The Kingdom of God Is Within You - Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best non fiction books of all time txt) 📗

as a

result of that love to love and serve one’s neighbor, seems to

scientific men obscure, mystic, and arbitrary. And they would

absolutely exclude the obligation of love and service of God,

holding that the doctrine of love for men, for humanity alone, is

far more clear, tangible, and reasonable.

 

Scientific men teach in theory that the only good and rational

life is that which is devoted to the service of the whole of

humanity. That is for them the import of the Christian doctrine,

and to that they reduce Christ’s teaching. They seek confirmation

of their own doctrine in the Gospel, on the supposition that the

two doctrines are really the same.

 

This idea is an absolutely mistaken one. The Christian doctrine

has nothing in common with the doctrine of the Positivists,

Communists, and all the apostles of the universal brotherhood of

mankind, based on the general advantage of such a brotherhood.

They differ from one another especially in Christianity’s having a

firm and clear basis in the human soul, while love for humanity is

only a theoretical deduction from analogy.

 

The doctrine of love for humanity alone is based on the social

conception of life.

 

The essence of the social conception of life consists in the

transference of the aim of the individual life to the life of

societies of individuals: family, clan, tribe, or state. This

transference is accomplished easily and naturally in its earliest

forms, in the transference of the aim of life from the individual

to the family and the clan. The transference to the tribe or the

nation is more difficult and requires special training. And the

transference of the sentiment to the state is the furthest limit

which the process can reach.

 

To love one’s self is natural to everyone, and no one needs any

encouragement to do so. To love one’s clan who support and

protect one, to love one’s wife, the joy and help of one’s

existence, one’s children, the hope and consolation of one’s life,

and one’s parents, who have given one life and education, is

natural. And such love, though far from being so strong as love

of self, is met with pretty often.

 

To love—for one’s own sake, through personal pride—one’s tribe,

one’s nation, though not so natural, is nevertheless common. Love

of one’s own people who are of the same blood, the same tongue,

and the same religion as one’s self is possible, though far from

being so strong as love of self, or even love of family or clan.

But love for a state, such as Turkey, Germany, England, Austria,

or Russia is a thing almost impossible. And though it is

zealously inculcated, it is only an imagined sentiment; it has no

existence in reality. And at that limit man’s power of

transferring his interest ceases, and he cannot feel any direct

sentiment for that fictitious entity. The Positivists, however,

and all the apostles of fraternity on scientific principles,

without taking into consideration the weakening of sentiment in

proportion to the extension of its object, draw further deductions

in theory in the same direction. “Since,” they say, “it was for

the advantage of the individual to extend his personal interest to

the family, the tribe, and subsequently to the nation and the

state, it would be still more advantageous to extend his interest

in societies of men to the whole of mankind, and so all to live

for humanity just as men live for the family or the state.”

 

Theoretically it follows, indeed, having extended the love and

interest for the personality to the family, the tribe, and thence

to the nation and the state, it would be perfectly logical for men

to save themselves the strife and calamities which result from the

division of mankind into nations and states by extending their

love to the whole of humanity. This would be most logical, and

theoretically nothing would appear more natural to its advocates,

who do not observe that love is a sentiment which may or may not

he felt, but which it is useless to advocate; and moreover, that

love must have an object, and that humanity is not an object. It

is nothing but a fiction.

 

The family, the tribe, even the state were not invented by men,

but formed themselves spontaneously, like ant-hills or swarms of

bees, and have a real existence. The man who, for the sake of his

own animal personality, loves his family, knows whom he loves:

Anna, Dolly, John, Peter, and so on. The man who loves his tribe

and takes pride in it, knows that he loves all the Guelphs or all

the Ghibellines; the man who loves the state knows that he loves

France bounded by the Rhine, and the Pyrenees, and its principal

city Paris, and its history and so on. But the man who loves

humanity—what does he love? There is such a thing as a state, as

a nation; there is the abstract conception of man; but humanity as

a concrete idea does not, and cannot exist.

 

Humanity! Where is the definition of humanity? Where does it end

and where does it begin? Does humanity end with the savage, the

idiot, the dipsomaniac, or the madman? If we draw a line

excluding from humanity its lowest representatives, where are we

to draw the line? Shall we exclude the negroes like the

Americans, or the Hindoos like some Englishmen, or the Jews like

some others? If we include all men without exception, why should

we not include also the higher animals, many of whom are superior

to the lowest specimens of the human race.

