Legend of the Grand Inquisitor’ Reconsidered Literary Irony and Theological Seriousness in Its Representation of Christ

Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 59(1-2), 103-121. doi: 10.2143/JECS.59.1.2023429 T©HE 2007 ‘LEGEND by Journal OF THE of EasternGRAND Christian INQUISITOR Studies.’ RECONSIDERED All rights reserved. 103

THE ‘LEGEND OF THE GRAND INQUISITOR’ RECONSIDERED LITERARY IRONY AND THEOLOGICAL SERIOUSNESS IN ITS REPRESENTATION OF CHRIST

WIL VAN DEN BERCKEN*

The chapter ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ in Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is one of the most intriguing religious-philosophical pieces in literature. It is an original interpretation of the figure of Christ and of the nature of Christian belief. The story has been commented on by many inter- preters but was more often used as an argument for or against a certain ecclesiastical theological standpoint, rather than appreciated as an autono- mous piece of literature. In order to make a sound theological evaluation, however, one must first approach the story within its own literary frame- work. What literary means does Dostoevsky use to convey his view of Christ and Christianity? Before analysing the theological content of the story, I would like to treat three aspects of literary style in ‘The Grand Inquisi- tor’1: irony in the presentation of the story, the anti-iconographical picture of Christ and the indirect method of presenting his message.

IRONY

First a word on the general structure of the story of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ itself. It is a story within the larger story of the novel and is not part of the plot. As regards content, it is linked to the discussion between the brothers, Ivan and Aleksei, on the suffering in the world, described in the previous chapter. In intention, but not in structure, it is linked to the life and teach-

* Wil van den Bercken is slavist and professor extraordinarius of Russian Church history at Radboud University Nijmegen. This article is based on a paper presented at the conference “Dostoevsky and Religion” in Barcelona, Sept. 7, 2006. The text will also be pub- lished in the proceedings of this conference, organized by the International Dostoevsky Society. 1 ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ with inverted commas refers to the story, without inverted commas to the person of the Grand Inquisitor.

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ing of the monk, Zosima (Book 6, chs. II, III): according to Dostoevsky’s notes, Zosima’s teaching is meant to be the answer to questions left unan- swered in the discussion between the brothers Ivan and Aleksei, including ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, but there is no logical transition. Structurally – and stylistically, as a variant of the vita-genre – the story of Zosima is also independent. In the rest of the novel, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is only mentioned once, hundreds of pages further on, in a sarcastic reference by the devil in Ivan’s hallucination (Book 11, ch. IX). In spite of this structural independence from the plot, the poem is fundamental to Ivan’s intellectual character and forms the core of his spiritual drama, and it is an intellectual high point of the entire novel. Using Ivan Karamazov as the spiritual father of the poem, the novel writer, Dostoevsky, has created a certain distance from its contents. And Ivan Karamazov himself keeps a certain distance by putting his thoughts into an ‘invented’ story and not writing it down. This distance is enlarged by presenting his invention light-heartedly and with self-mockery. Thus there is a multiple distance between the person of Dostoevsky and his Grand Inquisitor. Ivan Karamazov introduces his story as a ‘poem’. With this swollen term he expresses a subtle irony and he immediately warns his brother not to laugh. Laughing himself, he immediately says that he did not write it, but ‘made it up’ and remembered it. And, again laughingly, he asks if he may tell the ‘silly story’ (veshch’ nelepaya). But then he remembers with a self- mockery laugh that he needs a ‘literary preface’. ‘Laugh’ has already appeared four times as Ivan finally begins his ‘little poem’ (poemka). The irony is clear: first using the name of a classical genre and then calling it a silly story, giving it a quasi-literary preface, accompa- nied by a repeated laugh of self-mockery. During the telling itself, Ivan laughs or mocks another seven times and Alyosha also smiles now and then: this creates a somewhat frivolous atmosphere around this very serious argument. However, the laugh also acts as a sort of intermezzo, a break in the long story, and is coupled to a question from Alyosha and interjections from Ivan. At the end, Ivan again puts his whole story into perspective: ‘After all, it is all nonsense (vzdor), Alyosha, it is only a confused (bestolkovaya) poem by a confused student who has never put two lines of verse together. Why do you take it so seriously?’

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This sets a tone that contrasts with the content of the piece, but this is a well-known trick of Dostoevsky’s: the more serious his ideas, the more the presentation is put into perspective, relativised. In other novels, it is drunks, mentally disturbed or socially ostracised persons who transmit serious ideas. Ivan is not someone from the social fringe, he is a gentleman and an intellectual, but relativises himself through mockery. One could call the presentation of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ theology with irony. There is yet a deeper form of irony in the structure of the poem itself, namely in the role of the Grand Inquisitor, who, as Jesus’s opponent, turns out to be the interpreter of His message, but more of that later. First a remark on the outer appearance of Jesus.

