The Brothers Karamazov (60 page)

Men speak of hell fire as a physical fire. I will not look into this mystery, for I am afraid. But I believe that if the fire was physical, sinners would be glad, for if they were subjected to a physical ordeal, they would forget for a brief moment the infinitely more fearful spiritual torment. But it is impossible for them to escape that spiritual torment because it is within, not outside, them. And even if they could escape it, they would, I believe, become even more wretched. For even if the righteous in heaven forgave them at the sight of their sufferings and, in their infinite love, called them to join them in heaven, they would only further exasperate their suffering, for that would simply intensify their burning thirst to give the responsive, active, and grateful love which was now beyond their power forever. And here I would like to suggest, in all humility, that perhaps this very awareness of the impossibility of loving might lead to an eventual alleviation of the sinners’ torments, for, by accepting the love of the righteous along with the impossibility of their responding to it, through the resignation and humility which would result from that acceptance, they might come to experience a feeling resembling the active love they neglected on earth . . . I am sorry, my friends and brothers, that I cannot express this more clearly.

But woe unto those who have laid hands upon themselves on earth, woe betide the suicides! For I do not believe there can be anyone more wretched than they. They say that it is a sin to pray to God for them and the Church appears to deny them. But, deep down, in the secret recesses of my heart, I feel that for them, too, we may pray. Christ will never hold it against us if we act out of love. I have prayed for them inwardly all my life; I confess to you, fathers and teachers, that I prayed for them today, too.

Oh, even in hell there are some who remain proud and fierce, even though they have acquired knowledge beyond doubt and have seen the truth that cannot be rejected. Some frightening ones surrender themselves entirely to Satan and his spirit of pride. For them, hell is voluntary and unending. These have chosen by their own free will to suffer. For they have cursed themselves by cursing God and life. They feed on their evil pride, which is the same as if a starving man in the desert were to start sucking the blood from his own veins. But they will never be satisfied until the end of time, for they refuse to be forgiven and they curse God, when He calls them to Him. They cannot behold the living God without hatred. They wish God did not exist. They demand of God that He destroy Himself as well as all His creation. And they shall burn in the fire of their own rage forever and ever, always yearning for death and non-existence. But they shall not find death . . .

*

Here Alexei Karamazov’s manuscript ends. I repeat, it is incomplete and fragmentary. For instance, the biographical information covers only the elder’s early youth. His views and teachings, uttered at different times and prompted by different circumstances, are gathered and arranged into what is, perhaps, a meaningful whole. It is impossible to determine how much of this the elder actually said in the last hours of his life, but the spirit of what he said can be gleaned from those earlier pronouncements of his which Alexei Karamazov mentions in his manuscript.

The elder’s death came quite unexpectedly. For, although those who had gathered around him that evening knew that death was near, they never thought it would be so sudden. Indeed, as I mentioned earlier, seeing him so cheerful and talkative, they felt there was a noticeable improvement in his health, even if it was only for a short time. Even five minutes before the end, as they later reported with wonderment, none of them suspected anything. He suddenly felt an acute pain in his chest, turned pale, and pressed his hand to his heart. They all rose from their seats and rushed to him. Although in pain, he was still smiling at them. He slipped slowly from his armchair to the floor, knelt, bowed his head to the ground, spread his arms, and, apparently in a state of ecstasy, praying and kissing the ground—as he had taught others to do—quietly and joyfully, he gave up his soul to God.

The news of Zosima’s death immediately spread through the hermitage and reached the monastery. The departed’s closest friends, as well as those whose position and monastic rank made it their duty, began to lay out the body according to the ancient rites, and all the monks gathered in the monastery church. Before daybreak, it was said later, the news of the death had reached town. By morning, the whole town was talking of it and throngs of townspeople flowed toward the monastery. We shall say more of this in the next book, but for now we shall only warn the reader in advance that, before that day was over, something completely unexpected happened. It made such a strange, bewildering, and puzzling impression, both in the monastery and in town, that many people still remember it to this day.

