It is has become commonplace to regard Ivan Karamazov’s
"Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" as a prescient parable glorifying human
freedom and defending it against the kind of totalitarian threats it would
face in the twentieth century. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s angry atheist delivers
an uncanny prophecy of the omnicompetent, freedom–denying state that would
arise in his own native Russia. But concerning the liberty that is the only
cure for state–sponsored oppression, Ivan is terribly wrong. The Christ of
the Grand Inquisitor advocates an idea of freedom that Dostoevsky considered
an abomination. It is linked to Ivan’s critique of God for allowing innocent
suffering. For Dostoevsky, the problem of evil and the question of human
liberty are profoundly joined: our answer to one quandary determines our
answer to the other. Freedom and suffering are interstitial realities, as
the Grand Inquisitor understands, even if he understands them wrongly.
Western readers of The Brothers Karamazov have
remained virtually blind to Dostoevsky’s critique of the Grand Inquisitor.
The reason, I believe, is that Ivan’s vision of human freedom is so very
near to our own secular notion of liberty, and thus to our increasing relegation
of the Christian gospel to the private sphere of mere preference. Though
he was a student of Western Christianity and culture, Dostoevsky remained
fundamentally Russian in his conception of God and the world, of good and
evil, of the sacred and the secular. We cannot properly understand his treatment
of these matters, therefore, until we grasp his Orthodox reading of them.
Thus must we examine his parable of the Grand Inquisitor vis–à–vis the Orthodox
doctrine of human freedom as being founded not on autonomous choice but on
communal dependence on God.
Ivan Karamazov is no straw atheist. He gives voice to
the philosophical problem of evil perhaps more clearly and cogently than
any other speaker or actor, any other philosopher or theologian, in the whole
of world literature. Yet he is also a very Russian atheist. He thinks with
his solar plexus, as D. H. Lawrence might have said. He is passionately
intellectual. Ivan does not pose the question of theodicy as a philosophical
conundrum, as it is often posed in the West. From Leibniz through Hume, from
Alvin Plantinga to J. L. Mackie, the problem of evil has often been cast
in bare intellectual terms: how to think through the contradiction
that stands between the goodness, omniscience, and omnipotence of God, on
the one hand, and the massive misery and undeserved suffering that characterize
God’s world, on the other. In J.B., his dramatic contemporizing of
the Job story, Archibald MacLeish puts the intellectual problem of evil tersely
but accurately: "If God is good He is not God. If God is God He is not good."
If God is imbued with the charity which He Himself enjoins His creatures
to live by, then He must lack the divine power to create and sustain a world
in which such charity obtains: He is not God. If, by contrast, God possesses
the sovereignty and strength to perform what He wills, then this misery–riddled
world must be proof that He is deficient in love itself: He is not good.
Ivan does not make his case against God’s goodness in this intellectualized
fashion. He is not a philosophical thinker who abstracts ideas from experience
in order to test their logical clarity and coherence. As Albert Camus observed,
"Ivan really lives his problems." They are matters, quite literally, of life
and death, of eternal life and eternal death, of ultimate bliss or final
misery. Ivan is willing to face the anguish and terror inherent not only
in thinking but also in living without God.
As one who knows the truths of the heart, Ivan also knows
that reason alone cannot fathom the deepest things. On the contrary, reason
can be put to nefarious uses: "Reason is a scoundrel," he confesses. Ivan
is willing, therefore, to live "even . . . against logic." Yet he is unwilling
to live as a mindless vitalist, embracing life without much regard for its
meaning and, even less, with a blithe disregard for its injustice. So huge
are the world’s moral horrors, Ivan argues, that they undermine any notion
of divine order and purpose. Hence Ivan’s truly wrenching quandary: Can he
love life without believing that it has ultimate meaning—believing, instead,
that it is godless and absurd? Ivan is young and strong. He brims with intellectual
curiosity no less than bodily energy. He wants to travel to Europe and to
learn its science and its history. As a good romantic, Ivan cites Schiller’s
celebrated line about the "sticky little leaves" whose gummy unfolding in
spring seems to signal the whole world’s rebirth. They remind Ivan of all
that is precious in life, the glories of human love and natural splendor,
the inward movement of all things toward life’s energizing center.
There is still an awful lot of centripetal force on our
planet, Alyosha. I want to live, and I do live, even if it be against logic.
