Page 549 - the-brothers-karamazov

ly after this discovery among the very monks themselves.
Afterwards, even many years afterwards, some sensible
monks were amazed and horrified, when they recalled that
day, that the scandal could have reached such proportions.
For in the past, monks of very holy life had died, God-fear-
ing old men, whose saintliness was acknowledged by all,
yet from their humble coffins, too, the breath of corrup-
tion had come, naturally, as from all dead bodies, but that
had caused no scandal nor even the slightest excitement. Of
course, there had been, in former times, saints in the mon-
astery whose memory was carefully preserved and whose
relics, according to tradition, showed no signs of corrup-
tion. This fact was regarded by the monks as touching and
mysterious, and the tradition of it was cherished as some-
thing blessed and miraculous, and as a promise, by God’s
grace, of still greater glory from their tombs in the future.
One such, whose memory was particularly cherished,
was an old monk, Job, who had died seventy years before at
the age of a hundred and five. He had been a celebrated as-
cetic, rigid in fasting and silence, and his tomb was pointed
out to all visitors on their arrival with peculiar respect and
mysterious hints of great hopes connected with it. (That
was the very tomb on which Father Paissy had found Aly-
osha sitting in the morning.) Another memory cherished
in the monastery was that of the famous Father Varsonofy,
who was only recently dead and had preceded Father Zos-
sima in the eldership. He was reverenced during his lifetime
as a crazy saint by all the pilgrims to the monastery. There
was a tradition that both of these had lain in their coffins as

The Brothers Karamazov