ANTI-ICONOGRAPHY

In the poem, after a sketch of a ‘brilliant auto-da-fé … ad majorem gloriam Dei’, suddenly ‘He’ appears. Here a nameless and speechless somebody is introduced, the beginning of an absurd play. Nowhere in the piece is Jesus mentioned by name, always by ‘He’, ‘Him’, ‘His’. But the people recognise Him: ‘That is He, that is He Himself’, ‘It must be He, no-one but He’ and, when the dead girl’s mother turns to Jesus, she does so with the words: ‘If it is You …’. And the first words with which the Grand Inquisitor turns to Jesus are: ‘Is it You? You?’. Only at the end of the chapter will the name Je- sus be mentioned, not by Ivan but by Alyosha. Only in the short episode before the meeting with the Grand Inquisitor does Dostoevsky have Jesus act: He reaches out to the people surrounding Him and ‘softly’ says two Aramaic words to the dead girl, ‘Talitha cumi – maiden, arise’, a literal quotation from Mark 5,41. Dostoevsky describes Jesus as having several spiritual characteristics, vis- ible in His appearance: He appears ‘in His immeasurable compassion’, ‘from infinite mercy’, walks ‘quietly and imperceptibly’, has a ‘quiet smile of end- less pity’, looks ‘with pity’. And the people recognise Him: there is mutual contact. But after the appearance of the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, the people immediately disappear and from now Jesus plays a passive role, the Grand Inquisitor dominating the stage to the end. The figure of Jesus stands motionless opposite the continuously orating cardinal. Besides being speechless and nameless, Jesus also has no real face, since Dostoevsky gives no description of the physical appearance of Jesus,

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while drawing the physiognomy of the ninety-year-old inquisitor in detail. Two opposing figures without any action or real discussion: a static context for an explosive religious-anthropological argument. As a stage piece, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ derives its drama from the monologue, not the action. Only at the very last moment does Jesus break through His passivity with a surprising gesture: He kisses the old prelate on his bloodless lips. After Jesus’ long immobility up to then, this short gesture takes on great meaning. A gesture that says more than words and takes the Cardinal completely by sur- prise, having just ended his monologue with the words, ‘Tomorrow I shall have you burnt. Dixi!’ And this resolute Latin word again adds a touch of irony. Seen from Orthodox iconography, the portrait of Jesus that emerges from ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is unconventional. It is in every way the opposite of Christ Pantocrator or the throned Christ of the Day of Judgement. Instead we have here a compassionate Jesus among the people and then a submis- sive, silent prisoner in front of a human judge. Neither is this Jesus the glo- rified Christ of the transfiguration, nor the resurrected Christ of the Easter icons but the earthly Jesus. It is therefore characteristic that when Jesus is mentioned by name at the end of the story, it is not with the name ‘Christ’. Dostoevsky breaks through the canonised picture of the Christ of Ortho- dox iconography; his figure of Jesus is nearer to the people and is more vul- nerable than the divine judge. It is not the Christ of dogma and cult, but the kenotic Christ, come down to earth anew. This is indicated by Ivan himself with a quote from Tyutchev in which ‘the heavenly king, in the form of a slave,’ walks the earth.2 This quote becomes a motif-quote, although the location is changed from Russia to Spain. The ‘kenotic Christ’ is not unknown in Orthodoxy but it is more typical for Catholic theology and spirituality. In Orthodoxy the emphasis is on the resurrected Christ and on the divine nature of Christ, in Catholic and a fortiori in Protestant tradition the human aspect of Jesus is much more em- phasised. This makes the presentation of the Jesus figure in ‘The Grand In- quisitor’ exceptional in Orthodox context. However, the human Jesus does have a superhuman emanation: ‘The sun of love burns in His heart, rays of Light, Knowledge and Strength shine

2 A reference to Philippians 2,7. ‘But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a slave, and was made in the likeness of men…’

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from His eyes and, as they fall on the people, move their hearts to mutual love’. The metaphors of ‘sun’ and ‘rays from eyes’ are rather unusual for Or- thodox iconography and the shining eyes are the opposite of the piercing eyes of the not-made-by-human-hands-Christ or the divine rays of the transfigured Christ which paralyse the apostles on mount Tabor. Here they move the hearts of the people to love. Although the picture of Jesus sketched here by Dostoevsky does not fit into Orthodox iconography, it does fit into nineteenth-century representation of Jesus, manifested in popular Catholic and Protestant pictures for religious education and in Russian romantic painting (A. Ivanov, I. Kramskoy). But the people in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, who come to Him spontane- ously, are not romanticised by Dostoevsky, who earlier described them as the ‘people, stinking-sinful, but childishly loving Him’. And this love is lim- ited, as they leave Jesus at the first sign of the Cardinal Inquisitor. Jesus now stands alone before a human judge, as He did in his earthly life before Pilate, who also questioned Jesus about His actions. There is a Russian painting of this scene by Nikolay Ge (1890), ‘Jesus before Pilate’: the kenotic Godman before a human judge. This unorthodox painting is visu- ally close to Jesus before the Grand Inquisitor.3

INDIRECT METHOD

A special aspect of Dostoevsky’s approach to the figure of Jesus in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is His silence. Dostoevsky does not let Jesus say anything of his own, puts no words in His mouth (the words ‘Talitha cumi’ are a quote from the Gospel). Had he done so, Jesus would have become not only a literary but also a theological creation of the author. Dostoevsky typifies Jesus by a few biblical details and thus lets Him be Himself. Dostoevsky does not make Him the mouthpiece of his own views. Or Dostoevsky does not act the Messiah himself. Also the fact that Dostoevsky has Ivan speaking

3 Dostoevsky never uses the word ‘kenosis’, which appeared in fact in the 1890’s in Russian theological writings, although the idea existed before. See for the dispute about this theme: J. Børtnes, ‘Russkiî kenotizm: k pereocenke odnogo ponqtiq’ in Evangelàskiî tekst v russkoî literature XVIII-XX vekov, ed. V. Zakharov (Petrozavodsk, 1994), pp. 61-65. It is accidental but interesting that the painting by N. Ge appeared at the same time.

