This season of temptation

The great Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky left the abstract liberalism of his earlier Utopian socialism forever behind him when he returned to Russia in 1859 after years of imprisonment and exile in Siberia. There he had come before the reality of God, the dignity of his immortal soul, and the immensely precious but also fearsome gift of freedom. From 1864 on, he developed a tragic, religiously conservative view of human life that anticipated many of the deepest questions of the century that followed. But in The Brothers Karamazov, his last and greatest novel, which he began in 1878 and finished in 1881, just three months before his death, it is not "his ill-contrived attempt to transform Russia into a huge monastery" that commands our attention still, as one of his great translators, David Magarshack, has said, but rather his portrayal of the universal human condition. Sigmund Freud thought the novel, with Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex" and Shakespeare's "Hamlet," the greatest of all literary creations.

Originally intended to be the first of a multivolume sequence, The Brothers Karamazov is compelling on many levels. It is in the first place the tale of a parricide, a mystery story asking which of four brothers may have murdered their father--the innocent novice Alyosha, the atheist intellectual Ivan, the passionate, headstrong Dmitri, or the vulgar, illegitimate half-brother Smerdyakov. It also presents subtle psychological portraits of the four men, introduces a crowd of subsidiary characters including the profligate father and the venerable elder Zosima, and paints an enormous canvas of Russian life at the time--in monasteries, polite society, learned circles and common village life. Philosophical and religious issues are directly and fiercely debated, as the very stuff of life. Ivan's resolute thesis that "if there is no God, everything is permitted" exposes the coming crisis of values in the West. Dostoevsky's own commitment to mutual and universal responsibility for all one's fellow human beings is a lesson Zosima attributes to his younger brother and passes on to Alyosha. But it is Dmitri, in his humility and acceptance of suffering, who rejects the nihilism and enacts the altruism in practice.

On reading my colleague Antonia Ryan's lovely reflection last week on the importance of a desert experience in our lives, I recalled this great novel, and in particular, one of its most famous chapters, "The Grand Inquisitor." There Ivan recounts to Alyosha a "poem" he has composed. Remembering also St. Ignatius' advice on remaining with a grace given, I thought it might be helpful to "repeat" the desert meditation of last Sunday, or at least to revisit the three questions put by the tempter to Jesus in the desert.

In Ivan's poem (often called "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor"), on a day after almost 100 heretics have been burned publicly before the king and his court in 16th-century Seville, a stern, nearly 90-year-old cardinal comes upon someone who has chosen to "walk among [his people] in silence with a gentle smile of infinite compassion." This man has also dared, yet again, to raise a 7-year-old girl from death to life. Learning this, the cardinal has the intruder immediately arrested and the next day visits him alone in prison. What follows is not so much an interrogation as a chilling description of why the Grand Inquisitor believes it is his duty to have the Prisoner (whom he never calls by name) burned at the stake.

Don't you realize, he asks him, how miraculous it was, what a prophecy of the whole future history of humanity, when "the dread and intelligent spirit, the spirit of self-destruction and non-being" talked with you in the desert and revealed the three great questions of human life and their solution to you? Don't you realize how foolishly you clung to your noble ideal of freedom, while the Tempter knew that these poor human beings, born rebels but seeking happiness, prefer to be fed rather than to be free? Don't you realize that the first question for these abject souls is "Before whom shall I bow down?" And that they will worship anyone who feeds them, who satisfies their material needs?

And don't you realize that in taking you to the top of the temple and asking you to cast yourself down, performing a miracle that would compel belief, the Tempter was explaining the second great question: To whom will I entrust my conscience? You stood for "the free decision of the heart." We have learned from "the intelligent spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction," that what conquers and captures the consciences of these wretched, weak rebels is the miraculous, the mysterious-and authority.

Nor did you understand, continued the old man, how in showing you all the kingdoms of the world and offering them to you as your own, the spirit was addressing the third great search of fearful humanity, "how to unite everyone at last into a common, concordant anthill ... a universal union." You wanted a community of freedom. We few are willing to be unhappy so that millions more, putting aside the curse of knowledge of good and evil, may have a "quiet, humble happiness, the happiness of feeble creatures, such as they were created," united under us in impersonal association.