THE GRAND INQUISITOR
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to submit to the dictates of reason and self-interest. "Moral obliquity"
provides as insecure a foundation for the Kingdom of God as for the
Kingdom of Man. It is only in later years, as
his
religious conscious–
ness became fully engaged in his creative effort, that Dostoevsky de–
veloped a new idea of freedom, based not on "moral obliquity" but
on Christian love and the unviolated conscience.
Also, it is important to note that so far as socialism is concerned
it is mainly the conception of it dramatized in
The Possessed
which
is epitomized in the Legend, and that, in a sense, the figure of the
Inquisitor also derives from that novel, being an elaborated and his–
torically enriched variant of the sketchy figure of Shigalov. It will
be remembered that Shigalov, an eccentric ideologue, comes to the
conclusion that unlimited freedom can be attained only through un–
limited despotism, or, rather, that the extremes of freedom and despo–
tism are in reality identical. Accordingly he proposes, as no less than
"a final solution of the social question," that mankind be divided into
two unequal parts, one-tenth enjoying "absolute liberty and un–
bounded power over the other nine-tenths. The others have given up
all
individuality and become, so to speak, a herd, and, through bound–
less submission, will by a series of regenerations achieve primeval in–
nocence, something like the Garden of Eden. They'll have to work,
however." The society envisaged by the Inquisitor is plainly a later
edition of Shigalov's herd, and the latter's elite is even further reduced
in numbers by the Inquisitor: "There will be thousands of millions
of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken
upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil." The
reign of the "sufferers" will be cruel, of course, for they believe that
their cruelty will guarantee the happiness of the rest of mankind.
Moreover, as Albert Camus has remarked, they excuse their cruelty
by claiming, like the Satan of the Romantics, that it will be hard
for them to bear.
Yet there is no denying that even this mordant reading of the
historical past and future did not deter Dostoevsky from asserting his
belief that freedom of choice in the knowledge of good and evil is
the essence of man's humanity and the essence of Christ's teaching.
The kind of faith or obedience that is bought with bread is evil, and
so is any constraint on man's conscience, in whatever form, even if
the constraint is exercised for ostensibly good ends. Freedom is not
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