Tolstoy's Religious Humanism

October 7, 1910:

1. Religion is the establishment of one's relations to the world in a manner providing guidance in all one's acts. Usually people established their relationship to the source of all, to God, and they ascribe to this God their own characteristics: punishments, rewards, the desire to be respected, love, which is essentially only a human attribute, not to mention the absurd legends which describe God as a man. They forget that we can recognize or rather cannot help recognizing, the source of all, but we cannot form any sort of concept about this source. But we have invented a human God of our own and address Him as a familiar, ascribing our own characteristics to Him. This chumminess, this diminution of God, distorts the religious understanding most of all, and for the most part deprives people of any religion whatever or of guidance in their actions. If you establish such a religion, it is best to leave God in peace and not attribute to Him not only the creation of paradise and hell, wrath, the wish to redeem sins, and similar stupidities, not even attribute to him will, desires, or love. Let us leave God in peace, understanding that He is something completely inaccessible to us, and construct our own religion and our own relationship to the world, using the qualities of reason and love that we possess. This religion would also be a religion of truth and love just as all religions have been in their truest sense, from the Brahmins to Christ, but it will be more precise, clearer, more obligatory.

2. What a terrible blasphemy it is, for anyone who understands God as he can and should, to identify a certain Jew, Jesus, with God!

[Leo Tolstoy, Last Diaries, translated by Lydia Weston-Kesich and edited by Leon Stilman, New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons (1960), pp. 197-198].

October 31, 1910; dictated to Aleksandra Tolstoy in Astapovo:

God is that unlimited Whole, of which man acknowledges himself to be a limited part.

Only God truly exists. Man is a manifestation of Him in matter, space, and time. The more the manifestation of God in man (life) unites with the manifestations (lives) of other beings, the more he exists. The union of this life of one's own with the lives of others is accomplished through love.

God is not love, but the more love there is, the more man reveals God, the more he truly exists.

[Ibid, 219].

Later that day, Tolstoy dictated this addendum:

If we wish by the concept of God to clarify our understanding of life, then there can be nothing solid or reliable in our concept of God or of life. These are only idle speculations, leading nowhere. We recognize God only by being conscious that He is manifested in us. All that derives from this consciousness and the rules of conduct based on it never fails to satisfy man fully both in comprehending God and in managing his own life on the basis of this consciousness.

[Ibid.]

This would seem to be Tolstoy's final statement regarding theism. It is clear that no consistent Tolstoyan can be a post-Nicene Christian, but one can be a "Christian" of a different kind--a follower of Christ's teachings rather than someone who worships a Palestinian proto-Rabbi as a Hellenistic dying and rising god.

Tolstoy's views on religion were humanistic; as far as he was concerned, one can self-identify with any established tradition so long as one's true allegiance is to the "creed" expressed in the diary entries above. I find it difficult to reconcile such a creed with any recognized form of Christianity, however--except, perhaps, Unitarian Universalism. Among major world traditions, it is fairly inoffensive to Hinduism and Buddhism (insofar as they can be reconciled with monotheism). It seems least offensive to certain forms of Islamic piety, Judaism (insofar as Jews can tolerate Tolstoy's deep attachment to the teachings of Rabbi Jesus), and Baha'ism--which began life as a movement among Shi'i Muslims.

Certain scholars have attempted to conflate Tolstoy's position with Aldous Huxley's notion of "Perennial Philosophy" (see, e.g., Appendix One to Guy de Mallac's translation of Tolstoy's The Wisdom of Humankind, 1999, p. 191)--a conflation that Tolstoy himself may have approved. The problem with this view is that it fails to account for genuine (and irreconcilable) differences among the several world traditions and its fundamental claim that, at bottom, all religions agree about the way the world ought to be understood is, simply put, sloppy.

Despite Tolstoy's own assessment of his creed, it is probably least compatible with Christianity. That is why, when I became a Tolstoyan in my early thirties, I realized that I had ceased to be a Christian in any sense acceptable to the church in which I had been baptized as a child.