A peace of the famous parable of the Grand Inquisitor in
Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov.
The story is told by Ivan, a
cynical atheist, to his younger, mystically minded Christian brother,
Alyosha. In it, Jesus appears in the city of Seville during the Spanish
Inquisition, just as a huge crowd gathers to witness a mass execution.
He never says a mumbling word, and yet everyone immediately recognizes
him. Throngs gather around him, and he blesses and heals them. A tiny
white coffin passes by, and the child within it is revived.
Standing
in the cathedral doorway, the Cardinal Grand Inquisitor also sees
Jesus, and immediately has him arrested. "Such is his power over the
well-disciplined, submissive, and now trembling people," explains Ivan,
"that the thick crowds immediately give way, and scattering before the
guard, amid dead silence and without one breath of protest, allow them
to lay their sacrilegious hands upon the stranger and lead Him away." In
the evening, the Grand Inquisitor visits Jesus alone in his prison
cell, and explains to him that in the morning he will be burned at the
stake "as the most wicked of all the heretics; and that the same people
who today were kissing Thy feet, tomorrow at one bend of my finger, will
rush to add fuel to Thy funeral pile."
The
reason, explains the Inquisitor, is that Jesus came to give people
freedom, but that's not what they want. What they really want, he says,
is to be told what to do and believe, and to be fed. "For fifteen
centuries, we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended
and over for good."
BEAL, TIMOTHY. "The Bible Is Dead; Long Live the Bible." Chronicle Of Higher Education 57, no. 33 (April 22, 2011): B6-B8. Academic Search Elite, EBSCOhost (accessed November 19, 2013).
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