Christ and the Grand Inquisitor
IN THIS religiously contentious season, it is difficult to think aloud about Christmas as an event of more than commercial significance. The spiritual assertions of Christians, whether intentionally or not, can seem an imposition. Christianity has had such dominance in the West that its adherents often miss how alienating its observances can be to others. Yet Christmas, whatever else it means, is a given fact of culture. Jesus is a marker on the road of history. All who travel that road might ask, "Who was he?" "What did he mean?" These questions have obvious relevance for believers, but because followers of Jesus so dominate a vast geography of consciousness, nonbelievers, too, may have an interest.
Jesus eschewed violence. He was killed by a violent empire for opposing it.
The Jewish-Roman historian Josephus, who lived a generation after Jesus, and whose "Jewish Antiquities" provides independent, if not entirely undisputed, confirmation of key elements of the Gospel story, offered a simple but crucial observation about Jesus and his friends; "Those who in the first place had come to love him did not give up their affection for him." It was in that "not giving up affection" for the dead Jesus that the Jesus movement was born.
Stories were told about him that gave expression to that affection. Of those stories, the Nativity is the one, perhaps, that most resonates with feeling, which is why so many people have found it irresistible. But the very appeal of Jesus to vast masses of humans has itself led to skepticism.
The boldest meditation on the meaning of Jesus comes in the tale of the Grand Inquisitor in Fyodor Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," in which Jesus is interrogated by the Grand Inquisitor. The crime of Jesus consists precisely in the affection that so many otherwise ignoble humans have for him.
How dare Jesus inspire such widespread trust? A relatively small number "of the great and the strong," the Inquisitor argues, can carry the burden of freedom, "while the millions, numerous as the sands of the sea, who are weak but love Thee" cannot bear freedom's weight. Only an elite minority is worthy to manage the world. The rest, taken up with narrow concerns for bread and money, and consoled by miracles and mysteries, must live for subservience. The masses are to blindly meet their meager needs, while bowing before the authority of those few who are capable of higher aspirations.
The crime of Jesus was to say no to this. Dostoevsky sees in him an invitation addressed to every person, to regard himself or herself as capable of overcoming the limits of birth, circumstance, class, culture, and even time. That the Grand Inquisitor, an official in the movement that claims Jesus as founder, regards this invitation as an offense is Dostoevsky's way of pointing to the transcendent significance of Jesus, beyond Christian belief.
Indeed, the Jesus who rejects slavish authority for himself and others is the living critique of any institution, the church included, that asks less of humans, instead of more. It is in this universal call to self-surpassing that the radical appeal of Jesus can be found.
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is reviled as a malign figure, but he was laden with good intentions. He simply valued humanity as is, for all that keeps it earthbound. Jesus loved humanity for what it might become. There is more to life than bread, money, and the satisfaction of meager needs. Indeed, satisfaction and aspiration are mutually exclusive.
The Inquisitor was right to see the threat in such a difference, for restlessness and even rebellion are built into the hope for something higher. When the followers of Jesus could not "let go of their affection for him," and then when masses of ordinary people felt ennobled by their connection to him, the authority of institutions, from empire to church, would never again be paramount.
That is why, finally, the Grand Inquisitor pronounced his verdict; "Tomorrow, I shall burn Thee. Dixi." Christ said nothing in reply.
The Inquisitor "longed for Him to say something however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all His answer."
The Inquisitor, too, was a person - one of those grains of sand, to whom the transcendent invitation could be offered.
"Go!" the Grand Inquisitor said to Christ, allowing the principle of self-surpassing its escape. "And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away."
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
