The Brothers Karamazov: Logos 2 key examples

When various members of the Karamazov family, accompanied by the curious Miusov, visit the local monastery in an attempt to resolve a domestic dispute with the help of Zosima the elder, the monks of the monastery engage Ivan in a discussion of an article he published, that argued that the legal courts of the state should be supplanted by the ecclesiastical courts operated by the church. In his response to Ivan, Zosima employs logos in his argument that physical punishment does not reform criminals or improve society: 

All this exile to hard labor, and formerly with floggings, does not reform anyone, and above all does not even frighten almost any criminal, and the number of crimes not only does not diminish but increases all the more. Surely you will admit that. And it turns out that society is thus not protected at all, for although the harmful member is mechanically cut off and sent far away out of sight, another criminal appears at once to take his place, perhaps even two others. If anything protects society [...] it is Christ’s law alone. 

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Smerdyakov uses logos in his argument that a Christian, if asked to renounce Christ or die, can renounce Christ without receiving eternal punishment. Responding to Grigory’s pious anecdote about a man who was killed in Asia after refusing to deny his faith, Smerdyakov illustrates his reasoning: 

And since I’m no longer a Christian, it follows that I’m not lying to my tormentors when they ask am I a Christian or not, since God himself has already deprived me of my Christianity [...] And if I’m already demoted, then in what way, with what sort of justice can they call me to account in the other world, as if I were a Christian, about my renunciation of Christ, when for the intention alone, even before the renunciation, I was deprived of my baptism? If I’m not a Christian, then I can’t renunciate Christ, because I’ll have nothing to renounce.

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