The Grand Inquisitor

(1880)

[The following is an extract from M. Dostoevsky's celebrated
novel, The Brothers Karamazof, the last publication from the pen
of the great Russian novelist, who died a few months ago, just as
the concluding chapters appeared in print. Dostoevsky is
beginning to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest
among Russian writers. His characters are invariably typical
portraits drawn from various classes of Russian society,
strikingly life-like and realistic to the highest degree. The
following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology
generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea
is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of
the Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the
Grand Inquisitor. One of the three brothers of the story, Ivan, a
rank materialist and an atheist of the new school, is supposed to
throw this conception into the form of a poem, which he describes
to Alyosha--the youngest of the brothers, a young Christian
mystic brought up by a "saint" in a monastery--as follows:
(--Ed. Theosophist, Nov., 1881)]

"Quite impossible, as you see, to start without an introduction,"
laughed Ivan. "Well, then, I mean to place the event described in
the poem in the sixteenth century, an age--as you must have been
told at school--when it was the great fashion among poets to
make the denizens and powers of higher worlds descend on earth
and mix freely with mortals... In France all the notaries'
clerks, and the monks in the cloisters as well, used to give
grand performances, dramatic plays in which long scenes were
enacted by the Madonna, the angels, the saints, Christ, and even
by God Himself. In those days, everything was very artless and
primitive. An instance of it may be found in Victor Hugo's drama,
Notre Dame de Paris, where, at the Municipal Hall, a play called
Le Bon Jugement de la Tres-sainte et Graceuse Vierge Marie, is
enacted in honour of Louis XI, in which the Virgin appears
personally to pronounce her 'good judgment.' In Moscow, during
the prepetrean period, performances of nearly the same character,
chosen especially from the Old Testament, were also in great
favour. Apart from such plays, the world was overflooded with
mystical writings, 'verses'--the heroes of which were always
selected from the ranks of angels, saints and other heavenly
citizens answering to the devotional purposes of the age. The
recluses of our monasteries, like the Roman Catholic monks,
passed their time in translating, copying, and even producing
original compositions upon such subjects, and that, remember,
during the Tarter period!... In this connection, I am reminded of
a poem compiled in a convent--a