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Senior Seminar: Dr. Leininger
29 February, 2008
Faithful Free Will
Voltaire’s Candide and Dostoevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor present the
reality of human suffering and feature characters who, like all human beings, attempt to
justify and hopefully alleviate that suffering. Through the satirical and non-complex
characters in Candide, Voltaire shows that each one has his or her own view of reality
and that true reality is the ability to recognize inadequacies of human conventions. He
illustrates that suffering is inevitable. In the story of the Grand Inquisitor from his book,
The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky presents the Inquisitor as a man who believes he
sees reality beyond simple human understanding. He desires to alleviate all suffering by
creating the ultimate human convention—controlling, religious autocracy. In this way,
both stories explore the conflict between free will and blind faith, implicitly concluding
that a balance of the human will and thoughtful faith can determine the effects of pain
that we suffer.
Many times throughout his book, Voltaire’s’ characters acknowledge the painful
human condition and mention its inevitability. As Candide continually experiences a
series of violent, depressing, and impossible events, he is influenced by an eternal
optimist, Pangloss, and a troubled character, Martin. Candide is on a journey to find the
balance between submitting his will completely to the opinions and actions of others, and
taking control of his own life through faith.
Pangloss’s influence instructs Candide to submit to the fate that all will be well,
that all events happen for a reason, so that reason must be good. Under these assumptions
Candide says, “There is no effect without a cause […] all events are linked by the chain
of necessity and arranged for the best” (Voltaire 6). That “cause” that Pangloss and
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Candide depend upon may be God, some power whose trustworthy plan should not be
questioned just because of suffering.
Martin has an opposing influence over Candide. He has resigned to the awful
nature of humanity and its unchanging quality. Martin says, “…as I survey this globe, or
globule rather, I think that God has abandoned it to some evil spirit…” (Voltaire 43-44).
He speaks of the earth as a “globule” as if it is a meaningless hunk of mass. Martin is
deeply stuck in his pessimism, feeling the world doomed to evil and destruction. Candide
asks Martin if “men have always massacred one another as they do? That they have
always been liars, traitors, ingrates, thieves […] hypocrites, and fools? (46). When Martin
replies that they have, that it is their nature just like animals, Candide says that there is a
difference between the two, “because freedom of the will…” (46). Rather than see any
meaning or reason for this, he attributes it to nature. However, Candide, though easily
influenced, senses that there is something more, free will, which exists between the
contrasting worlds that both of his mentors have presented to him.
In the end, Candide achieves a balance by accepting that he must exist between
spiritual faith and capriciousness through free will, when he says, “we must cultivate our
garden” (74). One must take control enough to recognize the dangers of living in blind
faith to spurious happiness and of living in overpowering hopelessness. It is not enough
to attribute cause and effect to a higher will, or to sink into despair of meaninglessness.
Voltaire illustrates this balance by giving precedence to freedom of the will and
thoughtful faith. He must create his own reality.
In Dostoevsky’s story of the Grand Inquisitor, Jesus returns to the people during
the Spanish Inquisition. His presence threatens the domineering progress of the Church
and He is imprisoned by the Grand Inquisitor. The Grand Inquisitor characterizes all that
disagrees with free will. He believes human beings incapable of making decisions, living
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in peace, or creating a faithful life without powerful imposition. He argues that the
freedom that Christ faithfully gave to human beings only destroys them because they
have no capability of handling personal power. He says “Freedom, free thought, and
science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels
and insoluble mysteries that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy
themselves” (Dostoevsky 34). The Grand Inquisitor, here, argues not only against
freedom of faith, but freedom of “science,” or education. He sees the tendency for
human beings to behave like sheep and so finds his tyrannical approach to be the most
effective way of saving humans from themselves.
The Grand Inquisitor appears to embody all the dangers of both Candide’s
influential mentors. He is similar to Panlgoss in that he advocates the human being’s
need to submit to the powers-at-be with blind faith. He resembles Martin because he
feels the world is arbitrarily doomed to chaos. The only way he can imagine avoiding
chaos and creating order is for him to take the power that Christ rejected, deny people
their freedom, and tell them how to live. Only then will human beings be content and
will peaceful existence be possible. When he took this power, he claims that, “men
rejoiced that they were again led like sheep and that the terrible gift that had brought
them such suffering was at last lifted from their hearts” (32). The Grand Inquisitor, who
is in essence, no better than confused, fearful human beings he wishes to save, justifies
his oppressive action by claiming he is providing happiness. There are indications that he
knows his method is not the truth. For instance, he says, “Oh, we shall persuade them
that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us”
(34). The Grand Inquisitor knows that his actions do not align with the religion under
whose guise he claims truth. He will have “to persuade,” and therefore alter all that
Christ represents.
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This extreme character creates a reality that from a Christian perspective seems
obviously misconstrued. The Grand Inquisitor preaches the voice of the nonbeliever and
of the power-seeker, who feels justified by the inevitable suffering that makes up the
human condition. When Jesus kisses the Grand Inquisitor, it is implied that it troubles
the cynical man. He is not satisfied with the path of power that he has chosen, knowing it
does not match the truth of Christ, which he cannot accept.
Both of these texts call us, the readers, to ask questions about the meaning and
nature of suffering. Why to human beings suffer? Will the suffering ever go away? Do
we have the power to lessen suffering? Both texts examine the fashions in which
characters attempt to answer these questions. They all discover that pain is inevitable and
that the will of humanity surely contributes to that pain. But if we begin to doubt the
freedom that God has entrusted to us, we may begin to look like Pangloss, who accepts
suffering as fate, or the Inquisitor, who feels humans cannot fight suffering themselves.
In these states of mind, we would doom ourselves to a vicious cycle of persecuting those
who are less powerful, disenfranchised, or different. In this way, we cannot depend upon
a God to do it all because the suffering will be accepted and continue.
The Christ gave humanity freedom and with that freedom comes responsibility.
We do not have complete power over the world and its events, but we have been given
freedom to choose how we view and respond to reality. Both Voltaire and Dostoevsky
present us with characters that skew the world to fit a reality that suits them. We often
attribute our realities and convictions to a God, neglecting the fact that they might be
incompatible to the true message of our faith. Dostoevsky’s Christ kisses The Grand
Inquisitor on the cheek, returning to him the responsibility of his own freedom (37),
saying to him, in this action, the same message that Candide gives to us, “we must
cultivate our own garden” (75)
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Works Cited
Dostoevsky. Fyodor. “The Grand Inquisitor.” Brothers Karamazov.
Voltaire. Candide. Trans. Robert M. Adams. 2nd ed. New York: Norton and Company,
1996.