The Theological Works of Leo Tolstoy. Leo Tolstoy

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СКАЧАТЬ many of the views her husband has expressed during the last twenty years, and has been dissatisfied at his readiness to part with his property, to associate with ‘dirty’ low-class people, and to refuse payment for his literary work — not even these difficulties have diminished their affection for one another. Thirteen children were born to them, of whom five died young.

      The fact that twenty years of such a married life preceded Tolstoy’s change of views, and that the opinions he now expresses were formed when he was still as active and vigorous as most men are at half his age, should be a sufficient answer to those who have so misunderstood him as to suggest that, having worn himself out by a life of vice, he now cries sour grapes lest others should enjoy pleasures he is obliged to abandon.

      For some time Tolstoy was active as a “Mediator of the Peace,” adjusting difficulties between the newly emancipated serfs and their former owners. During the fourteen years that followed his marriage he also wrote the long novels, War and Peace, and Anna Karénina. His wife copied out War and Peace no less than seven times, as he altered and improved it again and again. With his work, as with his life, Tolstoy is never satisfied — he always wants to get a step nearer perfection, and is keen to note and to admit his deficiencies.

      The happiness and fulness of activity of his family life kept in the background for nearly fifteen years the great problems that had begun to trouble him. But ultimately the great question: What is the meaning of my life? presented itself more clearly and insistently than ever, and he began to feel that unless he could answer it he could not live.

      Was wealth the aim of his life?

      He was highly paid for his books, and he had 20,000 acres of land in the Government of Samára; but suppose he became twice or ten times as rich, he asked himself, would it satisfy him? And if it satisfied him — was not death coming: to take it all away? The more satisfying the wealth, the more terrible must death be, which would deprive him of it all.

      Would family happiness — the love of wife and children — satisfy him, and explain the purpose of life? Many fond parents stake their happiness on the well-being of an only child, and make that the aim of their lives. But how unfortunate such people are! If the child is ill, or if it is out too late, how wretched they make themselves and others. Clearly the love of family afforded no sufficient answer to the problem: What am I here for? Besides, there again stood death — threatening not only him but all those he loved. How terrible that they, and he, must die and part!

      There was fame! He was making a world-wide literary reputation which would not be destroyed by his death. He asked himself whether, if he became more famous than Shakespeare or Molière, that would satisfy him? He felt that it would not. An author’s works outlive him, but they too will perish. How many authors are read 1000 years after their death? Is not even the language we write in constantly altering and becoming archaic? Besides, what was the use of fame when he was no longer here to enjoy it? Fame would not supply an explanation of life.

      And as he thought more and more about the meaning of life, yet failed to find the key to the puzzle, it seemed to him — as it seemed to Solomon, Schopenhauer, and to Buddha when he first faced the problems of poverty, sickness, and death — that life is an evil: a thing we must wish to be rid of. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” “Which of us has his desire, or having it is happy?”

      Was not the whole thing a gigantic and cruel joke played upon us by some demoniac power — as we may play with an ant, defeating all its aims and destroying all it builds? And was not suicide the only way of escape?

      But though, for a time, he felt strongly drawn towards suicide, he found that he went on living, and he decided to ask those considered most capable of teaching, their explanation of the purpose of life.

      So he went to the scientists: the people who studied nature and dealt with what they called ‘facts’ and ‘realities,’ and he asked them. But they had nothing to give him except their latest theory of self-acting evolution. Millions of years ago certain unchanging forces were acting on certain immutable atoms, and a process of evolution was going on, as it has gone on ever since. The sun was evolved, and our world. Eventually plant life, then animal life, were evolved. The antediluvian animals were evolved, and when nature had done with them it wiped them out and produced us. And evolution is still going on, and the sun is cooling down, and ultimately our race will perish like the antediluvian animals.

      It is very ingenious. It seems nearer the truth than the guess, attributed to Moses, that everything was made in six days. But it does not answer the question that troubled Tolstoy, and the reply to it is obvious. If this self-acting process of evolution is going on — let it evolute! It will wipe me out whether I try to help it or to hinder it, and not me only, but all my friends, and my race, and the solar system to which I belong.

      The vital question to Tolstoy was: “What am I here for?” And the question to which the scientists offered a partial reply was, “How did I get here?” — which is quite a different matter.

      Tolstoy turned to the priests: the people whose special business it is to guide men’s conduct and tell them what they should, and what they should not, believe.

      But the priests satisfied him as little as the scientists. For the problem that troubled him was a real problem, needing all man’s powers of mind to answer it; but the priests having, so to say, signed their thirty-nine articles, were not free to consider it with open minds. They would only think about the problems of life and death subject to the proviso that they should not have to budge from those points to which they were nailed down in advance. And it is no more possible to think efficiently in that way than it is to run well with your legs tied together.

      The scientists put the wrong question; the priests accepted the real question, but were not free to seek the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

      Moreover, the greatest and most obvious evil Tolstoy had seen in his life, was that pre-arranged, systematic, and wholesale method of murder called war. And he saw that the priests, with very few exceptions, not only did nothing to prevent such wholesale murder, but they even went, as chaplains, with the soldiers, to teach them Christianity without telling them it was wrong to fight; and they blessed ships of war, and prayed God to scatter our enemies, to confound their politics and to frustrate their knavish tricks. They would even say this kind of thing without knowing who the ‘enemies’ were. So long as they are not we, they must be bad and deserve to be ‘confounded.’

      Nor was this all. Professing a religion of love, they harassed and persecuted those who professed any other forms of religious belief. In the way the different churches condemned each other, and struggled one against another, there was much that shocked him. Tolstoy tried hard to make himself think as the priests thought, but he was unable to do so.

      Then he thought that perhaps if people could not tell him in words what the object of life is, he might find it out by watching their actions. And first he began to consider the lives of those of his own society: people of the middle and upper classes. He noticed among them people of different types.

      First, there were those who led an animal life. Many of these were women, or healthy young men, full of physical life. The problem that troubled him no more troubled them than it troubles the ox or the ass. They evidently had not yet come to the stage of development to which life, thought, and experience had brought him, but he could not turn back and live as they lived.

      Next came those who, though capable of thinking of serious things, were so occupied with their business, professional, literary, or governmental work, that they had no time to think about fundamental problems. One had his newspaper to get out each morning by five o’clock. Another had his diplomatic negotiations to pursue. A third was projecting a railway. They could not stop and think. They were so busy getting a living that СКАЧАТЬ