The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky
Book V: Pro and Contra, Chapter 5: The Grand Inquisitor
SEE p. 76 f. of The Brothers Karamazov: Worlds of the Novel - Robin Feuer Miller
SPARKNOTES:
Summary
Ivan explains his prose poem, “The Grand Inquisitor.”
In a town in Spain, in the sixteenth century, Christ arrives, apparently
reborn on Earth. As he walks through the streets, the people gather
about him, staring. He begins to heal the sick, but his ministrations
are interrupted by the arrival of a powerful cardinal who orders
his guards to arrest Christ. Late that night, this cardinal, the
Grand Inquisitor, visits Christ’s cell and explains why he has taken
him prisoner and why he cannot allow Christ to perform his works.
Throughout the Grand Inquisitor’s lecture, Christ listens silently.
The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that he cannot
allow him to do his work on Earth, because his work is at odds with
the work of the Church. The Inquisitor reminds Christ of the time,
recorded in the Bible, when the Devil presented him with three temptations,
each of which he rejected. The Grand Inquisitor says that by rejecting
these three temptations, he guaranteed that human beings would have
free will. Free will, he says, is a devastating, impossible burden
for mankind. Christ gave humanity the freedom to choose whether
or not to follow him, but almost no one is strong enough to be faithful,
and those who are not will be damned forever. The Grand Inquisitor
says that Christ should have given people no choice, and instead
taken power and given people security instead of freedom. That way,
the same people who were too weak to follow Christ to begin with
would still be damned, but at least they could have happiness and
security on Earth, rather than the impossible burden of moral freedom.
The Grand Inquisitor says that the Church has now undertaken to
correct Christ’s mistake. The Church is taking away freedom of choice
and replacing it with security. Thus, the Grand Inquisitor must
keep Christ in prison, because if Christ were allowed to go free,
he might undermine the Church’s work to lift the burden of free
will from mankind.
The first temptation Christ rejected was bread. Hungry
after his forty days of fasting, Christ was confronted by Satan,
who told him that if he were really the son of God, he could turn
a stone to bread and satisfy his hunger. Christ refused, replying
that man should not live by bread, but by the word of God. The Grand
Inquisitor says that most people are too weak to live by the word
of God when they are hungry. Christ should have taken the bread
and offered mankind freedom from hunger instead of freedom of choice.
The second temptation was to perform a miracle. Satan
placed Christ upon a pinnacle in Jerusalem and told him to prove
that he was the messiah by throwing himself off it. If Christ were
really God’s son, the angels would bear him up and not allow him
to die. Christ refused, telling Satan that he could not tempt God.
Beaten, Satan departed. But the Grand Inquisitor says that Christ
should have given people a miracle, for most people need to see
the miraculous in order to be content in their religious faith.
Man needs a supernatural being to worship, and Christ refused to
appear as one.
The third temptation was power. Satan showed
Christ all the kingdoms in the world, and offered him control of
them all. Christ refused. The Grand Inquisitor says that Christ
should have taken the power, but since he did not, the Church has
now has to take it in his name, in order to convince men to give
up their free will in favor of their security.
The Grand Inquisitor tells Christ that it was Satan,
and not Christ, who was in the right during this exchange. He says
that ever since the Church took over the Roman Empire, it has been
secretly performing the work of Satan, not because it is evil, but
because it seeks the best and most secure order for mankind.
As the Grand Inquisitor finishes his indictment
of Christ, Christ walks up to the old man and kisses him gently
on the lips. The Grand Inquisitor suddenly sets Christ free, but
tells him never to return again.
As Ivan finishes his story, he worries that
Alyosha will be disturbed by the idea that if there is no God, there
are no moral limitations on man’s behavior. But Alyosha leans forward
and kisses Ivan on the lips. Ivan, moved, replies that Alyosha has
stolen that action from his poem. Ivan and Alyosha leave the restaurant
and split up. Ivan begins walking home and Alyosha walks to the
monastery where Zosima is dying.
