The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / Miscellanies. Tolstoy Leo
forms which it is not considered right to destroy. That is not true: throughout all of Russia, nothing but this faith has of late been impressed upon the people with particular effort. There is nothing else. Of something else they talk and write in the capitals, but only this is being impressed on one hundred million of people, and nothing else. The churchmen talk of other things, but they enjoin only this with every means at their command.
All this, and the worship of persons and images, is introduced into theologies, into catechisms; the masses are carefully taught this theoretically, and, being hypnotized practically, with every means of solemnity, splendour, authority, and violence, are made to believe in this, and are jealously guarded against every endeavour to be freed from these savage superstitions.
In my very presence, as I said in reference to my book, Christ's teaching and his own words concerning non-resistance to evil were a subject of ridicule and circus jokes, and the churchmen not only did not oppose this, but even encouraged the blasphemy; but allow yourself to say a disrespectful word concerning the monstrous idol, which is blasphemously carried about in Moscow by drunken persons under the name of the Iberian Virgin, and a groan of indignation will be raised by these same churchmen. All that is preached is the external cult of idolatry. Let no one say that one thing does not interfere with the other, that "these ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone," that "all, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and do not" (Matt. xxiii. 23, 3). This is said of the Pharisees, who fulfilled all the external injunctions of the law, and so the words, "whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe," refer to works of charity and of goodness, and the words, "but do ye not after their works, for they say, and do not," refer to the execution of ceremonies and to the omission of good works, and have precisely the opposite meaning to what the churchmen want to ascribe to this passage, when they interpret it as meaning that ceremonies are to be observed. An external cult and serving charity and truth are hard to harmonize; for the most part one thing excludes the other. Thus it was with the Pharisees, and thus it is now with the church Christians.
If a man can save himself through redemption, sacraments, prayer, he no longer needs any good deeds.
The Sermon on the Mount, or the symbol of faith: it is impossible to believe in both. And the churchmen have chosen the latter: the symbol of faith is taught and read as a prayer in the churches; and the Sermon on the Mount is excluded even from the Gospel teachings in the churches, so that in the churches the parishioners never hear it, except on the days when the whole Gospel is read. Nor can it be otherwise: men who believe in a bad and senseless God, who has cursed the human race and who has doomed His son to be a victim, and has doomed a part of humanity to everlasting torment, cannot believe in a God of love. A man who believes in God-Christ, who will come again in glory to judge and punish the living and the dead, cannot believe in Christ, who commands a man to offer his cheek to the offender, not to judge, but to forgive, and to love our enemies. A man who believes in the divine inspiration of the Old Testament and the holiness of David, who on his death-bed orders the killing of an old man who has offended him and whom he could not kill himself, because he was bound by an oath (Book of Kings, ii. 3), and similar abominations, of which the Old Testament is full, cannot believe in Christ's moral law; a man who believes in the doctrine and the preaching of the church about the compatibility of executions and wars with Christianity, cannot believe in the brotherhood of men.
Above all else, a man who believes in the salvation of men through faith, in redemption, or in the sacraments, can no longer employ all his strength in the fulfilment in life of the moral teaching of Christ.
A man who is taught by the church the blasphemous doctrine about his not being able to be saved by his own efforts, but that there is another means, will inevitably have recourse to this means, and not to his efforts, on which he is assured it is a sin to depend. The church doctrine, any church doctrine, with its redemption and its sacraments, excludes Christ's teaching, and the Orthodox doctrine, with its idolatry, does so especially.
"But the masses have always believed so themselves, and believe so now," people will say to this. "The whole history of the Russian masses proves this. It is not right to deprive the masses of their tradition." In this does the deception consist. The masses at one time, indeed, professed something like what the church professes now, though it was far from being the same (among the masses, there has existed, not only this superstition of the images, house spirits, relics, and the seventh Thursday after Easter, with its wreaths and birches, but also a deep moral, vital comprehension of Christianity, which has never existed in the whole church, and was met with only in its best representatives); but the masses, in spite of all the obstacles, which the government and the church have opposed to them, have long ago in their best representatives outlived this coarse stage of comprehension, which is proved by the spontaneous birth of rationalistic sects, with which one meets everywhere, with which Russia swarms at the present time, and with which the churchmen struggle in vain. The masses move on in the consciousness of the moral, vital side of Christianity. And it is here that the church appears with its failure to support, and with its intensified inculcation of an obsolete paganism in its ossified form, with its tendency to push the masses back into that darkness, from which they are struggling with so much effort to get out.
"We do not teach the masses anything new, but only what they believe in, and that in a more perfect form," say the churchmen.
This is the same as tying up a growing chick and pushing it back into the shell from which it has come.
I have often been struck by this observation, which would be comical, if its consequences were not so terrible, that men, taking hold of each other in a circle, deceive one another, without being able to get out of the enchanted circle.
The first question, the first doubt of a Russian who is beginning to think, is the question about the miracle-working images and, above all, the relics: "Is it true that they are imperishable, and that they work miracles?" Hundreds and thousands of men put these questions to themselves and are troubled about their solution, especially because the bishops, metropolitans, and all the dignitaries kiss the relics and the miracle-working images. Ask the bishops and the dignitaries why they do so, and they will tell you that they do so for the sake of the masses, and the masses worship the images and relics, because the bishops and dignitaries do so.
The activity of the Russian Church, in spite of its external veneer of modernness, learning, spirituality, which its members are beginning to assume in their writings, articles, clerical periodicals, and sermons, consists not only in keeping the masses in that consciousness of rude and savage idolatry, in which they are, but also in intensifying and disseminating superstition and religious ignorance, by pushing out of the masses the vital comprehension of Christianity, which has been living in them by the side of the idolatry.
I remember, I was once present in the monastery bookstore of Óptin Cloister, when an old peasant was choosing some religious books for his grandson, who could read. The monk kept pushing the description of relics, holidays, miraculous images, psalters, etc., into his hands. I asked the old man if he had the Gospel. "No." "Give him the Russian Gospel," I said to the monk. "That is not proper for him," said the monk.
This is in compressed form the activity of our church.
"But this is only true in barbarous Russia," a European or American reader will say. And such an opinion will be correct, but only in the measure in which it refers to the government which aids the church in accomplishing its stultifying and corrupting influence in Russia.
It is true that nowhere in Europe is there such a despotic government and one to such a degree in accord with the ruling church, and so the participation of the power in the corruption of the masses in Russia is very strong; but it is not true that the Russian Church in its influence upon the masses in any way differs from any other church.
The churches are everything the same, and if the Catholic, the Anglican, and the Lutheran Churches have not in hand such an obedient government as is the Russian, this is not due to the absence of any desire to make use of the same.
The church, as a church, no matter what it may be, Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Presbyterian, – every church, insomuch as it is a church, cannot help but tend toward the same as the Russian Church, – toward concealing the true meaning of Christ's teaching