Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

“ A very great deal was said, but not a word about the one thing that for every Christian is the most essential question in life – how to reconcile the duty of forgiveness, meekness, patience, and love for all, neighbors and enemies alike, which is so clearly expressed in the words of our teacher, and in the heart of each of us – how to reconcile this duty with the obligation of using force in war upon men of our own or a foreign people. ”

“ We may consider the answer given by Christ unsatisfactory; we may replace it by another and better, by finding a criterion by which evil could be defined for all men unanimously and simultaneously; we may simply, like savage nations, not recognize the existence of the question. But we cannot treat the question as the learned critics of Christianity do. They pretend either that no such question exists at all or that the question is solved by granting to certain persons or assemblies of persons the right to define evil and to resist it by force. ”

“ We kill the criminal that society may be rid of him, and we never know whether the criminal of today would not have been a changed man tomorrow, and whether our punishment of him is not useless cruelty. ”

“ Peter was not defending himself, but his beloved and heavenly teacher. And Christ at once reproved him for this, saying, that he who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword.
Besides, excuse for violence to use against one person in defense of another from greater violence is always untrustworthy, because when force is used against one who has not yet carried out his evil intent, I can never know which would be greater – the evil of my act of violence or of the act I want to prevent. ”

“ If all men were to learn that the Church professes to believe in a Christ of punishment and warfare, not of forgiveness, no one would believe in the Church; it would have no one to be proving what it is trying to prove. ”

“ He now believes that the kingdom of God would come if all men kept these five commandments of Christ: (1) live in peace with all men, (2) be pure, (3) take no oaths, (4) do not resist evil, and (5) renounce national distinctions.
“Tolstoy,” he says, “rejects the inspiration of the Old Testament; hence he rejects the chief doctrines of the Church – that of the Atonement by blood, the Trinity, the descent of the Holy Ghost on the Apostles, and his transmission through the priesthood.” And he recognizes only the words and commandments of Christ. “But is this interpretation of Christ a true one?” ”

“ The foreign free-thinking critics have tried in a delicate manner, without being offensive to me, to give the impression that my conviction that mankind could be guided by such a naive doctrine as that of the Sermon on the Mount proceeds from two causes: that such a conviction is partly due to my want of knowledge, my ignorance of history, my ignorance of all the vain attempts to apply the principles of the Sermon on the Mount to life, which have been made in history and have led to nothing ”

“ Ever since the beginning of the world, the use of violence of every kind, from the Inquisition to the Schlusselburg fortress, has rested and still rests on the opposite principle, of the necessity of resisting evil by force. ”

“ And in this they are successful; for, indeed, how could the notion occur to anyone that all that has been repeated from century to century with such earnestness and solemnity by all those archdeacons, bishops, archbishops, holy synods, and popes, is all of it a base lie and a calumny foisted upon Christ by them for the sake of keeping safe the money they must have to live luxuriously on the necks of other men? And it is a lie and a calumny so transparent that the only way of keeping it up consists in overawing people by their earnestness, their impenitence. ”

“ These men have, for the most part, through the intoxication of power, so lost the understanding of what that Christianity is, in the name of which they hold their position, that what is truly Christian in Christianity presents itself to them as heresy, while everything in the Old and New Testaments that can be interpreted in an anti-Christian and heathen meaning they regard as the foundation of Christianity. ”

“ Thirdly, even if it were possible to distinguish the wicked from the good unfailingly, even then it would be impossible to kill or injure or shut up in prison these wicked men, because there would be no one in a Christian society to carry out such punishment, since every Christian, as a Christian, has been commanded to use no force against the wicked. ”

“ But this assumption, that what seems evil to us is really evil, shows a complete misunderstanding of the question, and lies at the root of the argument of free-thinking critics about the Christian religion. In this way, then, the discussions of my book on the part of Churchmen and free-thinking critics alike showed me that the majority of men simply understand neither Christ’s teaching nor the questions that Christ’s teaching solves. ”

“ To regard this commandment as the indispensable condition of Christian life, as Garrison, Ballou, Dymond, the Quakers, the Mennonites, and the Shakers do now, and as the Moravian brothers, the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Bogomilites, and the Paulicians did in the past, is a one-sided sectarianism. This command has neither more nor less value than all the other commandments, and the man who through weakness transgresses any commandment whatever, the command of non-resistance included, does not cease to be a Christian if he hold the true faith. ”

“ And of this kind, without exception, are all the criticisms of educated believers, who must, as such, understand the danger of their position. The sole escape from it for them lies in their hope that they may be able, by using the authority of the Church, of antiquity, and of their sacred office, to confuse the reader and draw him away from the idea of reading the Gospel for himself and thinking out the question in his own mind. ”

“ The second, somewhat less gross, form of argument consists in declaring that, though Christ did indeed preach that we should turn the other cheek, and give the cloak also, and this is a great moral duty, yet that there are wicked men in the world, and if these wicked men were not restrained by force, the whole world and all good men would come to ruin through them. ”

“ No one is the least disturbed by what the poor scared young man is muttering. They do not even pay attention to it. “They all mutter something, but we’ve no time to listen to it, we have to enroll so many.” ”

“ This argument is ill grounded, because if we allow ourselves to regard any men as intrinsically wicked men (Raca) , then in the first place we annul, by so doing, the whole idea of the Christian teaching, according to which we are all equals and brothers, as sons of one Father in heaven. ”

“ We shut up the dangerous – as we think – member of society, but the next day this man might cease to be dangerous and his imprisonment might be for nothing. I see that a man I know to be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl. ”

“ This assertion is completely unfounded, and one cannot find in all Christ’s teaching any confirmation of such an argument. Such an argument is not only a limitation, but also a direct contradiction and negation of the commandment. If every man has the right to have recourse to force in face of a danger threatening another person, the question of the use of force is reduced to a question of the definition of danger for another. ”

“ Secondly, it is ill founded, because even if to use force against wicked men had been permitted by God, since it is impossible to find a perfect and unfailing distinction by which one could positively know the wicked from the good, so it would come to all individual men and societies of men mutually regarding each other as wicked men, as is the case now. ”

“ You expect, then, that in answer to this essential question, which is the only one that could induce a man to write an article about the book, he will say either that this interpretation of Christ’s teaching is true and we ought to follow it, or he will say that such an interpretation is untrue, will show why, and will give some other correct interpretation of those words that I interpret incorrectly. ”

“ But we know all the while that granting such a right to certain persons does not decide the question (still less so when we are ourselves the certain persons) , since there are always people who do not recognize this right in the authorized persons or assemblies. ”