Adepts in Self-Portraiture

by Stefan Zweig

  DOCTRINE

  I have come close to a great idea, to whose realization I could devote the whole of my life. This idea is the foundation of a new religion, the religion of Christ, freed from articles of faith and from miracles.

  DIARY IN YOUTH, MARCH 5, 1855

  As foundation stone of his doctrine, of his “message” to mankind, Tolstoy takes the text, “Resist not evil,” and gives it the arresting interpretation, “Resist not evil by force.”

  The whole Tolstoyan ethic is in this sentence. With all the oratorical and moral vehemence of his overstrained conscience, the great champion slung his stone so violently against the wall of our century that it was almost breached, and is still trembling from the blow. No one can measure the whole spiritual influence of the onslaught. The Russians voluntarily laying down their arms after Brest-Litovsk; Gandhi’s preaching of non-resistance; Rolland’s pacifist appeal during the world war; the heroic refusal of innumerable nameless men to act in defiance of conscience; the agitation for the abolition of capital punishment — these isolated and apparently disconnected movements owe a large part of their impetus to Leo Tolstoy’s message. Wherever, today, force is repudiated, whether as instrument, as weapon, as right, or as divine ordinance, no matter under what pretext force has been advocated, whether that of nation, religion, race, or property; wherever the advocates of a humanist morality refuse to shed blood, to approve the crime of war, to condone a relapse into medieval club-law, to recognize a victory in war as an expression of God’s will; there everyone filled with the spirit of moral revolt is strengthened by Tolstoy’s authority, Tolstoy’s example, and Tolstoy’s ardor. Wherever an independent conscience, instead of appealing to the outworn formulas of the Church, to the dictatorial demands of the State, or to the maxims of a traditional and mechanically operative justice, declares that in the last resort a brotherly sentiment and nothing else must decide the issues between man and man, Tolstoy can be referred to as exemplar, Tolstoy who firmly repudiated the rights of the infallible State over the individual spirit, and who appealed to his fellows to decide every question “in accordance with the dictates of the heart.”

  What is Tolstoy thinking of when he speaks of “evil” as something which we have to resist, though without using force? He means force itself, absolute force, whose muscles may be hidden under the clothing of political economy, national prosperity, popular aspirations, and colonial expansion; whose will-to-power and will-to-shed-blood may wear the mask of philosophical and patriotic ideals. We must not let ourselves be deceived. In the most alluring of its sublimations, force invariably subserves, not the brotherhood of man, but the authority of a group of men, and thus perpetuates inequality. Force means possessions, means ownership and a wish to own more; for Tolstoy all inequality begins with property. The young nobleman had learned much during the hours he spent with Proudhon in Brussels. Tolstoy, in the spirit of the most revolutionary of socialists, said: “Property is the root of all evil and all suffering, and there is danger of a conflict between those who have too much property and those who have none.” If property is to maintain itself, it must defend itself, and here defense implies aggression. Force is needed to acquire property, to increase property, and to protect property. Thus property calls in the State to its aid; and the State, in turn, safeguards its existence by organized forms of force, such as the army, the judiciary, “the whole coercive system, which serves only for the protection of property”; and anyone who accepts and recognizes the State pays homage to this principle of power. According to Tolstoy, in the modern State even the intellectuals, for all their seeming independence, are devoted to the maintenance of the system whereby property is kept in the hands of the law. Moreover, the Church of Christ, which “in its true significance aimed at the abolition of the State,” turns away from its supreme duty, blesses weapons of war, argues in favor of the prevailing unjust order of the world, and for these reasons is tied up in formulas, becomes a habit, a convention. The artists, too, free born, whose mission it is to defend the claims of conscience and the rights of man, shut themselves up in their ivory towers, and “put conscience to sleep.” Socialism tries to play body-physician to the incurable. The revolutionists, who are the only persons that have understood the situation sufficiently to desire a complete destruction of the existing order, make the mistake of grasping at the murderous instruments of their adversaries, and help to eternalize injustice in that they fail to attack, and indeed themselves consecrate, the essential principle of “evil” — force.

