The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (easy to read books for adults list .txt) 📕

Elders

SOME of my readers may imagine that my young man was a sickly,

ecstatic, poorly developed creature, a pale, consumptive dreamer. On

the contrary, Alyosha was at this time a well-grown, red-cheeked,

clear-eyed lad of nineteen, radiant with health. He was very handsome,

too, graceful, moderately tall, with hair of a dark brown, with a

regular, rather long, oval-shaped face, and wide-set dark grey,

shining eyes; he was very thoughtful, and apparently very serene. I

shall be told, perhaps, that red cheeks are not incompatible with

fanaticism and mysticism; but I fancy that Alyosha was more of a

realist than anyone. Oh! no doubt, in the monastery he fully

believed in miracles, but, to my thinking, miracles are never a

stumbling-block to the realist. It is not miracles that dispose

realists to belief. The genuine realist, if he is an unbeliever,

will always find strength and ability to disbelieve in the miraculous,

and if he is confronted with a miracle as an irrefutable fact he would

rather disbelieve his own senses than admit the fact. Even if he

admits it, he admits it as a fact of nature till then unrecognised

by him. Faith does not, in the realist, spring from the miracle but

the miracle from faith. If the realist once believes, then he is bound

by his very realism to admit the miraculous also. The Apostle Thomas

said that he would not believe till he saw, but when he did see he

said, “My Lord and my God!” Was it the miracle forced him to

believe? Most likely not, but he believed solely because he desired to

believe and possibly he fully believed in his secret heart even when

he said, “I do not believe till I see.”

I shall be told, perhaps, that Alyosha was stupid, undeveloped,

had not finished his studies, and so on. That he did not finish his

studies is true, but to say that he was stupid or dull would be a

great injustice. I’ll simply repeat what I have said above. He entered

upon this path only because, at that time, it alone struck his

imagination and presented itself to him as offering an ideal means

of escape for his soul from darkness to light. Add to that that he was

to some extent a youth of our last epoch-that is, honest in nature,

desiring the truth, seeking for it and believing in it, and seeking to

serve it at once with all the strength of his soul, seeking for

immediate action, and ready to sacrifice everything, life itself,

for it. Though these young men unhappily fail to understand that the

sacrifice of life is, in many cases, the easiest of all sacrifices,

and that to sacrifice, for instance, five or six years of their

seething youth to hard and tedious study, if only to multiply

tenfold their powers of serving the truth and the cause they have

set before them as their goal such a sacrifice is utterly beyond the

strength of many of them. The path Alyosha chose was a path going in

the opposite direction, but he chose it with the same thirst for swift

achievement. As soon as he reflected seriously he was convinced of the

existence of God and immortality, and at once he instinctively said to

himself: “I want to live for immortality, and I will accept no

compromise.” In the same way, if he had decided that God and

immortality did not exist, he would at once have become an atheist and

a socialist. For socialism is not merely the labour question, it is

before all things the atheistic question, the question of the form

taken by atheism to-day, the question of the tower of Babel built

without God, not to mount to heaven from earth but to set up heaven on

earth. Alyosha would have found it strange and impossible to go on

living as before. It is written: “Give all that thou hast to the

poor and follow Me, if thou wouldst be perfect.”

Alyosha said to himself: “I can’t give two roubles instead of

‘all,’ and only go to mass instead of ‘following Him.’” Perhaps his

memories of childhood brought back our monastery, to which his

mother may have taken him to mass. Perhaps the slanting sunlight and

the holy image to which his poor “crazy” mother had held him up

still acted upon his imagination. Brooding on these things he may have

come to us perhaps only to see whether here he could sacrifice all

or only “two roubles,” and in the monastery he met this elder. I

must digress to explain what an “elder” is in Russian monasteries, and

I am sorry that I do not feel very competent to do so. I will try,

however, to give a superficial account of it in a few words.

Authorities on the subject assert that the institution of “elders”

is of recent date, not more than a hundred years old in our

monasteries, though in the orthodox East, especially in Sinai and

Athos, it has existed over a thousand years. It is maintained that

it existed in ancient times in Russia also, but through the calamities

which overtook Russia-the Tartars, civil war, the interruption of

relations with the East after the destruction of Constantinople-this institution fell into oblivion. It was revived among us towards

the end of last century by one of the great “ascetics,” as they called

him, Paissy Velitchkovsky, and his disciples. But to this day it

exists in few monasteries only, and has sometimes been almost

persecuted as an innovation in Russia. It flourished especially in the

celebrated Kozelski Optin Monastery. When and how it was introduced

into our monastery I cannot say. There had already been three such

elders and Zossima was the last of them. But he was almost dying of

weakness and disease, and they had no one to take his place. The

question for our monastery was an important one, for it had not been

distinguished by anything in particular till then: they 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