I started the last post by claiming that perhaps no work has had such a profound influence upon me as that of Tolstoy’s non-fiction. While I certainly will not renege on that statement, I am at the same time not going to pretend that I have overhauled my life with the often very strenuous and radical principles that are laid out therein. I am not even claiming to agree with all of them–what I mean was rather the impression that they had and continue to have on me, for in comparison with just about any other author that I have read, I have never found myself so completely bowled over by such a force of truth as I have with Tolstoy.
That all might seem like a bit of a cowardly cop out since I understand perfectly well that for Tolstoy ideology mattered nothing unless practically applied in the world. Where I have therefore been personally convinced by something he has written but have not put it into practice myself is plainly the result of personal shortcoming.
With that out of the way, let’s get into the core of this post–namely, to present what constituted Tolstoy’s religious beliefs.
Tolstoy identied himself as a Christian, and through him Christianity–which throughout my fundamentally atheistic upbringing had seemed so outlandish–for the first time ever made sense to me. To weed out what constitutes Tolstoyan Christianity, however, it is necessary for the reader to briefly suspend any definition he or she has of that word, for while Tolstoy certainly used it to describe himself and his worldview, what he meant by it is so radically different from any other manifestation of Christianity that I can think of. Now that I come to think of it, it wouldn’t surprise me if Tolstoy called himself a Christian for no other reason than to distinguish himself from the institutionalised church of his day, which he considered fundamentally anti-Christian.
For Tolstoy, Christianity was exclusively a practical guide to how one ought to live one’s life, and this was exemplified by Christ and his moral teaching. It is nonetheless important to note that Tolstoy did not believe that this truth was exclusive to Christianity, rather, he held that the truths revealed by Christ were universally dwelling in the hearts of all men, and that many particularly wise individuals throughout history–among them Christ–have recognised and proclaimed these:
Both before Christ and after Him men have said the same: that there lives in man a divine light, sent down from heaven, and that light is ‘reason,’ and each must follow that light alone, seeking for good by its aid alone. This has been said by the Brahmin teachers, by the Hebrew prophets, by Confucius, Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, and by all truly wise men who were not compilers of philosophical theories, but who sought the truth for their own good and that of all men.
What I Believe
With all this in mind one might perhaps wonder why he called himself a Christian in the first place. The answer to this is that he felt that nowhere were these truths more clearly and eloquently stated than through Christ, particularly in his Sermon on the Mount. He held that Christ’s moral precepts, particularly the command of not resisting evil, were so evident and true that they was the only principles by which humans could reasonably co-exist. Turning the other cheek and loving and forgiving your enemy were not for him unrealistic ideals that could under many conditions be circumvented (as is the case with many major denominations), but rather perfectly rational imperatives. Reflecting his insistence on the practical value of these teachings, Tolstoy in one passage restates them with the admonition: “don’t be foolish”:
Christ says, ‘Never give way to angry feelings, nor consider another as worse than yourself; it is foolish. If you give way to anger, if you abuse others, it will be worse for you.’ Christ says, too, ‘Do not lust after all women, but take one to you, and live with her; it will be better for you.’ He says, likewise, ‘Make no promise, lest you be forced to act foolishly and wickedly.’ He says, likewise, ‘Never return evil for evil, for it will fall back upon you.’ Christ says, ‘Consider no men as strangers to you because they live in other lands and speak in other tongues than you do. If you consider them as your enemies, they will do the same with respect to you, and it will be worse for you. Do not act thus, and it will be better for you.’
What I Believe
It is through fulfilling these principles that we also realise the Kingdom of God. The centrality of this concept is reflected in the title of Tolstoy’s most comprehensive work detailing his worldview, The Kingdom of God is Within You. It also reflects his belief in the worldly nature of the Kingdom as well as our personal responsibility in bringing it about. In his more prophetic passages he sees the inevitability of it’s foundation as having come:
So that the prophecy that the time will come when men will be taught of God, will learn war no more, will beat their swords into plowshares and their spears into reaping-hooks, which means, translating it into our language, the fortresses, prisons, barracks, palaces, and churches will remain empty, and all the gibbets and guns and cannons will be left unused, is no longer a dream, but the definite new form of life to which mankind is approaching with ever-increasing rapidity.
