Confronting the Grand Inquisitor
"Alyosha stood up, went over to him in silence, and gently kissed [his brother] on the lips." - Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Thank you for reading the following piece! Dostoevsky’s view of Catholicism and my rebuttals could fill a book. I could not address every potential topic here, though I hope to go into great depth about this topic someday.
At twenty-eight, Fyodor Dostoevsky received a death sentence. He had joined a subversive literary group, and the government had charged him and the other members with plotting to overthrow the Tsar.1 Dostoevsky was arrested and imprisoned for eight months before soldiers led him from his cell, bound his hands, chained him to the other prisoners, and transported the captives to an open square in St. Petersburg.2
In a letter to his brother, Dostoevsky described what happened next:
“Today, December 22, we were driven to Semyonovsky Parade Ground. There the death sentence was read to us all, we were given the cross to kiss, swords were broken over our heads, and our final toilet was arranged (white shirts). Then three of us were set against the posts so as to carry out the execution. We were summoned in threes; consequently I was in the second group, and there was not more than a minute left to live…Finally the retreat was sounded, those who had been tied to the posts were led back, and they read to us that His Imperial Majesty granted us our lives.”3
The Tsar had decided the on day before to commute the prisoners’ sentences to years of hard labor. Still, he told his soldiers to wait until the last moment to cancel the executions.4 The Tsar accomplished his goal, which was to inflict psychological torture; Dostoevsky was tormented by this experience for the rest of his life, even as he produced some of the greatest literary works of all time.5 Gary Saul Morson wrote of the mock execution, “One of the prisoners went permanently insane on the spot; another went on to write Crime and Punishment.”6
After the mock execution, Dostoevsky served four years of hard labor in a prison colony in Siberia, then lived for six years in exile.7 While he was in prison in Siberia, Dostoevsky experienced a religious conversion thanks to a fellow inmate who shared the Gospel.8 Dostoevsky later wrote of this experience, “don’t tell me that I don’t know the people! I know them; it was from them I accepted Christ into my soul again, Christ whom I had known while still a child in my parents’ home and whom I was about to lose…”9
Even after he embraced faith in God, though, Dostoevsky remained “a child of [his] age, a child of nonbelief and doubt up till now and even (I know it) until my coffin closes.”10
Like many of us, Dostoevsky felt haunted by his doubts about God and religious authority. He articulated this anxiety in his masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, particularly in a chapter containing a poem he included called “The Grand Inquisitor”.
Essentially a tale of the Catholic Church imprisoning and condemning Christ during the Spanish Inquisition, The Grand Inquisitor represents two interrelated problems: first, recurring doubt about the existence of God, and second, distaste for religious hierarchy, which he believed often directly opposed Jesus’ message by striving for political power.
Near the start of The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky foreshadows the themes of The Grand Inquisitor through a dialogue between Ivan Karamazov, an intellectual atheist, and Father Païssy, a hieromonk11 at the monastery where Ivan’s brother Alyosha is a novice. Fr. Païssy and Ivan discuss a paper Ivan wrote about the appropriate degree of separation between the Church and State.
Fr. Païssy warns Ivan about the (perceived) Western attitude towards this problem, in which “[t]he Church ought to be transforming itself into a state, from a lower to a higher species, as it were, so as to disappear into it eventually, making the way for science, the spirit of the age, and civilization.”12
Fr. Païssy then elaborates on what he believes is the correct view: “[A]ccording to the Russian understanding and hope, it is not the Church that needs to be transformed into the state, as from a lower to a higher type…the state should end by being accounted worthy of becoming only the Church alone, and nothing else but that.”13
Fr. Païssy drives the point home again with this sentiment: “Understand, the Church is not to be transformed into the State. That is Rome and its dream. That is the third temptation of the devil. On the contrary, the State is transformed into the Church, will ascend and become a Church over the whole world.”14
Fr. Païssy’s statements echo Dostoevsky’s animus towards the Catholic Church, which he expresses more fully via The Grand Inquisitor.
As shown throughout The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky felt that the Catholic Church intended to usurp political power for the ultimate purpose of coalescing and maintaining such power. He viewed Catholicism as worse than atheism, because it embraced the “third temptation of the devil” - when the devil offered Jesus “the kingdoms of the world and all their splendor”15 - under the guise of Christianity. He also believed that Catholicism was the faux-Christian analog of socialism and that Catholic countries would produce socialist regimes.16
How odd that Dostoevsky’s grave predictions came to more accurately describe Russia in the twentieth century - and especially that the greatest opponent of this regime turned out to be a Catholic Polish man, the future saint Pope John Paul II.
