Temptation and The Spirit of The Grand Inquisitor
What Can Dostoevsky Teach Us About Catholicism?
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In my previous post, I discussed Dostoevsky’s perceptions of Catholicism in the context of his novel The Brothers Karamazov, and specifically The Grand Inquisitor, a story-within-a-story and a chapter in that book.
As I noted, Dostoevsky suggests that the Catholic Church and its leaders embrace the Devil instead of Christ, promising material security and rules that create moral certainty instead of accepting God’s gift of free will (and its derivatives, freedom of conscience and moral responsibility) . Dostoevsky reserves particular contempt for Jesuits1, a Catholic religious order of priests, who even Alyosha, the kindest and wisest of the three Karamazov brothers, despises.
Some might say that Dostoevsky’s critique sounds Protestant in nature, but Dostoevsky rejected Protestantism, too—he viewed it as fundamentally void and believed it would eventually collapse.2
Dostoevsky’s religious views are rooted in Russian Orthodoxy—and very emphatically Russian Orthodoxy, not Orthodoxy in general. I will discuss Dostoevsky’s Russian Orthodoxy at length in a moment, but first I want to address Dostoevsky’s view of Catholicism in more detail.
Dostoevsky’s view of Catholicism was shaped by the time he spent in a Siberian labor camp as a young man. There, Dostoevsky “observed the machinations of Polish prisoners, many of whom were revolutionaries hoping to throw off the Russian yoke.”3 Dostoevsky was also disturbed by intra-Catholic loyalty, especially the Polish loyalty to the Jesuits.4
Later, Dostoevsky came to view France as the paradigm of Catholicism—and the best example of its inherent errors. As he argued in his essay “Three Ideas”:
“Catholicism has sought but failed to organize society in the name of Christ; that same France with her revolutionists of the Convention, with her atheists, with her socialists and with her present-day communards,—is, continues to be, in the highest degree, fully and altogether, a Catholic nation, completely contaminated with the spirit and letter of Catholicism.”5
Dostoevsky believed that socialism and Catholicism shared the same core ideas, those expressed by the Grand Inquisitor. To Dostoevsky, both socialism and Catholicism seek to liberate men from the “burden” of their free will and its attendant responsibility, which requires individuals to make the difficult choice to choose God’s will on a daily basis. As John Moran argues,
“At its core, socialism promises a society that allows for the blossoming of human happiness. Once the material conditions of man’s existence are corrected through the elimination of private property, man can be expected to attain his highest state of happiness.”6
In other words, Dostoevsky believed that both socialism and Catholicism relied on “miracle, mystery, and authority,” which the Grand Inquisitor describes as “three powers, three powers on earth capable of conquering and holding captive forever the conscience of these feeble rebels, for their own happiness.”7 The Grand Inquisitor states that Jesus “rejected the first, the second, and the third” when he was tempted in the desert, refusing to perform miracles, to test God, and to seize earthly power.8 The Devil—and the Grand Inquisitor—tempted Jesus to abrogate free will via absolute authority—in Dostoevsky’s view, via something like the papacy—but Jesus refused.
Suffice it to say that Dostoevsky’s faith is inseparable from his rejection of worldly authority vis a vis the Papacy. Dostoevsky was even skeptical of institutional authority within Russian Orthodoxy—he believed that first Russia, and then the entire world, would be saved by the Russian peasantry.
Dostoevsky wrote in his essay “A Simple but Tricky Case” that a so-called intelligent Russian “who has dissociated himself from the people would be surprised to hear that the illiterate peasant fully and unwaveringly believes in the unity of God, that there is but one God, and no God other than He. At the same time the Russian peasant knows and reverently believes (every Russian peasant knows it) that Christ is his true God[.]” He states this more elegantly in The Brothers Karamazov via the saintly monk Father Zosima, who teaches that“[o]nly the people and their future spiritual power will convert our atheists, who have severed themselves from their own land…[t]he people will confront the atheist and overcome him, and there will be one Orthodox Russia.”
Dostoevsky reiterates the holiness of Russian peasants through another character in The Brothers Karamazov, Stinking Lizaveta. She is a cognitively impaired and destitute young woman who becomes pregnant following a rape. Lizaveta wears simple clothes and rejects the more suitable garments others try to give her to protect her from the elements; she also refuses any food besides bread and water. Lizaveta rarely attends formal church services and eventually dies in childbirth. Yet she is sinless and loved by all, representing something of a Christ figure.9
Now we have a working theory of Dostoevsky’s view of Christianity. Dostoevsky believes that salvation belongs to the humble, not to powerful institutional leaders (this seems to include several arrogant monks at Zosima and Alyosha’s monastery). He also believed that Russia, the nation, was integral to salvation history in that Russia would save the world from Western nihilism and atheism.
Those of us living today know that the events of the twentieth century seriously undermined Dostoevsky’s ideas. In the end, Russia fell to socialism, and many would argue that the man who played the greatest role in the fall of state-sanctioned Russian atheism was none other than a Catholic Polish man, St. Pope John Paul II.10
I posit that in addition to historical events, there is another problem with Dostoevsky’s analysis. While his argument that the poor and humble embody Christian virtue is consonant with Scripture, the reality is that Jesus did not reject “miracle, mystery, and authority,” at least not during the time of his public ministry. In fact, as Christians know, Jesus performed many miracles, including providing for the material needs of the five thousand during the miracle of the loaves and fishes.11 Jesus also speaks of “the mystery of the Kingdom of God”12 and establishes some kind of earthly authority in allowing his apostles that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven,” as well as by making Peter the rock upon which Jesus will build His Church.13
Like many people—including me—Dostoevsky focused heavily on one aspect of Jesus’ teachings. Dostoevsky believed that Jesus’ focus on meekness, poverty, and humility illuminated a future in which the poor would save the world through their faith. But Jesus teaches us that it is the poor in spirit—those who rely on God for spiritual sustenance—who have the kingdom of Heaven.14 While material poverty and poverty in spirit overlap, they are not the same. Further, in recognizing how Jesus abhorred corrupt institutions, Dostoevsky missed the significance of Jesus handing Peter the keys to Heaven. By establishing Peter as a very flawed leader, Jesus created some kind of role for the institutional Church (though Christians may disagree on what this means and what the Church should look like).
