Tolstoy and Dramatism

Tolstoy wrote plays as well as novels, short stories, and essays, but his experiments with play-writing are neglected by critics and rarely staged. His famous dislike of Shakespeare may have predisposed many in the Anglophone world to assume that he simply had no gift for the genre. Whether or not this is a fair inference is debatable; what is not debatable is that he understood and communicated a sense of the dramatic in all of his works. Indeed, in this regard, he has had few peers in world literature.

When he turned to the philosophy of history, his sense of the dramatic did not abandon him. One might even conclude, with Kenneth Burke, that it was Tolstoy's inherent "dramatism" that shaped his approach to historical narrative. In a perceptive footnote on page 259 of A Grammar of Motives [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969], Burke wrote:

"Consider those speculations on chance, genius, and historical law which Tolstoy has written at the end of War and Peace. Naturally, an author who had written a work in which he commanded so many destinies would feel strongly the sense of a divine principle guiding the totality of historical development. Such a feeling would be but the equivalent, in cosmological terms, of his artistic method."

Burke's own inimitable genius was often displayed in such pregnant asides. Here, with just a few deft strokes, he lays open to view the strong link between Tolstoy the artist and Tolstoy the philosopher of history. One might add to this list, Tolstoy the religious critic. For it is Tolstoy's implicit dramatism that makes his religious criticism so compelling. He apprehended human religiosity as "spilled poetry" (in Harold Bloom's fine phrase) and, as such, set the stage for Burke's "modest proposal" for a critical mode I have termed, inelegantly, "socio-poetics"--a mode in which "ritual drama [is taken to be] the Ur-form, the 'hub,' with all other aspects of human action treated as spokes radiating from this hub" [Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, 3rd edition, Berkeley: University of California Press (1973), 103].

I would suggest that Tolstoy's "dramatism" was instinctive and implicit; Burke's equally instinctive, but made explicit throughout his career. Tolstoy's genius, towering and with universal aspirations (he was, after all, as Isaiah Berlin famously observed, a "hedgehog"), made it impossible for him to accept Shakespeare's "foxy" poetics. Burke, the critic's critic, sat on the sidelines and observed the one-sided squabble--undoubtedly bemused.

Thomas Merton: Religious Critic and Apologist

Merton had the makings of a religious critic, although he was a queer mixture of critic and apologist. He knew that Christendom was a disaster, but believed that the Christian tradition itself had managed, in monasticism, to create within itself an antidote to its own poisoning.

Towards the end of his life, however, he may have grown restless with the prospect of permanent retreat. Merton had an insatiable mind and a remarkably positive and life-affirming spirit--qualities that monasticism may feed or starve, depending upon the individual monk and where a given monk might be in the arc of his particular life's journey.

In the Islamic tradition, Merton had a strong precursor in the figure of Hasan al-Basri (d. 728), a pietist and ascetic who was notable for possessing, in the words of Louis Massignon, a "realistic critical tendency" in contrast to the "idealistic tradition" that characterized other Muslim pietists [see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam, Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press (1975), p. 31]. Al-Basri turned in disgust from the worldliness of the post-Prophetic Umayyad caliphate and envisioned the role of the dedicated Believer in a rapidly expanding and Islamicizing society in much the same way as the anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetes had envisioned the role of the Christian in late ancient polytheistic Mediterranean culture: as a kind of purifying element or "salt of the earth" [see post for 3-27-12 below]. Like Kierkegaard, Hasan understood the role of the Believer as one of contradiction and opposition, not conformity and compromise.

Merton's own studies of Muslim pietism have been collected in a single volume published by Fons Vitae: Merton & Sufism: The Untold Story: A Complete Compendium, edited by Rob Baker and Gray Henry (1999).

The Vocation of Religious Critic

The anonymous author of the Letter to Diognetes (ca. 250-300 CE) insisted that Christian communities offered a radical alternative to the prevailing culture in the late Roman Empire. Essentially, the author argued that Christians made their contribution to the world by living in it, not of it. Little did the author suspect that the position of Christianity in the Empire was about to move from the social, cultural, and political margins to the center.

In The City of God, Augustine of Hippo (d. 430 C.E.) developed this argument. For Augustine, Christians "are to the world what the soul of man is to his body. Invisible, and yet scattered throughout the world as a soul is omnipresent to its body, the Christians love the world and quicken it from within; and just as the soul, which loves its body, is hated by its body, so also the Christians love the world, but they are hated by the world" [Etienne Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, New York: Random House (1955), 10].

Commenting on the Letter to Diognetes (after conflating it with the Augustinian expansion), Etienne Gilson wrote: "Each and every word of this remarkable text is as true today as it was in the second century after Christ" [Gilson, p. 11].

It is difficult to know what to make of such a remark. Tolstoy would have been appalled by the sheer effrontery of it. The compromises that the church has made with Empire (beginning in the 4th century C.E.) have essentially undermined any credible claim made on its behalf to providing a "radical alternative" to the prevailing culture throughout Christendom.

In the 19th century, the Danish religious critic Soren Kierkegaard (d. 1855--the same year in which Tolstoy confided to his diary his ambition to re-invent Christianity), asserted that "the Christianity of the New Testament rests upon the assumption that the Christian is in a relationship of opposition ... in 'Christendom' [however] we are all Christians--therefore the relationship of opposition drops out." Consequently, in Kierkegaard's view, what passes for Christianity in Christendom is nothing more than a fraud--a case of unabashed "criminality" [Soren Kierkegaard, Attack Upon "Christendom," translated by Walter Lowrie, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1944), 149].

Kierkegaard and Tolstoy discovered their vocation as religious critics when they began to take the Near Eastern prophetic tradition to heart. Apologists like Gilson and even St. Augustine, for all of their learning, piety, sincerity, and devotion to that same tradition, are sources of confusion for so many. Inevitably, ideology trumps history where they are concerned. Worse, it is frequently passed off as history.

The radical alternative to the status quo, if one is to be found, resides not with the religious apologists, but with the religious critics. It is the latter who are as the soul is to the body, and "as the body hates the soul," so are they hated.

Radical Obedience

In a 1964 study of the ethical thought of Rudolf Bultmann--filled with unintended pathos--Thomas Oden tried to articulate an antidote to what he called the "malaise of current Protestant ethics." He looked to Bultmann for clues to his longed for antidote with, as he was candid enough to acknowledge, mixed results. Along the way, however, Oden made a case for the Tolstoyan ethic of vocation--without knowing he had done so (hence the unintentional pathos of the book).

