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Strauss’s Machiavelli and Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor1 5 5tor, man’s torment has been greatly increased precisely by the one who gavehis life for him. Moreover, the Inquisitor insists that, undermining the “old,firm law,” 154 the freedom of conscience which Christ bestowed on the massof “feeble mutineers” 155 is the root cause of modern anarchy. Beyond man’sindividual torment, this freedom prevents the completion of the Tower, thusfurther increasing mankind’s suffering. For freedom of conscience inevitablyundermines the ecclesiastical authority and leads to the “splitting” of“the flock.” For this reason, the correction of Christ’s work presupposes thereplacement of faith based on a free conscience, with blind obedience to theecclesiastical authority “even in opposition to” one’s “conscience.” 156This being said, the Grand Inquisitor’s acceptance of the third satanicoffer that Christ rejected comes as the necessary conclusion and synthesisof the previous two. Whereas Christ refused to receive from the devil “thesword of Caesar,” the Inquisitor accepts this final offer 157 with the awarenessthat the resolution of the modern crisis, and through this of the theologicopoliticalproblem, requires the unification of theological and political poweras the final consequence of the God-man’s evacuation from the world. Notethat, just as in the case of the modern project as attributed by Strauss toMachiavelli and Spinoza, the political option for an earthly kingdom thatcloses itself hermetically to transcendence is not supported by a previousresolution of the conflict between reason and faith in favor of the former.We are dealing here not with a philosophical conclusion, but with a politicaldecision. Like Ivan, his Inquisitor is also aware of the persistence of the mystery,and, together with it, of the possibility of another world that does notsubmit to the laws of “Euclidean geometry,” a fact betrayed by his “shuddering”reaction to the kiss of his silent and therefore mysterious interlocutor. 158But the Inquisitor decides to repress the longing of his heart, and, rejecting as“madness” 159 the Christian mystery that Dostoyevsky—through his voices inthe novel, Zosima and Alyosha—accepts, takes instead a practical, politicaldecision. He accepts “the sword of Caesar” because political science emanci-154Ibid, 332.155Ibid., 334.156Ibid., 335, 337.157Ibid., 335.158Ibid., 307, 342. According to Malcolm Jones, “behind Jesus’s silence in ‘The Grand Inquisitor,’ liesthe Orthodox tradition of apophatic theology with its stress on paradox…and the ultimate unknowabilityof God” (Malcolm Jones, Dostoevsky and the Dynamics of Religious Experience [London:Anthem, 2005], 53).159Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov, 339.