To guarantee such freedom, Christ had rejected the second temptation, that of offering proof of his divinity. And finally, he had turned away from the third temptation, that of assuming power over “all the kingdoms of the earth,” not wishing like the Grand Inquisitor to enforce faith with temporal power. Christ had thus repudiated what the Grand Inquisitor declares to be “the three powers . . . able to conquer and to hold captive forever the conscience of the impotent rebels for their own happiness—these forces are miracle, mystery, and authority” (14: 232).
No segment of the Legend poses a knottier problem or is more difficult to unravel than this charge leveled against Christ. Interpreters of the stature of Berdyaev have taken it as Dostoevsky’s own definitive declaration—made a contrario through Ivan—that mankind’s freedom of conscience, the freedom defended by Christ in the Legend, is totally incompatible with magic, mystery, and authority. Such a reading, however, can hardly be reconciled with the description earlier given of the reappearance of Christ. As Roger Cox has pointed out, when the Grand Inquisitor accuses Christ of having abandoned miracle, mystery, and authority, “the Inquisitor’s most characteristic language and imagery come directly from the Book of Revelation, where it is associated with the ‘false prophet.’ ”2 We should not neglect this earlier image in endeavoring to grasp Dostoevsky’s thematic aim.
Earlier, when Alyosha had submitted himself to the starets Zosima, the narrator warns “that this instrument . . . may be a two-edged weapon. . . . [I]t may lead some not to humility and complete self-control but to the most Satanic pride, that is, to bondage and not freedom” (14: 27). The forces of legitimate miracle, mystery, and authority are thus open to perversion, as we see in the case of the Grand Inquisitor, but the text clearly indicates that they are far from having been repudiated by Christ in their authentic manifestation. For him, however, they derive their legitimate power only from a genuinely unconditional faith, only in that interpenetration of the earthly and the heavenly proclaimed by Zosima. When the Grand Inquisitor berates Christ for having abandoned such powerful instruments of control, the imperious prelate is speaking of them only as a means of coercion and domination. But they can exercise their influence by means of “responsive love,” and Dostoevsky hardly desired them to be viewed only through the distorted lens that the Grand Inquisitor provides. As Cox cogently puts it, the Grand Inquisitor has debased the authentic forms of miracle, mystery, and authority into magic, mystification, and tyranny.
Under the challenge of Christ’s silent gaze, the Inquisitor confesses the secret he has not yet openly declared. “We are not with Thee, but with him—that is our mystery.” The Roman Church had treacherously accepted the third temptation of the devil in Christ’s name and had “accomplished all that man seeks on earth—someone to worship, someone to keep his conscience, and some means of uniting all in one unanimous and harmonious ant-heap.” (The word “ant-heap” is frequently used by Dostoevsky to characterize a social order where no free will exists.) Having taken up the sword of the Caesars, the Inquisitor is certain that “we [the Roman Church] shall triumph and be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of man.” But this ultimate state will not be achieved before the interregnum of “the ages . . . yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism,” when humans will try to construct the Tower of Babel solely on the basis of reason and science and will end in devouring each other in a Darwinian struggle for life (14: 234–235).
By this time, even those who had initially served the true Christ (“the elect”) will have “grown weary of waiting for Thee,” and “they will transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth of their heart to the other camp, and end by raising their free banner against Thee.” The very banner of Christ himself now will be transformed into its delusory opposite. “Oh, we shall persuade them that they will become free only when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us.” Humankind will then be reduced to the level of children and will be given “the quiet humble happiness of weak creatures such as they are by nature.” Even sin will be allowed to these will-less creatures, “because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves.” Every detail of their existence, including the most intimate sexual and family matters, “the most powerful secrets of their conscience,” will be under the Grand Inquisitor’s control.3 Here is the earthly paradise of the Grand Inquisitor, the fraudulent facsimile of the freedom proclaimed by Christ. “Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, but beyond the grave they will find nothing but death.” Immortality does not exist, but “for their happiness we shall entice them with the reward of heaven and eternity” (14: 235–236).
