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The Roman Empire Humiliated Monotheists
A meditation on Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor parable
In The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky presents what’s become known as the Grand Inquisitor story, about the perils of organized religion.
In the story, the returned Jesus appears in Spain during the Inquisition and performs miracles, sparking a second Jesus movement. The Inquisitor orders his arrest, holds him in jail, and sentences Jesus to be burned to death. But the day before the sentence is to be carried out, the Inquisitor heads to Jesus’s cell, taking the opportunity to explain why a cynical organized religion is better than a spiritual counterculture.
According to the Inquisitor, Jesus erred in playing coy with people by protecting their freedom of choice to worship God or to oppose him with secular preoccupations. The Devil had tempted Jesus by challenging him to reveal his full divinity through miracles that would compel the masses to worship him, but Jesus declined. Although he performed some smaller-scale miracles, Jesus kept his power hidden enough to allow for reasonable doubt about whether God had ever visited our world.
Eventually, after Jesus resurrected and left the scene, ascending to Heaven, and after the memory of his exploits and his moral purity faded, his followers had to exercise…
