A word on IS, she has been around fighting the good fight as long as I have - and we both have the scars to prove it. Do not quietly into that good night ...
V
A few words: The alleged Christ did not create a religion. In fact, the existence of the person - "Jesus of Nazareth" is highly disputable, although from gnostic writings, there are indications there was probably a person of radical perspective who challenged the status quo of Judaism of those times. IMO, the "teachings of Christ" have been corrupted by the Church, so as to weaken & disempower man. And what about all those books that were thrown out [of the Bible]?
Isabel.
Dostoevsky recorded that The Brothers Karamazov was also his most difficult book. He was afraid his creative force would not suffice. “The older I get, the harder it is,” he wrote in his diaries. The difficulty here was that he had not only the Karamazov’s to deal with, but also the complex problem of freedom.
Above all, this book was to become a work of art, and that, he wrote, “is a most difficult and risky affair.” In a sense he bet his creative life on it and on the question of freedom. I read this book therefore as both his commitment and his desperation.
In true Dostoevskian style, the “Grand Inquisitor” is more an idea than a story. The narrator of the “poem”, Ivan, fades from the reader’s mind, while his interlocutor, Alyosha, hardly exists except to smile and say ‘I don’t understand, Ivan!’ The legend is not even a legend. Dostoevsky calls it a poem. And the poem, if it is that, is an accusation against the organized Church, in this case and time, against the Roman Catholic Church.
The story is threadbare: Christ returns to earth in the sixteenth century in the city of Seville where people recognize Him immediately and want to benefit from His miracles. The ninety-year old Grand Inquisitor who runs things in Seville also recognizes Him; there is no doubt about His identity. Immediately the priest has Him arrested. At night in His cell the old man proceeds to interrogate Him. The interrogation is an accusation-monologue, for Christ never speaks. The Grand Inquisitor (that is, one side of Dostoevsky) prefaces his terrible accusations with one question: “Why did you come back?”
In this short chapter, the Grand Inquisitor articulates his (the Church’s) devastating message: God is God and the Church is the Church; the Church does not believe in God and man no longer needs God; the Church promotes His work like a product and uses His name, but it renounces Christ; the Church does God’s work for Him; it is a Church without God.
After threatening to burn Him at the stake as a heretic, the Grand Inquisitor is disconcerted by Christ’s silence. The prisoner only looks at him and then, at the end, quietly kisses the old man’s bloodless lips with a kiss that the reader knows will burn for all eternity.
The old man starts, something moves on his lips, he goes to the door, opens it and tells Him: “Go and never return again.”
The prisoner leaves.
That is the story line.
Yet the idea behind the story is terrible. With Christ’s wordless departure, Dostoevsky, whose faith is always shaky, pronounces the divorce between faith and the Church. In the poem, neither the atheist Ivan nor Dostoevsky the author attack Christ; they attack the Church. Ivan does not defend his atheism; he defends true belief. Dostoevsky charges the Catholic Church of having robbed Christ’s message for its own imperialistic ends, which rings familiar to American ears today. In substance the writer charges all churches or organized religions of what was then called Caesarism.
The priest-Grand Inquisitor does not believe in God or in man and he refuses to hear or listen to the God-Man. “You have no right to add one single word to what you have already said,” he tells his prisoner. He insists that the Christian doctrine of free choice between good and evil is too heavy a burden for humanity. Christ’s man could choose freedom but if he did his conscience would torture him because of his sins. The Christianity offered by Christ is a religion of pain and suffering. It is a religion for only a few; for an elite.
The Grand Inquisitor points out that on the other hand man can choose submission. The truth is, man prefers comfort, or even death, to the freedom of choice between good and evil. Man, he says, only wants to be happy. He wants earthly bread. And that, he tells Christ, is the Church’s job: man’s happiness on earth.
The Church, the Grand Inquisitor-Procurator claims, loves man more than does the creator who placed on man’s shoulders that heavy burden. He charges that Christ overestimated the strength of his creation when he gave him the freedom of choice: “You acted without pity for him, you demanded too much from him.”
The religion Christ created is impossible for the masses. It is only for the strong who can bear the responsibility. It is aristocratic. Religion, the old man claims, must be for the masses. It must comfort all, the ignorant and the weak and the mean and the sick. It must be vulgar. Instead of the freedom and the uncertainty and spiritual suffering that Christ offers, the Church offers happiness. Since the weak and hungry and mean masses are not interested in heavenly bread, the Church promises earthly bread.