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about Jesus without mentioning his name, can be seen as a sign of religious respect.4 Dostoevsky has found a way of transmitting Jesus’ message without putting words into His mouth. He lets Jesus speak without His own words. It is a form of apophatic theology, of negative speech in order to convey a positive content. But here it is not the traditional apophasis in which the negative expresses the opposite, but the apophasis is transferred from the words to the speakers: it is not opposite words that say what God is not, but a speaker in opposition who specifically does not want to be ‘with God’. This means that it is not Jesus, but his denier, his opponent, who says what Jesus’ message is. This indirect way of speaking makes the contents all the more penetrating. This process is, at the same time, an ultimate form of irony: Dostoevsky has Jesus’ opponent say what he forbids Him to say; everything the prelate denounces and criticises in Jesus is exactly what Jesus wants to disseminate. The message is wrapped in the inquisitor’s anti-message, again mockingly pointed out by Ivan as ‘a feverish dream, a vision of a ninety-year-old man … a boundless fantasy’. The inquisitor’s indictment against Jesus is, in fact, an explanation of the nature of the Christian faith and his monologue is, in fact, a dialogue. The inquisitor anticipates Jesus’ answers: ‘Do not answer, be still. What could you say? I know all too well what you are going to say’. And, of course, he does not want a dialogue, for a little later he says: ‘I do not know who You are and I do not want to know: if it is You or only His image’. But he knows it full well because further on he says: ‘Or do You think I don’t know to whom I am talking? You have known all along what I am saying, I can see it in Your eyes’. A curious mono-dialogue. And yet ‘the old man would like the other to say something to him, even though it might be bitter and terrible’. But Jesus remains still and not only because the inquisitor has forbidden Him to speak. This silence has a deeper meaning. Jesus answers without words, with a kiss. This gesture reflects the core of His teaching: forgiveness. Jesus forgives the representative of the

4 This positive evaluation of the non-mentioning of the name Jesus Christ differs from the one given by Diane Thompson, who considers Ivan’s ‘absolute refusal to call his Christ-like figure by His divine names … perhaps the most ambiguous feature of Ivan’s representation’ and a negation of the canonical Christ. ‘The Brothers Karamazov’ and the Poetics of Memory (Cambridge, 1991), p. 284.

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Church! A superior gesture and an unprecedented theological idea: Jesus forgiving the Church. Formulated in words, the idea is indeed so absurd that it can only be communicated by a gesture. The inquisitor is hit, the kiss ‘burns on his heart’. ‘On’ not ‘in’ his heart. He is not able to reciprocate, he sticks to his view. The kiss as answer also has a theological meaning: Jesus’ answer is not argumentative, not logical, but affective. It is the only possible answer to the inquisitor’s rational thinking, it is love in opposition to the Euclidean wis- dom of Ivan, who, in the discussion with Alyosha prior to his poem, raised the problem of suffering and happiness. He is not convinced, since, as an analyst aptly says: ‘At a minimum, he wants a philosophically respectable Christ who answers the theodicy problem.’5 Thus the kiss implies a theological statement by Dostoevsky himself, whose entire struggle with the problem of God is an answer to the rationalism of atheism. In ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, the kiss is a brilliant idea of Dostoevsky’s, who, however, again parodies it himself by having Alyosha plant a similarly unexpected kiss on Ivan’s lips at the end of the chapter. This is another form of irony, and a special literary trick: as the author of a novel, Dostoevsky plagiarises one of his own characters from the novel. An- other literary interpretation can be that with this copy of Jesus’ gesture, Dostoevsky symbolically expresses the fact that he sees Alyosha as a reflec- tion of Jesus. It has rightly been noted that in the Gospel Christ is never shown kissing anyone, let alone on the lips.6 This means that Dostoevsky while carefully avoiding laying non-biblical words in Jesus’ mouth, he nevertheless lets him perform an unbiblical gesture. However, Dostoevsky is not necessarily de- picting the canonical Christ of the dogmatic theology. He expresses his thoughts and feelings on Christ in his own literary way. The originality of the kiss cannot be denied, and the theological meaning as counterweight to the rational verbalism of the grand inquisitor, and as a sign of forgiveness is strong.

5 P. Travis Kroeker – B. Ward, Remembering the End. Dostoevsky as Prophet to Modernity (Boulder, Col., 2001), p. 261. 6 Thompson, Poetics of Memory, p. 290. However, Thompson, qualifies it as ‘another the- atrical, even heretical, stroke of Ivan’s Christ’. This is again a judgement from a canoni- cally theological point of view.