Analysis
The story of the Grand Inquisitor strongly resembles a
biblical parable, the kind of story that Christ tells in the New
Testament to illustrate a philosophical point. Both Ivan’s story
and Christ’s stories use a fictional narrative to address a deep
philosophical concern and are open to various interpretations. The
similarity between Ivan’s story and Christ’s stories illustrates
the uneasy relationship between Ivan and religion. At the same time
that Ivan rejects religion’s ability to effectively guide human
life, he relies on many of its principles in forming his own philosophical
system. Like Christ, Ivan is deeply concerned with understanding
the way we define what is right and what is wrong, and with understanding
how morality guides human actions. However, Ivan ultimately rejects
both Christ’s and God’s existence, as he cannot accept a supreme
being with absolute power who would nonetheless allow the suffering
that occurs on Earth.
The story also implicitly brings up a new point
with regard to Ivan’s argument about expanding the power of ecclesiastical
courts. By setting his story in sixteenth-century Spain, where ecclesiastical
courts were at the height of their power to try and punish criminals,
Ivan asks what verdict such a court would have reached in judging
Christ’s life. Since Christian religions teach that Christ lived
a sinless life, presumably an ecclesiastical court would have been
unable to find Christ guilty of any sin. However, the fact that
Ivan’s court finds Christ guilty of sins against mankind illustrates
the difference between Ivan’s religious beliefs and his beliefs
in the efficacy of ecclesiastical courts. He sees the courts as
an effective way to guide human action, but not necessarily as a
way to induce men to believe more strongly in God or religion.
The conflict between free will and security further illustrates
the reasons for Ivan’s dissent from Christianity. The fundamental
difference between Christ’s point of view and that of the Grand
Inquisitor is the value that each of them places on freedom and
comfort. Christ’s responses to the three temptations emphasize the
importance of man’s ability to choose between right and wrong, while
the Inquisitor’s interpretation of Christ’s actions emphasizes the
greater value of living a comfortable life in which the right path
has already been chosen by someone else.
The assumption at the heart of the Inquisitor’s
case is that Christ’s resistance of Satan’s temptations is meant
to provide a symbolic example for the rest of mankind. The Inquisitor
interprets the rejection of the temptations as Christ’s argument
that humanity must reject certain securities: comfort, represented
by bread; power and the safety that power brings, represented by
the kingdoms; and superstition, represented by the miracle. The
Inquisitor believes that Christ’s example places an impossible burden
on mankind, which is inherently too weak to use its free will to
find salvation. Effectively, the Inquisitor argues, the only option
is for people to lead sinful lives ending in damnation. The Inquisitor’s
Church, which is allied with Satan, seeks to provide people with
stability and security in their lives, even if by doing so it ensures that
they will be damned in the afterlife.
Ivan’s story presents the Inquisitor, a man who considers
himself an ally of Satan, as an admirable human being, acting against
God but with humanity’s best interest at heart. Ivan does not believe
that God acts in the best interest of mankind, but the implication
that human nature is so weak that people are better off succumbing
to the power of Satan is a radical response to the problem of free
will. Ivan’s attitude stems from the psychology of doubt. Ivan’s over-riding
skepticism makes it impossible for him to see anything but the bad
side of human nature. As a result, he believes that people would
be better off under the thumb of even a fraudulent religious authority
rather than making their own decisions. Even though his argument
is pessimistic, his reasoning is compelling.
Just as Alyosha is unable to offer a satisfactory
response to Ivan’s critique of God, Christ says nothing during the
Inquisitor’s critique of him, one of several parallels between Alyosha
and Christ during this chapter. But Christ’s enigmatic kiss on the
Inquisitor’s lips after his indictment completely changes the tenor
of the scene. Recalling Zosima’s bow before Dmitri at the monastery
in Book I, the kiss represents an overriding act of love and forgiveness
so innate that it can only be expressed wordlessly. On its deepest
level, it defies explanation. The power of faith and love, Dostoevsky
implies, is rooted in mystery—not simply in the empty and easily
digestible idea that God’s will is too complex for people to understand,
but in a resonant, active, unanswerable profundity. The kiss cannot
overcome a logical argument, but at the same time there is no logical
argument that can overcome the kiss. It represents the triumph of
love and faith, on their own terms, over rational skepticism. In
having Ivan end his poem on a note of such deep and moving ambiguity,
Dostoevsky has his major opponent of religion acknowledge the power
of faith, just as Dostoevsky himself, a proponent of faith, has
used Ivan to acknowledge the power of doubt. Alyosha’s kiss for
Ivan indicates how well the young Alyosha understands the problems of
faith and doubt in a world characterized by free will, and just
how committed his own will is to the positive goodness of faith.
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