PART THREE

Book VII: Alyosha

Chapter 1: The Smell Of Decay

THE BODY of the deceased monk-priest Father Zosima was prepared for burial in conformity with the established ritual. As is well known, the bodies of monks and hermits are not washed after death. The 
Great Prayer Book
 says: “Whenever a monk departs in the Lord, a specially designated monk must make the sign of the cross with a sponge on the forehead, the chest, the hands, the feet, and the knees of the deceased, rinse the body with warm water, and do nothing more.”

Father Paisii performed these rituals and, after sponging the body, clothed it in monastic garb and wrapped it in a cloak which, as prescribed, he slit slightly so as to wrap it crosswise around the body. On the head, he put a cowl bearing an orthodox cross. The cowl was left open, but the face was covered by a black veil. An icon of the Saviour was placed in the dead man’s hands. Thus arrayed, the body was placed toward morning in a coffin that had been prepared long in advance. The coffin was to be left in the elder’s cell—the larger room where he used to receive his visitors. In accordance with the rule, the deceased being a monk-priest and an ascetic, the Gospel rather than the Psalter was to be read over his body by monks who were ordained priests like himself.

After the requiem service, Father Joseph began the reading. Father Paisii, who wished to follow him and to continue reading over the body all day and throughout the following night, was greatly agitated, just then, and was conferring feverishly with the prior of the hermitage. For a strange, unheard of—one might even say unseemly—excitement and impatient expectation were increasingly evident among the monks, among the laymen in the inns around the monastery, and among the throngs of people arriving from town. The prior and Father Paisii tried hard to calm the fidgety crowds.

By the time the sun had fully risen, some townspeople had arrived, bringing with them the sick, in particular, sick children. They had obviously been waiting for just that moment in the belief that the healing powers of the dead man would at once become effective. Now it became apparent how certain everyone in town had been that Father Zosima was a great and indisputable saint. And it was not, by any means, only the uneducated who believed it.

This great expectation sweeping the faithful, displayed with such haste, so openly, with even a suggestion of demanding impatience about it, struck Father Paisii as a clear temptation to sin. He had foreseen that something of the sort would happen after Zosima’s death, but this exceeded all his anticipations. He now started to rebuke those of the monks who shared the general excitement:

“Your impatient expectation of something miraculous,” he told them, “is a mark of levity, which may be excusable in a layman but is most unseemly in a monk.”

But his words had little effect on them. Father Paisii was aware of this and it worried him, although deep down he himself—if we are to be completely truthful about it—despite all his indignation at the impatient expectations of others, which he considered vain and irresponsible, was waiting for something, just as the excited monks were, as he had to admit to himself. Nevertheless, some of those he came across that day made a very unpleasant impression on him and filled him with uneasy forebodings.

Among the crowd in the dead man’s cell, he noticed with a shudder of revulsion—for which he at once rebuked himself—such people as Rakitin and the visiting monk from distant Obdorsk, who was still at the monastery. Somehow Father Paisii was particularly suspicious of these two men, although they were not, by any means, the only ones he looked upon with distrust. The Obdorsk monk’s excitement stood out even amidst the excited crowd. He scampered about, asking questions, eavesdropping on conversations, whispering mysteriously. He looked impatient, annoyed as it were, as if something that was about to happen was being unduly delayed. As to Rakitin, it turned out later that he was in the hermitage at the special request of Mrs. Khokhlakov. That kindly but distracted lady, hearing of the elder’s death upon awakening that morning, had been seized by such violent curiosity that she had at once delegated Rakitin to observe everything for her at the hermitage (since she could not be admitted herself) and to send her a “complete” written report every half hour or so. She considered Rakitin a devout and deeply religious young man, for he was very good at creating whatever impression he wanted in people, if he thought it was to his advantage.