Though I do not believe in the order of things, still the sticky little leaves
that come out in the spring are dear to me, the blue sky is dear to me, some
people are dear to me, whom one loves sometimes, would you believe it, without
even knowing why; some human deeds are dear to me, which one has perhaps
long ceased believing in, but still honors with one’s heart, out of old habit.
It is noteworthy that Ivan makes this confession to his
young brother Alyosha just after he has broken off relations with Katerina
Ivanovna. Ivan feels as free and light as the air. Living in this detached
and uncommitted—indeed, this almost angelic—state, Ivan makes qualifications
that are altogether as important as his affirmations. Though he wants to
drink life to the lees, he confesses that only "some people" and only "some
human deeds" are dear to him, and that he loves them only "sometimes." Ivan
deliberately denies the teaching of Father Zosima, the head of an Orthodox
monastery who also stands at the religious center of the novel. Father Zosima
insists that love cannot be selective, that it must be at once universal
and concrete, that we must not love those who are conveniently remote so
much as those who are inconveniently near. Already, it is evident, the philosophical
and the religious arguments are linked. Ivan not only thinks but also lives
in autonomous and anti–communal terms. It is precisely the neighbor whom
we cannot love, he insists. The neighbor’s objective and objectionable
otherness—his bad breath, his foolish face, his ill manners—threaten Ivan’s
sovereign selfhood. Of such a neighbor, Ivan complains like an early Jean–Paul
Sartre that "he is another and not me." Despite his eager embrace of the
world, therefore, Ivan wants to remain a solitary and transcendent judge
over it, a godlike withholder no less than a gracious giver of praise. Others
must satisfy his own criteria before he will embrace them. And because God
does not satisfy the requirements of Ivan’s logic, he will not believe in
God.
Yet Ivan’s logic is not sophomoric. He makes a strenuous
case against God’s goodness. He refuses, for example, to cite the many natural
calamities—typhoons and tornadoes, floods and droughts, fires and earthquakes
and disease—that seem to disclose a ham–fisted Creator. Ivan knows that such
cosmic evils might be attributed to a natural process that is divinely ordered.
Like Job, he might discover that, while the natural order seems inimical
to human happiness, its operations might have their own purposes, not revealing
any divine hostility toward human well–being. But Ivan is not vexed chiefly
with natural evils. He cares about moral evils, about the crimes that we
human creatures commit. The standard explanation of such moral evils is that
they are the unfortunate consequence of human freedom. God’s uncoerced creatures,
so the argument runs, are capable of grossly misusing their liberty. If God
were to prevent evil human actions, His world would no longer be free.
Ivan subjects the standard free–will defense of the divine
goodness to devastating critique. At best, he says, the free perversion of
human will explains only the suffering of adults, the grown–ups who are accountable
for the evils that they both cause and suffer. They have eaten the apple
of knowledge, says Ivan. Because they have followed the demonic temptation
to become "as gods," they deserve their self–wrought misery. What this standard
theodicy cannot account for, Ivan maintains, is the agony of children whose
wills are still innocent. That their suffering results from human cruelty
more than natural mishap makes it all the more horrible. As Ivan notices,
animals rarely torment their prey. Only our human kind derives erotic pleasure
from its savagery, becoming virtual voluptuaries of cruelty. In a passage
that would have made even the Marquis de Sade tremble, Ivan declares the
awful allurement of unprotected innocence. "It is precisely the defenselessness
of these creatures that tempts the torturers, the angelic trustfulness of
the child, who has nowhere to turn and no one to turn to—that is what enflames
the vile blood of the torturer."
Ivan offers searing examples of such wanton and motiveless
malignity. Indeed, he creates a virtual phantasmagoria of suffering from
actual instances of human barbarity that he has read about in Russian newspapers:
Turkish soldiers cutting babies from their mother’s wombs and throwing them
in the air in order to impale them on their bayonets; enlightened parents
stuffing their five–year–old daughter’s mouth with excrement and locking
her in a freezing privy all night for having wet the bed, while they themselves
sleep soundly; Genevan Christians teaching a naive peasant to bless the good
God even as the poor dolt is beheaded for thefts and murders that his ostensibly
Christian society caused him to commit; a Russian general, offended at an
eight–year–old boy for accidentally hurting the paw of the officer’s dog,
inciting his wolfhounds to tear the child to pieces; a lady and gentleman
flogging their eight–year–old daughter with a birch–rod until she collapses
while crying for mercy, "Papa, papa, dear papa."