The Legend is Ivan’s creation, and is therefore meant to objectify dramatically the struggle in his own consciousness between reason and faith. This struggle suddenly comes to the fore when the Grand Inquisitor reveals himself to be someone who has only reluctantly abandoned the true Christ, and who still feels the lofty beauty of the Christian faith and its image of humanity as free and morally responsible. “I too have been in the wilderness,” he confesses to Christ, “I too was striving to stand among Thy elect. . . . But I awakened and would not serve madness.” If Christ were to return again one day, he defiantly asserts, in the thunderclap of the Second Coming, then the Grand Inquisitor and his fellows could say, “pointing out to Thee the thousand of millions of happy children who have known no sin . . . ‘Judge us if Thou canst and darest.’ ” He concludes by declaring that he will order Christ to be burned at the stake as a heretic the following day “for coming to hinder us” (14: 236–237).
Alyosha now interjects, “Your poem is in praise of Jesus, not in blame of Him,” and surely Alyosha’s interpretation may be taken as Dostoevsky’s own. To rebuke Christ for insisting on humanity’s right to choose between good and evil solely according to the dictates of their hearts was in effect to praise him for protecting the very foundation of man’s humanity as Dostoevsky conceived it. Ivan does not reply to this first exclamation of Alyosha’s, but he responds when Alyosha heatedly affirms that the Grand Inquisitor and his Romish army of Jesuits represent “a simple lust for power, . . . something like a universal serfdom with them as masters.” Refusing to accept such a reductive accusation, Ivan enlarges on the image of the Grand Inquisitor as a tragic figure, genuinely suffering because he “has wasted his whole life in the desert and yet could not shake off his incurable love for humanity” and is obligated to “lead men consciously to death and destruction and yet deceive them all the way . . . in the name of Him in whose ideal the old man had so fervently believed all his life long” (14: 237–239). The Grand Inquisitor is a grandiose extrapolation of his own inner conflict; and the tragic nature of the Inquisitor’s dilemma—the tragedy of having accepted the morality of Christ the Son and of acting in his name while no longer believing in God the Father—is also a preparation for the dénouement of the Legend.
Ivan proposes the following conclusion to his narrative. The prisoner’s unbroken muteness “weighed down” on his jailer, but “He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless, aged lips.” The Grand Inquisitor shuddered and opened the cell door. “ ‘Go,’ he said, ‘and . . . come not at all, never, never.’ ” As for the now solitary Grand Inquisitor, Ivan says that “the kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.” Alyosha immediately recognizes this last sentence to be applicable to Ivan himself, torn between his sensitivity to the Christian ideal and his “idea” that “everything is lawful” once faith in God and immortality has been lost. To Alyosha’s anguished question, “How will you live? . . . With such a hell in your heart and your head, how can you?” Ivan reasserts his former “rebellious” declaration: the “Karamazov baseness” will see him through until age thirty, and then he will dash the cup to the ground (14: 240).
At the end of their conversation, when Alyosha looks at him in silence, Ivan expresses sadness
because “now I see that there is no place for me in your heart, my dear hermit.” This sentiment motivates Alyosha to kiss Ivan on the lips, and he is then jokingly accused of “plagarism” by an Ivan “highly delighted” at this symbol-laden reenactment. Presented here in his most humanly appealing side, Ivan is shown as fully aware of the grief gnawing at his brother’s heart at this moment. Dostoevsky, however, did not wish to end on such a sympathetic image of Ivan, who had succeeded in provoking Alyosha to approve of an act of revenge. And so the narrator introduces a subtly discordant note in the final paragraphs as Ivan walks away after directing his brother, “and now you go to the right and I to the left.” Alyosha “notices that Ivan swayed as he walked and that the right shoulder looked lower than the left” (14: 241). Traditionally, the devil is associated with the left side, and because he limps when he walks, the left shoulder seems higher than the right. The narrator thus uses folk beliefs to associate Ivan with the dread spirit the latter had just evoked so approvingly in his Legend.