But when will it be?
Eighteen hundred years ago to this question Christ answered that the end of the world (that is, of the pagan organization of life) shall come when the tribulation of men is greater than it has ever been, and when the Gospel of the kingdom of God, that is, the possibility of a new organization of life, shall be preached in the world unto all nations. (Matt. xxiv. 3-28.) But of that day and hour knoweth no man but the Father only (Matt. xxiv. 3-6), said Christ. For it may come any time, in such an hour as ye think not.
To the question when this hour cometh Christ answers that we cannot know, but just because we cannot know when that hour is coming we ought to be always ready to meet it, just as the master ought to watch who guards his house from thieves, as the virgins ought to watch withlamps alight for the bridegroom; and further, we ought to work with all the powers given us to bring that hour to pass, as the servants ought to work with the talents entrusted to them. (Matt. xxiv. 43, and xxvi. 13, 14–30.)
The Kingdom of God is Within You
Tolstoy’s Christian pacifism was also the basis of his acceptance of anarchism. He saw the state, legitimised through the use of violence, as well as the ideologies propping it up as being evil:
To deliver men from the terrible and ever-increasing evils of armaments and wars, we want neither congresses nor conferences, nor treaties, nor courts of arbitration, but the destruction of those instruments of violence which are called governments, and from which humanity’s greatest evils flow.
To destroy governmental violence, only one thing is needed: it is that people should understand that the feeling of patriotism, which alone supports that instrument of violence, is a rude, harmful, disgraceful, and bad feeling, and, above all, is immoral. It is a rude feeling, because it is one natural only to people standing on the lowest level of morality, and expecting from other nations such outrages as they themselves are ready to inflict; it is a harmful feeling, because it disturbs advantageous and joyous, peaceful relations with other peoples, and above all produces that governmental organisation under which power may fall, and does fall, into the, hands of the worst men; it is a disgraceful feeling, because it turns man not merely into a slave, but into a fighting cock, a bull, or a gladiator, who wastes his strength and his life for objects which are not his own but his Governments’; and it is an immoral feeling, because, instead of confessing one’s self a son of God (as Christianity teaches us) or even a free man guided by his own reason, each man under the influence of patriotism confesses himself the soil of his fatherland and the slave of his government, and commits actions contrary to his reason and his conscience.
Patriotism and Government
So far Tolstoy’s brand of Christianity might not seem so radically different from that of some groupings that you might be able to think of, but just as we have to highlight what Tolstoy’s Christianity consisted of, so do we need to point out what it did not consist of. This list is quite extensive and here the divergence from mainline Christianity should become more obvious.
As I mentioned, Christianity was for Tolstoy an exclusively, practical relation to the world. Anything that he found absurd, incomprehensible or contradictory was promptly done away with. This included many of the basic doctrines that make up the foundations of Christian belief, including the Trinity, original sin, the atonement, the resurrection, Christ’s divinity and many more, not to mention his rejection of most of the Bible itself, including the Pauline epistles, as well as the rituals and outward practices of the Church.
Not even the gospels themselves, the only books where Tolstoy found religious value, were infallible, but admixtures of occasionally very noble truths with immoral and blasphemous falsehoods. In the quest of getting to the flashes of truth, Tolstoy learnt Greek and translated and consolidated the Gospel stories into one, bringing together all the parts of the Christ story that he found credible, comprehensible and of value while rejecting those that he found irrelevant, absurd and immoral in his Gospel in Brief, published in 1881. In a vaster work, The Four Gospels Unified and Translated, published the same year, he provides a far more meticulous commentary on this work while detailing his method of translation:
God has revealed the truth to men. I am a man, and so am not only entitled, but also compelled, to make use of it and stand face to face with it without any mediation. If God speaks in these books, he knows the weakness of my mind and will speak in such a way as not to lead me into deception. The argument of the church that the interpretation of the scripture by individuals must not be permitted, lest those who interpret it be led astray and the interpretations multiply greatly, can have no meaning for me. It might have had a significance, if the interpretation of the church were intelligible, and if there were but one church and one interpretation; but now, since the interpretation of the church about the Son of God and about God, about God in three persons, about the virgin who bore a son without losing her virginity, and about the blood of God which is eaten in the form of bread, and so forth, can find no place in my sound mind, and since there are thousands of different interpretations, this argument, no matter how often repeated, can have no meaning whatever. Now, on the contrary, an interpretation is needed, and it has to be such that all could agree on it. But an agreement will only then be possible when the interpretation is rational, in spite of our differences. If this revelation is the truth, it cannot and must not fear the light of reason, if it wishes to be convincing, and is obliged to invoke this light. If the whole revelation will turn out to be abused, so much the better, and God help it. God can do anything but this: he cannot talk nonsense. And it would be stupid to write a revelation which cannot be understood.