Such evils cannot be justified, Ivan argues, either by
religious arguments based on history’s beginning or by secular arguments
that look to its end. The Edenic exercise of free will is not worth the tears
of even one little girl shivering all night in a privy and crying out from
her excrement–filled mouth to "dear, kind God" for protection. Yet neither
will Ivan accept the Hegelian–Marxist thesis that the harmonious final outcome
of history sublates its present evils. The notion that such savagery reveals
the necessary consequences of human freedom or that it contributes to history’s
ultimate result is, to Ivan, a moral and religious outrage. Neither is he
any more satisfied with the conventional doctrine of hell, which holds that
the monsters of torment will themselves be eternally tormented. Hellish punishment
for heinous malefactors would not restore their victims, Ivan reminds us.
The impaled babies would not be brought back to life nor would their mothers
be consoled, the dismembered boy would not live out his years, the weeping
girls would not be comforted. Ivan rejects all such theodicies because they
belittle innocent suffering and thus commit unforgivable sacrilege against
innocent sufferers. With a dramatic metaphor drawn again from Schiller, he
refuses to offer his hosanna for such a world: he returns his ticket to such
a life.
Ivan’s brief against belief is intellectually
unanswerable. Dostoevsky makes no attempt to provide such an answer anywhere
in the course of the novel. He concedes that there is no logical justification
for the suffering of innocents. Yet this is hardly to say that there are
no theological answers to Ivan. It is rather to say that they will
be found, if at all, elsewhere than in abstract argument; they will be located
in the realm of religion and politics and the everyday requirements of true
freedom. In seeking to embody such answers in living form, Dostoevsky offers
the figures of Zosima and Alyosha as his religious counters to Ivan’s atheist
revolt. The most notable fact about the monastic elder and his young disciple
is that, unlike Ivan, they are not Euclidean men. They believe that, in the
most important matters, parallel lines do indeed meet. Things counter can
converge because the deepest truths are not univocal but analogical and paradoxical.
Theirs is not a three–dimensional block universe but rather a layered cosmos
containing multiple orders of being. For Zosima and Alyosha, the material
and immaterial worlds are never distant and remote from each other, as in
much of Western thought. The created and uncreated realms are deeply intertwined,
each participating in the life of the other.
Ivan remains opaque to this interstitial
cosmos that calls for interstitial discernment. Dostoevsky describes it as
proniknovenie, an "intuitive seeing through" or a "spiritual penetration."
Such theological sight is the product not of any special intelligence but
of the iconic imagination. The icons of Eastern Orthodoxy are produced by
a theology of presence rather than one of representation. God’s own splendor
is said to radiate through the icon, confronting worshipers with the experience
of Uncreated Light. The icon is not an image that one looks at in
order to discern an earthly image of something holy, in an attempt to portray
the invisible in visible terms. Nor is it an expression of the artist’s own
subjective experience of the sacred. Rather the icon looks out at
the beholder. It seeks to open up the eternal realm so that its light might
shine forth. Icons do not seek to embody a discarnate world, but rather to
reveal an earthly world that has been rendered transparent by a spiritualization
that embraces the entire cosmos. Worshipers are themselves transformed by
the invisible light that emanates from the icon, penetrating to the depths
of their being and forming their true personhood. At Zosima’s funeral, Alyosha
has such a transfiguring experience of this mystical touching of the visible
and invisible worlds. It prompts him to repeat the example of his dead master
in an iconic gesture of prostration:
Filled with rapture, his soul yearned for
freedom, space, vastness. Over him the heavenly dome, full of quiet, shining
stars, hung boundlessly. From the zenith to the horizon the still–dim Milky
Way stretched its double strand. Night, fresh and quiet, almost unstirring,
enveloped the earth. The white towers and golden domes of the church gleamed
in the sapphire sky. The luxuriant autumn flowers in the flowerbeds near
the house had fallen asleep until morning. The silence of the earth seemed
to merge with the silence of the heavens, the mystery of the earth to be
touched by the mystery of the stars. . . . Alyosha stood gazing and suddenly,
as if he had been cut down, he threw himself to the earth. . . .
