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’.
It was Dostoevsky’s declared intention that the refutation of Ivan’s rebellion should find its focus in Zosima’s testament in Book Six. The Jesus of the Legend remains entirely silent apart from the Aramaic words ‘talitha cumi’ (‘damsel arise’) which he utters as he makes his way through the crowd to meet the Inquisitor. Alyosha concludes that the Legend is in praise of Jesus and does not blaspheme him.
Dostoevsky was, however, very worried by the thought that he might fail to refute Ivan’s blasphemy convincingly. In May 1879 he assured Liubimov that he was working on the chapter ‘The Russian monk’ ‘with fear, trepidation and awe’. He had done an enormous amount of background reading of the Bible and works of Russian Orthodox piety; he had briefly met the Elder Amvrosy on his visit to Optina Pustyn. He had read the monk Parfeny’s account of a visit to the Elder Leonid. In August 1879 he wrote to Pobedonostsev that he did not intend to refute Ivan ‘point by point’ but ‘indirectly’ by means of an ‘artistic picture’.
Whether this ‘artistic picture’ does the work Dostoevsky intended for it has been a matter of intense dispute. His Zosima has been accused of heresy by some; others have simply regarded his image as too weak to overcome the deep emotional impact made by Ivan. Some, though usually those with a pre-existing commitment to Christianity, have been profoundly impressed by him. Yet there remains a lingering doubt that the God whom the Grand Inquisitor failed to take account of is frustratingly elusive in Zosima’s religious consciousness as well. One scholar (A. B. Gibson) has referred to ‘the combination of the sincerest piety with the apparent absence of its object’.
Alyosha too represents the religious principle in the debate, but for all his allegiance to Zosima and the life of the monastery, his profoundest religious ecstasy has very little about it that is specifically Christian.
It was as if threads from all those innumerable worlds of God came together in his soul, and it was trembling all over, ‘touching other worlds.’ He wanted to forgive everyone and for everything, and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! but for all and for everything, ‘as others are asking for me,’ rang again in his soul. But with each moment he felt clearly and almost tangibly something as firm and immovable as this heavenly vault descend into his soul. Some sort of idea, as it were, was coming to reign in his mind — now for the whole of his life and unto ages of ages. He fell to the earth a weak youth and rose up a fighter, steadfast for the rest of his life, and he knew it and felt it suddenly, in that very moment of his ecstasy. Never, never in all his life would Alyosha forget that moment. ‘Someone visited my soul in that hour,’ he would say afterwards, with firm belief in his words ...
Expressions such as ‘as if, ‘almost’, ‘some sort of, qualify the description and it is ‘someone’, not specifically ‘God’, who visits his soul. Perhaps to the modern mind, however, this bashfulness about the Christian God is less important than the affirmation of the value of religious experience itself. There is no doubt that Dostoevsky wanted at all costs to escape dry conventionality in the presentation of his answer to Ivan, and to represent religious faith as a synthesis of unique personal experience with the authority of the Scriptures. What he has undoubtedly succeeded in doing is demonstrating a wide variety of religious experience, much of it false (Ivan, Ferapont, Fyodor Karamazov), some of it bearing fruit in richer lives (Zosima, Markel, Alyosha).
As always, ideas are intimately linked with personal feelings in Dostoevsky and the reader is invited to judge the validity of the ideas by the viability of the personality. In that case, Alyosha’s spiritual destiny, being more enviable than Ivan’s, might incline us in his favour. The Russian scholar Valentina Vetlovskaia has shown, moreover, that Dostoevsky uses various subtle rhetorical devices to predispose us towards Zosima and Alyosha, and against Ivan and characters such as Miusov and Rakitin. Indeed, Zosima’s and Alyosha’s voices are never presented ironically, whereas the reverse is true to varying degrees of all the other characters.
This runs against what many readers, following the influential Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin, have seen as the principal distinguishing feature of Dostoevsky’s major novels, and The Brothers Karamazovin particular. Bakhtin called the Dostoevskian novel ‘polyphonic’. One of the things he meant by this is that each voice in the book has equal weight in an ongoing dialogue, including the author’s. Nowadays we should be more inclined to say ‘including the narrator’s’ in order not to confuse the voice of Dostoevsky’s narrator (itself a fictional construct) with his own. Bakhtin argues that this constitutes a major revolution in the history of the novel. Most other novels are ‘monologic’ in the sense that the voices of the characters are evidently subordinated to a single consciousness which we usually identify with that of the author. As a matter of fact (as Terras explains), Dostoevsky’s narrator himself exhibits here two fundamentally incompatible voices: a local resident who is realistic and sceptical, and an omniscient narrator who is an idealist and a believer, and who knows things about the characters’ thoughts which the resident could not possibly know. The reader may notice that in the former mode the narrator displays all sorts of stylistic awkwardness. Although the permissible limits of stylistic awkwardness are not the same in English as in Russian, the translators of this much-acclaimed English version have endeavoured to retain his idiosyncratic prose, thereby preserving much of the humour and distinctive voicing of the novel.