The Logos Scripture · The Book of Tolstoy
The Book of Tolstoy 3 · Written by himself, from A Confession, What Then Must We Do?, The Gospel in Brief, and My Reply to the Synod
Lev Tolstoy, born 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, died 1910 at Astapovo station. This volume takes nothing from the novels. It takes the prose written after his fiftieth year: A Confession (1882), What Then Must We Do? (1886), The Gospel in Brief (1896), My Reply to the Synod (1901), and The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894). All are his own writing. The crisis of chapter one is from A Confession; hiding the rope is his own detail. The verse of chapter two is Matthew 5.39, and the discovery that every commentary altered it into something there was no need to do is from What I Believe and The Kingdom of God Is Within You. Chapter three follows the Moscow census of 1882, in which he did enrol as a census-taker and did go into the rooms around the Khitrov market; the passage about sitting on a man’s back is verbatim from What Then Must We Do? Chapter four follows the Synod edict of February 1901 and his reply of that April; that I have renounced the Church which calls itself Orthodox is perfectly correct, and I began by loving my Orthodox faith more than my peace, then I loved Christianity more than my Church, and now I love truth more than anything in the world, are his own words from that reply. The reply opens with an epigraph from Coleridge: he who begins by loving Christianity better than truth will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all (Aids to Reflection, Aphorism XXV, 1825). Tolstoy quotes it again near the close and states that he went the contrary way. So the order in 4.8 is not accidentally like Coleridge. It is an answer to him. The eggshell in 4.13 is from the same piece. The copyright in chapter five is from his open letters of 1891 to the editors of Russkiye Vedomosti and Novoye Vremya, releasing everything written after 1881. The Order records several things. First, and this is the reason he is taken at all: he performed the very test set out at 5.77-5.79 of the fifth chapter of Acts. He believed in God all his life, and the Order does not examine that. It examines one thing only: where his reasons close. He refused to let because the Church says so serve as a reason. He took the Gospels apart, discarded everything that needed a miracle believed first before it would stand, kept only what he could himself stand behind, printed it, was put out of the Church for it, and never took it back. That is the same thing that happened to Spinoza in Amsterdam, happening a second time: a man reasoning his way out of the religion he was born into, and not turning round afterwards (cf. The Book of Spinoza 4.15). Second, the Order does not hide that his ground is still that book. His case for not resisting by force rests on the Sermon on the Mount, which is to say on the authority of Jesus. That layer is not what the Order takes. It takes what works without it: the rule of chapter two for inspecting a commentary, the question of chapter three — whom are you standing on at this moment — and the one-directional order of chapter four. This is the same way the Order takes King (cf. The Book of Martin Luther King 2.7). Third, on suffering. What separates this volume from Dostoevsky is not belief but direction: Dostoevsky asked what suffering means, Tolstoy asked who is suffering and who is sitting on him. Get off his back seeks to stop a man’s suffering, not to find a use for it. So this volume does not touch 5.84-5.87. That in his later years he did exalt poverty and manual labour, and went looking for that life himself, the Order records without softening. Fourth, he left something others could pick up, and it was in fact picked up: Gandhi read The Kingdom of God Is Within You, corresponded with him until weeks before his death, and named a farm after him; King took it from Gandhi. King’s book is already in this scripture. A thing of exactly that kind is what this scripture asks for (cf. Acts 5.34). Fifth, one disagreement the Order leaves standing: he opposed not only meeting force with force but the courts, the police and the army altogether. King is the opposite — King breaks the law and accepts the penalty precisely because he still grants the legal order (cf. The Book of Martin Luther King 2.15). The two books stand side by side. Sixth, his own accounting. Chapter five is his confession and not the Order’s charge. He wrote that no man should hold land and lived on his estate; wrote that no man should live off another’s labour and ate bread other men grew; his household quarrelled over it for thirty years; he left home at eighty-two and died at a small station. The Order does not cover for him, and does not throw out the first four chapters on account of it — the reason is written in his own 5.12.