As the Grand Inquisitor finishes his indictment
of Christ, Christ walks up to the old man and kisses him gently
on the lips. The Grand Inquisitor suddenly sets Christ free, but
tells him never to return again.
As Ivan finishes his story, he worries that
Alyosha will be disturbed by the idea that if there is no God, there
are no moral limitations on man’s behavior. But Alyosha leans forward
and kisses Ivan on the lips. Ivan, moved, replies that Alyosha has
stolen that action from his poem. Ivan and Alyosha leave the restaurant
and split up. Ivan begins walking home and Alyosha walks to the
monastery where Zosima is dying.
Analysis
The story of the Grand Inquisitor strongly resembles a
biblical parable, the kind of story that Christ tells in the New
Testament to illustrate a philosophical point. Both Ivan’s story
and Christ’s stories use a fictional narrative to address a deep
philosophical concern and are open to various interpretations. The
similarity between Ivan’s story and Christ’s stories illustrates
the uneasy relationship between Ivan and religion. At the same time
that Ivan rejects religion’s ability to effectively guide human
life, he relies on many of its principles in forming his own philosophical
system. Like Christ, Ivan is deeply concerned with understanding
the way we define what is right and what is wrong, and with understanding
how morality guides human actions. However, Ivan ultimately rejects
both Christ’s and God’s existence, as he cannot accept a supreme
being with absolute power who would nonetheless allow the suffering
that occurs on Earth.
The story also implicitly brings up a new point
with regard to Ivan’s argument about expanding the power of ecclesiastical
courts. By setting his story in sixteenth-century Spain, where ecclesiastical
courts were at the height of their power to try and punish criminals,
Ivan asks what verdict such a court would have reached in judging
Christ’s life. Since Christian religions teach that Christ lived
a sinless life, presumably an ecclesiastical court would have been
unable to find Christ guilty of any sin. However, the fact that
Ivan’s court finds Christ guilty of sins against mankind illustrates
the difference between Ivan’s religious beliefs and his beliefs
in the efficacy of ecclesiastical courts. He sees the courts as
an effective way to guide human action, but not necessarily as a
way to induce men to believe more strongly in God or religion.
The conflict between free will and security further illustrates
the reasons for Ivan’s dissent from Christianity. The fundamental
difference between Christ’s point of view and that of the Grand
Inquisitor is the value that each of them places on freedom and
comfort. Christ’s responses to the three temptations emphasize the
importance of man’s ability to choose between right and wrong, while
the Inquisitor’s interpretation of Christ’s actions emphasizes the
greater value of living a comfortable life in which the right path
has already been chosen by someone else.
The assumption at the heart of the Inquisitor’s
case is that Christ’s resistance of Satan’s temptations is meant
to provide a symbolic example for the rest of mankind. The Inquisitor
interprets the rejection of the temptations as Christ’s argument
that humanity must reject certain securities: comfort, represented
by bread; power and the safety that power brings, represented by
the kingdoms; and superstition, represented by the miracle. The
Inquisitor believes that Christ’s example places an impossible burden
on mankind, which is inherently too weak to use its free will to
find salvation. Effectively, the Inquisitor argues, the only option
is for people to lead sinful lives ending in damnation. The Inquisitor’s
Church, which is allied with Satan, seeks to provide people with
stability and security in their lives, even if by doing so it ensures that
they will be damned in the afterlife.
