Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition! (Notes on Dostoevsky's The Grand Inquisitor)

 

The Spanish Inquisition Monty Python style: Cardinal Ximénez (Michael Palin), 

Cardinal Biggles (Terry Jones) and Cardinal Fang (Terry Gilliam)  

 

 

I. 

 

I have to admit that until very recently my knowledge of the Spanish Inquisition was largely shaped by a famous Monty Python sketch [1] which, when I was a child, I found frightening rather than funny: I think it was the red robes that scared me, although I was from a very early age highly sensitive to any display of religiosity and resistant to the idea of attending Sunday school.   

 

Having just read Dostoevsky's tale of the Grand Inquisitor, however - and having studied the history of the Spanish Inquisition in a little more detail - I now fully appreciate that it was no laughing matter for the thousands of people who were terrified, tortured, and killed and that I was right to childishly sense something sinister and malevolent about priests of every description.   

 

 

II.  

  

The Inquisition was originally established in 1231 by Pope Gregory IX, in an attempt to combat the spread of heresy; i.e., beliefs or opinions contrary to the established teachings of the Church. God may have given mankind free will, but make the wrong choice and you will be judged and punished accordingly. 

 

Inquisitors were allowed to investigate anyone, even on the slightest suspicion of wrongthink - regardless of whether there was or was not sufficient evidence to warrant an investigation - and those accused of heresy were not allowed to challenge their accusers. Cruel and ingenious methods of torture were often used in order to extract confessions of guilt.

 

The Spanish Inquisition, established by Pope Sixtus IV in 1478, was an early-modern revival of a medieval institution that had largely become irrelevant. D. H. Lawrence describes it as a "new fangled thing, peculiar to Spain, with her curious death-lust and her bullying; and, strictly, a Spanish-political instrument" [2] - i.e., both rabidly national in character and diabolic.  

 

Monarchs Ferdinand II and Isabella I were determined to maintain Spain as a devoutly Catholic country and the Inquisition operated more under royal control than papal authority, primarily targeting Jewish and Muslim converts to Christianity who were suspected of secretly practicing their former faiths [3], although it later gleefully targeted Protestants as a new type of heretic [4]. 

 

Under the first Inquisitor Generalis, Tomás de Torquemada, prosecutions rapidly expanded throughout Spain and the areas it controlled and more than 2,000 accused individuals were burnt at the stake as an auto da fé. The name Torquemada is now rightly associated with religious intolerance and fanaticism [5]. 

 

All in all, it has been estimated that 150,000 people were prosecuted by the Inquisition and of these, perhaps as many as 5,000 were executed. Others were either flogged in public, enslaved on ships, forced into exile, or imprisoned (sometimes for life). Any properties belonging to these poor souls were, of course, confiscated by the State (nudge, nudge, wink, wink - say no more).  

 

 

III. 

 

While history records the bureaucratic greed and physical cruelty of the real inquisitors, it took a novelist to lay bare the disturbing, inverted logic driving the institution's zeal. 

 

In Dostoevsky's 'The Grand Inquisitor' [6], Jesus himself has finally returned and is brought before the Inquisition in Seville, where the Grand Inquisitor defends the following crucial argument: only by adopting the principles of the Devil - not the Gospels - can the Catholic Church bring about mankind's unification. 

 

Thus, the Church no longer has any need for Jesus: We are not with Thee, but with him, and that is our secret! 

 

The Grand Inquisitor also informs Jesus he was fundamentally mistaken - that he should have given in to temptation - which, you have to admit, is a terrifically provocative and amusing idea and one which D. H. Lawrence not only picks up on, but ultimately endorses.   

 

 

IV.

 

In his younger days, when he first read Dostoevsky's story of the Grand Inquisitor, Lawrence was not impressed. It seemed to him rubbish: "just a piece of showing-off: a display of cynical-satanical pose which was simply irritating" [7].

 

But by the end of his life, Lawrence is able to admit that its central argument is depressingly true and it makes his heart sink: "I still see a trifle of cynical-satanical showing-off. But under that, I hear the final and unanswerable criticism of Christ [...] borne out by the long experience of humanity" [8]. 

