Leo Tolstoy

“ These men must have fallen into some delusion. What could those men in the farm have imagined, to induce them to lead their former lives, despoiling each other, wasting their master’s property, and ruining themselves while believing in the words of the Teacher? It was this: the Teacher had said to them, ‘The life you lead here is a bad one, improve it and you shall be happy.’ They fancied that the Teacher condemned their life in the farm, and promised them another and better life, in some other place, and not in that farm. ”

“ The best way to live this life is to despise it, and to live by faith, i.e., by fancy, in a future life of eternal bliss. Philosophy, science, and public opinion say that the doctrine of Christ is impracticable because the life of man does not depend on the light of reason, but on general laws; and that there is no need to enlighten life by our reason or to seek to be guided by reason, for we must live as we can, firmly believing that, according to the laws of historical and sociological progress, after we have lived badly for a very long time, our life will grow very good of itself. ”

“ Men come to a farm, and find all they want there; a house with all necessary utensils, barns full of corn, cellars full of all kinds of provisions; in the yard are implements of husbandry, tools, harnesses, horses, cows, and sheep – in a word, all that is necessary for living contentedly. Men crowd in and begin to use what they find, each mindful of himself alone, never thinking of leaving anything either for those who are with him in the house, or for those who are to come after him. Each wishes to have all for himself. ”

“ He who exalts in himself the Son of God over all the rest that is in him, he who believes that life is in himself alone, will not find himself in contradiction with life. The contradiction only results from men not believing in the light that is in them; the light of which John the Evangelist speaks when he says, ‘In him is life, and the life is the light of men.’
Christ teaches us to exalt above all else the son of man, who is the Son of God and the light of men. ”

“ But free will is not only an illusion; it is a word that has really no meaning. It is a word invented by theologians and legislators; and to try to disprove its existence is but wrestling with a windmill. ”

“ Philosophy says that Christ’s doctrine is impracticable because certain laws, which are independent of the will of man, govern human life. Philosophy and science say, in other words, exactly the same as religion does in its dogmas of original sin and redemption.
In the doctrine of redemption there are two fundamental theses on which all is grounded: (1) man has a right to perfect bliss, but the life of this world is a bad one and cannot be amended by the efforts of man, and (2) we can only be saved by faith. ”

“ Let a man but set aside the teaching he has imbibed from his childhood, let him transfer himself in thought into a new man, not brought up in that doctrine, and then let him imagine in what light this teaching would appear to him. ”

“ It is in the nature of man to strive after what is best. Each doctrine of life is but a doctrine of what is best for man. If men have pointed out to them what is really best for them, how do they come to answer that they wish to do what is best, but cannot?
Human intellect, ever since man has existed, has been directed toward discovering what is best among all the demands that are made both in individual and in social life. ”

“ And the question, ‘Am I to eat the apples that tempt me?’ according to this teaching, no longer applies to man. Adam solved the question in the negative, once and forever, in the garden. Adam sinned, that is, Adam erred, and we all fell irrevocably, and all our endeavors to live rationally are useless, and even godless. I am irrevocably bad, and I must know it. My salvation does not lie in the fact that I can order my life by my reason, and, having learned to know good from evil, do what is best. No, Adam sinned once for all, and Christ has, once and for ever, set the evil right ”

“ Each hastens to take as much as he can, and consequent destruction of everything ensues; all are struggling, fighting to possess the property themselves; milk cows and unshorn sheep about to kid are killed for meat; the ovens are heated with benches and carts; the men fight for milk and for corn; and thus spill, spoil, and waste more than they use. Not one of them can eat a morsel in peace, each is snarling at his neighbor; a stronger man comes and takes possession of all, and he is despoiled in his turn.
At last these men, all bruised and exhausted with fighting and hunger, leave the farm. ”

“ Reason, which enlightens our life and forces us to modify our actions, is not an illusion, and cannot possibly be explained away. The following after reason in order to attain happiness was a doctrine taught to mankind by all true teachers, and in it lies the whole doctrine of Christ. ”

“ Hard, because its observance would deprive us of what we have always possessed. Have we never heard that it may be better for us to suffer and to lose, than never to suffer and always to have our desires satisfied? ”

“ That which man acknowledges in himself as being free, is just what is born of the Eternal Being, of Him Whom we call God. This Son of God in man, born of God, is what we must exalt in ourselves in order to obtain the true life. ”

“ Every being endowed with the least germ of reason knows that no great good can be attained without trouble and difficulty. And now we say that though Christ’s doctrine is sublime, we can never put it into practice because it is hard to do so. ”

“ If men would but keep from ruining their own lives, and keep from expecting someone from outside to come and help them – either Christ on the clouds, with the flourish of trumpets, or some historical law, or the law of the differentiation and integration of power! No one will help them, if they do not help themselves. ”

“ The teaching of Confucius deals with personal improvement; Judaism consists of man’s following the covenant made with God, and Buddhism teaches each how to escape the evils of life. Socrates taught personal improvement in the name of reason. The Stoics acknowledge rational liberty as the sole basis of the true life.
The rational activity of man has always lain in enlightening, by reason, his striving after good. Free will, says philosophy, is an illusion ”

