The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗
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several times in the year to bring the ikons from the church, and
to carry them slung on his shoulders through the fields and
houses. It is instilled into him that on his deathbed a man must
not fail to eat bread and wine with a spoon, and that it will be
still better if he has time to be rubbed with sacred oil. This
will guarantee his welfare in the future life. After his death it
is instilled into his relatives that it is a good thing for the
salvation of the dead man to place a printed paper of prayers in
his hands; it is a good thing further to read aloud a certain book
over the dead body, and to pronounce the dead man’s name in church
at a certain time. All this is regarded as faith obligatory on
everyone.
But if anyone wants to take particular care of his soul, then
according to this faith he is instructed that the greatest
security of the salvation of the soul in the world is attained by
offering money to the churches and monasteries, and engaging the
holy men by this means to pray for him. Entering monasteries too
and kissing relics and miraculous ikons, are further means of
salvation for the soul.
According to this faith ikons and relics communicate a special
sanctity, power, and grace, and even proximity to these objects,
touching them, kissing them, putting candles before them, crawling
under them while they are being carried along, are all efficacious
for salvation, as well as Te Deums repeated before these holy
things.
So this, and nothing else, is the faith called Orthodox, that is
the actual faith which, under the guise of Christianity, has been
with all the forces of the Church, and is now with especial zeal,
instilled into the people.
And let no one say that the Orthodox teachers place the essential
part of their teaching in something else, and that all these are
only ancient forms, which it is not thought necessary to do away
with. That is false. This, and nothing but this, is the faith
taught through the whole of Russia by the whole of the Russian
clergy, and of late years with especial zeal. There is nothing
else taught. Something different may be talked of and written of
in the capitals; but among the hundred millions of the people this
is what is done, this is what is taught, and nothing more.
Churchmen may talk of something else, but this is what they teach
by every means in their power.
All this, and the worship of relics and of ikons, has been
introduced into works of theology and into the catechisms. Thus
they teach it to the people in theory and in practice, using every
resource of authority, solemnity, pomp, and violence to impress
them. They compel the people, by overawing them, to believe in
this, and jealously guard this faith from any attempt to free the
people from these barbarous superstitions.
As I said when I published my book, Christ’s teaching and his very
words about nonresistance to evil were for many years a subject
for ridicule and low jesting in my eyes, and Churchmen, far from
opposing it, even encouraged this scoffing at sacred things. But
try the experiment of saying a disrespectful word about a hideous
idol which is carried sacrilegiously about Moscow by drunken men
under the name of the ikon of the Iversky virgin, and you will
raise a groan of indignation from these same Churchmen. All that
they preach is an external observance of the rites of idolatry.
And let it not be said that the one does not hinder the other,
that “These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other
undone.” “All, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that
observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and
do not” (Matt. xxiii. 23, 3).
This was spoken of the Pharisees, who fulfilled all the external
observances prescribed by the law, and therefore the words
“whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do,” refer to
works of mercy and goodness, and the words “do not ye after their
works, for they say and do not,” refer to their observance of
ceremonies and their neglect of good works, and have exactly the
opposite meaning to that which the Churchmen try to give to the
passage, interpreting it as an injunction to observe ceremonies.
External observances and the service of truth and goodness are for
the most part difficult to combine; the one excludes the other.
So it was with the Pharisees, so it is now with Church Christians.
If a man can be saved by the redemption, by sacraments, and by
prayer, then he does not need good works.
The Sermon on the Mount, or the Creed. One cannot believe in both.
And Churchmen have chosen the latter. The Creed is taught and is
read as a prayer in the churches, but the Sermon on the Mount is
excluded even from the Gospel passages read in the churches, so
that the congregation never hears it in church, except on those
days when the whole of the Gospel is read. Indeed, it could not
he otherwise. People who believe in a wicked and senseless God—
who has cursed the human race and devoted his own Son to
sacrifice, and a part of mankind to eternal torment—cannot
believe in the God of love. The man who believes in a God, in a
Christ coming again in glory to judge and to punish the quick and
the dead, cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left
cheek, judge not, forgive these that wrong us, and love our
enemies. The man who believes in the inspiration of the Old
Testament and the sacred character of David, who commanded on his
deathbed the murder of an old man who had cursed him, and whom he
could not kill himself because he was bound by an oath to him, and
the similar atrocities of which the Old Testament is full, cannot
believe in the holy love of Christ. The man who believes in the
Church’s doctrine of the compatibility of warfare and capital
punishment with Christianity cannot believe in the brotherhood of
all men.
