The Grand Inquisitor/Rebellion

Rebellion
In this chapter, Ivan relates several news stories that he has collected over the years. Each story is about a child that has been abused, or murdered, or otherwise made to suffer. Ivan claims that if God allows these children to suffer, Ivan will not accept any invitation into God's kingdom. After this, Alyosha says "That's rebellion!".

Part 1
Ivan here is referring to a passage from the book of Matthew, 22:35:


 * Then one of them, which was a lawyer, asked him a question, tempting him, and saying, Master, which is the great commandment in the law? Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind.  This is the first and great commandment.  And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.

Jesus claimed that "love thy neighbor" was the second most important law of god. It is by claiming to not be able to follow this law (and providing some justification against it) that Ivan starts this discussion.

Father Zossima is Alyosha's mentor at the monestary, and a well-respected local figure.

Part 2
When Ivan says "Christ-like love" he is referring to unconditional love towards your neightbors and your enemies. Ivan here is claiming that people in general are incapable of this kind of love by their nature, and are therefore incapable of following the laws of Jesus.

This is an important point in the narrative. Here, Ivan turns the focus of the conversation squarely onto the issue of children, and not on man-kind in general. He does this for two reasons: he says that restricting his conversation to children will limit his argument, but also because people are compassionate towards children.

"the apple" here refers to the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, from the garden of eden. When Adam and Eve ate the fruit (which later came to be identified with an apple) they committed what is now known as "original sin". Saint Augustine first wrote about the concept of original sin, a fallen state of humanity that is inherited by children from their parents.

Ivan starts by saying that it is "incomprehensible" that children should be made to suffer because of their original sin. If an innocent person should not suffer for the sins of another person, then children should not suffer for the sins of their ancestors.

Ivan goes on to talk about how even the most cruel and evil people still love children. He justifies this by saying that children are so small in stature that they are essentially different creatures from regular adult humans. When Ivan is talking about the affection or love that adults generally feel towards children, he is talking about a patronly love, not a sexual or romantic kind.

Part 2
Here Ivan mentions, almost without explanation stories he has heard of cruelties commited by the Turks against the Bulgarians. He uses these stories to illustrate the fact that men can be much more cruel then any animal can be, thus eliminating a possible model for the devil. If the devil was an invention, he must have been based off other men, and not off some cruel animal.

Part 3
Driving to the heart of the matter, Ivan says that man has created the Devil "in his own image and likeness." Alyosha immediately likens this to the theory that man has created God in a similar fashion.

It's at this point that Ivan first mentions his "collection" of stories. These stories, as we shall see, have a particular focus that has Ivan very troubled.

This passage is a little bit obscure, and it is difficult to understand all of Ivan's context-sensitive references. However, the point of this passage is quite clear: every society has manners of harming other people. Also, the ways that one society hurt people may seem to be barbaric to other societies, but all the methods are essentially equivalent.

Here Ivan recounts the story of a man named Richard, who was raised as an animal, and grew up to become a thief and a murderer. In prison, awaiting death, Richard is converted into a christian and educated in reading and writing. On the day of his execution, Richard is actually celebrating his own death as a holy act.

Here, Ivan discusses the story of a master and a horse. The horse is tired from pulling "too heavy a load", and stops pulling. The master, in a rage, lashes the horse and beats it repeatedly and for some time. Finally, having no untouched skin left to beat, the master lashes the horse on it's eyes. This finally motivated the horse to pull the load.

Ivan uses this story as an example that people experience satisfaction from inflicting pain, thus reinforcing his thesis that the Devil was created in the image of evil men.

In the same vein of the previous story, Ivan recounts now the story of a man and his wife beat their seven-year-old daughter with a birch rod. The beating lasted for more then 10 minutes, and grew harder and more savage as time went on.

When brought to court, instead of being punished for abusing their daughter, the couple is praised for properly correcting their child. As we shall see later, Ivan has a special place in his heart for abused children, and the stories he relates later focus more on them.