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THE CRISIS
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And Tolstoy adds naïvely:
“Strange as it may seem, I have been obliged, after eighteen centuries, to discover these rules as a novelty.”
Does Tolstoy believe in the divinity of Christ? By no means. In what quality does he invoke him? As the greatest of the line of sages—Brahma, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Zoroaster, Isaiah—who have revealed to man the true happiness to which he aspires, and the way which he must follow.[1] Tolstoy is the disciple of these great religious creators, of these Hindu, Chinese, and Hebrew demi-gods and prophets. He defends
- ↑ As he grew older, this feeling of the unity of religious truth throughout human history—and of the kinship of Christ with the other sages, from Buddha down to Kant and Emerson—grew more and more accentuated, until in his later years Tolstoy denied that he had “any predilection for Christianity.” Of the greatest importance in this connection is a letter written between July 27 and August 4, 1909, to the painter Jan Styka, and recently reproduced in Le Théosophe (January 16, 1911). According to his habit, Tolstoy, full of his new conviction, was a little inclined to forget his former state of mind and the starting-point of his religious crisis, which was purely Christian: “The doctrine of Jesus,” he writes, “is to me only one of the beautiful doctrines which we have received from the ancient civilisations of Egypt, Israel, Hindostan, China, Greece. The two great principles of Jesus: the love of God, that is, of absolute perfection, and the love of one’s neighbour, that is, of all men without distinction, have been preached by all the sages of the world: Krishna, Buddha, Lao-Tse, Confucius, Socrates, Plato, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and, among the moderns, Rousseau, Pascal, Kant, Emerson, Channing, and many others. Truth, moral and religious, is everywhere and always the same… I have no predilection
