According to Tolstoi our supreme law is love; from this he derives the commandment not to resist evil by force.
1. Tolstoi designates "Christianity"[860] as his basis; but by Christianity he means not the doctrine of one of the Christian churches, neither the Orthodox nor the Catholic nor that of any of the Protestant bodies,[861] but the pure teaching of Christ.[862]
"Strange as it may sound, the churches have always been not merely alien but downright hostile to the teaching of Christ, and they must needs be so. The churches are not, as many think, institutions that are based on a Christian origin and have only erred a little from the right way; the churches as such, as associations that assert their infallibility, are anti-Christian institutions. The Christian churches and Christianity have no fellowship except in name; nay, the two are utterly opposite and hostile elements. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life."[863] The church has "so transformed Christ's teaching to suit the world that there no longer resulted from it any demands, and that men could go on living as they had hitherto lived. The church yielded to the world, and, having yielded, followed it. The world did everything that it chose, and left the church to hobble after as well as it could with its teachings about the meaning of life. The world led its life, contrary to Christ's teaching in each and every point, and the church contrived subtleties to demonstrate that in living contrary to Christ's law men were living in harmony with it. And it ended in the world's beginning to lead a life worse than the life of the heathen, and the church's daring not only to justify such a life but even to assert that this was precisely what corresponded to Christ's teaching."[864]
Particularly different from Christ's teaching is the church "creed,"[865]—that is, the totality of the utterly incomprehensible and therefore useless "dogmas."[866] "Of a God, external creator, origin of all origins, we know nothing";[867] "God is the spirit in man,"[868] "his conscience,"[869] "the knowledge of life";[870] "every man recognizes in himself a free rational spirit independent of the flesh: this spirit is what we call God."[871] Christ was a man,[872] "the son of an unknown father; as he did not know his father, in his childhood he called God his father";[873] and he was a son of God as to his spirit, as every man is a son of God,[874] he embodied "Man confessing his sonship of God."[875] Those who "assert that Christ professed to redeem with his blood mankind fallen by Adam, that God is a trinity, that the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and that it passes to the priest by the laying on of hands, that seven mysteries are necessary to salvation, and so forth,"[876] "preach doctrines utterly alien to Christ."[877] "Never did Christ with a single word attest the personal resurrection and the immortality of man beyond the grave,"[878] which indeed is "a very low and coarse idea";[879] the Ascension and the Resurrection are to be counted among "the most objectionable miracles."[880]
Tolstoi accepts Christ's teaching as valid not on the ground of faith in a revelation, but solely for its rationality. Faith in a revelation "was the main reason why the teaching was at first misunderstood and later mutilated outright."[881] Faith in Christ is "not a trusting in something related to Christ, but the knowledge of the truth."[882]
"'There is a law of evolution, and therefore one must live only his own personal life and leave the rest to the law of evolution,' is the last word of the refined culture of our day, and, at the same time, of that obscuration of consciousness to which the cultured classes are a prey."[883] But "human life, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, is an unbroken series of actions; man must daily choose out from hundreds of actions possible to him those actions which he will perform; therefore, man cannot live without something to guide the choice of his actions."[884] Now, reason alone can offer him this guide. "Reason is that law, recognized by man, according to which his life is to be accomplished."[885] "If there is no higher reason,—and such there is not, nor can anything prove its existence,—then my reason is the supreme judge of my life."[886] "The ever-increasing subjugation"[887] "of the bestial personality to the rational consciousness"[888] is "the true life,"[889] is "life"[890] as opposed to mere "existence."[891]
"It used to be said, 'Do not argue, but believe in the duty that we have prescribed to you; reason will deceive you; faith alone will bring you the true happiness of life.' And the man exerted himself to believe, and he believed. But intercourse with other men showed him that in many cases these believed something quite different, and asserted that this other faith bestowed the highest happiness. It has become unavoidable to decide the question which of the many faiths is the right one; and only reason can decide this."[892] "If the Buddhist who has learned to know Islam remains a Buddhist, he is no longer a Buddhist in faith but in reason. As soon as another faith comes up before him, and with it the question whether to reject his faith or this other, reason alone can give him an answer. If he has learned to know Islam and has still remained a Buddhist, then rational conviction has taken the place of his former blind faith in Buddha."[893] "Man recognizes truth only by reason, not by faith."[894]
"The law of reason reveals itself to men gradually."[895] "Eighteen hundred years ago there appeared in the midst of the pagan Roman world a remarkable new teaching, which was not comparable to any that had preceded it, and which was ascribed to a man called Christ."[896] This teaching contains "the very strictest, purest, and completest"[897] apprehension of the law of reason to which "the human mind has hitherto raised itself."[898] Christ's teaching is "reason itself";[899] it must be accepted by men because it alone gives those rules of life "without which no man ever has lived or can live, if he would live as a man,—that is, with reason."[900] Man has, "on the basis of reason, no right to refuse allegiance to it."[901]
