The OG Fascist: Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor
Inspired by my son's indelible take on God
My son Andrew and the fable of the Village Shul
It’s 2002, and I’m sitting in the grand main sanctuary of Rodeph Sholom on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The place is packed with parents. We’ve come to see our pre-teen kids on the bimah (the stage) sing and display their Jewish learning.
The junior rabbi is telling a story. At this point in her career, storytelling is not her strength. She’s repetitious and discursive. She doesn’t realize we’re all waiting, impatiently, for our children to perform.
I’m fidgeting, and I can see my twelve year old son Andrew on stage fidgeting too.
Stripped of elaborations, the rabbi’s story is simple. There is a village shul in the old country. Every Shabbat evening, a rich man sneaks in and hides a loaf of bread behind the Torah Ark. It’s his offering of gratitude to God.
Early the next morning, a poor man sneaks in. He takes the loaf of bread and thanks God for giving him this miraculous bounty so his family can eat.
Then every Saturday afternoon the rich man sneaks back in, sees that the loaf is gone, and celebrates God’s acceptance of his sacrifice.
In the junior rabbi’s telling, loaf after interminable loaf is baked, hidden and found until it seems scarcely possible that there can be any flour left in the village. The rabbi finally finishes. She asks if one of the kids wants to take a shot at the story’s meaning.
I see a certain gleam in my son’s eyes.
In a loud voice that fills the big space, Andrew says,
“This story proves that God does not exist.”
The sanctuary becomes silent. The junior rabbi is flummoxed. Andrew’s gleam glows brighter. He is supremely pleased with himself. I’m trying to contain my laughter.
A senior rabbi elegantly intervenes. He compliments Andrew for demonstrating Reform Judaism’s commitment to asking the difficult questions.
Now, twenty years later, I consider whether, other than being a smart-aleck, Andrew had a point about the absence of God. What if the rich man forgets to hide the loaf or is sick? What if he dies? Or has a business reversal and blames God? What if the rich man’s name is Job?
Why should the poor man’s ability to feed his family rest on such fragile contingencies? If God is not responsible, then we are left with a disenchanted world, a world lacking miracle, mystery, and authority. This is the world the Grand Inquisitor sets out to mend.
The Fable of the Grand Inquisitor
In Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the Grand Inquisitor is a key chapter in the form of a “poem” or fable, told by the cynical brother Ivan Karamazov to his devout brother Alyosha. The fable’s premise is that Jesus has returned to earth in 16th century Seville, Spain at the height of the auto-de-fe, the burning at the stake of heretics by the Jesuits.
This is a casual visit by Jesus, not the Second Coming. The Seville crowds recognize Him, reach their fingers out to touch Him, to graze His garment. The crowd become ecstatic when Jesus cures a man’s blindness and raises a young girl from her coffin.
But then the Grand Inquisitor, the fearsome Jesuit ruler of Seville, appears on the scene. The crowd is silenced by his foreboding presence. Ninety years old, but still tall and erect, the Grand Inquisitor is dressed in the coarse robe of an ordinary monk. From his “sunken eyes…a gleam of light still shines like sparks of fire.”
The Grand Inquisitor arrests Jesus and takes Him to a jail cell where he berates Jesus for screwing things up so badly the last time He was on earth fifteen hundred years ago. Specifically, that Jesus was foolish and arrogant to reject Satan’s three temptations in the wilderness.
Jesus could make endless bread from the stones and rocks. Heavenly bread has little appeal when earthly bread is lacking. “Feed them first and then they might be virtuous.”
Jesus could cast Himself down from the mountaintop so that God’s angels could prevent His fall. Then people would worship Him because they would have seen a miracle.
Jesus could accept the sword of Caesar to rule people’s mortal life just as He wished to rule people’s immortal soul. People need authority, “because nothing has ever been more intolerable for an individual man and for human society in general than freedom.”
But Jesus wanted people to give their faith of their own free will, without the bribe of bread, without the display of miracle or mystery, without the coercion of earthly force. So Jesus refuses all three of Satan’s temptations, refuses everything that could have made people happy.
The Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that, with rare exception, people can’t handle the burden of giving their faith freely, with having no one to tell them if they’re behaving rightly or wrongly.
