The Gospel in Dostoyevsky. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves. And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in your name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they.
“‘It is prophesied that you will come again in victory, you will come with your chosen, the proud and strong, but we will say that they have only saved themselves, whereas we have saved all. We are told that the harlot who sits upon the beast and holds in her hands the mystery shall be put to shame, that the weak will rise up again and will rend her royal purple and will strip naked her loathsome body. But then I will stand up and point out to you the thousand millions of happy children who have known no sin. And we who have taken their sins upon us for their happiness will stand up before you and say: “Judge us if you can and dare.” Know that I fear you not. Know that I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and locusts, I too prized the freedom with which you have blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among your elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting “to make up the number.” But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected your work. I left the proud and went back to the humble for the happiness of the humble. What I say to you will come to pass, and our dominion will be built up. I repeat, tomorrow you shall see that obedient flock who at a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I shall burn you for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is you. Tomorrow I shall burn you. I have spoken.’
“When the Inquisitor ceased speaking, he waited some time for his Prisoner to answer him; his silence weighed down upon him. He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man 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 old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to him: ‘Go, and come no more – come not at all, never, never!’ And he let him out into the dark alleys of the town. The Prisoner went away.”
“And the old man?”
“The kiss glows in his heart, but the old man adheres to his idea.”
REBELLION AGAINST GOD
Rebellion
In The Brothers Karamazov, “Rebellion” immediately precedes “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor.” Like the Legend it is told by Ivan to Alyosha Karamazov, his younger brother, who is a novice living in a monastery outside the city.
“I MUST MAKE you one confession,” Ivan began. “I could never understand how one can love one’s neighbors. It’s just one’s neighbors, to my mind, that one can’t love, though one might love people at a distance. I once read somewhere of John the Merciful, a saint, that when a hungry, frozen beggar came to him, he took him into his bed, held him in his arms, and began breathing into his mouth, which was putrid and loathsome from some awful disease. I am convinced that he did that in self-laceration, in a self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. A man must be hidden for anyone to love him, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”
“Father Zossima has talked of that more than once,” observed Alyosha. “He, too, said that the face of a man often hinders many people not practised in love from loving him. But yet there’s a great deal of love in mankind, almost Christlike love. I know that myself, Ivan.”
“Well, I know nothing of it so far, and can’t understand it, and the innumerable mass of mankind are with me there. The question is whether that’s due to men’s bad qualities or whether it’s inherent in their nature. To my thinking, Christlike love for men is a miracle impossible on earth. He was God. But we are not gods. Suppose I, for instance, suffer intensely. No one else can ever know how much I suffer, because he is another and not I. And what’s more, a man is rarely ready to admit another’s suffering (as if it were a distinction). Why won’t he admit it, do you think? – because I smell bad, because I have a stupid face, because I once trod on his foot. Besides there is suffering and suffering; degrading, humiliating suffering such as humbles me – hunger, for instance – my benefactor will perhaps allow me; but when you come to higher suffering for an idea, for instance, he will very rarely admit that, perhaps because my face strikes him as not at all what he fancies a man should have who suffers for an idea. And so he deprives me instantly of his favor, not at all from badness of heart. Beggars, especially genteel beggars, ought never to show themselves but ask for charity through the newspapers. One can love one’s neighbors in the abstract or even at a distance, but at close quarters it’s almost impossible. If it were as on the stage, in the ballet, where if beggars come in, they wear silken rags and tattered lace and beg for alms dancing gracefully, then one might like looking at them. But even then we should not love them.
“But enough of that. I simply wanted to show you my point of view. I meant to speak of the suffering of mankind generally, but we had better confine ourselves to the sufferings of children. That reduces the scope of my argument to a tenth of what it would be. Still we’d better keep to the children, though it does weaken my case. For in the first place, children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty, even when they are ugly (though I fancy children are never ugly). The second reason why I won’t speak of grown-up people is that, besides being disgusting and unworthy of love, they have a compensation – they’ve eaten the apple and know good and evil, and they have become ‘like gods.’ They go on eating it still. But the children haven’t eaten anything, and so far are innocent.
“Are you fond of children, Alyosha? I know you are, and you will understand why I prefer to speak of them. If they too suffer horribly on earth, they must suffer for their fathers’ sins, they must be punished for their fathers, who have eaten the apple; but that reasoning is of the other world and is incomprehensible for the heart of man here on earth. The innocent must not suffer for another’s sins, and especially such innocents! You may be surprised at me, Alyosha, but I am awfully fond of children, too. And observe – cruel people, the violent, the rapacious, the Karamazovs, are sometimes very fond of children. Children while they are quite little – up to seven, for instance – are so remote from grown-up people; they are different creatures, as it were, of a different species. I knew a criminal in prison who had, in the course of his career as a burglar, murdered whole families, including several children. But when he was in prison, he had a strange affection for them. He spent all his time at his window, watching the children playing in the prison yard. He trained one little boy to come up to his window and made great friends with him…You don’t know why I am telling you all this, Alyosha? My head aches and I am sad.”
“You speak with a strange air,” observed Alyosha uneasily, “as though you were not quite yourself.”
“By the way, a Bulgarian I met lately in Moscow,” Ivan went on, seeming not to hear his brother’s words, “told me about the crimes committed by Turks and Circassians in all parts of Bulgaria through fear of a general uprising of the Slavs. They burn villages, murder, outrage women and children, they nail their prisoners by the ears to the fences, leave them so till morning, and in the morning they hang them – all sorts of things you can’t even imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that’s a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that’s all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children too; cutting the unborn child from the mother’s womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother’s eyes. Doing it before the mother’s eyes was what gave