As the conversation between the two brothers continues, Ivan vehemently challenges Alyosha’s devotion to Zosima’s world of all-embracing forgiveness and overflowing, selfless love. Ivan is struggling inwardly against his own yearning to accept the very worldview he is attacking with such passion. He half admits to himself, “quite like a little gentle child,” that he does not “want to corrupt you [Alyosha], or to turn you from your stronghold, perhaps I want to be healed by you,” but this moment of reassuring tenderness is soon swept away (14: 215). Ivan introduces his famous distinction between “Euclidean” (earthly) and “non-Euclidean” (supernatural) understanding, insisting that, although he is perfectly willing to accept the existence of this non-Euclidean world (and hence of God), his Euclidean understanding refuses to reconcile itself to all the moral horrors of the world created by such a divinity.
Since Ivan does not believe in God as more than a hypothesis, his opinion on this point reflects the same ambiguity that marked his article on church jurisdiction. “As for me,” he says, “I’ve long resolved not to think of whether man created God or God man.” Such a question is “utterly inappropriate for a mind created with an idea of only three dimensions” (and hence Euclidean). Ivan remains neutral on this issue, though perfectly willing to accept all the sublime consequences that flow from postulating the existence of God. Paraphrasing the Gospel of Saint John, he declares, both with deep feeling and a touch of irony: “I believe in the underlying order and the meaning of life; I believe in the eternal harmony in which they say we shall one day be blended. I believe in the Word to Which the entire universe is striving, and Which Itself was ‘with God,’ and Which Itself is God, and so on, and so on, to infinity” (14: 214). But to profess these beliefs as more than hypotheses would mean possessing a faith that transcends reason—a faith that Ivan is not only unable but also morally unwilling to muster even if he could manage to do so. What he desires is that such ecstatic expectations should justify themselves before the bar of his Euclidean understanding, of his earthly reason—and this, obviously, they cannot do.
The dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha serves as a prelude to the chapter “Rebellion,” an attack on God and the world he created so powerful that many critics have doubted whether the book as a whole succeeds in overcoming its subversive impact. Dostoevsky made some effort, however, to moderate the disquieting effects of his deeply moving jeremiad even before composing its “refutation” in Book 6. For Ivan begins by exhibiting his emotional incapacity to experience the fundamental act of Christian fellow-feeling, that of loving one’s neighbor. “I could never understand,” he says, “how one could love one’s neighbors . . . though one might love them at a distance.” Citing an extreme and repulsive example of self-sacrificial Christian love from Flaubert’s La légende de Saint Julien l’hospitalier (the embrace by the saint of a frozen beggar with some loathsome disease), Ivan sees it only as “a love imposed by duty, as a penance,” similar to Katerina’s “love” for Dimitry. It is an act accomplished “from the laceration of falsity” rather than from a sincerely spontaneous response to human suffering (14: 215–216). For Ivan, the precepts of Christianity thus become transformed into a duty and obligation contrary to human nature. Ivan’s feverishly overstrained compassion for humanity that follows is thus undermined by the suspicion that he may also be experiencing only a “laceration of falsity.”
The details of Ivan’s searing indictment of God unroll a catalogue of atrocities that Dostoevsky drew from many sources—court cases, barbarities reported about the Russo-Turkish War, a pamphlet distributed by an aristocratic Christian sect describing the edifying conversion of a criminal in Geneva just before his execution—which did not for a moment stop his being put to death. Ivan dwells particularly on the torture inflicted on helpless and innocent children, and does so with a morbid delectation that makes Alyosha distinctly uneasy; there are indications that Ivan’s fascination with human evil has begun to unbalance his mental equilibrium (he speaks “as though in delirium”). Humanity has become for Ivan nothing but a creator of destruction and darkness, an image not of God but of the devil. “I think if the devil doesn’t exist,” he tells Alyosha, “and therefore was created by man, he has created him in his own image and likeness” (14: 215–218).