It was as if threads from all those
innumerable worlds of God all came together in his soul, and it was trembling
all over, "touching other worlds." He wanted to forgive everyone for everything,
and to ask forgiveness, oh, not for himself! but for all and for everything,
"as others are asking for me," rang in his soul.
Ivan is blind to this iconic joining of
the earthly and heavenly realms, perhaps because he is also blind to the
Orthodox understanding of human personhood. After all, he is a man obsessed
with Western ideas. Yet Ivan is not a rationalist, as is often said, but
rather a thinker who wants to disjoin his thought from its rightful engagement
with God and the world. He lives a dichotomous life. Ivan’s mind is even
more severely perverted than his will. He fails to discern, for example,
that the doctrine of immortality concerns not only the life that is transfigured
in the world to come, but also the life that is meant to be transformed within
this world. To use the language of St. Paul found in 1 Corinthians 15 and
that of John’s Gospel contained in the novel’s epigraph, mortality is meant
to put on immortality, the dying seed to bring forth much fruit. To become
immortal is to become a unique and unrepeatable person who has been perfected
in both loving and being loved.
Ivan’s contention that no one can truly
love others as he loves himself is linked, therefore, to his denial of immortality.
Ivan holds, as we have seen, that other persons stand like dense Euclidean
clumps to block the path of his own autonomy. So long as we are confined
within the realm of mere human possibility, Dostoevsky is agreed with Ivan.
He despised the soupy benevolence that pervaded much of nineteenth–century
European and American culture. "Those who love men in general," he often
said, "hate men in particular." Yet he also insisted that Christ’s kenosis
—the divine self–emptying hymned in Philippians 2—can accomplish what is
humanly impossible: the emptying of human egoism for the sake of true charity.
Through this kenotic love that Zosima and his disciple Alyosha both embody,
one actually becomes a person by becoming another self—not an Ego but a Thou,
a person who exists only in self–giving solidarity with Christ and thereby
with others.
When personhood is measured in this kenotic
manner, Alyosha can be seen as a credible character, rather than the ghostly
and gossamer creature he is often accused of being. Unlike Ivan, Alyosha
does not clip newspaper accounts of suffering children and then offer anti–theological
arguments about them; instead, he actually seeks out the insulted
and injured, identifying himself with them. He joins faith with practice,
thinking with doing, thus answering the problem of evil with deeds rather
than reasons—with his whole personhood, not with his mind alone. Through
his patient and long–suffering friendships with children, Alyosha helps redeem
the pathetic Ilyusha Snegirov, even as he also helps to set the nihilistic
Kolya Krassotkin on the path to new life. Alyosha pulls these boys out of
their misery only at great cost to himself. Dostoevsky makes clear in the
novel’s final scene, when the youths gather to cheer Alyosha as if he were
their savior, that he is a true icon of Christ, a man through whom the invisible
light of eternity brightly shines. Yet Alyosha deflects all praise away from
himself and toward Christ. As the only man who has suffered absolutely everything,
says Alyosha, Christ alone has the right to forgive absolutely everything—even
the tormentors of children. Yet Alyosha’s mere mention of the "only sinless
One" so enrages Ivan that he comes forth with his "Legend of the Grand Inquisitor."
Ivan’s parable appears to be an assault on the character
of Jesus, when its real target is humanity itself. Though he professes to
love "some men," Ivan can no more give himself to other persons than he can
grant the existence of God. For Dostoevsky, the one follows from the other:
one cannot scorn the love of God and still love human beings. Ivan ends as
a misanthrope, I maintain, because he has a modern secular conception of
freedom that is incapable of fulfillment except by monstrous supermen.
The plot of Ivan’s legend is familiar enough, even if
its meaning remains quite obscure. The risen Christ returns to earth in fifteenth–century
Seville, where he immediately begins to perform miracles. The people hail
him as their liberator from the awful autos da fé that the Spanish
Inquisition is carrying out. Jesus is quickly arrested by the church authorities
and imprisoned in a dimly lit dungeon. There the ninety–year–old Cardinal
Grand Inquisitor relentlessly grills the silent Christ. This ancient church–ogre
accuses Jesus of having required men to live by the strength of their strong
wills, cruelly ignoring the fact that they are impotent creatures who can
live only for the sake of a swinish happiness. The Inquisitor thus upbraids
Christ for having rejected the Tempter’s wilderness offerings of bread and
power and fame. These, he says, are the satisfying substitutes that human
beings crave. They do not want the awful autonomy that Christ allegedly commanded:
Instead of taking over men’s freedom, you increased it
still more for them! Did you forget that peace and even death are dearer
to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil? There is nothing
more seductive for man than the freedom of his conscience, but there is nothing
more tormenting either. And so, instead of a firm foundation for appeasing
human conscience once and for all, you chose everything that was unusual,
enigmatic, and indefinite, you chose everything that was beyond men’s strength,
and thereby acted as if you did not love them at all. . . . You desired the
free love of man, that he should follow you freely, seduced and captivated
by you. Instead of the firm and ancient law, man had henceforth to decide
for himself, with a free heart, what is good and what is evil, having only
your image before him as a guide.
