Thus, he implies that Jesus, in giving humans freedom to choose, has excluded the majority of humanity from redemption and doomed it to suffer. Despite declaring the Inquisitor to be an atheist, Ivan also implies that the Inquisitor and the Church follow “the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction,” i.e. the Devil, Satan, for he, through compulsion, provided the tools to end all human suffering and unite under the banner of the Church. The multitude then is guided through the Church by the few who are strong enough to take on the burden of freedom. The Inquisitor says that under him, all mankind will live and die happily in ignorance. Though he leads them only to “death and destruction,” they will be happy along the way. The Inquisitor will be a self-martyr, spending his life to keep choice from humanity. He states that “Anyone who can appease a man’s conscience can take his freedom away from him.” |
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