The Comprehensive Vision

"[Tolstoy] rightly saw the crucial problem [of human life] as [one of learning to] recognize the limits of reason ... without becoming what Socrates called misologists, haters of reason ... Perhaps, after all, the true secret of happiness is simply to be, as Tolstoy was, a seeker after that God whom from the moral point of view we have to create in order to worship, if we are not to worship an idol unworthy of Him. As Tolstoy said to Bulgakov: 'Pitiful are those who do not seek, or who think that they have found.'" E. B. Greenwood, Tolstoy: The Comprehensive Vision (1975), 155.