Also known as the Inquisitor, the old Inquisitor, your Inquisitor, my old Inquisitor.
The Grand Inquisitor is the prose poem Ivan offers after his argument about innocent suffering. He tells Alyosha that he made it up about a year earlier and has remembered it rather than written it down. At this horizon, it is a prepared imaginative answer to Alyosha's appeal to Christ.
V-V. The Grand Inquisitor
Ivan tells the poem: Christ appears in sixteenth-century Seville and is arrested by an aged cardinal of the Inquisition. The old man accuses Him of giving humanity the unbearable burden of freedom and claims the Church has corrected His work through miracle, mystery, and authority.
V-V. The Grand Inquisitor
The poem ends when the silent Prisoner kisses the Inquisitor, who lets Him go into the dark alleys while keeping his own idea. Alyosha answers Ivan with a kiss of his own, making the poem part of the brothers' farewell.
XI-IX. The Devil. Ivan’s Nightmare
Ivan's nightmare visitor brings up The Grand Inquisitor to shame him with his old literary and philosophical self. The poem returns as evidence of the ideas Ivan no longer controls.
This entry is sealed. You have not yet read far enough to open it.
