Scene 5 – Oh Lord: The Church is in league with the Devil
Back in the prison cell with the ever-silent Jesus, the Grand Inquisitor acknowledges that because of the excessive burden of freedom of conscience, “We have corrected Thy work and founded it on miracle, mystery and authority.” This is why the Grand Inquisitor says, “Why has Thou come to hinder us?”
Then comes the truly revelatory moment in the Grand Inquisitor’s monologue, which Jesus knows already (obviously, because he is God). Knowing that he knows, the cardinal says, “Perhaps it is Thy will to hear it from my lips. Listen, then. We are not working with Thee, but with him – that is our mystery.” The Church is league with the Devil. It sits astride the Beast and raises aloft the cup marked “Mystery.” The Grand Inquisitor is diabolical. This explains why he is so fascinated with the temptations that Jesus faced in the desert. The Church has been seduced by those temptations in Jesus’ name.
The paradox is that the Church accepted those temptations in the hope of finding — as the Grand Inquisitor elegantly puts it — “Some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap.” The dream of a universal church, or a universal state, or the unity of all nations, or a cosmopolitan world order founded on perpetual peace, or whatever, is Satan’s most persuasive and dangerous temptation. The freedom proclaimed by Jesus is too demanding and makes people unhappy. We prefer a demonic happiness to an unendurable freedom. All that human beings want is to be saved from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves.
Scene 6 – The kiss and the curse
And so, all will be happy, except those, like the Grand Inquisitor, who guard the mystery and know the secret. They will be unhappy. But it is a price worth paying. The true Christians, by contrast, see themselves as the elect, the 12,000 from each of the 12 tribes who will be the company of saints in the millennium that follows Christ’s second coming. This is why the Grand Inquisitor says, “I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble.” This is why Christ hinders the work of the Church and why he must burn like a heretic.
At this point, the Grand Inquisitor stops speaking. Silence descends. The prisoner Jesus continues to look gently into the old Cardinal’s face, who longs for him to say something, no matter how terrible. Jesus rises, approaches the old man and softly kisses his bloodless lips. The Grand Inquisitor shudders, but the kiss still glows in his heart. He stands and heads for the door, saying to Jesus, “Go, and come no more…Come not at all…never, never!”
Scene 7 – Demonic happiness or unbearable freedom?
Back with the two brothers: Ivan immediately disavows the poem as senseless and naïve. But Alyosha upbraids Ivan, claiming he is an atheist and saying, “How will you live and how will you love with such a hell in your heart.” As Father Zossima — whose recollections and exhortations are intended as a refutation of Ivan in the following chapters of the book — says, “What is hell? I maintain that it is the incapacity to love.” The scene ends with Alyosha softly kissing Ivan on the lips, an act that the latter objects to as plagiarism.
RELATED
Read previous contributions to this series.
Dostoevsky in no way wants to defend the position that Ivan Karamazov outlines in his poem. But Dostoevsky’s great virtue as a writer is to be so utterly convincing in outlining what he doesn’t believe and so deeply unconvincing in defending what he wants to believe. As Blake said of “Paradise Lost,” Satan gets all the best lines. The story of the Grand Inquisitor places a stark choice in front of us: demonic happiness or unbearable freedom?
And this choice conceals another, deeper one: truth or falsehood? The truth that sets free is not, as we saw, the freedom of inclination and passing desire. It is the freedom of faith. It is the acceptance — submission, even — to a demand that both places a perhaps intolerable burden on the self, but which also energizes a movement of subjective conversion, to begin again. In disobeying ourselves and obeying this hard command, we may put on new selves. Faith hopes for grace.
Scene 8 – In which doubt and faith unite
To be clear, such an experience of faith is not certainty, but is only gained by going into the proverbial desert and undergoing diabolical temptation and radical doubt. On this view, doubt is not the enemy of faith. On the contrary, it is certainty. If faith becomes certainty, then we have become seduced by the temptations of miracle, mystery and authority. We have become diabolical. There are no guarantees in faith. It is defined by an essential insecurity, tempered by doubt and defined by a radical experience of freedom.
This is a noble and, indeed, God-like position. It is also what Jesus demands of us elsewhere in his teaching, in the Sermon on the Mount, when he says, “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you or persecute you.” If that wasn’t tough enough, Jesus adds, “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your father which is in heaven is perfect.” This is a sublime demand. It is a glorious demand. But it is, finally a ridiculous demand. Inhuman, even. It is the demand to become perfect, God-like. Easy for Jesus to say, as he was God. But somewhat more difficult for us.
Scene 9 – In which the Grand Inquisitor is, finally, defended
So what about us human beings, feeble, imperfect, self-deceived — the weakest reeds in nature? Does not Jesus’ insistence on the rigor and purity of faith seem, if not like pride, then at least haughtiness? The Grand Inquisitor, and the institution of the Church that he represents, accepted Satan’s temptations not out of malice, but out of a genuine love for humanity. This was based on the recognition of our flawed imperfection and need to be happy, which we perhaps deserve.
If the cost of the pure rigor of true faith is the salvation of the happy few, then this condemns the rest of us, in our millions and billions, to a life that is a kind of mockery. The seemingly perverse outcome of Dostoevsky’s parable is that perhaps the Grand Inquisitor is morally justified in choosing a lie over the truth.
The Grand Inquisitor’s dilemma is, finally, tragic: he knows that the truth which sets us free is too demanding for us, and that the lie that grants happiness permits the greatest good of the greatest number. But he also knows that happiness is a deception that leads ineluctably to our damnation. Is the Grand Inquisitor’s lie not a noble one?
Scene 10 – In which the author expresses doubt
To be perfectly (or imperfectly) honest, I don’t know the answer to this question. Which should we choose: diabolical happiness or unendurable freedom? Perhaps we should spend some days and nights fasting in the desert and see what we might do. Admittedly, this is quite a difficult thing to sustain during the holiday period.
Happy Holidays!
Simon Critchley teaches philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of, most recently, “The Faith of the Faithless,” and the forthcoming “”Stay, Illusion!” on Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” co-written with Jamieson Webster. He is the moderator of this series.
No comments:
Post a Comment