"The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor": The Suppression of the Second Temptation and Dialogue with God

Malcolm V. Jones, University of Nottingham

I attempted in the paper I gave to the Fifth International Dostoevsky Symposium to show how the relationships between similar episodes in various texts by Dostoevsky and his precursors (principally Rousseau) could be likened to the party game of Chinese Whispers, in which a message is whispered from one person to another and emerges in distorted but usually coherent form - a form which can only be traced back to source if one possesses privileged information, is lucky in discovering textual evidence, or is prepared to speculate freely about the intermediate links in the chain.(1) I attempted there to elaborate the positive side of the metaphor, concentrating on what was remembered and reworked. There is also a negative side: that of forgetting, suppression, or what Frank Kermode in The Genesis of Secrecy (2) calls deafness. It is deafness or suppression in this sense that I wish to discuss here, and the erection of the misheard into a dogma in its own right, with special reference to the "Legend" .

It might be argued in detail that, full though the text of The Brother's Karamazov is of Biblical references, it has become deaf to the essential kerygma of the New Testament, and that only by exposing successive distortions can one trace its religious discourse to its presumed source in the heart of the Christian Gospel. Time and space will not permit such an ambitious venture here, so I shall have to adopt more modest goals.

Of course, it is one of the characteristic features of The Brothers Karamazov that it may be punctuated (interpreted) variously by the reader to yield readings as dissimilar as Camus' and Berdyayev's, based on a poetics of atheism or a Christian poetics. As Bakhtin has led the way in showing, it is not possible to adjudicate between contending readings by showing one to be true and all the rest to be false. Although some readings are more plausible than others, the invitation to diverse strong readings is of the very nature of Dostoevskian discourse and each of them is vulnerable on close scrutiny to deconstruction.

Yet an entirely relativistic viewpoint remains unsatisfactory. No-one is likely to deny that the ultimate source of religious discourse in the novel - behind the Church Fathers, medieval Christian texts, the echoes of heresies and gnosticism, modern re-readings and so on - is the tradition of the New Testament, or that a variety of Christian readings can be given, taking one's cue, perhaps, from the epigraph, or from 2 Thessalonians 2, 3-12 (of which more will be said below).

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The question therefore is not so much: "Can the novel be given a comprehensive and consistent Christian reading?" (allowing of course for the existence of non-Christian and heretical views within it) as "What is the status of a post-Christian reading which has, by a process of cumulative suppression, produced within the text an entirely incompatible ideology, which may offer a similarly comprehensive account?"

The thesis of this paper is that whereas quite elaborate Christian readings are undoubtedly possible, they are subject to subversion by quite opposite views, the seeds of this subversion are to be found in Dostoevsky's own text and to attempt to choose decisively between them is to appeal to a metaphysics of presence in a context in which such an appeal is manifestly inappropriate. Even the religious discourse within the novel only indicates signposts or gives directions towards "living life" which is constantly deferred. It does not take its stand there.

As a substitute for the more exhaustive treatment the subject deserves and which I hope to give it elsewhere, I want to focus here on what a post-structuralist might call a moment of deconstructive reversal, and (without however relying on deconstructionist terminology or conceptions) identify the particular suppressions in the text which bring it about.

In view of the importance which Dostoevsky attached to "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor" it is not surprising that a crucial moment of reversal is to be found there.

Bakhtin has tantalizingly said that authoritative discourse and internally persuasive discourse are sometimes, though rarely, found in unity. (3) Had he developed a theology (which some think would have been in character with his religious interests and others regard as incompatible with his Marxist materialism) there can be no doubt that he would have found this convergence in the person of the Jesus of the Gospels and would inevitably have made great play with the theology of the Gospel of St. John ("In the beginning was the Word"), as well no doubt as with the materiality of the Christian Gospel, and with the image of the Galilean prophet living in a world of familiar contacts who subjects the official world of Judaism to a series of carnival reversals. A Bakhtinian way of describing Jesus's mission would be to say that it was to make the authoritative word of God as revealed in the Old Testament inwardly persuasive, without denying the fiat of the Old.

