THE GRAND INQUISITOR
255
What he puts most plainly to his prisoner is the enormity of
the error of rejecting coercion and domination for the sake of man's
free love. The three powers with which Satan had tempted Him in
the wilderness are miracle, mystery and authority, the sole means
of vanquishing the conscience of men forever and holding it captive
for their own good. The churchly hierarchy has found it necessary
to correct that error and to found its work on those powers. Never
has anything truer been said than what was revealed by the wise and
dread spirit of the wilderness in the three questions later recorded
in the Gospels as "the temptation." For in those questions "the
whole subsequent history of mankind is, as it were, brought together
into one whole and foretold, and in them are united all the unsolved
historical contradictions of human nature...."
Man, hungering both for "earthly bread" and "common wor–
ship," and on no account wanting the one without the other, will
gladly exchange his freedom for the promise that his double hunger
will be appeased. He longs "to find someone quickly to whom he
can hand over the gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature
was born"; and he prefers to worship the one who feeds him, the
one performing the miracle rejected by Jesus, the miracle of turning
stones into bread. Yet man is so constituted that he seeks to worship
only that which he believes to be established beyond dispute:
For those pitiful creatures are concerned not only to find what
one or the other can worship, but to find something that all would
believe in and worship; what is essential is that all may be
together
in
it. This craving for
community
of worship is the chief misery of every
man individually and of all humanity from the beginning of time. For
the sake of common worship they have slain each other with the sword.
They have set up gods and challenged one another, "Put away your
gods and come and worship ours, or we will kill you and your gods!"
And so it will be to the end of the world, even when gods disappear
from the earth; they will fall down before idols just the same.
Jesus' hope that man would cling to God and not crave miracles
is futile. Man seeks not so much God as the miraculous, and when
deprived of it he creates "new miracles of his own for himself, and
will worship deeds of sorcery and witchcraft, though he might be a
hundred times over a rebel, heretic and infidel." The Inquisitor fore–
tells that the downfall of the Church will come about exactly through
