Albrecht Dürer. St. Paul, The Four Holy Men (detail),1526. Alte Pinakothek, Munich
On the subject of Fyodor Dostoyevsky versus the Grand Inquisitor in Seville. There is an amsuing and revealing quote in the interview Savoj Zizek gave to Ian Parker in 2003 (pdf):
“I remember when I was young I found Dostoyevsky always boring but I heard about and basically went to the Grand Inquisitor in Karamazov Brothers. Even now I’m on the side of the Grand Inquisitor you know, which is why my hero is St Paul. He is totally disinterested in Christ as a person. You find almost none of this, Christ did that miracle, he did this, and this doesn’t bother St Paul. It’s only, Christ died, he arrives, and ok that was the event, now lets build the party and so on. Point two; he is external to the event. With the other apostles meeting, lets say in, 43, ten years after crucifixion, you can imagine then this nostalgic moment of having dinner, ‘do you remember how Christ asked me to pass him the salt’ ten years ago. None of that with St Paul, he is external, external, and this is why I’m with St Paul.”
Of course this is cute, but Zizek’s logic is flawed. Being external to an event allows you to created a myth that is far more powerful than a witness could ever produce. If you doubt this just ask a family member of a holy man near you (the man with the personal access to Christ must have been Judah). And Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was certainly not external, he was connected to Christ intensely. The horror that Dostoyevsky describes is that the Grand Inquisitor personifies Christ’s ethos, he becomes more “Christian” than the Christ himself and takes the Anno Domini to it’s tragic conclusion.
The image published with permission from the Web Gallery of Art