  In the light of these anarchist doctrines, the State and the extant earthly relationships of human beings are built on false foundations. Tolstoy rejects, as futile and impracticable, the democratic, philanthropic, pacifist, and revolutionary attempts to improve the forms of government. No duma, no parliament, and above all no revolution, can deliver the nation from the “evil” of force. A house built on an untrustworthy foundation cannot be propped up. We must abandon it, and build a new one. The modern State is grounded upon the idea of power, and not upon that of fraternity. Tolstoy considers it doomed to destruction; and he holds that socialist or liberal attempts to repair it merely serve to prolong the death struggle. What needs to be altered is, not the civic relation between governors and governed, but human beings themselves. Coercion by State power must be replaced by the spiritual coherence of brotherliness, for the latter alone can give social stability. Until this religious or moral fraternity has replaced the extant coercive form of State, true morality (contends Tolstoy) is possible only outside the State, outside parties, in the invisible domain of conscience. Since the State identifies itself with force, a moral man must refrain from identifying himself with the State. What is needed is a religious revolution, thanks to which every conscientious person will cut loose from communities grounded on force.

  Tolstoy resolutely turns his back on the State, and declares that he is morally independent of any dictates other than those of his own conscience. He repudiates “exclusive appurtenancy to any particular people or State, and subjection to any kind of government”; he voluntarily withdraws from the Orthodox Church; and on principle he renounces an appeal to a court of justice or to any other statutory institution of contemporary society, not wishing to have a finger in the devil’s pie of a State based on force. We must not let ourselves be led astray by the evangelical gentleness of his sermons on brotherly love, by the humility of his Christian diction, by the frequency with which he appeals to the authority of the gospels. We must not thereby be led to overlook how bitterly opposed to the State is his social criticism; we must not be deceived as to the purposive energy and obduracy with which this man, the boldest heretic of his time, this revolutionary anarchist, declares war against the dominion of tsar, Church, and all the approved State authorities. His doctrine of the State is the fiercest of attacks on the State. Just as Luther broke with the papacy, so did Tolstoy, a lone man, break with the new papacy, the infallibility of property. Even Trotsky and Lenin have not, as far as theory is concerned, advanced beyond Tolstoy’s “everything must be changed.” The books of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, “L’ami des hommes,” were like mines driven under the foundations of the French monarchy — mines with which the revolutionists blew the old system into the air. In like manner Tolstoy’s writings shook the tsarist, the capitalist, order of his country to the very foundations. In Germany, because Leo Tolstoy had a patriarchal beard, and because the powder of his doctrines was wrapped in honey, he is generally regarded as the apostle of gentleness, whereas in truth he was a revolutionist ultra. No doubt, just as Rousseau would have indignantly repudiated the methods of the sans-culottes, so would Tolstoy have angrily decried the methods of the bolsheviks. Tolstoy hated political parties, writing: “Whichever party conquers, it must, if it is to retain power, not only utilize the existing means of force, but also discover new ones.” Nevertheless, the unprejudiced historians of the future will admit that he smoothed the way for the Russian revolution. None of the forceful activ
ities of the revolutionists were so effective in undermining the old system and in shaking the old authority as were the public declarations issued by this solitary giant against the seemingly invincible powers of his homeland: against tsar, Church, and property. As soon as this brilliant diagnostician discovered the main flaw in the groundworks of our civilization, discovered that the State edifice is built, not upon humanity, or upon the community of men, but upon brutality, upon the dominion over men — for the ensuing thirty years he devoted his immense argumentative powers and his formidable moral strength to the launching of attack after attack against the established order in Russia. Willy-nilly, he became the Winkelried of the revolution; functioned as social dynamite; was a primal, an elemental destructive force: and thus, all unconscious, he fulfilled his Russian mission.