It is difficult to read a book like this and not feel sympathy for its author and, in addition, a pang of remorse: the sort of remorse one might also feel for a frog at the bottom of a well that looks up through the mouth of the well and believes that the heavens extend only as far as his vantage point allows. In 1964, Protestant ethics were stuck at the bottom of the well of antinomianism that Protestantism had dug for itself in the Reformation. In 2012, the situation has hardly changed at all. Oden's analysis of the immediate problem faced by Protestant ethics was quite insightful; but his prior Protestant commitments made it impossible for him to imagine that the underlying cause of the immediate problem is attributable to the very nature of the late medieval protest that split the Western church. Even so, he appears to have sensed this possibility; moreover, one might suggest that he tacitly acknowledged it:

The persistent antinomian inclinations of current Protestantism toward an ethic of self-affirmation without self-denial, gospel without law, freedom without obedience, and grace without obligation constitutes perhaps the most urgent problem of Protestant ethics, which, if we fail to clarify in the next decades, may make it necessary for us to unlearn much that we have learned about "Christian liberty." Perhaps the emerging conversation with Roman Catholicism, long steeped in an ethic of law and virtue, will provide some clues for the overcoming of these antinomian temptations without debilitating the accomplishments achieved in the last two generations in freeing us from a legalistic perception of the demand of God [Thomas C. Oden, Radical Obedience, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press (1964), 133].

I think it significant that Oden gave himself and his co-religionists "decades" to reach "clarity" on the issue; it is also telling that he cast an interested glance in the direction of Roman Catholicism--with its ethical tradition "steeped in ... law and virtue." The problem, however, is that Protestants just don't know what to do with law--or how to do it--and this is because, since Luther, they have read Paul as a Protestant Christian instead of reading him as the proud Jew and Pharisee he proclaimed himself to be (Philippians 3:5). And it will take more than decades for Protestants to begin to read Paul without an anti-Semitic bias; it will take utter desperation. The sort of desperation that only massive defections from the church will cure--massive defections that could eventually force a rapprochement with the Vatican in order for Protestant churches to survive in some attenuated fashion.

Of course, this is not what is happening to Protestantism--except, to some extent, in the mainline denominations. Consequently, the problems that sent Rev. Oden to Rudolf Bultmann will continue, unabated, for the foreseeable future.

But what of Bultmann? What was he recommending? We find his recommendation in the title of Oden's book: radical obedience. But what does this phrase mean to Bultmann?

Radical obedience means to listen for and respond to the Word of God speaking through the situation in which one exists. The demand of the moment must be taken with all seriousness as God's own demand. Such is the core idea with which Bultmann finds the eschatological ethic of the New Testament saturated. The New Testament presupposes that the reign of God is at hand! This immediate expectation of God's immanent coming is the presupposition of the call to obedience in the New Testament. A radical claim is laid upon man because of the emerging reality of God's presently impinging Kingdom [Oden, 25].

Again, it is difficult to read these words without experiencing a strong mixture of sympathy and remorse. The frog is gazing heavenward and sees the sky, but sees only that portion of the sky to which his position has predisposed him. Tragically, he might as well be blind.

Oden seems to suspect that there is something significant looming just beyond his view; but he cannot shift his position far enough to gain the necessary perspective. Instinctively, he seizes upon Bultmann's "essential proposal" that, in the New Testament's eschatological ethic, "indicative and imperative are not two things, but one" [Oden, 95]. What does this mean?

Predictably, it does not mean for Bultmann or Oden what it meant to Tolstoy. This is because Bultmann and Oden, as members in good-standing of the Christian church, could not possibly conceive of the Sermon on the Mount as the central ethic of Rabbi Jesus' indicative/imperative eschatological teaching. Oden states Bultmann's position as follows: "Bultmann strongly resists the notion of the Christian life as a striving toward an ideal condition, as if the Christ event might be regarded as an ideal type of humanity that men [and women] are called to try to achieve" [ibid]. And with this quite accurate rendering of Bultmann's argument, any possibility of escaping the bottom of the well is lost.

How so?

Statements constructed in the "indicative" mood tell us what is, i.e., how things stand at present. Statements constructed in the "imperative" mood tell us how things ought to be. In what Bultmann termed the "Christ event," is and ought are two sides of the same coin [ibid].

Tolstoy would have heartily agreed. He would have said, "Thank you, Rudolf, for making my case so eloquently. As the Christ (the Jewish Messiah), Jesus has inaugurated the Messianic Age. This is the indicative mood of his advent. It is now imperative for human beings to begin to live the Kingdom come, i.e., how they ought to live."

Bultmann would then reply, "Yes, Leo. We are in agreement. That is why I regard the 'Johannine sources as those providing the clearest formulation of the paradoxical relation of indicative and imperative. The essential formula is this: that "out of the love we have received arises the obligation to love"'"[Oden, 95-96].

"You are a clever one," Tolstoy would say. "But then, so is the devil. And like the devil, you know how to quote Scripture for your own purposes. But I am not deceived. Indeed, we are called to love--just as the Johannine sources admonish us. But the Johannine sources do not contain the Sermon on the Mount. Therefore, they offer us the commandment to love one another only as a general principle. The specific injunctions as to how we must put the general principle into common practice--and thereby demonstrate the essential unity of 'ought' and 'is'--are contained in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke."

What could Bultmann say in response? I imagine he could only obfuscate--in the time-honored tradition of Christian evasion of the Messianic teaching of Rabbi Jesus.

Oden's intuitive grasp of the inadequacy of Christian ethics left him dissatisfied with Bultmann's invocation of love in lieu of offering any specific form of genuine moral guidance. He knew as well as Bultmann--as well as anyone--that love is the answer. But what does that mean when someone strikes you in the face?

Leo Tolstoy held that the teaching of Rabbi Jesus about such painful circumstances was this: offer the other cheek as well. By and large, the Christian church has chosen to marginalize this teaching and those who profess the Sermon on the Mount's Messianic indicative/imperative. Consistent with the church's avoidance of Rabbi Jesus' Messianic teaching, Thomas Oden, a Methodist minister and professor at a Protestant theological seminary, took the extraordinary step of suggesting that Roman Catholicism might provide some escape from this ethical impasse!

