The Grand Inquisitor

“The Grand Inquisitor” is a parable that takes on several complex issues, including the way the relationship between the Church (especially the Catholic Church) and the teachings of Christ has changed over time, the existence of free will, and the truth about human nature. “The Grand Inquisitor,” put into the mouth of the atheist intellectual Ivan Karamazov, is on the broadest level an expression of the 19th-century atheistic, rationalist, and materialist ideas—ideas with which Dostoevsky himself had wrestled throughout his life. Western-influenced rationalism and scientism, championed throughout the novel by Ivan’s character, stand in opposition to the idea, still prevalent in late-19th century Russia, that the Orthodox Christian faith was the heart of the nation. But “The Grand Inquisitor” is a complex and multifaceted “poem,” made even more complex by its embedded position with a novel that is itself extremely complex and deeply philosophical, and cannot be reduced simply to an atheistic statement. The piece must be analyzed on several levels and raises many questions, not all of them necessarily answerable.

Ivan’s poem pits Christ and his teachings against those of the Church, specifically the Roman Catholic Church. The distinction is important as Dostoevsky’s Russia followed Orthodox Christianity and regarded the Catholic Church as a rival and wrong branch of the religion. For the Inquisitor, Christ has come to interfere with the Church, and must therefore be stopped. As the Inquisitor says to Christ when he visits him in his prison cell, “[Y]ou have no right to add anything to what you already said once” (250). This is because the Church no longer follows the teachings of Christ, but those of Satan:

[W]e are not with you, but with him, that is our secret! For a long time now—eight centuries already—we have not been with you, but with him. Exactly eight centuries ago, 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 (257).

The gift that Christ “so indignantly rejected” was the three temptations of Satan, as described in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke in the New Testament of the Bible. Above all, the Inquisitor is indignant about the rejection of the third temptation, namely, Satan’s offer to make Christ the ruler of all the kingdoms of the world. In the Inquisitor’s view, Christ was mistaken to reject the temptations, leaving it to the Church to correct his mistake. Now, having rejected Christ and embraced Satan, the Church can finally control all the earthly kingdoms and the human beings within them.

Christ’s mistake, the Inquisitor explained, emerged from a fundamental misunderstanding concerning human nature; human nature—and its relationship to free will—becomes one of the central themes of the piece. In rejecting the temptations, the Inquisitor explains, Christ championed free will, but this free will, in the Inquisitor’s view, does not make people happy. In this, the Inquisitor is perfectly serious, as Ivan explains to Alyosha when he interrupts him: The Inquisitor “precisely lays it to his and his colleagues’ credit that they have finally overcome freedom, and have done so in order to make people happy” (251). Freedom does not make people happy because “Man was made a rebel” (251), and a rebel cannot be happy—cannot find true redemption—without clear rules. By rejecting Satan’s offer to make him a true ruler of human beings, by championing freedom and free will, Christ thus betrayed humanity, effectively barring almost all human beings from redemption by permitting them to choose the wrong thing. The Church, in contrast, has taken away this ability by putting an end to freedom. Christ failed to realize that what human beings want more than freedom is stability, food, prosperity, and guidance, and this the Church provides by rejecting Christ’s teachings in favor of “miracle, mystery, and authority” (257).

The Inquisitor bases his theology on a pragmatic interpretation of the temptation of Christ in the wilderness. In this reading, the great “miracle” lies precisely in the truth proclaimed by “the force and depth” (252) of the three temptations. By rejecting the first temptation, the promise of bread, Christ has made it so that human beings will never be able to follow him for long: “‘Feed them first, then ask virtue of them!’—that is what they will write on the banner they raise against you, and by which your temple will be destroyed” (253). The Inquisitor thus exposes an apparent flaw in Christ’s response to Satan: that men do not live on bread alone, but on faith in God. But how can humans worship properly and be good when they are hungry? Similarly, in rejecting the second temptation (to throw himself down from the top of the Temple and prove his identity by having God send angels to save him), Christ denied humans the miracle and mystery they need in order to believe:

Oh, of course, in this you acted proudly and magnificently, like God, but mankind, that weak, rebellious tribe—are they gods? […] are there many like you? And, indeed, could you possibly have assumed, even for a moment, that mankind, too, would be strong enough for such a temptation? Is that how human nature was created—to reject the miracle, and in those terrible moments of life, the moments of the most terrible, essential, and tormenting questions of the soul, to remain only the free decision of the heart? (255).

