The Brothers Karamazov

Meanwhile ‘Rebellion’ was followed by ‘The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’. Whole books have been written on this chapter (a reference to Sandoz’s book is given below) and indeed it has many enigmatic aspects. For example, the meaning of Jesus’ silence and his kiss has generated much discussion, as has the Grand Inquisitor’s reading of the Gospel narrative of the temptations in the wilderness, which the novel presents in Matthew’s version. Since the Legend is there to be read in Dostoevsky’s text it would be fatuous to repeat it here. Nevertheless it may be worth rehearsing some of its central features. Some modern readers are overwhelmed by its in-cisiveness, but others labour in vain to discover the point.

The Grand Inquisitor, a Roman Catholic Cardinal, already ninety years old, in charge of the burning of heretics in sixteenth-century Seville, is unexpectedly visited by Jesus in his cell, and attempts to justify himself. It should be noticed that the Grand Inquisitor is actually an atheist. He is also a humanitarian, motivated by a deep love for humanity. His objective is the happiness of mankind and he has devoted his life to organizing society so as to ensure general peace and prosperity. He perceives that humanity’s deepest need is not for freedom: moral choice is the gift which Jesus brought to the world, but it is a burden too heavy for all but a very few to bear. Humanity’s present lot is conflict, turmoil, confusion, bloodshed and unhappiness, the result of that gift of freedom. Humanity yearns above all not for freedom but for what the Grand Inquisitor calls ‘mystery’, ‘miracle’ and ‘authority’, and he relates these three principles to the three temptations in the wilderness. There the devil tempted Jesus to win people’s hearts by turning stones into bread, to test God by leaping from the pinnacle of the temple, and to rule over all the kingdoms of the earth. Jesus was wrong to reject these temptations. The Catholic Church has corrected Jesus’ error and accepted them. For eight centuries it has been on the devil’s side. Of course this means that for eight centuries the leaders of the Church have been propagating an enormous lie, since they alone know that there is no God and that Christianity is an elaborate myth designed to organize and control people’s rebellious imaginations. But they have done so in the interests of humanity and its greater happiness. Freedom is incompatible with happiness.

By adopting these three principles — formulated by the devil in the most penetrating questions ever devised — the Church has furnished all that humanity seeks on earth: someone to bow down to, someone to take over their consciences, and a means for uniting everyone into a common, concordant and incontestable anthill.

Alyosha challenges Ivan’s identification of his Grand Inquisitor with the Catholic Church, but of course Ivan’s Legend does not have to be taken literally: he is talking about fundamental forces in human history. For him the Grand Inquisitor stands for all totalitarian creeds and ideologies based on an honest desire to save humanity from its own inability to handle freedom without lapsing into bloodshed and chaos. Ivan does not question the Grand Inquisitor’s motives: indeed he affirms that he is tormented by great sadness and loves humanity. But until human beings understand the feebleness of their rebellion, the burning of heretics will continue to be necessary.

Readers familar with Dostoevsky’s other writings know that Dostoevsky saw socialism as the illegitimate offspring of Catholicism. The ‘anthill’ and the ‘Tower of Babel’ which the Legend also mentions are among Dostoevsky’s favourite metaphors for socialism. It is for such reasons that the Legend has frequently been taken from its context in the novel and seen as a powerful allegory of the development of twentieth-century totalitarianism, particularly of the Communist variety. There can be little doubt that with the collapse of the Soviet empire it will take on a potent new force as that country reviews its recent history.

The Legend is but one of four, or possibly five, stages in Ivan’s thought recorded in the novel. They span the period between his eighteenth and twenty-fourth year: they are the legend of the philosopher who refused to believe in paradise, the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, the article on the ecclesiastical courts, the conversation with Alyosha on rebellion and the theory of ‘geological upheaval’ set forth by Ivan’s hallucinatory devil. Each of them represents a stage in Ivan’s wrestling with questions of theodicy, God and the world-order. And they feed back into the plot through the axiom which so impresses Smerdyakov, that ‘if there is no God there is no morality’.