The Kiss and the Terrible Gift

I really like Dostoevsky. I am a bit of a geek that way. And there is a question Dostoevsky slips beneath the door of the human heart, and it is still there when we wake up: Do we really want to be free?

I mean really free, not free to choose among fifteen shampoos or ninety-seven streaming shows, God bless us and our splendid modern abundance, but free in the old, frightening sense. Free to love. Free to refuse love. Free to tell the truth when a lie would buy us a little peace. Free to become someone, or fail to become someone, with no committee meeting to blame afterward.

Fyodor Dostoevsky puts this question in the mouth of Ivan Karamazov, who tells his younger brother Alyosha a strange invented story called “The Grand Inquisitor.” Christ has returned to earth quietly, in sixteenth-century Seville. People know him somehow. He heals a blind man. He raises a little girl. The crowd reaches for him as a thirsty crowd reaches for water.

Then an old cardinal, the Grand Inquisitor, has him arrested.

That night, in a prison cell, the old man explains the whole terrible arrangement. Christ, he says, asked too much of people. In the wilderness, Christ refused to turn stones into bread. He refused to dazzle the world into belief with an undeniable miracle. He refused political rule over all humanity. Bread, miracle, authority: the Inquisitor says these were not temptations at all. They were the merciful answers to the human condition.

People are hungry, he says. They are anxious. They do not want to bear the awful weight of choosing. Give them bread, certainty, and someone strong enough to make decisions for them, and they will surrender freedom willingly. They will be grateful. They will call their chains safety.

And Lord, I recognize this man.

Not only in dictators and demagogues, not only in institutions that confuse control with care, but in myself. I recognize him in the part of me that wishes someone would simply tell me what to do with the bewildering hours of my one unrepeatable life. Tell me whom to forgive. Tell me whether I am good. Tell me which choice will never hurt. Tell me I cannot fail. Tell me I do not have to risk the great embarrassment of loving someone who may not love me back.

The Inquisitor sees something true. Freedom is not a fireworks display. It is not a private permission slip. Freedom is costly. It includes the possibility of error, loneliness, guilt, grief, and the hideous discovery that no one can do the essential work of becoming human in our place.

But he mistakes this truth for the final truth.

The Inquisitor believes human beings want happiness more than freedom. Perhaps, often, we do. But the happiness he offers is too small. It is the happiness of being managed. Fed, pacified, assigned, spared the burden of a soul. It is the happiness of a child who is never allowed to walk because walking could lead to falling.

The Catholic teacher Luigi Giussani wrote of freedom not merely as the ability to choose, but as the capacity and responsibility to fulfill oneself, to move toward one’s destiny and toward the infinite desire planted in us. He understood that an isolated freedom for me becomes thin and lonely, even destructive. Real freedom needs communion, reality, truth, and another face across the table.

That feels right to me. We do not finally want freedom as endless options. We want to be met. We want to be known without being possessed. We want a love large enough to call forth the self we are afraid to become.

This is why Christ’s response to the Grand Inquisitor is so staggering.

He says nothing.

There is no thunderclap, no doctrinal rebuttal, no syllogism polished to a devastating shine. Christ walks toward the old man, the man who has accused him of cruelty, the man who has built a system meant to correct God, and Christ kisses him.

A kiss.

It is not coercion. It is not proof. It is not bread distributed in exchange for obedience. It does not overwhelm the Inquisitor’s mind or make his choice for him. It leaves him free. Which is almost unbearable, because it means the kiss is truly love and not conquest.

Pope Benedict XVI often described Christianity not first as an intellectual system, a list of doctrines, or a moral program, but as an encounter, a love story, an event. That is what the kiss is. It is not an argument against the old cardinal’s grim view of humanity. It is an encounter with the possibility he has excluded.

The possibility that a human being can endure freedom when freedom is not abandonment. The possibility that we can bear the risk of love because Love has come near.

Christ does not promise the Inquisitor that he will never be afraid. He does not promise that the poor will never need bread, or that doubt will never ache, or that people will not use their freedom to wound one another. Any faith that denies those things becomes the Inquisitor’s faith: tidy, powerful, merciless.

Instead, the kiss says something harder and kinder: I will not reduce you. I will not save you by turning you into an obedient animal. I will love you enough to leave your answer in your own hands.

And that may be what we want beneath all our frantic requests for certainty. Not freedom from responsibility, but freedom held in love. Not a ruler who relieves us of the danger of being human, but a God who knows the danger from inside it. A God who enters the locked room, sits down in the dark, and refuses to leave us alone there.

The Grand Inquisitor opens the cell door. He tells Christ to go and never return.

But the kiss remains with him.

May it remain with us too.