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1 5 0 I n t e r p r e t a t i o n Volume 41 / Issue 2Grand Inquisitor, like Machiavelli “a great master of blasphemy,” 134 and anihilist struggling to contain the social consequences of nihilism, is aware,and this is why he concludes that, while the crisis of political modernity canbe solved only through a return to religion, this new religion has to be anythingbut Christianity. Or, if it formally remains Christianity, it has to bea Christianity divorced from intellectual honesty and the democratic idea,as a result of a fundamental mutation. Only at this point does the twistedand cynical project of the Grand Inquisitor—which shares with Machiavelli’sproject the same concealed aversion to Christianity—become fully comprehensible.As stressed by Bruce K. Ward, for Dostoyevsky, “the final Westernsolution to the crisis of order,” supported by a pseudo-Christianity turnedinto a means of universal unification and homogenization, appears to be auniversal tyranny organized by the nihilists themselves, the only regime thatcan satisfy both “the power-lust” of the nihilists “and the yearning of theweak for order.” 1356. The Legend of the Grand InquisitorThe Legend of the Grand Inquisitor represents the key to Dostoyevsky’sunderstanding of modernity, a fact reflected by the place that the Legendoccupies in The Brothers Karamazov, as well as by the Dostoyevskyan characterwho is the author of this short fictional poem. Like Nietzsche, withwhom he also shares a similar tragic end, Ivan Karamazov is a character“of an intellectual honesty that reaches the point of cruelty and especiallyof cruelty directed against oneself.” 136 If the theologico-political systemexposed in the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor represents the culmination ofthe modern quest for a secular order, the Inquisitor’s solution is a responseto man’s fundamental problem as a being who is thrown and suffers in ameaningless world, a problem that has been exposed in detail by Ivan inthe chapter preceding the one dedicated to the Grand Inquisitor. Startingfrom the observation that innocent children suffer terribly in the existingworld, Ivan arrives at the conclusion that this suffering, together with lifeon earth as a whole, cannot but be meaningless, independently of whetherfinally destroyed Christianity from within (Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogyof Morals, trans. Francis Golffing [New York: Doubleday, 1956]), 296–97).134Strauss, “What Is Political Philosophy?,” 40.135Ward, Dostoevsky’s Critique of the West, 97, 128.136Paléologue, Sous l’œil du Grand Inquisiteur, 197.