It is the existence of all this suffering and misery in the world that Ivan finds emotionally unendurable and intellectually incomprehensible. At the very least, sinful adults might be made to pay a price. But how is one to accept the idea of original sin—the idea that children must suffer for the sins of their fathers? For Ivan, “such a truth . . . is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially such innocents!” Dostoevsky even allows Ivan to reject in advance the position from which he will be opposed. “Do you understand why this infamy must be permitted?” he shouts at Alyosha. “Without it, I am told, man could not have existed on earth for he could not have known good and evil. Why should he have known that diabolical good and evil when it costs so much?” (14: 218–220). The force of Ivan’s argument is adroitly countered by the adjective “diabolical,” which reveals the implicitly Manichean premise of his indignation, his conviction that humans can use freedom only to accomplish evil.
Ivan’s tortured cogitations reject the very idea of “a universal harmony” in the future as something monstrous and unjust. With bitter irony, he declares that he can well envisage how glorious it would be “when the mother embraces the fiend who threw her child to the dogs, and all three cry aloud with tears, ‘Thou art just, O Lord.’ ” He can understand this sublime apotheosis, but he cannot accept it: “It’s not worth the tears of that one tortured child who . . . prayed in the stinking outhouse, with its unexpiated tears, to ‘dear, kind God!’ ” Nobody, Ivan argues, has the right to forgive her torturer. “I don’t want harmony. From love for humanity, I don’t want it. I would rather be left with unavenged suffering . . . even if I were wrong” (14: 223). The intensity of Ivan’s conflict between his desire for “rational” retributive justice, on the one hand, and the sublimity of universal forgiveness, on the other, is revealed by Dostoevsky’s underlining. Nonetheless, Ivan is unyielding in his refusal, which culminates in his famous declaration: “And so I hasten to give back my entrance ticket, and if I am an honest man I must give it back as soon as possible. . . . It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him my ticket” (the ticket to a world of non-Euclidean eternal harmony that would redeem all suffering in the Euclidean realm) (14: 223).
Ivan has set out to unsettle Alyosha’s faith, and he succeeds momentarily. When he asks Alyosha whether a general who had unleashed his dogs on a peasant boy should be shot “for the satisfaction of our moral feelings,” Alyosha cannot help replying, “To be shot!” Delighted at this reply, Ivan exclaims, “Bravo! . . . so there is a little devil sitting in your heart, Alyosha Karamazov!” (to agree with Ivan is to surrender to the temptation of the devil) (14: 221). Ivan then challenges Alyosha to answer whether he would consent to found the fabric of human destiny—“that would bring future happiness to mankind”—on the unavenged torture of an innocent child. Alyosha again replies in the negative, but then, recovering himself, he recalls that the fabric of human destiny (at least in their moral universe) is founded on another principle—that of self-sacrificial Christian love. In response to Ivan’s other question—whether there is “in the whole world a being who would have the right to forgive and could forgive” the terrible tapestry of human suffering he has just unrolled—Alyosha replies with a passionate affirmation. “But there is a Being and He can forgive everything, all and for all, because He gave His innocent blood for all and everything . . . and on Him is built the edifice, and it is to Him they cry aloud, ‘Thou are just, O Lord, for Thy ways are revealed’ ” (14: 223–224).
These pages are among the most justly famous in all of Dostoevsky’s work, and they reveal once again his boldness in giving the mo
st powerful expression to the very attitudes he was attempting to combat. Aside from Alyosha’s final invocation of Christ, there has been no attempt up to this point to counter Ivan’s implacable attack on God’s world. Nor would any such effort have been consistent with Dostoevsky’s artistic strategy. The ideas he opposed are invariably combated by portraying their effects on the lives of his characters, not by attempting to demonstrate their lack of theoretical persuasiveness or rational coherence. Ivan’s sense of despair and inner desolation, his disabused cynicism about his own youthful love of life, the contempt for mankind that has corrupted his feelings despite all his supposed “love for humanity”—all these are meant to illuminate indirectly the hopelessly self-destructive nature of his convictions. Alyosha’s sudden appeal to the image of the God-man lights up in a flash the narrowness and vindictiveness of Ivan’s “love of humanity.” His insistence on justice—and hence on punishment and retribution—glaringly contrasts with Christ’s gospel of all-reconciling and all-forgiving love and the hope of infinite mercy for the sinner who repents.
