THE GRAND INQUISITOR
253
does Ivan envisage the future?
If
we take the Grand Inquisitor as
his
persona,
then he thinks that just as historical Christianity has
failed man, so socialism-the Tower of Habel of the coming centur–
ies--will fail him and afterwards the authoritarian theocrats will re–
sume command. And the fault, from first to last, is in man himself
because he is an "impotent rebel," a slave even if rebellious by
nature. Implicit here is the idea of freedom as the consummation of
rebellion and of happiness as the total renunciation of it. The choice
is between freedom and happiness. But so long as man is unable to
carry his rebellion through to the end or, alternatively, renounce
it
once and for all, he will attain neither goal. Ivan torments himself
with the question of what is to be done with man if you at once love
and despise him. The ideology of the Grand Inquisitor, which repudi–
ates freedom for the sake of happiness, is the means he devises for
forcing a solution. Yet it also is a means of exposing it. The very
manner in which Ivan develops this ideology expresses his loathing of
it even as he despairingly accepts it.
This is but another way of saying that in the last analysis he
is not really possessed by it, that his mind moves freely in and out
of it. The Legend as a whole, in its interplay of drama and ideology,
is to be taken, I think, .as an experiment, one of those experiments
in frightfulness with which modern literature has the deepest affinity.
Dostoevsky stands at two removes from the Inquisitor, and Ivan at
one remove; and this placing, or aesthetic "distancing," reflects
pr~
cisely the degree of commitment we are entitled to assume. Therefore
to identify Ivan wholly with the Inquisitor, as so many commentators
have done, is an error, though a lesser one than that of wholly identi–
fying Dostoevsky with
him.
The fact is that the Legend has not one
but two protagonists, Jesus and the Inquisitor, and that Ivan makes
no real choice between them. Jesus is freedom and transcendent truth,
whereas the Inquisitor typifies the implacable logic of historical
reality; but so stark a confrontation in itself demonstrates that Ivan's
dilemma is absolute. Mter all, he has no God to whom he can appeal
for a guaranty of
his
choice; Jesus is his hero but not his God. Ivan,
like his creator, is split through and through, torn between love and
contempt, pride and submission, reason and faith, teleology and the
extremest pessimism. Inherently a stranger in the world of action, he
is capable, however, of apprehending his thought with such urgency
