Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

“ If he had stood on the same scale of civilization as these learned men, he would not have uttered those pretty trifles about the birds of the air, about letting one’s cheek be struck, and about taking no care for tomorrow. Learned historians judge Christianity according to what they see in our Christian society. Now the Christian society of our times considers our life as a good and holy one, with its institutions of solitary imprisonment, of fortresses, sweatshops, journals, brothels, and parliaments, while it only borrows from the teaching of Christ what is not against these habits of life. ”

“ We know very well that the teaching of Christ, as we have received it, embraces all the errors into which humanity has fallen, all the ‘tohu,’ empty idols, the existence of which we try to justify by calling them church, government, culture, science, arts, and civilization, thinking thus to exclude them from the rank of errors. ”

“ This law is eternal, and if in history we find any progress made toward the annihilation of evil, it is due to those who truly understood the teaching of Christ, who suffered evil without resisting by violence. The progression of mankind toward good is brought about by martyrdom, not by tyranny. Fire cannot extinguish fire, no more than evil can extirpate evil. Good, meeting with evil and remaining untainted by it, can alone conquer evil. There is a law in the heart of each man that is immutable. ”

“ But let a man even for a moment shake off in thought the net of worldly institutions that so ensnares him, and he will see what is really incompatible with his nature.
If once we cease to affirm that the evil we are so used to, and profit by, is an immutable divine truth, we may see clearly which is the more natural to man – violence, or the law of Christ. ”

“ Every teaching of truth is a dream for those who are in error. We have come to such a state of error that there are many among us who say, as I did myself formerly, that this teaching of Christ is chimerical because it is incompatible with the nature of man. It is incompatible with the nature of man, they say, to turn the other cheek when he has been struck; it is incompatible with the nature of man to give up his property to another – to work, not for himself, but for others. ”

“ When once we clearly understand the teaching of Christ, we see that it is not the world given by God to man for his happiness that is a dream, but the world such as men have made it for their own destruction that is a wild terrifying dream – the delirium of a madman – a dream from which it is enough to awake once, never to return to it. ”

“ I now understood that, in this teaching of non-resistance, Christ not only tells us what the natural result of following his teaching will be, but by placing this same teaching in opposition to the Law of Moses, the Roman law, and the various codes of the present time, he clearly shows that it ought to be the basis of our social existence and should deliver us from the evil we have brought on ourselves. He says, ‘You think to amend evil by your laws, but they only aggravate it. There is one way by which you can put a stop to evil; it is by indiscriminatingly returning good for evil. ”

“ It is sufficient to comprehend, once and for all, that, in our present organization of life, every joy and every moment of peace is bought at the cost of the privations and sufferings of thousands, who are only restrained by violence, in order to see clearly what is natural to man; i.e., not only to the animal nature of man, but to his rational nature as well. ”

“ No magistrate will himself drag a peasant from his weeping family in order to shut him up in prison. Not a single general, not a single soldier, would kill hundreds of Turks or Germans, and devastate their villages – no, not one of them would consent to wound a single man, were it not in war, and in obedience to discipline and the oath of allegiance. ”

“ Cruelty is only exercised (thanks to our complicated social machinery) when it can be so divided among a number that none shall bear the sole responsibility, or recognize how unnatural all cruelty is. Some make laws, others apply them; others, again, drill their fellow-creatures into habits of discipline – i.e., of senseless passive obedience; and these same disciplined men, in their turn, do violence to others – killing without knowing why or wherefore. ”

“ Which is better – to know that the comfort and safety of my family and myself, all my joys and pleasures, are obtained at the price of the misery, depravity, and suffering of millions, by yearly executions, by hundreds of thousands of suffering prisoners, and by millions of soldiers, policemen and sergeants torn from their homes and half stupefied by military discipline, who protect my idle pleasures by keeping starving men at a distance with their loaded pistols ”

“ And I say to you, do not resist evil.’ Christ means, ‘You have been taught to consider it right and rational to protect yourselves against evil by violence, to pluck out an eye for and eye, to institute courts of law for the punishment of criminals, and to have a police and an army to defend you against the attacks of an enemy ”

“ Who will deny that it is repugnant and harrowing to a man’s feelings to torture or kill, not only a man, but also even a dog, a hen, or a calf? (I have known men, living by agricultural labor, who have ceased entirely to eat meat only because they had to kill their own cattle.) ”

“ We have grounded the conduct of our lives on a principle that he rejects; we do not choose to understand his teaching in its simple and direct sense. Those who call themselves ‘believers’ believe that Christ-God, the second Person of the Trinity, made Himself man in order to set us an example how to live, and they strictly fulfill the most complicated duties, such as preparing for the sacraments, building churches, sending out missionaries, naming pastors for parochial administration, etc. ”

“ Unbelievers, on the other hand, try to regulate their lives somehow or other, but not in accordance with the law of Christ, feeling convinced beforehand that it is worthless. Nobody ever tries to fulfill his teaching. ”

“ The learned historians see this, and not having the same interest in concealing the fact as the so-called believers have, they subject this, for them, meaningless teaching of Christ to a profound analysis, argue against it, and prove on good grounds that Christianity never was anything but the dream of an idealist. ”