As Professor Rodney Delasanta argues,
“Dostoevsky’s fantasy that this Russian Christ ‘must shine forth in opposition to the West’—that the East must not ‘fall like slaves into Jesuit traps but carry our Russian civilization to them’ [seems] to have gotten it backwards. Were he alive today, would he have recognized the great irony that, had it not been for the providential nexus of two scorned adversaries, Catholicism and Poles, [atheist] Ivan Karamazov might have had the last word?”17
In my opinion, Dostoevsky understood Catholicism as a vehicle through which individuals could seize worldly power and wealth for the ultimate goal of earthly dominion. For Dostoevsky, the Russian Orthodox Church was the opposite - he believed that power would ultimately flow upward from the Russian people and transform the State into the Church.
Dostoevsky also believed that Russia would save humanity from the menace of godless Western culture as embodied by Catholicism (and to some extent, Protestantism, which Dostoevsky abhorred just as much).18
How could a man as brilliant as Dostoevsky have been so mistaken about the fate of the world?
As a Catholic, I think part of the problem is that Dostoevsky misunderstood Catholic political theory and philosophy.19
The fundamental problem with Dostoevsky’s belief that the Catholic Church evolved with the aim of becoming a State is that Catholicism (and Orthodoxy) preceded the concept of the State as Dostoevsky understands it.
Writing for The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, Archbishop Roger Minnerath describes the concept of the “State” as such:
“The state is the organized legal structure of a people, a nation or, in some cases, of several nations. The state is an abstract entity [which until] the 16th century…was not used. Political power was seen as identified with the person of the ruler. In modern times the state appeared as the bearer of sovereignty in a specific territory…[s]o the state was born as an abstract expression of the permanent supreme authority regulating a community.”20
Minnerath argues that “Pentecost is the exact counterpart to Babel. Humanity was divided and dispersed as a result of its pretention to equal God. Now, a process of return to the lost unity is launched. The Church constitutes a universal community of believers transcending national, cultural and state borders into something totally new and unknown elsewhere.”21
In other words, the governing power of the Catholic Church, known as the Holy See,22 did not develop as a State entity in the modern sense. Rather, the Catholic Church engendered a new form of leadership that was not based on genetic, cultural, or ethnic claims, but rather shared belief.
In fact, the Papacy is the world’s oldest functioning institution.23 The Papacy precedes the modern concept of the State, and has provided a model of ecclesiastical, civil, and political power for millennia. This example is so fundamental that, according to the Encyclopedia Brittanica, “some understanding of Roman Catholicism—its history, its institutional structure, its beliefs and practices, and its place in the world—is an indispensable component of cultural literacy, regardless of how one may individually answer the ultimate questions of life and death and faith.”24
Dostoevsky correctly recognized that the Renaissance period - when The Grand Inquisitor poem takes place, around 1500 - was a bleak period for Catholic leadership. From approximately the end of the Avignon Papacy in 1420 to the start of Pope Sixtus’s Papacy in 1585, the Popes ruled the Papal States more like kings than vicars of Christ on earth. This included several Popes fathering children25 and abusing indulgences (which are not, as memes would have you believe, properly understood as financial remuneration in exchange for salvation)26. Dostoevsky interpreted this relatively aberrant period as representative of the true nature of the Church, akin to dismissing the Israelites as doomed because they worshipped the golden calf.27
None of this is to say that we cannot learn from The Brothers Karamazov and The Grand Inquisitor in particular. The poem is not just about Dostoevsky’s objections to Catholicism, but also reflects Dostoevsky’s continuous doubts about God, starting from the time he first accepted the Gospel while in a Siberian prison.
The Grand Inquisitor presents a damning vision of Catholicism, but also of religion in general. The Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that He overestimated man. After all, Jesus expected us to deny ourselves, to eschew political power and material security the way He did. How many of us felt the same - that it is impossible to really love our neighbors, to refrain from gossip and anger and wrath? How many of us have cried out to God, insisting that He is asking too much of us?
Dostoevsky did, too.
What’s incredible about Dostoevsky is that he could write such a searing indictment of religion and choose faith anyway.
That is, I think, the most useful takeaway from The Grand Inquisitor.
Often, those who reject religion present upsetting information as “gotchas.” They might raise stories from Scripture in which God destroys cities, or they may raise clerical abuse scandals. Either way, the message is - how could you believe in such a God? How could you put faith in such an institution?