To some this thesis will need to be argued in detail to have any credibility. To others it will be so self-evident as to require no demonstration at all, and for want of space I shall have to let members of the latter group carry the day.

Let us leave at this point the question of how Bakhtin might read the story of the Temptations, by noting simply that whereas Satan's purpose seems to be to tempt Jesus to attain his Messianic ends by false means, by employing "miracle,

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mystery and authority" (which is the thrust of the Grand Inquisitor's reading too and of that of most of his interpreters), Jesus's replies emphasise another implication, that of "failing in the radical obedience to God that is the duty of every human soul" as it has recently been put by a Canadian theologian (Francis Wright Beare).(4) The Jesus of the Gospels does not take up the points of the Grand Inquisitor in Ivan's poem, though they are implicit in Satan's questions. He does not try to defend or justify some specious and burdensome doctrine of freedom. In each case his responses are prefaced by the words "It is written", quote Scripture, and refer not to his impact on men's imagination, but to his personal relationship with God. Both Matthew's and Luke's accounts of the Temptations(5) potentially involve a tripartite dialogue, in which Satan is attempting not simply to win Jesus's allegiance but more importantly to seduce him away from his allegiance to God. Jesus's replies read, if run together,

"It is written, 'Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God'" (...) "Again it is written 'You shall not tempt the lord your God.'" (...) "Begone Satan! for it is written 'You shall worship the Lord your God and him only shall you serve.'"

The Grand Inquisitor, as Sandoz remarks in his book Political Apocalypse (6) suppresses Jesus's replies, or to be more exact, since he quotes the beginning of Jesus's reply to the first temptation, he suppresses reference in them to Jesus's relationship with God, and specifically to a relationship based upon God's authoritative word.

The Grand Inquisitor demonstrably and radically misconstrues the Biblical text in this respect - with results which are entirely consistent with the nature of the misconstruction - and on the surface he seems entirely unaware of it, since he has built a whole ideology and a lifetime's strenuous endeavour on the misconstruction. The gospel which the Inquisitor claims he has "corrected" has, it seems, already been corrected before by an original suppression. His response to Jesus in in the "Legend" is the result of a double suppression, each part of which facilitates the next step: in the first act of suppression he had rewritten the Gospel narrative to suppress God; in the second he accuses Jesus of imposing too great a burden on man for him to bear alone (i.e., without God). There is no doubt about the consequences of this double suppression: we can observe them in detail.

Theologically, as numerous commentators have observed, the Grand Inquisitor suppresses Divine Grace; he suppresses the authority of God underlying Jesus's inwardly persuasive discourse and he translates Jesus's discourse into an authoritative (i.e., in this case, dead) voice which, according to him, needs to be abandoned and corrected.

Personally, within the narrated dialogue, he forbids Jesus to modify his Word (as he, the Grand Inquisitor, has inter preted it) i.e., he forbids him to remind him of the dimension he has suppressed.

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Textually, he suppresses the greater part of Jesus's replies to Satan (and with them the authoritative discourse of Holy Writ, made inwardly persuasive through Jesus).

In this respect the partial suppression of the Second Temptation (in which Jesus is tempted to leap from the pinnacle of the Temple) is of particular importance and follows logically, because it is the Second Temptation which lays most emphasis on an emotional relationship with God. In the view of Satan in the Gospel narrative, the success of the first temptation is to be guaranteed by Jesus's power as a wonder-worker; the success of the third is to be guaranteed by Satan himself. The success of the second, however, depends on God's own intervention to save his misguided son.

The Grand Inquisitor assimilates the Second Temptation partly to the wish to impress people by miracle. He also comments on the objection that to try it out would be catastrophic since it would involve a questioning and hence a loss of that faith which might preserve Jesus from catastrophe. But two further comments need to be made here.

