Lies

Fyodor Karamazov and his two eldest sons, Dmitry and Ivan, met Alexei (the third son) at the hermitage of the elder. (Remember, Alexei admires the elder.)
First, I would like to address the title of “elder”. There is an entire chapter dedicated to this topic, in fact.
“What precisely is an elder, then? An elder is a man who takes your soul and your will into his soul and his will. Once you have chosen your elder, you renounce your own will, you yield it to him in total submission and self-renunciation. A man who consents to this ordeal, to this terrible apprenticeship, is willing to bear it in the hope that, after a long period of trial, he will conquer himself and achieve a self-mastery that will enable him to finally attain, through a whole life of obedience, complete freedom (that is freedom from himself) and thus avoid the fate of those who reach the end of their lives without ever having found themselves within themselves.”
I found the idea of an “elder” very interesting. I first looked at Fyodor Karamazov—a father. Most people think of fathers as “elder” figures, meaning that children look to their fathers for advice and guidance. Fyodor Karamazov, however, is hardly a respectable father figure. He drinks and owns whore houses. Not to mention, he abandoned his children when their mothers died. This led me to further examine his three children. Dmitry, the eldest, is obsessed with getting money back from his father. He was raised by the cousin of his mother, a man who was obsessed with business deals and travelled Europe to experience the richness of foreign nations. Ivan is very intelligent and very angry with his father. I thought that this was interesting—Dmitry was raised by a man who very much enjoyed the constant pursuit of money thus making him the same way; meanwhile, Ivan was raised on money from “charity” and was ashamed of his father. Their father was not their “elder” but they became very much like the people who raised them.
Alexei was not raised by his father either, but he did have Zosima, the elder at the monastery. Zosima became almost a father to Alexei. I was most interested in the contrast between the crude, sinful character of Fyodor Karamazov and the holy, saint-like being of Zosima. Alexei seemed to take up a life opposite of his fathers.
This now brings me to the encounter between Zosima and Fyodor Karamazov. The elder says to Fyodor, “The important thing is to stop lying to yourself. A man who lies to himself, and believes his own lies, becomes unable to recognize truth, either in himself or in anyone else, and he ends up losing respect for himself as well as for others.” Lies. This all comes back to religion. Lying is a sin according to the church. And Karamazov does a lot of it. Honestly, I don’t know what to do with this.
One idea I have has to do with Fyodor’s uncontrollable desire to make a fool of himself. This is a bit extreme, but maybe he has something there. He has become the complete opposite of the church. The Catholic Church holds to their traditions, and they do not approve of vain, so when Fyodor parades around making himself look like an idiot, he is looked down upon. I know that he seems stupid, but looking at the situation from his perspective, it makes a little bit of sense. Maybe he does not want to partake in the church’s practice of “elders” for instance. Elders “take your soul and your will” but Fyodor rejects that idea. He has become the master of his soul and of his will by not giving it up to the elders.