On Tolstoy's "A Confessions of What I Believe"

Leo Tolstoy

By Bp. Joseph Boyd (Ancient Church of the West)

Leo Tolstoy, the writer of such compulsory classics as “War and Peace” and “Anna Karinina,” is an embodiment of the age in which we live today. In this he was a man before his time, for he let the waters of Darwinism and Materialism wash over him, and abandoned himself to be carried away in their current to a lifestyle that ended with debauchery and murder. At the end of his life, a broken conscience caught upon an idea of redemption, which his failing philosophical fingers frantically grasped for some anchorage. He had known nothing but this shifting stream, and even after he caught hold of a strand of religious meaning, he never thought to pull himself ashore, being a firm believer in doubt as a way to understand the reality in which he swam. He proves what our generation has found to be true, that once you believe these things, it is hard to ever believe again. Doubt can also be a center of personal identity.

I particularly admire the almost-prophetic tone of his book, “A Confession of What I Believe.” He anticipates the despair of the postmodern philosophy that the Millennials have embraced en masse, and yet he still chose to seek God in the same spirit of indefiniteness that most choose to disregard Him. He shows the typical aversion to violence, war, and all other environmental endeavors that flavor our age, motivated more by his inner sensing of an intuitive truth, rather than out of a desire for stylishness or approval of a popular mysticism.

As I read this classic work of self-abasement, Tolstoy’s inner tension is almost unbearable at times - his suicidal frenzy understandable all the time, for it is clear where value lies in the heart of its author. His total sensitivity and compassion, empathy and desire mirror all mystics and saints, is a brief explanation why such men either starved themselves to death out of penance or were immolated for their heresies by orthodox communities. It shows the harried inner-life of one who cannot believe in the reality of what he is desperate to accept – to live, love, and be loved by Someone greater than life. The search for a God in a mind conditioned against ever finding Him.

With all of his admirable traits, one thing eluded him and caused him pain – not the lack of faith, but the lack of a specific revelation, a preserved word, or a statement of truth not besmirched by the cruel hand of man’s doubt. The reason for this is clear; the unreserved admiration for Kant and Schopenhauer, who convinced him that “logic cannot reason towards the existence of God.”

This belief that God cannot be a logical choice fills our contemporaries as well. This is unfortunate, for while Tolstoy rejected the conclusions this belief manifested, and ultimately found that a rejection of reason was necessary to live, he did not go back to the beginning of the equation, where death crept in, to see if a mystical reasoning towards God, called "contemplation" by the Ancient Church Fathers, might not erase the embedded pricks that his mind had to kick against continually. Our generation fails to see generational patterns, bent on ignoring the past for the thrills of contemporary self-appreciating titillation, and overlooks the changes in culture as the source of our heartache. Our generation should trace our lack of meaning back up stream, where Tolstoy once drank deep at the headwaters of the Enlightenment.

The truth of Tolstoy’s observations of life’s meaninglessness are valuable, not only because they are universal in occurrence, flitting from the Porch of Solomon to the Buddha’s futile reaction to death and poverty, but also that they are the sole-concern of the teachings of the Gospel (in which he was able to find some feeble consolation). No one would try to debate the truth of his experience, or the sharp clarity in which he records the pangs of spiritual hunger in his most dubious days, for Tolstoy was a man of the world, and his experience was deepened though living many lives in the pen of a novelist. He saw clearly that man’s world dissolves into annihilation without a God, and makes this the sole reason for his Confession.

Life surely is vanity, and all things lead to the same end – death – which is the ultimate anticlimax to all intelligence and ingenuity, and the opposite of the will and creativity that make up life. The difference of his stammering, doubting, self-centered faith-for-life-sake mentality, and the ipso-facto assurance and inner peace of the Gospels, is quite clear to me – it is the basis of a rationalistic view of the necessity of God’s place in the origins of the universe, and one which Tolstoy cuts off from himself through his philosophy of meaningful doubt.

