Read Online The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Andrew R. MacAndrew - Free Book Online

particular: it had no saints’ relics, no miracle-working icons, nor even any glorious traditions connected with the history of Russia. Nor were there any records of special services it had rendered the country. It was only thanks to its elders that it had flourished and its fame spread all over Russia; it was to see and hear our elders that pilgrims from every corner of the country traveled thousands of miles to flock to the monastery.
    What precisely is an elder, then? An elder is a man who takes your soul and your will into his soul and his will. Once you have chosen your elder, you renounce your own will, you yield it to him in total submission and self-renunciation. A man who consents to this ordeal, to this terrible apprenticeship, is willing to bear it in the hope that, after a long period of trial, he will conquer himself and achieve a self-mastery that will enable him to finally attain, through a whole life of obedience, complete freedom (that is, freedom from himself) and thus avoid the fate of those who reach the end of their lives without ever having found themselves within themselves.
    The institution of elder is not an invention based on theory but evolved in the East in more than a thousand years of practice. The obligations a man contracts toward an elder are quite different from the usual “obedience,” such as has always existed in Russian monasteries. Once accepted by an elder, a disciple must live a life of continual confession, and the bond between the two is indissoluble. Once in the early days of Christianity, according to legend, a novice failed to carry out a command imposed on him by his elder and, instead, left his monastery in Syria and went to Egypt. There, after many heroic acts of self-abnegation, he underwent torture and died a martyr for his faith. Yet when before burial his coffin stood in a church where he was already venerated as a saint, a strange thing happened: as soon as the deacon began to intone, “Depart, all ye possessed by the devil,” the coffin rose into the air and was hurled out of the church. And this was repeated three times. It was only then that they learned that this saint had broken his vow of obedience to his elder and so, despite his great exploits, had to be pardoned by his elder before he could receive Christian burial. Of course, that is only an old legend, but let me tell you a true story, of something that happened not long ago. One of our Russian monks, seeking salvation on Mount Athos, was suddenly ordered by his elder to leave Mount Athos, a holy place which he loved and where he had found a peaceful haven for his soul, and first to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to worship at the holy shrines, then to return to Russia and go north to Siberia, “because,” the elder told him, “your place is there and not here.” Stunned and filled with despair, the monk went to Constantinople, where he begged the Ecumenical Patriarch to release him from his vow of obedience; but the Patriarch explained that neither he nor any power on earth could ever release him from his vow of obedience, and that only the elder who had imposed the command had the power to rescind it. Thus, in some ways, elders exercise an authority that is boundless beyond understanding. That is why the institution of elder was at first opposed, even condemned, in Russian monasteries. The common people, however, showed tremendous respect for the elders right away. And soon the uneducated and the humble, the rich and the mighty, were flocking from all over Russia to see the elders of our monastery, to throw themselves at their feet, to confess their sins, to confide their doubts and torments, to seek guidance and advice. This caused the opponents of the elders to accuse them, among other things, of arbitrarily and irresponsibly degrading the sacrament of confession, although the continual baring of a novice’s or a layman’s soul before his elder was quite different from that sacrament. The