Jesus's reply in the Gospels indicates that he sees it not so much as a test of his own faith or a threat to himself, as a matter of putting God to the test or in more modern language, subjecting God to moral blackmail, (attempting to put God in what R.D. Laing in his heyday would have called an untenable position(7) or, after Bateson, a "double bind"). (8) The syllogism which underlies this seems to be roughly as follows:

(1) God will protect the righteous from natural disaster.

(2) I am one of the righteous.

(3) Therefore God will protect me from natural disaster.

Leaving aside the logical ambiguities of the syllogism, its theological faults lie in the arrogance of self-definition as one of the righteous, and the assumption that such righteousness affords absolute protection against all physical ills, even when self-provoked. According to Elihu in the Book of Job, this was Job's mistake. The Book of Job makes a further point: when God is subjected to moral blackmail he withdraws. That, it has to be said, is a consequence which the Grand Inquisitor also foresees. The overriding point which the Inquisitor brackets out, however, is that to subject someone (even God) to moral blackmail implies a pre-existing emotional relationship.

The suppression of the Second Temptation has another dimension. Although the fact that Jesus is invited to jump from the pinnacle of the Temple rather than from a high point in the wilderness is often commented upon, the choice of location is usually put down to the fact that here Jesus would have an audience he could impress. Obvious though the thought is, it seems not to occur to readers that the Temple might symbolise the religion of the Old Testament, and that to jump from it might symbolise the abandonment of the Old Covenant in favour of a new dispensation which, paradoxically, God is expected to sustain while his very existence is challenged. This omission is all the more surprising in that Jesus repeatedly

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insists that his Gospel fulfils and does not supersede the Old Covenant embodied in the Hebrew Scriptures; whereas, in the Grand Inquisitor's reading of Jesus's creed, he has abandoned the idea of Divine Grace entirely. In other words the Grand Inquisitor is here suppressing the significance of his own reading of Jesus's creed: he not only fails to notice that his Jesus (the one he accuses in his monologue) has, unlike the Jesus of the Gospels, abandoned the authoritative Word of God and replaced it by a creed of unsupported freedom. He also fails to recognise that this same Jesus has succumbed in this measure to the Second Temptation. And the presumably unconscious strategy which enables him to do this is the assimilation of the Second Temptation to the First: that is, the implication that both are essentially about impressing people by performing miracles. (9) Jesus's reply, on the other hand, makes it clear that in his view the Second Temptation is about "putting God to the Test". It is an example of suppression not so much by simple omission or oversight as by emotionally motivated misreading.

It might be argued that once the Grand Inquisitor's stratagems are laid bare the way is open to his assimilation into the Christian apocalyptic tradition sketched in 2 Thessalonians 2, 3-12 and to his being seen as a symbol of the spiritual significance of the generation of which Ivan Karamazov is a member and to which Zosima and, in part Alyosha, provide a Christian counterweight. An alternative, however, would be to see his distortions as essential, if painful steps towards a post-Christian dispensation, steps, which, if more slowly and by a different route, Zosima and Alyosha are also taking. My earlier reference to Kermode brings to mind a passage from his same book in which he writes: "If the true sense of the Old Testament is only what is fulfilled and made plain in the New, the literal sense of the New may itself be subject to further determination (...) It could be argued, for example, that as the Old signified the New Testament, so the New Testament signified the Church, which alone had power to determine its spiritual sense."(10) Kermode points out that this is not mere speculation: it is history.

Whether the Grand Inquisitor be seen as a literary omen of the Second Coming or the herald of a brave new atheistic Utopia, it is of interest to see how far other major characters in the novel are infected by the suppressions which he announces.

Alyosha certainly seems to be a prominent victim. Briefly, one may point to his mystical experiences which, although high on the scale of emotional intensity are low on the scale of definition of divine origin. But perhaps more significant is that he appears retrospectively to have succumbed to the Second Temptation in his reaction to the odour about Zosima's corpse. The underlying syllogism here seems to be:

(1) God will protect the righteous from the ill-effects of natural processes (and even go against them to indicate his approval)

(2) Zosima is one of the righteous

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(3) Therefore God will preserve him from the ill-effects of natural processes (etc.)