It is truly remarkable to observe the lengths to which Christians will go to evade "radical obedience" to the Christ they profess to follow. Indeed, the desire to avoid radical obedience to the teachings of Christ is so powerful that it has the potential to reunite Protestants and Catholics after centuries of schism--for they are united in a common struggle to escape the strictures of the Sermon on the Mount.

The Tolstoyan ethic of vocation is to listen to the call of conscience and to heed that call. For Tolstoy, the conscience is the voice of God. But human consciousness is polyphonic. How does one decide which voice to obey? Tolstoy's unequivocal answer: the voice that is consistent with the admonitions of the Axial Age prophets and their spiritual progeny. And among the latter, most particularly, the admonitions contained in the Jewish Messiah's Sermon on the Mount.

The Sign of Contradiction

To be or not to be ... a Christian. That is the question every Tolstoyan must face. Tolstoy himself asserted that he was a Christian; it was the Church that had left Christ. Like so many of Tolstoy's arguments, this one was both perfectly sound and, at the same time, unwinnable.

It is a simple fact of religious history that, several generations after Rabbi Jesus had passed on, a significant proportion of the leadership of the movement he had founded chose to make Jesus himself the focus of its worshipful attentions, rather than implement the message that he had brought. On the fringes of the Christian community, in various times and places, groups of thoughtful individuals have admitted to themselves that this is, in fact, what happened, but they have never been able to move their views from the margins of the tradition to the center and, often, their fate has been one of exclusion or expulsion as heretics--the fate of Tolstoy himself.

Paradoxically, then, despite being centered on the Sermon on the Mount, Tolstoy's teachings are not Christian teachings and, indeed, their appeal has been most noticeable among non-Christians (Mahatma Gandhi, 'Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Hermann Kallenbach). Martin Luther King, Jr., does not appear to have read Tolstoy--or he was reluctant to credit his turn to non-violence to Tolstoy but, rather, credited it to the Tolstoyan Gandhi. This is an interesting issue in itself, but not one that is relevant to the present post.

In any case, this paradox--though seeming to present Tolstoyans with a dilemma--is, in fact, good news for them: though few appear to perceive it as such. For it means that Tolstoyanism is not itself a religious tradition but, instead, is something akin to what the African-American Muslim intellectual Sherman Jackson terms "a spontaneous folk orientation at once grounded in the belief in a supernatural power outside of human history and yet uniquely focused on that power's manifesting itself in the form of interventions into the crucible" of systemic violence that we, in the West, privilege as "civilization" (Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican, Oxford: 2005, 31-32).

For Jackson, the "supernatural power outside of human history" is "neither specifically Jesus, Yaweh [sic], nor Allah but an abstract category into which any and all of these can be fit" (ibid). For Tolstoy, on the other hand, there is nothing abstract about this category at all--indeed, he would probably have denied that there is anything "supernatural" about it either. Instead, in his view, this trans-historical power is perfectly natural and concrete: it is life itself. Consequently, one need not even be a theist to be a Tolstoyan; one need only value life and oppose violence as antithetical to life.

Jackson wraps his professed Sunnism around his "spontaneous folk orientation" (which he terms, somewhat misleadingly, "Black Religion"--misleading because he denies it is a distinct religious tradition) and, in so doing, offers an instructive example to the Tolstoyan. As a Tolstoyan, one is free to be a theist, an agnostic, or an atheist. Moreover, one is free to belong to any religious community that will have him or her. But one is not free to cooperate with the violent status quo.

Quixotically, the Tolstoyan contradicts the very root of "civilized" life on this planet: the assumption that violence is necessary or, at the very least, unavoidable. If a Tolstoyan is a Christian, or chooses to continue as one after embracing Tolstoy's teachings, s/he must be prepared to accept the fact that life as a Tolstoyan Christian is necessarily a life of religious contradiction in addition to being a life of civilizational contradiction.

Indeed, contradiction is the sign under which every Tolstoyan is born.

Tolstoyan Ethics, Aesthetics, and Metaphysics--In One

"Having found the traces of yesterday's stag he crept under a bush into the thicket just where the stag had lain, and lay down in its lair. He examined the dark foliage around him, the place marked by the stag's perspiration and yesterday's dung, the imprint of the stag's knees, the bit of black earth it had kicked up, and his own footprints of the day before. He felt cool and comfortable and did not think of or wish for anything. And suddenly he was overcome by such a strange feeling of causeless joy and of love for everything, that from an old habit of his childhood he began crossing himself and thanking someone. Suddenly, with extraordinary clearness, he thought: 'Here am I, Dmitri Olenin, a being quite distinct from every other being, now lying all alone Heaven only knows where--where a stag used to live--an old stag, a beautiful stag who perhaps had never seen a man, and in a place where no human being has ever sat or thought these thoughts. Here I sit, and around me stand old and young trees, one of them festooned with wild grape vines, and pheasants are fluttering, driving one another about and perhaps scenting their murdered brothers.' He felt his pheasants, examined them, and wiped the warm blood off his hand onto his coat. 'Perhaps the jackals scent them and with dissatisfied faces go off in another direction: above me, flying in among the leaves which to them seem enormous islands, mosquitoes hang in the air and buzz: one, two, three, four, a hundred, a thousand, a million mosquitoes, and all of them buzz something or other and each one of them is separate from all else and is just such a separate Dmitri Olenin as I am myself.' ... And it was clear to him that he was not a Russian nobleman, a member of Moscow society, the friend and relation of so-and-so and so-and-so, but just such a mosquito, or pheasant, or deer, as those that were now living all around him. 'Just as they, just as Daddy Eroshka, I shall live awhile and die, and as he says truly: "grass will grow and nothing more".'