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Back to the inquisitor. Although he mentions Jesus’ message, he gives it a reasoned dismissal and corrects it. The whole story therefore seems to be a rejection of Jesus. That is what Ivan thinks but his brother, Alyosha, denies this: the story is ‘in praise of Jesus, not in blame (khvala Iisusu a ne khula) as you wanted’. That is the climax of apophasis: minus becomes plus, an explanation meant as a rejection turns out to be a defence, and the nameless figure of Ivan’s story receives from Alyosha the name Jesus. Without intending to, the anti-theist Ivan Karamazov has sketched a positive portrait of Jesus. It is important to note that Dostoevsky not only puts no theological sentences into Jesus’ mouth but, in the indirect reproduction of His message, does not render Him as a nineteenth-century moralist. Neither does he make Him a protagonist of Russian religious values, something Dostoevsky, the Slavophile, tends to do elsewhere. No romantic Russian Christ here, but an evangelical Jesus confronted by a fundamental sceptic who was once His follower. It has been shown by Dostoevsky-scholars that Dostoevsky’s undogmatic Christ was also determined by the liberal Protestant theology of the nineteenth century, which presents Jesus primarily as a religious-aesthetic ideal. To some extent Dostoevsky’s Jesus indeed may be called ‘Protestant’ but not of the liberal sort. The ‘human’ Jesus confronts people with an obviously superhuman call to belief without certainty and good feeling, and – later in Zosima’s teaching – to limitless readiness for forgiveness. Dostoevsky’s dra- matic theology of faith and forgiveness is the opposite of the rational aesthetical theology of his time. It anticipates the Protestant dialectical and existentialist theology of the twentieth century, with its Christ-centricity and personalistic view of Man.

THEOLOGICAL SERIOUSNESS

The picture of the humiliated Christ in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is Dostoev- sky’s most pronounced view on Christ. There is another scene with Christ in The Brothers Karamazov, equally famous but totally different, in the chapter ‘Cana of Galilee’. Here Christ appears in a vision of Alyosha where the earthly wedding party in Cana is being transformed in a heavenly banquet and the Jesus of the Gospel story turns into the mystical Christ. Instead of the seemingly unbearable call to free acceptance of faith in ‘The Grand In-

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quisitor’ we have here the invitation to take part in the joyful eternal meal in heaven, and as such ‘Cana of Galilee’ is the completion of the Christ of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. That means that there is no opposition between the Christ image of Ivan and the Christ image of Alyosha. In the scene Jesus is called by his name in the verbally quoted sentences of the Gospel (John 2,1- 11) but not in the mystical vision itself, there he is only indicated as ‘our sun’. Curiously enough, Dostoevsky lets the Jesus of the Gospel story again perform an unbiblical gesture, he lets him smile at his mother: ‘He speaks with a quiet smile (Undoubtedly he tenderly smiled at her)’.7 Prince Myshkin of The Idiot, is often seen as an allegory of Christ but The Idiot is certainly not the most religious novel of Dostoevsky and Myshkin, clumsy and platonically in love with two women, is psychologically interesting but not theologically impressive, although he personifies a high ethical ideal. There is also a non-literary text in Dostoevsky’s oeuvre with an explicit opinion on Christ: a meditative note on the laying-out of his deceased first wife, Maria Isaeva.8 Here a much more philosophical and abstract picture of Christ appears than in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’: Christ as the Great Synthe- sis. This ego-document of April 16th, 1864 can, however, not be used to ex- plain the literary Jesus of Ivan’s poem. If, for the understanding of a novel, one has to know personal notes by the author, never intended for publica- tion, one would, in fact, have to have a novel with footnotes.9 Anyhow, there is a great difference between Christ as ‘The Great Synthesis’ and the kenotic Jesus of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. Looking for the religious meaning of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, we have to find it in the story itself. The inquisitor’s indictment is about the character of the attitude to Christian belief. What is this? It becomes clear through two groups of terms

7 Although Jesus never smiles in the Bible like he never kisses, Thompson does not qualify this gesture as heretical. She interprets with good arguments the Christ of Alyosha as ‘the authentic Christ of the novel’ (ibid., pp. 297-299). However, this scene and especially the continuation in the ecstasy of Alyosha has often been characterised as doubtful Christian because of the implicit cosmic cult and the anonymous approach of the Divine (‘something whole’, ‘something firm and unshakeable’, ‘someone’). This demonstrates the poly-interpretability of Dostoevsky’s literary Christology. 8 Poln. sobranie sow. v 30 tomah (Leningrad, 1972-1990), XX, pp. 172-175. 9 The hermeneutical relation which Travis Kroeker and Ward lay between the Christ in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ and the Masha-text is therefore not necessary, however interesting their analysis of the two texts is (Remembering the End, pp. 251-255).