Numerous commentators have understandably stressed the moving pathos of Ivan’s humanitarianism; it has even been suggested, as Blake said of Milton, that Dostoevsky was really of the devil’s party and could not suppress his emotional agreement with Ivan. There is no question that Dostoevsky poured into these passages all his own anguish over the abominations he was recording. However, Ivan represents, on the highest level of intellectual and moral sensibility, the supreme and most poignant dramatization of the conflict between reason and faith at the heart of the book, and it would have been inconsistent with his thematic aim to have softened or weakened his utterances. Faith, as Dostoevsky wishes it to be felt in The Brothers Karamazov, must be totally pure, a commitment supported by nothing except a devotion to the image and example of Christ, and the opposing arguments of reason must thus be given at their fullest strength.
What provides Ivan’s overwhelming monologue with its still undiminished power is the relentless rejection of God’s world in the name of the very morality of love and compassion that Christ himself had brought to it. Ivan is expressing what Dostoevsky saw as the deepest challenge of the Populist mentality to a genuine acceptance of the Christian faith of the Russian people. To combat this challenge, Alyosha had called the image of Christ to his aid, the true source of Ivan’s own morality. He accuses his brother of having “forgotten” Christ, and in reply Ivan narrates a prose poem of his own composition, the renowned Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. A complex narrative, it encompasses three levels: that of Dostoevsky the author, that of the fictional narrator, who vanishes during Ivan’s majestic monologue, and that of Ivan himself, the presumed creator, whose moral-social psychology it symbolically dramatizes in all the tangle of its oppositions.
As a preface, the erudite Ivan indulges in a brief survey of the universal popularity of similar poems and plays in the past, when “it was customary . . . to bring down heavenly powers on earth.” Most important of all was a Byzantine apocryphal tale, “The Wanderings of Our Lady in Hell,” which depicts the Mother of God being led through hell by the archangel Michael. Horrified by the suffering of the damned, she falls before God “and begs for mercy for all in Hell . . . indiscriminately.” God points to the crucified Christ and asks how “His tormentors” can be forgiven, but he relents when Our Lady summons “all the saints, all the martyrs, all the angels and archangels” to join her in pleading for mercy. When God finally agrees to “a respite of suffering” for those in hell every year from Good Friday until Trinity Day (eight weeks after Easter), the sinners chant, “Thou art just, O Lord, in this judgment” (14: 224–225).
Ivan’s poem is placed in sixteenth-century Spain, where Christ appears again. Humankind awaited him with “greater faith” than ever because “it is fifteen centuries since man had ceased to see signs from Heaven.” It is into a world filled with such yearning and such faith that Ivan imagines Christ returning—to southern Spain, in the darkest days of the Inquisition. Ivan paints the scene in a few suggestive strokes, calling to his aid both poetry and the New Testament. The reader is taken to Seville the day after a hundred heretics have been burned in a magnificent auto-da-fé. At this juncture, “Christ suddenly appears softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognized Him. . . . The sun of love burns in His heart. Light, Enlightenment, and Power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love.” Out of the fullness of his overflowing love, Christ brings back the sight of a blind man and raises a little girl from the dead on the steps of the cathedral; “the crowd weeps and kisses the earth” (14: 226–227).
The Grand Inquisitor orders Christ arrested, and comes to the prison that night. Throughout their encounter, Christ does not utter a word; and his mute presence serves as a goad to the conscience of the Grand Inquisitor, who, while pretending to carry out Christ’s wishes on earth, knows that he is doing the opposite. The monologue of the Inquisitor, swinging between his accusations against Christ and self-exculpation, betrays the tension gnawing at his conscience, a conscience that has led him, out of pity for the suffering of a weak and unhappy humanity, to “correct” Christ’s work by relieving humankind of the source of its misery: the burden of free will. Ivan had refused to accept God’s world in the previous chapter, and now he indicates how he would reconstruct it according to more “humane” specifications.
