Ivan stopped. He was flushed from speaking, and from speaking with such enthusiasm; but when he finished, he suddenly smiled.
Alyosha, who all the while had listened to him silently, though towards the end, in great agitation, he had started many times to interrupt his brother’s speech but obviously restrained himself, suddenly spoke as if tearing himself loose.
“But ... that’s absurd!” he cried, blushing. “Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn’t revile him ... as you meant it to. And who will believe you about freedom? Is that, is that any way to understand it? It’s a far cry from the Orthodox idea ... It’s Rome, and not even the whole of Rome, that isn’t true— they’re the worst of Catholicism, the Inquisitors, the Jesuits...! But there could not even possibly be such a fantastic person as your Inquisitor. What sins do they take on themselves? Who are these bearers of the mystery who took some sort of curse upon themselves for men’s happiness? Has anyone ever seen them? We know the Jesuits, bad things are said about them, but are they what you have there? They’re not that, not that at all ... They’re simply a Roman army, for a future universal earthly kingdom, with the emperor— the pontiff of Rome—at their head ... that’s their ideal, but without any mysteries or lofty sadness ... Simply the lust for power, for filthy earthly lucre,[179] enslavement ... a sort of future serfdom with them as the landowners .. . that’s all they have. Maybe they don’t even believe in God. Your suffering Inquisitor is only a fantasy ...”
“But wait, wait,” Ivan was laughing, “don’t get so excited. A fantasy, you say? Let it be. Of course it’s a fantasy. But still, let me ask: do you really think that this whole Catholic movement of the past few centuries is really nothing but the lust for power only for the sake of filthy lucre? Did Father Paissy teach you that?”
“No, no, on the contrary, Father Paissy once even said something like what you ... but not like that, of course, not at all like that,” Alyosha suddenly recollected himself.
“A precious bit of information, however, despite your ‘not at all like that.’ I ask you specifically: why should your Jesuits and Inquisitors have joined together only for material wicked lucre? Why can’t there happen to be among them at least one sufferer who is tormented by great sadness and loves mankind? Look, suppose that one among all those who desire only material and filthy lucre, that one of them, at least, is like my old Inquisitor, who himself ate roots in the desert and raved, overcoming his flesh, in order to make himself free and perfect, but who still loved mankind all his life, and suddenly opened his eyes and saw that there is no great moral blessedness in achieving perfection of the will only to become convinced, at the same time, that millions of the rest of God’s creatures have been set up only for mockery, that they will never be strong enough to manage their freedom, that from such pitiful rebels will never come giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist had his dream of harmony. Having understood all that, he returned and joined ... the intelligent people. Couldn’t this have happened?”
“Whom did he join? What intelligent people?” Alyosha exclaimed, almost passionately. “They are not so very intelligent, nor do they have any great mysteries and secrets ... Except maybe for godlessness, that’s their whole secret. Your Inquisitor doesn’t believe in God, that’s his whole secret!”
“What of it! At last you’ve understood. Yes, indeed, that alone is the whole secret, but is it not suffering, if only for such a man as he, who has wasted his whole life on a great deed in the wilderness and still has not been cured of his love for mankind? In his declining years he comes to the clear conviction that only the counsels of the great and dread spirit could at least somehow organize the feeble rebels, ‘the unfinished, trial creatures created in mockery,’ in a tolerable way. And so, convinced of that, he sees that one must follow the directives of the intelligent spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and to that end accept lies and deceit, and lead people, consciously now, to death and destruction, deceiving them, moreover, all along the way, so that they somehow do not notice where they are being led, so that at least on the way these pitiful, blind men consider themselves happy. And deceive them, notice, in the name of him in whose ideal the old man believed so passionately all his life! Is that not a misfortune? And if even one such man, at least, finds himself at the head of that whole army ‘lusting for power only for the sake of filthy lucre,’ is one such man, at least, not enough to make a tragedy? Moreover, one such man standing at its head would be enough to bring out finally the real ruling idea of the whole Roman cause, with all its armies and Jesuits—the highest idea of this cause. I tell you outright that I firmly believe that this one man has never been lacking among those standing at the head of the movement. Who knows, perhaps such ‘ones’ have even been found among the Roman pontiffs. Who knows, maybe this accursed old man, who loves mankind so stubbornly in his own way, exists even now, in the form of a great host of such old men, and by no means accidentally, but in concert, as a secret union, organized long ago for the purpose of keeping the mystery, of keeping it from unhappy and feeble mankind with the aim of making them happy. It surely exists, and it should be so. I imagine that even the Masons have something like this mystery as their basis,’[180] and that Catholics hate the Masons so much because they see them as competitors, breaking up the unity of the idea, whereas there should be one flock and one shepherd ... However, the way I’m defending my thought makes me seem like an author who did not stand up to your criticism. Enough of that.”