There are many things in connection with Tolstoy which Russia of the future will wish to see expunged from the pages of its history, and chief of these will be its having branded him as infamously irreligious. Few men have been as genuinely religious as he. Few men have given religion as much thought as he. Few men have written on religious subjects as much as he.
Rebelled against adulteration of religion.
He studied the Scriptures in the original languages, and carefully he read Church doctrine and dogmatic theology, and the more he read the firmer became his conviction that Christ’s Christianity was quite a different thing from Church Christianity. He rejected the latter, and fervently he espoused the former. Three-fourth of what passes for Christianity, he said, has no historical nor logical nor spiritual warrant. He saw how its fundamental principle, the equality of all men as sons of God, had been perverted to give the classes the right to enslave the masses. He saw how a divine being had been made of Jesus, and how this enabled the church to say that living the life he lived, and practicing the precepts he preached was impossible for human beings. He had read in the Scriptures not to resist evil, and yet had been taught the soldier’s trade, the art of killing.
The army to which he had belonged was called “The Christophile Army,” and it was sent forth with a Christian benediction. One day, he said, he was reading in Hebrew, with a Rabbi, the fifth chapter of Matthew. After nearly every verse the Rabbi said “This is in the Old Testament or in the Talmud,” and showed me the corresponding passages. When we reached the words “Resist no evil,” the Rabbi did not say “This is in the Talmud,” but he asked “Do the Christians obey this command? Do they turn the other cheek?” “I had nothing to say in reply,” said Tolstoy, “for at that particular time, Christians, far from turning the other cheek, were smiting the Jews upon both cheeks. I saw the support the church gave to persecutions and to the death penalty, and my soul cried out against it.”
And his mind rebelled, he said and wrote, against the mythology which was paraded as theology, such teachings as the immaculate conception, the heaven opening and the angels singing, Christ’s flying through the air and into the sky, and seating himself at the right hand of God. He denounced as blasphemous such teachings as that by partaking of the Sacrament God’s body becomes assimilated with that of man, or that of God being three Gods in one, being still angry at man for the sin of Adam, and sending His only son on earth to be crucified so that by the son’s blood the father’s wrath may be appeased. He regarded as unworthy even of heathens such teachings as that salvation for sin depended on being baptized, and that God will visit eternal punishment on those who do not believe in His divinely begotten son. He professed a sincere belief in God as the author of all existence, and as the source of all love. He believed that death meant a new and higher birth. He believed that God’s will was most clearly expressed in the teachings of the man Jesus, whom to consider and pray to as God he regarded as blasphemous.
Compressed religion into five commandments.
He compressed the teachings of Jesus into the following commandments: I. “Do not be angry. II. Do not lust. III. Do not give away the control of your future actions by taking oaths. IV. Do not resist evil. V. Do not withhold love from any one.” These five commandments he developed into a comprehensive moral philosophy, and by it he conscientiously endeavored to guide his life and thought.[8]
Was indebted for his faith to peasants.
And for that strong and simple faith of his, which is destined, in the not distant future, to inaugurate an era in the religious world similar to that which Luther inaugurated four centuries earlier in Germany, he was indebted to the peasants. During the libertine life of his early years, he had lost the little faith that had been taught him in his childhood. He had returned to his estate an avowed atheist, and as such had he continued for some time, until, one day, he inquired into what it was that made the wretchedly poor and ignorant and hard-working peasants contented with their lot, resigned to their fate, bearing hardships and sufferings unmurmuringly, and looking happily forward to the end. He found it in their faith. “Surely,” said he, “a state of mind that can do so much for the poor is worth having by all.”
And he devoted himself to a diligent study of their religion. He found it burdened with foreign accretions, contaminated with a putrid mass that had been gathered during centuries of darkness and superstition, adulterated with all kinds of conscious and unconscious inventions. Stripping away the foreign and putrid and false, he alighted upon a rational, satisfying faith, the faith which he believed to have been that of the Rabbi of Nazareth, and, henceforth, consecrated his life to the propagation of it.
Gave them his life and labor in return.
And more yet than what the peasants gave to him he gave to them in return. He gave them himself, and, in the end, he sacrificed even his life for them. He found them down-trodden serfs, he endeavored to make free men of them. He found them cowed and bowed, he taught them to walk and stand erect. He found them unbefriended, he became a brother to them. He found them wretchedly poor, he renounced pleasure and treasure, luxury and ease, to lessen as much as he could the distance between them and himself. He dressed as they dressed, and labored as they labored, and, as far as permitted, ate the kind of food they ate. He found them stalking in darkness, he brightened their way for them.
He found them ignorant and at the mercy of priest and government official, he became their advocate, dared to brave an all-powerful autocracy in the defense of their rights. He started schools for them. He gave up writing for the thousands of select readers that he might write for the millions of illiterate peasants and other laborers. He wrote special booklets for them, and sold them at a loss, at one-half cent a copy, stories, legends, symbolical tales, moral plays and religious tracts, all fitted for their minds and stations, and intended to deepen in them the law of love and right.
Died believing he had failed.
To have sacrificed and renounced and dared as much and as long as he had, and, in the end, to find what he found, in his three days observation of village miseries and outrages, was more than his great heart could stand. It broke. He was eighty-two years old. He could no longer continue the fight. He could no longer look upon the suffering of the unfortunates, nor upon the wrongs of the world, nor upon the extravagances even within his own family. He regarded his whole life-work a dismal failure.
He knew of no other balm for his bleeding heart than flight from the world to some secluded spot, there, as a hermit, to await the end, which he knew was not far distant. Truly pathetic were his farewell lines to his wife:
“I cannot continue longer to live a life of ease and luxury while others starve and suffer. Like many other old men, I retire from the world to await my end in solitude. I ask that you do not seek my place of sojourn, and that you do not come to it if it be discovered. I beg forgiveness for the grief that I may cause you.”
Characteristic of great reformers.
He was not the first of the world’s great reformers and lovers of humanity to lose heart and to experience spells of despair. Moses and Elijah and Jesus and others had their hours of agony, and prayed that the end might come, and deliver them from their hopeless labors. And many who, like Tolstoy, closed their eyes in the belief that they had utterly failed loomed large in subsequent ages among the greatest of the world’s benefactors.
Succeeded better than he knew.
Tolstoy has not failed. He succeeded better than he knew. His pathetic death revealed the vast number of followers he had in his own country and in all parts of the world. And had he cared to inquire, he might have known it before his death. He could have seen it from the fact that more books of his were sold than of all other Russian authors combined. He could have seen it in the vast crowds that gathered all along the line, to catch a glimpse of him, when on his journey, a few years ago, to the Crimea, in search of health. He could have seen it in the deputations of sympathizers that waited upon him, and in the streams of congratulatory letters and telegrams that rushed in upon him—till suppressed—after his excommunication.
He could have seen it in the Tolstoyan societies among the students of almost all the Russian universities and among other bodies. He could have seen it among the considerable number of landlords, who made conscientious efforts at following his life, and at adopting his mode of dealing with peasants and laborers. Were the yoke of autocracy removed, there would arise in Russia an army of Tolstoyans as vast and mighty as the host which Ezekiel in his vision saw