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which occur repeatedly in the inquisitor’s plea. ‘Free will’, ‘free love’ (of God) and ‘one’s own conscience’ on the one hand, and on the other hand, ‘miracle’, ‘mystery’ and ‘authority’. Belief must be Man’s personal choice. However, Man finds this freedom of choice, with the attendant decisions of conscience about good and evil and his own responsibility, too much of a burden. He has different priorities, such as concern for bread and happiness. He exchanges his conscience for bread and, when his physical needs are sat- isfied, Man looks to idols of collective worship for his other needs, as long as these guarantee psychological comfort and spiritual peace. The Grand In- quisitor’s Roman Catholic Church has understood this human trait and acts accordingly. Jesus is accused of having thought too highly of Man, with His paradoxical demand for free love. Instead of ‘firm foundations for their peace of mind’, Jesus offers them ‘all that is unusual, puzzling and unde- fined, all that they cannot cope with’. Living with fundamental freedom brings Man ‘unrest, confusion and misery’. These words of the Grand Inquisitor sound as if they had been taken from modern existentialist philosophy. The unconditional recognition of Man’s freedom of conscience is definitely new in the context of the Church in Dostoevsky’s time, when one was a member of a church on the grounds of belonging to a national or ethnic collective. Here Dostoevsky even devi- ates from his own view on belief, expressed elsewhere, as an ethnic quality (Russians are said to be Orthodox by nature). It is an almost Protestant approach to belief as a personal appeal by God to Man, widely different from the scholastic Catholic and Orthodox theology of the time. The central point of Christianity is belief as an act of free will not of blind obedience to the Church nor as a result of being over- whelmed by miracles and mysteries. The acceptance of authority and liturgi- cal mysteries are the result of belief not the condition. The stress on freedom does not imply a negation of the authoritative word of God as is often thought and presented as a theological argument against the ‘The Grand Inquisitor’.10 It only means that Gods word is to be accepted freely.

10 See for example Malcolm Jones interpretative option (as theoretical possibility) in Dostoyevsky after Bakhtin (Cambridge, 1990), p. 176, where it is said that Ivan ‘fails to notice that his Jesus (the one he accuses in his monologue) has, unlike the Jesus of the Gospels, abandoned the authoritative Word of God and replaced it by a creed of unsup- ported freedom’.

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Belief cannot be based on exterior proofs or arguments by authorities, it must come ‘from the heart’. This theme had already been anticipated by Ivan Karamazov at the beginning of his poem with the quote: ‘Believe what your heart dictates: Heaven does not give collaterals’. The Grand Inquisi- tor’s Church, however, has long moved to another approach: ‘We have corrected your work and based it on miracle, mystery and authority’ (Dostoevsky’s italics). With that, the Church has emasculated the essence of faith. It has subjected the human spirit with the lure of miracle and mystery and the coercion of authority. The inquisitor’s Church, however, acted with an eye to the happiness of the people. To this end, it corrected Jesus’ message and, in fact, falsified it. The faithful herd must, however, not be aware of it, it is the Church’s secret, one of the pillars of its power. ‘We shall say that we obey You and govern in Your name …. Our suffering is inherent in this deception, for we shall have to lie’. And: ‘We shall keep the secret and, for their happiness, tempt them with a heavenly and eternal reward.’ This is the theme of the “pious fraud” that was already used against the Church in the Renaissance and that Dostoevsky may have taken from Thomas Paine, as has been shown in a re- cent study.11 Besides the theological defence of freedom, Dostoevsky also presents an anthropological one. This comes from the criticism of socialism, ‘the wis- dom and knowledge that there is no crime and therefore no sin, but only hungry people’, from the building of a new Tower of Babel, from ‘a unani- mous and harmonious ant heap’, ‘a world-wide unification’, ‘a universal state’. This secular suppression of human individuality by a regime without God is, in essence, the same as suppression in the name of God. With this theme of atheist socialism, Dostoevsky steps across the time-structure of Ivan’s poem, leaping from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, but clev- erly avoiding anachronism by presenting it as a phenomenon of all times. First by projection into the future – ‘centuries will pass’ – then by associat- ing it with political empires from world history, from ‘the Timurs and the Dzengis Khans’, then by referring to the Old Testament Tower of Babel and,

11 A. Harris Fairbanks, ‘Was Thomas Paine a source for Dostoevskij’s “Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”?’, Russian Literature, 48 (2000), pp. 223-230. Besides the idea of pious fraud, the author also notes remarkable similarity between Paine’s ‘three means, Mystery, Miracle and Prophecy’ and Dostoevsky’s ‘three powers, miracle, mystery and authority’.

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finally, by shifting the phenomenon of a political utopia to the eschato- logical end of time from the Apocalypse: the beast and the harlot of Babylon. In The Devils (part 2, chapter 7,II), Dostoevsky had already used the theme of political collectivism in the view of society held by Shigalyev, the cynical ideologist. The ideocracy sketched there is similar to the Grand In- quisitor’s theocracy in the sense that in both these societies a self-appointed minority determines the happiness of the majority, determines what is good and bad and allows the weak people to sin within certain limits. The difference is that the Grand Inquisitor does not act in a self-opinionated Nietz- schean way, but out of pity for weak humanity. In the mentioned part of The Devils, Dostoevsky lays no relationship between ideological totalitarian- ism and the Church of Rome, although he had done this earlier in The Idiot (part 4, chapter VII). There – and even more in his publicist writings – he averred that socialism, atheism and Catholicism were evolutionarily related. In ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, Dostoevsky sees the ideological builders of the Tower of Babel as rebels against the Church of Rome, but both systems mis- lead the people with their materialistic and conscience-salving temptations. The rebels will persecute the Church but, after a thousand years of fruitless building on their tower, return to the Church of Rome, which will eventu- ally finish the job. Dostoevsky enlarges on these religious and anthropological themes by means of a variation on the biblical story of the devil’s three temptations for Jesus (Matthew 4,1-11, Luke 4,1-13). He does not use the words ‘three temptations’ but speaks of ‘three questions’, thereby giving a meaning to this evangelical scene that transcends religion: ‘For in these three questions, the entire further history of Man is, as it were, bunched together and proph- esied and the three images, in which all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature in the whole world come together, are made mani- fest.’ Dostoevsky thinks that no ‘ruler, high priest, scholar, philosopher, or poet’ could give a better formulation of those problems. So, if Dostoevsky via Ivan’s inquisitor so strongly underlines the trans-religious meaning of the problem of freedom and faith, it must be justifiable to look for a trans-confessional meaning of his view of the Church in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’.

