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Konson, G. R. The Grand Inquisitor as the Ideologist of Murder Supported by the Catholic Church

Abstract: The subject under review is the ideology of the Grand Inquisitor, the main character of The Great Inquisitor story told by Ivan Karamazov. In this story the elderly Jesuit criticizes Jesus’ self-sacrifice for the sake of the freedom of humanity and offers the only alternative to the concept of state power and violence that came after Christ’s teaching. This alternative, in fact, deifies the three powers: authority, miracle and mystery. The approach chosen by the author of the article allows to specify peculiarities of Dostoevsky’s fundamental concept of the image of the Grand Inquisitor that involves meta-demonization of the Grand Inquisitor’s image. The research method used by the author integrates a few types of analysis including ethical and philosophical analysis, psychological analysis, literary analysis and comparative analysis. Combination of these methods allows to recode the demoniac symbols in the image of the Catholic power. The scientific novelty of the research is in the author’s philosopheme according to which the Grand Inquisitor, on one hand, is like a devil hunting for human souls but, on the other hand, he differs from the devil because in his dreams about the unlimited power he without any remorse sees a global ‘happy’ society where Jesus Christ was not needed. This is the cynicism of the universal level and this is why the Jesuit is even more dangerous than the devil because the former represent the all-destroying Ahrimanic power. As a result of his research, the author concludes that the Grand Inquisitor represent the phenomenon of catastrophism because for an Orthodox person religion without Christ is a nonsense and absurdity. For Russia the image of God has always been the measure of spirituality and moral purity.


Keywords:

God, Christ, church, Catholicism, the Grand Inquisitor, human, devil, temptation, freedom, religion and moral, authority, mystery, power and violence.


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