True love is "an ideal of full, infinite, divine perfection."[906] "Divine perfection is the asymptote of human life, toward which it constantly strives, to which it draws nearer and nearer, but which can be attained only at infinity."[907] "True life, according to previous teachings, consists in the fulfilling of commandments, the fulfilling of the law; according to Christ's teaching it consists in the maximum approach to the divine perfection which has been exhibited, and which is felt in himself by every man."[908]
According to the teaching of Christ, love is our highest law. "The commandment of love is the expression of the inmost heart of the teaching."[909] There are "three conceptions of life, and only three: first the personal or bestial, second the social or heathenish,"[910] "third the Christian or divine."[911] The man of the bestial conception of life, "the savage, acknowledges life only in himself; the mainspring of his life is personal enjoyment. The heathenish, social man recognizes life no longer in himself alone, but in a community of persons, in the tribe, the family, the race, the State; the mainspring of his life is reputation. The man of the divine conception of life acknowledges life no longer in his person, nor yet in a community of persons, but in the prime source of eternal, never-dying life—in God; the mainspring of his life is love."[912]
That love is our supreme law according to Christ's teaching means nothing else than that it is such according to reason. As early as 1852 Tolstoi gives utterance to the thought "That love and beneficence are truth is the only truth on earth,"[913] and much later, in 1887, he calls love "man's only rational activity,"[914] that which "resolves all the contradictions of human life."[915] Love abolishes the insensate activity directed to the filling of the bottomless tub of our bestial personality,[916] does away with the foolish fight between beings that strive after their own happiness,[917] gives a meaning independent of space and time to life, which without it would flow off without meaning in the face of death.[918]
3. From the law of love Christ's teaching derives the commandment not to resist evil by force. "'Resist not evil' means 'never resist the evil man', that is, 'never do violence to another', that is, 'never commit an act that is contrary to love'."[919]
Christ expressly derived this commandment from the law of love. He gave numerous commandments, among which five in the Sermon on the Mount are notable; "these commandments do not constitute the teaching, they only form one of the numberless stages of approach to perfection";[920] they "are all negative, and only show"[921] what "at mankind's present age"[922] we "have already the full possibility of not doing, along the road by which we are striving to reach perfection."[923] The first of the five commandments of the Sermon on the Mount reads "Keep the peace with all, and if the peace is broken use every effort to restore it";[924] the second says "Let the man take only one woman and the woman only one man, and let neither forsake the other under any pretext";[925] the third, "make no vows";[926] the fourth, "endure injury, return not evil for evil";[927] the fifth, "break not the peace to benefit thy people."[928] Among these commandments the fourth is the most important; it is enunciated in the fifth chapter of Matthew, verses 38-9: "Ye have heard that it was said, Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. But I say to you, Resist not evil."[929] Tolstoi tells how to him this passage "became the key of the whole."[930] "I needed only to take these words simply and downrightly, as they were spoken, and at once everything in Christ's whole teaching that had seemed confused to me, not only in the Sermon on the Mount but in the Gospels altogether, was comprehensible to me, and everything that had been contradictory agreed, and the main gist appeared no longer useless but a necessity; everything formed a whole, and the one confirmed the other past a doubt, like the pieces of a shattered column that one has rightly put together."[931] The principle of non-resistance binds together "the entire teaching into a whole; but only when it is no mere dictum but a peremptory rule, a law."[932] "It is really the key that opens everything, but only when it goes into the inmost of the lock."[933]
We must necessarily derive the commandment not to resist evil by force from the law of love. For this demands that either a sure, indisputable criterion of evil be found, or all violent resistance to evil be abandoned.[934] "Hitherto it has been the business now of the pope, now of an emperor or king, now of an assembly of elected representatives, now of the whole nation, to decide what was to be rated as an evil and combated by violent resistance. But there have always been men, both without and within the State, who have not acknowledged as binding upon them either the decisions that were given out as divine commandments or the decisions of the men who were clothed with sanctity or the institutions that were supposed to represent the will of the people; men who regarded as good what to the powers that be appeared evil, and who, in opposition to the force of these powers, likewise made use of force. The men who were clothed with sanctity regarded as an evil what appeared good to the men and institutions that were clothed with secular authority, and the combat grew ever sharper and sharper. Thus it came to what it has come to to-day, to the complete obviousness of the fact that there is not and cannot be a generally binding external definition of evil."[935] But from this follows the necessity of accepting the solution given by Christ.[936]
According to Tolstoi, the precept of non-resistance must not be taken "as if it forbade every combat against evil."[937] It forbids only the combating of evil by force.[938] But this it forbids in the broadest sense. It refers, therefore, not only to evil practised against ourselves, but also to evil practised against our fellow-men;[939] when Peter cut off the ear of the high priest's servant, he was defending "not himself but his beloved divine Teacher, but Christ forbade him outright and said 'All who take the sword will perish by the sword.'"[940] Nor does the precept say that only a part of men are under obligation "to submit without a contest to what is prescribed to them by certain authorities,"[941] but it forbids "everybody, therefore even those in whom power is vested, and these especially, to use force in any case against anybody."[942]
3.—LAW
I. For love's sake, particularly on the ground of the commandment not to resist evil by force, Tolstoi rejects law; not unconditionally, indeed, but as an institution for the more highly developed peoples of our time. To be sure, he speaks only of enacted laws; but he means all law,[943] for he rejects on principle every norm based on the will of men,[944] upheld by human force,[945] especially by courts,[946] capable of deviating from the moral law,[947] of being different in different territories,[948] and of being at any time arbitrarily changed.[949]