Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy

Sometime around his fiftieth year, the most famous novelist alive stopped believing in novels. Leo Tolstoy had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, he had wealth and fame and a large family and his health, and he found that none of it could answer a question that had risen up and would not be put down: what is the meaning of a life that death will simply erase? Out of that crisis came not silence but a second Tolstoy, a Christian anarchist who renounced the state, the church, private property, and eventually his own great novels, and who spent his last three decades as the most famous moral radical on earth, teaching one scandalous thing above all: that you must never resist evil by force. The world called it the eccentricity of a genius gone strange. It was in fact a philosophy, and it would change the century more than any of his fiction.

The crisis of meaning. The record of the turn is A Confession, one of the great accounts of a person looking straight at the abyss. Tolstoy describes how, at the height of every worldly success, he came to feel that unless life had a meaning that death could not destroy, it had no meaning at all, and how the thought brought him to the edge of suicide. The learned, he found, answered with despair or with distraction; only the unlettered peasants seemed to possess something that let them live and die without terror, a faith that gave their labor and suffering a sense. His long search for what they had, stripped of the dogmas he could not accept, produced the religion of his later life.

Resist not evil. At the core of that religion is a single command from the Sermon on the Mount, which Tolstoy took with absolute and literal seriousness: resist not evil. Where the churches had explained the hard sayings away, he insisted they meant exactly what they said. Evil must never be answered with violence, not because the victim is weak but because returning evil for evil only multiplies it and makes the avenger into the thing he fought. Nonresistance is not passivity or cowardice; it is the active and demanding refusal to take part in the cycle of force, the turning of the other cheek as a deliberate act that breaks the chain rather than extending it.

The kingdom of God is within you. Follow that command honestly, Tolstoy argues in the book of that name, and it dissolves the whole apparatus of the state. Every government, he observes, rests in the last analysis on violence: behind the tax stands the bailiff, behind the law the prison, behind the border the army. A person who truly will not resist evil by force cannot serve that machinery, cannot be a soldier or a judge or an executioner, cannot swear the oaths or fire the volleys it requires. This is Christian anarchism: the kingdom of God, a life ordered by love instead of compulsion, is not to be seized by capturing the state but built from below, as individuals withdraw their hands from its violence. Both the empire and the official church that blessed it fall under the same judgment.

Art is infection. The same demand for sincerity drives his theory of art. Art, Tolstoy holds in What Is Art?, is not beauty, not pleasure, not skill; it is the transmission of feeling. One person, having truly lived through an emotion, conveys it by external signs so that others catch it and feel it too. By that test he measures all of culture, and most of it fails: the obscure, refined, exclusive art of the upper classes infects no one outside a narrow circle and divides people rather than uniting them, while the art that matters spreads the feelings that draw human beings together, above all the sense of their common brotherhood. With this standard Tolstoy unsentimentally condemned Shakespeare, Wagner, and the novels that had made him famous. The conclusion is provocative, but the theory is coherent: art is to be judged by what feeling it carries and how widely it reaches.

Bread labor. Tolstoy refused to let any of this stay on the page. He tried to live the gospel literally at his estate of Yasnaya Polyana: manual work in the fields, the simple life, vegetarianism, the renunciation of luxury and, as far as his family would allow, of property, on the principle that a person should earn bread with the labor of the body and take no more than he needs. The attempt strained against his aristocratic household and was never complete, but it drew followers, and Tolstoyan communities sprang up to practice the plain, laboring, nonviolent Christianity he preached.

What this room reads. The corpus carries two of his central works of philosophy, both public domain. Constance Garnett's The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) is the statement of nonresistance and Christian anarchism. Aylmer Maude's What Is Art? is the theory of art as infection. Both come from Project Gutenberg. Citations run by work and chapter. A Confession, the account of his crisis of meaning, is among his key works but was not available as a clean public-domain text in this namespace, so the chat addresses it from training knowledge and from the autobiographical frame of the religious writings, and says so.

Tolstoy's contemporaries filed his late philosophy under the strange enthusiasms of a great artist, and posterity has had to correct them, because nonresistance turned out to be one of the most consequential ideas of the modern age. A young Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi read The Kingdom of God Is Within You, was overwhelmed by it, wrote to its author, and built the method of satyagraha on its foundation; through Gandhi the doctrine reached the civil rights movement and the century's great nonviolent revolutions. Ludwig Wittgenstein carried Tolstoy's short gospel through the trenches and said it kept him alive. His countryman Soloviev thought nonresistance a noble half-truth and argued against it to the last. Thoreau, who had also gone to the woods to live deliberately and gone to jail rather than pay a war tax, was his American kin, and Rousseau and Schopenhauer had helped shape him. But the doctrine was Tolstoy's own, the work of a moral philosopher who asked, with terrible seriousness, what it would actually mean to do what the Sermon on the Mount says, and who refused every comfortable way out.