2. Christ's teaching sets up love as the supreme law for us.
What is love? "What men who do not understand life call 'love' is only the giving to certain conditions of their personal comfort a preference over any others. When the man who does not understand life says that he loves his wife or child or friend, he means by this only that his wife's, child's, or friend's presence in his life heightens his personal comfort."[902]
"True love is always renunciation of one's personal comfort"[903] for a neighbor's sake. True love "is a condition of wishing well to all men, such as commonly characterizes children but is produced in grown men only by self-abnegation."[904] "What living man does not know the happy feeling, even if he has felt it only once and in most cases only in earliest childhood, of that emotion in which one wishes to love everybody, neighbors and father and mother and brothers and bad men and enemies and dog and horse and grass; one wishes only one thing, that it were well with all, that all were happy; and still more does one wish that he were himself capable of making all happy, one wishes he might give himself, give his whole life, that all might be well off and enjoy themselves. Just this, this alone, is that love in which man's life consists."[905]
True love is "an ideal of full, infinite, divine perfection."[906] "Divine perfection is the asymptote of human life, toward which it constantly strives, to which it draws nearer and nearer, but which can be attained only at infinity."[907] "True life, according to previous teachings, consists in the fulfilling of commandments, the fulfilling of the law; according to Christ's teaching it consists in the maximum approach to the divine perfection which has been exhibited, and which is felt in himself by every man."[908]
According to the teaching of Christ, love is our highest law. "The commandment of love is the expression of the inmost heart of the teaching."[909] There are "three conceptions of life, and only three: first the personal or bestial, second the social or heathenish,"[910] "third the Christian or divine."[911] The man of the bestial conception of life, "the savage, acknowledges life only in himself; the mainspring of his life is personal enjoyment. The heathenish, social man recognizes life no longer in himself alone, but in a community of persons, in the tribe, the family, the race, the State; the mainspring of his life is reputation. The man of the divine conception of life acknowledges life no longer in his person, nor yet in a community of persons, but in the prime source of eternal, never-dying life—in God; the mainspring of his life is love."[912]
That love is our supreme law according to Christ's teaching means nothing else than that it is such according to reason. As early as 1852 Tolstoi gives utterance to the thought "That love and beneficence are truth is the only truth on earth,"[913] and much later, in 1887, he calls love "man's only rational activity,"[914] that which "resolves all the contradictions of human life."[915] Love abolishes the insensate activity directed to the filling of the bottomless tub of our bestial personality,[916] does away with the foolish fight between beings that strive after their own happiness,[917] gives a meaning independent of space and time to life, which without it would flow off without meaning in the face of death.[918]
3. From the law of love Christ's teaching derives the commandment not to resist evil by force. "'Resist not evil' means 'never resist the evil man', that is, 'never do violence to another', that is, 'never commit an act that is contrary to love'."[919]
Christ expressly derived this commandment from the law of love. He gave numerous commandments, among which five in the Sermon on the Mount are notable; "these commandments do not constitute the teaching, they only form one of the numberless stages of approach to perfection";[920] they "are all negative, and only show"[921] what "at mankind's present age"[922] we "have already the full possibility of not doing, along the road by which we are striving to reach perfection."[923] The first of the five commandments of the Sermon on the Mount reads "Keep the peace with all, and if the peace is broken use every effort to restore it";[924] the second says "Let the man take only one woman and the woman only one man, and let neither forsake the other under any pretext";[925] the third, "make no vows";[926] the fourth, "endure injury, return not evil for evil";[927] the fifth, "break not the peace to benefit thy people."[928] Among these commandments the fourth is the most important; it is enunciated in the fifth chapter of Matthew, verses 38-9: "Ye have heard that it was said, Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. But I say to you, Resist not evil."[929] Tolstoi tells how to him this passage "became the key of the whole."[930] "I needed only to take these words simply and downrightly, as they were spoken, and at once everything in Christ's whole teaching that had seemed confused to me, not only in the Sermon on the Mount but in the Gospels altogether, was comprehensible to me, and everything that had been contradictory agreed, and the main gist appeared no longer useless but a necessity; everything formed a whole, and the one confirmed the other past a doubt, like the pieces of a shattered column that one has rightly put together."[931] The principle of non-resistance binds together "the entire teaching into a whole; but only when it is no mere dictum but a peremptory rule, a law."[932] "It is really the key that opens everything, but only when it goes into the inmost of the lock."[933]
We must necessarily derive the commandment not to resist evil by force from the law of love. For this demands that either a sure, indisputable criterion of evil be found, or all violent resistance to evil be abandoned.[934] "Hitherto it has been the business now of the pope, now of an emperor or king, now of an assembly of elected representatives, now of the whole nation, to decide what was to be rated as an evil and combated by violent resistance. But there have always been men, both without and within the State, who have not acknowledged as binding upon them either the decisions that were given out as divine commandments or the decisions of the men who were clothed with sanctity or the institutions that were supposed to represent the will of the people; men who regarded as good what to the powers that be appeared evil, and who, in opposition to the force of these powers, likewise made use of force. The men who were clothed with sanctity regarded as an evil what appeared good to the men and institutions that were clothed with secular authority, and the combat grew ever sharper and sharper. Thus it came to what it has come to to-day, to the complete obviousness of the fact that there is not and cannot be a generally binding external definition of evil."[935] But from this follows the necessity of accepting the solution given by Christ.[936]
According to Tolstoi, the precept of non-resistance must not be taken "as if it forbade every combat against evil."[937] It forbids only the combating of evil by force.[938] But this it forbids in the broadest sense. It refers, therefore, not only to evil practised against ourselves, but also to evil practised against our fellow-men;[939] when Peter cut off the ear of the high priest's servant, he was defending "not himself but his beloved divine Teacher, but Christ forbade him outright and said 'All who take the sword will perish by the sword.'"[940] Nor does the precept say that only a part of men are under obligation "to submit without a contest to what is prescribed to them by certain authorities,"[941] but it forbids "everybody, therefore even those in whom power is vested, and these especially, to use force in any case against anybody."[942]
