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The Grand Inquisitor says to Jesus, “you did not want to enslave man by miracle and thirsted for faith that is free, not miraculous” (p. 256) This is true. Faith is not knowledge. It is for this reason that it is free. I have no choice to believe that the sun is rising in the East. To doubt this is to doubt that I understand the words sun and East. But although faith is not knowledge and therefore is a free choice, the object of faith is miraculous. Belief in Jesus requires me to believe that God became man. This is contrary to nature. Science has no explanation of how a God could become man. But even if I witnessed water turned into wine, or Lazarus raised from the dead, would this have given me indisputable evidence that Jesus was the son of God? If it is indisputable evidence why is it that not everyone in the world believes? Later if I had witnessed the water being turned into wine I might conclude that magic was involved or that I was drunk. I might have thought that Lazarus was not really dead at all. I might believe when the blind see and the lame walk that the person who cures them is a charlatan and that these people have been planted in the audience. Even viewing Christ after the resurrection might be taken to be just another ghost story. There are any number of such stories throughout the world. Do they prove the existence of ghosts?
The Grand Inquisitor overestimates the power of miracles. There are miracles every day in the world. The Church has testified to thousands of miracles. The Virgin Mary has appeared to more than one person. People with incurable diseases have been cured. Why then does not the whole world believe in what the Church teaches? Because there is always the possibility to dispute whether the miracle actually occurred. Even eye witnesses will doubt. It is not even really possible to witness a miracle. If I testified in court that I saw a miracle, the court would doubt my testimony. It would always be reasonable to do so.
What about the second way of controlling people? The Grand Inquisitor continues that we “had the right to preach mystery and to teach them that it is not the free choice of the heart that matters, and not love, but the mystery, which they must blindly obey, even setting aside their own conscience” (p. 257).
Faith is indeed a mystery. There is no understanding it on earth. There is a limit beyond which I cannot go in my study of theology. I cannot batter down the gates of heaven with my reason. But how can this make me choose to believe in the mystery. The mystery in itself can make no one believe. It was of course possible in the time of the Inquisition to say to people you do not understand this, but must blindly accept it, but it is not the mystery that is making them believe it is the authority of the Inquisition and the power that it has over men’s lives.
The Grand Inquisitor thinks that freedom of choice is a burden and that man prefers to be told what to do. He thinks that only a small sub section of mankind is capable of exercising freedom. The rest want to be controlled. There is an element of truth in this. Why is it that throughout the world there is tyranny and has been throughout history? It is in part because we prefer it that way. If you give many men freedom they will not choose to keep it. We liberated Iraq from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein. They had the ability to choose democracy and freedom, but they preferred barbarism. The Arab Spring was a prime example of people being granted freedom but choosing to use it only once so as their side should win and then no other side would get the chance to win. Democracy is fragile because we care more about winning that democracy. This can be witnessed in people being unwilling to accept the result of an election or a referendum.
The Grand Inquisitor has a negative view of the majority of mankind. Only people like him are capable of being free. The masses are incapable. He is too pessimistic. There is more freedom in the world that either during the time of the Inquisition or Dostoevsky’s own time. But even if I live in a tyranny, I still always feel my freedom. Even if I lived in Stalin’s Russia, I felt free when I crossed the road. I made thousands of free choices every day. Even in the Gulag I had freedom of choice, even if it was only in choosing to walk to the left rather than the right. This freedom is the seed of the destruction of all tyranny. It is also the reason why people have faith. My freedom is contrary to nature and involves a continuous miracle.
The Grand Inquisitor thinks that by taking away man’s freedom the Church has been kind “Have we not indeed, loved mankind, in so humbly recognizing their impotence, in so lovingly alleviating their burden and allowing their feeble nature even to sin, with our permission” (p. 257).
Sin is mediated through the Church. So long as the sinner tells the Church of his sin then it can be forgiven on the performance of some penance that most often is trivial. The Inquisitor puts a cynical gloss on confession, but it is not far from the truth. It is as if the individual person gives up his own responsibility before God to repent of his sins. He is told what is right and what is wrong by the confessor.