It is astonishing that so many readers have taken the
Grand Inquisitor’s conception of freedom as if it were Dostoevsky’s own—and
also as if it were true. Camus regarded it as an unprecedented statement
of the human cry for liberty against all religious restraints. Camus can
make such a claim only because, together with Ivan, he embraces the thoroughly
secular conception of freedom that has largely prevailed in the modern West,
from John Stuart Mill to John Dewey and John Rawls. Ivan’s Inquisitor belongs
to their lineage. Liberty, he declares, entails a brave and lonely autonomy,
as each individual determines for himself the difference between good and
evil. Jesus serves not as the savior who redeems corporate humanity from
sin, therefore, but as a moral example to guide solitary and heroic individuals—having
himself trod the same lonely path of self–determination.
Michael Sandel has shown what is problematic about this
notion of freedom as consisting entirely of unfettered choices. Such choices
are prompted by nothing other than the individual subject and his private
conscience acting either on persuasive evidence or the arbitrary assertion
of will. Just as this modern secular self is not determined by any larger
aims or attachments that it has not chosen for itself, neither does it have
obligations to any larger communities, except those it autonomously chooses
to join. The one moral norm, it follows, is the injunction to respect the
dignity of others by not denying them the freedom to exercise their own moral
autonomy. Such an understanding of human liberty, argues Sandel, opposes
any view that regards us as obligated to fulfill ends
that we have not chosen—ends given by nature or God, for example, or by our
identities as members of families, peoples, cultures, or traditions. Encumbered
identities such as these are at odds with the liberal conception of [persons]
as free and independent selves, unbound by prior moral ties, capable of choosing
our ends for ourselves. This is the conception that finds expression in the
ideal of the state as a neutral framework . . . a framework of rights that
refuses to choose among competing values and ends. For the liberal self,
what matters above all, what is most essential to our personhood, is not
the ends we choose but our capacity to choose them.
Dostoevsky repeatedly attacked this modern secular notion
of freedom and personhood, dismissing it scornfully as "socialism." Astounded
by the Inquisitor’s similar idea of liberty as absolute autonomy, Alyosha
cries out to Ivan: "And who will believe you about freedom? . . . Is that
the way to understand it? It’s a far cry from the Orthodox idea." It’s also
a far cry from the Jewish and Catholic and classical Protestant ideas of
freedom. In all four traditions, we are not made into free persons by becoming
autonomous selves who have been immunized from all obligations that we have
not independently chosen. Our freedom resides rather in becoming communal
selves who freely embrace our moral, religious, and political obligations.
These responsibilities come to us less by our own choosing than through a
thickly webbed network of shared friendships and familial ties, through political
practices and religious promises. In a very real sense, such "encumbrances"
choose us before we choose them. There is no mythical free and autonomous
self that exists apart from these ties. There are only gladly or else miserably
bound persons—namely, persons who find their duties and encumbrances to be
either gracious or onerous.
