Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

“ The Church has carried the light of the Christian teaching of life through eighteen centuries; and while trying to conceal it in its raiment it has been burnt itself in this light. The world, with its social adjustments consecrated by the Church, has now thrown the Church aside in the name of the same Christian truths that the Church unwillingly carried along with it, and the world now lives without it. The Church is done with, and it is impossible to conceal the fact. All those who really live, and do not drearily vegetate, in our European world have left the Church. ”

“ Before saying that we live rationally we must answer the question, ‘Which teaching of life do we consider as a rational one?’ Miserable beings that we are, we have no such teaching; we have even lost all consciousness of the necessity for gaining any rational teaching of life.
Ask people of our time, believers or unbelievers, what teaching they follow. They will have to confess that they follow only the laws written by the officials of the Second Section, or by the Legislative Assembly, and put in practice by the police. This is the only teaching that our European world acknowledges. ”

“ The average man answers exactly as the believer and philosopher do. He answers a personal question by a general one; and the reason why the believer, the philosopher, and the average man retort by a general question is that not one of them has any true notion of life. And each of them really feels ashamed of his ignorance.
It is only in our Christian world that, instead of the teaching of life, the explanation of what our life ought to be – which is religion – there is only the explanation of why life must be such as it was of old ”

“ If you ask an average man, a representative of the great majority of the civilized men who are half believers, half unbelievers, and who are all, without a single exception, dissatisfied with their own lives and with our social adjustments, and who always foresee approaching ruin – such an average man, on being asked why he leads a life that he himself finds fault with, and why he does nothing to improve it, never gives you a direct answer and never speaks of himself, but turns the conversation to some general question about justice, trade, the state, or civilization. ”

“ Instead of answering about himself he would speak of the general state of mankind, and of the Church, as if his own life was of no importance whatever, and as if he were engrossed by the idea of saving all mankind, and especially the institution called ‘the Church.’
A philosopher, whether an idealist, a spiritualist, a pessimist, or a positivist, would answer the question of why he did not live according to his philosophical teaching by talking of the progress of mankind and of the historical law of that progress, thanks to which mankind was rapidly advancing toward perfect happiness. ”

“ All eagerly follow those who are in front, and all will soon reach the point where the foremost now stand. But the foremost are standing upon the brink of an abyss. The position of the foremost is an awful one. They point out the path to those who are to follow them, and are themselves completely ignorant both of what they are doing and of the things that impel them to act as they do. ”

“ These men imagine that they have very elevated convictions and no faith. But, whatever people may say, if they take any thoughtful actions, they have beliefs, because thoughtful actions are always defined by beliefs. The actions of these individuals are defined only by the belief that they always ought to do what they were told. The religion of these people, who do not recognize religion, is the religion of obedience to everything that makes a strong majority, that is, in short, the religion of obedience to the existing Government.
We may live according to the teaching of the world ”

“ Isn’t it as if this had been written only yesterday against those who now force men to accept their faith, and persecute and destroy all the prophets and just men, who try to bring their deception to light? ”

“ And this is what must occur in our Christian world: it must cry out of its helplessness; only the consciousness of its helplessness, consciousness of the impossibility of nourishing itself the former way and the impossibility of using any other way of nourishment than its mother's milk, will deliver it to the mother's breast, already overfilled with milk. ”

“ Only don’t do what our European world does now: to live the life they don’t consider reasonable, to commit acts they don’t consider reasonable, not to believe their own mind, to live in discord with it.
The teaching of Christ is ‘light.’ The light shines. It is impossible not to accept the light when it shines. ”

“ There was Church that passed the rational teaching of Christ to the world. Every manifestation of life was nourished by it, grew, and have grown up. The Church has done its business, and has withered away. All the organs of the world are full of life, but the source of their former nourishment is stopped, and they have not found a new one. They seek it everywhere, but only not at their mother from which they have just separated. ”

“ The unthoughtful Christian now solves these questions in this way: soldiery, war, courts of law, and executions exist according to the commandments of God, transmitted to us by the Church. The Church teaches that the world, as we know it, is a lost world. All the evil that fills it exists only by the will of God as a punishment for the sins of men, and therefore we must submit to it. We can only save our souls by faith, by the sacraments, by prayer, and by submission to the will of God. ”

“ The result of all this is that, in our century, we see wise and learned men who are ‘naively’ convinced that they are devoid of all religion, only because they do not acknowledge the correctness of those metaphysical explanations that were, in some past time, given as explanations of life. The idea never occurs to them that they must live in some way or other, that they do live in some way or other, and that it is exactly the principle on which their lives are based that is their religion. ”

