Love is a Teacher and Prayer is an Education: Pedagogical Lessons from The Brothers Karamazov

Near the end of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, The Brothers Karamazov, the youngest brother, Alyosha, makes a curious claim, one that has reframed the way I think about education. Alyosha has gathered around him the schoolboys he befriended on the very day of their friend Ilyusha’s funeral. Addressing the boys alternately as “gentlemen” and “my dear children,” he says to them,

You must know that there is nothing higher, or stronger, or sounder, or more useful afterwards in life, than some good memory, especially a memory from childhood, from the parental home. You hear a lot said about your education, yet some such beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life. And even if only one good memory remains with us in our hearts, that alone may serve some day for our salvation.¹

It is curious, right, to think that the best education might be a single memory or collection of memories saved from childhood?

What Alyosha is attempting to do here with the schoolboys is something that I now endeavor to do for my own students: to build for them their own sacred memory that is durable enough to hold both pain and beauty. Alyosha knows these boys—knows their families, knows their struggles, their petty vanities, their nagging sins. He knows, too, the destitution and depravity many of them face in their own homes. So far, it seems, the world has offered these boys precious few opportunities to witness anything either beautiful or sacred. Yet Alyosha also knows that perhaps they simply haven’t yet learned how to recognize beauty or divinity, especially if all they can see is pain.

In their shared grief for the loss of their friend, Alyosha points the boys towards joy and hope and love. He invites them to transform their grief into a memory that they can carry with them like a pearl throughout their lives: “Whatever may happen to us later in life,” he tells them, “even if we do not meet for twenty years afterwards, let us always remember how we buried the poor boy, whom we once threw stones at—remember there by the little bridge?—and whom afterwards we all came to love so much.”²

But it’s not quite what we’d expect, is it? Alyosha hasn’t followed the advice we hear these days: “Don’t speak ill of the dead.” In fact, Alyosha here reminds the boys of a recent shameful moment in their interactions with the now-dead Ilyusha—he reminds them that no more than a few weeks prior, they used to tease Ilyusha for his father’s drunkenness and poverty, causing Ilyusha to retaliate by throwing rocks at them. But the way Alyosha frames it here, he blames these boys for throwing rocks, not Ilyusha, and he implicates himself along with them—“we once threw stones,” he says. It can’t be that he’s forgotten what actually happened or that he is deliberately misrepresenting the facts in order to shame these boys. Instead, Alyosha recognizes that the way the boys treated Ilyusha was just as painful, just as harmful, as if they had thrown actual stones. Alyosha knows, too, that these boys had actual stones in their hands, ready to retaliate.

For his part, Alyosha demonstrates for the boys his own humility—he’s willing to share the blame for something he didn’t do—and his readiness to repent. When Ilyusha stops throwing stones at his schoolmates and instead aims them at Alyosha, Alyosha doesn’t get angry. Instead, he says very gently, “Though I don’t know you at all, and it’s the first time I’ve seen you … it must be that I did something to you—you wouldn’t have hurt me like this for nothing.”³ By the power of the Holy Spirit, Alyosha assumes the best of Ilyusha and of the other boys, and in so doing, he invites them to live up to the high standard by which he treats them. Alyosha models for the boys making peace with Ilyusha, and they all follow his lead.

But now, gathered as they are around Ilyusha’s grave, Alyosha attempts to mold their experience into a memory they can carry with them into their future lives. He exhorts them, “And even though we may be involved with the most important affairs, achieve distinction or fall into some great misfortune—all the same, let us never forget how good we once felt here, all together, united by such good and kind feelings as made us, too, for the time that we loved the poor boy, perhaps better than we actually are.”⁴ Alyosha acknowledges that there is something special in a community of seekers gathered together with a common goal, something that has the power to elevate the individual members above themselves, to affect a change in character and virtue. Even if the change turns out to be temporary, as it certainly will, it gives each boy a memory, a model, a goal to strive towards again and again.

The lessons Alyosha most wants to teach the boys have less to do with the subject matter and more to do with the community centered on the pursuit of virtue and truth together. He doesn’t want them to be lone intellectuals, trapped in their own minds like his brother Ivan. The togetherness matters, and the way the individual members treat each other matters.

Alyosha concludes by pointing his students to the new heavens and the new earth, promising resurrection not only for Ilyusha, the boy who has died, but for them all—resurrection, renewed life, and a joyful reunion: “Certainly we shall rise, certainly we shall see and gladly, joyfully tell one another all that has been.”⁵ But rather than leave them only longing for this joyful future, Alyosha ends by re-grounding the boys in the present. This present life matters, with all its joys and griefs, and it is a good thing, he tells them, “an ancient, eternal thing,” to eat pancakes together at a funeral dinner.⁶ The memory of the group of boys gathered beside Ilyusha’s grave and the memory of the boys eating pancakes together serve as moments of meaning in a world that often appears meaningless. These are memories that hold in tension both pain and joy.

Alyosha, it seems, models his teaching on that of his own teacher, Elder Zosima. Pointing Alyosha to Christ and his incarnation, Zosima directs Alyosha towards his proper vocation, which it turns out is not in the monastery as Alyosha thought, but out in the world. Before he dies, Zosima shares with Alyosha his own beautiful, sacred memory from his own childhood, but he reminds Alyosha that “from a very bad family, too, one can keep precious memories, if only one’s soul knows how to seek out what is precious.”⁷ Alyosha learns from Zosima what he passes on to his own students, training them to “seek out what is precious” even in the face of evil, pain, and death.

The tools Zosima gives Alyosha, which Alyosha in turn gives his own disciples, are prayer and love. “Prayer is an education,” Zosima tells Alyosha, and “Love is a teacher.”⁸ Prayer and love are what allow Alyosha to ask forgiveness of Ilyusha without having done him any harm. They are what allow him to truly cherish the children in front of him, instead of abstractly claiming to love children without knowing any, as his brother Ivan does. Prayer and love teach Alyosha to seek justice and fight actively against the evil of this world, knowing that Christ will come again to redeem the world. And prayer and love are what allow Alyosha for a few moments to set aside his own griefs, which are many, to share in the griefs of his students, teaching them how to transform their pain into beautiful, sacred memories.

Alyosha has become a model for my own teaching, reminding me what I so often forget in the flurry of class preparation and grading: lead with prayer and love, humility and repentance. Model for students how to hold in tension both pain and beauty. Remember that students might not yet know how to recognize beauty or divinity. Invite students to be—and seek to be myself—better than we are. Offer students a beautiful, sacred memory of their time together that can serve as an Ebenezer for the rest of their lives. Point them towards the resurrection and eat pancakes together.

1. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002), 774.
2. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 774.
3. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 180.
4. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 774.
5. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 776.
6. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 776.
7. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 290.
8. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, 318, 319.