(We might find a new formulation at a deeper level which would encompass this example, that underlying the Second Temptation and the experience of Job.)

When God does not apparently behave in this way, Alyosha is devastated and his faith radically weakened.

Ivan is a much more complicated case. For reasons which Stuart Sutherland examines at length in his book(11) but which there is no time to rehearse here, I do not think, paradoxically, that the obvious charge of emotional blackmail against God will stick. It is certainly true that Ivan says he prefers to return the ticket of entry to paradise rather than accept innocent suffering here, but there are grounds for concluding that his religious imagery is conventional, lacks a basis in religious emotion and is the product of debate with a religious environment of which Alyosha is the immediate representative. There is certainly the structure of blackmail here, and the reader must not forget that Ivan is the author of "The Legend of the Grand Inquisitor". But that does not mean of course that he is necessarily aware of all its implications. However that may be it is certainly the case that his religious awareness is dulled and that there is no evidence that an experience of the divine is a part of his own experience or that it counts for anything in his assessment of reality.

But what about Zosima? The difficulty of distinguishing between what Hackel has called the cosmetic use of Christian discourse(12) and the genuine article makes it difficult to reach a final judgement. Nevertheless it has to be said that Zosima's God is a distant one. He is a God who has to be sought, who seems to be located at a distance in time and space (anywhere indeed but in the here and now of human experience) and in the forms of his representation in this world (the image of Christ preserved in the monasteries but for which humanity would have gone astray). There is even a Pelagian hint that people have to find their own salvation. It would hardly be too much to say that Zosima's seems to be a man-centred rather than a God-centred religion. It is tempting to add that he reduces God to a function of human love, or worse, of Russian nationality.

Still there is sufficient of the traditional Gospel there, or its echo, to make one unsure. Is this, after all, merely a distortion in the game of Chinese Whispers in the direction of internally persuasive discourse, and where does this end and heresy begin? The answer probably depends on how clearly the reader hears the originary whisper of the Gospels themselves in reading Zosima's discourse, on how far Zosima's "heresies" are perceived as surface deviations and therefore peripheral, and how far they are perceived as having taken on their own independent life.

It should not be imagined, however, that Dostoevsky himself was unaware of the essential suppressions. Geir Kjetsaa's recent book on Dostoevsky and his New Testament (13) makes this

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plain. From our point of view three things stand out about the passages that Dostoevsky marked in his own copy:

(1) he did not mark the Temptations either in Matthew's or Luke's versions, though he did mark a number of other passages which take up the themes which the Grand Inquisitor associates with them, for example Jesus's rejoinder in Mark 12, 17 that people should "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's", where once again God is explicitly made part of the equation; he also marked the passage in Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians (2. 3-12) which warns of the one who will come according to the working of Satan with all power and signs and lying wonders, sitting in the Temple of God and setting forth the mystery of lawlessness.

(2) besides the many passages in John's Gospel exhorting people to love one another which Dostoevsky marks, he notes in the First Letter of John (4.12) a passage which expresses the essence of Zosima's doctrine of active love ("No man hath beheld God at any time; if we love one another, God abideth in us, and his love is perfected in us") and also the passage (John, 12.24) which forms the epigraph to the novel.

(3) most important of all, he marks numerous passages, especially in John's Gospel, but also in Paul's Letters, which emphasise the doctrine of Grace, the relationship between God and Jesus and people's approach to God through Jesus.

Whatever their relationship to the novel, one cannot argue that they escaped Dostoevsky's attention.

There are various ways that one may make use of the evidence I have brought out. It does not point towards a single conclusion. But perhaps that is the most important conclusion. The evidence is true to the general character of Dostoevsky's texts in which any attempt to find a single principle of coherence is as misconceived as the illusion that any single one of his characters has found the ultimate secret of that elusive "living life" preached by John in his Gospel and sought by Dostoevsky's characters.