It was a bright, clear day and many of the visitors crowded in among the hermitage graves, which were scattered all over the grounds, although more thickly concentrated around the church. Walking around the hermitage, it suddenly occurred to Father Paisii that he had not seen Alyosha since the night before. At the moment he thought of him, however, he caught sight of him in a faraway corner of the hermitage, sitting on the ancient gravestone of a monk who had been renowned for his devotion. Alyosha sat facing the wall. He seemed to be making himself as inconspicuous as possible behind the gravestone. Father Paisii went over to him and saw that Alyosha was weeping bitterly, his hands covering his face. He was weeping noiselessly, but his sobs shook his whole body. Father Paisii stood over him in silence for a while.

“Come, son, that’s enough, my boy,” he said sympathetically. “Why, you should be glad instead of crying. Don’t you know that this is the greatest of his days? Just remember where he is at this very moment, just think of it!”

Alyosha uncovered his face, which was swollen from crying, like a child’s face, and looked up at Father Paisii. But he at once turned away and, without saying a word, quickly put his hands over his face again.

“Well, I suppose that’s how it is,” Paisii said thoughtfully. “All right, go ahead, weep if you must. Christ has sent you these tears . . .”

As he walked away, feeling a great tenderness for the boy, he thought: “Your warm tears will bring you peace and will gladden the soul of your dear departed.” In fact, he had left Alyosha so abruptly because he had felt that he would be unable to control his own tears much longer if he stayed with him.

Meanwhile the requiem mass and the monastery service for the departed were performed in due course. Father Joseph again read the Gospels by the coffin and Father Paisii once more took over from him. But then, just before 3 p.m., something happened. This was the completely unexpected thing to which I alluded at the end of the preceding chapter. It was so contrary to the general hopes and expectations that, as I said before, every last detail of it is remembered to this day by everyone in our town and throughout our district. At this point I would like to say for myself personally that it makes me quite sick when I think of all the commotion caused by that phenomenon, which, though it was unpleasant and unsavory, was at the same time unimportant and quite natural. I would have left it out of my narrative altogether had it not strongly affected my principal hero—or rather my future principal hero—Alyosha, bringing him to a turning point and giving him a violent shock, but as a final result strengthening his resolution to pursue his goal to the end.

But now, back to the story. When before daybreak the elder’s body had been made ready for burial, laid out in the coffin, and taken into what used to be his reception room, someone had wondered aloud whether the windows should not be opened. The question, asked in a casual tone, remained unanswered and would have passed unnoticed had not some of the people present been struck by the very absurdity of its implication—that the body of such a saint might give off a smell of decay. Such thoughtlessness, such a flagrant lack of faith, was felt to be pitiful, not to say ridiculous. Indeed, everyone expected just the opposite to happen.

But shortly after midday, those going in and out became silently aware of something. They were obviously afraid to remark upon it aloud to others. By three in the afternoon, though, it became so clear and unmistakable that the news spread at once through the hermitage, was caught up by all the visitors there, reached the monastery, causing great amazement among the monks, and finally swept the town, stirring tremendous excitement among believers and unbelievers alike. The unbelievers, of course, were delighted, although some of the believers were even more delighted than the unbelievers themselves, because “men enjoy witnessing the fall and disgrace of the upright,” as the elder himself had said in one of his discourses.