Ivan’s rebellion and his Legend are framed between two encounters with Smerdyakov. He returns home to encounter the obsequiously insinuating but also vaguely sinister presence of his father’s cook and manservant, and the subconscious expectation of meeting Smerdyakov plunges him, though he is not fully aware of this reason himself, into a state of intense depression. The relation between the two—only hinted at previously—is now developed more fully. Ivan had initially “taken an interest in Smerdyakov, and had even thought him very original.” They discussed questions such as the literal accuracy and truthfulness of some of the statements in the Old Testament, and Smerdyakov had begun to see himself as Ivan’s disciple. Indeed, when Smerdyakov was ridiculing the heroism of Foma Danilov in refusing to renounce his faith, Feodor had said to Ivan, “He’s got this all up for your benefit. He wants you to praise him” (14: 118).
Ivan soon comes to feel an “aversion” to Smerdyakov because the lackey “began to betray a boundless vanity, and a wounded vanity,” that Ivan finds intolerable. The irony of this observation is obvious: Smerdyakov’s “vanity” is a parody of his admired model, who in the person of the Grand Inquisitor had imagined himself capable of “correcting” the work of God. Worst of all, from Ivan’s point of view, is that Smerdyakov now acts as if they “had some kind of compact, some secret between them,” unknown to everyone else, which created a bond (14: 242–243). Such a bond exists whether Ivan desired it or not because Smerdyakov has assimilated the amoral nihilism of Ivan’s ideas, which had begun to ferment within a mind and heart lacking his own sensitivity to human suffering. The dialogue that ensues is portrayed on two levels—the exchange of words between them, accompanied by the dialogue of Ivan with himself. In this second dialogue, the loathing Ivan has come to feel for Smerdyakov is dominated by his subconscious sense that both are linked by a secret, subliminal compact—one that he resents but cannot resist or shake off. Ivan’s clash of feelings about Smerdyakov dramatizes, on the moral-psychological level, the same conflict between reason and faith (the source of moral conscience for Dostoevsky) that forms the basis of Ivan’s character.
Even though Ivan does not wish to speak to Smerdyakov, he finds himself involuntarily addressing Smerdyakov in a tone inviting conversation. Ivan behaves under a compulsion, almost a fascination, that can only arise from the tormenting paralysis resulting from his inner conflict. In the course of their exchange, Smerdyakov insinuates in veiled terms all the events that will leave the way clear, if Ivan goes to Chermashnaya, for Dimitry to invade the house again and carry out the threat to kill his father. As he listens, Ivan becomes incensed by Smerdyakov’s allusive words, which seemingly provide purposeless information but in fact hint at the likelihood of murder. Almost throwing himself upon the servant in a paroxysm of rage, he then quietly announces instead that he will leave for Moscow the next day. Ivan’s contradictory behavior has been foreshadowed by his words to Alyosha, after they both pulled Dimitry away from their bloodied father. “One viper will devour the other,” he had said. “And serves both of them right, too.” Nonetheless, while insisting to Alyosha that he would always defend his father, Ivan had also added: “But in my wishes I reserve myself full latitude in this case.”
Ivan’s “wishes” prove stronger than his asserted obedience to the moral code, and he decides to leave even after becoming aware that his absence might bring on the crime. The narrator reports objectively on the turmoil in Ivan’s spirit that night, “fretted by all sorts of strange and almost surprising desires,” such as wishing to go to the lodge and beat Smerdyakov. He could not explain why, “except perhaps that he loathed the lackey as one who had insulted him more gravely than anyone in the world.” Smerdyakov’s “insult” consisted in his perfectly justified assumption that Ivan had no deeply rooted objection to the murder of his loathsome father, though he himself refused to face up to this truth. That night, hearing his father stirring downstairs, Ivan went out on the staircase and listened “with a sort of strange curiosity, holding his breath while his heart throbbed,”and he never forgot the memory of that brief span of time. “That ‘action,’ all his life afterward he called ‘infamous,’ and at the bottom of his heart, he thought of it as the basest action of his life” (14: 251). It was the moment when he decided to let the two vipers devour each other—or so he believed.
