Would people rather be given happiness than freedom? Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor

In Dostoevsky's story, the aged Grand Inquisitor says yes: people, he claims, would rather be handed happiness than carry the weight of freedom. But it is a character speaking, and Dostoevsky wrote a later part of the novel to answer him. The tale is called 'The Grand Inquisitor', and it sits inside Dostoevsky's 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov.

The setting is odd and vivid. Ivan Karamazov recites the story to his brother Alyosha, a novice monk, in a conversation about whether a personal and benevolent God is possible. In Ivan's tale, Christ returns to Seville during the Inquisition. The crowd adores him, and Inquisition leaders arrest him and sentence him to be burnt the next day.

That night the aged Grand Inquisitor visits him in his cell and delivers a long speech while Christ stays silent. His complaint is that Christ gave people freedom, and he does not believe the vast majority of humanity can tolerate it. In his view people will always follow whoever feeds them and can work miracles. The Church, he says, will relieve them of the great anxiety and torment of free and individual decision, and they will accept its decisions with joy. Under his rule all mankind will live and die happily in ignorance.

Christ answers with no words at all. He kisses the Inquisitor on his bloodless, aged lips. The old man releases him but tells him never to return.

So is it Dostoevsky's own view? No. He meant the legend to unmask the idea behind the Russian movement toward atheism, nihilism, rationalism and materialism, and he wrote a later part of the novel, with the teachings of the Elder Zosima, as a refutation. Still, the poem is arguably among the best-known passages in modern literature for its ideas about freedom, power and authority, and for its ambiguity. Philosopher Charles Guignon says Ivan became an icon of existentialist rebellion for Camus and Sartre.