For Dostoevsky, the character of the Grand Inquisitor represents a prototypical expression of an ideology that denies Christ's true spiritual and historical significance and affirms its opposite. The Grand Inquisitor's anti-Christian philosophy is ironically accentuated by its appearance within an institutionally Christian context, but Dostoevsky identifies this same negation at the root of the socialist, nihilist and materialist doctrines of his contemporaries.[3] In a letter to his publisher, he writes that Ivan, through the Grand Inquisitor, openly "declares himself in favour of what the devil advocates". The Grand Inquisitor speaks the same doctrine as Russian socialism, except that the socialists would never admit it openly. Ivan, however, is "a sincere person who comes right out and admits that he agrees with the Inquisitor's view of humanity and that Christ's faith elevated man to a much higher level than where he actually stands." For the socialists, according to Dostoevsky, Christ's law is "burdensome and abstract, too heavy for weak people to bear—and instead of the law of Freedom and Enlightenment, they offer them the law of chains and enslavement through bread."[4] Dostoevsky's notes contain passages that are more extreme than those eventually used. According to Edward Wasiolek, it is emphatically asserted in these notes that "it is Christ who is guilty and cruel, and it is the Grand Inquisitor who is kind and innocent. It is Christ who demands that men suffer for Him, whereas the Grand Inquisitor suffers for men."[5]
According to Joseph Frank, the prototype for the character of the Inquisitor can be found in Schiller's Don Carlos: "The play shares the same justification for the existence of evil in the world, the same answer to the problem of theodicy, that is at the heart of Dostoevsky's legend."[6]
