Category: Books and Book reviews

Bread, Balance, and the Burden of Freedom in Dostoevsky’s The Grand Inquisitor

A Meditation on the Grand Inquisitor in Light of Metaphor and Meaning

“Man seeks not so much God as the miraculous… For man seeks not so much freedom as someone to bow before.”
— The Grand Inquisitor, The Brothers Karamazov

Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799)—an image of what emerges when the mind abdicates its responsibility: not freedom, but fantasy; not peace, but nightmare. Where reason sleeps, the trinity of miracle, mystery, and authority awakens to devour.

In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, the tale of the Grand Inquisitor remains one of the most unsettling parables in modern literature. Told by Ivan Karamazov to his younger brother Alyosha, the fable imagines Christ returning during the Spanish Inquisition—only to be arrested and silenced by the Church. The Inquisitor, a cardinal of imposing intellect and grave compassion, does not accuse Christ of falsehood, but of cruelty: You gave them freedom, he says, when they needed bread. You gave them mystery, when they needed answers. You gave them love, when they needed order.

There was a time, decades ago, in the earnest conviction of my youth, when I found myself perplexed by the Grand Inquisitor’s logic. I did not admire him, nor excuse his authoritarianism, but I recognized the ache that underpinned his argument. Bread matters. Peace matters. Even then, I sensed the moral gravity of the dilemma he posed: How does one respond to suffering in a world that is often brutal, hungry, and unforgiving?

But I also responded viscerally to something else: the pen of Dostoevsky was not just crafting a fable, but weaponizing a caricature. The Inquisitor was not simply a tragic figure—he was also a polemic against Catholicism, a projection of Dostoevsky’s own religious bigotry. As someone educated within the Catholic tradition, I saw the ugliness beneath the fable—the prejudice tucked behind the parable’s grandeur. The critique was not only of power, but of Rome. The Inquisitor’s mitre bore the unmistakable weight of Jesuit anti-types, cloaked in suspicion and veiled accusation. My disquiet, then, was not only with the Inquisitor’s words, but with the frame within which they were uttered.

And yet, despite its polemical underpinnings, the parable remains one of the most profound meditations on freedom and faith in modern literature. Its imaginative force exceeds its prejudices. The Inquisitor endures not only as a critique, but as a haunting embodiment of the human temptation to trade liberty for comfort.

And that temptation has not faded. The Grand Inquisitor endures because he gives voice to something deeply human, and psychologically real: the desire for security, for certainty, for order amidst chaos. It is a desire that remains active—arguably ascendant—in our own time. One hears the Inquisitor’s voice today in populist strongmen, in the cynical strategist’s smirk, in the media apparatus that soothes while it divides, and in slogans that promise greatness through obedience—Make America Great Again, for instance, the rallying cry of a leader who proclaimed, “I am the only one who can save this nation,” inviting not deliberation, but devotion. The trinity he offers—miracle, mystery, and authority—is the very catechism of modern demagoguery.

This reflection, then, is not a defense of the Inquisitor, but an attempt to understand his appeal, and to reclaim the concepts he distorts. In my recent essay on literalism, metaphor, and balance, I sought to describe the menace of the literalist disposition—a mentality that cannot live with ambiguity, that flees from the poetic, and that finds in surface meaning a shield against the deeper, riskier call of the soul. Here, I apply that lens to the Inquisitor’s three pillars.

Miracle and the Tyranny of the Literal

The Inquisitor offers miracle as literal spectacle: bread conjured from stone, laws suspended, proof offered to silence doubt. He rebukes Christ for refusing to perform such signs in the desert, calling His restraint an act of cruelty rather than spiritual wisdom.

Even as a young reader, I did not mistake the Inquisitor’s miracle for holiness. But I understood that hunger cannot be spiritualized away. In a world where the body is often broken before the spirit can rise, the refusal to give bread seems harsh.

What I have since come to understand is that bread must be shared, not wielded—and that miracles, if they mean anything at all, must point beyond themselves. A miracle that ends conversation is not a miracle but a manipulation.

