The Gospel in Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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man in the crowd, blind from childhood, cries out, ‘O Lord, heal me and I shall see thee!’ and as it were, scales fall from his eyes and the blind man sees him. The people weep and kiss the earth under his feet. Children throw flowers before him, sing, and cry hosannah. ‘It is he – it is he!’ all repeat. ‘It must be he, it can be no one but he!’ He stops at the steps of the Seville cathedral at the moment when the weeping mourners are bringing in a little open white coffin. In it lies a child of seven, the only daughter of a prominent citizen. The dead child lies hidden in flowers. ‘He will raise your child,’ the crowd shouts to the weeping mother. The priest, coming to meet the coffin, looks perplexed and frowns, but the mother of the dead child throws herself at his feet with a wail. ‘If it is you, raise my child!’ she cries, holding out her hands to him. The procession halts, the coffin is laid on the steps at his feet. He looks with compassion, and his lips once more softly pronounce, ‘Talitha cumi!’ and the maiden arises. The little girl sits up in the coffin and looks round, smiling with wide-open wondering eyes, holding white roses they had put in her hand.
“There are cries, sobs, confusion among the people, and at that moment the cardinal himself, the Grand Inquisitor, passes by the cathedral. He is an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of light. He is not dressed in his gorgeous cardinal’s robes, as he was the day before, when he was burning the enemies of the Roman Church – at this moment he is wearing his coarse, old monk’s cassock. At a distance behind him come his gloomy assistants and slaves and the ‘holy guard.’ He stops at the sight of the crowd and watches it from a distance. He sees everything; he sees them set the coffin down at his feet, sees the child rise up, and his face darkens. He knits his thick grey brows and his eyes gleam with a sinister fire. He holds out his finger and bids the guards take him. And such is his power, so completely are the people cowed into submission and trembling obedience to him, that the crowd immediately make way for the guards, and in the midst of deathlike silence they lay hands on him and lead him away. The crowd, like one man, instantly bows down to the earth before the old inquisitor. He blesses the people in silence and passes on. The guards lead their prisoner to the close, gloomy vaulted prison in the ancient palace of the Holy Inquisition and shut him in it. The day passes and is followed by the dark, burning, breathless night of Seville. The air is fragrant with laurel and lemon. In the pitch darkness the iron door of the prison is suddenly opened and the Grand Inquisitor himself comes in with a light in his hand. He is alone; the door is closed at once behind him. He stands in the doorway and for a minute or two gazes into his face. At last he goes up slowly, sets the light on the table and speaks.
“‘Is it you? You?’ but receiving no answer, he adds at once, ‘Don’t answer, be silent. What can you say, indeed? I know too well what you would say. And you have no right to add anything to what you have said of old. Why then, are you come to hinder us? For you have come to hinder us, and you know that. But you know what will be tomorrow? I know not who you are and care not to know whether it is you or only a semblance of him, but tomorrow I shall condemn you and burn you at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed your feet, tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of your fire. Know you that? Yes, maybe you know it,’ he added with thoughtful penetration, never for a moment taking his eyes off the Prisoner.”
“I don’t quite understand, Ivan. What does it mean?” Alyosha, who had been listening in silence, said with a smile. “Is it simply a wild fantasy, or a mistake on the part of the old man – some impossible confusion?”
“Take it as the last,” said Ivan, laughing, “if you are so corrupted by modern realism and can’t stand anything fantastic. If you like it to be a case of mistaken identity, let it be so. It is true,” he went on, laughing, “the old man was ninety, and he might well be crazy over his set idea. He might have been struck by the appearance of the Prisoner. It might, in fact, be simply his ravings, the delusion of an old man of ninety, over-excited by the auto-da-fé of a hundred heretics the day before. But does it matter to us after all whether it was a mistake of identity or a wild fantasy? All that matters is that the old man should speak out, should speak openly of what he has thought in silence for ninety years.”
“And the Prisoner too is silent? Does he look at him and not say a word?”
“That’s inevitable in any case,” Ivan laughed again. “The old man has told him he hasn’t the right to add anything to what he has said of old. One may say it is the most fundamental feature of Roman Catholicism, in my opinion at least. ‘All has been given by you to the pope,’ he says, ‘and all, therefore, is still in the pope’s hands, and there is no need for you to come now at all. You must not meddle for the time, at least.’ That’s how they speak and write too – the Jesuits, at any rate. I have read it myself in the works of their theologians.
“‘Have you the right to reveal to us one of the mysteries of that world you have come from?’ my old man asks him, and answers the question for him. ‘No, you have not; so you may not add to what has been said of old, and may not take from men the freedom which you exalted when you were on earth. Whatever you might reveal anew will encroach on men’s freedom of faith; for it will be manifest as a miracle, and the freedom of their faith was dearer to you than anything in those days fifteen hundred years ago. Did you not often say then, “I will make you free”? But now you have seen these “free” men,’ the old man adds suddenly, with a pensive smile. ‘Yes, we’ve paid dearly for it,’ he goes on, looking sternly at him, ‘but at last we have completed that work in your name. For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with your freedom, but now it is ended and over for good. Do you not believe that it’s over for good? You look meekly at me and do not deign even to be wroth with me. But let me tell you that now, today, people are more persuaded than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet. But that has been our doing. Was this what you did? Was this your freedom?…
“‘The wise and dread spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-existence,’ the old man goes on, ‘the great spirit talked with you in the wilderness, and we are told in the books that he “tempted” you. Is that so? And could anything truer be said than what he revealed to you in three questions and what you rejected, and what in the books are called “the temptations”? And yet if there has ever been on earth a real and stupendous miracle, it took place on that day, on the day of the three temptations. The statement of those three questions was itself the miracle. If it were possible to imagine simply for the sake of argument that those three questions of the dread spirit had perished utterly from the books and that we had to restore them and to invent them anew and to do so had gathered together all the wise men of the earth – rulers, chief priests, learned men, philosophers, poets – and had set them the task to invent three questions such as would not only fit the occasion but express in three words, three human phrases, the whole future history of the world and of humanity – do you believe that all the wisdom of the earth brought together could have invented anything in depth and force equal to the three questions which were actually put to you then by the wise and mighty spirit in the wilderness? From those questions alone, from the miracle of their statement, we can see that we have to do here not with the fleeting human intelligence but with the absolute and eternal. For in those three questions the whole subsequent history of mankind is foretold, as it were, gathered together into one whole and uniting in them all the unsolved historical contradictions of human nature. At the time it could not be so clear, since the future was unknown; but now that fifteen hundred years have passed, we see that everything in those three questions was so rightly divined and foretold and so truly fulfilled that nothing can be added to them or taken from them.
“‘Judge yourself who was right – you or he who questioned you then. Remember the first question; its meaning, in other words, was this: “You would go into the world, and are going with empty hands, with some promise of freedom that men in their simplicity and their natural unruliness cannot even understand, that they fear and dread – for nothing has ever been more unbearable for a man and a human society than freedom. But see you these stones in this parched and barren wilderness? Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after you like a flock of sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest you withdraw your hand and deny