Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

“ The essence of every religious teaching lies not in the desire for a symbolic expression of the forces of nature, nor in the dread of these forces, nor in the craving for the marvelous, nor in the external forms in which it is manifested, as men of science imagine; the essence of religion lies in the faculty of men of foreseeing and pointing out the path of life along which humanity must move, in the discovery of a clearer meaning of life than was perceived before, which must influence future conduct of humanity, different from before. ”

“ As the man of the social conception of life said to the savage, “Reflect, consider yourself! The life of your individuality cannot be true life, because that life is pitiful and passing. But the life of a society and succession of individuals, family, clan, tribe, or state, goes on living, and therefore a man must sacrifice his own individuality for the life of the family or the state.” In exactly the same way the Christian teaching says to the man of the social, societal, conception of life, ‘Repent’ – μετανοζετε– i.e., consider yourself, or you will be ruined. ”

“ Therefore I say to you, take no thought for your life, what you shall eat, or what you shall drink; nor yet for your body, what you shall put on. Isn’t life more than meat, and the body than clothing? Behold the birds of the air; for they do not sow, neither do they reap, nor do they gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much better than they are? ”

“ The man who holds the divine view of life recognizes life not in his own individuality, and not in societies of individualities (in the family, the clan, the nation, the native state, or the government) , but in the eternal undying source of life – in God; and to fulfill the will of God he is ready to sacrifice his individual and family and social welfare. The motor power of his life is love. And his religion is the worship in deed and in truth of the principle of the whole – God. ”

“ To let go the requirements of the ideal means not only to diminish the possibility of perfection, but also to destroy the ideal itself. The ideal that has power over men is not an ideal invented by someone, but the ideal that every man carries within his soul. Only this ideal of complete infinite perfection has power over men, and drives them to action. A moderate perfection loses its power of influencing men’s hearts. ”

“ The Christian teaching to love God and serve him, and (only as a result of that love) to love and serve one’s neighbor, seems to scientific men obscure, mystic, and arbitrary. And they would absolutely exclude the obligation of love and service to God, holding that the teaching of love for men, for humanity alone, is far more clear, tangible, and reasonable.
The men of science teach in theory that the only good and rational life is that which is devoted to the service of the whole of humanity. That is for them the importance of the Christian teaching, and to that they reduce Christ’s teaching. ”

“ And therefore, in the first place, religion is not, as science imagines, a manifestation that at one time corresponded with the development of humanity, but is afterward outgrown by it. It is a manifestation always inherent in the life of humanity, and is as indispensable, as inherent in humanity at the present time as at any other. Secondly, religion is always the theory of the practice of the future and not of the past, and therefore it is clear that investigation of past manifestations cannot in any case grasp the essence of religion. ”

“ Christ recognizes the existence of both sides of the parallelogram, of both eternal indestructible forces of which the life of man is compounded: the force of his animal nature and the force of the consciousness of kinship to God. Saying nothing of the animal drive, which, while asserting itself, always keeps its own nature and is beyond human control, Christ speaks only of the Divine force, calling upon a man to know it more closely, to set it more free from all that hinders it, and to bring it to the highest degree of intensity. ”

“ The divine perfection is the asymptote of human life to which it is always striving, and always approaching, though it can only be reached in infinity.
The Christian religion seems to exclude the possibility of life only when men mistake the pointing to an ideal as the laying down of a rule. It is only then that the principles presented in Christ’s teaching appear to be destructive of life. These principles, on the contrary, are the only ones that make true life possible. Without these principles true life could not be possible. ”

“ They usually say that the moral teaching of Christianity is very fine, but over-exaggerated; that to make it quite right we must reject all in it that is superfluous and unnecessary to our manner of life. “And the doctrine that asks too much, and requires what is impossible to do, is worse than that which requires of men what is possible and consistent with their powers,” these learned interpreters of Christianity maintain, repeating what was long ago asserted, and could not but be asserted, by those who crucified the teacher because they did not understand him – the Jews. ”

“ After eighteen hundred years of education in Christianity the civilized world, as represented by its most advanced thinkers, holds the conviction that the Christian teaching is a teaching of dogmas; that its teaching in relation to life is unreasonable, and is an exaggeration, subversive of the real lawful obligations of morality consistent with the nature of man; and that very doctrine of retribution that Christ rejected, and in place of which he put his teaching, is more practically useful for us. ”