We have seen modern versions of such miracles: promises made and spectacles staged not to elevate understanding, but to prove power. Consider the border wall—hailed not merely as a policy, but as a singular, salvific act. Its construction, real or exaggerated, was brandished as proof of providence, as the visible sign that the nation could be made great, pure, and safe again. Nor was it the only such “miracle.” Similar wonders were promised: the immediate end of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the revival of a fading industrial economy, the return of jobs long gone, and the rapid reordering of the global market in our favor. These, too, were presented as guarantees—not to be debated, but to be believed. And like the Inquisitor’s miracles, they have largely yet to be seen.

In my essay on literalism and metaphor, I argued that literalism becomes a menace when it displaces metaphor—when it insists on one meaning, one proof, one visible sign. The Inquisitor’s miracles are precisely that: spectacles that end the need for faith. They are miracles without meaning.

Mystery and the Collapse of Metaphor

The Inquisitor’s use of mystery is a case study in spiritual containment. Mystery becomes the guarded unknown, parceled out by clerical authority to pacify rather than provoke. It is not a sacred unknowing, but a fog of confusion meant to keep the people docile.

But true mystery, like true metaphor, does not confuse—it illuminates by depth. It renders the world porous to truth. It refuses finality not because it is evasive, but because it is more honest than premature closure allows.

I did not reject mystery in youth, nor do I now. But I reject the collapse of mystery into secrecy, the transformation of the ineffable into the inaccessible. Metaphor must breathe. Mystery must invite. When weaponized, they become not sacred, but sinister.

In our current dysfunctional era, mystery is often replaced by conspiracy—a counterfeit that plays the same psychological role, offering significance without wisdom, awe without humility. The literalist disposition, fearing true complexity, gravitates toward these shallow depths. Conspiracy is mystery stripped of humility. It retains the trappings of hidden knowledge but closes the mind rather than opening it. It flatters the believer with secrets while shielding them from ambiguity. It is not reverence for the unknown, but a refuge from the supposed unbearable complexity of reality.

We see this vividly in the ecosystem of conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s political movement. Whether it is the belief that a global cabal of elites and pedophiles is secretly running the world (QAnon), or that massive voter fraud orchestrated by shadowy networks altered the outcome of the 2020 election, or that figures like Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or George Soros are puppet-masters in an international scheme to undermine American sovereignty—each offers an illusion of secret insight in place of the real work of understanding. These narratives are not pursued for their truthfulness but for their emotional certainty. They replace sacred mystery with a kind of gnosis—fierce, insular, and self-reinforcing.

And like the Inquisitor’s mystery, they are not shared to free the soul, but to bind it—to a worldview, to a figure (whether cult, religious, or political leader, a distinction without merit or significance), to a sense of exceptionalist belonging. The effect is not illumination but containment.

Authority and the Displacement of Balance

The Inquisitor’s authority is final, paternal, and brutal in its compassion. It replaces freedom with peace, conscience with obedience. Its appeal lies not only in its force, but in its promise: You no longer have to choose. I will choose for you. And I will feed you.

As I have aged, I have come to see that this vision is not merely imposed—it is desired. Much of the populace is psychologically predisposed to respond favorably to such authority, whether it comes in vestments or slogans. It offers relief from the burden of discernment. It relieves the anxiety of paradox.

This recognition—that the hunger for certainty is as much internal as external—has shaped my own philosophical trajectory.

And that is where the menace lies. This is not a top-down problem alone, but a convergence of design and desire. The Inquisitor gives the people what they already, in some meaningful manner, want: a world made safe through submission. The leader becomes the sole interpreter of truth, the guarantor of safety, the vessel of meaning. Authority becomes a theology in itself.

We have seen this in our time, where devotion to a figure supplants loyalty to principle. When a leader proclaims “I am the only one who can save this nation,” and is met not with unease but with cheers, authority has ceased to be a mediating presence and has become a metaphysical claim. It no longer balances tension; it obliterates it.

In contrast, the authority I defended in my earlier essay was not coercive, but mediating—a balancing presence, a harmonizing voice. It does not dominate or dismiss. It holds the tension without collapsing it. It does not provide peace through closure, but through co-suffering. It listens. It waits.

The Bread and the Burden

So no, I did not approve of the Grand Inquisitor—not in youth, not now. But I acknowledged, and still acknowledge, the ache beneath his argument. It was not cruelty that made him persuasive, but compassion twisted into control—a desire to ease pain by removing the possibility of choice.

What I now see more clearly is that this fable is not merely a theological drama. It is a psychological map. The Grand Inquisitor is the high priest of the literalist disposition—offering miracle that silences, mystery that obscures, authority that absolves.

