The Grand Inquisitor is a chapter from Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Brothers Karamazov, often read as a standalone philosophical parable. In it, Ivan Karamazov recounts a prose poem in which Christ returns to Seville during the Spanish Inquisition and is arrested. The Grand Inquisitor then speaks about freedom, faith, miracle, mystery, and authority, inviting reflection on conscience and belief.
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Cover of the original edition (Project Gutenberg, public domain).
Text source: gutenberg.org · The work is in the public domain.
Opening of the book
THE GRAND INQUISITOR
By
Feodor Dostoevsky
(Translation by H.P. Blavatsky)
[Dedicated by the Translator to those sceptics who clamour so loudly, both in print and private letters—"Show us the wonderworking 'Brothers,' let them come out publicly—and we will believe in them!"]
[The following is an extract from M. Dostoevsky's celebrated novel,
The Brothers Karamazof, the last publication from the pen of the great
Russian novelist, who died a few months ago, just as the concluding chapters appeared in print. Dostoevsky is beginning to be recognized as one of the ablest and profoundest among Russian writers. His characters are invariably typical portraits drawn from various classes of Russian society, strikingly life-like and realistic to the highest degree. The following extract is a cutting satire on modern theology generally and the Roman Catholic religion in particular. The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the
Inquisition, and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand
Inquisitor. One of the three brothers of the story, Ivan, a rank materialist and an atheist of the new school, is supposed to throw this conception into the form of a poem, which he describes to Alyosha— the youngest of the brothers, a young Christian mystic brought up by a "saint" in a monastery—as follows: (—Ed. Theosophist, Nov., 1881)]
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