'But what though the grass does grow?' he continued thinking, 'Still I must live and be happy, because happiness is all I desire. Never mind what I am--an animal like all the rest, above whom the grass will grow and nothing more; or a frame in which a bit of the one God has been set,--still I must live in the very best way. How then must I live to be happy, and why was I not happy before?' And he began to recall his former life and he felt disgusted with himself. He appeared to himself to have been terribly exacting and selfish, though he now saw that all the while he really needed nothing for himself. And he looked round at the foliage with the light shining through it, at the setting sun and the clear sky, and he felt just as happy as before. 'Why am I happy, and what used I to live for?' thought he. 'How much I exacted for myself; how I schemed and did not manage to gain anything but shame and sorrow! and, there now, I require nothing to be happy'; and suddenly a new light seemed to reveal itself to him. 'Happiness is this!' he said to himself. 'Happiness lies in living for others. That is evident. The desire for happiness is innate in every man; therefore it is legitimate. When trying to satisfy it selfishly--that is, by seeking for oneself riches, fame, comforts, or love--it may happen that circumstances arise which make it impossible to satisfy these desires. It follows that these desires are illegitimate, but not the need for happiness. But what desires can always be satisfied despite external circumstances? What are they? Love, self-sacrifice ... Since one wants nothing for oneself,' he kept thinking, 'why not live for others?'" -- Leo Tolstoy, The Cossacks, translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude, New York: The Modern Library (1965), 366-368.

Tolstoyan Noblesse Oblige: Ethics and Aesthetics Are One

"So valor drove/ Sarpedon to the wall to make a breakthrough..." The Iliad, Book XII.

Let Nietzsche scoff: Tolstoyan ethics are indeed of the "mixed" sort--an attempt at "mediation" between the "master morality" of the privileged class to which Tolstoy himself belonged and the "slave morality" that he imbibed from close study of the Sermon on the Mount [see F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, sec. 260].

For all of his brilliance--nay, genius--Nietzsche could be remarkably obtuse at times. Having little or no faith in the common herd of humankind, he did not perceive--as did Tolstoy--that the true challenge presented by the utopian ethical imagination lies precisely in transforming both master and slave by means of their mutual interpenetration. Granted, there are a variety of ways in which such mutual interpenetration may be accomplished, and not all of them are desirable. Moral mediocrities are sure to abound, but is that any reason to scuttle the entire project? If I have no hope of ever becoming a virtuoso, ought I never to pick up the violin?

For those Nietzscheans who think the analogy inapt, I can only quote Wittgenstein's parenthetical dictum from the Tractatus: "(Ethics and aesthetics are one.)" [Prop. 6.421]--a peculiarly Nietzschean and Tolstoyan insight.

Yes, ethics and aesthetics are one: hence, in the Islamic tradition, adab means both literary accomplishment and admirable behavior. The roots of this notion extend deep into the desert sands of Arabia, before the rise of Muhammad's movement, to the aristocratic poetic tradition and the figure of the karim (or "generous one") whose nobility is acquired through acts of selfless devotion to his guest--typically one wandering bedouin who has chanced upon the campsite of another.

The occasion of this chance encounter becomes an opportunity for the host to display his mettle--not in combat but in hospitality. The Qur'an appropriates this pre-Islamic value and assigns its perfect expression to God (al-Karim) but then obligates the 'abd-al-Karim (the slave of the Generous One) to extend the divine-aristocratic prerogative to the "neighbor." Who is the 'abd-al-Karim? Why, we all are.

Later Islamic tradition elaborates upon this theme in the famous hadith of the Prophet's colloquy with the angel Gabriel. In this story, the Prophet is engaged by a stranger who questions him in such a way as to draw out from him three key concepts of the tradition: "islam," "iman," and "ihsan." The third of these three concepts is formed from the triliteral root h-s-n, meaning "beauty." In the hadith, al-ihsan is the perfection of the religious way of being in the world: it is the ideal of conducting oneself as if one's eyes are always fixed upon the divine--which, we learn from another oft-quoted hadith, is beauty itself.

The point of these reflections is to acknowledge the degree to which Tolstoyan ethics not only mix Nietzschean "master" and "slave" moralities but do so in a way that democratizes the aristocratic sense of noblesse oblige. In creating this heady mixture, Tolstoy was working within a well-worn groove of the Near Eastern prophetic tradition--a tradition to which Nietzsche was, oddly, tone-deaf.

Although both Tolstoy and Nietzsche were students of Schopenhauer and Montaigne, it was the Russian aristocrat who, for my money, was able to climb up the ladder of his strong philosophical precursors to see the world aright. Nietzsche challenges us to think and re-think our understanding of ethics and aesthetics and the relation between the two but, in the end, we must leave him, regrettably, to try to escape from the pit he dug for others but fell into himself.

Tolstoyan Ethics

"Tolstoy is the greatest moralist of the twentieth century." --Kozlov and Kuvakin

In After Virtue, Alisdair MacIntyre argues that "Aristotle and Nietzsche represent the only two compelling alternatives in contemporary moral theory" [MacIntyre, "The Claims of After Virtue," The MacIntyre Reader, edited by Kelvin Knight, Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press (1998), 71].

MacIntyre is undoubtedly correct in his assessment; therefore, anyone who reads him and takes his statement to heart must understand that contemporary moral theory is the last place one should go to seek out moral guidance.

This does not mean that there is no guidance to be had, only that philosophy departments in our colleges and universities are not the repositories of such guidance. They see their mission differently than, say, Socrates did.

Or Tolstoy, for that matter. And this is a good thing, really. With any luck, academic philosophy will continue to ignore the 20th century's greatest moralist and, instead, occupy itself with the likes of Aristotle and Nietzsche. For there is no shame in that. Meanwhile, those who want to know, in Wallace Stevens's inimitable phrase, "how to live, what to do," can turn to Tolstoy. But be forewarned: as an ethicist (as in everything else), Tolstoy was not just a shot of Stolichnaya, but a fortified shot of Stolichnaya. Those readers who feel that imbibing such strong drink would be detrimental to their health are advised to surf elsewhere in the world wide web.

Tolstoy's ethics are, notoriously, an unapologetically literalistic reading of the Near Eastern prophetic tradition as summarized and revised in the Sermon on the Mount. Such a reading is notorious because it flies in the face of twenty centuries of ecclesiastical rationalization of that Sermon. Indeed, the history of that Sermon's reception by Biblical exegetes, Christian ethicists and theologians may be accurately viewed as a concerted attempt to explain how it is that Jesus did not intend his followers to enact his admonition to resist not evil with evil but, instead, to love their enemies and pray for those who persecute them (see Matthew 5: 38-48). Consequently, they gladly take refuge in the Pauline notion of the "scandal of the cross" (1 Corinthians 1: 18-21). But the true scandal, as Tolstoy knew, is not the cross--for that is really ordinary tragedy, business as usual in the workaday world. The cross is used by the Church to avoid confrontation with the true scandal of Jesus' teachings: it is nothing less than a dodge and a smoke-screen.

