'The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor': the utopian as sadist.

• Author: Beauchamp, Gorman
• Position: Fyodor Dostoevsky - Critical essay

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

--George Orwell, "Reflections on Gandhi"

The argument of Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is simple: man is a weak, pitiful creature unable to achieve peace or happiness unless he submits to the rule of the few superior beings capable of determining his social destiny for him. This argument has been seen--correctly, I think--as an adumbration of the totalitarian regimes that emerged in the twentieth century; but it also continues a tradition of utopian thinking that began with Plato. The Republic is generally accepted as the first utopia--a depiction, that is, of the ideal state. But the exact nature of that state--the premises on which it rests and the contempt that it displays for the abilities of ordinary men--is, because of Plato's great prestige, too seldom recognized. His utopia is predicated not on the great mass of mankind's becoming wise or good, only obedient. In this regard, the Grand Inquisitor stands as Plato's direct ideological heir.

The Republic, we recall, begins as an investigation of justice in the individual, of the nature of the just man; only subsequently does it address the matter of the just state. Plato's just state proves to be one in which the three strata of society--rulers, soldiers, and workers (banuistics)--each performs the specific social function that "nature" suited it for and only that function: rulers must rule, soldiers guard, workers work. The harmony that results from this natural division of social labor Plato calls justice. Analogously, the just individual is the one in whom the three faculties equivalent to the three social strata--reason, will, and appetite--are properly ordered. That person, the one ruled by his reason, nature meant to be a philosopher-king; those dominated by one of the other faculties belong in one of the other classes, which include, of course, the vast majority of the citizens of the Republic. Indeed, this distinction provides the rationale for the whole hierarchical arrangement of Plato's utopia, and the implication is unmistakable: only the philosopher-kings are truly just men, everyone else falling short, in varying degrees, of the ideal psychic structure. Only these figures, their inner lives properly regulated, are meant by nature to rule the rest, just as the head rules the body. "A multitude," Plato asserts, "cannot be philosophical," a capacity reserved for a select few. (1)

Plato's logic in The Republic thus leads him to posit a utopia composed of a great many unjust (or at least non-just) men ruled over by a very few just ones. Since most of its citizens can never discover for themselves what is right or wrong, their proper civic duty consists in unquestioning obedience. Doxa or belief is the highest form of understanding of which the ordinary man is capable, as distinct from the philosopher's noesis or appodictic knowledge, so that the task of the Republic's rulers is the inculcation in the citizens of "correct" beliefs: beliefs that promote the stability of the state. Plato's utopia thus poses, according to Raphael Demos, a paradox: that his ideal state is composed largely of un-ideal individuals. "Both the warrior class and the masses are deprived of reason and must be governed by the philosopher-king. How can one legitimately call a community perfect when so many of its members are imperfect?"

Professor Demos believes that he resolves the paradox by the following argument:

What [Plato's] Socrates, in effect, is saying is that the perfection of the whole requires the subordination of the parts; and that the subordination of the parts contributes to the perfection of the whole. Going further he asserts that the parts would not be proper parts if they achieved perfection independently of their place in the whole. For the parts are defined by their function in the whole --for instance, the eyes by their function of guiding the whole man .... The relative incompleteness (or imperfection) of the lower classes--indeed of all three classes--is logically entailed by the perfection of the city as a whole. The state would not be ideal if its parts, as such, were ideal. (2) This argument strikes me as significantly less persuasive than it apparently does Professor Demos, for it represents nothing more, of course, than a recasting of the hoary "fable of the belly"--most familiar, perhaps, from Menenius' use of it in Shakespeare's Coriolanus--that the haves have traditionally used to mystify the have-nots: (3) only that in The Republic what the haves have is knowledge instead of wealth. Nevertheless, this line of argument represents Plato--and the long tradition of Platonic Utopias--correctly: for in that tradition, the ideality of the state does not depend on the perfection of its individual members, but on the perfection of the system itself. Indeed, the good of the polity is paramount and the individuals who compose it are to be judged by how well they subordinate themselves to and mesh with the system. Or as Auguste Comte--in this regard the most Platonic-in-spirit of all the many nineteenth-century system-building utopists--writes in his System of Positive Polity, individuals "should be regarded, not as so many distinct beings, but as organs of one Supreme Being"--that is, of the State. (4)

