L. N. Tolstoy (1828-1910), Russian author, essayist and philosopher.

"Man in connection with the general life of humanity appears subject to laws which determine that life. But the same man apart from that connection appears to be free. How should the past life of nations and of humanity be regarded - as the result of the free, or as the result of the constrained, activity of man? That is a question for history."  (Excerpt: War and Peace, Epilogue 2, Ch. VIII)

Tolstoy condemned the law of violence.

He revealed the law of love, benevolence, and conscience. And he appealed to the morality of his readers, to realize the ethical commandments: no more and no longer tortures or executions of more and more victims:

“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.”

My Religion

“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.”

“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”.

Tolstoy's Legacy - A Manifesto For Nonviolence

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 originary meaning of Christ's teachings to all people who could read and listen.

In his famous work “The Kingdom of God is Within You” (1893), Leo Tolstoy laid down his political philosophy of nonviolent resistance. He ostracized in particular the modern slavery of military conscription or compulsory military service which had been introduced in Russia after the army reform of 1874.

From: The Kingdom of God is Within You by L. N. Tolstoy 1894

But Christ could not have founded the Church, that is, what we now understand by that word. For nothing like the idea of the Church as we know it now, with its sacraments, miracles, and above all its claim to infallibility, is to be found either in Christ’s words or in the ideas of the men of that time. The fact that men called what was formed afterward by the same word as Christ used for something totally different, does not give them the right to assert that Christ founded the one, true Church. Besides, if Christ had really founded such an institution as the Church for the foundation of all his teaching and the whole faith, he would certainly have described this institution clearly and definitely, and would have given the only true Church, besides tales of miracles, which are used to support every kind of superstition, some tokens so unmistakable that no doubt of its genuineness could ever have arisen. But nothing of the sort was done by him. And there have been and still are different institutions, each calling itself the true Church…..

It is terrible to think what the churches do to men. But if one imagines oneself in the position of the men who constitute the Church, we see they could not act differently. The churches are placed in a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene Creed–the one excludes the other. If a man sincerely believes in the Sermon on the Mount, the Nicene Creed must inevitably lose all meaning and significance for him, and the Church and its representatives together with it. If a man believes in the Nicene Creed, that is, in the Church, that is, in those who call themselves its representatives, the Sermon on the Mount becomes superfluous for him. And therefore the churches cannot but make every possible effort to obscure the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount, and to attract men to themselves. It is only due to the intense zeal of the churches in this direction that the influence of the churches has lasted hitherto.

Let the Church stop its work of hypnotizing the masses, and deceiving children even for the briefest interval of time, and men would begin to understand Christ’s teaching. But this understanding will be the end of the churches and all their influence. And therefore the churches will not for an instant relax their zeal in the business of hypnotizing grown-up people and deceiving children. This, then, is the work of the churches: to instill a false interpretation of Christ’s teaching into men, and to prevent a true interpretation of it for the majority of so- called believers.

First Council of Nicaea

“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”.

Tolstoy’s Theory of Nonviolence

Academician Abdusalam A. Guseinov on pacificism and the perspective of the infinite beginning.

The idea of nonviolence entered into the cycle of Russian ethics on the wave of Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika. It struck a chord among society at large. Since that period, the attitude to pacifist ideas has changed considerably. This attitude can now be expressed by two words: doubt and disappointment. I would like to comment on one common opinion, namely that nonviolence can be considered only as a wonderful dream. It has moral attractiveness but there is no compelling force of logic to it. This is a widely held view, but I will attempt to demonstrate its falseness by discussing Leo Tolstoy, who more than anyone else is reproached for having an inclination to utopianism.

 The teaching of Tolstoy which he called ‘nonresistance to evil’, is one of the most valuable and deeply developed versions of the nonviolence idea. It springs from a life position that has been named tolstovstvo and it had a great influence upon the nonviolence movement of the Twentieth Century.

Humans ask the question “What is the Meaning of Life?” For philosophers like Schopenhauer, the answer to this question is that there is no ultimate meaning. But the fact that a person asks this question at all means that life itself cannot be the answer. Therefore the question about life’s meaning, reduced logically to the justification of the question itself, comes to the postulating of some infinite source of life, to God.

 Tolstoy gave his own specific meaning to the concept of God. For him, it signified the unknown beginning of life, its endless foundation. It is the absolute limit of reasonable knowledge, the limit established by reason itself. We cannot utter any positive statement about God. We know that he is, but do not know what he is. In the same way that we know what a infinite number is through the summing up of simple numbers, but cannot say what kind of number (even or odd) it is, so a man comes to the notion of God in searching for answers to where he comes from and for what is he, but he has no clue as to what God really is.

