Leo Tolstoy

Qu'est-ce que l'Absolu ? Dieu existe-t-il ?

God is spirit, love and source of all; knowing him and living are one

Un Absolu impersonnelIl le dit expressément

Tolstoy reached God through the crisis narrated in A Confession: after years in which life seemed to him a cruel joke, he concluded that to know God and to live are one and the same, and that God is life. In his Reply to the Synod of 1901 he sets out his creed: he believes in a God whom he understands as spirit, as love and as the source of all, who is in him as he is in God. He rejects, on the other hand, the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, miracles and sacraments, which he regards as ecclesiastical additions to the Gospel. His God is not a being who intervenes capriciously in history, but the source of the rational and loving life that each person discovers within. He keeps the language of the Father and his will, but detaches it from the figure of a sovereign who rewards and punishes.

Qui suis-je ? Existe-t-il un vrai soi ?

The true self is not the animal personality but the divine spiritual principle

Le Soi est l'AbsoluIl le dit expressément

In On Life, the treatise of 1887, Tolstoy distinguishes between the animal personality, which seeks its own good and fears death, and rational consciousness, which discovers that the personality's good is impossible and that true life consists in subordinating it to the law of reason, which is the law of love. The self that clings to itself is for him an illusion that produces anguish; the real self is the spiritual principle dwelling in every human being and the same in all. In the Reply to the Synod he says he believes that God is in him and he in God, and in The Path of Life, his last compilation, he devotes a chapter to the soul as a spiritual principle uniting all beings. This identity with the divine does not abolish consciousness, but frees it from egoism.

Pourquoi souffrons-nous ?

We suffer from living for the animal personality and not by the law of love

L'ignorance de ce que nous sommesIl le dit expressément

Tolstoy knew existential suffering at first hand: in A Confession he relates that, rich, famous and healthy, he hid a cord and stopped going shooting with a gun so as not to take his own life. His diagnosis, developed in On Life, is that pain arises from placing life in the animal personality, which wants its own good and knows it will lose it at death. The Death of Ivan Ilyich dramatises it: the judge suffers less from illness than from the lie of an ordinary, correct and empty life, and the anguish yields only when, at the end, he feels pity for his family. To this inner suffering he adds what men inflict on one another through violence, property and the State. The remedy is the same on both levels: to live by reason and love, not by the self.

Que se passe-t-il après la mort ?

Death exists only for the personality; true life lies outside time

Ce que je suis ne naît ni ne meurtIl le dit expressément

Death obsessed Tolstoy from his youth, and his fiction studies it as few others do: Three Deaths, Prince Andrei in War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Master and Man. In On Life he gives his doctrinal answer: the fear of death arises from identifying life with the animal personality, which does indeed perish; but true life, the rational and loving relation to the world, is not subject to space and time and cannot be destroyed. As evidence he notes that the influence of a dead brother continues to act in him more strongly than in life. He rejects the resurrection of the flesh and personal immortality as the Church teaches them. In the last chapter of Ivan Ilyich, the dying man, on feeling pity for his family, discovers that instead of death there is light and that death is no more.

Comment atteint-on la libération ou le salut ?

Salvation is keeping the commandments of the Sermon on the Mount here and now

Par une pratique disciplinéeIl le dit expressément

Tolstoy rejects the doctrine of redemption through Christ's death and the efficacy of the sacraments. In What I Believe he sums up Jesus's teaching in five commandments drawn from the Sermon on the Mount: do not be angry, do not commit adultery or abandon one's spouse, do not swear oaths, do not resist evil by violence, and love one's enemies, without distinction between peoples. Salvation is not a future reward but life itself, obtained by keeping them: the kingdom of God is within each person and is realised insofar as one lives by the law of love. The task is therefore one of daily moral self-perfection, sustained by reading the sages he compiled in The Path of Life and in his calendars of readings, and by a simple life of one's own labour.

Faut-il un maître ?

The sages guide, but each must verify the truth with his own reason

Utile mais pas indispensableIl le dit expressément

Tolstoy broke with the authority of the Church, which he accused of hiding Christ's teaching under dogmas and rites, and in the Reply to the Synod he explains that he began by loving his Orthodox faith more than his peace of mind, then Christianity more than his Church, and finally truth more than anything in the world. He recognises no intermediaries between conscience and God: reason and conscience are the final criterion. But he does not do without teachers: he reveres Jesus as the greatest of them, though not as God, and spent his last years compiling the thoughts of sages from every tradition, from the Buddha and Confucius to Pascal, in Thoughts of Wise Men, A Calendar of Wisdom and The Path of Life. In the story The Three Hermits, the hermits' simple prayer surpasses the bishop's instruction.

