Tolstoy hoped for the reign of universal good-will.
Upon my saying that it was fortunate for us of the present day that all churches have been deprived of their one-time all-controlling power, since no church has yet been known to have possessed power and not to have abused it, he replied: “That is true of all power, temporal as well as of ecclesiastic, and it would be more fortunate still if governments were as restricted in their power as is the church, if all power, all authority, were to cease, if the good that is inherent in every human being were to be given a chance to germinate and to flourish, and every man learn to live in complete harmony with the highest of all laws, the law of peace and good-will, which God has written into the human heart. There would then be no need of armies and armaments, of courts and police, of prisons and jails, no need of impoverishing the masses through heavy taxation for the support of millions of soldiers and officers in idleness, who ought to raise their own bread by their own handiwork.”
Believed that the Messiah is still to come.
“On that day,” said I, “the Messianic Age, for which the Jews have hoped and prayed, will surely have dawned.” To which he answered: “You, Jews, are right, the Messiah is still to come, or, if he has come, his message has not yet entered the hearts of men.”
Recalling this remark of Tolstoy, on this Christmas morn, suggests the question: How many Christmas days will yet have to come and go before its gospel of peace and good-will will govern the hearts of all who call themselves Christians as it governed that of the Russian peasant-saint.
Lessening of church power shown by failure of Tolstoy’s excommunication.
And vividly I recalled his remarks on the shorn power of the church, when, six years later, the papers brought the news that Tolstoy had been excommunicated by the Russian church. I could picture to myself the expression of sorrow or disgust on his face when that church decree was conveyed to him. Its ecclesiastical wrath, could have meant only hollow sounds to him. None knew better than he that the metropolitans who issued this excommunication merely grasped at a shadow, that the substance was gone, that that age was happily passed when the pronouncement of the ecclesiastical anathema deprived its victim of all association with friend or foe, deprived him of intercourse even with the closest members of his family, prevented them, under the penalty of like punishment, from providing him even with food, shelter and raiment. When during his flight from home, shortly before his death, he knocked at the doors of a monastery, and said “I am the excommunicated and anathematized Leo Tolstoy,” the reply was “It is a duty and a pleasure to offer you shelter.” The life of Tolstoy passed on as serenely, in the midst of his family and friends, after his excommunication as before. And the world’s esteem of him grew even greater than it had been, by reason of the charges upon which the excommunication was based, namely:
“In his writings on religious questions he clearly shows himself an enemy of the Russian Orthodox Church. He does not recognize God in three persons (or three persons in one God), and he calls the Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, a mortal human being. He scoffs at the idea of Incarnation. He perverts the text of the Gospel. He censures the Holy Church and calls it a human institution. He denies the Church Hierarchy and ridicules the Holy Sacraments and the rites of the Holy Orthodox Church. Therefore, the Holy Synod has decreed that no priest is to absolve Count Tolstoy, or give him communion. Nor is he to be given burial ground, unless, before departing this life he shall repent, acknowledge the Orthodox Church, believe in it, and return to it.”
Died unreconciled with church.
He never recanted. He never changed his attitude towards the errors and wrongs of the Russian orthodox church. And no one who ever stood and talked with him, face to face, could ever have believed that that modern Prometheus, that stern and fearless personality, that re-incarnation of Mattathias of old, and of his valiant sons, the Maccabees, could ever swerve from a position once taken by him. When upon his death-bed, he was frequently importuned to return as a penitent to the mother-church; he spurned every mention of it. He was still in the possession of his senses, he said, he still knew and believed that twice two equals four, and as long as he knew and believed this so long would he continue to know and to believe that what he had said and written concerning the errors and wrongs of the church was the truth.
Never a truer follower of Jesus than he.
It is noteworthy, and quite in keeping with the general tenor of the Russian orthodox church, that no cognizance was taken by the church of the many noble things Tolstoy had said and written and done; no cognizance of the self-sacrificing efforts he had made to live the life which Jesus had lived and had enjoined upon his followers; no cognizance of his having conscientiously endeavored to square his life with the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount; no cognizance of his having brought light to those in darkness and comfort to those in sorrow, of his having consorted and labored with the poor and lightened their burden, of his having thirsted and hungered after righteousness, of his having sought peace and protested against war, and preached the gospel of the wrongfulness of all physical resistance, of his having, though of the oldest nobility, spurned luxury and ease and even money, having regarded these the source of corruption and the root of many of the evils in society.
Yet refused Christian burial.
Such a person, and one even but half as good as this, should have been entitled to sepulture in the most sacred of Christian cemeteries, and the most eminent of priests should have deemed it a privilege to have been permitted to perform the last rites over his mortal remains. So would it have happened among rational people, but so could it not have happened in Russia. There, because he could not subscribe to doctrines and rites and ceremonies for which he found neither scriptural nor rational warrant, priests felt themselves disgraced, and in danger of eternal damnation, even when their names were associated with that of Tolstoy.
Priest objected to his name being associated with Tolstoy’s.
A striking illustration of this was given, seven years ago, at the university of Dorpat, at the occasion of the celebration of its hundredth anniversary. In commemoration of that event the institution elected as honorary members of the corporation a number of Russians distinguished in literature, science and art, one of these was Tolstoy, another was Ivan, the miracle-working priest of Cronstadt, elected to allay the church’s indignation at the choice of Tolstoy. Ivan, the priest, refused the honor, and in the following letter to the Rector of the University:
YOUR EXCELLENCY—I have read your estimable and respectful letter to me, which is so full of subtle delicacy—I decline absolutely the honor of the membership to which I have been elected. I do not wish to become connected, in any way, with a corporation—however respectable and learned—which, by some lamentable misunderstanding, has put me side by side with that atheist Leo Tolstoy—the most malignant heretic of our unfortunate age—who, in presumption and arrogance, surpasses all previous heretics of any age. I do not wish to stand beside Antichrist. I am surprised furthermore, to see with what indifference the University Council regards that satanic author, and with what slavishness it burns incense to him.”
IVAN SERGEIEF,
Prior and Archpriest of the Cronstadt Cathedral.
This letter tells of the attitude of the church towards Tolstoy better than any words of mine can tell. And this same Ivan, it is said, approved of the massacre of the petitioners of St. Petersburg on that memorable White Sunday, and when petitioned to protect the Jews against threatening massacres, treated the appeal with silent contempt.
Government hatred back of that of the church.
It is to be remembered, however, that over and back of the Church of Russia stands the government. The Czar is the head of the church. Whom the government favors the church favors; whom the government hates, the church hates. The church hated Tolstoy because the government hated him, and why it hated him we shall be told in the next discourse of this series.
Government used church for discrediting Tolstoy.
Speaking in our last discourse of the church’s excommunication of Tolstoy, and of its refusing a resting place to
