In any conventional sense, both compassion and freedom of conscience are intrinsically valuable commodities. Existentially, however, a strict hierarchy governs the relationship between these integral components of humanity. The Grand Inquisitor’s preference for compassion is revealed through his contempt for Christ’s actions: believing “peace and even death are dearer to man than free choice in the knowledge of good and evil.” Christ, the Inquisitor opined, was wrong to permit free choice among humans; rather, he should have exercised compassion by employing “miracle, mystery, and authority” to ameliorate “feeble rebels” from torment, the indissoluble corollary of freedom. By seizing what Christ rejected, the Church enslaved humanity on the pretext of saving it from the “turmoil, confusion, and unhappiness” inherent to freedom. Absurdly, the Inquisitor was existentially and wrong and categorically right in his judgment. Christ’s mute kiss, his final action before melting into the night encapsulates this eternal ambiguity.
Sartre argued that “man exists...and, only afterwards, defines himself.” Implicit in this claim is the assertion that freedom is a necessary condition for such definition; otherwise, existence could only follow the trajectory of an immutable essence. Freedom is paramount, for its presence permits humans to define themselves. Its absence, slavery, is merely exogenous definition. More saliently, however, is the notion that freedom begets compassion, whereas compassion isolated from freedom only emphasizes the chasm dividing them. The Inquisitor mandated solidarity for humans, believing “the need for universal union [to be] the third and last torment of men.” Unanimity is indeed required, but it emerges not from surrender or acquiescence, but from lucid rebellion against injustice and absurdity: “from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience.” Rebellion is the apotheosis of freedom, for it is always incipient – becoming and not being – and must therefore be launched and sustained from within. Albert Camus’s novel The Plague instantiates this idea: when Rieux and the other inhabitants of Oran recognized the first strains of disease, they did not surrender to the inevitable but instead rebelled against it. The conglomeration of parallel yet individual actions perpetually affirmed the union and dignity of free humans. Only by being free to choose could Rieux and his fellow citizens come together in union. Unfettered choice achieves solidarity without the intervention of an outsider, preaching compassion and wielding manacles. The Inquisitor’s erroneous assumption that humanity cannot endure freedom of conscience and his subsequent decision to enslave people in the name of compassion negated, in an existential sense, the ineffable value of freedom.
The Grand Inquisitor was right in claiming that by accepting the authority to rule, Christ “would have furnished all that man seeks on earth, that is: someone to bow down to...someone to take over his conscience, and a means for uniting everyone at last into a common...anthill.” Actually accepting the offer, on the other hand, is contrary to the fundamental principles of existentialism. Christ declined to accept the power of a celestial dictator because he ostensibly understood the importance of humanity’s ability to choose; the Inquisitor accepted the bargain because he believed humans too weak to tolerate the vagaries of freedom. His spurious argument for peace – humans “will no longer rebel or destroy each other, as in [Christ’s] freedom”– fails to consider that the authoritarian regime removed the ability to choose, and consequently the freedom to rebel. A Church in which membership is compulsory, irrevocable, and enforceable precludes self-awareness and self-definition, conditions derived from the freedom of conscience. In spite of the Inquisitor’s intransigent commitment to this ethic, Christ bestows him with a kiss. This gesture embodies the absurd foundation on which the Brothers Karamazov rests, for it is irreconcilably ambiguous; it is contradiction. Christ’s kiss, freely given, is the ultimate fusion of silent affirmation and pity, for the Inquisitor affirms his own freedom – of conscience and of action – by the act of denying it to others. He rebels against all those who would do so beside him.
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