Ivan stopped. He was flushed from speaking, and from speaking with such enthusiasm; but when he finished, he suddenly smiled.
Alyosha, who all the while had listened to him silently, though towards the end, in great agitation, he had started many times to interrupt his brother’s speech but obviously restrained himself, suddenly spoke as if tearing himself loose.
“But ... that’s absurd!” he cried, blushing. “Your poem praises Jesus, it doesn’t revile him ... as you meant it to. And who will believe you about freedom? Is that, is that any way to understand it? It’s a far cry from the Orthodox idea ... It’s Rome, and not even the whole of Rome, that isn’t true— they’re the worst of Catholicism, the Inquisitors, the Jesuits...! But there could not even possibly be such a fantastic person as your Inquisitor. What sins do they take on themselves? Who are these bearers of the mystery who took some sort of curse upon themselves for men’s happiness? Has anyone ever seen them? We know the Jesuits, bad things are said about them, but are they what you have there? They’re not that, not that at all ... They’re simply a Roman army, for a future universal earthly kingdom, with the emperor— the pontiff of Rome—at their head ... that’s their ideal, but without any mysteries or lofty sadness ... Simply the lust for power, for filthy earthly lucre,[179] enslavement ... a sort of future serfdom with them as the landowners .. . that’s all they have. Maybe they don’t even believe in God. Your suffering Inquisitor is only a fantasy ...”
“But wait, wait,” Ivan was laughing, “don’t get so excited. A fantasy, you say? Let it be. Of course it’s a fantasy. But still, let me ask: do you really think that this whole Catholic movement of the past few centuries is really nothing but the lust for power only for the sake of filthy lucre? Did Father Paissy teach you that?”
“No, no, on the contrary, Father Paissy once even said something like what you ... but not like that, of course, not at all like that,” Alyosha suddenly recollected himself.
“A precious bit of information, however, despite your ‘not at all like that.’ I ask you specifically: why should your Jesuits and Inquisitors have joined together only for material wicked lucre? Why can’t there happen to be among them at least one sufferer who is tormented by great sadness and loves mankind? Look, suppose that one among all those who desire only material and filthy lucre, that one of them, at least, is like my old Inquisitor, who himself ate roots in the desert and raved, overcoming his flesh, in order to make himself free and perfect, but who still loved mankind all his life, and suddenly opened his eyes and saw that there is no great moral blessedness in achieving perfection of the will only to become convinced, at the same time, that millions of the rest of God’s creatures have been set up only for mockery, that they will never be strong enough to manage their freedom, that from such pitiful rebels will never come giants to complete the tower, that it was not for such geese that the great idealist had his dream of harmony. Having understood all that, he returned and joined ... the intelligent people. Couldn’t this have happened?”
“Whom did he join? What intelligent people?” Alyosha exclaimed, almost passionately. “They are not so very intelligent, nor do they have any great mysteries and secrets ... Except maybe for godlessness, that’s their whole secret. Your Inquisitor doesn’t believe in God, that’s his whole secret!”