 We live but do not know what is the beginning of life. The existence of God gives each of us the choice of how to live: for ourself or for God; within the boundary of a finite life or from the perspective of the infinite beginning. This question is the main content of any religion. Life lived either for oneself in an individual sense (for Ivan, Peter and so on) or in the creativity belonging to a particular group (or population, or class, or even humankind) comes face-to-face meaninglessness, a goalless existence that is the source of the question concerning the sense of life. According to Tolstoy, the adequate answer of life’s essence is in God. In Tolstoy’s opinion the question about life’s sense was most accurately formulated by Jesus Christ, who was not God himself (at least, not in the sense described above). “Who believes in God”, wrote Tolstoy, “cannot consider Christ as God.”

 We ought to live for God. This was the decision suggested by Jesus. He expressed it in the phrase: “Not as I want, but as You” (Matthew 26, 39). Following Jesus, Tolstoy considered the relation to God in terms of the relation between a son and his father. Tolstoy supposed that Jesus called himself the Son of God in the same way that any man can do so. At the same time, the relation of a man to God is the formula of love. Love in any of its variations and appearances is a relation in which one situates oneself in the position of servant, and sacrifices oneself for the benefit of the other. A woman loves a man and cannot live without him; a subject loves his sovereign and protects him; a friend loves a friend and struggles for him. But God is different from all others, as he is the Other that absolutely merits to be loved. Love as the normative foundation of conduct is represented in all religions, but according to Tolstoy only Jesus elevated it to the height of a law of consciousness.

 But how can one practically apply love in this highest sense? That is, how can one follow God’s will if we do not know God and consequently do not know what he wants us to do?

 The formula of love has two parts: negative (not as I want), and positive (as you want). The love of God in its positive expression is not possible, as we do not know what God wants. Therefore the adequate relation to God appears not as a positive service but as a voluntary restriction of activity. This negation, this restriction, is the only possible way in which a man can directly and responsibly express his love to God.

 In relation to judging questions of good and evil, the restriction of one’s activity is nothing other than nonviolence. According to Tolstoy, to act in a violent way means to do what is not wanted by the object of the violence. It is not difficult to see that his definition of violence is the direct opposite of love. Consequently, the negative part of one’s expression of love is the negation of violence, that is, nonviolence.

 Nonviolence (nonresistance to evil), in the accurate sense of the word, means only that a person does not agree to be judge in questions of life and death, does not agree to accuse other people because this is not within his or her competence. It is necessary to stress that this doesn’t suppose that we ought to completely abandon any kind of judgment concerning people’s actions. It only supposes that we have no right to judge them as people. A brother cannot judge his brother in the same way their father can do. The crime of Cain, who killed his brother Abel, was in the fact that he crossed over the boundary put before him as a brother. He acted as if he was not a brother.

 The essence of Religion for Tolstoy is that it considers the life of a man from an endless perspective which recognizes the equality of all people. Their relation to infinity is equal for everybody. Therefore the recognition of the equality of all people (in the Christian variant, through their brotherhood in relation to God) is the most important moral imperative. Tolstoy supposed that religions of all kind demand us to act by the model of the Golden Rule (i.e. “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”). The main consequence of applying this rule is nonviolence.

 Tolstoy’s position on this question shows the difference that he sets between the violence of a robber and the violence of people acting as representatives of the state (kings, presidents, military commanders and so on). The second is worse than the first. No violence has any justification: it is always bad. But if the violence of a robber can to some degree be understood, the violence of a state representative can not. It is much worse because it pretends to be moral, and is conducted in a ‘legal’ form. A robber does not flaunt his violent acts, but the robber on the throne is proud of his violence.

 The main statements of Tolstoy’s teaching have an analytical nature. They can be derived from his reasoning about God as an absolute, infinite, immortal source of life. Tolstoy in his methodical way proves that violence cannot be the conclusion from the syllogism the main premise of which is the initial equality of all people. Thus his teaching has a philosophical status in the sense that it is rationally founded. And it has ethical status in the sense that it is established by the boundaries of responsible behavior for each individual.

© A.A. Guseinov 2006

Professor Abdusalam A. Guseinov is an Academician of the Russian Academy of Science, 

and is Chair of the Ethics Department at Moscow State University.

Disciples of L. N. Tolstoy

Few are aware of Tolstoy's extensive writings on the subject of Christ's teachings of non-resistance. Two of his disciples, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., stand at the forefront of this movement and their efforts have clearly established the validity of the principle of non-violent resistance to unjust laws, violence, and oppression.

Mohandas K. Gandhi 

Martin Luther King Jr.