1. Tolstoi designates "Christianity"[860] as his basis; but by Christianity he means not the doctrine of one of the Christian churches, neither the Orthodox nor the Catholic nor that of any of the Protestant bodies,[861] but the pure teaching of Christ.[862]
"Strange as it may sound, the churches have always been not merely alien but downright hostile to the teaching of Christ, and they must needs be so. The churches are not, as many think, institutions that are based on a Christian origin and have only erred a little from the right way; the churches as such, as associations that assert their infallibility, are anti-Christian institutions. The Christian churches and Christianity have no fellowship except in name; nay, the two are utterly opposite and hostile elements. The churches are arrogance, violence, usurpation, rigidity, death; Christianity is humility, penitence, submissiveness, progress, life."[863] The church has "so transformed Christ's teaching to suit the world that there no longer resulted from it any demands, and that men could go on living as they had hitherto lived. The church yielded to the world, and, having yielded, followed it. The world did everything that it chose, and left the church to hobble after as well as it could with its teachings about the meaning of life. The world led its life, contrary to Christ's teaching in each and every point, and the church contrived subtleties to demonstrate that in living contrary to Christ's law men were living in harmony with it. And it ended in the world's beginning to lead a life worse than the life of the heathen, and the church's daring not only to justify such a life but even to assert that this was precisely what corresponded to Christ's teaching."[864]
Particularly different from Christ's teaching is the church "creed,"[865]—that is, the totality of the utterly incomprehensible and therefore useless "dogmas."[866] "Of a God, external creator, origin of all origins, we know nothing";[867] "God is the spirit in man,"[868] "his conscience,"[869] "the knowledge of life";[870] "every man recognizes in himself a free rational spirit independent of the flesh: this spirit is what we call God."[871] Christ was a man,[872] "the son of an unknown father; as he did not know his father, in his childhood he called God his father";[873] and he was a son of God as to his spirit, as every man is a son of God,[874] he embodied "Man confessing his sonship of God."[875] Those who "assert that Christ professed to redeem with his blood mankind fallen by Adam, that God is a trinity, that the Holy Spirit descended upon the apostles and that it passes to the priest by the laying on of hands, that seven mysteries are necessary to salvation, and so forth,"[876] "preach doctrines utterly alien to Christ."[877] "Never did Christ with a single word attest the personal resurrection and the immortality of man beyond the grave,"[878] which indeed is "a very low and coarse idea";[879] the Ascension and the Resurrection are to be counted among "the most objectionable miracles."[880]
Tolstoi accepts Christ's teaching as valid not on the ground of faith in a revelation, but solely for its rationality. Faith in a revelation "was the main reason why the teaching was at first misunderstood and later mutilated outright."[881] Faith in Christ is "not a trusting in something related to Christ, but the knowledge of the truth."[882]
"'There is a law of evolution, and therefore one must live only his own personal life and leave the rest to the law of evolution,' is the last word of the refined culture of our day, and, at the same time, of that obscuration of consciousness to which the cultured classes are a prey."[883] But "human life, from getting up in the morning to going to bed at night, is an unbroken series of actions; man must daily choose out from hundreds of actions possible to him those actions which he will perform; therefore, man cannot live without something to guide the choice of his actions."[884] Now, reason alone can offer him this guide. "Reason is that law, recognized by man, according to which his life is to be accomplished."[885] "If there is no higher reason,—and such there is not, nor can anything prove its existence,—then my reason is the supreme judge of my life."[886] "The ever-increasing subjugation"[887] "of the bestial personality to the rational consciousness"[888] is "the true life,"[889] is "life"[890] as opposed to mere "existence."[891]
"It used to be said, 'Do not argue, but believe in the duty that we have prescribed to you; reason will deceive you; faith alone will bring you the true happiness of life.' And the man exerted himself to believe, and he believed. But intercourse with other men showed him that in many cases these believed something quite different, and asserted that this other faith bestowed the highest happiness. It has become unavoidable to decide the question which of the many faiths is the right one; and only reason can decide this."[892] "If the Buddhist who has learned to know Islam remains a Buddhist, he is no longer a Buddhist in faith but in reason. As soon as another faith comes up before him, and with it the question whether to reject his faith or this other, reason alone can give him an answer. If he has learned to know Islam and has still remained a Buddhist, then rational conviction has taken the place of his former blind faith in Buddha."[893] "Man recognizes truth only by reason, not by faith."[894]
"The law of reason reveals itself to men gradually."[895] "Eighteen hundred years ago there appeared in the midst of the pagan Roman world a remarkable new teaching, which was not comparable to any that had preceded it, and which was ascribed to a man called Christ."[896] This teaching contains "the very strictest, purest, and completest"[897] apprehension of the law of reason to which "the human mind has hitherto raised itself."[898] Christ's teaching is "reason itself";[899] it must be accepted by men because it alone gives those rules of life "without which no man ever has lived or can live, if he would live as a man,—that is, with reason."[900] Man has, "on the basis of reason, no right to refuse allegiance to it."[901]
2. Christ's teaching sets up love as the supreme law for us.
What is love? "What men who do not understand life call 'love' is only the giving to certain conditions of their personal comfort a preference over any others. When the man who does not understand life says that he loves his wife or child or friend, he means by this only that his wife's, child's, or friend's presence in his life heightens his personal comfort."[902]
"True love is always renunciation of one's personal comfort"[903] for a neighbor's sake. True love "is a condition of wishing well to all men, such as commonly characterizes children but is produced in grown men only by self-abnegation."[904] "What living man does not know the happy feeling, even if he has felt it only once and in most cases only in earliest childhood, of that emotion in which one wishes to love everybody, neighbors and father and mother and brothers and bad men and enemies and dog and horse and grass; one wishes only one thing, that it were well with all, that all were happy; and still more does one wish that he were himself capable of making all happy, one wishes he might give himself, give his whole life, that all might be well off and enjoy themselves. Just this, this alone, is that love in which man's life consists."[905]