In this blog post, I will be continuing our discussion of Feodor Dostoevsky with an exposition of what is likely his most widely read work, “The Grand Inquisitor.” The text is itself a short excerpt from a deeply complex and brilliant novel called The Brothers Karamazov. As you likely noticed in your reading, however, the story of “The Grand Inquisitor” is a relatively self-contained section within the novel and is, therefore, widely anthologized separately. Even so, the real significance of the story is hard to assess independently of its role within The Brothers Karamazov.
The story is told as part of a conversation between two of the three Karamazov brothers, Alexei (Alyosha) and Ivan. Alyosha is the younger brother and has entered into the priesthood of the Russian Orthodox church as a novice. He is presented as naive, yet deeply sincere and likable. Much of the novel is concerned with his crisis of faith. Ivan, by contrast, is cynical. Despite his deep love of humanity, Ivan is an atheist and is deeply disillusioned with the world – as his story illustrates. At one level, Ivan serves as a paradigmatic figure of the rationalism and philanthropic concern for the world that characterized the Enlightenment. Yet, simultaneously, he represents the painful end result of the combination of these qualities. Much like the narrator of Notes from Underground, he has seen through the promise of progress and is no longer able to accept the ideals of the Enlightenment naively. The story of “The Grand Inquisitor” is presented to Alyosha by Ivan as a poem he had previously composed and should be understood as reflecting the viewpoint, not of Dostoevsky, but of Ivan.
The story imagines one of the central events of Christian belief and certainly the event which serves as the anchor to the Christian understanding of history: the second coming of Jesus Christ. Startlingly, according to the story, this event has already transpired. Christ has already returned to the earth and was, as we see, sent away. It is worth holding onto this aspect of the story for a moment. What exactly remains for faith after the return of Christ? The temporal dimension here is absolutely important to the story and is something we will return to with our reading of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. In “The Grand Inquisitor,” the issue is not that God doesn’t exist or that some other religious belief is true. Rather, the Christian faith is right about the world and yet its promises are disappointed and the future it looked to previously in hope is now a past event. Could there be a greater challenge to faith?
But wait, it gets worse. The return of Jesus Christ has taken place during the Spanish Inquisition and he has been knowingly persecuted as a heretic, an unbeliever. And possibly this is the deepest wound of the story, that Christ himself was not a Christian. That, indeed, the church is the antithesis of the message of Christ and is, as the Grand Inquisitor himself will intimate, in league with Satan. But how could this be?
Ultimately, it boils down to the issue of faith. As presented by Ivan, the church is not the protector of faith, but instead its destroyer. He drives this point home not only by having the Grand Inquisitor, a cardinal, arrest Jesus and persecute him, but also through the Grand Inquisitor’s discourse about the temptation of Christ. In the Biblical account, Jesus enters the desert after his baptism by John and fasts for forty days. At this time, he is visited by Satan who offers him three temptations. These temptations are: (1) to relieve his hunger by transforming stones into bread, (2) to prove that he is indeed the son of God by leaping from a great height and allowing angels to support him, and (3) to join Satan in ruling over all the kingdoms of the earth.
“The statement of those three questions was itself the miracle. If it were possible to imagine, simply for the sake of argument, that those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from the books, and that we had to restore them and to invent them anew, and to do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth – rulers, chief priests, learned men, philosophers, poets – and had set them the task to invent three questions, such as would not only fit the occasion, but express in three words, in three human phrases, the whole future history of the world and of humanity – dost Thou believe that all the wisdom of the earth united could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the three questions which were actually put to Thee then by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness? From those questions alone, from the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have here to do not with the fleeting human intelligence, but with the absolute and eternal.”
Even according to the traditional interpretation, Christ’s refusal of these temptations is understood as a demonstration of his faith – a faith that was necessary not because Christ was God, but on the contrary because he was simultaneously, as paradoxical as it is, human.
How do we interpret these temptations and Christ’s refusal? According to the narrative of the Grand Inquisitor, each temptation is an opportunity to trade the burden of the freedom and uncertainty of faith for the easy security of worldly goods and objective knowledge. Though he could turn stones to bread and ease his own hunger, Christ refuses to use his power – even to feed himself. And, if we look around and see the many starving people of the world, we might be inclined to think that he should not only have fed himself, but everyone else as well. Why leave people to starve and die of hunger when you could so easily feed the world? Well, as Jesus himself says, “man cannot live on bread alone.” The Grand Inquisitor explains,
“In that Thou wast right. For the secret of man’s being is not only to live, but to have something to live for. Without a stable conception of the object of life, man would not consent to go on living, and would rather destroy himself than remain on earth, though he had bread in abundance.”
