The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [children's books read aloud TXT] 📗

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 fulfil 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 unbaptised,” 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 Oecumenical 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 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 someone or something holy to fall down before and worship.

 

“Among us there is sin, injustice, and temptation, but yet,

somewhere on earth there is someone 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 anyone 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 offence 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