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TRANS-CONFESSIONAL MEANING

At first sight, ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ constitutes a clear attack on the Ro- man Catholic Church. It is manifested in the guise of the Cardinal-Grand Inquisitor as an institution of power that has distorted Christ’s message and made the Church into a political institution. Papacy and its ecclesiastical state dating from the eighth century are said to be the cause of the politicization of the Church. But the poem of Ivan Karamazov differs in tone from the anti-Catholic sally that Dostoevsky has Myshkin give in the fragment in The Idiot (part 4, ch. VII) already mentioned, where Myshkin nationalises the figure of Christ to ‘our Christ’ (nash Khristos), and also from the anti-Catholic attack in The Devils (part 2, ch. 1, VII), where Shatov dismisses the ‘the Roman god’ (rimskiy bog) as anti-Christ and posits a national Russian god. As the representative of Catholic rationalism and authoritarianism, the Grand Inquisitor is not caricatured. The inquisitor appears not in cardinal’s red, but in a coarse monk’s habit.12 The old man is not a power-loving prelate, living in luxury, but someone who lives an ascetic life, like Jesus Him- self: ‘Know that I, too, was in the desert, I, too, fed on grasshoppers and the roots of plants’. He has given up the pursuit of his own salvation and offers himself up for the people, has taken over their moral dilemma, is ‘a martyr, bowed down by great solicitude, who loves the people’. ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is not solely an exposure of Catholicism, for this negative theme paradoxically is the starting point for a positive account of Christianity. The unmasking of the authoritarian vision of the Church re- sults in praise of the freedom of faith, which is essential for Christianity. Thus ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is not aimed exclusively against the Catholic Church, but against the collectivist religious ideology of the institutionalised Church. The most important reason for a trans-confessional interpretation of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is the theological-anthropological depth of this core. And even this is not only aimed at authoritarian religious belief but against all views that make individual conscience and freedom subservient to a social ideology. Happy slaves or tormented free people, that is the fun-

12 If Dostoevsky took the idea of a cardinal-inquisitor from Schiller’s play, Don Carlos, the difference between the robes of the one and the monk’s habit of the other is all the more remarkable.

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damental dichotomy, not Catholicism or Orthodoxy. Ivan’s poem transcends the confessional divides and even the ecclesiastical theme. The theme is a fundamental anthropological one. The unmasking of the materialist Man and his willingness to exchange moral responsibility for material prosperity, is a universal anthropological truth and therefore also valid for the Russian people. Even if the Slavophile Dostoevsky thought that, in contrast to western Man, the Russian is not materialistic, this ideological narrow-mindedness – not shown by Dostoev- sky in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ – would not affect the fundamental value of the argument. There are yet more considerations in favour of a trans-confessional interpretation of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. Dostoevsky himself warns against gen- eralisation with Alyosha’s words. Ecclesiastical obsession with power is, indeed, ‘Rome, but not even entirely, they are the worst elements of Catholi- cism, the inquisitors and the Jesuits! … And such a fantastic figure as your inquisitor could not even exist’. Another argument against an exclusively anti-Catholic interpretation is that of the religious phenomenon, the miracle, the second ecclesiastical temptation. Belief in miracles is ex aequo present in the Catholic and in the Orthodox Church. What Dostoevsky says about it can equally be applied to Orthodoxy. Besides, Dostoevsky himself ridicules the belief in miracles elsewhere in the novel, first in old Fyodor Karamazov’s sarcastic mockery and later in the biting irony about the corpselike smell of the dead Zosima. This irony not only criticises the monks’ naive belief in miracles, but breaks through the hagiographic topos of sweet-smelling odours in the Orthodox vita-genre. Earlier in the novel, Dostoevsky has fundamentally reversed the relationship faith-and-miracles by stating that miracles do not lead to faith, but that miracles stem from faith (book 1, ch. V). A miracle is not a proof of faith but the result of it. Thus, in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’, the raising of the dead girl is no show-miracle, not a way of winning people for the faith by spectacular means: it is done for the people who already believe in Jesus. On the other hand, the devil in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ challenges Jesus to perform miracles like magic tricks (changing stones into bread) or as a circus act (jumping from the roof). It must be pointed out that Dostoevsky not only dismisses the ecclesiastical use of miracles as an argument for belief, but also rejects the negation of