  Russian thought, before it can build up, must clear the ground. No Russian artist has been spared the necessity of descending into the darkest depths of nihilism, before rising out of black despair to heights of new and ardent faith. Not for them, as for western Europeans, to be satisfied with timid ameliorations, with cautious and kindly attempts to prop up the old system. Like a woodman with his axe, felling the great tree with courageous and skilful blows, the Russian thinker, the Russian poet, the Russian man of action, attacks his difficulty. A Rostopshin, fired with the idea of victory, does not hesitate to commit Moscow, wonder of the world, to the flames. So Tolstoy, like Savonarola, does not hesitate to destroy all the cultural inheritance of mankind, all art and all science, in order to promote the establishment of a new and better theory. It may well be that Tolstoy, the religious dreamer, never realized what would be the practical outcome of his onslaught; it is more than doubtful whether he thought of calculating how many earthly existences would be crushed by the sudden collapse of an edifice as wide as the heavens. Enough for him, under stress of conviction, to devote himself with all his energies and all his staying power to pulling and pushing at the pillars of the social structure. When such a Samson bows himself to his task, even the most giant of roofs will fall in. Discussions after the event as to whether Tolstoy would have approved or condemned the bolshevik revolution are superfluous, in view of the fact that nothing in the way of spiritual preparation did so much to favor the Russian revolution as Tolstoy’s tirades against the superfluity of wealth, as the petards of his tracts, the bombs of his pamphlets. No critic of our age (not even Nietzsche, who, as a German, aimed his shafts at the cultured, and who, were it only by his metaphorical and Dionysian phrasing, was cut off from influencing the crowd) has exercised an influence comparable with Tolstoy’s in transforming the mentality and revolutionizing the beliefs of the masses. Hence, little as Tolstoy would have desired it, his bust will stand for all time in the invisible pantheon of the great revolutionists, of those who have cast down the mighty from their seats, of those who have transformed the world.

  Little as he would have desired it — for his Christian and individualist revolution, his anarchism, was sharply distinguished by him from the revolution, from the anarchism, of those who looked to attain their ends by force. Consider, for example, the following passage: “When we meet revolutionists, we often mistakenly believe that we and they can join hands. Like us, they cry: ‘No State, no property, no inequality’; and in many other respects they voice our demands. But there is a great difference. For the Christian, there is no State; whereas they want to annihilate the State. For the Christian, there is no property; whereas they want to abolish property. For the Christian, all are equal; whereas they want to destroy inequality. The revolutionists fight against the government from without; whereas Christianity does not fight at all, but destroys the foundation of the State from within.” Tolstoy’s plan was that molecule after molecule, one individual after another, should be withdrawn from the State, until its organism succumbed from debility. But there is no difference in the ultimate effect, which is the destruction of all authority; and at this Tolstoy ever aimed. It is true that he also looked for the establishment of a new order, counterposing a State Church to the State, and a religious tie to the practical social tie that now exists. He wanted to found a more humane, a more brotherly religion, old as well as new, primitively Christian. He preached a Tolstoyan-Christian gospel. Let us, however, be perfectly frank when we are appraising his constructive ideas. We must draw a clear distinction between Tolstoy as an inspired critic of civilization, and Tolstoy as an unpractical, capricious, and illogical moralist; between Tolstoy the seer, and Tolstoy the thinker, the thinker who, in an access of pedagogical frenzy, was no longer content as he had been in the sixties to drive the peasant lads of Yasnaya Polyana into the school, but, with the levity of an armchair philosopher, now proposed to teach all Europe the alphabet of “right” living, to teach all Europe the one and only truth. There can be no limit to our respect for Tolstoy so long as he contents himself with criticizing the world of the senses; and so long as, with his magnificent endowments in this sensuous world, he analyses its structure. But as soon as he would like to soar into the metaphysical, where he can no longer touch and taste and see, but where these wonderful palps of his palpate in the void, we are horrified at his spiritual incapacity. The point cannot be overemphasized. Tolstoy as theoretician, as systematic philosopher, was as lamentable a figure as was Nietzsche (his antithesis in the world of genius) when he tried to compose. Nietzsche’s musical faculty, which was gloriously productive in the realm of linguistic melody, was hopelessly inadequate in the realm of tone. In like manner, Tolstoy’s intellectual faculty went woefully astray as soon as he ventured beyond the sensuous and critical sphere into the theoretical and abstract. This lack of balance in his endowments can be traced in his works.