The Grand Inquisitor and his Church have chosen for mankind. The Church’s work, he says, is to correct Christ’s work. The earth is the reign of mediocre happiness. “None of your great spiritual aspirations!” he says, “Oh yes, men will have to work!” But then during their leisure we organize their lives like a child’s game, childish songs and dancing. We even let them sin.
Here is Dostoevsky, the great visionary. He foresaw the role of organized religions of today, of America’s religions. This was the highest point of Dostoevsky’s dialectical genius: he is for man, his whole idea is the human problem; he believes that godlessness leads to the denial of the freedom of the spirit to be a true individual. He foresaw revolution in Russia; he wanted revolution, but a revolution with God and Christ. The Russian religious philosopher Berdyaev labels Dostoevsky “a socialist with Christ.”
Yet, his cry for freedom of the individual was anti-revolutionary, and for readers of today confusing. Dostoevsky aspired to an impossible brand of spiritual Communism in which all would be responsible for each other. He wanted both revolution and individual freedom.
Dostoevsky opposed the idea of an aesthetic state, of the aesthetic socialism the Grand Inquisitor proposes. In that sense too his novels are tragedies of the human condition—double tragedies in that they are never resolved, no more than are his great mysteries. No more than did he resolve his dubious form of Christianity. Yet universal ideas stand behind his decisions. In his revolutionary attack on the Church, he is attacking the Grand Inquisitors in every church, in every state.
Dostoevsky was the embodiment of the Russian idea of an all-human brotherhood (vsyechelovechnost). In fact, as Berdyaev suggests, Internationalism (the Internationalism of Soviet Communism) was a distortion of the Russian idea. Hence, at least until the Russian Revolution and the great wars of the Twentieth century nationalism was foreign to Russian mentality.
At this point emerge some fundamental contradictions between Dostoevskian Christian love and Christian churches that I long had trouble pinpointing until I read an article by Gustavo Zagrebelsky, the Italian philosopher-writer-jurist and President of Italy’s Constitutional Court, “The Church between Charity and Truth.”
Charity, Zagrebelsky points out, is a concrete act toward specific individuals; truth in the religious context is a series of doctrines expressed in codified beliefs concerning abstract behavior. Charity is experienced, truth learned. Charity acts internally, truth externally. Charity considers each human being an individual; for truth, each individual is assimilable to others, each is a number within classes or categories. Charity is free of general rules, which derive from truth. Charity resides in the human being; truth tends toward stabilization within institutions. Charity spurs one toward leading a good life; it forgives and reconciles. Truth formulates precepts and sanctions and separates the elect from the reprobates.
The literary representation of this dichotomy is manifest in Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor.” The silence and the compassionate charitable kiss of Christ is the ethical counter-position to the didactic verbosity of the Inquisitor. Maybe each of them loves, each in his own way. But Dostoevsky’s Christ loves the individual with a warm, real love; the Inquisitor loves the people, the weak, humanity as a whole, with a cold love that bypasses love for the single person.
Here one recalls the slogan of the Revolution Convention in Paris: “For love of humanity, we are inhuman.” And here the chasm between charity and truth begins to emerge
Charity, i.e. love for the individual can be extended to many, but it never loses the personal relationship and cannot permit itself to become a bureaucracy. Abstract truth, on the other hand, does not even need to know the persons it tends, while it creates bureaucracies to administer its orthodoxy.
So, the question remains: Is the Christian ethic an ethic of charity or an ethic of truth? That question plagued Dostoevsky. He attacked Catholicism and had his doubts about Orthodoxy. Convinced on one hand that man does not live by bread alone, he nonetheless paved the way for the revolution that promised bread to all, even though he remained forever full of doubts, forever looking over his shoulder. That is also the problem for those who abhor free market philosophies and believe in some form of Socialism.
In the nocturnal cell, the Grand Inquisitor reminds Christ of His rejection of the three temptations in the desert. First, He refused to use earthly bread to convince man to follow Him. Then, He refused to use authority to force man to follow Him because He wanted to be loved freely. Third, He refused to use miracles.
The Grand Inquisitor’s Church instead is founded on Christ’s rejections: earthly bread, authority and miracle. Man wants three things, the Grand Inquisitor says: someone to bow down to, someone to hand over his conscience to and a way to unite everyone in one common anthill. The Christianity of his Church is a Church for all, not only for the strong. For its purported and distorted love of mankind, the Church betrayed the idea of the Christian God.