That disposition is not confined to Dostoevsky’s century. It is at work now—in every movement that prefers spectacle to sign, dogma to dialogue, power to presence. It thrives in political rhetoric, in media narratives, in spiritual systems that replace grace with control.

Dostoevsky does not argue against it. Christ does not rebut it. He answers with a kiss.

A kiss without domination.
A kiss that respects freedom.
A kiss that does not resolve the tension, but chooses to love within it.

That is the burden of freedom: not only to bear it ourselves, but to offer it to others, knowing they may prefer their chains.

To offer bread, but not as bribe.
To teach, but not as demand.
To speak, but not to silence.
To live, still and quietly,
within the balance that resists the Inquisitor’s call.

To refuse the miracle that enslaves,
To offer bread and still preserve the soul,
That is the quiet defiance the world most needs.

James Baldwin on Race: Insights from ‘The Cross of Redemption’

Photo of James Baldwin in 1969
James Baldwin in 1969. Photograph: Allan Warren CC BY-SA 3.0

One of the books I am currently reading is James Baldwin: The Cross of Redemption (Uncollected Writings), edited with an introduction by Randall Kenan and published in 2010. One of the essays in the collection, dated 1984 but still strikingly relevant, is “On Being White … and Other Lies.” A particular passage from that essay stood out to me:

“Just so does the white community, as a means of keeping itself white, elect, as they imagine, their political (!) representatives. No nation in the world, including England, is represented by so stunning a pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre. I will not name names—I will leave that to you.

But this cowardice, this necessity of justifying a totally false identity and of justifying what must be called a genocidal history, has placed everyone now living into the hands of the most ignorant and powerful people the world has ever seen. And how did they get that way? By deciding they were white. By opting for safety instead of life. By persuading themselves that a black child’s life meant nothing compared with a white child’s life. By abandoning their children to the things white men could buy. By informing their children that black women, black men, and black children had no human integrity that those who call themselves white were bound to respect. And in this debasement and definition of black people, they debased and defined themselves.” (The Cross of Redemption, pp. 168–169)

This passage struck me as just as relevant today as it was in Baldwin’s time. The language of racial division may sometimes be more coded—though often, it is not—but the underlying dynamics remain. Some now speak of a mythical golden age to be restored, painting diversity, equity, and inclusion as enemies to be vanquished. Yet Baldwin’s pantheon of the relentlessly mediocre remains firmly in place, with a growing number of elected officials – led by one in particular – who traffic in racial grievance and nostalgia for an edifice of the past that was built upon exclusion. The resentment they cultivate is growing more visceral, more vengeful by the day.

At its core, Baldwin’s essay is a reminder that race is a social construct—one created not out of noble ideals or science but out of moral rot. It was, and remains, a means of defining power and justifying subjugation. Today’s renewed emphasis on racial division in politics—whether explicit or coded—is no less morally bankrupt than in Baldwin’s time.

The Dream of Gilgamesh: Mourning the Loss of the Rock from the Sky

The Epic of Gilgamesh: Gilgamesh and Enkidu, No. 6 (ink and gouache on paper, 1966) by Dia Al-Azzawi (Iraqi, b. 1939).

The Epic of Gilgamesh and its related ancient tales have long been a source of inspiration for me, often woven into my prose. Earlier this week, I had the pleasure of reading an essay by Andrew George, written in 2012, which I highly recommend to your attention: The Mayfly on the River: Individual and Collective Destiny in the Epic of Gilgamesh. As with all of George’s works, this essay is masterful, and it resonated with much of my recent work. By coincidence, his reference to the mayfly aligned perfectly with a sub-theme of a monograph I have been developing over the past several weeks.

Inspired by these reflections and my own experience with the loss of close friends, I chose to explore The Epic of Gilgamesh through poetry, marking a departure from my usual prose. Below, I offer a poem that captures a dream in which Gilgamesh contemplates the profound absence of Enkidu, his friend and companion, who met death as punishment for the transgressions he and Gilgamesh committed against the gods. The timeless relationship between Gilgamesh and Enkidu seemed to me a fitting metaphor for the sorrow that accompanies the loss of friends and the enduring nature of their memory.

