In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s dark parable, “The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor”, Jesus returns to Earth amid the Spanish Inquisition and performs smalls miracles – curing an old man of blindness, resurrecting a young girl from the dead – as hundreds of heretics are burned alive. While crowds gather at Jesus’s feet, the town’s grand inquisitor, an elderly cardinal overseeing the violence, is unimpressed, and has Jesus locked up in a prison cell where he chastises the holy prisoner for his sins.
According to the grand inquisitor, God is guilty: he has left humans to flail in the unhappiness of their own freedom, when what they really crave is bread and “someone to worship”. The brave and benevolent inquisitor has taken matters into his own hands, “correcting” God’s creation while deceiving the masses that he is merely enacting His divine will. Jesus’s untimely return merely complicates matters, undermining the grand inquisitor’s authority and utopian ambitions, and so the aged man declares that he will have Jesus burned at the stake. “Tomorrow you will see the obedient flock,” he says, “which at the first nod of my head will rush to rake up the hot embers of the bonfire on which I am going to burn you for having come to get in our way.”
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