Notions of Revenge in Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor

It is difficult to find the notion of revenge in Chapter III of Book V of Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, let alone a discussion of its justification (or lack thereof). The subject becomes more pronounced in Chapter IV, but even here it does so in an indirect way, as a derivative of Ivan's argument for the nonexistence of God - at least the type of God that Christians worship. This is an important distinction - Ivan is not an atheist, to which he confesses in Chapter III: "... I accept God and am glad to, and what's more, I accept His wisdom, His purpose - which are utterly beyond our ken..." (p. 295). However, he does not believe that God of Christian faith could have created the world in which he and his contemporaries live: "... in the final result I don't accept this world of God's, and, although I know it exists, I don't accept it at all." Ivan argues that God could not have created a world in which innocents are made to suffer - and he gives plenty of horrifyingly vivid examples of such suffering taking place.

It is not in Ivan's narrative but rather in his brother Alyosha's instinctive, knee-jerk reactions to it that the notion of taking revenge for justifiable reasons first appears at this particular place in the story. Before Ivan embarks on his argument in Chapter IV, Alyosha, a novice in a religious order, espouses the Christian doctrine of love, mercy, and self-sacrifice. However, as Ivan rolls out one harrowing story of child abuse and infanticide after another, Alyosha is finally shocked into a vengeful reaction; when Ivan asks him what is to be done with a sadistic aristocratic landowner who orders his hounds to attack an eight-year-old boy for a petty indiscretion, Alyosha blurts out that the man must be shot. He catches himself immediately and tries to backtrack, saying that what he said was "absurd," but the fact remains - and Ivan develops it further - that a monk is, in the end, just human and as such tends to feel - even if not, perhaps, to believe - that under certain circumstances, revenge is indeed justified.

Having drawn Alyosha out this way, however, Ivan takes the argument onto a different track. It appears that to him, revenge is just as senseless as the act of initial violence because it does nothing to bring things in the balance, to achieve the ultimate "harmony." To accept Ivan's argument, punishment in human interactions does not exist - only revenge does. Humans might call an act of retribution punishment, but it is not so because it does not bring "harmony" back to the world. True, a sinner, a transgressor might suffer as a subject of retribution, but it does not take away from the fact that the child has already suffered - it does nothing to preclude or alleviate such suffering. The balance may be achieved when both the transgressor and the victim are adults - as Ivan puts it, "I understand solidarity in sin among men. I understand solidarity in retribution, too..." (p. 307). Even in this case, however, an act of retribution cannot be considered true punishment because in the end it is performed for no reason other than "the satisfaction of our moral feelings" (p. 305).

True punishment, therefore, is reserved for God's judgment, an act in which a person's entire life is evaluated in the balance of good and evil things he or she has done. As such, according to Ivan, punishment is a concept that humans, living within the highly finite, almost immediate, "Euclidian" limitations of their three-dimensional world, are incapable of comprehending. True, humans generally possess an understanding of the moral concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, but it is against their nature to consider an act of retribution as some far-removed act of true punishment bringing "balance" back into the universe. The human mind comprehends retribution only in the chronological immediacy that allows this act to be classified only as revenge, not punishment.

Equally incomprehensible to humans is the notion of forgiveness of the transgressor by the victim. Once again, this is the province of divine authority, and even if such only achievable, supposedly, at the time of the Final Judgment. For a sensible, reasonable human being - as Ivan can be considered to be - even the realization of the ultimate possibility of such an occurrence is not enough. The reason for it is not hard to find; even a person of strong faith, like Alyosha, for example, feels that some acts are too evil to be simply forgiven (hence his reaction to a story of an eight-year-old boy being torn apart by the hounds of his landlord). If such forgiveness is indeed to take place, the only way to believe it is to see it with one's own eyes. As Ivan puts it, "I must have justice, or I will destroy myself. And not justice in some remote infinite time and space, but here on earth, and that I could see myself... I want to see it, and if I am dead by then, let me rise again, for if it all happens without me, it will be too unfair" (pp. 306-307).

Can the creation of this kind of the world, the one in which innocents suffer, be considered an act of God's transgression upon humanity? While Ivan's "poem in prose" in Chapter V is not entirely relatable, it can be argued that the Grand Inquisitor's decision to burn Christ at the stake after His second coming is an act of revenge for His betrayal of humanity. Christ - and through him, God - has given the world a dysfunctional system of social interaction. Specifically, Christ offered people freedom of choice - something that the human mind, in its finiteness, is incapable of utilizing. By giving people freedom, Christ took away their sense of direction and their feeling of internal and external security. In the view of the Grand Inquisitor, Christ has committed the most irresponsible act - he relinquished the responsibility to lead, to provide, and to reassure.

Could the Grand Inquisitor's act then be considered punishment rather than revenge? Based on the above-mentioned concept, it cannot; the burning at the stake is an act of immediacy characteristic of human revenge.