“ The orthodox teaching does not dwell at any length upon the consequent results of the redemption, according to which, after the death of Christ, the earth should have begun to yield up her fruits to believers without labor, sickness should have ceased, and mothers should have given birth to their offspring without suffering; for, however great their faith is, it is difficult to instill into those who find labor hard, and sickness painful, that labor is not hard, and suffering is not painful. ”

“ The master again makes the farm ready so that men may live there in peace. Again plenty fills the yard, and again passers-by come in, and the struggling and fighting are renewed; all is wasted once more, and the worn-out, bruised, and angry men again leave the farm, abusing and hating their companions and the master too, for having so sparingly and so poorly provided for them. Once again the good master gets the farm ready, and the struggling returns over and over again. Now, one day, among the new comers there appears a teacher who says, ‘Brethren, we are all wrong. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Man may be but an animal, and nobody will find fault with him for being such; but a man cannot reason that he chooses to be only an animal; no sooner does he reason than he admits himself to be a rational being, and, making this admission, he cannot help recognizing a distinction between what is rational and what is irrational. ”

“ Great stress, however, is laid on that part of the teaching that says that ‘death and sin are no more.’
It is confidently asserted that the dead live. And, as the dead cannot possibly tell us whether they are dead or alive, any more than a stone can tell whether it can speak or not, this absence of all denial is taken as a proof of the assertion that those who are dead are not dead. ”

“ Spiritism, with its learned partisans, is the best proof that scientific and philosophical views are not free, but are based on the principle, inculcated by religion, that a blissful eternal life is natural to man. ”

“ The doctrine of this creed is literally as follows: God eternal, Three Persons in one God, chose to create a world of spirits. The bountiful God created that world of spirits for their happiness; but it chanced that one of the spirits grew wicked, and therefore unhappy. Some time passed away, and God created another world, a material world, and created man, likewise for happiness. God created man happy, immortal, and sinless. Man was happy because he enjoyed all the blessings of life without labor ”

“ I am persuaded that, in a few centuries, the history of the so-called scientific activity in Europe during these latter ages will form an inexhaustible subject of laughter and pity for still later generations, who will report somewhat in this style: ‘During several centuries the learned men of the small Western part of the great hemisphere were in a state of epidemic insanity, fancying that a life of eternal bliss was to be theirs ”

“ Pessimism, which expects of life what it cannot give, and therefore denies life, is but the result of the same thesis.
Materialism, with its strange enthusiastic assertion that man is but a process, is the lawful child of this teaching, which acknowledges that the life here below is a fallen life. ”

“ The true believer must fancy that ever since Christ came into the world, the earth yields fruit without labor; that children are brought into the world without suffering; that there is no sickness, no death, no sin – i.e., no errors. He must imagine that what is not, is, and what is, is not. ”

“ We must consider, say unbelievers, by what laws the infinitesimal particle of substance moves in the endless expanse of endless time; but it is not necessary to consider what reason requires of man for his own good, because the improvement of his state will not proceed from his own efforts, but from the general laws that we shall discover. ”

“ Men struggle for land, for any object that they may want, and then end by dividing all among themselves, each calling what he may get his ‘personal property.’ They find that though difficult of adjustment, it is better arranged thus, and they keep to their own property. Men fight to get wives for themselves, and then come to the conclusion that it is better for each to have his own family ”

“ To prove that ‘the Son of Man’ signifies the son of man is superfluous. In order to consider the words, ‘the Son of Man’ as having any other meaning, it would be necessary to prove that Christ purposely used words that have another meaning to express what He wished to say. ”

“ It is only by assuming that what is, is not, and that what is not, is, that man can have arrived at so strange a negation of the possibility of fulfilling a doctrine that, as he himself admits, would give him happiness. ”

“ According to this teaching the Son of God, God Himself, the Second Person of the Trinity, was sent down from heaven by God, and was made man, to save men from this accidental, temporary state, unnatural to them, to deliver them from the curse laid upon them by the same God for the sin of Adam, and to re-establish them in their former natural state of perfect happiness, i.e., of health, immortality, innocence, and idleness. ”

“ According to this teaching, not only are the loves of good and truth, which are innate in man, his endeavors to enlighten by his reason the various phenomena of life, and his spiritual life deemed unimportant, but they are all vainglory and pride. ”

“ Even beasts know in what manner to eat their food without trampling it underfoot; and men who knew how to live better, who believed that God Himself had taught them how they were to live, lived worse, because, as they said, they could not live otherwise. ”

“ If ‘hard’ means that it is hard to give up the momentary satisfaction of our desires for some great and good end, why do we not say, as well, that it is hard to plough the ground in order to have bread ”

“ Man was tempted in Eden by the spirit of the first creation who had grown wicked; and from that time man fell, and other fallen men like him were born into the world; men labored, sickened, suffered, died, and struggled morally and physically; i.e., the imaginary man became the real man, such as we know him to be ”

“ 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. ”