II

The Grand Inquisitor argues for just such a conception of utopia, although Dostoevsky's presentation carries before it, of course, the negative sign of auctorial irony, opposed as he was to all the secular socialist movements of his century. In a prophetic anachronism, Dostoevsky makes the spokesman for authoritarian utopianism a Catholic cardinal of sixteenth-century Spain; and, to give the Legend the fullest ideological significance, casts Christ, allegorically returned to Seville to witness the Inquisition, as his silent but compelling antagonist. Determining why Dostoevsky selects these two symbolic antagonists to enact the sociomachia of his Legend and what ideas he invests in each of them reveals the exact nature of his attitude toward utopianism. That Dostoevsky chooses a Catholic prelate to embody the secular chiliasm of the nineteenth century emphasizes the peculiar equation that he made of socialism with Catholicism, both of which he detested as pernicious Western heresies, agencies of the Anti-Christ. Given their historic opposition, the marriage arranged between them in the Legend appears a bizarre misalliance indeed, born of Dostoevsky's indiscriminate animus against anything non-Russian. Strange as it may strike the modern reader, this equation nevertheless figures centrally in his political thought, expressed nowhere more perfervidly than in The Idiot (1868) where he has Prince Myshkin exclaim:

Roman Catholicism in its essence .... is not exclusively a theological question. For socialism, too, is the child of Catholicism and the intrinsic Catholic nature! It, too, like its brother atheism, was begotten of despair ... in order to replace the lost moral power of religion, to quench the spiritual thirst of parched humanity, and save it not by Christ, but also by violence! (5) Extreme as Myshkin's attack appears, his views reflect exactly Dostoevsky's own, as witness this passage from The Diary of a Writer:

The present-day French socialism itself--seemingly an ardent and fatal protest against the Catholic idea on the part of all men and nations tortured and strangled with it, who desire to live, and without its gods--this protest itself ... is nothing but the truest and most direct continuation of the Catholic idea, its fullest, most final realization, its fatal consequence which has been evolved through centuries. French socialism is nothing else but a compulsory communion of mankind--an idea which dates back to ancient Rome, and which was fully conserved in Catholicism. Thus the idea of the liberation of the human spirit from Catholicism became vested there precisely in the narrowest Catholic forms borrowed from the very heart of its spirit, from its letter, from its materialism, from its despotism, from its morality. (6) The fear that a fusion of Catholicism and socialism might be effected, as the former strove to retain its temporal dominance in an age of secular ascendancy, haunted Dostoevsky for years before he distilled it into the allegory of the Legend. As early as 1864, he had entered in his notebook the sketch for an article "Socialism and Christianity"--never actually written--that in its content and phrasing anticipates the Grand Inquisitor's prophecy. The Papacy, he suggests there, is a dying force. But, he continues: "Prove that the Papacy has penetrated into the entire West much more deeply and completely than they think, that even the former reformations were a product of the Papacy, and Rousseau, and the French Revolution--a product of Western Christianity, and, finally, socialism with all its formalities and twigs--is a product of Catholic Christianity." Through its secular disguise--socialism--the Papacy will be restored, bearing openly the sword of Caesar rather than the keys of Peter, although the assumption of infallibility will remain the same: "The absolute logicality in the formation of the idea: that if the Pope is the spiritual ruler and if the church combines in itself the answers to everything and the keys to the future, then, consequently, to whom should everything be subordinated, if not to the Pope." (7) This conversion from sacred to secular domination posed no paradox for Dostoevsky, for the Church of Rome had always cared less for the souls of men and the Kingdom of Heaven than for men's political allegiance and earthly sway. Prince Myshkin again:

Roman Catholicism believes that the Church cannot exist on earth without universal temporal power, and cries: Non possumus! In my opinion, Roman Catholicism isn't even a religion, but most decidedly a continuation of the Holy Roman Empire, and everything in it is subordinate to...