The fact was that a slight whiff of decay from the coffin became more and more perceptible and by three in the afternoon the smell had become quite distinct, and it continued to increase. Not in the living memory of our monastery had there been such a disgraceful display of sinful and unrestrained behavior among the monks as there was immediately after this fact had become known. Later, the most reasonable of our monks could not remember the events of that day without horror and amazement, wondering how the public scandal could have reached such incredible proportions. For, of course, monks of well-established righteousness and God-fearing elders had died before and the smell of decomposition had come from their humble coffins too, just as it comes from all corpses. But that had never provoked any such disgraceful display or, for that matter, had it ever stirred up any undue excitement. Of course, there had also been some monks whose memory had been preserved in our monastery and whose remains, according to belief, had never been touched by decay. This fact was treasured with sacred fervor by the monks as a beautiful and miraculous pledge of an even greater sanctity for the monastery’s tombs in the future, if, by the grace of God, that time should come. One such monk, Father Job, a celebrated ascetic, famous for his feats of fasting and his long unbroken silences, whose memory was greatly cherished, had died at the beginning of the nineteenth century at the age of a hundred and five. His grave was always shown with great veneration to visitors and mysterious hints were made about certain great hopes the monastery nurtured in connection with it (this, by the way, was the grave on which Father Paisii had found Alyosha sitting that morning). As well as this saint of long ago, the monks also greatly revered the memory of another famed priest-monk, who had died much more recently. This was Father Varsonofy, whom Father Zosima had succeeded as the monastery’s elder and whom all the visiting monks and pilgrims had considered almost a holy fool. These two saintly men, tradition had it, had lain in their coffins just as though they were alive and had been buried without showing any signs of decay whatever. Indeed, they had smiled in their coffins. Some even insisted that their bodies had given off a fragrance of flowers.

However, even such glorious memories still hardly account for the thoughtless, preposterous, and spiteful demonstrations that took place by Father Zosima’s coffin. For my part, I think that there was much more to it and that there were other reasons for what happened—among these, the ancient, deep-rooted hostility toward the institution of elders, which was openly considered a harmful innovation by many outside the monastery, and also secretly thought to be so by a number of monks inside. There was also, it goes without saying, envy of the saintliness that had been so insistently attributed to Zosima during his lifetime that, indeed, one was not even allowed to question it. For, although Father Zosima had won over followers by his love rather than by miracles and had surrounded himself with what became a sort of world of love and affection, that very fact also made some people envious of him and many of these eventually became his bitter enemies, both openly and secretly, both within the monastery and without. He had never harmed anyone, but people nevertheless somehow felt resentful and asked: “Why should this man be considered such a saint?” And because it was repeated again and again, this question eventually generated an insatiable hatred for him. That is why, I believe, when many people noticed the smell of decay coming from his dead body, so soon moreover (less than a day) after his death, they were delighted beyond all measure. And this is also why some of the elder’s most devoted and still loyal disciples felt almost personally offended by this occurrence.

The whole affair developed as follows.

Once the decay had been noticed, monks kept hurrying in and out of the cell, and it was quite obvious why they came. They would come in, stand about for a moment, then leave again, to confirm the news to a group of others waiting outside. Of these, some would just gloomily shake their heads, while others did not even bother to hide the joy that gleamed in their malevolent eyes. It was strange that no one felt outraged by their attitude, that no one protested against it, for, after all, most of the monks had been devoted to the elder. It was apparently the will of God that, this time, the minority should prevail for a while. And soon lay observers, mostly educated people, also came to find out what was happening. Of the common people, very few came into the cell, although many gathered at the gates of the hermitage. It is a fact that the flow of lay visitors visibly increased after 3 p.m. and there is no doubt that this increase was due to the shocking news. People who would never have come that day, who, indeed, had not planned to come at all, were now there, among them some extremely important and highly placed people. Decorum was still maintained, however, and Father Paisii, with a stern expression on his face, kept reading from the Gospels in a firm, clear voice, as if he noticed nothing, although he had been perfectly aware from the beginning that something was going on. In the end, however, these people’s words reached his ears too, words uttered at first in hushed tones, then gradually louder as the visitors grew bolder.

“It just goes to show that God’s judgment is different from that of men,” Father Paisii suddenly heard someone say.

The man who was the first to say this aloud was a middle-aged civil servant from the town, a pious man by reputation. And he had only stated aloud an idea that the monks had been whispering into each other’s ears for quite some time. These words of condemnation had long been in the air and the worst of it was that every minute the note of triumph in the tone in which they were uttered became more and more obvious. And soon even decorum began to give way, for many evidently felt that there was no longer any need for discretion now.