Once again, Christ failed humanity by misunderstanding them, as he would do a third time by rejecting the third temptation, the temptation of earthly power. By refusing earthly power, Christ deprived humans of the overseeing authority that they need to be good, leaving them only the freedom to remain wicked.

Who, then, is Christ’s real opponent in the story? Does Ivan’s poem set Christ against all Christian institutions, the Roman Catholic Church specifically, or only the Grand Inquisitor or others like him within Church hierarchy? The devout Alyosha cannot accept that Christ’s opponents represent anything more than a small fraction of the combined institutions of the Church: “It’s Rome, and not even the whole of Rome […] the worst of Catholicism, the Inquisitors, the Jesuits…!” (260). Such movements, for Alyosha, represent “Simply the lust for power, for filthy earthly lucre” (260), and thus depart not only from the teachings of Christ, but also from the teachings of the Church more broadly. Yet Alyosha interprets the poem differently: He cannot believe that Ivan’s Inquisitors and Jesuits act on their own or solely for superficial power and wealth: They are after something more.

What is also important to remember is that Ivan does not see his poem as an attack on the Church at all: Rather, he clearly believes that the Grand Inquisitor is right and that Christ was wrong. Ivan’s version of Christ failed humanity by rejecting Satan, and the Church tries to save its flock by correcting this mistake.

This, at least, is the position Ivan himself proclaims. However, on closer inspection, Ivan’s poem, like Ivan’s character, is more ambiguous. The Inquisitor sees human beings as truly weak, “stupid,” and even evil, yet he still loves them enough to sacrifice his own happiness for theirs. The goal of the Church, in the Inquisitor’s eyes, is to ensure that “everyone will be happy, all the millions of creatures, except for the hundred thousand of those who govern them” (259). Ivan, similarly, bases his own denial of God on his overlapping compassion and contempt for humans, asking (especially in the chapters of the novel that precede “The Grand Inquisitor”) how a merciful God can allow humans to suffer as they do even as Ivan considers most humans contemptible and base.

The story of “The Grand Inquisitor” is thus much more dialogic—or featuring several conflicting but equally weighted attitudes—than its structure initially suggests. The Inquisitor’s speech, as presented by Ivan, is only superficially a monologue. It is punctuated by quotes from scripture, setting Christ as the Inquisitor’s interlocutor even though the physical Christ never speaks a word. On a wider level, the whole poem is presented within a dialogue between its author Ivan and his devout brother Alyosha. The superficial monologue of “The Grand Inquisitor” is thus really polyvocal, a combination of different voices both from the novel’s world (Ivan, Alyosha, the Church) and from within Ivan himself. According to the renowned literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, this is what lies behind “The Grand Inquisitor”:

[A] profound participation of all elements of Ivan's worldview in his internal dialogue with himself and in his internally polemical interrelations with others. For all its external proportionality, the “Legend” is nevertheless full of interruptions; both the very form of its construction as The Grand Inquisitor's dialogue with Christ and at the same time with himself, and, finally, the very unexpectedness and duality of its finale, indicate an internally dialogic disintegration at its very ideological core (Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. University of Minnesota Press, 1984, p. 279).

The meaning of the kiss Christ leaves the Inquisitor with also contributes to the ambiguity of the piece, and the ambiguity of Ivan’s own beliefs. The gesture recalls the kiss with which Judas betrayed Christ to arresting soldiers in the gospels. In this case, is Christ, like Judas, signaling that he is forsaking the Inquisitor, and with him the Church? Culturally, kisses symbolize connection and affection. If this is the effect Christ is after, is he approving what the Inquisitor has said to him? Reversely, is he showing that, in spite of everything, he still accepts and loves a world that has forsaken him and his teachings? Dostoevsky does not answer these questions. But it is no doubt significant that when Ivan, wrestling with the voices inside of him, asks Alyosha not to hate him for his beliefs, Alyosha’s response is to copy Ivan’s Christ and kiss his brother on the lips, indicating that he loves him and does not condemn him.