The Grand Inquisitor is a poem that Ivan invents and tells Alyosha in a tavern, in Book V: Christ returns to sixteenth-century Seville, and a ninety-year-old cardinal has him arrested so that he will not disturb the happiness the Church has fabricated.
In the cell, at night, the Inquisitor speaks and the prisoner says nothing. The old man maintains that the three questions of the spirit of the desert, the one about stones turned into bread, the one about the pinnacle of the temple, and the one about the kingdoms of the earth, foretold all of human history, and that Christ was wrong to give men a freedom they cannot bear. The Church corrected his work with the three forces He refused: miracle, mystery and authority. And he reveals the secret: for eight centuries they have been no longer with Christ but with the other one.
The cardinal is not a cynic; he says he went into the desert and came back for the happiness of the weak, and he lies out of love for them. Alyosha protests that the poem praises Jesus and that the Inquisitor does not believe in God; Ivan replies that perhaps this is his suffering.
Christ's answer is a kiss on the bloodless lips of the old man, who sends him away and does not change his mind. Alyosha repeats the gesture, kissing Ivan, and Ivan calls it a literary theft. The book does not refute the poem with words: it answers in Zosima's chapters, in Book VI.