As Dostoevsky’s oral poem develops, Alyosha begins to grasp that the great secret of the Inquisitor’s Church is that it does not believe in God. Yet for Ivan and for Alyosha, for the Church and for all Dostoevsky’s characters, God is the question. Disorder and anxiety are everywhere, in every character, caused by the question of God. Is He there or not? The mystery in The Brothers Karamazov is God.
In this big book an enormous number of events take place in a few days. The canvas is peopled by a vast cast. All talking about God! Everyone from the simplest of fools to the intellectuals to the monks have deep thoughts about God. Danger threatens, mystery reigns, presentiments and fates, crimes and passions, and secrets abound, but everywhere God is the question.
In this work Dostoevsky does not question the existence of God, as Nietszche was soon to do. His Christianity is not of the vague type that Kierkegaard depicted. He is not interested in transforming the particular into the universal, or vice versa. He does not attack here Christ-God; he attacks the Church. His Church calls to mind the contradiction between the life of St. Francis of Assisi who opted for God and poverty and lived in simplicity and talked with birds and was distant from the institutions his followers constructed: a super rich order and the town of Assisi turned to gold, all in His name.
Dostoevsky does not search for the secrets of creation. He does not delve into the idea of two Creator Gods or search for the secret of two humanities. He does not take note that in Genesis God created one man on the sixth day and another on the eighth day, and that the confusion began then, with a good strain and an evil strain of man. [Isabel: this is why I've encouraged people to gain a knowledgeable understanding of Ponerolgy & psychopathy (which is not psychosis) & how the good strain is literally controlled by the evil strain to this day.] That He then planted a garden east of Eden and put there the man He had formed and named him Adam, that is, the man He formed on the eighth day. [Isabel: IMO, most people who claim to be christians have neither knowledge nor understanding of what I've emphasised in this para. In all the years I participated in the church (nearly 3 & 1/2 decades :(( ), I never heard an exposition on this crucially significant issue. Mouravieff's Gnosis explicates this.] He told the man Adam that he could eat from all the trees except the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
For Creationists the mystery of mankind should begin here. The sons of God saw that the daughters of men were beautiful and took them as wives, as many as they wanted, and gave them children. But God quickly saw that this was evil, a bad mixture. Who then was the mother of Cain, the evil strain of humanity? From all that followed, apparently Cain loved Satan more than God, which raises the doubt that Adam’s second wife, Eve, was not his mother. Anyway, from the Bible and ancient texts of Hebrew legends and myths, one can deduce that from the very beginning a “created” earth was populated by two strains of men, by two humanities, one overlapping the other.
Through most of his work Dostoevsky examines the evil strain but he does not question God. He questions the Church. The Church that in “The Grand Inquisitor” does not believe in God.
I still find it strange that Ivan doesn’t bring up the two Creator-god theory. He should have. History instructs us that monotheism is not for all men. Primitive peoples saw the need for more. A plurality of gods, sometimes one against the other. A system of checks and balances. We recall that some philosophers contend that God needs man as much as man needs God. Even the God of the Old Testament complained through the mouth of His prophet Isaiah that He was a slave of man. That He needed help.
But the question remains that if there are two—or more—Creator gods, one good and one evil, which is the God of the Christian Church? Or, as Dostoevsky says, does it have no god at all? For the God of the Old Testament, the God of the chosen people, is truly terrible, committing all the sins He forbade to man. He blessed theft and treachery. He was jealous, no other God but Him! He fornicated with any woman He wanted under the eyes of their husbands. He favored genocide. He lied and made false promises. He cursed man in every way. And though He has absolutely nothing in common with Jesus of Nazareth, according to their Bible He even sent His own son to hang on a cross. Besides, why did He always hide his face? Some think because He was the evil God, ashamed to show His face. [As a child of 8yrs, I questioned the bold red above. I learned over time to silently question & keep my mouth shut! As an adult, I became an open challenger & was told I couldn't call myself a christian if I didn't believe. Of course, I did cease to call myself a "christian". :))))) but I remained involved for another 17 years! Talk about sado-masochism!!]
Dostoevsky continually mixes countless details and minute particulars with great universal truths. The Church of the Grand Inquisitor is the Roman Catholic Church of his times, the Church in incessant dispute with Russian Orthodoxy for the souls of European man. Yet the sickness of his Church is an old sickness.
The sickness infecting organized religions preceded Dostoevsky’s age and has now burgeoned in our times. Today religion is on the lips of all, of believers, false believers and non-believers in every part of the world. Most claim to know the right way and the true God or gods. And perform the vilest actions in His name.
