His interpretation of the Christian teaching

The ideas which Tolstóy thus slowly worked out are explained in a succession of three separate works: (1) Dogmatic Theology, of which the Introduction is better known as Confession and was written in 1892; (2) What is my Faith? (1884); and (3) What is then to be Done? (1886), to which must be added The Kingdom of God in Yourselves, or Christianity, not as a mystic Teaching but as a new Understanding of Life (1900) and, above all, a small book, The Christian Teaching (1902), which is written in short, concise, numbered paragraphs, like a catechism, and contains a full and definite exposition of Tolstóy’s views. A number of other works dealing with the same subject — such as The Life and the Teachings of the Christ, My Reply to the Synod’s Edict of Excommunication, What is Religion, On Life, etc., were published during the same year. These books represent the work of Tolstóy for the last twenty years, and at least four of them (Confession, My Faith, What is to be Done, and Christian Teaching) must be read in the indicated succession by everyone who wishes to know the religious and moral conceptions of Tolstóy and to extricate himself from the confused ideas which are sometimes represented as Tolstóyism. As to the short work, The Life and the Teaching of Jesus, it is, so to speak, the four gospels in one, told in a language easy to be understood, and free of all mystical and metaphorical elements; it contains Tolstóy’s reading of the gospels.

These works represent the most remarkable attempt at a rationalistic interpretation of Christianity that has ever been ventured upon. Christianity appears in them devoid of all gnosticism and mysticism, as a purely spiritual teaching about the universal spirit which guides man to a higher life — a life of equality and of friendly relations with all men. If Tolstóy accepts Christianity as the foundation of his faith, it is not because he considers it as a revelation, but because its teaching, purified of all the additions that have been made to it by the churches, contains “the very same solution of the problem of life as has been given more or less explicitly by the best of men, both before and since the gospel was given to us — a succession which goes on from Moses, Isaiah, and Confucius, to the early Greeks, Buddha, and Socrates, down to Pascal, Spinoza, Fichte, Feuerbach, and all others, often unnoticed and unknown, who, taking no teachings on mere trust, have taught us, and spoken to us with sincerity, about the meaning of life” The Christian Teaching, Introduction, p. vi. In another similar passage he adds Marcus Aurelius and Lao-tse to the above-mentioned teachers. ²⁰; because it gives “an explanation of the meaning of life” and “a solution of this contradiction between the aspiration after welfare and life, and the consciousness of their being unattainable” (Chr. Teach. § 13) — “between the desire for happiness and life on the one hand, and the increasingly clear perception of the certainty of calamity and death on the other” (ibid., § 10).

As to the dogmatic and mystical elements of Christianity, which he treats as mere additions to the real teaching of Christ, he considers them so noxious that even he makes the following remark: It is terrible to say so (but sometimes I have this thought) if the teaching of Christ, together with the teaching of the Church that has grown upon it, did not exist at all — those who now call themselves Christians would have been nearer to the teachings of Christ — that is, to an intelligent teaching about the good of life — than they are now. The moral teachings of all the prophets of mankind would not have been closed for them.” What is my Belief, ch. X, p. 145 of Tchertkoff’s edition of Works prohibited by Russian Censorship. On pp. 18 and 19 of the little work, What is Religion and What is its Substance. Tolstóy expresses himself even more severely about “Church Christianity.” He also gives us in this remarkable little work his ideas about the substance of religion altogether, from which one can deduct its desirable relations to science, to synthetic philosophy, and to philosophical ethics. ²¹

Putting aside all the mystical and metaphysical conceptions which have been interwoven with Christianity, he concentrates his main attention upon the moral aspects of the Christian teaching. One of the most powerful means — he says — by which men are prevented from living a life in accordance with this teaching is “religious deception.” “Humanity moves slowly but unceasingly onward, towards an ever higher development of consciousness of the true meaning of life, and towards the organisation of life in conformity with this development of consciousness;” but in this ascendant march all men do not move at an equal pace, and “the less sensitive continue to adhere to the previous understanding and order of life, and try to uphold it.” This they achieve mainly by means of the religious deception which consists “in the intentional confusion of faith with superstition, and the substitution of the one for the other.” (Chr. Teach., § § 181, 180.) The only means to free one’s self from this deception is — he says — “to understand and to remember that the only instrument which man possesses for the acquisition of knowledge is reason, and that therefore every teaching which affirms that which is contrary to reason is a delusion.” Altogether, Tolstóy is especially emphatic upon this point of the importance of reason. (See The Christian Teaching, §§ 206, 214.)

Another great obstacle to the spreading of the Christian teaching he sees in the current belief in the immortality of the soul — such as it is understood now. (My Belief, p. 134 of Tchertkoff’s Russ. ed.) In this form he repudiates it; but we can — he says give a deeper meaning to our life by making it to be a service to men — to mankind — by merging our life into the life of the universe; and although this idea may seem less attractive than the idea of individual immortality, though little, it is sure.” (Chr. Teaching.)

In speaking of God he takes sometimes a pantheistic position, and describes God as Life, or as Love, or else as the Ideal which man is conscious of in himself (Thoughts about God, collected by V. and A. Tchertkoff); but in his last work (Christian Teaching, ch. VII. and VIII.) he prefers to identify God with “the universal desire for welfare which is the source of all life.” “So that, according to the, Christian teaching, God is that Essence of life which man recognises both within himself and in the whole universe as the desire for welfare; it being at the same time the cause by which this Essence is enclosed and conditioned in individual and corporal life” (§36). Every reasoning man — Tolstóy adds — comes to a similiar conclusion. A desire for universal welfare appears in every reasoning man, after his rational consciousness has been awakened at a certain age; and in the world around Man the same desire is manifest in all separate beings, each of whom strives for his own welfare (§37). These two desires “converge towards one distinct purpose — definite, attainable, and joyful for man.” Consequently, he concludes, Observation, Tradition (religious), and Reason, all three, show him “that the greatest welfare of man, towards which all men aspire, can only be obtained by perfect union and concord among men.” All three show that the immediate work of the world’s development, in which he is called upon to take part, is “the substitution of union and harmony for division and discord.” “The inner tendency of that spiritual being-love — which is in the process of birth within him, impels him in the same direction.”

Union and harmony, and steady, relentless effort to promote them, which means not only all the work required for supporting one’s life, but work also for increasing universal welfare — these are, then, the two final accords in which all the discords, all the storms, which for more than twenty years had raged in the distraught mind of the great artist, all the religious ecstasies and the rationalistic doubts which had agitated his superior intelligence in its insistent search for truth finally found their solution. On the highest metaphysical heights the striving of every living being for its own welfare, which is Egoism and Love at the same time because it is Self-Love, and rational Self-Love must embrace all congeners of the same species — this striving for individual welfare by its very nature tends to comprise all that exists. “It expands its limits naturally by love, first for one’s family — one’s wife and children — then for friends, then for one’s fellow-countrymen; but Love is not satisfied with this, and tends to embrace all” (ibid., §46).