 

We know nothing of humanity as an eternal object, and we know

nothing of its limits. Humanity is a fiction, and it is

impossible to love it. It would, doubtless, be very advantageous

if men could love humanity just as they love their family. It

would be very advantageous, as Communists advocate, to replace the

competitive, individualistic organization of men’s activity by a

social universal organization, so that each would be for all and

all for each.

 

Only there are no motives to lead men to do this. The

Positivists, the Communists, and all the apostles of fraternity on

scientific principles advocate the extension to the whole of

humanity of the love men feel for themselves, their families, and

the state. They forget that the love which they are discussing is

a personal love, which might expand in a rarefied form to embrace

a man’s native country, but which disappears before it can embrace

an artificial state such as Austria, England, or Turkey, and which

we cannot even conceive of in relation to all humanity, an

absolutely mystic conception.

 

“A man loves himself (his animal personality), he loves his

family, he even loves his native country. Why should he not love

humanity? That would be such an excellent thing. And by the way,

it is precisely what is taught by Christianity.” So think the

advocates of Positivist, Communistic, or Socialistic fraternity.

 

It would indeed be an excellent thing. But it can never be, for

the love that is based on a personal or social conception of life

can never rise beyond love for the state.

 

The fallacy of the argument lies in the fact that the social

conception of life, on which love for family and nation is

founded, rests itself on love of self, and that love grows weaker

and weaker as it is extended from self to family, tribe,

nationality, and slate; and in the state we reach the furthest

limit beyond which it cannot go.

 

The necessity of extending the sphere of love is beyond dispute.

But in reality the possibility of this love is destroyed by the

necessity of extending its object indefinitely. And thus the

insufficiency of personal human love is made manifest.

 

And here the advocates of Positivist, Communistic, Socialistic

fraternity propose to draw upon Christian love to make up the

default of this bankrupt human love; but Christian love only in

its results, not in its foundations. They propose love for

humanity alone, apart from love for God.

 

But such a love cannot exist. There is no motive to produce it.

Christian love is the result only of the Christian conception of

life, in which the aim of life is to love and serve God.

 

The social conception of life has led men, by a natural transition

from love of self and then of family, tribe, nation, and state, to

a consciousness of the necessity of love for humanity, a

conception which has no definite limits and extends to all living

things. And this necessity for love of what awakens no kind of

sentiment in a man is a contradiction which cannot be solved by

the social theory of life.

 

The Christian doctrine in its full significance can alone solve

it, by giving a new meaning to life. Christianity recognizes love

of self, of family, of nation, and of humanity, and not only of

humanity, but of everything living, everything existing; it

recognizes the necessity of an infinite extension of the sphere of

love. But the object of this love is not found outside self in

societies of individuals, nor in the external world, but within

self, in the divine self whose essence is that very love, which

the animal self is brought to feel the need of through its

consciousness of its own perishable nature.

 

The difference between the Christian doctrine and those which

preceded it is that the social doctrine said: “Live in opposition

to your nature [understanding by this only the animal nature],

make it subject to the external law of family, society, and

state.” Christianity says: “Live according to your nature

[understanding by this the divine nature]; do not make it subject

to anything—neither you (an animal self) nor that of others—and

you will attain the very aim to which you are striving when you

subject your external self.”

 

The Christian doctrine brings a man to the elementary

consciousness of self, only not of the animal self, but of the

divine self, the divine spark, the self as the Son of God, as much

God as the Father himself, though confined in an animal husk. The

consciousness of being the Son of God, whose chief characteristic

is love, satisfies the need for the extension of the sphere of

love to which the man of the social conception of life had been

brought. For the latter, the welfare of the personality demanded

an ever-widening extension of the sphere of love; love was a

necessity and was confined to certain objects—self, family,

society. With the Christian conception of life, love is not a

necessity and is confined to no object; it is the essential

faculty of the human soul. Man loves not because it is his

interest to love this or that, but because love is the essence of

his soul, because he cannot but love.

 

The Christian doctrine shows man that the essence of his soul is

love—that his happiness depends not on loving this or that

object, but on loving the principle of the whole—God, whom he

recognizes within himself as love, and therefore he loves all

things and all men.

 

In this is the fundamental difference between the Christian

doctrine and the doctrine of the Positivists, and all the

theorizers about universal brotherhood on non-Christian

principles.

 

Such are the two principal misunderstandings relating to the

Christian religion, from which the greater number of false

reasonings about it proceed. The first consists in the belief

that Christ’s teaching instructs men, like all previous religions,

by rules, which they are bound to follow, and that these rules

cannot be fulfilled. The second is the idea that the whole

purport of Christianity is to teach men to live advantageously

together, as one family, and that to attain