The Brothers Karamazov

This elder was, as I have explained above, the elder Zosima; but I ought to say a few words first about what, generally, the “elders” in our monasteries are, and the pity is that I feel myself not very competent or steady on this path. I shall try, however, to give a superficial account in a few words. First of all, special and competent people maintain that elders and the institution of elders appeared in our country, in our Russian monasteries, only very recently, less than a hundred years ago, whereas in the whole Orthodox East, especially on Sinai and Athos,^[15] they have existed for well over a thousand years. Some maintain that the institution of elders also existed in Russia in ancient times, or must have existed, but that owing to national calamities—the Tartar yoke,^[16] disorders, the interruption of the former ties with the East after the fall of Constantinople^[17]—the institution was forgotten and elders ceased. It was revived again in our country at the end of the last century by one of the great ascetics (as he is known), Paissy Velichkovsky,^[18] and his disciples, but even to this day, after almost a hundred years, it exists in rather few monasteries and has sometimes been subjected almost to persecution as an unheard-of innovation in Russia. The institution flourished especially in one celebrated hermitage, Kozelskaya-Optina.^[19] When and by whom it was planted in our neighboring monastery I cannot say, but they had already counted a succession of three elders, the latest being the elder Zosima. But he himself was now dying from weakness and disease, and they did not even know whom to replace him with. It was an important question for our monastery, which until then had not been famous for anything in particular: it had no relics of saints, no wonder-working icons, not even any glorious legends connected with its history, nor did it have to its credit any historical deeds or services to the fatherland. It flourished and became famous all over Russia precisely because of the elders, whom crowds of pilgrims from all over Russia, from thousands of miles, came flocking to us to see and hear. What, then, is an elder? An elder is one who takes your soul, your will into his soul and into his will. Having chosen an elder, you renounce your will and give it to him under total obedience and with total self-renunciation. A man who dooms himself to this trial, this terrible school of life, does so voluntarily, in the hope that after the long trial he will achieve self-conquest, self-mastery to such a degree that he will, finally, through a whole life’s obedience, attain to perfect freedom—that is, freedom from himself—and avoid the lot of those who live their whole lives without finding themselves in themselves. This invention—that is, the institution of elders—is not a theoretical one, but grew in the East out of a practice that in our time is already more than a thousand years old. The obligations due to an elder are not the same as the ordinary “obedience” that has always existed in our Russian monasteries as well. All disciples accept an eternal confession to the elder, and an indissoluble bond between the one who binds and the one who is bound. They say, for instance, that once in the early days of Christianity there was such a disciple who, having failed to fulfill a certain obedience imposed on him by his elder, left his monastery in Syria and went to another country, to Egypt. There, after a long life of great asceticism, it was finally granted him to suffer torture and die a martyr for the faith. When the Church, already venerating him as a saint, went to bury his body, suddenly, at the deacon’s exclamation: “All catechumens, depart,”^[20] the coffin containing the martyr’s body tore from its place and cast itself out of the church. This happened three times. In the end, it was discovered that this holy martyr had broken his obedience and left his elder, and therefore could not be forgiven without the elder’s absolution, even despite his great deeds. The elder was summoned and absolved him of his obedience, and only then could his burial take place. Of course, all that is only ancient legend, but here is a recent fact: one of our contemporary monks was seeking salvation on Mount Athos, and suddenly his elder ordered him to leave Athos, which he loved and adored with all his soul as a haven of peace, and go first to Jerusalem to venerate the holy places, and then back to Russia, to the north, to Siberia: “Your place is there, not here.” Stricken and overcome with grief, the monk went to Constantinople, to the Ecumenical Patriarch,^[21] and implored him to release him from his obedience, but the Ecumenical bishop replied that not only was he, the Ecumenical Patriarch, unable to release him but there neither was nor could be any power on earth that could release him from his obedience, once it had been imposed by the elder, except the power of the very elder who had imposed it. Thus elders are, in certain cases, granted a boundless and inconceivable power. That is why in many Russian monasteries the institution of elders was first met almost with persecution. Yet elders immediately found great respect among the people. For instance, common people as well as the highest nobility flocked to the elders of our monastery so that, prostrating before them, they could confess to them their doubts, their sins, their sufferings, and ask for advice and admonition. Seeing which, the opponents of the elders shouted, among other accusations, that here the sacrament of confession was being arbitrarily and frivolously degraded, although a disciple’s or layman’s ceaseless confession of his soul to the elder is not at all sacramental. In the end, however, the institution of elders held out and is being established little by little in Russian monasteries. It is also true, perhaps, that this tested and already thousand-year-old instrument for the moral regeneration of man from slavery to freedom and to moral perfection may turn into a double-edged weapon, which may lead a person not to humility and ultimate self-control but, on the contrary, to the most satanic pride—that is, to fetters and not to freedom.