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Each of Dostoevsky’s final five novels is long. They are long in terms of the number of pages, but not only long in this way. There are long novels I have read that it is possible to read so continuously that the pages fly past in a swirl of plot. I have read novels with over a thousand pages that seem short. Even Dostoevsky’s short novels like Notes from Underground seem long.
The Brothers Karamazov, in terms of plot, could be turned into a fairly short novel. If an editor reduced the novel to only those parts that were necessary to understand the story what would remain? I think the whole thing could be told in 150 pages.
So much is completely unrealistic. Alyosha meets Ivan in a bar. The course of their meeting is three chapters, over thirty pages. Much of it involves dialogue which goes on for pages without paragraph breaks. Have you ever had a conversation with someone in a bar that involves you or him speaking a monologue that might take an hour for you to speak aloud?
The Grand Inquisitor is supposed to be a poem that Ivan made up though he didn’t write it down. He learned it by heart and now for the first time he is going to speak it to his first listener. Is this likely?
As so often in Dostoevsky’s novels, we are forced to go along with conversations and conventions that are inherently impossible. Frequently they don’t even fit the time frame. In terms of plot there may be a conversation that can take no more than an hour, yet one hundred pages later we are still involved in these lengthy monologues that often do not advance the plot one little bit, but just explore some topic or other.
Is this a complaint? No. This is what makes Dostoevsky great. His plots are sometimes fascinating. Often I return to the complexity of the plot, but it is not fundamentally plot that interests me. The plot is the frame on which Dostoevsky hangs his depictions of character and his ideas about philosophy, psychology, theology, life and love. It is these things that matter. It is for this reason that I don’t really describe plot. Read the books for yourself. The plots are frequently clever. As works of literature, Dostoevsky’s novels are as good as anything ever written. But this is not why I write about Dostoevsky. I don’t write about Tolstoy. I don’t write about Jane Austen. They too wrote great novels. But I don’t keep returning to their books, drawn in by long passages that might have been edited out, because they contribute nothing to plot. I read and re-read Dostoevsky only because of these passages.
It has taken me a long time to come to any sort of understanding of the chapter called “The Grand Inquisitor.” It is a thought experiment. What would happen if Jesus returned to Earth during the Spanish Inquisition? There has just been an auto da-fe in Seville where over 100 heretics have been burned. But Jesus appears and performs miracles. A blind man is made to see. A girl is resurrected from the dead. The Grand Inquisitor, a very old man, witnesses this and has Jesus arrested. This man visits Jesus in a prison cell. He promises that the next day Jesus will be burned as a heretic.
What is the nature of Jesus’ crime? The Grand Inquisitor says, “you have no right to add anything to what you already said once” (p. 250). This is quite an interesting point. There is a tendency to treat revelation as something that has finished. When was the last canonical book of the Bible written? When did we decide what was in the Bible and what was not? This all happened in the early days of the Church. Since then have we added any new books? Why should the letters of Saint Paul be in the Bible, but the letters of another saint excluded. Why could not Saint Augustine’s letters be the result of revelation? Or those of Saint Thomas Aquinas. We have rejected all subsequent revelation. The Church does not accept the revelation of Mohamed. Christians do not think that the Koran is divinely inspired. We do not add it to the New Testament, though it clearly is influenced both by the Old and the New Testaments. We do not think that the Book of Mormon is divinely inspired. We think that Joseph Smith was a false prophet. If we did not think in the way we would be Latter-Day Saints.
But then, this is a problem. Is it possible to add to the revelation that we already have in the Bible? What would count as adding to that revelation? If nothing would could, then how can Jesus return and be recognised by Christians. This return would add a new book to the Bible. But we think the Bible is finished and has been finished since the days of the early church.
Ivan points out in an aside, “the most basic feature of Roman Catholicism … ‘Everything’ they say, ‘has been handed over by you to the pope, therefore everything belongs to the pope, and you may as well not come at all now’” (p. 251) The you here is clearly Jesus, but really it is any second revelation. Only the Pope is allowed to have a second revelation. Papal infallibility means that it would be for the Pope to judge if Jesus appeared. I don’t mean the Pope literally. The Pope is guided by his cardinals and by the Church in general. His infallibility consists in the theology of the Church. But there is then an issue here of how the Church would respond to a later revelation.
Yet it has to be admitted that the Church from time to time allows the idea that some ordinary person is contacted directly by the divine. Saints can perform miracles. People can have visions of the Virgin Mary. When Bernadette of Lourdes saw the Virgin, she was not given any permission. This revelation was given to her and her alone. But if later day revelation is possible why is it not possible to add to the revelation of the Bible. What if Bernadette was inspired to write a letter and she told everyone that the letter was dictated to her by the Virgin. Would such a letter end up in the Bible?
It is for the Church to determine whether Bernadette’s visions were authentic. They could have ruled that she was a fraud or insane. After careful investigation the Church believed her. But they might not have. So if Jesus visited Seville during the time of the Inquisition, who would determine if he was genuine or a fraud? The Church would determine. At that point in Seville the person appointed to judge over these matters was the Grand Inquisitor. Could he decide that the returned Christ was a fraud? Why not? But what is interesting about the present case is that that Grand Inquisitor doesn’t think that Christ is a fraud. He thinks that Christ is genuine. That he really has returned, but still he wants to burn him. Why should this be so? Why should this man be the judge of whether Christ has returned? Who is he to determine this? After all when Christ appeared on Earth two thousand years ago it was ordinary people who first became aware of the revelation. It wasn’t the “Church” that existed then that determined whether Jesus was the Messiah. That “Church” with all its learned rabbis and Pharisees rejected Jesus as being the Messiah. Why should the Church that exists at the time of the Inquisition be allowed to determine the truth? If we admit that the Church could be in error in Seville during the Inquisition, must we admit that it could be in error today. Perhaps we would not be inclined to burn the returning Christ today, but can we be so smug about how he might be treated. Might we for instance confine him to a mental hospital as someone who suffers delusions? If I claim to be able to turn water into wine to my doctor what do you think he would do? So this story is about us. It isn’t only about the Inquisition in Seville.
But the situation in the time of the Inquisition is different from the time when Christ walked upon the Earth. The disciples chose to follow Jesus, but during the Inquisition there is no choice. Failure to believe in the Seville of those days leads to the stake. The reason for this, the Inquisitor explains, is that the “people are more certain than ever before that they are completely free, and at the same time they themselves have brought us their freedom and obediently laid it at our feet” (p. 251). This sort of freedom is illusory. It is no longer the people who are free to choose and believe. The church commands. The inquisitor thinks that he and his colleagues “have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy” (p. 251).
This is the essence of the debate. Does freedom make people happy or is being commanded the key to happiness. This is the essence of the debate between existentialism and collectivism, the debate between Hegel and Kierkegaard. The Grand Inquisitor thinks that Christ “rejected the only way of arranging for human happiness, but fortunately, on your departure, you handed the work over to us” (p. 251). It is for this reason that although he believes Christ has returned he wants to reject him saying “surely you cannot even think of taking this right away from us now” (p. 251).
Sources
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, Vintage, 1992.
Come back soon for part 2 of Chapter 10: Grand Inquisitor.