The Four Gospels Unified and Translated
He believed that the Church’s insistence on the infallibility of scripture inhibited the understanding of Christ’s message and further, was the cause of the great ruptures seen throughout the history of Christianity:
The church erred in this, that, wishing more emphatically to reject what was not received by it, and to give more right to what it did receive, it put one general seal of infallibility on what it accepted. Everything is from the Holy Ghost, and every word is true. With this it ruined and harmed everything which it received. By inevitably accepting this strip of the tradition the white, the bright, and the grey, that is, the more or less pure teaching, and by imposing on everything the seal of infallibility, it deprived itself of the right to combine, exclude, elucidate what was accepted, which, indeed, was its duty to do, and which it has never done. Everything is sacred: the miracles the Acts of the Apostles, Paul’s advice concerning the wine, and the delirium of the Apocalypse, and so forth, so that after the eighteen hundred years of their existence these books lie before us in the same coarse, clumsy, absurd, contradictory form in which they have ever been. By assuming that every word of the Scripture is sacred truth, the church tried to combine, elucidate, solve the contradictions, and understand, and did everything which could be done in this sense, that is, gave the greatest possible meaning to what is absurd.
The Four Gospels Unified and Translated
Yet these are far from Tolstoy’s harshest attacks on the Church. They are rather innocuous in comparison to his execrations of religious institutions and figures that sanction and promulgate what he conisdered the greatest of all evils: war. The following extract is from an essay entitled Bethink Yourselves!, written in response to the Russo-Japanese war of 1905.
Christian pastors continue to invite men to the greatest of crimes, and continue to commit sacrilege, praying God to help the work of war; and, instead of condemning, they justify and praise that pastor who, with the cross in his hands on the very scene of murder, encouraged men to the crime. The same thing is going on in Japan. The benighted Japanese go in for murder with yet greater fervour, owing to their victories; the Mikado also reviews and rewards his troops; various Generals boast of their bravery, imagining that, having learned to kill, they have acquired enlightenment. So, too, groan the unfortunate working people torn from useful labor and from their families. So their journalists also lie and rejoice over their gains. Also probably—for where murder is elevated into virtue every kind of vice is bound to flourish—also probably all kinds of commanders and speculators earn money; and Japanese theologians and religious teachers no less than the masters in the techniques of armament do not remain behind the Europeans in the techniques of religious deceit and sacrilege, but distort the great Buddhistic teaching by not only permitting but justifying that murder which Buddha forbade. The Buddhistic scientist, Soyen-Shaku, ruling over eight hundred monasteries, explains that although Buddha forbade manslaughter he also said he could never be at peace until all beings are united in the infinitely loving heart of all things, and that, therefore, in order to bring into harmony that which is discordant it is necessary to fight and to kill men.
Tolstoy recognised that religious fawning on the state and its affairs has always existed and, though horrified, would not in the least have been surprised had he lived today to see Kirill, the current Patriarch of Moscow, giving his blessing to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I wish he were alive to excoriate such hypocrisy and sacrilege because words fail me in trying to express my own indignation.
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I hope this has given you a rough background of Tolstoy’s religious beliefs. They of course amounted to much more than this, and many of the lesser practices and principles that he espoused, such as vegetarianism, asceticism, sexual abstinence and many more, have not been touched on at all. I can only encourage you to read his works in order to find out more about them. Very many excellent translations of them are easily available in the public domain.