Ivan tells his father the next morning that he will go to Chermashnaya, as the old man had requested, to sell a copse for him. Feodor is delighted, “because you are a clever man,” but Ivan avoids kissing him on departure (14: 253). This repeated designation echoes Ivan’s remark to Alyosha that the Grand Inquisitor, after losing his faith in Christ, had joined “the clever people.” As Ivan rolls through the countryside, he at first feels a sense of relief, but then recalls the lackey’s parting words, whose implications he pretends not to understand. Changing his plans, Ivan travels to Moscow, but his gloom and anguish do not vanish, and on arriving in Moscow he has a moment of truth: “ ‘I am a scoundrel,’ he said to himself” (14: 255). It is only much later, however, that he will experience the full implications of this recognition.
Book 6, “The Russian Monk,” is an account of Zosima’s life and teachings cast in the form of a zhitie, the hagiographical biography of the life of a saint as composed by his disciple, Alyosha. It is perhaps the most artistically daring section of the work—in the sense that it is almost unprecedented to include in a novel, except perhaps for purposes of parody, an extended example of a text imitative of a purely religious genre. While The Brothers Karamazov is filled with violent movement, strong passions, and intense psychological dramatics, the zhitie lacks (quite intentionally) the powerful vehemence to which it is meant to respond, and most modern readers have considered it ineffectual in countering the brunt of Ivan’s unbridled assault. However that may be, there is no doubt that Zosima conveys the essence of Dostoevsky’s own moral-social views, and the account of Zosima’s life also plays an important part in the structure of the novel.
Through Zosima Dostoevsky was trying to present an alternative attitude toward life and toward the problem of human suffering—an attitude of serene acceptance of human destiny deriving from a conviction in the all-forgiving mercy of a loving God. Figures embodying states of virtuous beatitude have always been more difficult to make interesting and convincing than those struggling to confront the problems of human existence. Nonetheless, Dostoevsky took the risk of couching the response to Ivan in the genre of a saint’s life, written in a highly poetic style full of Church Slavonic expressions and the pious language of Saint Tikhon Zadonsky’s eighteenth-century clerical sentimentalism. Since no attempt is made to ground such a narrative in realistic particularities or verisimilar psychological analyses, events occur according to the laws of the moral lesson to be illustrated, not by the causality of mundane existence. There is a timeless quality about such narratives precisely because they are related to the real world only in an ancillary fashion, and the moral they exemplify remai
ns valuable for any time and any place.
Book 6 has not fared very well in critical opinion because it is viewed primarily as a direct answer to the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor. Commentators have not paid sufficient attention to Dostoevsky’s remark that “the whole novel is an answer” to Ivan and his Legend. Such a definitive assertion makes us aware that Dostoevsky was not depending only on these stories and utterances to accomplish his artistic task. This will be achieved through the interweaving of Zosima’s experiences with the remainder of the plot-action, which reveals the salutary effect of his own life, and of the values he practiced, on the lives of others. It will illustrate as well that the image delineated by the Grand Inquisitor of a weak, debased humanity, incapable of fulfilling Christ’s law of love, is delusory and pernicious.
The stories of Book 6 are narrated, as in a zhitie, in a style intended to awaken pious and reverential responses, and to communicate a sense of serenity opposed to the agitations and passions depicted elsewhere. It begins with the life of Zosima’s elder brother Markel, who had converted to atheism as a youth but then, after being suddenly taken ill, his spirit is transformed by the immanence of death. Attempting to comfort his grieving mother, he tells her that “we are all in paradise, but we won’t see it; if we would, we should have heaven on earth the next day” (14: 262). Feeling unworthy of the love lavished on him, he desires to change places with the servants. He tells his mother that “every one of us has sinned against all men, and I more than any.” Like Saint Francis, he asks pardon from the birds and from nature because “there was such a glory of God all about me, birds, trees, meadows, sky, only I lived in shame and dishonored it all and did not notice the beauty and glory” (14: 263). Not understanding this act of self-surrender to “the glory of God,” the family doctor, a man of science, declares that Markel’s “disease is affecting his brain” (14: 262). But the afflicted young man is only rejoicing in that ecstatic apprehension of life as an ultimate good that even Ivan had experienced, and he embodies this crucial epiphanic sentiment—that Dostoevsky himself had once voiced in the shadow of death.
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