V. Старцы

On the contrary, Alyosha was at that time a well-built, ruddy-cheeked youth of nineteen, clear-eyed and brimming with health.

He was, at that time, even very handsome — shapely, of medium-to-tall height, dark-haired, with a regular though somewhat elongated oval of a face, with shining dark-gray, wide-set eyes, deeply thoughtful and to all appearances perfectly calm.

It may be objected that ruddy cheeks are no obstacle to fanaticism or to mysticism; but to me it seems that Alyosha was a realist even more than anyone else.

Oh, of course, in the monastery he believed wholeheartedly in miracles; but, to my mind, miracles will never trouble a realist.

It is not miracles that incline a realist toward faith.

A true realist, if he is not a believer, will always find in himself the strength and the capacity to disbelieve even a miracle, and if a miracle should stand before him as an undeniable fact, he will sooner distrust his own senses than admit the fact.

And if he does admit it, then he will admit it as a natural fact that until now had simply been unknown to him.

In a realist, faith is not born of a miracle; rather, the miracle is born of faith.

Once a realist comes to believe, then by the very logic of his realism he must inevitably admit the miracle as well.

The apostle Thomas declared that he would not believe until he saw, and when he saw, he said: "My Lord and my God!"

Was it a miracle that made him believe?

Most likely not; rather, he came to believe solely because he wished to believe, and perhaps already believed completely, in the innermost recess of his being, even at the very moment when he was saying: "I will not believe until I see."

It may be objected that Alyosha was dull, undeveloped, that he had not finished his studies, and so forth.

That he did not finish his studies was true, but to say that he was dull or stupid would be a great injustice.

I will simply repeat what I have already said above: he set out upon this path only because at that time it alone struck him and offered him, all at once, the whole ideal of an escape for his soul, which was straining out of darkness toward the light.

Add to this that he was a youth belonging in part already to our own latest age — that is, honest by his nature, demanding the truth, seeking it and believing in it, and, once he believed, demanding to take part in it at once with the whole strength of his soul, demanding some swift act of devotion, with an unfailing wish to sacrifice everything for that act, even his life.

Though, unhappily, these youths do not understand that the sacrifice of one's life is perhaps the easiest of all sacrifices in a great many such cases, and that to sacrifice, for example, five or six years of one's seething young life to difficult, arduous study, to learning — if only in order to multiply tenfold within oneself the powers to serve that same truth and that same deed of devotion which one has come to love and has resolved to accomplish — such a sacrifice is, time and again, very nearly beyond the strength of many of them.

Alyosha merely chose the path opposite to everyone's, but with the same thirst for a swift act of devotion.

No sooner had he, reflecting in earnest, been struck by the conviction that immortality and God exist than he at once, naturally, said to himself: "I want to live for immortality, and I accept no half-measure compromise."

In just the same way, had he decided that immortality and God do not exist, he would at once have gone over to the atheists and the socialists (for socialism is not merely a labor question, the question of the so-called fourth estate, but is preeminently an atheistic question, the question of the contemporary embodiment of atheism, the question of the Tower of Babel, built precisely without God — not in order to reach heaven from earth, but to bring heaven down to earth).

To Alyosha it even seemed strange and impossible to go on living as before.

It is written: "Give away all you have and follow me, if you would be perfect."

And Alyosha said to himself: "I cannot give two rubles instead of 'all,' nor go merely to mass instead of 'following him.'"

From the memories of his earliest childhood there had perhaps been preserved something of our monastery outside the town, where his mother may have taken him to mass.

Perhaps there had also worked upon him the slanting rays of the setting sun before the icon toward which his mother — a shrieker — used to hold him out.

Thoughtful, he came to us then perhaps only to look: was it all here, or was there here too only the two rubles — and in the monastery he met this elder...

This elder, as I have already explained above, was the elder Zosima; but here one ought to say a few words about what these "elders" are in our monasteries generally, and the pity of it is that on this road I feel myself not competent or sure enough.

I shall try, however, to convey it in brief words and in a superficial account.

And first of all, the specialists and the competent assert that elders and elderhood appeared among us, in our Russian monasteries, only very recently — not even a hundred years ago — whereas throughout the whole Orthodox East, and especially on Sinai and Athos, they have existed already for well over a thousand years.

They assert that elderhood did exist among us in Rus in the most ancient times, or that it must of necessity have existed, but that, owing to the calamities of Russia — the Tatar yoke, the times of troubles, the breaking off of former relations with the East after the fall of Constantinople — this institution was forgotten among us and the elders died out.

It was revived among us once more from the end of the last century by one of the great ascetics (as they call him), Paisius Velichkovsky, and his disciples; but even to this day, even after nearly a hundred years, it exists in very few monasteries still, and has at times even been subjected almost to persecution, as an innovation unheard of in Russia.

It flourished among us in Rus especially in one famous hermitage, the Kozelsk Optina.

When and by whom it was planted in our monastery outside the town as well, I cannot say, but there it had already counted three successions of elders, and the elder Zosima was the last of them — and even he was already nearly dying of weakness and infirmity, and there was no one to replace him; they did not even know with whom.

The question was an important one for our monastery, since up to that time our monastery had been famous for nothing in particular: it possessed neither relics of holy saints, nor wonder-working icons that had revealed themselves, nor even any glorious legends bound up with our history, and no historic exploits or services to the fatherland stood to its name.

It flourished and grew famous throughout all Russia precisely because of the elders, to see and to hear whom pilgrims came flocking to us in crowds from all over Russia, from thousands of versts away.

And so, what, then, is an elder?

An elder is one who takes your soul, your will, into his own soul and into his own will.

Having chosen an elder, you renounce your own will and surrender it to him in complete obedience, with complete self-abnegation.

This ordeal, this fearful school of life, the one who dooms himself to it accepts of his own free will, in the hope that after a long trial he will conquer himself, master himself to such a degree that he may at last attain, through a lifetime of obedience, a perfect freedom — that is, freedom from his own self — and escape the lot of those who have lived out their whole lives without ever finding themselves within themselves.

This invention — that is, elderhood — is not theoretical, but was derived in the East from a practice already, in our time, a thousand years old.

The duties owed to an elder are not the same as ordinary "obedience," which has always existed in our Russian monasteries too.

Here there is acknowledged a perpetual confession of all who place themselves under the elder, and an indissoluble bond between the one who binds and the one who is bound.

It is told, for instance, that once, in the most ancient times of Christianity, a certain novice, having failed to carry out some act of obedience laid upon him by his elder, fled from him out of the monastery and came into another country, from Syria into Egypt.

There, after long and great labors of devotion, he was at last accounted worthy to suffer tortures and a martyr's death for the faith.

And when the church was burying his body, already venerating him as a saint, then suddenly, at the deacon's cry of "Ye catechumens, depart!" — the coffin with the martyr's body lying in it tore itself from its place and was cast out of the church, and so it happened three times.

And at last they learned only that this holy passion-bearer had broken his obedience and forsaken his elder, and therefore, without the elder's release, could not be forgiven, even in spite of his great labors of devotion.

But when the elder, summoned, released him from his obedience, then only could his burial be accomplished.

Of course, all this is only an ancient legend, but here is a recent true tale as well: one of our contemporary monks was seeking salvation on Athos, and suddenly his elder commanded him to leave Athos, which he had come to love as a holy place, as a quiet refuge, to the very depth of his soul, and to go first to Jerusalem to venerate the holy places, and then back to Russia, to the north, to Siberia: "There is your place, and not here."