As I have argued previously, ultimate spiritual truths are increasingly fragmented or distanced in this last novel, to the extent that huge gaps open up between signifier and signified allowing an enormous variety of different readings of crucial events. For example, to ask what is the referent of "Jesus" in the Legend is a patently unanswerable question. Even Ivan mocks it within the narrative itself. To ask what conception the signifier "Jesus" refers to is a possible question but a highly problematic one; so also are such questions about that famous kiss. There are at least three possibilities :

(1) Jesus is the Jesus of the Gospels: in which case he understands all about the Inquisitor's deafness; the prelude might suggest this, but is Ivan capable of such a conception? If he is consciously or unconsciously, then the kiss might

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signify the fullness of Christ's understanding, forgiveness, mercy and compassion.

(2) Jesus is the Jesus of the Grand Inquisitor's first suppression, who has given people a burden too heavy to bear. Ivan is capable of this conception. In this case the kiss might signify loving though sorrowful acceptance of the Inquisitor's case.

(3) Jesus is simply a compulsive, sentimental trace in the Inquisitor's imagination, incapable of anything but an approximate repetition of past deeds and of acquiescence, perhaps also of provoking a final statement of the Inquisitor's alternative creed.

The significance of the kiss must depend on the answers to these prior questions, though even so ambiguity remains. Ivan's apparently modern refusal to let Alyosha ask such questions is perhaps his own supreme suppression.

In diachronic terms, then, we have observed a series of distortions and suppressions leading to two principal latter-day descendants of the Christian Gospel (as Dostoevsky himself would affirm). In synchronic terms we may observe diverse systems of ideas with their own internal coherence, interacting in ways which seek to subordinate the other to an inferior (or at least negative) place in its own hierarchy of values. Most significantly we find both in Zosima's creed and in the Inquisitor's (and is Zosima's creed less a creation of Alyosha than the Inquisitor's is a creation of Ivan?) the seeds for the undoing of the other.

Mention of seeds leads me finally to the epigraph. It could be argued, and indeed often is, that they represent the Gospel message and would therefore, if my opening metaphor be taken seriously, be the first whisper (the Divine whisper) in chains which lead variously, with the lack of symmetry characteristic of an evolutionary tree, to both Zosima and the Grand Inquisitor, and no doubt to other characters as well. Kermode, among others, would want to question whether the Gospel message itself is as free from ambiguity as some would maintain. Are the parables or the miracles unproblematic? Is the Passion narrative itself entirely transparent in its meaning? Does the image of Christ have a definite semantic content? The history of Christianity, from the reactions of the disciples recorded in the Gospels themselves to the disputes of preachers and theologians through the ages would not lead one to think so. Here too, some would want to claim, logocentric truth is endlessly deferred. There is no locatable first whisper, though we may arbitrarily, or owing to a particularly rich concentration of meaning, define one as such.

My point, however, is simpler: Dostoevsky's text does not unambiguously privilege something that can be consensually defined as "Christianity" and associated with the "Christian characters" over against something which can be unambiguously defined as a departure from or negation of it.

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That is not to say however, that it cannot be effectively read from the point of view of a Christian poetics. On the contrary, I believe that it can and that there is much to be said for doing so. Bakhtin never (so far as we know) developed such a poetics, though others have attempted it independently of him in recent times. A profoundly challenging example is Michael Edwards' book Towards a Christian Poetics (14) published in 1984.

