The Brothers Karamazov
had neither relics of saints, nor wonder-working ikons, nor glorious
traditions, nor historical exploits. It had flourished and been
glorious all over Russia through its elders, to see and hear whom
pilgrims had flocked for thousands of miles from all parts.
What was such an elder? An elder was one who took your soul, your will,
into his soul and his will. When you choose an elder, you renounce your
own will and yield it to him in complete submission, complete
self-abnegation. This novitiate, this terrible school of abnegation, is
undertaken voluntarily, in the hope of self-conquest, of self-mastery,
in order, after a life of obedience, to attain perfect freedom, that
is, from self; to escape the lot of those who have lived their whole
life without finding their true selves in themselves. This institution
of elders is not founded on theory, but was established in the East
from the practice of a thousand years. The obligations due to an elder
are not the ordinary “obedience” which has always existed in our
Russian monasteries. The obligation involves confession to the elder by
all who have submitted themselves to him, and to the indissoluble bond
between him and them.
The story is told, for instance, that in the early days of Christianity
one such novice, failing to fulfill some command laid upon him by his
elder, left his monastery in Syria and went to Egypt. There, after
great exploits, he was found worthy at last to suffer torture and a
martyr’s death for the faith. When the Church, regarding him as a
saint, was burying him, suddenly, at the deacon’s exhortation, “Depart
all ye unbaptized,” the coffin containing the martyr’s body left its
place and was cast forth from the church, and this took place three
times. And only at last they learnt that this holy man had broken his
vow of obedience and left his elder, and, therefore, could not be
forgiven without the elder’s absolution in spite of his great deeds.
Only after this could the funeral take place. This, of course, is only
an old legend. But here is a recent instance.
A monk was suddenly commanded by his elder to quit Athos, which he
loved as a sacred place and a haven of refuge, and to go first to
Jerusalem to do homage to the Holy Places and then to go to the north
to Siberia: “There is the place for thee and not here.” The monk,
overwhelmed with sorrow, went to the Œcumenical Patriarch at
Constantinople and besought him to release him from his obedience. But
the Patriarch replied that not only was he unable to release him, but
there was not and could not be on earth a power which could release him
except the elder who had himself laid that duty upon him. In this way
the elders are endowed in certain cases with unbounded and inexplicable
authority. That is why in many of our monasteries the institution was
at first resisted almost to persecution. Meantime the elders
immediately began to be highly esteemed among the people. Masses of the
ignorant people as well as men of distinction flocked, for instance, to
the elders of our monastery to confess their doubts, their sins, and
their sufferings, and ask for counsel and admonition. Seeing this, the
opponents of the elders declared that the sacrament of confession was
being arbitrarily and frivolously degraded, though the continual
opening of the heart to the elder by the monk or the layman had nothing
of the character of the sacrament. In the end, however, the institution
of elders has been retained and is becoming established in Russian
monasteries. It is true, perhaps, that this instrument which had stood
the test of a thousand years for the moral regeneration of a man from
slavery to freedom and to moral perfectibility may be a two-edged
weapon and it may lead some not to humility and complete self-control
but to the most Satanic pride, that is, to bondage and not to freedom.
The elder Zossima was sixty-five. He came of a family of landowners,
had been in the army in early youth, and served in the Caucasus as an
officer. He had, no doubt, impressed Alyosha by some peculiar quality
of his soul. Alyosha lived in the cell of the elder, who was very fond
of him and let him wait upon him. It must be noted that Alyosha was
bound by no obligation and could go where he pleased and be absent for
whole days. Though he wore the monastic dress it was voluntarily, not
to be different from others. No doubt he liked to do so. Possibly his
youthful imagination was deeply stirred by the power and fame of his
elder. It was said that so many people had for years past come to
confess their sins to Father Zossima and to entreat him for words of
advice and healing, that he had acquired the keenest intuition and
could tell from an unknown face what a new-comer wanted, and what was
the suffering on his conscience. He sometimes astounded and almost
alarmed his visitors by his knowledge of their secrets before they had
spoken a word.
Alyosha noticed that many, almost all, went in to the elder for the
first time with apprehension and uneasiness, but came out with bright
and happy faces. Alyosha was particularly struck by the fact that
Father Zossima was not at all stern. On the contrary, he was always
almost gay. The monks used to say that he was more drawn to those who
were more sinful, and the greater the sinner the more he loved him.
There were, no doubt, up to the end of his life, among the monks some
who hated and envied him, but they were few in number and they were
silent, though among them were some of great dignity in the monastery,
one, for instance, of the older monks distinguished for his strict
keeping of fasts and vows of silence. But the majority were on Father
Zossima’s side and very many of them loved him with all their hearts,
warmly and sincerely. Some were almost fanatically devoted to him, and
declared, though not quite aloud, that he was a saint, that there could
be no doubt of it, and, seeing that his end was near, they anticipated
miracles and great glory to the monastery in the immediate future from
his relics. Alyosha had unquestioning faith in the miraculous power of
the elder, just as he had unquestioning faith in the story of the
coffin that flew out of the church. He saw many who came with sick
children or relatives and besought the elder to lay hands on them and
to pray over them, return shortly after—some the next day—and, falling
in tears at the elder’s feet, thank him for healing their sick.
