The Grand Inquisitor
Avi Zenilman notes that both Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton cite The Brothers Karamazov as a favorite work of literature, and both specifically cite the “Grand Inquisitor” parable. Here’s Bush:
In the dialogue with the Inquisitor, Jesus remains silent, and the chapter has two endings, the first tragic, the second a victory for Christianity.
For Mrs. Bush, there was no ambiguity. ”It’s about life, and it’s about death, and it’s about Christ,” she has said. ”I find it really reassuring.”
And here’s Clinton:
Asked to name the book that had made the biggest impact on her, she singled out “The Brothers Karamazov.” The parable of the Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel, she said, speaks to the dangers of certitude.
“For a lot of reasons, that was an important part of my thinking,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything.”
The passage in question is deliberately ambiguous. That said, I think bother former first ladies are wrong. Clinton just seems confused. There’s a lot of stuff about doubt and certainty in Karamazov but not really in this part. Bush’s point of view I don’t really understand. From a literary perspective, the whole reason the parable is famous is because the Inquisitor’s argument is, as written, pretty persuasive. And yet it’s also repugnant! At the end, Christ’s faith is unshaken, but the Inquisitor is also unmoved. It’s the reverse of reassuring; it’s a deliberate provocation meant to shake us out of our complacency. If it was reassuring, it would be boring.
34 Responses to “The Grand Inquisitor”
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October 17th, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Dostoevsky dealt with injustice in the world.
Speaking of which, one of the greatest injustices in the U.S. is the media’s reporting on rape.
Obama has recently asked that a 2005 study be removed from the website of the Department of Justice.
What is this study about?
It’s a 2005 study on interracial rape – the most conclusive study ever conducted.
What are the results of this study?
“In the United States in 2005,
37,460 white females were sexually assaulted or raped by a black man
while
less than 10 black women were sexually assaulted or raped by a white man.”
This is an inconvenient fact that both Obama and the liberal media want to hide. White on black rape is so rare that liberals must invent cases like the Duke “rape” case.
Overview of report: http://97.74.65.51/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=26368
Actual report:
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/abstract/cvusst.htm
October 17th, 2009 at 2:49 pm
The Grand Inquisitor is certain he’s right, yet what he argues for is repugnant and what he does is repugnant. How is Clinton wrong for saying this shows a danger from people who are certain?
October 17th, 2009 at 2:50 pm
so now steven sailer is commenting as “burt”??
but seriously–matt, doesn’t your own summary show that hillary is a lot closer than the drunk’s wife?
hillary talks about people who are absolutely certain that they are right.
you say that the inquisitor and jesus are both entirely unmoved by opposing arguments. neither modifies their position or considers less extreme alternatives.
you know why? because they are both absolutely certain that they are right. that’s hillary’s point.
i’d give her at least a b+. laura gets a c-, for not reading carefully.
October 17th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
In all fairness, Mrs. Bush seems a bit confused too.
In my opinion, if “The Inquisitor’s” about anything, it’s a summation of the author’s faith that human compassion will ultimately overcome the tendency of societies toward authoritarianism.
Dostoyevsky had the moral luxury of writing the passage in the late 1870s–had he written it a hundred years later, he might not have been so confident.
October 17th, 2009 at 2:55 pm
hillary talks about people who are absolutely certain that they are right.
I always took the Inquisitor to be a straw man/unreliable narrator/whatever–when I read the passge, it seemed to me he was merely justifying his position, rather than “absolutely certain.”
October 17th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
I guess another thing to keep in mind is that the story is told by Ivan Karamazov — someone who isn’t sure whether God is nonexistent or does exist but is a jerk. Ivan is hardly a straw man representation of skepticism, but he doesn’t represent some undistorted truth either. If Alyosha had been telling the story, perhaps Christ’s love would have redeemed the inquisitor, like Longinus. Even if Alyosha isn’t really close to who Dostoevsky was, he’s a Mary Sue-ish representation of his aspirations.
October 17th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Shorter Burt: 1, 2, 3, 4, I declare a race war!
October 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
Burt:
that statistic on reported rapes by perceived white offenders of black women is weird. Since these are reports to police by black women, shouldn’t there be more that 10 false reports of white men raping black women per year in the US with its millions of black women? I assume you believe these kinds of false accusations occur more than once a year in places like California or NY. Or was the Duke Lacrosse case totally weird? If you believe these numbers black women almost never make false rape accusations against white men. Go there if you want…
If there is a reason this data is coming down, and I don’t see any reason to believe it is, it might be because the numbers aren’t credible.
