The Grand Inquisitor
from Continuum’s “Milestones of Thought,” edited by Anne Fremantle, translated by Constance Garnett

Remember last summer when I wrote that I wanted to write a bunch of things about The Brothers Karamazov? Of course you do, devoted devotee of my blog. Among the things that I desired to do but didn’t was write an entry on The Grand Inquisitor. And then, surprise, surprise, as I was in Barnes & Noble a couple of weeks ago, what do I find but a standalone edition of The Grand Inquisitor, something I might use with my AP class, if I can figure out how to help seventeen year-olds access its ideas.

So I read it again, and it was not easy, so let me work through a process to try to figure it out. We have a logical progression running through the temptations one, two and three and leading to the Inquisitor’s Utopia, which is, as Anne Fremantle points out, resemblant of the communist and fascist dictatorships of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the Islamist theocracies that have waged their campaigns of Draconian righteousness against inadequate believers.

The process I’ll go through is to take the task temptation by temptation, first as I remember it from the Gospel, then as Ivan’s Inquisitor sees it.

The First Temptation
Temptation one is to end the painful desert fast and turn the stones into bread. In the Gospels, Jesus’s reply is that man can not live by bread alone, that the nourishing of the spirit is greater than the nourishing of the body.

To the Inquisitor, Jesus’s choice of heaven over earth, duty to God over duty to self, has doomed man to a freedom of thought and choice where, because of man’s inherent weakness, thousands will be capable of the right choice while thousands of millions will be capable of only the wrong choice. By enabling others to provide the earthly bread that man must crave, Jesus has forced man to choose earthly rulers over heavenly god. There is no debating over whether it is possible, in fact, to serve two masters. The Inquisitor posits that humanity’s “universal and everlasting craving” is to find someone to worship, and that this quest compels man to worship the person who provides him with the comfort of earthly bread.

Temptation Two
This takes place as the devil brings Jesus to the top of the temple and tells him to prove God’s power by throwing himself from the roof, thereby giving God the opportunity to save him. Jesus responds that you shall not tempt God, in essence, that faith in God is betrayed when you ask him to prove what you profess to believe.

The Inquisitor connects the imposition of freedom to choose between earthly and heavenly needs to conscience. While another can give you bread, only you can own your conscience. The Inquisitor accuses Jesus of giving man not the freedom of conscience, but because He denied him bread, giving him an impossible burden, “a vague and enigmatic” sense of right and wrong whose appropriate application is “beyond the strength of man.” Because this enigma will cause “greater confusion and suffering,” it “lays the foundation for the destruction of Thy kingdom, and no one is more to blame for it” (than Jesus). This observation is based on the Inquisitor’s assumption about the fundamental and profound weakness in man.

Temptation the Third
Here is where Jesus is offered “all the kingdoms of the world,” the choice once again between riches in this temporal existence and the other riches of eternity.

As the Inquisitor points out for the sake of this narrative, the significance of this temptation is rooted in the actions of the Roman Church from the time of Charlemagne to the time in which the interview is set, 1503. The Inquisitor and the editor render this temptation as addressing “the problem of unity,” the idea that Jesus’s victory over Caesar was actually a Caesarean victory 800 years in the making, as the armies of the Holy Roman Empire have attempted to impose the victory of Christ on all the kingdoms of the world. Because Jesus rejected the dread spirit’s offer of all the earthly kingdoms, he rejected the possibility of unity, and therefore peace, and left a power vacuum that leaders have repeatedly sought by exploiting the promise of heaven and cowing mankind into the obedience that it doesn’t know it craves. The Inquisitor says, “We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him.” And in the confusion wrought by free thought and the arms taken up to allay that confusion and dispel such thought, the seeds for anarchy are sown; the Church will reap the harvest of men’s souls by providing them with their daily bread. As the Inquisitor summarizes, “Freedom, free thought and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: ‘Yes, you were right, you alone possess the mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves.’” This is the process that will break man from his infatuation with freedom and steer him into the arms of a provider, much as I used to show in my dramatically oversimplified rendition of cause and effect between the fall of Rome and the start of the Middle Ages back in my history-teaching days.

And what follows is the godless dystopia, the triumph of the Devil and the subjugation of the weak by the willful. The masses have their basest (and basic) needs provided for while the elect, an approximation of the 144,000, suffer because of their knowing and their willingness to carry the burden of suffering for the beasts who are too stupid for freedom. Maybe this story would serve as an effective pretext for Brave New World.

Ivan may be moved when he finishes his poem, as Alyosha’s Jesus is not burned as a heretic in what seems to be an afterthought; to really get at a weighty counterpoint to Ivan’s argument that God doesn’t exist (and therefore, everything is permissible and there is no crime ), you probably need the context of Father Zosima’s homilies. Still, the ending, with its kiss and its pardon, if you can call it that, presents the possibility that Ivan may one day be redeemed by love and forgiveness.