be found in Dostoevsky's last novel. We should look there not only for what Epstein calls minimal religion, but also for signs that such phenomena tend to proliferate in a situation where the extremes of religious faith and atheistic conviction appear to have reached stalemate. We should also look for evidence that these extremes have a common origin in the nothingness where cosmic despair or an experience of a transcendent reality may equally be found.

When Epstein talks of minimal religion, of course, he has the Russian context specifically in mind, and he seems to use the expression to denote any manifestation of religion that falls short of a complete expression of Russian Orthodoxy. It could be argued that all manifestations of religion in The Brothers Karamazov, including Zosima's faith, and the conception of God against which Ivan rebels, fall into that category. The concept is an extremely broad one and, as we shall see, it encompasses many varied expressions of religious sensibility. Moreover, the expressions ‘minimal religion’ and ‘minimal religious experience’ are often used outside the Russian context simply to mean an experience of a transcendent reality unencumbered by all but the most rudimentary of interpretative traditions. In the pages that follow, we may have to distinguish Epstein's sense from the more usual sense.