Le monde est-il réel ?

He does not speculate on the world's reality: what matters is how to live in it

Ne s'est pas prononcé

Tolstoy did not pose the reality of the world as a metaphysical problem. His fiction is among the most attentive in literature to the materiality of things, to bodies, to nature, to farm labour, and the Olenin of The Cossacks lives in the Caucasian forest an experience of communion with all living things. But in his religious writings he distrusts speculative theology and cosmologies, including the narratives of creation, which he regards as irrelevant to the only important thing: the meaning of one's own life and the law of love. In On Life he maintains that the human being knows the outer world only through his relation to it, and that it is this relation, not the ultimate nature of things, that constitutes true life.

Qu'est-ce que l'amour ?

The law of love is life's supreme law and excludes all violence

L'amour de Dieu et du prochainIl le dit expressément

For Tolstoy love is not one feeling among others, but the law of life that Christ revealed and that all the great religions know. In On Life he defines it as the activity of rational consciousness that places the good of others before one's own; love that prefers some to others, family or homeland over strangers, is still enlarged egoism. In The Law of Violence and the Law of Love, of 1908, he argues that such love is incompatible with any use of force, including that of the State, and his Letter to a Hindu, which Gandhi translated and spread, applies the same idea to India's liberation. His popular tales, such as What Men Live By or Where Love Is, God Is, turn it into parables: God is where there is love.

Sommes-nous libres ou tout est-il déterminé ?

History obeys necessity; freedom lies in obeying reason

Le destin et la responsabilitéIl le dit expressément

Tolstoy devoted the second part of the epilogue of War and Peace to the question of freedom and necessity. There he argues that, seen from outside, human actions and the movements of history are determined by countless causes that no individual, not even Napoleon, controls; seen from within, each consciousness knows itself to be free. The more the conditions of an act are known, the less free it appears. In his religious work he gives this tension a moral resolution: human freedom does not consist in arbitrary choice, but in recognising truth and submitting to the law of love; in The Kingdom of God Is Within You he states that the human being is free insofar as he obeys that law and not the powers of the world. Responsibility remains where conscience is at stake.

Pourquoi méditer ou prier ?

To pray is to recall the divine within; the only time that matters is now

Être présentCela se déduit de sa doctrine

Tolstoy rejected liturgical and petitionary prayer, which he regarded as attempts to bend God's will in one's favour. In the story The Three Hermits, a bishop teaches the Lord's Prayer to hermits who know only a naive formula, and they later run across the water to have him repeat it: the simple prayer of the heart is worth more than the correct one. For him to pray is to recall one's relation to God and to examine one's conscience, and in his diaries he does so daily. His most widely known answer is in The Three Questions: the most important time is the present, the most important person the one before you, and the most important task to do that person good. The Path of Life insists that true life is lived only in the present.

La raison peut-elle connaître l'ultime ?

Reason alone leads to despair; a reasonable faith gives life meaning

La foi et la raison s'entraidentIl le dit expressément

Tolstoy holds a double thesis. In A Confession he relates how he sought the meaning of life in the experimental sciences and philosophy and found only, in Solomon, the Buddha, Socrates and Schopenhauer, confirmation that life is an evil; rational knowledge, he concludes, cannot answer the question of meaning. What saved him was the faith of simple people, which he calls an irrational knowledge, able to link the finite with the infinite. But in his later work, such as Reason and Religion or What Is Religion and What Is Its Essence, he demands that this faith be reasonable: he rejects everything that contradicts reason, such as miracles or incomprehensible dogmas, and considers reason a gift of God for knowing his law. Faith and reason are not opposed: reason purifies faith and faith gives reason its object.

Se retirer du monde ou le transformer ?

Society changes when each person stops cooperating with violence

La révolution est intérieureIl le dit expressément

Tolstoy was a relentless critic of the State, the army, the official Church and landed property, and he did not withdraw from the world: he organised soup kitchens during the famine of 1891, defended the persecuted Doukhobors and wrote letters to Alexander III, Nicholas II and Stolypin. But he rejected both violent revolution and political reform as means of change. In The Kingdom of God Is Within You he argues that social evil is sustained because each individual cooperates with it, as soldier, taxpayer or official, and that it will disappear only when each person, moved by conscience, refuses to take part in violence. To a revolutionary he wrote that violence only breeds violence. Transformation begins in individual conscience, but is proved in life.