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Now Alyosha was impressed by Madame Hohlakov’s blunt and persistent assertion that Katerina Ivanovna was in love with Ivan, and only deceived herself through some sort of pose, from “self-laceration,” and tortured herself by her pretended love for Dmitri from some fancied duty of gratitude. “Yes,” he thought, “perhaps the whole truth lies in those words.” But in that case what was Ivan’s position?
All she can do is to struggle against it in secret to sink in the contest if she is weak; to win her way through it if she is strong, by a process of self-laceration which is, of all moral remedies applied to a woman's nature, the most dangerous and the most desperate; of all moral changes, the change that is surest to mark her for life.
So it came to pass that, when he said bitterly to himself that, if he were at that moment lying dead at the bottom of the river, Benjamin would have found consolation very near at hand, he was able to reflect upon the folly of self-laceration, and to rebuke himself for a complaint against what was simply the order of Nature, and not a personal failure.
Hence, whatever comes, we must now face it with firmness. "The horrible self-laceration of the European peoples, is the cruel confirmation of our warnings to the ruling classes for more than a generation; we have spoken admonishingly and in vain.
Hence fastings, scourgings, self-laceration, ascetic rigors in dress and food, pilgrimages, all to purchase forgiveness; which idea of forgiveness was scattered to the winds by Luther, and replaced by grace, faith in Christ attested by a righteous life.
May they be decoyed out of this life by the "life eternal"! "The yellow ones": so are called the preachers of death, or "the black ones." But I will show them unto you in other colours besides. There are the terrible ones who carry about in themselves the beast of prey, and have no choice except lusts or self-laceration. And even their lusts are self-laceration.
She loved me and not Dmitri,” Ivan insisted gayly. “Her feeling for Dmitri was simply a self-laceration. All I told her just now was perfectly true, but the worst of it is, it may take her fifteen or twenty years to find out that she doesn’t care for Dmitri, and loves me whom she torments, and perhaps she may never find it out at all, in spite of her lesson to-day.
I am convinced that he did that from ‘self-laceration,’ from the self-laceration of falsity, for the sake of the charity imposed by duty, as a penance laid on him. For any one to love a man, he must be hidden, for as soon as he shows his face, love is gone.”
For you’re torturing Ivan, simply because you love him—and torturing him, because you love Dmitri through ‘self-laceration’—with an unreal love—because you’ve persuaded yourself.” Alyosha broke off and was silent. “You ... you ... you are a little religious idiot—that’s what you are!” Katerina Ivanovna snapped. Her face was white and her lips were moving with anger.
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