The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Andrew R. MacAndrew Page B

he believed in it, he yearned to serve it and give it his whole strength; he was spoiling for immediate action, was prepared to sacrifice everything, his life itself, in an act of supreme devotion. Unfortunately, these young men often fail to understand that the sacrifice of their lives may be the easiest of all sacrifices, much easier, for instance, than giving up five or six years of their seething youth to hard study, to the acquisition of knowledge which would increase their strength tenfold in the service of that same cause, and in the performance of the great works they aspire to. But to sacrifice those few years to study often proves too much for them. Alyosha chose a course opposite to that of the majority, although he felt the same yearning for action and sacrifice as the others. Once, having given it serious thought, he had become convinced of the existence of God and immortality, it was natural for him to say to himself: “I want to live to achieve immortality and will accept no compromise.” If by chance he had become convinced that God and immortality did not exist, he would immediately have joined the ranks of the atheists and socialists (for socialism is not just a question of labor organization; it is above all an atheistic phenomenon, the modern manifestation of atheism, one more tower of Babel built without God, not in order to reach out toward heaven from earth, but to bring heaven down to earth). Once he had decided, Alyosha would have félt it strange, even impossible, to go on living as he had been.
    It is written: “If thou wouldst be perfect, go and give up all that thou hast and come and follow me.” So Alyosha said to himself: “I cannot very well just give up a couple of rubles, instead of all that I have, or, instead of obeying the Lord’s ‘Follow me,’ just attend church.” Perhaps there lingered in his mind some early memory of our monastery, to which his mother may have taken him to attend mass. Or perhaps his decision was somehow connected with the slanting rays of the setting sun on the icon before which his crazy mother had held him. When he first arrived, Alyosha had seemed to be pondering deeply about something, perhaps trying to decide whether he would be able to give up “all” or only a couple of rubles. Then he met the elder at the monastery.
    This was the elder Zosima whom I mentioned earlier. But before I proceed, I should try to explain what an “elder” in our monasteries is. I regret that I am not fully versed in these matters, but I will do my best to give a rough idea of that institution. First of all, according to the experts, the institution of elder came into existence in our Russian monasteries only quite recently, less than a hundred years ago, although it has existed for well over a thousand years throughout the Orthodox East, particularly in Sinai and on Mount Athos. As I understand it, in olden times there were probably elders in Russia too, but as the country went through a series of calamities—the Tartar invasion, civil wars, and isolation from the Orthodox East after the fall of Constantinople—the institution fell into disuse and the elders vanished from our monasteries. They were reintroduced in Russia toward the end of the eighteenth century by the great ascetic (as he was called) Paisii Velichkovsky and his followers, but to this day, almost a hundred years later, elders are found in only a very few monasteries and they have occasionally been subjected to persecution as an un-Russian innovation. The institution of elder especially flourished in the famous Kozelskaya Optina Monastery. Who introduced it into our monastery and when I cannot say. I only know that there had already been three elders, Zosima being the third. But he was weak and sick and obviously did not have long to live, and no one knew where another would be found to take his place. This was a crucial problem for our monastery because it had not previously been renowned for anything in