Leo Tolstoy

I would like to give outward expression to the gravity and importance, the solemnity and the religious awe in the presence of the greatest event in life of every human being. And I can think of nothing more fitting – and fitting for all ages and all stages of development – than a religious setting. (Ls, I, p. 256)

Deaths of close family members moved Tolstoy from ‘religious respect’ to sincere belief. Like Levin, he expected spiritual guidance from the peasants working his land. It only followed that he was eager to accept the religion that supported them in their toils and freed them from fear and anguish of their mortality.

Tolstoy immersed himself in Orthodoxy with characteristic fervour. He fasted and patiently stood during long liturgies, bowing and praying on his knees. He made a pilgrimage to Kiev, the cradle of Russian Christianity, to see relics of the first Russian saints. He visited monasteries to talk to leading clergymen. Especially important was his pilgrimage to Optina Pustyn’, the monastery famous for its elders, who provided spiritual nourishment to many believers including Dostoevsky, who described Optina in The Brothers Karamazov. Tolstoy had long conversations with Amvrosii, the most revered elder of the monastery, the prototype for Dostoevsky’s Zosima. Wishing to read the Gospels in the original, Tolstoy immersed himself in studies of theological literature and biblical Greek.

The longer and harder he studied traditional Orthodoxy, however, the less he felt able to believe in it. As he wrote in his Confessions, he ‘had envied the peasants for their illiteracy and their lack of education’, but their unquestioning faith was beyond his reach:

I was listening to an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim, talking about God, faith, life, and salvation, and a knowledge of faith was opened up to me. I grew closer to the people as I listened to their reflections on life and faith, and I began to understand the truth more and more . . . But as soon as I mixed with learned believers or picked up their books, a certain doubt, dissatisfaction and bitterness over their arguments rose up within me, and I felt that the more I grasped their discourses, the further I strayed from the truth and the closer I came to the abyss. (CW, XXIII, p. 52)

From his early days, Tolstoy had been certain that God endowed human beings with sufficient reason and moral feeling to see the truth. True religion did not need numerous dogmas or the traditional Church; it had to be self-evident, simple and clear. Historic Christianity, rooted in mysteries that one had to believe but could never fully comprehend, did not satisfy him. The sheer number of Christian denominations and fierce theological debates between them was proof, in Tolstoy’s eyes, that none of the existing churches preserved the spirit of the Gospels. Tolstoy’s break with Orthodoxy was the result of tortuous inner reflection, but, as was always the case with him, appeared quick and decisive: at a dinner during one of the fasts, he suddenly asked his son to pass him a meatball prepared for the non-fasting members of the household.

Already during the siege of Sebastopol in 1855 Tolstoy had felt himself ‘capable of devoting’ his entire life to the realization of a ‘great’ and ‘stupendous’ idea – the creation of ‘a new religion appropriate to the stage of development of mankind – the religion of Christ, but purged of mysticism, a practical religion not promising future bliss but giving bliss on earth’. The young officer aspired to work ‘consciously . . . towards the union of mankind by religion’ (Ds, p. 87). By the age of fifty, and great novels behind him, Tolstoy found himself ready to embark on that mission. He aspired to refute nearly 2,000 years of errors, self-deceit and outright lies and to present to the world the real, unadulterated word of Christ.

This mission went beyond the reformation or purification of existing Christianity. The mantle of Martin Luther was too tight for Tolstoy. He wanted to bring to the world a new faith based on some parts of the Gospels, especially the Sermon on the Mount, while totally rejecting other major parts of the New Testament, such as the Acts of the Apostles or the Book of Revelation, and such basic dogmas as the Immaculate Conception, the Holy Trinity and the Resurrection.