me to refuse to hear the voice of my reason and my conscience.”
He found himself repeating, in calmer tones, the savage outcry of the murderer Posdnicheff against love and marriage.
“He who regards woman—above all his wife—with sensuality, already commits adultery with her.”
“When the passions have disappeared, then humanity will no longer have a reason for being; it will have executed the Law; the union of mankind will be accomplished.”
He will prove, on the authority of the Gospel according to Matthew, that “the Christian ideal is not marriage; that Christian marriage cannot exist; that marriage, from the Christian point of view, is an element not of progress but of downfall; that love, with all that precedes and follows it, is an obstacle to the true human ideal.”[1]
But he had never formulated these ideas clearly, even to himself, until they fell from the lips of Posdnicheff. As often happens with great creative artists, the work carried the writer with it; the artist outstripped the thinker; a process by which
- ↑ Let us take
notice that Tolstoy was never guilty of the
simplicity of believing that the ideal of celibacy and absolute
chastity was capable of realisation by humanity as we know it.
But according to him an ideal is incapable of realisation by its
very definition: it is an appeal to the heroic energies of the soul.
“The conception of the Christian ideal, which is the union of all living creatures in brotherly love, is irreconcilable with the conduct of life, which demands a continual effort towards an ideal which is inaccessible, but does not expect that it will ever be attained.”