An Audio Recitation of Donald S. Yarab’s The Dream of Gilgamesh

The Dream of Gilgamesh

In the shadows of my sleep, you came,
Enkidu, my brother, carved from the heavens,
The rock that fell to earth and struck me whole.
But now the earth has claimed you,
Silent is the storm of your breath,
Felled like the great cedar, your might is no more.
I reach for you, yet grasp but dust.

The gods whisper through the winds,
Enkidu, you are beyond my reach,
Though I call, your name echoes
Through the empty halls of Uruk,
A soundless shadow, a memory unmade.

In the dream, I see you on the plain,
Your laughter rolls like thunder once more,
Yet it is distant, swallowed by the sky.
I run to you, but the earth swallows my feet,
The horizon stretches and bends,
And you fade, a shadow of stars,
Leaving me to wrestle with the night.

Oh, Enkidu, my companion, my rock from the heavens,
In life, you steadied me, made my heart whole.
Now the world is too wide,
The journey too long.
What joy can be found in Uruk’s walls,
Without your hand upon my shoulder?
You lie beneath the river stones,
And I am left to wander the desolate road alone.

The Importance of Language: A Journey Through Words

When I was but twelve years old and in the sixth grade, I was already a peculiar lad—of that, there can be no dispute. One of my distinct memories from that time is sharing with Miss Davis, my teacher, that I had purchased a dictionary, which I studied ardently each night to enrich my vocabulary. Even then, I was enamored with words and punctuation—the brick and mortar of literature and poetry—and I was learning as much about them as I could. A few years later, in high school, as I have noted elsewhere, a very dear educator, my sophomore English teacher Mrs. Calpin, honored me with a graduation gift: a thesaurus, in recognition of my love of words.

At college, I developed another peculiar habit, alongside acquiring yet another new dictionary. Whenever I coined a neologism (which I believed perfectly appropriate to do), I would record it on a sheet that I had inserted into the dictionary for future reference. That dictionary remains in my possession, though not readily at hand or in regular use, as will soon be explained. Otherwise, I would gladly provide an example of one of those neologisms.

After I finished college and law school, and was sufficiently recompensed as an attorney for the federal government, I indulged myself with the purchase of the complete hardbound set of The Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition as well as the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. It is a safe assumption that few homes, indeed, few offices, possess either of these gems for consultation, let alone for regular use. But the wealth of words contained in these volumes—the backbone of a rich and wondrous language—is awe-inspiring. Not once have I regretted the sum spent on their purchase, nor the richness they have added to both my writing and knowledge.

This lifelong fascination with language, along with those dictionaries and thesauruses, naturally informs my choice of words in my prose writing and poetry, where every term is carefully considered. This serves as a preface and background to a brief note I would like to append to my poem Where is Am I?

Some who have read the poem may be struck by the verse:

The shadow of a shadow,
a footfall lost to time’s soft track?

In particular, they may find footfall to be wholly unfamiliar. Of course, the vocabulary in the poem was not selected by happenstance; every word was chosen with deliberate care, and footfall was no exception. I hesitated only momentarily before selecting this word, but ultimately decided that context should guide the reader (or listener, as poems should always be recited after being read).

To clarify, I did consider alternatives such as step, trace, footprint, and mark, but I ultimately returned to footfall during the poem’s construction. Footfall is not a neologism; it appears in the Oxford English Dictionary (see accompanying image of the Oxford English Dictionary entry for footfall). Footfall refers to the act of stepping—the motion and sound of a foot hitting the ground—rather than the trace or mark left behind, such as a footprint. As such, footfall captures the fleeting nature of action itself, emphasizing the transitory motion rather than the lasting trace of a footprint.

Oxford English Dictionary: Second Edition – entry for footfall

To add another layer to my choice of footfall, it was not just the meaning but the sound of the word itself that carried significance. Again, poetry is to be recited, not just read. The soft, muted quality of the word, when spoken aloud, mirrors the quiet, almost imperceptible nature of the action it describes. The word begins with a gentle f sound, followed by a soft, cushioned ending—a fall that lands lightly, much like the act of stepping itself. It has an almost whispered quality, evoking the idea of a footstep that passes quietly through time, barely noticed before it fades entirely.

This auditory element of the word footfall reinforces the theme of impermanence in the poem. The word itself, in both sound and evanescence, fades even as it is spoken, much like the action it represents disappears into time’s soft track. The fleeting nature of footfall contrasts with the more solid, lasting impression suggested by alternatives like footprint or mark. Where those words imply something left behind, footfall emphasizes the moment of movement itself—the instant when the foot touches the ground, just before it lifts again, leaving no lasting trace.

