Perhaps only a handful of literati can fully comprehend the pinnacle of Dostoevsky's magnum opus The Grand Inquisitor, a chapter in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. To understand existentialist-atheistic narratives one must perhaps be an existentialist and an atheist himself, even just for one fleeting moment, for fifteen minutes or so, to suspend one's judgment and consider the possibilities of this godless, purposeless, but liberating, existence.

It's the fifteenth century and Jesus Christ finally descends from the clouds in a strategic location, in Seville, Spain--of all places, why there, is perhaps God's random decision--and performs miracles. Everyone who sees Him is indisputably sure that He is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, or God Himself, incarnate, walking among the peoples of faith. He is engulfed in an invisible cloak of irresistible magnetic force that draws all people to him, to follow Him wherever He goes, sit wherever He sits, and listen to Him intently with every indecipherable parable He utters, which only the chosen few can understand, one of which, the Grand Inquisitor.

Fifteenth century in Seville is an era of arresting witches, sorcerers, blasphemers, atheists, heretics, and all nonbelievers alike who dare question the norm and authority and renegade against the established institution. They are imprisoned in torture chambers, tried in religious courts, and are either crucified, flogged, flagellated, drowned, burned, skinned, guillotined, bludgeoned, lapidated, mutilated, hanged, strappadoed, and other forms of medieval torture depending on the gravity of their crimes.

Just then, here comes Jesus, the central magnet of the opposing force: the weak, the sinful, the simpletons, the lost, the unholy, the bereaved. He blesses the people, heals them, cures the blind, while an obsequious lot kiss His trodden ground and little children scatter flowers on His path. In a moment a coffin is hauled before Him and a clamant woman throws herself at His feet wailing, "Save my daughter if you really are He!" As expected, Jesus resurrects the little girl from the dead as the girl bolts upright from her satin-laden bed, squints her eyes open, and smiles at everybody. Some are flummoxed but everybody cheers anyway.

A few feet away from all the ruckus in the cathedral square, the ninety-year-old Grand Inquisitor, the decision maker of the trials and kinds of torture for witches, heretics, atheists, et al, watches everything in smirked amusement, and orders his guards to arrest Him and incarcerate Him in a cell.

Okay, I have just inadvertently narrated the scene. Here comes the juicy part, which, I repeat, requires a suspension of judgment in the concept of this godless, purposeless, but liberating, existence. Oh boy, this part shook every neuron in my brain and enlightened me with the major ideas in existentialist literature, propounding the culmination of the truth, the absurdity of reality, the simplicity of the world, and the glaring patency of human nature.

The following scene involves the Grand Inquisitor's monologue which deftly explicates my weltanschauung. His castigation of Jesus completely speaks my soul, the conspirator of fabrications guised as a witty creative writer adept in the scheme of lies and chicaneries for the Truth is wildly unacceptable, intolerable, and would push one's self to self-destruction. So the Grand Inquisitor's institution, the Church, invented "necessary fictions" to appease man's self-destruction and misery at the blunt pointlessness of existence amidst this unmanageable concept of freedom.

The Grand Inquisitor explains that He will be executed the following day like all the impostors, heretics, and hypocrites, before a horde of anticipating toothless fish-smelling medieval barbarians. Though GI knows He is kosher, Jesus stands as a stymie against the constructed institution, this mass contrivance of fictional rubbish to comfort man against the stark nothingness beyond death and the afterlife and all the unprovable fishy mysteries acquainted with it. Jesus therefore cannot provoke the people to learn the Truth and become rebels against the church, thus resulting to dystopia, meaning, the prevalence of perpetual mad fucking in public, violence, corruption, The Seven Deadly Sins, leading to the Apocalypse unabridged, the destruction of the earth by itself. Moreover, Jesus has already bequeathed His power to the fat, short, and bald Pope (Notice how they all wear that sheet of round, red cloth on their bald shiny heads? Whatsit called anyway?) to lord over His kingdom on earth, ergo, He is not any more needed (and He should've had known before hand) and His mere presence poses an alarming threat to the blind utopia the church has tediously constructed for fifteen effing centuries since His ascent.

God has granted man freedom as a form of punishment when man ate the Fruit and was kicked out on the derriere from the Paradise. And when Jesus descended to earth for the first time, there was strife and corruption and suffering all over the world. Why such vile things existed, GI explained, was because of this freedom. God has given man freedom without warning, without advice, as such a powerful "gift" is to spawn suffering among men if used unwittingly. Perhaps it is this warning, this advice about freedom that God divested man of the knowledge to be a god himself. Remember Genesis? After man ate the Fruit of Knowledge, God said, "Behold, man has become one of us!" Thus depriving man of this knowledge, God made man suffer, sparing the exclusive few who know the secret of becoming the god latent within their self, as man lived in the hell of his own making.

Freedom, in the existentialist perspective, is guided by the proposition that everything is permissible. Yes, everything is permissible, including masturbating with a bottle of Coke or slaying all humans alive without even perpetrating the law. Wait, there is no law. In this lawless dystopia, man is condemned to be free, and because man is weak, corrupt, derisory, and ignorant of this knowledge of freedom's indispensable utility, he relies on the wisdom of others, primarily that of the church, to replace this guidance God Himself must've given him, to comfort him of reaping the rewards of the afterlife, to supply for him his meaning and purpose in the cosmos, to give him direction and peace of mind, and therefore to make him happy in the course of blind, constructive, but necessary, faith. Ultimate freedom is beyond what man can manage, and yet man must define his own reality within this purposeless world through the complete utilization of this freedom, and become a god of his own. So the church gives man bread in the figure of a coin-sized holy wafer in behalf of God, to appease him, suppress his freedom, and control his unmanageable desultory life.

