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PARTISAN REVIEW
and fearlessness that it comes almost to resemble an action. And in
his
rage of love he invokes with prophetic violence a totalitarian elite
whose rule is justified by humanity's refusal of Christ's tragic gift
of freedom.
The scene of Ivan's "poem in prose" is Seville at the time of the
Inquisition. On a day when nearly a hundred heretics had been
burnt
ad
majorem gloriam Dei
by the cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor,
in a splendid
auto da
fe,
Christ reappears in His human shape, as
He appeared fifteen centuries earlier. The people, recognizing their
Savior, welcome Him with cries of love and faith, but at that mo–
ment the cardinal-"an old man, almost ninety, tall and erect, with
a withered face and sunken eyes, in which there is still a gleam of
light"---orders the guards to seize and lead Him away to the dungeon
of the Holy Inquisition. At night the door of the cell is suddenly
opened and the aged cardinal comes in alone to confront his prisoner.
On the morrow, he announces, he will condemn and burn Him at
the stake as the worst of heretics: "And the very people who have
today kissed Thy feet, tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will
rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire. " Throughout the long scene
that follows Christ is speechless. Only the Inquisitor speaks, and his
speech is an astonishingly coherent and complete apology for the
total power of man over man. It has grandeur, penetration and enor–
mous audacity-thus would the Inquisitor's counterparts in real life
speak if they had candor and were capable of making independent
forays into the philosophy of history. The phenomenon of power has
always been surrounded by taboos. Power is in some sense the
deepest of mysteries, hence taboo, for whatever is behind it
is
at
once holy and unclean. But the Inquisitor breaks
all
taboos. It was
the recommendation of Edmund Burke, that enemy of extremism
and of theory, that a "sacred veil" should ever be drawn "over the
beginnings of all governments." Now if by "beginnings" we under–
stand the motive-force or inner principle of government, then the
Inquisitor
is
bent on rending asunder the veil that shrouds it and
letting us in on its secret. Not that he is not himself a firm believer
in the beneficent uses of Burke's "politic, well-wrought veil." He is
that above all, but in the seance with his speechless prisoner he
is
for once intent on putting all things plainly.