Michael Edwards claims that we do not understand literature without a theory of language and we do not understand either without a theory of life. He sets out to discover what we can learn about literature and language by viewing them in terms of Christianity and comments that it is surprising that, given the richness of Christian enquiries in other areas, the basic questions about literature and language do not appear to have been asked, despite the fact that Christianity foregrounds language by its doctrine of the Word, and literature by the centrality of the Scriptures.(15) The central trope in Edwards' theory is that of the Fall. In his terms Dostoevsky's text (and the discourse of his characters) like all other human discourse is a fallen discourse in which immense gaps open up between signifier and signified and the sign and the referent. Following Pascal he argues that all that is great about a man derives from his "first nature". His wretchedness, blindness, mortality is constituted by his "second nature" which has resulted from the original sin of Adam. In a fallen, contradictory world Jesus is the supreme paradox in which greatness and wretchedness are supremely combined. Yet he also points beyond the contradictions and initiates a renewed greatness: the cosmology of Christianity is triadic, a cosmology founded on creation, fall and recreation.

In the hope of taking my reader with me, I should like to pause here and note the strong traces of this structure in Dostoevsky's work which can be acknowledged by both Christian and non-Christian reader alike. There is no doubting his profound concern about and detailed analysis of each stage in this cosmology. That his novels are about "fallen man" is not likely to be seriously disputed even by those who would prefer other terminology. Where he considers the Fall in his texts (above all in "The Dream of a Ridiculous Man") it has, as in the Bible, an overtly linguistic connotation: it is fundamentally and explicitly associated with the lie. Similarly his preoccupation with "recreation", whether seen in terms of earthly Utopia or a veiled Fyodorovism, is too well attested to require detailed demonstration.

Edwards perceives in the cosmology of Christianity, in Biblical history and in Biblical anthropology, not merely a triadic pattern but a dialectical process: in the sending of Jesus, God climaxes the revelation of his love. God too approaches dialectically, as Creator, Judge, Redeemer.

Whether or not we are Christian we may recognise that "in each of the subtly related areas, and underneath them all, there is a fundamental process at work that perfectly defines

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our happiness, our unhappiness and our desire: a process of life, death and resurrection.(...) Outside of Christian belief, the process is at least true to the need of the human condition, or to its dream. Inside, it achieves a profoundly elegant, and moving, and awesome focus. All the many instances of dialectic have their ground and origin in no less than the experience of God himself, being exemplified and crowned in the life, death and resurrection of Christ."(16)

Edwards traces the way in which language accompanies each of the moves by which the Bible expounds its dialectic - from Adam's Edenic naming, which is true to the nature of things and charged with human significance, by way of the Fall of language in the lie (fallacious gloss) of the serpent and the confusion of Babel to the pledge of the future transformation of the world at Pentecost.

We do have a sense of language in an Edenic condition of efficacy and plenitude, at one with the world and with ourselves, fulfilling our desires as speakers and writers and doing so with ease. We recognise it at times as a quite prodigious power. On the other hand, we also know, perhaps more clearly in our century than ever before, that language has been subjected, like the human and non-human world to which it belongs, to 'vanity' and 'corruption' (...) We arrive after generations of shady complicity between language and the world, to find ourselves in an inextricable yet incongruous texture of words, self, things. The incongruity of language, however, is precisely our chance, the flaw between word and object, the flaws within words (the apartness of sound and sense, for example), and the complex obscurities of meaning, impel the imagination".(17)

Dostoevsky was unquestionably aware of this fallen state in a sense not very distant from Edwards' as he was also aware of the consequences of it for literature and lived experience: "We tell stories in a fallen world".(18) In this self-awareness as in much else he was a precursor of modernism.

I have made occasional use of the language of deconstruction, which would seem to sit oddly with talk of the possibility of an overarching Christian poetics. Without explicit reference to Dostoevsky, Edwards points towards a solution to this dilemma. Derrida's theory asks to be read as an onslaught on logos, as being the condition of "our most tenacious but uncritical assumptions: of self-consciousness, or the presence of the self to the self, and of the world, or the presence of 'the infinite signified', of a vast intelligibility secure beyond word and thought".(19)

But what is threatened here, argues Edwards, is a pseudo-Christian philosophy, not Christianity itself. To deconstruct logocentrism is to discover the fallacy not of Logos itself but of what our worldly metaphysics has made of it, by proceeding as though there were no Fall.