The burden of faith is to believe even in the face of starvation – or poverty, or homelessness, or real persecution. And this, we are told, is because even our most minor sufferings must have meaning. Otherwise, we simply could not go on.
Similarly, Christ could prove himself and demonstrate, not only to himself, but to all the world, that he was who he claimed to be. But, paradoxically, to know is not to believe, at least not in the sense that is meant when we speak of religious faith. Knowledge overcomes the freedom and passionate intensity of faith, rendering it into the objective certainty of cool reason. By denying knowledge through the performance of such a miracle, Christ placed upon himself and upon the world the burden of free choice. Without proof, one must choose to believe, committing oneself to something seemingly absurd and decidedly paradoxical; i.e. that God had become a man and the Eternal had entered into time. As the Grand Inquisitor puts it,
“Instead of taking possession of men’s freedom, Thou didst increase it, and burdened the spiritual kingdom of mankind with its sufferings forever. Thou didst desire man’s free love, that he should follow Thee freely, enticed and taken captive by Thee. In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter, with free heart, decide for himself what is good and what is evil, having only Thy image before him as his guide.”
Without a miraculous demonstration, some indisputable evidence, all that remains is uncertainty. And, in the face of this uncertainty, all one can do is to choose.
Finally, as Satan suggests, Christ could have established his kingdom on earth simply by taking worldly power. He could have ruled over all humanity and established true peace through the force of the state. Yet, he rejected this temptation. The Grand Inquisitor entreats,
Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar’s purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands?
Instead of establishing his kingdom through force and law, Christ left it to the vagaries of human belief. Peace, yes. But only a peace freely chosen in the passionate intensity of faith in a world where one must believe in spite of suffering and without guarantee.
As you may have noticed, the Grand Inquisitor sides with Satan on each of these points. He thinks that the burden of freedom, of faith, is too great for humanity. To be clear, it is not that he doesn’t believe that Christ is real or that he is, as he claims, God on earth. Rather, he knows full well who he is talking to, and that he has chosen to reject God. He rejects God, not because he doesn’t believe, but out of love for humanity. Christ refused to make bread to feed himself, yet the church provides food and succor to those who are poor or distressed. Christ refused to perform a miracle to demonstrate his claim to be the son of God, yet the church awes the conscience of the multitudes through the performance of mysteries and the invocation of miracles. Christ refused to ally himself with Satan to rule over humankind and create a lasting and universal peace, yet the church has long allied itself with state power.
Perhaps the deepest paradox presented to us is this: the Grand Inquisitor is busy ordering that people be burned alive because they are unbelievers for, as he sees it, the good of humanity. He does this even as he demonstrates that he himself is an unbeliever by rejecting Jesus upon his return. The key to all this lies in something we have already discussed. Namely, the fact that human beings are free and are by nature, therefore, rebellious. The rebelliousness of humankind is such that we would reject what we ourselves believe to be in our best interest only to prove our freedom. Even as he stands before Christ himself, the Grand Inquisitor embraces Satan. A rebel if ever there was one. Simultaneously, his very rejection of Christ is based on the fact of human rebelliousness. The “unbelievers” do not know what is good for them, or, in any case, they have chosen to act against their own best interests. And, the duty of the church is to teach humanity – in however brutal a fashion – what will make them happy, healthy, sane, rational, and virtuous.
From the standpoint of the Grand Inquisitor, God asks too much of humanity. The Grand Inquisitor feels compelled out of love of humanity to remove the burden of freedom and to replace it with the implacable certainty of the church, positioned as an absolute (though earthly) power. Why allow Adam and Eve the freedom to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil if you knew all along they would disobey the command?
As I have hoped to suggest, though their targets appear to be separated by a gulf, “The Grand Inquisitor” and “from Notes from the Underground” share many important themes and target many of the same ideals. Ultimately, they suggest that those who would “improve” humanity are deeply misguided. Human beings are by nature free and will act in the most outrageous ways to prove it.
To prime you a bit on this point consider your response to this brief summary of the psychologist B.F. Skinner’s brief utopian novel Walden Two
Can human behavior ever really be manipulated to produce a harmonious, peaceful and happy society? Should it be?
Comments and questions are more than welcome!
Dr. Absher's Philosophy 210 Blog 
One thought on “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor””