Tolstoy

by A. N. Wilson

  Though Tolstoy was temperamentally incapable of reading Dostoyevsky’s novels, and claimed that he had been unable to finish The Brothers Karamazov, he cannot have been unaware of the book’s religious substance. All of it, in essence – the religious problem posed by the suffering of children, the mystic destiny of the Orthodox Church (‘a star has arisen in the East!’), even the imaginative obsession with Christ’s temptations in the wilderness, all the things which stay so vividly in our heads when we have read The Brothers Karamazov – had been pouring forth in disconnected outbursts in The Diary of a Writer throughout the late 1870s. When the Tolstoys were aware that Papa was in his study reading ‘periodicals’, he was surely meditating on the Dostoyevskian position. So, even if we accept Tolstoy’s claim that he had not read the whole of The Brothers Karamazov, it still makes sense to view his religious apologia What I Believe as a piece of writing which has Dostoyevsky all the time in view.

  The Brothers Karamazov asks religious questions more searching than any other work of literature. As such, it sailed terribly near the wind as far as censorship was concerned. Even though Dostoyevsky was a personal friend of Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the Procurator of the Holy Synod itself, the opening sections of his novel (which Tolstoy did admit to having read) were regarded in official circles with extreme suspicion. The dialogue between Ivan and Alyosha, and in particular Ivan’s exposition of how he does not accept God’s world – he hands back his admission ticket – was an unanswerable statement of the theological problem of suffering. Then, in the next chapter, came the poem Ivan had never written about the Grand Inquisitor, who saw the temptations in the wilderness as an offer to Christ of three great weapons – miracle, mystery and authority. He silently rejects them all. But are not these the weapons by which the Orthodox Church (as well as Dostoyevsky’s principal target, the Roman Church) has, throughout history, attracted its adherents? So, at first, it would seem, though not in fact, either in logic or in Dostoyevsky’s view. On August 16, 1879, Pobedonostsev had written to Dostoyevsky, ‘Your “Grand Inquisitor” made a strong impression on me. I have not read anything so powerful for a long time. All I was waiting for was a rebuff, an objection and an explanation – but so far in vain.’25

  Dostoyevsky was quick to reply that the book is a novel, and that even the elder Zosima’s sermons ‘belong to his person, that is to say, his artistic portrayal’, but even so, he was equally hasty to put the Orthodox case in the next section of the novel, ‘The Russian Monk’.

  The best possible defence of Orthodox Christianity (small or large ‘o’) is placed not, in fact, on the lips of the famous Elder Zosima, but in the great speech made by the wilier, and more worldly Father Paisy, when he says to Alyosha:

  ‘Always remember, young man, that secular science, having become a great force in the world, has, especially since the last century, investigated everything divine handed down to us in the sacred books. After a ruthless analysis the scholars of this world have left nothing of what was held sacred before. But they have only investigated the parts and overlooked the whole, so much so that one cannot help being astonished at their blindness. And so the whole remains standing before their eyes as firm as ever and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it. Has it not existed for nineteen centuries and does it not exist today in the inmost hearts of individual men and the masses of the people? Why, it is living in the hearts of the atheists who have destroyed everything, and is as firmly rooted there as ever! For even those who have renounced Christianity and are rebelling against it are essentially of the same semblance as Christ, and have always been that, for so far neither their wisdom nor the ardour of their hearts has been able to create a higher ideal of man or of man’s dignity than the one shown by Christ in the days of old. . . .”26

  The wholeness of which Father Paisy speaks is nothing less than the everlasting Gospel, the mystery of the incarnate Christ, which continues in the world, and in men and women’s hearts, even though each individual part of it, when subjected to scrutiny, might appear to have been disintegrated and destroyed. This argument goes with the whole thrust of Dostoyevsky’s novel that man is a wild, irrational being, who will always gravitate in individual cases to folly or evil, and who is always going to be a prey to political and economic exploitation for the same reason. It would be wrong to look for a rational means of salvation for such a being. The means of salvation is not in the man-manipulated ‘myth, mystery and authority’ which religious groups might try to exploit but in the actual reality, only perceptible here as a mystery, of the Incarnate.

  Tolstoy attempts, in his synthesis of the Gospels, to ‘investigate the parts’. But his exegetical method, though based purely on Enlightenment presuppositions, is the very reverse of ‘modern’. On the contrary, like Dostoyevsky’s, it is a great imaginative recasting of the New Testament material. Tolstoy could not approach the Gospels without a compulsion to rewrite them.

  European scholarship, western scholarship, which had been focusing upon the Gospels in radical sceptical earnest for the previous forty years, had achieved the results described by the anguished Father Paisy to Alyosha Karamazov. The Tübingen school in Germany had taken the Gospels to bits. The most notorious and radical of their theologians, David Friedrich Strauss, had brought to the study of the New Testament a whole package of scientific and philosophical presuppositions which enabled him to examine the Gospel stories in the same sceptical spirit which would have governed a scholar’s reading of, say, Plutarch’s Lives. Strauss took it for granted that personal immortality was an impossibility and that ‘science’ had disposed of the miraculous. But having dismantled the whole thing, he then wanted to put together some picture of Christ of his own. The result was his Leben Jesu (1838) which George Eliot translated into English, tearfully losing her simple Evangelical faith as she did so. Ernest Renan did for the Catholic world what Strauss had attempted for the Protestant. His Vie de Jésus of 1863 depicts a rather-sugary, sentimental figure, fond of his mother, devoted to reveries by the seashore or in meadows full of flowers, someone who is in many ways a bit like Renan himself. It was not until the century was over that a bleak German sceptical mind was able to look at these lives of Jesus and their many analogues, and see them for the imaginative works which they really were. Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus is a corrective to the idea that Jesus can be discovered as a real historical character without taking into account the manner in which the Evangelists saw him. Jesus outside the Gospels only exists in the faith of the believers. This was something which, in their different ways (neither of them would have liked Schweitzer’s bleakly apocalyptic Christ much, but that is beside the point), both Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky saw. Coming from a completely different religious tradition, their imaginative Christs emerge with much more terrifying wholeness than that of Strauss or Renan. In fact, knowing of Tolstoy’s obsession with the Gospels, Strakhov sent Tolstoy Renan’s Vie de Jésus in the spring of 1878. Tolstoy fasted in preparation for his reading of the book, which perhaps explains his particularly dyspeptic reactions.

  If Renan has any ideas of his own, they are the two following ones:

  (1) That Christ didn’t know about l’évolution et le progrès and in this respect Renan tries to correct Him and criticises Him from the superior position of his idea. This is terrible, at least to me. Progress in my opinion is a logarithm of time, i.e. nothing, an establishment of the fact that we live in time; and suddenly it becomes the judge of the highest truth we know. . . .

  The other idea of Renan’s is that if Christ’s teaching exists, then some man or other existed, and this man certainly sweated and went to the lavatory. For us, all degrading realistic human details have disappeared from Christianity for the same reason that all details about all Jews etc. who ever lived have disappeared, for the same reason everything disappears that is not everlasting: but what is everlasting, remains.27

  But dyspepsia alone does not explain Tolstoy’s differing attitude. For a
French Catholic brought up like Renan to believe in an almost magical, insubstantial Christ – a figure pointing gingerly to his scarlet Sacred Heart from the bright statues of Breton country churches, and identified with the light wafer of the sacred host – it was shattering to faith to imagine a real, Palestinian itinerant teacher who sweated and went to the lavatory. To an Orthodox, such contrasts would be meaningless. Likewise a German Protestant who had been brought up to believe that the Bible was some kind of magic book, every word of which was authenticated by the Holy Ghost, the textual inconsistencies in the Bible were wholly injurious to faith. For the westerners, Catholic and Protestant, all hung on authenticity. For the Russians, it was not so. Neither Tolstoy nor Dostoyevsky can be taken as representative Orthodox (believers or heretics), but for both men what counted was the moral and spiritual power of Christ in the lives of men and women. Where they diverged was in their response to the essentially European question of ‘authenticity’. Tolstoy, having ‘gone into it all’, found that it would not ‘do’. He therefore self-confidently jettisoned the Church, the sacraments, the theology of grace. . . . But what emerged was not something tragic or etiolated, but something four-square and strong.

  Nu i chto zh? Tolstoy had asked the question, having decided that he was a greater genius than Gogol, Pushkin, Shakespeare, or Molière. It has a sort of baby-directness. It is not the language of intellectual argument, it is the language of nursery squabbles. But on his lips it represents his extraordinary searchlight mind, which focused on what for him was the most important side of the question. And in this matter of New Testament scholarship, and Church doctrine, it is as if he asks it again. So! Some character from Germany has proved that Christ never thought of Himself as the second person of the Trinity, or that miracles are impossible. Nu i chto zh? Well, so what?

  Tolstoy had a voracious appetite for scholarly reading, for languages, for textual work. But as far as he is concerned, nearly all the questions which caused such anguish to the European theologians were not worth asking. He brushes it all aside. What is burningly, glaringly important, is the question of how we should live. Was the Sermon on the Mount true? Did not its truth expose all that was wrong in the hearts of men, all that was wrong in contemporary society? Should we not be actually living as Jesus taught us to live, banishing anger from our hearts, refusing to take vengeance even on those who wrong us, banishing lust and avarice from our lives? Is not that the path to life? The rest, as far as Tolstoy is concerned, is simply an irrelevance.

  Although, or perhaps because, he understood what the German critical school were up to, his own exegetical methods take no account of his years of study in the field. As so often in his life, one is struck by the curious way in which the ‘enlightened’ eighteenth-century nobleman is combined in one person with the ‘original’ newborn babe Lev Nikolayevich, who sees everything with shockingly fresh eyes. Pierre Bezukhov and old Prince Bolkonsky are both the co-authors of his synthesis of the Gospels. The idea that you could simply rewrite the Gospels in a shape which suited you and throw out all the bits you did not like would have offended the scholarly sensibilities of the sceptical, Protestant Germans quite as much as it scandalised the Orthodox believers of the Russian or Roman Churches. But to the eighteenth-century rationalist, it was a perfectly sensible thing to do. Long before anyone had done any real scholarly work on the New Testament, Thomas Jefferson, for example, had been so certain of the rightness of his own views that he could produce a Gospel gutted of the miraculous: a marriage feast at Cana in which everybody drank good wine, but not wine which had once been water. With the same self-confidence the eighteenth-century squire in England might have pulled down the little Gothic church on his estate and replaced it with a neoclassical temple in the clean modern manner. At the same time, Tolstoy is in some ways oddly a Russian Orthodox: for example, in the way in which he treats the fourth Gospel as fully historical as the Synoptics, and does not in the least share the German belief that the first three Gospels are somehow or other closer to the source.

  He lets the Gospels say what they say when it is what he would be saying anyway. There is a most revealing passage in What I Believe when the nu i chto zh arrogance gets pushed to its furthest limit and he actually says, ‘It is terrible to say, but it sometimes appears to me that if Christ’s teaching, with the Church teaching that has grown out of it, had not existed at all, those who now call themselves Christians would have been nearer to the truth of Christ – that is to say, to a reasonable understanding of what is good in life – than they are now.’

  The everlasting doctrine of redemption thus gets rewritten into a reasonable understanding of what is good in life. His Jesus is an eccentric countryman, violently opposed to citified bigwigs, Europeanisers, Tsars, Procurators, bishops and the like. Tolstoy discards all the elements in the Gospel which make no sense. No one here kneels before a transfigured Christ on Tabor; no one sees Him still the winds and waves; no women flee, terrified in the darkness of dawn at the discovery of an empty tomb. The sheer terror of the Gospels, the extraordinary sense that people were all the time being confronted with a Being who both is and is not one of them, is quite absent in Tolstoy’s version. There is no demoniac seized with devils who recognise an enemy stronger than themselves; no Virgin kneeling before the angel of the annunciation; no Thomas, scarcely able to look at the figure who stands before him showing the print of the nails. There are merely a lot of stubborn idiots who won’t see the plain truth about the way they ought to live.

  Nevertheless, a heresy will get nowhere if it is all wrong. Tolstoy’s great appeal is not in his cavalier attitudes to the text of the Gospels (anyone could do that if they had the patience or the cheek) but in his merciless spotlight on the chinks in the Orthodox armour. Even today many Christian believers assert (1) that Jesus was divine and infallible and (2) that there is no need to take any notice of the things He is alleged to have taught. This is the inconsistency which Tolstoy highlights. And he replaces in typically exaggerated form, with another pair of incompatibles, a Jesus who is not divine, but whose words are. Tolstoy believed Christ’s words to have an absolute, unassailable, moral authority, and it is for this that modern Christians can feel gratitude towards Him. In our own day, there has been a further refinement on behalf of the clerisy. We have not merely clergymen, as Tolstoy had, who claim that there is no reason why we should even attempt to follow Christ’s teachings; we also have those (the majority, perhaps, of New Testament scholars) who believe that it is impossible to reconstruct what the ipsissima verba of Christ actually were. So, why try? Tolstoy’s approach to the New Testament is arresting because it undercuts even such evasiveness as this. Even if Christ did not say the words, they are still true, eternally true, morally and absolutely true. So, for the next thirty years, he boldly asserted.

  Like many other heresiarchs, he is certain not only of what the ipsissima verba were, but also, precisely what is meant by them. By the time his distinctive creed was formed, Tolstoy made no bones about believing that Christ advocated a consistent anarchism, a policy of civil disobedience. ‘Swear not at all’ means ‘Refuse to take part in judicial assemblies.’ It may be that this is what Jesus taught. It may be, further, that no one who took these words of Jesus to heart could, in conscience, have taken part in the judicial procedures of nineteenth-century Russia. But – this is the point which would have meant nothing to Tolstoy – nor is it possible to reconstruct exactly what Jesus thought about law courts. The assertion that He violently disapproved of them is a good enough stick with which to beat the Establishment and to enrage the likes of Katkov, Pobedonostsev – and Dostoyevsky. ‘Resist not evil.’ Again, it is hard to see how anyone who had absorbed Christ’s teaching of non-violence could knowingly or willingly get involved in a war. But there is no evidence that Jesus, or his precursor John, taught pacifism as such. John the Baptist told soldiers to be content with their pay, not to burn their draft cards. Jesus said that he had never known such faith, in the
whole of Israel, as was found in a Roman centurion. On the other hand (another consideration which would have meant nothing to Tolstoy) scholars believe that the Gospel of Luke, from which these two examples are drawn, was deliberately compiled to give to the Romans the impression that the Christians were not subversive. So the argument comes full circle.

  Even in the area of wealth, where it would seem that the Gospel of St. Lev was completely in agreement with those of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, it is hard to say exactly whether Jesus had an ‘economic policy’. If Christ had not wished us to have any money at all, why did He hold up a coin and tell us to pay our taxes? How can you pay tax if you have not saved up some money?