A case in point: In his article on Matthew's Gospel in the Oxford Bible Commentary (edited by John Barton and John Muddiman, 2001), Dale C. Allison, Jr. assures the reader that the "SM" (Sermon on the Mount)

"must be associated with the Kingdom of God. The SM does not speak to ordinary people in ordinary circumstances. It instead addresses itself to those overtaken by an overwhelming reality. This reality can remake an individual and beget a new life. Beyond that, the SM sees all through the eyes of eternity. It does not so much look forward, from the present to the consummation, as back from the consummation to the present. Mt 5-7 presents the unadulterated will of God because it proclaims the will of God as it will be lived when the kingdom comes in its fullness. This is why the SM is so radical, so heedless of all earthly contingencies, why it always blasts complacency and shallow moralism and disturbs every good conscience" (p. 853, emphases added).

Were he alive today to read this particular instance of exegetical legerdemain, Tolstoy would not be able to conceal his utter contempt for it. Allison, in lock-step with centuries of similar attempts to evade the Messianic call to institute justice through non-participation in injustice, attempts to let Christians off the hook. "Don't worry," he says, "these injunctions are not meant for ordinary believers like you and me in the world as we presently experience it. Oh no! This is 'Kingdom-speak.' Jesus is providing us with a glimpse of how life on earth will be when God's Kingdom has come. No need to beat your swords into plowshares yet. In fact, keep them sharp and at the ready, for, until the Kingdom arrives in its glory, the world will be filled with bad guys in need of dispatching."

As Tolstoy would point out, however, such a reading is patent nonsense. Jesus is not providing anyone with a glimpse of how life will be when the Kingdom has arrived on earth; for, as he and his listeners would have known full well, the picture of that life had already been provided to Israel in its sacred scriptures (e.g., Isaiah 2:4, 11:6, 65:25; Ezekiel 34:25; Hosea 2:18; Job 5:23). When the Kingdom has arrived, the lion will lie down with the lamb and the nations will learn war no more. It is obvious, then, that the injunctions given by Jesus during the Sermon on the Mount will be superfluous when the Kingdom has come. That's right: superfluous. Obsolete. When the Kingdom comes, the need to turn the other cheek will no longer exist because it would never occur to anyone in God's Kingdom to strike another person in the first place.

Tolstoy's reading of the Sermon on the Mount is the only credible one: the injunctions of that Sermon are designed to bring about the Kingdom of God--to realize it on earth by means of a radical reorientation of human behavior towards non-violence. Any other interpretation of this Sermon is itself an act of violence against the Messianic preaching of Jesus; it is to crucify the man anew.

Tolstoy saw this as did his disciple Mohandas K. Gandhi (a Hindu), and Gandhi's close associates Hermann Kallenbach (a Jew) and Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan (a Muslim). Martin Luther King, Jr. followed Gandhi into non-violence, demonstrating that the teachings of Jesus may also be embraced by practicing Christians as well.

In 1901, Lev Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church for his unconventional interpretation of the Messianic teachings of Christ.

And so it goes.

Again, the Call

"There is an ecstasy that marks the summit of life, and beyond which life cannot rise. And such is the paradox of living, this ecstasy comes when one is most alive, and it comes as a complete forgetfulness that one is alive. This ecstasy, this forgetfulness of living, comes to the artist, caught up and out of himself in a sheet of flame; it comes to the soldier, war-mad on a stricken field and refusing quarter; and it came to Buck, leading the pack, sounding the old wolf-cry, straining after the food that was alive and that fled swiftly before him through the moonlight. He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time. He was mastered by the sheer surging of life, the tidal wave of being, the perfect joy of each separate muscle, joint, and sinew in that it was everything that was not death, that it was aglow and rampant, expressing itself in movement, flying exultantly under the stars and over the face of dead matter that did not move." Jack London, The Call of the Wild, New York: The Library of America (1982), 33-34.

In what Jack London termed the "call of the wild," out of the "deeps" of one's animal nature, there is something that beckons us to interrogate the limits of our world: "That the world is my world," Wittgenstein wrote in the Tractatus, "shows itself in the fact that the limits of the language (the language which I understand) mean the limits of my world" [Proposition 5.62].

For Tolstoy, the job of the artist, then, is to master his or her own language to such an extent that he or she can test and push those limits to their farthest extremity. This is not in any way a denial of humanism, nor is it a leap into the mystical or supernatural. Pindar's self-counsel in his 3rd Pythian Ode to abandon the desire for immortal life in favor of the effort to exhaust the limits of the possible remains good advice in Tolstoy's view. Indeed,

"Tolstoy's reflections on man and the aims and meaning of his life were a powerful contribution to the development of humanist thought and the enrichment of mankind's moral experience. He did not, by any means, deny the material, or as he put it, the 'animal' nature of man, but he brought to the fore the 'spiritual,' 'rational,' 'good' element immanently inherent in a human being, and man's capacity for constructive labor and creative activity. Life was the main value. The meaning and aim of existence of each person was therefore to maintain life as a universal good. For Tolstoy a life, whatever it was, was a good than which there was nothing higher. When one said that life was evil, one did so only in comparison with another, imaginary, better life. Yet one did not know, and could not know, any other, better life; therefore, life, whatever it was, was the highest good attainable" Nikita Kozlov and Valery A. Kuvakin, "Leo Tolstoy," A History of Russian Philosophy, Vol. 2, edited by Valery A. Kuvakin, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books (1994), 391.

That which calls to us from what Yeats named "the deep heart's core" is a polyphony of voices--often a cacophony; but, for Tolstoy, the insistent call of conscience that beckons us to our best selves is the voice to which we must learn to listen--for that voice is the voice of God. Our best selves, for Tolstoy, are those that honor life by making the otherwise unvoiced heard and the otherwise invisible seen.

And so William Blake: "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way,/Is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?" [The Marriage of Heaven and Hell].

Tolstoy would reply that we do "know" this because, as Marshall McLuhan argued, "We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." Chief among our self-shaping and world-shaping tools is language. We therefore determine, by means of language, that beyond the reach of our five senses are worlds available to imaginative rendering. Such imaginative renderings permit us to deal sympathetically with other human beings, even other species--anything that possesses life--because life itself is sacred and our highest value.

