[4] Confessions.
[5] His portraits of this period betray this plebeian tendency. A painting by Kramskoy (1873) represents Tolstoy in a moujik's blouse, with bowed head: it resembles a German Christ. The forehead is growing bare at the temples; the cheeks are lined and bearded.—In another portrait, dated 1881, he has the look of a respectable artisan in his Sunday clothes: the hair cut short, the beard and whiskers spread out on either side; the face looks much wider below than above; the eyebrows are contracted, the eyes gloomy; the wide nostrils have a dog-like appearance; the ears are enormous.
[6] Confessions.
[7] To tell the truth—not for the first time. The young volunteer in the Caucasus, the officer at Sebastopol, Olenin of the Cossacks, Prince Andrei, and Pierre Besoukhov, in War and Peace, had had similar visions. But Tolstoy was so enthusiastic that each time he discovered God he believed it was for the first time; that previously there had been nothing but night and the void. He saw nothing of his past but its shadows and its shames. We who, through reading his Journal, know better than he himself the story of his heart, know also how profoundly religious was that heart, even when he was most astray. But he himself confesses in a passage in the preface to the Criticism o; Dogmatic Theology: "God! God! I have erred; I have sought the truth where I should not have sought it; and I knew that I erred. I flattered my evil passions, knowing them to be evil; but I never forgot Thee. I was always conscious of Thee, even when I went astray." The crisis of 1878-79 was only more violent than the rest; perhaps under the influence of repeated loss and the advance of age; its only novelty was that the image of God, instead of vanishing and leaving no trace when once the flame of ecstasy flickered out, remained with him, and the penitent, warned by past experience, hastened to "walk in the light while he had the light," and to deduce from his faith a whole system of life. Not that he had not already tried to do so. (Remember the Rules of Life written when he was a student.) But at fifty years of age there was less likelihood that his passions would divert him from his path.
[8] The sub-title of the Confessions is Introduction to the Criticism of Dogmatic Theology and the Examination of the Christian Doctrine.
[9] "I, who beheld the truth in the unity of love, was struck with the fact that religion itself destroyed that which it sought to produce." (Confessions.)
[10] "And I am convinced that the teaching of the Church is in theory a crafty and evil lie, and in practice a concoction of gross superstitions and witchcraft, under which the meaning of the Christian doctrine absolutely disappears." (Reply to the Holy Synod, April 4-17, 1901.)
[11] 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 for Christianity. If I have been particularly attracted by the teaching of Jesus, it is (1) because I was born and have lived among Christians, and (2) because I have found a great spiritual joy in disengaging the pure doctrine from the astonishing falsifications created by the Churches."
[12] Tolstoy protests that he does not attack true science, which is modest and knows its limits. (Life, chap. iv. There is a French version by Countess Tolstoy.)