2b8
PARTISAN REVIEW
cost and wherever it may lead." He readily admits that man "likes
to make roads and to create," but this admission goes with the em–
phatic reminder that man also loves chaos and destruction. He is
therefore convinced that the organization of a rational society–
which, in his view, cannot but turn out to be a human antheap–
will prove forever impossible.
Now this is a vision entirely at variance with that of the Inquisi–
tor, whose idea it is that "independent choice" is exactly what men
fear most; that is the source both of his contempt for them and his
paradoxical determination to strip them of the useless gift of free
choice so as to convert them into the childishly happy and ignorant
members of a totalitarian collective. He proclaims the failure of his–
torical Christianity to illuminate and sanctify human existence, but
this failure he imputes not to the Church but to the falsity of Christ's
message in the light of the proven inadequacy of human nature.
Consequently the Church can have no function but that of an in–
strument of power in the hands of an elite that has taken up the
sword of Caesar. Since man is feebler and baser than Christ believed
him
to be, it was senseless to bring
him
the gift of freedom. The weak
soul is unable to benefit from such heady gifts. The Inquisitor is not
a psychologist pure and simple, like the undergroundling. In his
thought psychological insights are supported by historical facts.
Another difference is that the primary object of his polemic is what
he takes to be the illusion of human freedom, whereas the under–
groundling makes reason the target of his devaluating analysis.
When it came to writing
The Brothers Karamazov
Dostoevsky
had wholly surmounted the standpoint of defiant and obdurate in–
dividualism exhibited in
Notes from Underground.
He then thought
that the Palace of Crystal (at that time his prime symbol of socialism,
superseded later by the Tower of Babel, a more cheerless symbol)
would never be built because men were too independent to permit
its construction. This type of individualism, however, with its stress
on the unfettered human will and the inexhaustible intransigence of
self-pride, is not really consonant with the religious valuation of life.
It is, in fact, a secular type of individualism which can be turned
quite as effectively against Christian philosophies as against the phil–
osophy of social progress; the recalcitrant individual may after
all
refuse to choose Christ in the same "irrational" way as he refuses