October 17th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I especially like it when they make jokes while juggling.
October 17th, 2009 at 3:11 pm
I’ll recommend the podcasts of Hubert Dreyfus (of UC Berkeley) from his class “Existentialism in Literature and Film” which contain an extended discussion of The Brothers Karamazov, and which make a lot of sense of stuff in the book and The Grand Inquisitor chapter in particular, that is otherwise very puzzling. I am not going to try and summarize it here, but it is important to remember that The Grand Inquisitor is supposed to have been written by Ivan.
The views of the Grand Inquisitor are supposed to be the extreme but logical outcome of Catholicism, and the views the Grand Inquisitor attributes to the silent Christ are supposed to be the extreme but logical outcome of Protestantism. The solution to this apparent antimony is of course Russian Orthodoxy (or, well, Dostoevsky’s idea of its deep inner truth), but laying that out and how it differs from Catholicism/Protestantism is the burden of the rest of the book, and is not even hinted at in The Grand Inquisitor itself.
October 17th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Re: Burt
The Neanderthal-Sailerite race-monger Burt needs to go s*ck his own c*ck.
Re: The Grand Inquisitor
Ah, what an amazing, hypnotic, and haunting piece of literature. I don’t think neither Ivan nor the Grand Inquisitor, and certainly not Dostoyevsky, was certain about anything. If we had certainty, after all, what need would there be for faith? Dostoyevsky’s view that ultimate love would overcome power was just that, an act of faith, and he was pretty honest about that. Dostoyevsky was, if nothing else, a deeply tortured and conflicted Christian, and it shows.
The “answer” to the Inquisitor’s argument (and the devil’s argument later in the book) is supposed to be given in the deathbed address of the Elder Zossima. Which of them you find more convincing is up to you.
And by the way, my understanding is that Dostoyevsky didn’t intend us to conclude that because the Inquistor’s view is false, the opposite is therefore true. The inquisitor is meant to be convincing because, like the Devil fifteen centuries earlier and like the twentieth-century Bolsheviks and Fascists, he tells a lie that is all the stronger because it contains a great deal of truth. That’s why Dostoyevsky made the Inquisitor’s arguments so powerful and seemingly irrefutable.
October 17th, 2009 at 3:20 pm
Re: Ivan is hardly a straw man representation of skepticism, but he doesn’t represent some undistorted truth either.
I don’t read Ivan as a skeptic at all. I read him as someone who, because of the problem of evil, doesn’t believe, but at some level deeply wants to. That’s not quite skepticism.
Bryan,
I’m not entirely sure that Christ represents Protestantism (or, for that matter, anything). He doesn’t speak, after all, in the whole chapter.
October 17th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
Along with others, I see exactly what Hillary is saying here and agree. MY’s argument simply doesn’t make sense… Matt agrees the Inquisitor’s position is repugnant, but somehow feels that the fact the Inquisitor is unmoved from it even in the presence of Christ has no relation to the Inquisitor being absolutely certain of himself? That’s just weird. Seems to me that Hillary and Matt are making similar points here.
Laura Bush’s answer is, of course, an idiotic beauty pageant type answer. It uses big words to say nothing at all. Honestly, I have no idea if she’s really an idiot or just pretending to be one for the sake of the press, although after a while I suspect the two things are indistinguishable.
October 17th, 2009 at 3:46 pm
I also recommend the Dreyfus lectures. He was my adviser in college and graduate school. However, I see the GI as part of Dostoyevsky’s general view that works don’t suffice for gaining heaven, only God’s Grace can achieve that for you through prayer and repentance. Even if the GI can assure the fact that everyone behaves perfectly, that will not save them. On the other hand, Tolstoy seems to have believed that only actual deeds matter. For Dostoyevsky, human beings are not capable of acting perfectly, and, even if they do, they need to ask for God’s grace and forgiveness.
October 17th, 2009 at 4:05 pm
That said, I think both
erformer first ladies are wrong.It’s hard to say Laura Bush’s comment is wrong, because there’s nothing there that can really be evaluated for a truth value.
October 17th, 2009 at 4:07 pm
It is also my favorite book, and this passage is my favorite in the book, but I never studied it formally.
I don’t think Clinton’s view is that off base. Unlike MY I don’t think the Inquisitor’s argument is persuasive.
I like the passage because it is so provocative. It takes a dim view of humanity that, while repugnant, I think contains many truths. I was particularly drawn the the implicit acceptance of injustice in the world — people are divided into weak and strong seemingly by intrinsic nature, not because of personal will. (For me, this resonated with a theme that would arise later, that people do good or evil not because of “virtue” or lack thereof, but because of opportunity and circumstance.)
