Satan Tempts Jesus in the Wilderness

In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus goes into the wilderness on an extended retreat of fasting and prayer, and while he’s there, Satan appears to him and delivers three challenges:

Challenge 1: Perform a miracle. “And the tempter came and said to him, ‘If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.’”

But Jesus refuses to perform a miracle.

Challenge 2: Prove you are the son of God. “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down; for it is written, ‘He will give his angels charge of you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, less you strike your foot against a stone.’”

But Jesus refuses to prove he is the son of God.

Challenge 3: Worship me and be king of the World. “Again, the devil took Him to a very high mountain, and showed Him all the kingdoms of the world and the glory of them; and he said to Him, ‘All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.’”

But Jesus rejects the offer.

The Grand Inquisitor wants to relitigate that night. The Inquisitor believes that, in those three challenges, Satan gave Jesus the opportunity to save humanity from needless suffering.

“Judge thyself who was right!” the Grand Inquisitor says to Jesus, “Thee or he who questioned Thee when?”

When Jesus refused the challenges, the Inquistor argues, he squandered an opportunity to purge suffering from the world.

In Dostoevsky’s view, when Jesus turned Satan away three times, he forced humanity to bear the burden of spiritual freedom, of choosing to believe or not to believe, and spiritual freedom is central to Dostoevsky’s view of God, man, and faith.

The Grand Inquisitor, however, looks at the idea of spiritual freedom, and condemns it. For him, freedom is a burden that most humans are simply unable to shoulder.

“Freedom, free thought and science, will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves,” the Inquisitor says. “Others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet.”

If the Inquisitor is starting to sound to you like a harbinger of 20th century totalitarian regimes, you’re not alone. Many critics recognize that The Grand Inquisitor seems to predict the horrors of Communism, Fascism, and Nazism.

“Receiving bread from us, they will see clearly that we take the bread made by their hands from them, to give it to them, without any miracle. They will see that we do not change the stones to bread, but in truth they will be more thankful for taking it from our hands than for the bread itself! For they will remember only too well that in old days, without our help, even the bread they made turned to stones in their hands.”

One of the amazing things about The Grand Inquisitor is that it was so prescient about where much of the world was headed, even though predicting the future wasn’t the poem’s purpose.

The purpose of The Grand Inquisitor is for Ivan to lay out a well-defined social ethic that challenges Alyosha’s spiritual worldview.

That ethic is the one Ivan argued earlier in the novel when he made the case for Ecclesiastical Courts.

“They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song.”

The Grand Inquisitor sounds at times like a megalomaniac, but his motives are pure, at least in his own mind. His aim is to relieve human suffering.

“In his old age he reached the clear conviction that nothing but the advice of the great dread spirit could build up any tolerable sort of life for the feeble, unruly incomplete empirical creatures created in jest.”

Dostoevsky recognizes that only the emotionally strong can embark on a life of faith like Zosima and Alyosha do. Ivan recognizes it too, but while Dostoevesky believes the spiritual freedom to choose or not choose a life of virtue is primary, he creates Ivan to believe that spiritual freedom is too heavy a burden for the masses to bear.

Ivan would have the strongest among us bear the burden of freedom for all of us. In his speech, The Grand Inquisitor presents himself as the strongest of all, ready to suffer for all:

“I too have been in the wilderness, I too have lived on roots and locusts, I too prized the freedom with which Thou hast blessed men, and I too was striving to stand among Thy elect, among the strong and powerful, thirsting “to make up the number.” But I awakened and would not serve madness. I turned back and joined the ranks of those who have corrected Thy work. I left the proud and went back to the humble, for the happiness of the humble.”

The Grand Inquisitor is Ivan’s rationalization, and Dostoevsky’s condemnation, of any institution that would take away an individual’s spiritual freedom in order to create a world with less suffering. It is a devout Russian Orthodox criticizing the history of the Catholic Church in Europe, and also a former Russian radical speaking to the radicals who came after him. It is a warning from Dostoevsky to all the would-be social reformers at work in Russia and throughout the world in the 19th Century, the idealists who strove to create new social systems to replace the old monarchies.

Dostoevsky is telling all of them that institutions and social structures don’t matter if the hearts of the people they serve aren’t free. He is telling us that the creation of a better world doesn’t happen at the level of government and institutions; it happens one human heart at a time.

In The Grand Inquistiory, Dostoevsky allows Ivan to dig a theological hole for himself, one that shows the problems of putting social systems before individual virtue. It’s a theme Dostoevsky revisits many times in Brothers Karamazov. The idea that before you can decide the best way to structure the societies in which people live, you need to be clear on what everyone is living for. Any would be reformer who places material wealth, security, and comfort ahead of spiritual freedom is acting as The Grand Inquisitor in the poem, which is to say, is acting as a tormentor and interrogator of Christ himself. Spiritual freedom, Dostoevsky tells us, is an immense burden, humanity’s greatest, but any attempt on our part to alleviate that burden, even one motivated by sympathy for the suffering, is not only wrong, but is in defiance of God.

Dostoevsky believes the entirety of a life’s work for the ethical man comes in exercising his spiritual freedom, every day, in every moment, to choose the difficult life of virtue over the easy life of worldly comfort.