Still, this doesn’t mean Dostoevsky’s critique is useless. In fact, the Catholic Church’s first Jesuit Pope is a fan of The Grand Inquisitor.15 I suspect this is because The Grand Inquisitor speaks to three universal temptations for Christians: (i) the temptation to create rules to avoid the necessity of relying on our consciences, in other words shirking the responsibility of our own free will; (ii) our tendency to expect God to prove Himself to us by blessing us as a “reward” for good behavior; (iii) our tendency to leverage Christianity for worldly acclaim, wealth, and yes, power. No Christian is immune from these tendencies, so we are wise to heed the example of The Grand Inquisitor, who finds himself so dedicated to earthly security that he forgets God altogether.
There is also a more general inclination among human beings—something I might call the “spirit” of the Grand Inquisitor—to give up easily, to believe that God asks too much of us. The Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that “[m]an is created baser and weaker than you thought him. How, how can he ever accomplish the same thing as you.” The Grand Inquisitor believes that Jesus respected human beings too much and ultimately “demanded too much” of man by permitting men to have free will.16 The Grand Inquisitor believed that human beings are not capable of bearing material uncertainty and making their own moral decisions, and that Jesus asked too much of human beings in expecting them to emulate God.
This spirit of the Grand Inquisitor is alive and well in all of us, or at least it is in me. How many times have we faced hardship and thought, “this is more than one person can bear,” or “this is too much”? How many of us have fallen short of our own standards out of laziness or a lack of faith? This attitude reflects the universality of the three temptations I mentioned earlier. The spirit of the Grand Inquisitor is what tempts us to reject God for worldly reasons. Dostoevsky understood this and used a compelling parable to illustrate it. This is the insight that all Christians should take from The Grand Inquisitor—the reality that, in conforming God to worldly standards, we look for reasons to reject Him.
With all that being said, my next essay will be about an idea that is foundational to The Grand Inquisitor, The Brothers Karamazov and Christianity itself—the notion that there are two kinds of freedom.
I do intend to direct this series toward an explanation of my belief in Catholicism and my conversion as an adult, but I don’t consider my writing as an apologia for Catholicism per se. Instead, I want to focus on discussing literature and how it influences my perceptions of religion, particularly “high church” traditions such as Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Anglicanism.
Thank you so much for reading! I look forward to publishing again in two weeks.
Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor (from The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book 5, Chapter 5).
“Were, let us say, Catholicism to come to an end, the Protestant sects would of necessity be destroyed, in this event what would there be left to protest against?” Fyodor Dostoevsky, Diary of a Writer, page 193. https://archive.org/details/the-diary-of-a-writer/The-Diary-Of-A-Writer/page/192/mode/2up?view=theater&q=protest
Darrick Taylor, Dostoevsky for Catholics (and Everyone Else), Part II, Crisis Magazine (30 Dec. 2023) https://crisismagazine.com/opinion/dostoevsky-for-catholics-and-everyone-else-part-ii.
Id.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Three Ideas (from The Diary of a Writer), page 563, https://archive.org/details/the-diary-of-a-writer/The-Diary-Of-A-Writer/page/562/mode/2up?view=theater&q=%22sought+but+failed%22.
John P. Moran, This Star Will Shine Forth from the East: Dostoevsky and the Politics of Humility, Voegelin View, March 21, 2018, https://voegelinview.com/star-will-shine-forth-east-dostoevsky-politics-humility/.
(As an aside, it’s interesting that Dostoevsky invokes these three powers, and in a later essay invokes ‘three ideas’ that will chart the course of humanity—Catholicism, Protestantism, and pan-Slavic Russian Orthodoxy).
Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor (from The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book 5, Chapter 5).
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Part I, Book 3, Chapter 2).
See generally George Weigel, Witness to Hope, Harper Perennial (April 1, 2004).
Matthew 14.
Mark 4:11
Matthew 18:18, Matthew 16:18.
Matthew 5:3-12.
“God’s way, the Pope explained, is different from the world’s ways. Jesus does not follow a worldly strategy of violence and intervention to bring about peace, which would end up being a false peace that amounts to little more than an interval between wars. Instead, “the peace of the Lord follows the way of meekness and the Cross, it is taking responsibility for others,” as Jesus took our evil, sin, and death upon Himself in order to free us.
To illustrate this point, Pope Francis recalled Dostoevsky’s tale of the Grand Inquisitor, who imprisoned Jesus when He returned to earth. The Inquisitor, said the Pope, represents “worldly logic,” and condemns Christ for not embracing worldly power. “Here is the deception that is repeated throughout history,” the Pope said, “the temptation of a false peace, based on power, which then leads to hatred and betrayal of God.” Christopher Wells, Pope at Audience: War is an outrage and a blasphemy, Vatican News (13 Apr. 2022).
Dostoevsky, The Grand Inquisitor (from The Brothers Karamazov, Part II, Book 5, Chapter 5).
Thank you for this article. Explain to a good friend who has criticism of the cc and also loves Russian history and literature and me too. Dostoevsky is my favorite Russian author.