Whether they had really been healed or were simply better in the
natural course of the disease was a question which did not exist for
Alyosha, for he fully believed in the spiritual power of his teacher
and rejoiced in his fame, in his glory, as though it were his own
triumph. His heart throbbed, and he beamed, as it were, all over when
the elder came out to the gates of the hermitage into the waiting crowd
of pilgrims of the humbler class who had flocked from all parts of
Russia on purpose to see the elder and obtain his blessing. They fell
down before him, wept, kissed his feet, kissed the earth on which he
stood, and wailed, while the women held up their children to him and
brought him the sick “possessed with devils.” The elder spoke to them,
read a brief prayer over them, blessed them, and dismissed them. Of
late he had become so weak through attacks of illness that he was
sometimes unable to leave his cell, and the pilgrims waited for him to
come out for several days. Alyosha did not wonder why they loved him
so, why they fell down before him and wept with emotion merely at
seeing his face. Oh! he understood that for the humble soul of the
Russian peasant, worn out by grief and toil, and still more by the
everlasting injustice and everlasting sin, his own and the world’s, it
was the greatest need and comfort to find some one or something holy to
fall down before and worship.
“Among us there is sin, injustice, and temptation, but yet, somewhere
on earth there is some one holy and exalted. He has the truth; he knows
the truth; so it is not dead upon the earth; so it will come one day to
us, too, and rule over all the earth according to the promise.”
Alyosha knew that this was just how the people felt and even reasoned.
He understood it, but that the elder Zossima was this saint and
custodian of God’s truth—of that he had no more doubt than the weeping
peasants and the sick women who held out their children to the elder.
The conviction that after his death the elder would bring extraordinary
glory to the monastery was even stronger in Alyosha than in any one
there, and, of late, a kind of deep flame of inner ecstasy burnt more
and more strongly in his heart. He was not at all troubled at this
elder’s standing as a solitary example before him.
“No matter. He is holy. He carries in his heart the secret of renewal
for all: that power which will, at last, establish truth on the earth,
and all men will be holy and love one another, and there will be no
more rich nor poor, no exalted nor humbled, but all will be as the
children of God, and the true Kingdom of Christ will come.” That was
the dream in Alyosha’s heart.
The arrival of his two brothers, whom he had not known till then,
seemed to make a great impression on Alyosha. He more quickly made
friends with his half-brother Dmitri (though he arrived later) than
with his own brother Ivan. He was extremely interested in his brother
Ivan, but when the latter had been two months in the town, though they
had met fairly often, they were still not intimate. Alyosha was
naturally silent, and he seemed to be expecting something, ashamed
about something, while his brother Ivan, though Alyosha noticed at
first that he looked long and curiously at him, seemed soon to have
left off thinking of him. Alyosha noticed it with some embarrassment.
He ascribed his brother’s indifference at first to the disparity of
their age and education. But he also wondered whether the absence of
curiosity and sympathy in Ivan might be due to some other cause
entirely unknown to him. He kept fancying that Ivan was absorbed in
something—something inward and important—that he was striving towards
some goal, perhaps very hard to attain, and that that was why he had no
thought for him. Alyosha wondered, too, whether there was not some
contempt on the part of the learned atheist for him—a foolish novice.
He knew for certain that his brother was an atheist. He could not take
offense at this contempt, if it existed; yet, with an uneasy
embarrassment which he did not himself understand, he waited for his
brother to come nearer to him. Dmitri used to speak of Ivan with the
deepest respect and with a peculiar earnestness. From him Alyosha
learnt all the details of the important affair which had of late formed
such a close and remarkable bond between the two elder brothers.
Dmitri’s enthusiastic references to Ivan were the more striking in
Alyosha’s eyes since Dmitri was, compared with Ivan, almost uneducated,
and the two brothers were such a contrast in personality and character
that it would be difficult to find two men more unlike.
It was at this time that the meeting, or, rather gathering of the
members of this inharmonious family took place in the cell of the elder
who had such an extraordinary influence on Alyosha. The pretext for
this gathering was a false one. It was at this time that the discord
between Dmitri and his father seemed at its acutest stage and their
relations had become insufferably strained. Fyodor Pavlovitch seems to
have been the first to suggest, apparently in joke, that they should
all meet in Father Zossima’s cell, and that, without appealing to his
direct intervention, they might more decently come to an understanding
under the conciliating influence of the elder’s presence. Dmitri, who