Tolstoyan Theology

Leo Tolstoy, The Wisdom of Humankind, translated by Guy de Mallac, Grand Rapids, MI: CoNexus Press (1999):

"We know God within ourselves or not at all. We know not even ourselves, if we do not know God who animates us. We should love God and foster his presence within ourselves. Love [eros] and the ability to reason [logos] are the characteristics of God which we recognize within ourselves. Other things often are crowding our awareness of God; if only we make more space for God, our awareness of him will increase" (40).

"It is impossible to know God as he really is, and it is impossible to know him or to prove or disprove his existence by reason, but it is possible to feel God's presence within us ... Every attempt of my imagination to comprehend God only puts me further away from him. Even the pronoun 'he' somehow belittles or limits him. God cannot be expressed in words" (41).

"God is God only to those who seek him" (41).

But who seeks God? Those who heed the call of the voice of the God within:

"I know God not when I believe what is said about him, but when I am conscious of him as I am of my own soul. It is as though we always heard a voice behind us, but had no power to turn our heads and see who spoke ... If only we obeyed this voice to the letter and accepted it so as not to keep ourselves apart from it even in thought, we would feel that we are one with this voice" (32).