“ The teaching of Christ establishes the kingdom of God on earth. To think that it is difficult to fulfill his teaching is unfair. It is not difficult; indeed, he who has once clearly understood it cannot do otherwise than fulfill it. The teaching of Christ is the only possible salvation of the inevitable destruction of the individual life. ”

“ That would not have mattered much if the men had not forgotten, in their anger against the useless helmsman, that without one they would not know in what direction they were going. So it was with our Christian world. The Church does not stand at the helm any more; we row rapidly on, and all the progress of knowledge on which our nineteenth century prides itself is only the result of our floating without a helmsman. We do not know where we are going. We go on leading our present lives absolutely without knowing why we do so. ”

“ Art, which at first served the Church alone, now has separated from it. Not only the whole life has emancipated from the Church, the life has no relationship to the Church other than contempt, while the Church tries to remind its former rights. If there is a form that we call Church, it’s just because people are afraid to break up the vessel that kept a valuable content once; only this can explain the existence in our century of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and various Protestant Churches. ”

“ But all notions of there being a law that is indubitably rational and that each feels in his inmost soul to be obligatory are so lost in our world that the existence of a law among the Jews, which defined the whole order of life, for them, a law that was rendered obligatory by the moral feeling of each, is considered as existing exclusively among the Jews. ”

“ In all that really enters into the life of man – for instance, how he is to live, is he to commit murder or not, is he to condemn his fellow-creatures or not, in what way he is to bring up his children – people submit without a murmur to the rule of others who know no more than they do themselves why they themselves live as they do, and why they insist upon others living the same way. ”

“ The Church teaches us that each must submit to the sovereign, who is the anointed of God, and to those who are in authority over us; that each must defend his own property by violence, make war, and execute or be executed according to the will of the authorities placed over him by God.
It does not matter if this explanation good or bad, it formerly explained all the various phases of life to the believing Christian, and man did not renounce his own reason while living according to the law that he acknowledged as divine. ”

“ While I write, a chill creeps over me at my daring to say what I must say – that we have no right to annihilate the commandments of God, which are written in all His laws and in all our hearts, by adding such words as ‘duty,’ ‘our sovereign,’ ‘our father-land,’ etc., which explain nothing.
Yes, what Christ warned us against has come to pass, for he said (Luke 11:33-36, and Matt. 6:23) , ‘Take heed that the light that is in you is not darkened. If the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness!’
The light that is in us has indeed become darkness ”

“ If people did nothing themselves, but by some outward power were placed to the current condition, then they might answer the question, ‘Why are you in such a condition?’ by saying that they did not know why. We do not know, but we happen to be in this condition. But people make their own conditions for themselves, for each other, and especially for their children, and they must therefore be able to answer when asked why they assemble into armies, to cripple and to kill each other; why they waste the immense strength of millions in erecting useless and pernicious cities ”

“ A newborn lamb moves its eyes and ears, shakes its tail, jumps, kicks. We see its determination and it seems to us that he knows everything, but this poor thing knows nothing. All its determination and energy is the fruit of its mother’s juices, the transmission of which has ceased and cannot be resumed. ”

“ However modest your lot may be, you cannot help sometimes asking yourself, ‘Ought I to act as all around me do, or according to my own feeling?’ And no sooner does the question arise in your mind than the commandments of Christ are found to answer both your reason and your conscience. ”

“ It is thus with our European world. See what a complicated, seemingly rational, energetic life there is in our European world. It looks like all these people know all they are doing and why they are doing this. Take a look at how decisively, youthfully, energetically they act. Art, science, trade, and social activity – all are full of life. ”

“ These two sides of every teaching are to be found in all the religions of the world. Such is the religion of Brahma, Confucius, Buddha, and Moses, and such is the religion of Christ. It teaches us how we are to live and explains why we are to live thus. ”

“ There is not one man among them who could now answer the direct question, “Why do you lead the life that you lead?’ ‘Why do you do what you do?’ I have addressed such questions to hundreds of men, and have never received a direct reply. ”

“ The teaching of Christ does not disagree with men in respect to their view of life, but, including it, gives them what is wanting in it, what is indispensable. It points out to them a path that is not a new one, but one familiar to them from their childhood. ”

“ Christ teaches men to place this light of reason above all else, to live up to it, and not to do what they themselves acknowledge to be irrational. If you consider it irrational to kill Turks or Germans, do not do so; if you consider it irrational to force poor creatures to work hard, in order that you may wear fine hats or have fine drawing rooms, do not do so ”

“ Wars and relations between countries are established on the principle of nationalities, equilibrium, anything else but the Church. Government agencies directly ignore Church. The idea that the Church could be the foundation for the court, the property, in our time, is just ridiculous. Science is not only not conducive to the Church’s doctrine, but inadvertently, unintentionally in its development is always hostile to the Church. ”