Alyosha’s idea of freedom is communal because it is first
of all religious. Athanasius of Alexandria articulated it most clearly in
the fourth century: "God became man so that man may become God." The central
Orthodox doctrine is called theosis or theopoesis—the divinizing
or deifying of humanity. The Eastern Church does not call for believers to
imitate Jesus through the exercise of moral choice. It summons them rather
to participate in the life of Christ through the transformative power of
the liturgy and sacraments of the Church. To become persons in the true sense
is to become what the New Testament calls "partakers of the divine nature"
(2 Peter 1:4). The modern secular notion of freedom articulated by the Grand
Inquisitor is the very definition of slavery. As Orthodox theologian Vladimir
Lossky observes, the Eastern Church regards choice as the mark not of freedom
but of fallenness, as a debasement of true liberty, as a loss of the divine
likeness: "Our nature being overclouded with sin no longer knows its true
good . . . and so the human person is always faced with the necessity of
choice; it goes forward gropingly." To deliberate autonomously in the face
of alternatives, it follows, is not liberty but servitude. True freedom,
says Lossky, is revealed in the Christ who freely renounces his own will
in order to accomplish the will of his Father. Alyosha is free in precisely
this way. Jesus has not abandoned him to his lonely conscience in order to
let him solitarily determine good and evil for himself. The self–emptying
Christ has freed Alyosha to empty his own ego, to live and act in joyful
obedience to God, and thus to be bound in unbreakable solidarity with his
father and brothers, with his friends and enemies, and (not least of all)
with the miserable children of his neighborhood.
Given the Grand Inquisitor’s anti–Orthodox conception
of freedom as unencumbered self–determining choice, it is not surprising
that he should have contempt for the average run of men. He despises their
dependence, their animal desire for security and comfort. The Inquisitor
thus informs Jesus that the Catholic Church has been forced to correct his
impossible summons to autonomy. Rome understands, says the Inquisitor, what
Christ did not—that men must first be fed before they can be made virtuous.
"Make us your slaves," the Inquisitor’s masses cry out, "but feed us." Thus
has the cynical church of the Grand Inquisitor replaced Christ’s purported
call for unfettered autonomy with its own sheepish substitutes: "miracle,
mystery, and authority." Yet even these sorry placebos will not finally suffice,
the Inquisitor insists, for the modern world will confront men with such
scientific wonders and terrors that the vast human horde will not be content
even with comfort and security. They will finally demand the antheap of personal
oblivion, in order that they might be relieved of their freedom. They want
only to live in childish self–indulgence:
Freedom, free reason, and science will lead them into
such a maze, and confront them with such . . . insoluble mysteries, that
some of them, unruly and ferocious, will exterminate themselves; others,
unruly but feeble, will exterminate each other; and the remaining third,
feeble and wretched, will crawl to our feet and cry out to us: "Yes, you
were right, you alone possess his mystery, and we are coming back to you—save
us from ourselves." . . . Yes, we will make them work, but in the hours free
from labor we will arrange their lives like a children’s game, with children’s
songs, choruses, and innocent dancing.
Inverting the gospel entirely, the Grand Inquisitor declares
that only the Master Managers like himself will suffer. Yet these new secular
christs of the omnicompetent state will bear their torment heroically. Knowing
their totalitarian paternalism to be a gargantuan lie, they nonetheless retain
the courage to feed it to the gullible millions: "For only we, we who keep
the mystery, only we shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions
of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves
the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully [these multiplied
millions] will die; peacefully will they expire in [Christ’s] name, and beyond
the grave they will find only death. But we will keep the secret, and for
their own happiness we will entice them with a heavenly and eternal reward."
This final prophecy of the Grand Inquisitor
is perhaps the most frightening augury in the entirety of Dostoevsky’s work.
With amazing prescience, he foresees the rise of the totalitarian state that
has dominated much of late–modern life, killing more people by violent means
than in all of the previous ages combined. This is the era of blood, and
ours is the culture of death. That Dostoevsky mistakenly linked our calamity
with the Catholic Church, and that he did not foresee its first triumph in
his own beloved Russia, hardly invalidates his vision. On the contrary, Dostoevsky
was right to prophesy that, if we begin (as Ivan does) with absolute anti–communal
freedom, we will end (again as Ivan does) with absolute anti–communal slavery,
whether in its individualist or its totalitarian form. Were Dostoevsky living
at this hour, he might well ask whether the American reduction of nearly
every aspect of human existence, including religion itself, to either entertainment
or commodification constitutes a yet worse kind of herd–existence than the
one Ivan describes—a subtler and therefore deadlier attempt to relieve humanity
of its suffering and sin, and thus of its real character and interest.
Given Ivan’s horrifying vision of this
grim and Christless future, it is not surprising that Alyosha regards Ivan’s
"poem" as praising Jesus rather than reviling him. Yet Alyosha does not commend
the Christ of the parable because he commands autonomous self–determination
as the answer to a totalizing politics of oppression. Rather, the Jesus of
Ivan’s legend is to be praised because his silence indicates his patient
confidence that evil will eventually undo itself, and that Ivan is to be
embraced rather than condemned in his concern for the suffering of innocents.
