The Grand Inquisitor, By Fyodor Dostoyevsky

889 Words2 Pages

In Frederick Nietzsche’s The Death of God, his madman cries, “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us?”(The Madman) To Nietzsche, the phrase "God is dead" is not to be take literally in the sense that he believed in an actual God who existed and then died. Rather, he is implying that the Christian God is no longer the go to for absolute moral principles. In a way, Nietzsche’s The Death of God is explaining that because people are starting to no longer believe in god, their morality isn't tied up in the idea of some imaginary being. It seems that Nietzsche's intended purpose was to do away with the traditional idea of “Christian” morality as he believed that because people were evolving to a place where they could create their own morality, God was unnecessary and irrelevant. …show more content…

In perhaps one of, if not the most famous chapters in the novel, "The Grand Inquisitor", Ivan tells Alyosha a poem that describes a leader from the Spanish Inquisition and his encounter with Jesus, who has made his return to earth. This Grand Inquisitor rejects Jesus and throws him in jail exclaiming: Why hast Thou come now to hinder us? For Thou hast come to hinder us, and Thou knowest that... We are working not with Thee but with him [Satan]... We took from him what Thou didst reject with scorn, that last gift he offered Thee, showing Thee all the kingdoms of the earth. We took from him Rome and the sword of Caesar, and proclaimed ourselves sole rulers of the earth... We shall triumph and shall be Caesars, and then we shall plan the universal happiness of

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