“ Nevertheless, just as a man with wife and children cannot continue to look at life as he looked at it when he was a child, so too in the face of the various changes that are taking place, the greater density of population, the establishment of communication between different peoples, the improvements of the methods of the struggle with nature, and the accumulation of knowledge, humanity cannot continue to look at life as of old, and it must frame a new theory of life, from which conduct may follow adapted to the new conditions on which it has entered and is entering. ”

“ In the process of liberating, of increasing this force, the true life of man, according to Christ’s teaching, consists. The true life, according to preceding religions, consists in carrying out rules, the law; according to Christ’s teaching it consists in an ever closer approximation to the divine perfection held up before every man, and recognized within himself by every man, in an ever closer and closer approach to the perfect fusion of his will in the will of God, that fusion toward which man strives, and the attainment of which would be the destruction of the life we know. ”

“ Understand that this carnal, personal life that now comes into being and tomorrow is no more can have no permanence, that no external means, no arrangement of it can give it firmness and meaning. Take thought and understand that the life you are living is not real life – the life of the family, of society, of the state will not save you from annihilation. ”

“ Consider the lilies of the field and how they grow; they do not toil, neither do they spin; and yet I say to you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Therefore, if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is here today, and tomorrow is cast into the oven, shall He not clothe you much more, O you of little faith? ”

“ This view of life is the ultimate, and founded upon it is the Christian teaching, which is a guide for the whole of our life and lies at the root of all our activity, practical and theoretic. Yet men of what is falsely called science, pseudo-scientific men, looking at it only in its externals, regard it as something outgrown and having no value for us. ”

“ The second is the idea that the whole purpose of Christianity is to teach men to live profitably together, as one family, and that to attain this we need only follow the rule of love to humanity, dismissing all thought of love of God altogether.
The mistaken notion of men of science that the essence of Christianity consists in the supernatural, and that its moral teaching is impracticable, constitutes another reason of the failure of men of the present day to understand Christianity. ”

“ The ideal is to love the enemies who hate us. The precept, showing the level below which we are fully capable of not falling, is not to do evil to our enemies, to speak well of them, and to make no difference between them and own countrymen.
All these precepts are indications of what, on our journey to perfection, we are already fully able to avoid, and what we must labor to attain now, and what we ought by degrees to translate into instinctive and unconscious habits. ”

“ Contrary to the previous teachings, Christ’s teaching does not impose external rules; instead, it guides people by their consciousness of possibility of reaching the divine perfection. Human soul, too, contains not temperate rules of justice and charity, but an ideal of ultimate, infinite divine perfection. Only by striving toward that perfection a man diverts the direction of his life away from his animal state toward the divine one, in as much as it is feasible in this life. ”

“ They forget that the love that they are discussing is a personal love, which might expand in a rarefied form to embrace a man’s native country, but which disappears before it can embrace an artificial state such as Austria, England, or Turkey, and which we cannot even conceive of in relation to all humanity, an absolutely mystic conception. ”

“ Of degrees of life understanding we know three; two have already been passed through by humanity, and the third is that we are passing through now in Christianity. These life understandings are three in number, and only three, not because we have arbitrarily brought the various theories of life together under these three heads, but because all men’s actions are always based on one of these three views of life – because we cannot view life otherwise than in these three ways. ”

“ It seems that in the judgment of the learned men of our time the Jewish law – a tooth for a tooth, and an eye for an eye – the law of just retaliation known to mankind five thousand years ago, is more rational than the law of love which eighteen hundred years ago Christ taught in place of that just law. ”

“ To see clearly how impossible it is to understand the Christian teaching from such a point of view, one must form for oneself an idea of the place actually held by religions in general, by the Christian religion in particular, in the life of mankind, and of the meaning attributed to them by science. ”

“ This would be most logical, and theoretically nothing would appear more natural to its advocates, who do not observe that love is a sentiment that may or may not be felt, but that it is useless to advocate; and moreover, that love must have an object, and that humanity is not an object. It is nothing but a fiction.
The family, the tribe, even the state were not invented by men, but formed themselves spontaneously, like anthills or swarms of bees, and have a real existence. ”