Ivan had in fact ended his parable by having
the silent Savior gently kiss the Inquisitor on "his bloodless, ninety–year–old
lips." Alyosha instantly recognizes that Ivan’s imagination was groping for
the profoundest of all truths—that nothing other than God’s self–emptying
love can answer bitter unbelief. To bring home the point, Alyosha repeats
Christ’s act: he kisses the tormented Ivan. It’s another Russian iconic gesture
of humility and submission, and it calls for a recompensing kiss of humble
recognition and identification. Ivan will not grant it, for then he, too,
would be called to embrace the same kenotic suffering and joy that imbue
Alyosha’s entire life. Instead, Ivan dismisses Alyosha’s act as mere plagiarism.
Ivan must rid himself of this Christ–like gesture that is the real answer
to human agony. It is appropriate, therefore, that the Inquisitor’s final
command to the truth–gesturing Christ who kissed him is not Maranatha
, but "Go and do not come again . . . do not come at all . . . never, never!"
Alyosha, as Christ’s earthly embodiment, will not depart.
Instead, he confronts Ivan with the moral and religious consequence of his
atheism. If God is dead, Alyosha famously declares, "everything is permitted."
We must not misread Alyosha here. He does not deny that men can be moral
without believing in God. He insists, instead, that such morality has no
ultimate basis, that freedom understood as self–construction hovers over
an abyss of nihilism, and thus that all godless peoples and cultures await
their inexorable plunge into the barbaric void. The first epistle of John
defines sin precisely as lawlessness. Ellis Sandoz observes that John of
Damascus, the eighth–century Greek theologian, linked this definition of
sin to the larger claim that barbarism is the primal heresy: "Every man as
independent and a law unto himself after the dictates of his own will."
Dostoevsky regards individualist autonomy not only as
barbaric but also as satanic. Perhaps the chief of Ivan’s demonic deceptions
is the widespread acceptance of the Inquisitor’s argument that "miracle,
mystery, and authority" are pathetic necessities for weak–willed men. Just
as Ivan misreads freedom to mean unencumbered self–determination, so does
the Inquisitor pervert the meaning of miracle, mystery, and authority. Nowhere
in the novel does God perform miracles by jumping in and out of His creation
like a divine factotum who accedes to human petition if it is sufficiently
pious. It is exactly such a sentimental and superstitious understanding of
miracles—namely, as God’s arbitrary violation of the natural order to heed
clamant human request—that Alyosha is required to surrender. Hoping that
Zosima’s corpse would be wondrously preserved, giving off the sweet odor
of sanctity, Alyosha is horrified when it putrefies prematurely. The saint’s
rapidly rotting body demonstrates to Alyosha that God is not a sacred Santa
Claus who brings him whatever he wants. In the "Cana in Galilee" chapter,
Alyosha learns that miracles do not precede and thus produce faith;
rather, they follow faith as the by–product of the transformed life.
That Alyosha can kiss the earth and bless the creation despite its rampant
suffering, that he can live as a monk in a sex–sodden world, that he can
increase men’s joy amidst human misery as Christ increased it by turning
water into wedding wine—this, he learns, is the true miracle: the divine
possibility that overcomes human impossibility.
Like a brittle Enlightenment philosophe, perhaps a Diderot
or a Comte, the Inquisitor also slanders mystery. He reduces it to a cynical
mystification, to a new secular priestcraft, a political anesthetizing of
the masses with the morphine of heaven. "For only we, we . . . keep the mystery,"
he boasts. For him, mystery can be hoarded as a weapon in his arsenal of
deceit, as a spiritual poison gas meant to blind true vision and stifle true
thought. For Alyosha and all other believers, by contrast, the mysterion
enlivens such vision and thought. It’s a word that can also be translated
sacrament. The mystery of God is thus not a riddle or a conundrum,
not a brain–straining puzzle; it is the one reality that prompts an endless
delectation of mind no less than heart and soul. "In the proper religious
sense of the term," writes Orthodox bishop Kallistos Ware, "‘mystery’ signifies
not only hiddenness but disclosure. . . . A mystery is . . . something
revealed for our understanding, but which we never understand exhaustively
because it leads into the depth or the darkness of God."