"The fool hath said in his heart, There is no god..." [Psalm 14:1]. Why is this foolish? From the Tolstoyan perspective, such statements are not only foolish but morally irresponsible: for it is our duty to affirm the reality of the Divine (i.e., that which animates us) and, thereby, to substantiate our best selves.

For Tolstoy, every effort to inject love (eros) and reason (logos) into our lives is a realization of God. We have no right to deny our world God. To do so is an abdication of our calling, as human beings, to exhaust the limits of the possible.

Tolstoy and Mazeppa

The link between Tolstoyanism and Mazeppism is deep. Indeed, Mazeppism is but a variety of Tolstoyanism. Both are a species of sober Romanticism--although Tolstoy's Romanticism is frequently over-looked by Tolstoy scholars, if not altogether denied.

Instead, Tolstoy's Enlightenment rationalism is emphasized--ignoring the fact that Tolstoy's hero of the French Enlightenment was Rousseau, perhaps the founding figure of Romanticism.

Other scholars will look to novels like The Cossacks as evidence that Tolstoy was tempted by Romanticism in his youth but then turned away from it in the same way that Olenin's romantic illusions about life in the Caucasus mountains are shattered by the experiences he has while living there.

To read this novel (or any novel) as its author's autobiography, however, is an unwise practice.

Likewise, to regard Romanticism as a unitary phenomenon is equally perilous.

I think it true that Tolstoy rejected Romantic modes not tempered by what Wallace Stevens termed "reality," but such tempering does not automatically vitiate one's Romanticism: it sobers and seasons it.

Tolstoy's philosophical forbears (Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer, Fichte), his privileging of peasant life, his Slavophile sympathies, and his Orientalism are all indicia of a profoundly Romantic attitude and orientation. The Mazeppist would not be the Mazeppist without having first become a Tolstoyan. For Tolstoy was continually negotiating "East" and "West," unable to embrace one to the exclusion of the other. This is the Mazeppist's dilemma, blessing, and curse. The two are inextricably linked and inter-related.

Tolstoy and Wittgenstein's Tractatus

Jeff Love's insight into the "axiomatic" nature of Tolstoy's "intrinsically unstable, synthesis or reconciliation of reason and revelation" is not only important for understanding Tolstoy's thought but also for understanding Wittgenstein's attraction to Tolstoy's attempted solution to vexing philosophical problems [see Love, Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Continuum (2008), 125].


As is well known, Wittgenstein himself admitted to friends and colleagues the strong impression that Tolstoy's Gospel in Brief made upon him while he was writing the Tractatus.

And Caleb Thompson makes a persuasive case for regarding Tolstoy's Confession as yet another work to read in pari materia with Wittgenstein's philosophy [see Thompson, Philosophical Investigations 20:2 April 1997, 97-116].

Many years ago, after noting that Wittgenstein had been "deeply impressed by Augustine, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy," Walter Kaufmann opined: "Of such a philosopher one might expect that his greatest influence would be on the lives of other men. Yet it is his impact on academic philosophy that is almost unequaled" [Kaufmann, Critique of Religion and Philosophy, Princeton: Princeton University Press (1958), 53]--an accident of history that one can only imagine would have disappointed Wittgenstein to no end.

My Path to Tolstoy

My path to Tolstoy began about thirty years ago, in the Spring of 1982. I was preparing to graduate from the University of Pittsburgh with a double-major in Philosophy and Classical Languages. I had chosen that major because, as a junior in high school, I had stumbled upon a copy of Robert Bretall's Kierkegaard Anthology, picked it up out of curiosity and, to my own surprise, found that I could not put it down. The Danish thinker's erudition, irony, wit and, above all, passion for ideas, spoke to me like nothing (outside of the Bible) had ever spoken to me before. Out of his deep love for Christ, S.K. had become a religious critic, and in his writings I heard my call. But in order to follow in his foot-steps, I knew that I had much to read, much to learn, and (as it turned out) much to suffer. I thought that the study of philosophy and the "foundational texts" of the "Western tradition" would be a good place to start my training in religious criticism, and that is how I began.

Classicists, I discovered, were, with a few exceptions (like Norman O. Brown), antiquarians. Academic philosophy, on the other hand, had re-invented itself in the 20th century (in the U.S. and Great Britain) as the hand-maid of the physical sciences. I learned a great deal from my professors in both disciplines but concluded that a professional career in either one would not help me to pursue my calling. My father pressed me to consider a career in the law, but that did not appeal to me, either. I felt I had no place in this world; nevertheless, I was determined to make one. Kierkegaard had managed to do it; somehow, I would too.

As the date of my graduation drew near, I was summoned for something like an exit interview with an academic adviser from the philosophy department. My recollection is that the person who was assigned to meet with me was not a tenured member of the faculty but, rather, a visiting professor--an individual with whom I had not taken a single course. I believe his name was van Aken, but I cannot be certain of that.

In any event, when I entered his office he was looking through my academic file. After greeting me, the first words out of his mouth were, "So, where have you applied to graduate school--or, should I say, where have you been accepted?"

"I haven't applied to graduate school," I said.

He looked at me as though stunned or confused. Gesturing towards my file he continued: "Philosophy, Classics, you've been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, I see ... Why haven't you applied to grad school?"

I explained the history of how I had come to study philosophy, and that I saw no future in the discipline for someone like myself.

"But there's Continental philosophy," he countered, showing some irritation. "Duquesne has an excellent program and it's just down the street."

"I don't want to do Continental philosophy," I said. "What they call 'philosophy' looks to me like bad psychology."

This characterization seemed to amuse him. "I see," he nodded. We sat in silence for a few moments and then he asked, "So what do you plan to do with yourself?"

"I don't know, really. All I know is that I'm going to have to find a job."

"Doing what?" he asked.

"I don't know, but I'll figure something out."

We sat in silence for a few more moments and then he said, "Well, best of luck to you."

I thanked him and rose to go to the door. As I pulled it open I heard him say something, but I wasn't sure what it was.

"I beg your pardon?" I asked.

He repeated what he had said before: "Read Wittgenstein."

"Right. Thanks," I said, and went out.

