The Oxford World Classics Edition of Tolstoy's "A Confession, The Gospel In Brief, and What I Believe"

Translated by Tolstoy's biographer, the British Tolstoyan Aylmer Maude, this collection of three of Tolstoy's finest works of religious criticism (including his spiritual autobiography, which is itself a work of relentless critique of religion and self), has become, for me, a constant companion. And the more I read A Confession, the more it fascinates me.

On the one hand, Tolstoy wanted a faith that did not require him to "believe the unbelievable" as Paul Tillich put it--and was continually frustrated by "learned believers" who insisted that "evident absurdities" (Tolstoy's phrase [74]) found in Christian dogma were somehow essential elements of the tradition.

On the other hand, he envied the simplicity of the illiterate Russian peasants who seemed (to him) to be capable of taking those absurdities in stride, without questioning them, and even derived profound truths from those very absurdities.

Tolstoy's inability to believe as the simple believe tormented him--and would continue to do so until he finally reached the conclusion (several years after he completed writing A Confession) that such faith was not his portion in life. His portion in life--his Tolstoyan call--was to give free reign to his intellect without regard to the toll it may take upon religious dogma. The liberating moment for Tolstoy came when he abandoned orthodoxy and embraced, instead, an orthopraxy. Righteous living--the outlines of which he found articulated in an interpretation of the teachings of Jesus (that he himself composed after close study of the canonical gospels, i.e., Tolstoy's own "Diatessaron" or The Gospel In Brief)--became the key to faith.

In his own inimitable fashion, Tolstoy found his way to a kind of Islamicized Christianity (or, perhaps, Christianized Islam); one that may well reflect in significant respects the basic thrust and tenets of the primitive community of Muhammad's followers: what Fred Donner has rightly called the "Believer's Movement" or (in Arabic) the mu'minun (see Fred M. Donner, Muhammad and the Believers, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).