Tolstoy himself acknowledged this by saying that “God is the name given to the cause at the beginning” (but why this should not be so, or why it invalidates God as this cause, is not given). It is the way in which he intensely stated that his personal questions were the only valid questions, and then clung to the belief that the answer he desired, the truth, could not be revealed to any one person, but only to a church united in love (under the philosophy that truth only comes to those in that love, since love and truth are equal facets of the life-giving God). The search for truth in the doctrines and dogmas of an infallible church, and the appellation of fallacy to the Scriptures, is not only a fact of his environment and long-stay in the streams of evolutionarily-inclined society, but also the result of realms of Christian experience outside of the teachings of a self-proclaimed infallible tradition. If he had reasoned towards God, sought self-revelation, and thrown off the heresies of men he already distrusted, then he might have come to an inner assurance of God's existence, a source of constant enlightenment, a saving faith!

I believe Tolstoy’s rejection of the spiritual, miracles, and the Person of Christ to be the direct result of his unwillingness to address the reality of the arguments he assumed as absolutely unquestionable, the idea that the material world was completely explicable through natural causes and that God functioned as a superstitious crutch in the lives of the peasants that he loved so dearly, rather than as a metaphysical and philosophical necessity. Everything that these arguments entailed, Tolstoy followed, and with as dull and self-sustaining sense of self-righteousness as all the parasitic wealthy Christians in his acquaintance, following these reasons toward an epicurean pride that made the world defined by a subservient, licentious logic. Tolstoy was not wrong in assuming that he was the center of the universe, or that his questions were the only valid ones, only the belief that God was a merely an excuse for ignorance and that human psychology or need, or the laws of the created world themselves, were never admissible evidence in a quest for God. 

The kind of Epicureanism that Tolstoy so criticized in the lackadaisical Christian laity, which clung to the outward status and comfort for security, was the seat of his own pride’s contempt for a provable faith... the desire to maintain a position that conveniently provides for all need. If he felt the confusion of a doctrine, it was improvable to his logic, and therefore foolish, rather than understanding the nature of immaterial and causal transcendence, which would, of necessity, be only comprehensible in the human mind as a balance of opposites - a mystery. If he heard an explanation of Christ’s salvation, he felt it offend his understanding, and turned away, devising something more convenient for that sense which he logically knew stripped him of life and the ultimate reason for the strivings of his thought. This desire for a place from which pride could look down on the universe is the death of certainty, and the graveyard of faith: as the adage goes, “Morality dictates philosophy,” and we see that philosophy dictates the capacity for faith. To believe that faith is not "natural" and "necessary" is as skewed as the faith that is based on flimsy propositions.

Tolstoy loved Kant in his youth, because he agreed with his immoral attitudes. He sought faith as an old man, because he saw where those attitudes led, but never saw that they were rooted in his former immorality. While confessing his former misdeeds, he never realized that these were the tormentors of his mind, not the stodgy philosophies of those who “taught, knowing not what it was they spoke” as he put it so aptly.

Faith is not faith that is indefinite and obscure. Faith is to be the “substance of things unseen, the evidence of things hoped for...” it is not, by any stretch of the Christian definition of the word, an Existentialist “life-saving leap in the dark, which does not matter if it is true or not if it enables you to live.” The kind of questioning faith that reasons toward the existence of a God, and that disregards the epicurean comforts of a life’s attitudes defining a life’s philosophy, is the answer to Tolstoy’s round-about question, “How can I not know everything, but to understand why I cannot know everything?” The answer simply becomes “God.” As St. Anselm so famously said, "Faith seeks understanding." 

There must be a reason for reasoning towards God, if He is to be the end of our search and the anchor for our soul. We cannot believe, like Tolstoy, that it is ultimately the belief that counts, for if it is, the truth is merely a restatement of the futility of ever finding truth. If Christianity is a truth, then it must compensate for all things, and must give an answer for purposelessness and the multiplicity of answers that circulate endlessly in our minds, in our cultures, and in our conversations. Faith must be logical within its embrace of Divine Darkness and Holy Mystery, consistent within itself and truthful, even if it cannot be completely comprehended through anything but the Face of Christ. It is a little like the doctrine of Theosis - at no point will we ever be perfect, but to stop trying is devastating to our mind and spirit. So, we will never comprehend God, but to cease the use of the only organs through which we experience truth and maintain our sentiency, our consciousness of what lies beyond the self, is also suicidal to faith.