THE GRAND INQUISITOR
263
Hugo's Christ responds angrily to the cardinal's tale of betrayal,
and this must have struck Dostoevsky as an egregious error on the
part of the French poet, a symptom no doubt of the pride and self–
will ruling the West. In his own version Christ kisses the cardinal and
departs quietly-a meek exit entirely in keeping with Dostoevsky's
conception of Russian Christianity.
III
But if Dostoevsky's Christ is so very Russian in his meek–
ness, his Inquisitor is no less Russian in his cruelty. Though appearing
in the role of a Catholic hierarch, he is in fact quite as Byzantine
as he is Roman, if not more so. However considerable the part he
has played in the history of the West, in Russian history he gained
even greater ascendancy. From Ivan the Terrible to Stalin he has
always known how to apply cruelty, violence and deception, as well
as how to make use of doctrine and dogma, in order to subjugate
the people, depriving them of all rights but one-the right to prac–
tice the Christian virtue of meekness; and to this day that virtue
is still widely practiced in Russia, though to call it a Christian virtue
has now been forbidden. Why call
it
meekness when there are other
words for it, such as obedience and discipline? In the Kremlin's new
ideological Empire the traditional Christian idiom has been replaced
by the language of Communism. But the sway of the Grand In–
quisitor is greater than ever.
6
6 The specter of Communism that a century ago Marx saw haunting
Europe is scarcely to be distinguished any longer from the specter of Dostoev–
sky's Inquisitor, who now haunts not only Europe but the entire world. And
his presence is to be detected in nearly all the grisly representations of the future
attempted by contemporary writers.
Thus in George Orwell's 1984, a novel about the unfuture of the future,
the words and purposes of the Grand Inquisitor are obsessively recalled, as in
the torture-scene showing how Winston Smith, the hero, is broken by the Ingsoc
Commissar, O 'Brien, even as he initiates him into the secrets of power. Smith
thinks that he will please O'Brien by reproducing the Inquisitor's idea in explana–
tion of the Party's drive for limitless power: "That the Party did not seek power
for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. . . . That the choice
for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk
of mankind, happiness was better. That the Party was the eternal guardian of
the weak, a dedicated sect doing evil that good might come...." But O'Brien,
going beyond even this last and most insidious rationalization of power, forcibly
teaches Smith the plain truth that "the Party
(Footnote continued on
p.
264)
