Trump’s Literacy / Hillary and the Grand Inquisitor

This past summer, I invited historian Jon Meacham to write a piece about the approaching presidential election. After bandying several ideas, he delivered an essay on the kind of president Hillary Clinton might be based on her professed admiration for Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. That was September 1. Like many Americans — including me — he assumed Clinton would win the election. In the early hours of November 9, he agreed to write a reflection on Trump’s victory. We decided to run both articles.

—a. r.

HILLARY AND THE GRAND INQUISITOR

The setting, at least for the historically-minded, was a familiar one: the hall at Moscow State University in which Ronald Reagan had hailed the “Moscow spring” of two decades before, in the waning hours of the Cold War. In that classic Reagan speech, the American president struck characteristically optimistic notes. “Freedom is the right to question and change the established way of doing things,” Reagan said. “Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority of government, has a monopoly on the truth, but that every individual life is infinitely precious, that every one of us put on this world has been put here for a reason and has something to offer.” Now, in the autumn of 2009, the American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, stood before a colorful mural featuring a hammer and sickle — the bust of Lenin from Reagan’s day had been removed — to address the students not of the Soviet Union but of Russia. And while Lenin was gone, the Russian past, and her own, was very much on Clinton’s mind.

Asked from the floor about what book had “changed [her] life” — it was a university crowd, after all — the Secretary of State cited Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s epic The Brothers Karamazov. Recalling two readings of the sprawling philosophical nineteenth century novel, Clinton singled out “The Grand Inquisitor” section of the book, what Dostoyevsky’s atheistic narrator Ivan refers to as a “poem” he recites to his devout brother, Alyosha. Conventionally interpreted as a depiction of Roman Catholic certitude against a more personal and Protestant understanding of faith, the scene features a cardinal of the church describing the perils of free will to a Christ who has returned to sixteenth century Spain. A long lament that God had made faith a matter of choice, the cardinal’s monologue offers a defense of the church’s subsequent — and in the cleric’s view, necessary — creation of order, ritual, and creed. “Thou mayest not add to what has been said of old,” the Inquisitor tells Jesus, adding: “For fifteen centuries we have been wrestling with Thy freedom, but now it is ended and over for good.” Doctrine and authority have replaced the radical message of Christian love. The church, the Inquisitor believes, has been pragmatic in the face of the existential human problem: how to govern men and their appetites in the maelstrom of what George Eliot, another nineteenth century novelist concerned with life’s largest questions, called the “dim lights and tangled circumstance of the world.” In the end, before Christ is burned as a heretic, the Messiah — for the church, once an answer, now a puzzle — steps forward to kiss the cardinal in a symbolic gesture, as simple as it is disruptive, that silently declares the Lord’s affirmation of love above all.

Clinton appeared to subscribe to the essence of the Catholic versus Protestant interpretation in her remarks in Moscow. The New York Times reported her comments as a warning of “the dangers of certitude,” quoting her as saying, “One of the greatest threats we face is from people who believe they are absolutely, certainly right about everything.” The newspaper failed to include the rest of her sentence. In Moscow, Clinton added that she worried about those who believe “they have the only truth that exists and that it was passed on from God. And I think God has the ultimate truth, I just don’t think any one of us is smart enough to figure out all that it is.”

The omitted part of her reply...