"Dostoevsky's use of the biblical language of 'image and likeness' [in The Brothers Karamazov] is an index of the importance of these categories in his imagination. If humanity is in God's image, there is something that it is like to be human, something beyond any negotiation or contingency. In this sense, Adam cannot wholly die. Yet if every individual is of incalculable value, a situation in which large numbers of human beings are liable to suffer the obscuring or defacing of the image is an insupportable tragic one. Adam will not wholly die, but this does not mean that the death - morally or spiritually - of any one child of Adam is tolerable."

Rowan Williams, Dostoevsky: Language, Truth and Fiction (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2008), p.240