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the possibility of miracles as an argument against the Church. This is what he accuses the Protestants of at the beginning of Ivan’s poem, where he mentions the appearance ‘in Germany of a terrible new heresy’, which ‘began to negate miracles in a blasphemous way’. This is either a form of irony or a strange ambivalence in Ivan’s story, since this passage comes immediately after the motif-quote, already mentioned, ‘Believe what your heart dictates: Heaven does not give collaterals’, strengthened by ‘And only believe what your heart tells you!’. This Dostoevskian sola fide is in opposition to the miracles. By the way, the reference to Luther shows that Dostoevsky, in spite of his suggested Protestant view of Christ, dismisses Protestantism as institution. The terms miracle and mystery can be understood in a wider sense. One can also include the mysteries of liturgy and sacraments in this phenomenon. Maybe the entire external ecclesiastical ritual is a ‘miracle’ to Dostoevsky, one that tempts people to an equally external belief. This conclusion is not exaggerated if one realises that Dostoevsky, after his attack on Catholicism, does not defend Orthodoxy in Alyosha’s reaction. Dostoevsky often criticises the Catholic Church as institution but never argues in favour of the Orthodox Church as institution. We may tentatively conclude that Dostoevsky’s criticism of the Catholic Church can also be applied to the Orthodox Church.13 When Dostoevsky writes about Orthodoxy in his literary work, it is never about the Orthodox Church but about the Orthodoxy of the people or the Orthodox Rus’ and sometimes just about Orthodoxy. Neither does Dostoevsky, in his description of the monk Zosima defend the Church or monastic life in its official form. On the contrary, he ridicules Zosima’s fel- low monks and their rules. And old Fyodor Karamazov’s derisive mockery of monastic life (book 2, chs. I and II) is, in all its cheerfulness, a debasement of this very Orthodox institution. This does not mean to say that Dostoevsky rejects monastic life, but that he has no romantic-religious views

13 In Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience (London, 2005), Malcolm Jones rightly states: ‘There is no doubt that the objections to Christianity expressed in Dostoevsky’s novels are applicable to all its forms […]’ (p. 51). That would imply that Dostoevsky’s anti-Catholic critique in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ can also be applied to the Orthodox Church, although Jones does not explicitly draw this conclusion. This innova- tive book of Jones effectively deconstructs the cliché of Dostoevsky as an Orthodox writer.

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about it, such as is usual in Orthodox (and Catholic) self-understanding. Dostoevsky praises starchestvo (the phenomenon of elder, wise monks) but this obviously makes for a problematical relationship with the hierarchical Church. And not only are the startsy Zosima and Makar in The Adolescent all but conventional types, but also Bishop Tikhon in The Devils, the only hierarch in Dostoevsky’s novels. It is striking that, when touching on Christian themes, Dostoevsky ig- nores the Orthodox Church. The Bible is very often mentioned but never ecclesiastical matters. There is a striking disregard for piety in Raskolnikov’s search for forgiveness in Crime and Punishment: there is no priest present, only Sonya reading the Gospel. In the last chapter of The Devils, the dying Stephan Verkhovensky makes an enthusiastic religious statement that has nothing to do with the Church. And nowhere in The Idiot, the hero of which was conceived as a Christ-figure, can any interest in the Church be found. Liturgy, the essence of Orthodox ecclesiology, is never dealt with, and icons are only rarely mentioned. The ideal of Christian beauty is not the holy icon but the Sixtine Madonna of Rafael, which from Orthodox point of view is a typical expression of western sensualism, and an ideal picture of Christ is not the Pantocrator but a romantic painting projected by Nastasha Filippovna. Indeed, Dostoevsky seems to have a view of the Church, stripped of power, miracles and mystery, and it does not look as if he sees the Russian State Church as the embodiment of his ideal. He very rarely uses the word church in his work. Ironically enough, the term appears in a statement by the religious wanderer, Makar: ‘My dear, work for the Holy Church and – when the time is ripe – be ready to die for it; but wait, do not be frightened, not now – he laughed’ (The Adolescent, part 3, ch. 4, II). He says ‘Holy’, not ‘Orthodox’. However, in The Brothers Karamazov, the institution Church does appear once explicitly, namely in the chapter, ‘May it be so, may it be so!’ (book 2, ch. V). There, Dostoevsky explains the relationship between Church and State in the form of a discussion on church administration of justice in a newspaper article by Ivan Karamazov. In Ivan’s argument, the term Church is used in a wider sense than in the Orthodox ecclesiastical meaning of a li- turgical community: here the Church is God’s kingdom on earth, into which the State must merge. This religious-political idea is rather that of the

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Catholic Church, which has always advocated the unity of Church and State but, in Catholicism, according to Dostoevsky, the direction has been reversed and the idea corrupted. And also according to Vladimir Solovyov, from whose Lectures on Godmanhood Dostoevsky took the theocratic view of the Church for Ivan’s article. In Catholicism, the Church wants to be the State, in Orthodoxy, the State becomes Church. Into the view that the State must merge into the Church instead of the other way round, one can also read Dostoevsky’s criticism on the servility of the Russian Church to the State. In any case, Dostoevsky again says nothing in favour of his own Church. We can say that the Russian Church and the Orthodox Church in general are conspicuous by their absence in Dostoevsky’s novels and even more so in the criticism of the Catholic Church in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’. If any- where, they could have been presented here as a positive alternative to ‘Rome’.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