When Jesus first climbed down the beanstalk to earth and walked among the mortals, The Wise and Dreaded Spirit of Self-Destruction and Nonexistence otherwise known as Satan or the devil tempted Him three times to stifle this freedom from man by luring Him into power, thus making man surrender himself to Him, to be guided towards the Truth under His tutelage. So when Satan provided Jesus the stones to be turned into bread, Jesus turned the stones into smelly brown coiled droppings which He heedlessly cried as, "Holy shit!" Nay, Jesus dismissed the demonstration of a miracle to prove not Himself a God thus divesting Himself of the advantages of being stalked, praised, adorned, and worshiped, and therefore the responsibility of governing man on earth. When Satan tempted Him the second time, He was lured into pushing Himself off the pinnacle of a temple, to be saved by God's army of flying angels, and thus be hailed a deity. But no, Jesus didn't submit to this temptation either. Perhaps He knows winged creatures don't exist. Perhaps He's afraid He will be maimed in the process. Or perhaps He thought it wasn't the grandest exhibition He wished to die. Either way, He didn't want to rule over earth. Why? Because He wants man to exercise his freedom instead of Him directing man's course in life. When the third temptation came, Jesus was given Rome and the Emperor's scepter to rule over all the kingdoms of the earth. But of course, Jesus neither submitted to this. It wasn't just land, power, property, and minions of worshipers that He can have, but the entire planet, that includes the oceans and the underwater real estates. But He was an idiot and rejected the bargain. Out of these three temptations to grant Jesus the power over man and to bereave man of his freedom and the suffering he made for himself, Jesus, instead of bearing this responsibility to be the the director of each earthling's destiny, shunned them all away, these temptations, and gave man all the freedom the world can possibly offer. Which means more suffering, of course.

In this dystopia, the church assumed power in His behalf without His permission, to carry all this burden of responsibility: the responsibility of man to be responsible for his self. The Grand Inquisitor explicated that they invented this idea of repentance, to allow man to sin and be expiated, for man to do good on earth in expense of being rewarded in the afterlife, and its counter situation thereof, hell; to assure man that his life has meaning imprinted and footnoted in God's Divine Plan, to lie to him in order to comfort him against the echoing abysmal vacuity and nothingness beyond death.

And yet the Grand Inquisitor burdened himself of this secret, that there is nothing beyond death but maggots and worms, that man is not to go back to God, but to this base brown earth, to rot and be decomposed into carbon molecules, and provide a fertile ground for other living things to thrive on. He confronted man in a claustrophobic wooden confessional box where man would shrive all his deplorable sins and all other things that tormented him, and would emerge immaculate, sinless as a log, blithe, and happy, when in reality, it was all an illusion of atonement, and that the clerics and the Grand Inquisitor himself bore man's loathsome secrets and God's mundane responsibility.

GI admits he's an atheist--like me! :claps hands:--and that he has the right to be outraged at Jesus and side with Satan. And when he was expecting Jesus to strangle him to death, scratch his eyes out, and ram them into his rectum, Jesus kissed his puckered lips instead--a sign of gratitude. Jesus is then released a free man from His prison cell, and GI sticks to his idea. Brilliant, no?

Fiction is the lie that tells the truth, one aphorism says, and Dostoevsky cunningly fabricated this narrative to tell us the truth. (Well, the Truth is subjective anyway, but when I say my Truth, subjectively speaking, it is that God is dead. If God is dead, then perhaps He once existed?) On the contrary, fiction can also mask as truth itself, ie. the Bible, to save man the burden of carrying the real Truth--that God does not exist--such as what GI has undergone, allowing man to live blissfully a life of ignorance.

Let's face it: man cannot and will not accept that God does not exist. That there isn't any cosmic inspection camera over his head that wires back to this omniscient Deity. He will not accept that the world is all there is to it and nothing else. That the world is simple, comprehensible, understandable, and not in the very wink, mysterious. That he was born without purpose, without meaning, except that which he makes for his self during the course of his mortal life. That he has no soul, that there is no heaven, no hell, no gods, no angels, no devils, no afterlife, no rewards, no damnation, no immortality, no forever. Man will reject all these things because he cannot accept the responsibility of being responsible for his self. If he encounters a mishap or misfortune, he will blame the devil, some spirit, or the people around him. If someone dies, he will say that some Almighty Creature has plans for him. If he encounters luck and blessings in his life, he will thank God and prostrate himself before this imaginary being all the more. He cannot understand this mysterious idea of being his own god on earth. He cannot understand that every decision towards his destiny depends on him alone. He will not accept that the Church and the Bible are but necessary fictions to comfort man. He will not understand that the church is but a magnificent grandiose architecture built from the donations of blind sponsors. He will not accept that all these idols, crucifixes, and statues are but point-blank things without spiritual enlightening properties. He will not accept that prayers are futile, useless, senseless, pointless, and idiotic. He will not understand that the world is all wrapped with connotations created by those who are in power. He will not see the Naked Emperor in the Emperor's New Clothes; he will see majestic silk sewn in fine gold and florid embroidery. But when man wakes up from this prevaricated fairy tale and understands all these things, it will be the most liberating moment of his defining existence. He is free! He can do whatever he wants! Yay freedom! Best of all, he will laugh at the Naked Emperor, the allegory for this embellishment-stripped universe. The Kingdom of Heaven is here on earth and all you schmucks have access to it!

I am a free man, and by "man" I mean the generic sense of the word. I have no god. Everything is permissible. But only I am responsible for the consequences of my own actions.

Well. This was some serious ponderous stuff, eh? Fascinating mental workout, this novel.

Word did you say?

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