People, says the Grand Inquisitor “are weak, irrevocably vicious, and eternally ungrateful,” and people will surrender their freedom to a higher earthly authority the first chance they get.
The Grand Inquisitor tells Jesus that people will only become happy when they are “united on one general unanimous and harmonious anthill.” But Jesus has instead doomed humanity to live in a world of Babel with religions and tribes violently contending to be the sole unifying higher authority.
Only “my” Church, says the Grand Inquisitor, can step in to unite humanity. And there is a plan.
The Church will tell lies about the miracle of eternal Heaven, even though it knows the truth: that after death there is only eternal darkness. The Church will forgive the countless sins of people too weak to resist temptation. The Church will seize earthly power for itself and extirpate all other religions by fire and by sword.
After millennia of suffering, all of which, by the way, Jesus could have prevented, people will finally know the “joy of submission,” the “gentle, humble happiness of weak creatures” in grateful awe before the power of the Church.
What does Jesus do or say in response?
“He approaches the old man in silence and kisses him softly on his withered and bloodless lips.”
And then He goes gently into the night.
The Grand Inquisitor Today
To read the Grand Inquisitor chapter is to hear echoes of its influence everywhere.
In 2009, for example, centrist NYT columnist Tom Friedman wrote a now infamous essay wishing America was governed by Chinese-style autocracy, because China knew how to get things done.
And lately, it’s become fashionable to observe how badly divided people are. The sociologist Jonathan Haidt named his Substack “After Babel.” His theme is the “chaos, fragmentation, and outrage that began to set in by the mid-2010s.”
But of course we’ve always lived in a Tower of Babel world. We’ve always been separated by religions and nationalities and by factions within factions.
Perhaps, however, in the case of our divisions, we should fear the cure more than the disease.
Because it seems that people like the Grand Inquisitor who dream of that “universal and harmonious anthill” are the very worst among us. Men like Hitler and Stalin and Mao and their followers who would kill tens of millions in order to impose the “joy of submission” on the rest of us.
The Grand Inquisitors of the world will always be among us. They are among us now. Confident that their ideas, their platforms, and their politics are the only true way to achieve unity.
Their motto is always the same. Resist us and you will suffer, submit to us and you will be happy. Our unpleasant means will be justified in the end.
Note that not every Grand Inquisitor comes to power through the scourge of fire and sword.
In the Weimar Republic election of July 1932, Hitler’s Nazi Party received 37% of the vote. In the November 1932 election, the Nazi share of the vote dropped to 33%. Despite that decline, Hitler was made Chancellor in January 1933.
As Chancellor, Hitler was able to influence the March 1933 elections through violence and propaganda to win 44% of the vote. He then used violence and the threat of violence to coerce the Reichstag to give him absolute “emergency” powers. Only after that was he able to enact the first of his antisemitic laws.
I agree with my son Andrew that the story of the hidden loaf of bread shows human hands at work, not the presence of God.
But what animated those human hands? Faith, to be sure. Faith that was not freely given in an absolute sense. But also faith not primarily coerced by carrots and sticks.
People can be kind and generous and noble for no other reason than their belief in their own goodness and the goodness of others.
That belief is what we have going for us as we contemplate the new year.
Question for the Comments
Is our fragmentation a “feature” of the human condition or is it a “bug?”
Note: All quotes from The Brothers Karamazov are from the excellent new translation by Michael Katz. This new translation (so much better than the one I recall reading a long time ago) came to my attention via a compelling guest post on
by John Stamps.
David - enjoyed this intriguing post. I read The Brothers Karamazov earlier this year so this story is still somewhat fresh in my mind. The Grand Inquisitor is a beautiful chapter and the story as a whole is a fascinating exploration of faith.
I don't have the answer to your question as I am only human and not god. What I have found interesting though is that frequently our fragmentation happens at the macro level. Groups tend to fight or hate or have animosity towards other groups. At the micro level, individual to individual we frequently see the reverse. These are not universal rules obviously but I wonder if there is something in the herd mentality that causes us to fragment or follow paths we would not normally take on our own.
It is an intriguing dilemma to ponder and one that is timely for our world.
"People can be kind and generous and noble for no other reason than their belief in their own goodness and the goodness of others." Thanks for these words, David. That belief is what can save us, once again.