I never saw the man again and I don't know whatever became of him. But I took his advice. I went straightaway to the campus bookstore and ordered a copy of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. When it arrived, I began to read it; slowly, line by line. Much of it was very difficult to understand, but there was something about it that intrigued me. Wittgenstein seemed to think that the world we inhabit makes sense--or, rather, that we can make sense of the world because there is an underlying logical structure or order to it that corresponds to our language. Or so the book begins. But as it proceeds, the author's confidence in the underlying logos and linguistic correspondence appears to grow thin. One has the sense that he is putting on a brave face--like whistling a merry tune as he strolls through a graveyard--but he doubts his own assertions.

Towards the end of the book, one wonders if Wittgenstein is losing his composure; he loudly proclaims the supremacy of the natural sciences, but is he convinced? He counsels his reader to silence, but why? Are his doubts overwhelming? That, at any rate, is how I understood the Tractatus and, understanding it thus, cherished it as an honest book. I often read it alongside the poetry of Wallace Stevens--a contemporary of Wittgenstein's and another modern committed to whistling his "blessed rage for order" as he made his way through the world--a "metaphysician in the dark."

By my mid-20's, I was reading everything I could get my hands on by and about Wittgenstein and his philosophy. I developed a reading program for myself in which I tried to read not only everything that Wittgenstein had written but also everything that he himself had read.

And, in this roundabout way, I was gradually led, by my late-20's, to reading Tolstoy.

Tolstoyan Fideism?

In his approach to religious belief, Tolstoy would appear to teeter on the edge of fideism. Like Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali (d. 1111 C.E.), Tolstoy engaged in a systematic and rational critique of religious dogma. Also like al-Ghazali, he continued further, turning the guns of reason upon reason itself.

As a true fideist, al-Ghazali then returned to belief, adopting what was essentially the position of traditional Sunni kalam on the problem of faith versus reason, i.e., he claimed to accept the "consensus of the community" (a fictional construction, of course, but one that provides Sunni Muslims with some degree of "orthodox" opinion) on questions of dogma bi-la kayf--literally, "without asking how."

At this stage in the argument over reason and faith, al-Ghazali and Tolstoy part ways--and Tolstoy's fideism is rendered suspect. For Tolstoy never stops asking questions. At the same time, however, neither does he lack something that might be construed as religious belief, e.g., he is a theist. The content of his theism, however, bears a strong affinity to J. G. Fichte's--where "God" appears to be shorthand for "the moral order of the world"--a position that Fichte's contemporaries equated with atheism (see, e.g., Gunter Zollar's article "Fichte" in the 2nd edition of the Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2005), 613-620).

Jeff Love rightly describes Tolstoy's "solution" to the faith/reason problem as "an intriguing, if intrinsically unstable, synthesis or reconciliation of reason and revelation that owes more to axiomatic thought, thus, to modern mathematics, than it does to Christian dogmatics" (Love, Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Continuum (2008), 125).

Love then elaborates:

Tolstoy's manner of thinking is something like this: reason has limits, it cannot ground itself. Therefore reason, if it is to retain any legitimacy, must proceed from a given, a ground accepted as such, a pure postulate or axiom. Faith can provide the given, the axiomatic foundation, if purified of absurdities, of contradictions (ibid).

Love rightly points out that Tolstoy's "solution" is really no solution at all because it is "fraught with difficulties no less severe than those that arise from a faith purged of reason. For the threshold question--which of faith or reason retains the primary authority?--receives no definitive answer" (ibid).

While this conclusion may trouble many, it is regarded as quite elegant by genuine Tolstoyans. For example: that most acute reader of Tolstoy, Ludwig Wittgenstein, posited in the Tractatus that "doubt can only exist where there is a question; a question only where there is an answer, and this only where something can be said" [prop. 6.51].

For Wittgenstein, at the limits of reason, i.e., the place where all questions are exhausted or where the chain of justifications slams into bedrock, one's spade is turned. The inclination then is to say, "This is simply what I do" (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, paragraph 217).

Such a response satisfies no one--nor should it. For both God and the devil can offer this same response when asked to justify their actions.

Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, and all genuine Tolstoyans make no attempt to improve upon this answer, however, because they are all convinced ironists: they recognize that the truth in such matters is inherently unsatisfactory. Consequently, the "intrinsic instability" of Tolstoy's "solution" is viewed as an indication that the great Russian thinker had indeed placed his finger upon something vital: the unmitigated contingency of human being-in-the-world.

Wittgenstein's Tractarian assertion that "We feel that even if all possible scientific questions be answered, the problems of life have still not been touched at all. Of course, there is then no question left, and just this is the answer" [prop.6.52] may be read as an interpretation of the dream that Tolstoy recounted in his 1882 post-script to his Confession.

The "answer" at which Tolstoy had arrived (and of which his dream was emblematic) is that there is no answer; that all of us balance precariously on a single cord over an unfathomable abyss. For the Tolstoyan, this answer raises not frustration or despair but a further question: "What of it?" Tolstoy's conclusion--missed by most who read him but understood by Wittgenstein and all genuine Tolstoyans--is this: if we must balance on a single cord, then balance we must. Let us at least have enough class to balance well. It must be remembered that Tolstoy, for all of his proletarian sympathies, was never anything less than an aristocrat.

His post-Confession writings were dedicated to articulating exactly what "balancing well" over the abyss entails for those who take to heart the Near Eastern "prophetic tradition" as it was revised (re-visioned) in the Sermon on the Mount.

Tolstoy had discovered that the true aristocracy of the world is not obtained by privileged birth, but by action taken in response to the call of conscience: a summons contained in the faith traditions that emerged among humankind during the Axial Age.

Who Is Tolstoy?

"Tolstoy is plurality, change and movement. This is arguably his most powerful legacy. For Tolstoy represents a life seeking its limits, ceaselessly inventive, restless and unsure: here is an artist who combines tremendous moral earnestness with cunning and delight in the power fiction grants its creator; here is a questing, religious personality who combines authentic humility with an arrogance that mocks any notion of piety; here is a supreme rationalist whom reason disappoints; here, finally, is a man who sought to become at home in the world and ran away from home to die. The wonder of Tolstoy is that he encompassed all these divergent energies and converted them into an immensely rich body of work that magnificently expresses the sheer precariousness of human life, that homelessness with which we try to become at home despite death's insistent presence."