Like Dostoevsky, though, people of faith grapple with these horrors. Dostoevsky was tortured by the possibility of a loving God permitting child abuse and war crimes. Too, he despised religious leaders - including within Orthodoxy - who vaunted wealth and worldly esteem.
Still, Dostoevsky was a believer. The same person who conjured The Grand Inquisitor also imagined the saintly novice Alyosha Karamazov.
This is how faith always works. Having faith in anything, even one other person, necessitates accepting the imperfect nature of our world. As long as church leadership is composed of human beings, church leadership will disappoint us. Likewise, institutions are governed by fallible beings who will often err, sometimes in significant ways.
The alternative to faith is, of course, avowed cynicism. But refusing to trust anyone is hardly the basis of a flourishing life. We must all trust someone, which in turn means trusting something - the institution of marriage, of the Church, even of the legal system. And in trusting such things, we must accept that they will disappoint us.
Such is the story of my choice to live as a Catholic as an adult. Accepting an institution helmed by human, deeply flawed leaders is painful. Still, I have accepted that it is the only way to live.
This should give all of us hope - that a young man was spared on a harsh December morning so many years ago to meet God in a wretched Siberian prison.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Introduction (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky trans. 2021)
Id.
Id.
Id.
Id.
Gary Saul Morson, “Fyodor Dostoevsky.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Fyodor-Dostoyevsky/Political-activity-and-arrest.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Introduction (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky trans. 2021).
Id.
Richard John Neuhaus, Dostoevsky and the Fiery Word, First Things, March 2003, https://www.firstthings.com/article/2003/03/dostoevsky-and-the-fiery-word.
Id.
A monk who is also ordained as a priest; https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hieromonk#:~:text=noun,who%20is%20also%20a%20priest.
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Introduction (Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky trans. 2021) at Book I, Chapter 5.
Id.
Id.
Matthew 4:8.
“Dostoevsky regarded socialism as merely an extension of the Catholic principle that had now largely dispensed with the religious component, while Protestantism was no more than the recurrent ineffectual protests against this principle in the name of individualism…” David Walsh, Dostoevsky’s Discovery of the Christian Foundation of Politics, Voegelin View (https://voegelinview.com/dostoevskys-discovery-christian-foundation-politics/#:~:text=Dostoevsky%20regarded%20socialism%20as%20merely,of%20individualism%20(DW%20563ff).
Rodney Delasanta, “Dostoevsky Also Nods,” First Things (January 2002) https://www.firstthings.com/article/2002/01/dostoevsky-also-nods.
Richard John Neuhaus, Dostoevsky and the Fiery Word.
Another problem is that Dostoevsky was obsessed by the notion of a chosen race, specifically the Slavs, to save the world. In the interest of time, I will focus on Dostoevsky’s misconceptions about Catholicism in my post today.
Archbishop Roland Minnerath, “Nation, State, Nation-State and the Doctrine of the Catholic Church,” The Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, https://www.pass.va/en/publications/acta/acta_22_pass/minnerath.html.
Id.
https://www.usccb.org/offices/general-secretariat/holy-see
Thomas Noble, Atria Larson, The Medieval Papacy, (24 July 2018) https://www.oxfordbibliographies.com/display/document/obo-9780195396584/obo-9780195396584-0067.xml.
Michael Frassetto, John L. McKenzie, “Roman Catholicism.” The Encyclopedia Brittanica, https://www.britannica.com/topic/Roman-Catholicism.
This led me to a bizarre, but admittedly amusing Wikipedia page devoted to “Sexually Active Popes” - which unfortunately misrepresents Catholic doctrine concerning priestly celibacy, but that’s a matter for another day. Discipline versus dogma distinction!
https://www.catholic.com/tract/myths-about-indulgences.
Exodus 32.
I would always make a joke that Dostoevsky's Jesus never condemned the Grand Inquisitor but kissed him. Though a joke, it seems many people miss it along with that Ivan is also skeptical of God being good. Have you read books by Soloviev, who was a good friend of Dostoevsky who even carried his coffin? His view towards Rome can bring many heated debates between Catholics and Orthodox, and whether he died a catholic is also disputed. Overall, Soloviev's idea, I believe, gives a more nuanced understanding of what Dostoevsky and his colleagues thought of Catholicism: if the Russian Empire needs a tsar, the Church needs a pope too.
Loved this.
I read a while back an article on a Catholic site suggesting all Catholics read Dostoyevsky and have been interested in him ever since. That, and a good friend's favorite novel is The Brothers Karamazov. I own that as well as Crime and Punishment...one of these days I'll dive in!