 

Any thoughtful and naturally questioning person who thinks the story of Christ (and what becomes known as Christianity) through to the bitter end will, according to Lawrence, come to the same conclusion: Jesus was a kind of идиот whose teachings were inadequate and a fatal misunderstanding of the nature (and limits) of man. 

 

Ultimately, man doesn't want freedom (or even salvation), he demands rather miracle, mystery, and an authority to whom he must submit. Only a very rare few can live without these things and enjoy individual sovereignty. Jesus either couldn't or wouldn't see this and via his ideal teaching he makes "demands greater than the nature of man can bear" [9]. 

 

Thus, if you want to establish a Christian Church and State, you're going to have to turn to "that other great Spirit" [10] who loves man for what he is and not for what he ought to be: Satan. Dostoevsky is a marvellous visionary, but he is also a thinker of evil (which is at last merely a term for vivid life) and his diagnosis of human nature "is simple and unanswerable" [11]. 

 

What this means, then, is that Jesus should have been a little more Wildean and given in to temptation. Lawrence writes: "Jesus refused the three offers out of pride and fear: he wanted to be greater than these, and 'above' them. But we now realise that no man, not even Jesus, is really 'above' miracle, mystery, and authority." [12] 

 

And Jesus cannot be above money either: it cannot simply be rendered unto Caesar or left to the Devil: 

 

"Money is not life, it is true. But ignoring money and leaving it to the devil means handing over the great mass of men to the devil: for the mass of men cannot distinguish between money and life. It is hard to believe: certainly Jesus didn't believe it: and yet, as Dostoevsky and the Inquisitor point out, it is so." [13] 

 

So, where does this all leave us: must we too side with the Devil? 

 

Readers can decide that for themselves, but Lawrence suggests it may be possible to borrow certain things from the Devil without actually serving him or selling our souls. 

 

However, I'm a bit sceptical about that, although, unlike Lawrence, I don't worry about being seen as - what was the phrase he used to condemn Dostoevsky - cynical satanic and, push comes to shove, I'm sympathetic with the Devil and would always side with the anti-Christ, whatever the cost of so doing [14].   

 

 

 

A 1948 edition featuring wood engravings 

by Fritz Eichenberg  

 

  

Notes

 

[1] Written by Michael Palin and Terry Jones, this satirical (and unexpected) reimagining of the Spanish Inquisition became a running gag in the classic British sketch show Monty Python's Flying Circus. It first featured in the second episode of series two, broadcast on BBC1 on 22 September 1970. The catchphrase - 'Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!' - is now ingrained in the cultural imagination and lives on as an internet meme. 

      For those who wish to view the first sketch, please click here. I still don't find it funny, but no longer find it frightening either. 

 

[2] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Grand Inquisitor, by F. M. Dostoevsky', Introductions and Reviews, ed. N. H. Reeve and John Worthen (Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 131.

 

[3] The regulation of faith intensified following royal decrees issued in 1492 and 1502 ordering Jews and Muslims to either convert to Catholicism, go into exile, or face death. Hundreds of thousands of forced conversions, mass expulsions, and executions all resulted.

 

[4] The Inquisition wasn't only interested in identifying what we might think of as common or garden heretics; witches, sodomites, and Freemasons were also targeted. 

 

[5] Torquemada died in 1498 and was interred in the monastery to which he had semi-retired. His tomb was ransacked in 1832 - just two years before the Spanish Inquisition was finally disbanded - and his remains were allegedly stolen and ritually incinerated.

 

[6] 'The Grand Inquisitor' is a story contained within Fyodor Dostoevsky's philosophical novel The Brothers Karamazov (1880). It was first translated into English by Constance Garnett in 1912 (published by Heinemann).

 

[7] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to The Grand Inquisitor, by F. M. Dostoevsky', Introductions and Reviews, p. 127. 

 

[8] Ibid. 

 

[9] Ibid., p. 128. 

 

[10] Ibid. p. 129. 

 

[11] Ibid. 

 

[12] Ibid., p. 130. 

 

[13] Ibid. 

 

[14] Funnily enough, in a letter to Else Jaffe written in June 1929, Lawrence concedes to his sister-in-law that she is right, in a sense, to see him as siding with the anti-Christ, and a touch Satanisch (although he is not anti-life): "I am all for Lucifer, who is really the Morning Star." 

      See The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Keith Sagar and James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 331-332.