RELIGIOUS CONTRADICTION AND THE GRAND INQUISITOR
Religion, especially as offered in Christianity, is hobbled by contradiction. It exhorts to two antithetical behaviors simultaneously, and it seldom confronts or even acknowledges the schizophrenia. As a result, its pernicious side prevails over its positive one, because its pernicious side is so much easier for people to embrace.
Jesus, as presented in his spoken words and actions, is an uncompromising moralist. He demands not just an exacting personal adherence to a largely superhuman behavioral code, but adherence to a social model directly at odds with the prevalent ones like the Western. He’s radical and revolutionary, demanding and demeaning, hard and intolerant of human weakness. He emphasizes our attachment to “sin,” and he demands that we repent. He tells us we are inadequate as we are, and that we become adequate only by reinventing ourselves in his image.
But either Jesus or his explicators and popularizers felt it necessary, or maybe just prudent, to provide a go-round to avoid the strenuous commands. “Tell you what,” Jesus is supposed to have said, “I know you’re trash, always will be, and you won’t be able to do as I demand. I’ll do it for you. I’ll suffer what is rightfully your punishment, and we’ll call it even if you “believe in” me. Hell, you can even wait till the last second, so long as you get in a heartfelt repentance and declare your real belief.”
The contradiction is absolute. Humans are vile and trashy, deserving condemnation every one. We must change, rewire, and rewrite ourselves, repent, and live as selflessly as Jesus purported to. But no hurry. Get to it when you want. And in case you can’t even manage that, get in a Hail Mary before your last breath.
It’s like every person, impossibly unsuited to becoming a Navy Seal, nevertheless gets to be one by saying sometime before dying, “I’m sorry I sucked at being a Seal but I really want to be one anyway.” It’s okay you never worked up to walking a quarter-mile without getting winded, never completed a push-up. You’re in.
Christianity thus offers two options to get to the same payoff: either overcome your innate vileness by loving God and neighbor in a superhuman way, or just say you wish you’d done so. No one chooses the first route, because it’s wholly optional and it’s hard. It’s the strictest moral code we can imagine, the denial of self, but we can forget the behavior part if we want and just assume a proper attitude toward Jesus.
This is why Christians as a group are no better than non-believers and different-believers. It’s why every church has infighting and factions like every human community. Christianity demands the impossible, or nothing at all, at one’s option. Even the few who genuinely aspire to be, and work diligently at becoming, Jesus-like seem to take solace in knowing their shortcomings are erased by belief.
Christianity is a message of unending castigation of humans for being humans instead of gods, but it’s piped along with another message that we all get to live like gods with Christ forever anyway if we “believe.” It offers simultaneous choices of condemnation or comfort, so everyone chooses comfort; the condemnation part sticks with us and makes for a life of self-reproach and recrimination and fear, but those are standard human proclivities anyway.
There may be no better or more powerful expression of the Christian contradiction than the stand-alone segment from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov called “The Grand Inquisitor.” In sixteenth-century Seville, the ninety-year-old Grand Inquisitor of the Church has been burning a hundred heretics when Jesus appears. Jesus heals a sick person, raises a child from the dead, and the people are in a frenzy that he’s reappeared. The Inquisitor has Jesus locked away immediately, then goes to see him in the cell.
The entire story is largely the castigation of a silent Jesus by the Grand Inquisitor. The Inquisitor angrily reproaches Jesus for reappearing and jeopardizing all the Church has worked to accomplish over the centuries in order to undo the harm caused by Jesus and his original message. He accuses Jesus of a sort of elitism, of having overestimated the capacity of all but a few rare and superior humans, and of adding to the confusion and the misery of the masses. He tells Jesus he will burn him along with the other heretics the next day, in order to prevent Jesus from reviving his message of freedom, choice, and conscience that it has taken the Church so long to subvert. Freedom, choice, and conscience are sources of fear and misery for almost all humans in the Grand Inquisitor’s view, and he and his fellow churchmen have striven to remove the burden of them from the people.
The Inquisitor scorns Jesus for having responded as he did to Satan’s three temptations. Jesus could, and should, have turned the stones to bread, thrown himself from the great height, and accepted Satan’s offer to make Jesus ruler of the world in exchange for bowing in worship to Satan. Humans crave provision of sustenance and miracle and mystery and mastery by others; they hate and fear freedom and responsibility. But Jesus, the Inquisitor charges, nevertheless foisted freedom and responsibility on them, wishing as Jesus did to be loved and emulated for himself and for the pure power of love, and not by awing and overwhelming with miracle and rule. Nothing, the Inquisitor says, is “more unbearable to the human race than personal freedom.” The masses want to be fed and told what to do, told who and how to worship; they want unanimity in the object of worship; they want to yield to sin and appetite but still be redeemed and cared for.