In Edwards' sense Dostoyevsky is a novelist of "fallen" dis-

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course, and all his characters (narrators included) are inevitably subject to this universal condition. In one sense this is, given Edwards' premises, inevitable: all human discourse partakes of the same condition. What is particular about Dostoevsky is the acute consciousness of it which permeates his entire fictional world.

Probably both Edwards's theory and the study of Dostoevsky would benefit greatly from a closer acquaintanceship with each other.

NOTES

 
1. The metaphor of "Chinese Whispers" does not in fact appear in the published version of my article, but can easily be grafted onto it: Malcolm V. Jones, "Dostoevsky, Rousseau and Others. (A Study of the 'Alien Voice' in Dostoevsky's Novels)", Dostoevsky Studies, 4 (1983), 81-93.
 
2. Frank Kermode, The Genesis of Secrecy, On the Interpretation of Narrative (Cambridge, Massachusetts and London, England, Harvard University Press, 1979).
 
3. M.M. Bakhtin, "Slovo v romane", in Voprosy literatury i estetiki (Moscow, Khudozhestvennaya literature, 1975) , p. 154. There has been a tendency in recent articles to depreciate Bakhtin's contribution to Dostoevsky studies, expressed particularly strongly by Elena Dryzhakov in her article 'Segmentatsiya vremeni v romane Prestupleniye i nakazaniye', Dostoevsky Studies, 6 (1985), 67-89, p. 67. However, while the shortcomings of Bakhtin's book on Dostoevsky have been sufficiently aired, it remains true that Bakhtin fathered through his other published works a number of theoretical conceptions which are highly applicable to the study of Dostoevsky. It would be a pity if attempts to apply them were to be frustrated by an academic consensus that Bakhtin, seen exclusively in terms of Problemy poetiki Dostoyevskogo (Moscow, 1963) or its precursor Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (Leningrad, 1929), is now passé.
4. Francis Wright Beare, The Gospel according to Matthew (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 105.
5. Matthew, 4, 1-11 ; Luke, 4, 1-13. Dostoevsky uses Matthew's version, which differs most obviously from Luke's in the order of presentation of the second and third temptations. Matthew's Second Temptation is Luke's Third.
 
6. Ellis Sandoz, Political Apocalypse (Baton Rouge, Louisiana State University Press, 1971), p. 152.
7. R.D. Laing, Self and Others (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1971) , pp. 125ff.
8. Bateson, G., Jackson, D.D., Haley, J., and Weakland, J. "Toward a theory of schizophrenia", Behavioural Science, 1 (1956), 251-64.
    

   
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9. It has to be said that the reading of the Second Temptation in terms of a miracle to impress the masses is widespread among theologians, some of whom go no further. Indeed Francis Wright Beare (op. cit., p. 110) is only a partial exception. He remarks that the narrator must be thinking of public display, otherwise Satan could just as well have chosen a high point in the wilderness. 
10. Kermode, p. 19.
 
11. Stewart R. Sutherland, Atheism and the rejection of God: Contemporary philosophy and 'The Brothers Karamazov' (Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1977).
 
12. Sergei Hackel, "The religious dimension: vision or evasion? Zosima's discourse in The Brothers Karamazov," in New Essays on Dostoyevsky edited by Malcolm V. Jones and Garth M. Terry (Cambridge, London, New York, New Rochelle, Melbourne and Sidney, Cambridge University Press, 1983) pp. 139-168. The reference is to p. 164.
 
13. Geir Kjetsaa, Dostoevsky and his New Testament (Oslo, Solum Vorlag A.S. and New Jersey, Humanities Press, 1984).
 
14. Michael Edwards, Towards a Christian Poetics (London, Macmillan Press, 1984).
15.
15. Edwards, p. 2.
 
16. Edwards, p. 7.
 
17. Edwards, p. 11..
18. Edwards, p. 72.
19. Edwards, p. 220.