Faith and Freedom

In his discussion of the Grand Inquisitor poem, Konstantin Mochulsky ( Dostoevsky ) examines how Dostoevsky depicts the slippage from humanitarianism to despotism. He sees it first in Ivan, the “author” of the poem: “The keenness of Ivan’s reasoning lies in that he renounces God out of love for mankind , comes forward against the Creator in the role of the advocate of all suffering creation.” Within this humanitarian impulse, Dostoevsky recognizes a “diabolical deceit,” since for an atheist the “noble human sentiments of compassion, magnanimity, love” are “pure rhetoric.” Ivan doesn’t really love mankind: Rather, “he himself dons the mask of love for mankind in order to raise himself to the place of the lover of mankind – God. He is, he says, more kind and more compassionate than God; he would have created a more just order.” This is simply “Lucifer’s arrogant pretension” in a new form.

Ivan begins with a denial of original sin: “Denying original sin, he absolves men of any responsibility for evil and fixed it upon God. But an evil God is not God ,” and in this Ivan finds justification for his revolt, his decision to “turn in his ticket.” Without a fall, there is no sin, and no notion of redemption.

What Dostoevsky depicts in Ivan himself he fills out in a more overtly political form in the poem. Mochulsky notes that the Inquisitor defends the Catholic reversal of Jesus’ decision to resist Satan’s temptations, and then writes:

“The Inquisitor justifies his betrayal of Christ by the same motive to which Ivan resorted in justifying his own struggle with God: love of mankind . The Savior was mistaken about men: He had too high opinion of them, demanded too much from them . . . . Christ believed in the image of God in man and respected his freedom; the Inquisitor considers freedom the curse of these pitiful and weak rebels and, in order to make them happe, proclaims slavery.” Freedom can only end in “mutual destruction and anthropophagy,” and so to protect man from himself the Inquisitor limits human freedom.

The Inquisitor is “not a vulgar atheist, not a ‘petty devil,” but rather “an ascetic, a wise man and a philanthropist.” This is what makes his argument so compelling, and Dostoevsky’s depiction of the humanitarian impulse so devastating: “The Antichrist steps forward against Christ in the name of Christ’s testament of love for one’s neighbor. He presents himself as His disciple, as continuing His work. The Antichrist is a false-Christ, and not an anti-Christ.” Though he rejects “the commandment of love for God,” he is “a fanatic of the precept of love for one’s neighbor.”

But this half-grasp of Christ’s commands is diabolical, finally not love but hatred: “Having lost faith in God, he Inquisitor must also lost faith in man , for these two faiths are indivisible. Denying the immortality of the soul, he rejects man’s spiritual nature . And at once man is transformed for him into a pitiable, weak, and vile creature; the history of mankind – into a senseless accumulation of miseries, crimes, and sufferings . . . . He began with loving mankind and ended up by transforming men into domestic animals. In order to make mankind happy, he took away everything human from it. Like Shigalyov in The Devils , the hero of the Legend ended with the idea of ‘limitless despotism.’”

The inverse of the Inquisitor’s argument is equally important: “Without freedom, man is a beast, mankind – a herd; but freedom is supernatural and superrational; in the order of the natural world there is no freedom, there is only necessity. Freedom is a divine gift, the most precious property of man. Not by reason, nor by science, nor by the natural law can one prove it – it is rooted in God, is revealed in Christ. Freedom is an act of faith . . . . Under false compassion for the sufferings of mankind is hidden a diabolic hatred of human freedom and the ‘image of God’ in man. Here is why, beginning with love of mankind, it ends in despotism.”