Ivan begins with a confession. He could never understand how one can love one's neighbours. It is just one's neighbours, up close, that one cannot love, though one might love those at a distance. He meant to speak of the suffering of mankind, then narrows the case to children, which reduces the argument to a tenth and weakens it. Children can be loved even at close quarters, even when they are dirty. Grown people have eaten the apple and know good and evil. The children have not, and are so far innocent. If they suffer, the other world says they suffer for their fathers. That reasoning, Ivan says, is incomprehensible to the heart here on earth.
He has been collecting facts, copying anecdotes from newspapers and books, and he already has a fine collection. A beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. He piles example on example. A murderer in prison loved a boy at the window. In Turkey, soldiers tossed infants on their bayonets before the mothers' eyes. The Swiss foundling Richard was kissed, taught the name of God, and led to the guillotine. A father of good education stung his little daughter with birch twigs. A five-year-old was locked in a privy and beaten by her own mother. Alyosha says he wants to suffer too. Ivan adds the serf boy torn apart by the general's hounds, while the mother was made to watch.
Then he sticks to the fact. He does not understand. With his earthly mind he knows that suffering exists, and that none are guilty, and yet he must have justice or he will destroy himself. He will not accept a harmony in some remote eternity if it is bought with the tears of one tortured child. He will not forgive a torturer on behalf of the victim. Even if he himself is only manure for the soil of some future harmony, he refuses the arrangement. It is not God that he does not accept. He most respectfully returns the ticket.
Alyosha calls it rebellion. Ivan asks whether Alyosha would consent to be the architect of human happiness if the building had to be founded on the unavenged tears of one innocent child. Alyosha says no. He invokes the One who gave His innocent blood for all. Ivan says he has not forgotten Him. He has a poem, a story, The Grand Inquisitor, and that is the next stage of the argument.
Coming Up in Chapter 36
Ivan laughs that his poem needs a literary preface. The action is in the sixteenth century, in Seville, when fires were lighted every day. Christ comes softly. At the cathedral a child of seven sits up in her coffin. The Grand Inquisitor, almost ninety, bids the guards take Him. They shut Him in the prison of the Holy Inquisition.