We must conclude that, just as Dostoevsky’s picture of Christ differs from the theologized Christ, his view of the Church transcends confessional boundaries. It is this openness and ambivalence of Dostoevsky’s view of the Church, his non-denominationalism, that makes his “literary theology” so captivating. And does not a large part of the Bible belong to the genre of literary theology? In that sense, the story of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ can be compared to the Book of Job, which treats of human suffering and the Creator’s righteousness in an equally daring way.14 ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ as a biblical book! This is an evaluation diametrically opposed to the theological disqualification of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ by the Roman Catholic theo-

14 Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky. The Mantle of the Prophet 1871-1881 (Princeton, 2002), p. 600, is amongst those who have put the chapters ‘Rebellion’ and ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ within the biblical tradition, esp. the book of Job (and of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound). Victor Terras also makes a reference to Job and concludes that the novel as a whole ‘is no more and no less than a modern version of the Old Testament theodicy’: Reading Dostoevsky (Milwaukee, Wisc., 2004), p. 127. However, his evaluation of ‘The Grand In- quisitor’ is very negative and he considers it indeed to be ‘a silly poem of a silly student’ which is ‘undermined even from within through the introduction of false notes, melo- drama, and inner contradictions’ (pp. 122 and 140).

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logian Romano Guardini, who dismisses this sublime chapter as ‘Gottes- lästerliche Fratze des Grossinquisitors’ (‘blasphemous babble of the Grand Inquisitor’).15 Guardini is an example of reading Dostoevsky theologically without attention to the literary form and from a specific ecclesiological point of view. One last remark by way of epilogue. From the interpretation of ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ as presented in this article the literary character of the grand inquisitor emerges as a positive hero in the novel. One may ask whether this corresponds with the intention of Fyodor Dostoevsky himself. However, this question is not necessarily relevant from a literary point of view. The world of ideas created by an author becomes independent from the author in the history of its reception by the readers. More important is the question whether the interpretation can be related to structural elements and implicit indications in the text itself. I have based my interpretation of the role of the Grand Inquisitor on a literary approach of the text, but speaking on the Christian content in the text it is inevitable that a personal attitude toward Christianity plays a part in the evaluation of it. Regarding the literary approach, this includes the element of irony in the work of Dostoevsky and the paradoxical and ambivalent way of presenting religious- philosophical ideas by Dostoevsky in his literary work (otherwise then in his journalistic writings). Regarding my personal view on Christianity, this does not make me approach ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ from a particular confessional point of view. On the contrary, my view on Christianity is being modified, co-shaped by reading the text. Confessional theologians confiscate the text in order to create a degree of correspondence of the literary text with their dogmatic belief. As for myself, I feel attracted to Dostoevsky’s unique presentation in ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ of the paradoxical and antinomical nature of Christian belief. By ‘antinomical’ I mean the conflict between human striving for material well-being and spiritual comfort on the one hand and the nearly superhuman act of free belief in God and the spir-

15 Romano Guardini, Der Mensch und der Glaube. Versuche über die religiöse Existenz in Dostojewskijs grossen Romanen (Leipzig, 1932, many reprints), p. 160. Wolfgang Kasack is of the same opinion. In his article ‘Dostojewskis Darstellung Christi im “Grossinquisitor”’ he uses sixteen times the words ‘falsch’, ‘verfälscht’, or ‘Verfälschung’ next to ‘diffamieren’, ‘Verleumdung’ and ‘Pseudochristus’ to qualify the Grand Inquisitor’s thoughts: Deutsche Dostojewskij-Gesellschaft Jahrbuch 1996, pp. 51-70. Ludolf Müller rejects Guardini’s judgement in his ‘Dostojewskijs Poem vom “Grossinquisitor”’ (in the same volume, p. 47).

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itual uneasiness of moral responsibility on the other hand. Therefore I re- peat approvingly Alyosha’s qualification of Ivan’s ‘Poem of the Grand In- quisitor’: khvala Iisusu a ne khula (in praise of Jesus, not in blame). A qualification which, by the way, was against the intention of the “author” Ivan Karamazov.

ABSTRACT

Dostoevsky’s chapter on ‘The Grand Inquisitor’ is an original imagery of the Je- sus figure, different from the traditional image of Christ in Orthodox theology. It represents Jesus as the kenotic Godman and as a silent prisoner of the inquisitor. However, Dostoevsky turns the humiliation and silence into a medium for the message of Jesus. The Grand Inquisitor in his plea against Jesus and in his contra-message conveys indirectly the essence of Jesus’ own message on what belief should be. This literary device is on the one hand a sublime use of literary irony and on the other hand a metamorphosis of theological apophasy. As a second theme, the article demonstrates the trans-confessional meaning of the religious criticism of the Grand Inquisitor, which makes the story much more than just an anti-Catholic attack. By consequence, the role of the Grand Inquisitor is to be evaluated much more positively than traditionally occurs in Dostoevsky studies, especially by theologians.

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