The Church, the Inquisitor chides Jesus, has supplied those wants and rescued the masses, has in fact “corrected and improved” Jesus’s teaching, by adopting the ways of Satan. Faced by the silent and unresponding Christ, though, the Inquisitor briefly melds his reproach into a tortured plea for blessing and approval, seeking Jesus’s recognition that he and the Church have acted mercifully and in love and compassion for suffering humanity. He turns defiant again immediately, asserting the Church will fulfill in the end man’s “innate necessity for universal union” by subjugating man by the means of Satan himself.
The Inquisitor explains (and again seeks acknowledgment by Jesus) that he and the Church have acted at great personal sacrifice, having surrendered their souls to satanic ways in order to spare the masses from having to suffer “the misery of Good and Evil.” They have achieved what they have by adopting the false promises of Satan and misrepresenting them to the people as the teaching of Jesus. Jesus must therefore burn the next day before he can ruin their work.
The Inquisitor dares Jesus to judge him, crying that he doesn’t fear Jesus or regret his own sacrifice. He was, he asserts, in fact among the elite few who would have been able to earn his own salvation by means of accepting the burden of freedom and conscience. He has repudiated Jesus’s gift to him in order to spare mankind as a whole an awful punishment for their lack of capacity.
Jesus does not speak, even when the Inquisitor lashes out at him for his gentle but otherwise impassive silence. The Inquisitor stares, defiant and beseeching at once. After a pause, Jesus approaches and kisses him on the lips. The Inquisitor “shudders,” opens the cell door, and orders Jesus to leave and never return.
The Grand Inquisitor can be seen as having as much as or more dignity than Jesus on the cross. He has no promise of resurrection or of recovery of the soul he has sacrificed for others. Jesus recognizes his sacrifice and sincerity with his kiss, but we’re left to wonder if Jesus bestows salvation on the Inquisitor or merely accepts his supreme sacrifice. It’s not clear that Dostoevsky intended to make the Inquisitor out-Jesus Jesus, but the story can fairly be read that way. And read that way, “The Grand Inquisitor” serves as an explanation and apology for Christianity’s contradictory message—the Church bastardized the demanding standards imposed by Jesus, substituting the expedient of “belief” as sufficient basis for comfort and sense of salvation.
I’ve thus far omitted an important element of context of “The Grand Inquisitor,” in order to focus on the Inquisitor in his own right as a literary creation. But in the context of the novel, the story of the Inquisitor is presented as the creation of Ivan Karamazov, the God-skeptical, somewhat tortured older brother of the Christ-like, monkish Alyosha. Ivan’s “prose poem” is his own telling of the story of the Inquisitor to Alyosha, and the reader may, like Alyosha himself, take it as mere mockery of Alyosha’s love for and devotion to Christ. But Dostoevsky’s intention remains ambiguous, and the Inquisitor is presented as tortured, resolute, loving, and sincere in his life-long and life-sacrificing effort to “correct” Jesus’s gift of deliverance only to the elite few. The Inquisitor is sublime, even if the reader sees him as wrong and deluded as Alyosha views him. The Inquisitor offers himself as Antichrist to what he sees as the essential wrongness in Christ, hating himself for what he has made himself but accepting it for the good of the people. He has repudiated what he most wanted, to become one of Jesus’s elect.
So maybe the Christian tradition built in its own Grand Inquisitor to temper, make more compassionate, make more available a sense of comfort and worthiness for humans. Maybe the tradition recognized the monstrosity of demanding more of humans than most can possibly provide. The Church has perhaps subverted itself, evolved to subvert itself, in an effort to “correct” the teachings of Jesus, to dilute what is required to achieve the comfort of salvation. Maybe the Church did so selflessly, or maybe it acted in self-interest to fashion a faith that would appeal to more than the rare elite person who can emulate Jesus. Maybe the tradition chose an expedient: leave intact the demanding, merciless, humanity-shaming Jesus, but create an alternative route of belief. In essence put in Jesus’s mouth the assurance, “Swine that you are, I grant permission to ignore everything I demand of you, and just tell me you believe in me and you really wish you could be like me.” The actual Jesus, strict moralist and mystic and man apart, would have repudiated this conversion of his commands to comfort. But the Church has embraced human weakness and wretchedness, normalized it, even sacralized it. It has made Jesus a god of mercy over mandate, grace over misery, and allowed billions to work the will of Satan in the name of God and goodness. Maybe it, like the Grand Inquisitor, is sublime.
Written January 1 and January 10, 2023
©2023 Lawrence Helms