But apart from the cynicism, perhaps the confessor has a point. Man is weak, we are tempted to sin and frequently we cannot help it. Zosima recognised this point. But do we need permission from this cynical Inquisitor. Jesus himself is forgiving. God will be kind about my sins. I don’t need the permission of the Inquisitor I just need to believe in a God that will love me.
The Inquisitor confesses that he doesn’t love Jesus. He says “we are not with you, but with him, that is our secret” (p. 257). This is Ivan’s attack on Jesuits and the Catholic Church that also no doubt reflects Dostoevsky’s attitude that the Catholic Church is Satanic. The reason is that “we took from him what you so indignantly rejected, that last gift he offered you when he showed you all the kingdoms of the earth: we took Rome and the sword of Caesar from him, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth, the only rulers, though we have not yet succeeded in bringing our cause to its full conclusion” (p. 257). It is because the Catholic Church became a worldly power that Dostoevsky thinks it is the work of the Devil.
But we might argue that the Orthodox Church of Dostoevsky’s time was just as much a part of the Russian Empire. It told the Tsar that he had a divine right to rule and told everyone to submit to this autocracy. The Orthodox Church likewise through its priests controlled man’s sin and through the sacrament of confession regulated this sin. In what real way is there a difference? The Roman Empire split and the two halves went their separate ways. They manufactured an argument over a sentence that no-one will ever understand. The Church in the East just as much as in the West has been for centuries involved in secular power. Schismatics in Russia were persecuted by the state because they disagreed over how many fingers to cross themselves with.
But once more it is more interesting to look forward than to look back. It is with communism in Russia that we see the vision of the Grand Inquisitor come to life. He is talking about world revolution. We have not yet brought about communism; we are still working towards our goal. But in time, after we have broken a few eggs, we will arrive at our goal. No wonder the communists in Russia so disliked Dostoevsky. He talks about them even when he talks about something else. The goal of the Church, what they are striving towards is “the universal happiness of mankind.” The Grand Inquisitor is with the Devil because he wants to create heaven on Earth. But this is communism. It might take a few auto da fe, it might take the reign of terror in France or the horrors of 1930s Soviet Union, but it will be worth it because of the telos. This is the temptation that is offered to us all. Shall we try to create heaven on Earth and pay the price which usually is rather high? People set out with high ideals to create their heaven on earth. Not every communist nor every socialist, it amounts to the same thing, is wicked to begin with. They may have high ideals. But soon they find in order to reach their goal they have to do something dreadful. It may be burning people at the stake. It may be stealing their property or putting them in the Gulag, it may merely be making morality a matter of law. Yes this is the opposite of Christianity for Christianity cares little in the end about what happens on earth.
The Grand Inquisitor explains that by rejecting the ability to rule the world Jesus rejected all that man requires. “Had you accepted that third counsel of the mighty spirit, you would have furnished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to, someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common, concordant, and incontestable anthill—for the need for universal union is the third and last torment of man” (p. 257).
In this he is describing the ideal of abolishing countries. He is describing John Lennon’s Imagine. The ideal of some people is indeed to abolish all borders for all people in the world simply to be treated as simply people. This too was the aim of world revolution.
This likewise is the distinction between Kierkegaard and Hegel. The Grand Inquisitor writes “Mankind in its entirety has always yearned to arrange things so that they must be universal” (p. 257). This is the Hegelian-Marxian idea that individuality is not real, that ultimate truth is one thing, one universal. The Kierkegaardian alternative is that individuality is the basic and that mediation is not possible because of paradox. It is only contradiction that prevents the universal.
The Inquisitor makes the point more explicit by saying, “There have been many great nations with great histories, but the higher these nations stood, the unhappier they were, for they were more strongly aware than others of the need for a universal union of mankind” (p. 257). This is the choice then between the individual, whether it is family or nation or person and the universal, bringing down borders, establishing one universal world Government. Again Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor is pointing forward rather than backwards. The Catholic Church did not seek to abolish countries, but communism did and so do those today who seek to abolish borders and the distinctions between countries.
Sources
Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karamazov, translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky, Vintage, 1992.
Come back next week to read part 5 of Chapter 10: Grand Inquisitor.