Grand Inquisitor On the Nature of Man

Ivan is a man of many passions and weaknesses and full of vehement, animal vitality. Now and then he shows a surprisingly deep insight into human nature while remaining an eruptive, incalculable and utterly selfish cynic. His four sons suffer from various splits in their personalities. Alyosha, cast in the mold of sainthood, suggests at times that he too is secretly fragile. He is a churchman and lives in the mysteries of the invisible but has not yet attained the “unmixed wisdom” of the pure. Dmitri is impulsive and can be as chaotic as his father but lives, generally, on a higher level than his parent. Smerdyakov, the illegitimate degenerate, kills his father in the final tragedy in which money, lust, jealousy and the most primitive instincts make a weird mesh of guilt and fate. Ivan represents the intellectual element in this family gallery. In many respects he is the double of several other characters in Dostoevski’s novels and—of Dostoevski himself. Full of zest for living, he too is a divided man. He wavers between intellectual honesty and a moral nihilism and it is no surprise that his incessant play with truth and its perversions brings him close to insanity. But he has our sympathy when he rebels against society and a church which deny social justice to the many sufferers of his time. He is an atheist, yet he is also compelled to admit the existence of God, or at least of a God of his own if man is responsible to God, so he argues, God is also responsible to man, and it is therefore only logical that he quarrels with Him about senseless suffering and injustice in human life. Traits like these are part of Dostoevski’s own development and experience. The Grand Inquisitor stands high above all similar attempts of our poets, dramatists, and novelists to deal with the figure of Christ. All such portraits in American and European literature are done on too small a canvas and with faded colors. Dostoevski’s story rises from a moment of apostolic illum