THE GRAND INQUISITOR
257
sociation, we must look to his intellectual development and political
and literary biography.
What is first to be accounted for is the strange amalgam of so–
cialism and Catholicism. The critique of socialism is no more than
insinuated in the Legend. Its specifications of time and place are
such that socialism can come into it only through oblique references
and allusions of an allegoric nature. Thus in the Inquisitor's gloss
pn
the Gospel story of "the temptation" the motif of "stones turned
into bread" is brought in again and again so as to convert it into the
formula for socialism. The linkage of socialism with the Roman
Church, though it may strike western readers as fantastic, is integral
to Dostoevsky's thought.
The connection he saw between these two apparently hostile
forces actually dates back to the period of the 1840s, when in his
youth he belonged to the Petrashevsky circle of intellectual conspira–
tors. Even then, while reading such ideologues as Fourier, Saint–
Simon, Proudhon, and Pierre Lerroux, he was still holding fast to
the image of Christ and searching for a way of reconciling it with
the socialist creed;3 and he was doubtless influenced by the example
of Lamennais, the Catholic priest and social philosopher, the apostle
to the poor as he was called, who stood for a kind of theocratic de–
mocracy and preached the ideals of the French Revolution. His writ–
ings were well known to the members of the Petrashevsky circle, and
so were such works as V. Menier's
Jesus Christ devant les conseils de
guerre
and Cabet's
Le vrai christianisme suivant Jesus Christ.
Now
after Dostoevsky's return from penal servitude in Siberia, as he
gradually shed his radical views, he began interpreting the connec–
tion he had once seen between the Catholic Church and the socialist
movement in a different sense, positing the authoritarian principle
as the root-idea of both. To be sure, the animus against Rome is
partly explained by the anti-western tum of his thought and his
growing inclination to identify Christianity exclusively with the Rus–
sian people and their national Church. In the main, however,
it
was
the authoritarian idea of the "compulsory organization of human
happiness" that was the essential link in his conception of socialism
3 In this he differed markedly from his fellow-conspirators. Petrashevsky,
for instance, once referred to Christ in a private letter as "that notorious dema–
gogue who ended his career somewhat unfortunately."