Perversely, if also consistently, Ivan has the Inquisitor
voice a skewed understanding of authority. He regards it as the tyrannical
power of the state or the church to suppress individual autonomy. For him,
authority can have only the negative meaning of raw coercive force. For Alyosha,
again in notable contrast to the Inquisitor, true authority (both human and
divine) invites free submission of the will for the sake of the good—submission
to the rightly constituted state, to his elder Zosima, to the incarnate Christ,
to the merciful God. Free subjection of the will begins in penitence, as
when Zosima confesses that all men are sinners and that he is the worst.
It ends in the acceptance, even the embrace, of suffering.
Perhaps the novel’s chief irony is that Ivan has turned
rightful religious concern for injured innocents into wrongful personal justification
of his own hatred and scorn. Claiming to care about the world’s innocent
sufferers, Ivan cannot care for the creature who is his own closest kin,
his father. In a nightmare interview with the Devil, Ivan is made to recognize
his own moral culpability for his father’s death. He had poisoned Smerdyakov’s
mind with the demonic gospel that God is dead and that all things are permitted.
Acting out what Ivan had intellectually advocated, Smerdyakov has killed
old Fyodor in a dreadful demonstration that, in a godless world, absolutely
nothing is forbidden. Since Satan is the primal deceiver, it is no wonder
that Ivan has been made into his agent. Dostoevsky maintains that demonic
perversions of mind are no mere intellectual failings: they issue in demonic
perversions of will. Philosophical deicide results in existential parricide.
The mental killing of God breaks the deepest of human bonds. It is thus fitting
that Ivan the perverted intellectual should end in madness.
Yet Ivan’s final insanity is not to be explained as psychosis
alone. In the Orthodox tradition, to deny the presence and reality of God
is to be subject to a psychopathic condition. Not sharing the Western doctrine
of original sin, the Orthodox hold that every person retains an efficacious
awareness of God, even after the Fall. "Just because it is light," writes
Vladimir Lossky, "grace, the source of revelation, cannot remain within us
unperceived. We are incapable of not being aware of God, if our nature is
in proper spiritual health. Insensibility [to God] in the inner life is an
abnormal condition." Lossky adds, far more darkly, that total unawareness
of God "would be nothing other than hell, the final destruction of the person."
It follows that Zosima is not a golden–hearted humanist when he defines hell
as "the suffering of being unable to love." He is describing Ivan’s spiritual
condition exactly. Ivan suffers the hellish laceration of the soul that occurs
when freedom is exercised negatively—not to engender life but to bring death.
"Death for a person," declares Orthodox theologian John Zizioulas, "means
ceasing to love and to be loved, ceasing to be unique and unrepeatable, whereas
life for the person means the survival of the uniqueness of its hypostasis
[personification], which is affirmed and maintained by love."
To possess true freedom and personhood through love is,
in Dostoevsky’s view, to suffer rightly. It is to accept responsibility,
not only for one’s own sin, but also for the sins of others. All theodicies
fail if they do not recognize that only the embrace of innocent suffering
can answer the infliction of innocent suffering. One who is willing to suffer
for Christ’s sake must be willing, moreover, to suffer fools. Father Zosima
exhibits such foolish suffering when, early in the novel, he makes a low
bow of humility before the cruel buffoon who is old Fyodor Karamazov. It
is an act utterly unlike the abstentions practiced by Nietzsche’s Übermensch
. The Overman is akin to a lion who has claws but refrains from using them.
He doesn’t show mercy so much as he seeks to humiliate the weaklings of the
world with his contemptuous self–restraint. Though having the rightful authority
to condemn the despicable old lecher, Zosima gestures forth his solidarity
with Fyodor in bowing down before him. Unlike the Overman, Zosima identifies
himself with the wretched creature. He knows that old Fyodor has become a
buffoon, in large part, because everyone regards him as a fool. In secret
pride and contempt for others, he fulfills their scornful judgment. Zosima
refuses such judgment. He humbles himself before the despicable Fyodor, discerning
in him the divine image and likeness: a person meant for agapeistic community
rather than buffoonish autonomy. For Dostoevsky, the gospel of suffering
in communal love is the only lasting answer to the perennial problem of evil
and thus to the perennial question of human freedom. It is a gospel peculiar
neither to East nor West because it is centered in the common Christian ground
of the Incarnation, Cross, and Resurrection.
Ralph C. Wood is University Professor of Theology and
Literature at Baylor University.