His narrative is a free variation of the Gospel version of the temptations of Christ included in Saints Mark, Matthew, and Luke. According to the sacred text, Christ spent forty days in the desert being tempted by Satan before embarking on his mission to humanity. Like Milton in Paradise Regained, Ivan elaborates this account into a magnificent historiosophical panorama of the future course of human history, which he sees as prefigured in this temptation episode of the New Testament. Indeed, the Grand Inquisitor is certainly speaking for Dostoevsky when he rapturously praises the three questions put to Christ in the desert by “the wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and nonexistence.” He is certain that these questions must be the product not of “the fleeting human intelligence . . . but [of] the absolute and eternal,” because the mind of man could not possibly have invented by itself the grandeur of this prophetic vision (14: 229–230).
Why, Christ is asked, had he come to man “with empty hands, with some promise of freedom,” when he could have performed the miracle of turning “these stones in this parched and barren wilderness” into bread? “Turn them into bread,” the devil had advised in the first temptation, “and mankind will run after Thee like a flock, grateful and obedient.” Christ refused because “Thou would not deprive man of freedom,” but the Grand Inquisitor, prophesying the victory of what, from the terminology, can only be Socialism, foresees that “ages will pass, and humanity will proclaim by the lips of their sages that there is no crime, and no sin, there is only hunger.” And then, “for the sake of that earthly bread . . . all will follow him, crying: ‘Who can compare with that beast? He has given us fire from heaven!’ ” (a citation that combines the book of Revelation with the myth of Prometheus) (14: 230).
As we know from the Diary, Dostoevsky believed in the possibility of Roman Catholicism joining forces with the Socialists to lead the impending revolution that would destroy the West. Both, in his eyes, had surrendered to the first temptation of Christ by subordinating his message—freedom of conscience—to earthly aims and ambitions, and were thus united in his imagination. “The spirit of the earth” will thus achieve a temporary victory because humanity will lay its disastrous freedom at their feet. For “freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them.” The moral principle of “sharing” cannot originate from any source other than the true Christ, who calls for the free sacrifice for others out of love; and humankind will finally be forced to return to him as the sole fount of morality. In this instance, however, it will retur
n to a false Christ, the Roman Catholic one of the Grand Inquisitor, who believes that “nothing has ever been more insupportable for a man and human society than freedom,” and that humanity “can never be free, for it is weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious” (14: 230–231).
Despite this disparaging view of human nature, Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor makes the same appeal to pity that Ivan made in the chapter “Rebellion.” He acknowledges that although the doctrine of “the bread of Heaven,” the freedom of human conscience, may appeal to thousands, millions more “will not have the strength to forgo the earthly bread for the heavenly”; and it is for these millions, “who are weak, but love,” that the Grand Inquisitor is speaking (14: 231). This “care,” however, will not be accepted unless offered in the name of the true Christ preaching freedom and love while his ideal is being distorted and betrayed.
The Grand Inquisitor now turns from the first temptation to the more properly religious issue of whether humanity possesses the moral strength to support the freedom proclaimed by Christ. For the Grand Inquisitor is willing to agree with Christ—the only time he does so!—“that if someone gains possession of [humankind’s] conscience—Oh! then [it] will cast away Thy bread and follow after him who has ensnared [its] conscience. In that Thou wast right. For the secret of man’s being is not only to live but to have something to live for.” In other words, man does not live by bread alone; but Christ refused to take command over the conscience of humanity, thus denying it the tranquility of certitude and obedience. “Didst Thou forget that man prefers peace, and even death, to freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil?” Far from providing a new and immutable guide for human conscience, Christ, the Grand Inquisitor charges, only increases its plight. “Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater source of suffering. . . . In place of the rigid ancient law, man must hereafter with free heart decide for himself what is good and what evil, having only Thy image before him as a guide” (14: 232).
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