Yet perhaps I misread it. Dostoyevsky was Christian (or so it says above), yet my reading of the book undermines the notion of absolute justice, which is foundational to religion.
October 17th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
It’s the reverse of reassuring; it’s a deliberate provocation meant to shake us out of our complacency. If it was reassuring, it would be boring.
While not reassuring, Dostoevsky nevertheless is boring. He makes us understand why Russians drank so much vodka during those long winters.
For a good Russian novel, read Gogol’s Dead Souls.
Otherwise, just proceed to Woody Allen’s Love and Death.
October 17th, 2009 at 4:21 pm
The Grand Inquisitor does seem to suggest that human beings desperately want some God or idea to worship with certitude. The Grand Inquisitor seems to think Christ should have givin it to us by enslaving mankind. I will differ from Clinton since it is clear to me that the parable points to our desire for certainty rather than our certainty itself that is the danger.
October 17th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
In its simplest form, the Grand Inquisitor demonstrates how the proprietors of religious institutions frequently have small use for the teachings of the religion’s original founder.
Thus, conservatives want to re-write the Bible to eliminate the teachings of that pinko Jesus.
They are not Christians –because that means a follower of the teachings of Christ. Rather, they are members of institutions that have some vague historical connection to the teachnigs of Christ.
October 17th, 2009 at 5:11 pm
“If there is a reason this data is coming down, and I don’t see any reason to believe it is, it might be because the numbers aren’t credible.”
See you’ve made the mistake of believing that Obama is asking for the ’study’ (actually all fbi crime statistics lol) i.e. to come down at all.
He provides no citation of that claim and a quick google search takes you to a dozen dated white supremacist articles that say nothing about the statistics being removed.
And of course by inspection his entire argument — that the media is unsympathetic to white victims — is laughable.
Don’t feed the troglodytes.
October 17th, 2009 at 5:13 pm
While not reassuring, Dostoevsky nevertheless is boring.
The Idiot is even worse. The trick is to skip a whole bunch of pages, as soon as it gets boring. Then you can entertain yourself by trying to figure out what happened in those pages you skipped, though usually it’s not much. Probably something as silly as the Grand Inquisitor story.
October 17th, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Hillary Clinton on Karamazov: ‘One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything.’
MY “Clinton just seems confused. There’s a lot of stuff about doubt and certainty in Karamazov”
Does not compute. Hillary is making a simple political point, beware the “certainty” of the Grand Inquisitor types. She would know. As a lifelong PLAYER she has been bumping into great numbers of certainty driven people her entire adult life. Also, Hillary believes the preponderance of the dangerous Grand Inquisitor types are on the other side of the political divide. Hell, Hillary thinks there a veritable “conspiracy” of Grand Inquisitors on the other side out to get her. And Billy too. I would posit that her interpretation of the GI in BK, at least as it relates to politics, is pretty fucking good.
When I think of Christ’s kiss, I think of The Grinch and Alan Greenspan. Christ kisses the Grand Inquisitor and the GI’s heart glows. Same thing happened to Greenspan after the “kiss” delivered by the crash. His little heart glowed for a brief moment “I was wrong” but the glow has gone out and the Greenspan heart has quickly recalcified.
The Grinch, on the other hand, allows his “kiss” to blossom. In fact, “they say that the Grinch’s small heart grew three sizes that day.” And unlike the Grand Inquisitor and Alan Greenspan, the Grinch chooses to allow his little heart to continue to blossom and glow.
And no. I don’t believe there is any way to work E.T. into this equation.
October 17th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Re: I like the passage because it is so provocative. It takes a dim view of humanity that, while repugnant, I think contains many truths. I was particularly drawn the the implicit acceptance of injustice in the world — people are divided into weak and strong seemingly by intrinsic nature, not because of personal will. (For me, this resonated with a theme that would arise later, that people do good or evil not because of “virtue” or lack thereof, but because of opportunity and circumstance.) Yet perhaps I misread it. Dostoyevsky was Christian (or so it says above), yet my reading of the book undermines the notion of absolute justice, which is foundational to religion.
Mike,
Dostoyevsky was an Orthodox Christian. I would presume that his strongly dislike for the Catholic church rested on some of the same grounds that other Orthodox Christians condemned it: for accepting temporal power in the eighth century and then for embracing a monarchical, rather than a collegial, view of how the Bishop of Rome related to other bishops.