And what is most important of all—the man who believes in
salvation through faith in the redemption or the sacraments,
cannot devote all his powers to realizing Christ’s moral teaching
in his life.
The man who has been instructed by the Church in the profane
doctrine that a man cannot be saved by his own powers, but that
there is another means of salvation, will infallibly rely upon
this means and not on his own powers, which, they assure him, it
is sinful to trust in.
The teaching of every Church, with its redemption and sacraments,
excludes the teaching of Christ; most of all the teaching of the
Orthodox Church with its idolatrous observances.
“But the people have always believed of their own accord as they
believe now,” will be said in answer to this. “The whole history
of the Russian people proves it. One cannot deprive the people of
their traditions.” This statement, too, is misleading. The
people did certainly at one time believe in something like what
the Church believes in now, though it was far from being the same
thing. In spite of their superstitious regard for ikons,
housespirits, relics, and festivals with wreaths of birch leaves,
there has still always been in the people a profound moral and
living understanding of Christianity, which there has never been
in the Church as a whole, and which is only met with in its best
representatives. But the people, notwithstanding all the
prejudices instilled into them by the government and the Church,
have in their best representatives long outgrown that crude stage
of understanding, a fact which is proved by the springing up
everywhere of the rationalist sects with which Russia is swarming
to-day, and on which Churchmen are now carrying on an ineffectual
warfare. The people are advancing to a consciousness of the
moral, living side of Christianity. And then the Church
comes forward, not borrowing from the people, but zealously
instilling into them the petrified formalities of an extinct
paganism, and striving to thrust them back again into the
darkness from which they are emerging with such effort.
“We teach the people nothing new, nothing but what they believe,
only in a more perfect form,” say the Churchmen. This is just
what the man did who tied up the full-grown chicken and thrust it
back into the shell it had come out of.
I have often been irritated, though it would be comic if the
consequences were not so awful, by observing how men shut one
another in a delusion and cannot get out of this magic circle.
The first question, the first doubt of a Russian who is beginning
to think, is a question about the ikons, and still more the
miraculous relics: Is it true that they are genuine, and that
miracles are worked through them? Hundreds of thousands of men
put this question to themselves, and their principal difficulty in
answering it is the fact that bishops, metropolitans, and all men
in positions of authority kiss the relics and wonder-working
ikons. Ask the bishops and men in positions of authority why they
do so, and they will say they do it for the sake of the people,
while the people kiss them because the bishops and men in
authority do so.
In spite of all the external varnish of modernity, learning, and
spirituality which the members of the Church begin nowadays to
assume in their works, their articles, their theological journals,
and their sermons, the practical work of the Russian Church
consists of nothing more than keeping the people in their present
condition of coarse and savage idolatry, and worse still,
strengthening and diffusing superstition and religious ignorance,
and suppressing that living understanding of Christianity which
exists in the people side by side with idolatry.
I remember once being present in the monks’ bookshop of the Optchy
Hermitage while an old peasant was choosing books for his
grandson, who could read. A monk pressed on him accounts of
relics, holidays, miraculous ikons, a psalter, etc. I asked the
old man, “Has he the Gospel?” “No.” “Give him the Gospel in
Russian,” I said to the monk. “That will not do for him,”
answered the monk. There you have an epitome of the work of our
Church.
But this is only in barbarous Russia, the European and American
reader will observe. And such an observation is just, but only so
far as it refers to the government, which aids the Church in its
task of stultification and corruption in Russia.
It is true that there is nowhere in Europe a government so
despotic and so closely allied with the ruling Church. And
therefore the share of the temporal power in the corruption of the
people is greatest in Russia. But it is untrue that the Russian
Church in its influence on the people is in any respect different
from any other church.
The churches are everywhere the same, and if the Catholic, the
Anglican, or the Lutheran Church has not at hand a government as
compliant as the Russian, it is not due to any indisposition to
profit by such a government.
The Church as a church, whatever it may be—Catholic, Anglican,
Lutheran, Presbyterian—every church, in so far as it is a church,
cannot but strive for the same object as the Russian Church.
That object is to conceal the real meaning of Christ’s teaching
and to replace it by their own, which lays no obligation on them,
excludes the possibility of
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