Leo Tolstoy

The Russian lion

Everything that I understand, I understand only because I love.
 

 

Tolstoy vs. the Church

He believed that the Russian Orthodox church was corrupt on several counts:-

   It served the state and the the Tsars

   It's teachings were false and heretical

   It kept the people in  subjugation to the church and priests

   It did not represent Christ and his teachings

 

Tolstoy's Christianity

Follow the sermon on the mount

  Love your neighbour and your enemy

  Give to the poor and help the needy

  Fight for justice and peace whatever the cost

  Turn the other cheek

  Distrust miracles and fables of the church

 

Tolstoy learned Hebrew and Greek in order to read and translate the Holy Scripts of Judaism and Christianity in their ancient translations. Before he was excommunicated by the Orthodox Church, he had written “A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology” and “The Gospel in Brief”, and, in addition, Tolstoy later gave an account of Christian doctrines in a version dedicated to children, which actually explained the original meaning of Christ's teachings to all people who could read and listen.

 

Tolstoy’s writings on pacifism and such matters

 

     “My personal life is interwoven with the social, political life, and the political life demands of me a non-Christian activity, which is directly opposed to Christ's commandment. Now, with the universal military service and the participation of all in the court in the capacity of jurymen, this dilemma is with striking distinctness placed before all people. Every man has to take up the weapon of murder, the gun, the knife, and, though he does not kill, he must load his gun and whet his knife, that is, be prepared to commit murder. Every citizen must come to court and be a participant in the court and in the punishments, that is, every man has to renounce Christ's commandment of non-resistance to evil, not only in words, but in action as well.”

 

“Christ says, Do not resist evil”. The purpose of the courts is to resist evil.

Christ prescribes doing good in return for evil. The courts retaliate evil with evil.

Christ says, Make no distinction between the good and the bad. All the courts do is to make this distinction.

Christ says, “Forgive all men; forgive, not once, not seven times, but without end; love your enemies, do good to those who hate you. The courts do not forgive, but punish; they do not do good, but evil, to those whom they call enemies of society. Thus it turns out, according to the meaning, that Christ must have rejected the courts.”

“No man with a heart has escaped that impression of terror and of doubt in the good, even at the recital, not to speak of the sight, of the executions of men by just such men, by means of rods, the guillotine, the gallows”.

“Christ says, You have been impressed with the idea, and you have become accustomed to it, that it is good and rational by force to repel the evil and to pluck an eye out for an eye, to establish criminal courts, the police, the army, to resist the enemy: but I say, Use no violence, do not take part in violence, do no evil to any one, even to those whom you call your enemies”.

“These men belong to the two extreme poles: they are the patriotic and conservative Christians, who acknowledge that their church is the true one, and the atheistic Revolutionists.

Neither the one nor the other will renounce the right of forcibly resisting what they regard as an evil. Not even the wisest and most learned among them want to see the simple, obvious truth that, if we concede to one man the right forcibly to resist what he considers an evil, a second person may with the same right resist what he regards as an evil”.

 

Not only Christ, but all Jewish prophets, John the Baptist, all the true sages of the world, speak of precisely this church, this state, this culture, this civilization, calling them evil and destruction of men”

“Who will deny that it is repulsive and painful to human nature, not only to torture or kill a man, but even to torture a dog, or to kill a chicken or a calf? (I know men living by agricultural labour, who have stopped eating meat only because they had themselves to kill their animals.)””

“Not one judge would have the courage to strangle the man whom he has sentenced according to his law. Not one chief would have the courage to take a peasant away from a weeping family and lock him up in prison. Not one general or soldier would, without discipline, oath, or war, kill a hundred Turks or Germans, and lay waste their villages; he would not even have the courage to wound a single man.

All this is done only thanks to that complicated political and social machine, whose problem it is so to scatter the responsibility of the atrocities which are perpetrated so that no man may feel the unnaturalness of these acts. Some write laws; others apply them; others again muster men, educating in them the habit of discipline, that is, of senseless and irresponsible obedience; others again -- these same mustered men -- commit every kind of violence, even killing men, without knowing why and for what purpose”.

“ whether to know that my peace and security and that of my family, all my joys and pleasures, are bought by the poverty, debauch, and suffering of millions, -- by annual gallows, hundreds of thousands of suffering prisoners and millions of soldiers, policemen, and guards, torn away from their families and dulled by discipline, who with loaded pistols, to be aimed at hungry men, secure the amusements for me; whether to buy every dainty piece which I put into my mouth, or into the mouths of my children, at the cost of all that suffering of humanity, which is inevitable for the acquisition of these pieces; or to know that any piece is only then my piece when nobody needs it, and nobody suffers for it”.

 

Christ's teaching about non-resistance to evil is a dream! And this, that the life of men, into whose souls pity and love for one another is put, has passed, for some, in providing stakes, knouts, racks, cat-o'-nine-tails, tearing of nostrils, inquisitions, fetters, hard labour, gallows, executions by shooting, solitary confinements, prisons for women and children, in providing slaughter of tens of thousands in war, in providing revolutions and seditions; and for others, in executing all these horrors; and for others again, in avoiding all these sufferings and retaliating for them, - such a life is not a dream!”.

“The movement of humanity toward the good takes place, not thanks to the tormentors, but to the tormented. As fire does not put out fire, so evil does not put out evil. Only the good meeting the evil, and not becoming contaminated by it, vanquishes the evil. Every step in advance has been made only in the name of non-resistance to evil. And if this progress is slow, it is so because the clearness, simplicity, rationality, inevitableness, and obligatoriness of Christ's teaching have been concealed from the majority of men in a most cunning and dangerous manner; they have been concealed under a false teaching which falsely calls itself his teaching”.

 

 

 

 

 

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I wish to thank Wikipedia.com for much of this article

I sit on a man's back, choking him and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means - except by getting off his back.
 

 

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