The Roman Empire Humiliated Monotheists
A meditation on Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor poem
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 shows up in Spain during the Inquisition, and performs miracles, starting up 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 with miracles that would compel the masses to worship him, but Jesus declined and although he performed some smaller-scale miracles, he 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 of his moral purity faded, his followers had to exercise…
