Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tolstoyan

For Tolstoy and his disciple Wittgenstein, religious belief may be directed towards "some apparently trans-empirical Being. However, for them, the genuine religious spirit involve[d] something else ... an 'authentic orientation to the world'" Emyr Vaughan Thomas, "Wittgenstein and Tolstoy: The Authentic Orientation," Religious Studies 33 (1997), pp. 363-377.

This authentic orientation is a "non-articulative stance expressed in a form of knowledge too basic to be part and parcel of normal deliberative assessments ... Tolstoy, like Wittgenstein, has no place for religion conceived of as a system of beliefs because such a conception is seen as thoroughly given to self-orientation ... Being in the right relation to the universe is not a matter of adopting a particular belief-system concerning a supernatural Being. For Tolstoy insists that to try to justify the superiority of one form of relation to the universe to another through reason is an expression of self-interest" (ibid, 374).

What reveals this genuinely religious stance, this "unreflective view of the world as a whole," is the way in which it manifests itself in personal behavior.