  For instance, in the pamphlet What Is to be Done, the first part describes the poverty-stricken quarters of Moscow concretely, with a mastery that takes the reader’s breath away. In the second part, Tolstoy the utopist moves on from diagnosis to therapeutics, tells the reader how, in his opinion, things can be bettered. At once the ideas are clouded, the outlines grow hazy. This confusion increases from problem to problem, the more boldly he moves onward. Nor can it be denied that he moved onward boldly enough. Though he has had no philosophical training, in his tracts and pamphlets, with terrifying irreverence he touches on all the eternally insoluble problems which range into the infinite, and “solves” them as easily as if he were melting glue in a pot. For just as, during the crisis, the impetuous man wanted to endue a “faith” as easily as if he were putting on a sheepskin coat, expected to become Christian and humble in a night, so in these writings which are to educate the world he expects to grow a forest in less time than it takes to plant a sapling. The man who in 1878 had declared that our whole earthly life was unmeaning, is ready three years later to offer us his universal theology as the solution of all the enigmas of the world. It need hardly be said that one who thinks at such dizzy speed, and builds with such desperate haste, must necessarily be impatient of contradiction. That is why Tolstoy stops his ears when he sets to work, why he overrules every objection, and desires no approval but his own. How wavering must be the faith of him whose only concern is “to bear testimony”; how illogical, how insecurely based must be the thought of him who, as soon as arguments fail, quotes a text from the Bible as irrefutable support! It cannot be too emphatically asserted that Tolstoy’s didactic writings are but zealotry and are among the most unpleasant specimens of this unpleasant kind of literature; they are confused, arbitrary, and (this amazes us in the case of Tolstoy the devotee of truth) positively dishonest.

  Indeed this most veracious of artists, this most exemplary of moralists, this great and almost saintly man, does not run straight as a theoretician. Wanting to put the boundless world of thought into his philosophical sack, he begins with a crude conjuring trick, simplifying all the problems to an extreme, so that they can be handled as easily as playing cards. He arranges them in his pack: “man,” “good,” “evil,” “sin,” “sensuality,” “brotherline
ss,” “faith,” and so on. Shuffling the cards with the ostensible openness of a cardsharp, he turns up “love” as trump, and wins the game. In one short hour, the riddle of the universe, infinite and insoluble, whose answer has been vainly sought for a thousand generations, is solved by him as he sits at his desk; and the old man smiles like a happy child, delighted and astonished to see “how simple it is after all.” He finds it inexplicable that for thousands of years the philosophers, the men of genius, who lie in thousands of coffins, in thousands of countries, should have wrestled with this enigma so strenuously, and should never have noticed that “truth”, the whole truth, has long since been set forth clear as daylight in the gospels — provided always that you interpret them as he, Leo Nikolaevich, interprets them in the year of our Lord 1878, “understanding them rightly for the first time in eighteen hundred years,” and at long last stripping from the divine message the plaster with which it has been covered (yes, such are his very words!). Now our troubles are ended. Men will surely recognize, at length, how simple life is. They need merely scrap the causes of their troubles. Let them do away with the State, religion, art, civilization, property, marriage. Then they will have freed themselves forever from “evil” and “sin.” When each man plows his own plot of land, bakes his own bread, and cobbles his own boots, there will be no more State and no more religions, but only the Kingdom of God upon earth. For “God is love, and love is the aim of life.” Away, then, with books; trouble no more to think; “love” suffices; everything can be achieved tomorrow, “if only men have the will.”