It is this auditory resonance that made footfall the right choice for the verse, as it complements the poem’s exploration of the transient and fragile nature of human conscious presence and action in the universe. In pairing this word with time’s soft track, the verse captures the tension between motion and stillness, existence and disappearance, echoing the poem’s larger themes of impermanence and the passing of time.

This interpretation also explains my selection of the image of an eroding footprint, a fossilized mark in sand, as a visual metaphor for time’s imperceptible erasure of human presence, chosen to illustrate the poem. The image embodies the idea of humanity, an individual, attempting to leave a lasting mark, while acknowledging that even fossils, over time, are subject to the elements—in time’s soft track.

The word footfall also appears in T.S. Eliot’s Burnt Norton, the first of his Four Quartets. Eliot has been a favorite of mine since I first read Murder in the Cathedral at the age of twelve or thirteen. The specific lines containing footfall open Burnt Norton:

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

The Influence of German Pietism: Lessons for Historical and Contemporary Scenarios

“The Ancient of Days” (frontispiece to Europe A Prophecy, 1794) by William Blake (1757-1827) The William Blake Archive

Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788) may be obscure names to many, and their writings equally impenetrable, but they are nonetheless important to numerous academic disciplines, many of which I study. Consequently, many of the scholarly tomes and articles I read frequently mention these gentlemen, with whom I have thus become somewhat acquainted.

This past week, I have been revisiting The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton University Press, 2013) by Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997). The aforementioned scholars make their obligatory appearances, as do men more famous and more obscure. It was, however, when Berlin sought to set the stage for a lesser-known figure by discussing the genesis of the Pietist movement in the German lands in the 17th and 18th centuries, that the inspiration for today’s post took root.

Berlin, prone to sweeping observations—both historical and psychological—offers fascinating insights into the rise of the Pietist movement, insights that merit reflection and may well extend to contemporary parallels. He posits that, during this era, German culture was largely provincialized: “There was no Paris, there was no centre, there was no life, there was no pride, there was no sense of growth, dynamism and power. German culture drifted either into extreme scholastic pedantry of a Lutheran kind—minute but rather dry scholarship—or in the direction of the inner life of the human soul. This was no doubt stimulated by Lutheranism as such, but particularly by the fact that there was a kind of huge national inferiority complex, which began at that period, vis-à-vis the French, this brilliant glittering State which had managed to crush and humiliate this great country which dominated the science and the arts, and all the provinces of human life, with a kind of arrogance and success unexampled hitherto” (Berlin, 42).

Berlin then notes that the Pietist movement, a branch of Lutheranism, became deeply embedded in the German lands. He describes the movement as possessing a passion for a meticulous study of the Bible, a profound respect for the personal relationship between man and God, an emphasis on the spiritual life, and a contempt for learning, ritual, and form. Moreover, the movement placed “tremendous stress upon the individual relationship of the suffering human soul with its maker” (Berlin, 43).

Berlin does not mince words in his assessment of the outcome:

“This was a very grand form of sour grapes. If you cannot obtain from the world that which you really desire, you must teach yourself not to want it. If you cannot get what you want, you must teach yourself to want what you can get. This is a very frequent form of spiritual retreat in depth, into a kind of inner citadel, in which you try to lock yourself up against all the fearful ills of the world. The king of my province—the prince—confiscates my land: I do not want to own land. The prince does not wish to give me rank: rank is trivial, unimportant. The king has robbed me of my possessions: possessions are nothing. My children have died of malnutrition and disease: earthly attachments, even love of children, are as nothing before love of God. And so forth. You gradually hedge yourself round with a kind of tight wall by which you seek to reduce your vulnerable surface—you want to be as little wounded as possible. Every kind of wound has been heaped upon you, and therefore you wish to contract yourself into the smallest possible area, so that as little of you as possible is exposed to further wounds.” He concludes that “[t]his is the mood in which the German Pietists operated” (Berlin, 44).

The above is striking, as it applies, in my view, to many historical, contemporary, and even personal scenarios. For the latter, I need only consider my post entitled Poetic Reflections: Exploring the Fortress of the Mind. Indeed, I see connections and relevance everywhere.