You’re of course, correct in that the Inquisitor’s argument contained many truths. The book is framed as an exegesis of the threefold temptation of Christ by the devil, and we should remember that during that episode, the devil actually said nothing that was false. Like the Inquisitor, he presented truths (in one case quoting scripture) while leaving out other and equally important truths. In the Christian understanding that’s what heresy (as opposed to unbelief) is, and what makes it more threatening then simple unbelief. His argument is directed in a spiritual sense against Christian heresy (Protestantism and others) and in a political sense against individualism, liberalism, and other anti-authoritarian ideologies. And his opponent isn’t actually Christ (who stays silent during the dialogue) it’s a shadow Christ, a pseudo Christ of his own imagining whom he sets up as a straw man.
Dostoyevsky didn’t agree with the shadow Christ any more than with the Inquisitor. He felt (at least if I understand him correctly) that this was a false choice between one evil and another- between the thesis and the antithesis, individualism and authority, capitalism and socialism, Catholicism and Protestantism. The answer wasn’t to pick one or another, but to transcend them both, by embracing the love of Christ, as embodied in Russian Orthodoxy, which could overcome both man’s self-interest and self-love as well as his thirst for power and authority.
I’m not Orthodox, of course, nor am I a particular fan of Dostoevsky’s political ideas, just a High Anglican with some sympathies towards Orthodox ecclesiology and towards the agrarian Christian socialism of at least some Russian Slavophile thought. So it might be better to ask a genuine Russian Orthodox Slavophile for an exegesis of the book.
October 17th, 2009 at 6:14 pm
Re: Abb1 and Furmpkin
“It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, are a different opinion, it is because they only know their own side of the question. The other party to the comparison knows both sides.”
October 17th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
You’ll notice that when our resident conservatives see a thread that requires a certain amount of intelligence, thoughtfulness, and literary background to comment on, they choose to sit this one out.
October 17th, 2009 at 9:44 pm
Okay, I just went and read the narrative again…
Hillary Clinton absolutely does miss the point, as Ivan corrects Aloysha who responded as she did.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
I felt very sorry for the Inquistitor, though. Lots of absent father appearing all of a sudden to the scrappy son who’s born all the arrows Fate could sling at fatherless children vibes here.
To me the passage is fundamentally about theodicy and theologically structural responses–from a world run by left-to-their-own-devices saints who corrupt themselves to make the world a better place to a world with constant factional infighting over who/what gives divine inspiration to a world where the elites “john galt” themselves in the desert while the teeming masses suffer.
Daddy-in-the-sky has a lot to answer for. If Jesus came down to earth today and started healing the sick and raising the dead, as a practical response as the very least, our (entirely well meaning elites) would have much the same reaction.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:05 pm
If people are inspired to go back and read “The Grand Inquisitor” by this thread, then it might be interesting to read the scriptural story on which it comments:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/bib/kjv/luk004.htm
It’s also linked, thematically, to the chapters “The Russian Monk” and “The Devil: Ivan’s Nightmare”, so go ahead and read those too.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:11 pm
Oh I love that. Yeah, the insurance lobby would definitely take issue with a superhuman suddenly healing everyone by prayer! (Assuming he did so free of charge
October 17th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
Re: Yeah, the insurance lobby would definitely take issue with a superhuman suddenly healing everyone by prayer!
This reminds me a lot of Charles Williams’ religiously charged adventure story, “Many Dimensions”. Which you should read.
October 17th, 2009 at 10:17 pm
No, the point wasn’t that Jesus came back, it was that Jesus came back and will be leaving again soon.
Insurance companies will be perfectly fine with this, as they would be fine if Jesus *did* heal the world’s sick. It will be the doctors who will become cabmen.
October 18th, 2009 at 8:03 am
Per Hector, Dosto believed the Western Church succumbed to Christ’s temptation in the desert by assuming worldly power. As far as certainty, after his mock execution/exile/ conversion experience he became pretty doggone certain about slavophilism and anti-semitism, although he transcended his own biases in his works, as great artists do. Having come under the spell of european romanticism in his youth, and struggled through the furnace of doubt, he had an empathic understanding of several sides of the Russian mind.
October 18th, 2009 at 9:19 am
Re: he became pretty doggone certain about slavophilism and anti-semitism
Going by his two works I’ve read (’The Idiot’ and ‘Karamazov’) he was more sure about those things than he was that Christ was God. Which is sad.
October 18th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Oh, so that’s why she refused to read the relevant intelligence before voting for war against Iraq–and even now, 6 years later, refuses to reevaluate that vote.