--Jeff Love, Tolstoy: A Guide for the Perplexed, London: Continuum (2008), 151-152.

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy had what I like to call the Heraklitean "genius of belonging." It is the genius of a life, restless and insistent, that can sing with Dylan Thomas:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

It is the poetic genius that William Blake insisted was the mark of the Word made Flesh. A sturdy genius, hard as rock, consuming as flame, in tune with the rhythms of the cosmos. Difficult to live with, impossible to live without. It is the genius of life itself.

Tolstoy's Confession

"A confession has to be a part of your new life." Ludwig Wittgenstein, 1931.

I first read Tolstoy's Confession in 1992. I am confident of this date because I wrote an essay in response to it, so powerful was its effect upon me. I was 32 years of age at the time.

Re-reading Confession today, 20 years later, and then re-reading the essay of 20 years ago, I see my younger self deeply disturbed by Tolstoy's struggle. Having read his major novels (War and Peace, Anna Karenina, and the late masterpiece Hadji Murad), I was unnerved by the vehemence with which the great artist attempted to distance himself from his literary creations.

It is one thing to want greater honesty in one's life and personal relations, or to feel at a loss for meaning and fruitful direction, or to find the dogmas of religious tradition false to history and experience. These aspects of Tolstoy's reflections rang true with me then and ring true today. But to look upon literary achievements as monumental as Tolstoy's own and to count them as so much straw--this, I thought (and continue to think), was too much.

So I focused my essay on the internal artistry of the Confession itself: wishing to show that the old man had not lost his touch--despite himself--and, perhaps, wishing to show that, try as he might, he could never distance himself from his genius.

Of course, he was not so old when he wrote Confession--51, my current age. Re-reading the book now and in light of so many other works that Tolstoy wrote before and after his "spiritual crisis," I take less offense at his self-assessment. I don't agree with it, nor am I altogether convinced that he completely believed it himself; but I see it, instead, as a necessary step for him, as both an artist and a man.

In March 1855, Tolstoy had confided to his diary:

Yesterday a conversation about Divinity and Faith suggested to me a great, a stupendous, idea to the realization of which I feel capable of devoting my life. That idea is the founding of a new religion corresponding to the present development of mankind; the religion of Christ but purged of dogmas and mysticism--a practical religion, not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth.

Considering the fact that he was in his mid-20's at the time he conceived this audacious plan, it is unlikely that anyone would have faulted him for not carrying through with it--anyone but Tolstoy himself. And yet, for my money, he did carry through with it: year by year and book by book. For it was by and through his literary productions that Tolstoy the artist was able to work through the ideas that make Tolstoy the religious reformer worth taking seriously. And though he denied that he was the founder of any sort of "Tolstoyan" movement or school, he was indeed that for those few of us who understand him as such. Which is to say that, while he may not have intended to found a "school" (it is usually the mediocre who set out with such a goal), he managed to do so regardless.

And, in my view, this is, in fact, a better outcome than what he originally had in mind--the founding of a new religion. Thankfully, Tolstoyanism is not a "new religion"--the world already has enough religions, religions to spare. I would even suggest that it is something better than a new religion: Tolstoyanism is what Cornell West calls a "critical alignment with an enabling tradition." Tolstoy's teachings on religion empower one to "align" oneself in a critical manner with an existing religious tradition and to selectively appropriate (as Sherman Jackson employs this term) those aspects of the "host" tradition that correspond to reason and "further" one's moral and devotional life (see Hermann Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund).

I will gladly elaborate on these assertions in future posts. For the time being, however, what is most important to understand is that Tolstoy's Confession represents not a turning away from the artist's self-proclaimed religious mission of 1855 but, rather, the continued prosecution of it (beginning in 1879) in a more direct and intensified vein. His depression would seem to have stemmed from the fact that he felt, after a quarter century, that he had not been as intensely preoccupied as he ought to have been with producing the religious revolution he had envisioned in his 20's. But any such feeling was, in my view, misplaced. He could not have written the great religious critiques of his final three decades had he not spent the previous three decades developing a profound understanding of the human condition--an understanding he developed by means of his novels, short stories, and plays.

Confession was not so much a part of a new life for Tolstoy as it was a continuation of his old life, revised and re-presented, in a new key.

Tolstoyan Religion As Vocation

Steeped in Kant and Kant's most creative philosophical heirs (Fichte and Schopenhauer), Tolstoy reconceptualized religion as a "pre-conscious" inward call to a life lived in service to others and the conscious response of obedience to that call. He termed this "pre-conscious" inward call the promptings of conscience--what, in the Islamic tradition, would appear to correspond to fitra or the "inner compass" that makes one long for (re-)union with the Divine Reality.

Precursors to this view can be found in St. Augustine's confession that "Thou hast made us for Thyself and our hearts are restless until they find their repose in Thee" and the cry of Rumi's reed flute, cut from the reed-bed. Tolstoy argued that the unsettling nature of this call prompted people to "stupefy themselves" with alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs, in an effort to drown it out.

For the Tolstoyan, there is no genuine religion absent this "call-and-response." Vocation is the foundation of authentic living.

"Our Lord! We have indeed heard one who calls us to faith [trust], saying 'Trust your Lord!' And so we have trusted" (Qur'an 3:193)

The Call

I have a soft spot in my heart for the 20th century theologian Paul Tillich. I wrote my first research paper (in high school) on Tillich because his thinking could not be contained by dogmatic constraints--he was too much an historian of religion to allow himself to be hemmed in by orthodoxies. "Dogma does not drop from heaven like a stone," he wrote. Consequently, in his view, the Christian church should not be afraid to retire doctrines that have lost credibility in the modern period.

Unfortunately, Tillich's inclusive and iconoclastic vision of theology never caught on with his co-religionists--far from it. Instead, since his death in 1965, Christian triumphalism and the will to believe "the unbelievable" (his description of what passes for faith among most religious people) has rebounded with renewed vigor (one might even say a vengeance).

Tillich was, in significant respects, an heir to Tolstoyan theology as his famous address/sermon "The New Being" amply demonstrates. In it we hear the call of that voice we have always heard behind us but to which we have not responded--for we lack the courage required to challenge the dead hand of the past and re-imagine our relationship to it and, therefore, to one another.

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).

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.

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.

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.