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

class="calibre1">Kars, which was not passed by the censor, and is not known in

Russia:

 

“Tiflis, October 2, 1818.

 

“In the morning the commandant told me that five peasants

belonging to a landowner in the Tamboff government had lately

been sent to Georgia. These men had been sent for soldiers,

but they would not serve; they had been several times flogged

and made to run the gauntlet, but they would submit readily to

the cruelest tortures, and even to death, rather than serve.

‘Let us go,’ they said, ‘and leave us alone; we will not hurt

anyone; all men are equal, and the Tzar is a man like us; why

should we pay him tribute; why should I expose my life to

danger to kill in battle some man who has done me no harm? You

can cut us to pieces and we will not be soldiers. He who has

compassion on us will give us charity, but as for the

government rations, we have not had them and we do not want to

have them’ These were the words of those peasants, who declare

that there are numbers like them Russia. They brought them

four times before the Committee of Ministers, and at last

decided to lay the matter before the Tzar who gave orders that

they should be taken to Georgia for correction, and commanded

the commander-in-chief to send him a report every month of

their gradual success in bringing these peasants to a better

mind.”

 

How the correction ended is not known, as the whole episode indeed

was unknown, having been kept in profound secrecy.

 

This was how the government behaved seventy-five years ago—this

is how it has behaved in a great cumber of cases, studiously

concealed from the people. And this is how the government behaves

now, except in the case of the German Mennonites, living in the

province of Kherson, whose plea against military service is

considered well grounded. They are made to work off their term of

service in labor in the forests.

 

But in the recent cases of refusal on the part of Mennonites to

serve in the army on religious grounds, the government authorities

have acted in the following manner:

 

To begin with, they have recourse to every means of coercion used

in our times to “correct” the culprit and bring him to “a better

mind,” and these measures are carried out with the greatest

secrecy. I know that in the case of one man who declined to serve

in 1884 in Moscow, the official correspondence on the subject had

two months after his refusal accumulated into a big folio, and was

kept absolutely secret among the Ministry.

 

They usually begin by sending the culprit to the priests, and the

latter, to their shame be it said, always exhort him to obedience.

But since the exhortation in Christ’s name to forswear Christ is

for the most part unsuccessful, after he has received the

admonitions of the spiritual authorities, they send him to the

gendarmes, and the latter, finding, as a rule, no political cause

for offense in him, dispatch him back again, and then he is sent

to the learned men, to the doctors, and to the madhouse. During

all these vicissitudes he is deprived of liberty and has to endure

every kind of humiliation and suffering as a convicted criminal.

(All this has been repeated in four cases.) The doctors let him

out of the madhouse, and then every kind of secret shift is

employed to prevent him from going free—whereby others would be

encouraged to refuse to serve as he has done—and at the same time

to avoid leaving him among the soldiers, for fear they too should

learn from him that military service is not at all their duty by

the law of God, as they are assured, but quite contrary to it.

 

The most convenient thing for the government would be to kill the

non-resistant by flogging him to death or some other means, as was

done in former days. But to put a man openly to death because he

believes in the creed we all confess is impossible. To let a man

alone who has refused obedience is also impossible. And so the

government tries either to compel the man by ill-treatment to

renounce Christ, or in some way or other to get rid of him

unobserved, without openly putting him to death, and to hide

somehow both the action and the man himself from other people.

And so all kinds of shifts and wiles and cruelties are set on foot

against him. They either send him to the frontier or provoke him

to insubordination, and then try him for breach of discipline and

shut him up in the prison of the disciplinary battalion, where

they can ill treat him freely unseen by anyone, or they declare

him mad, and lock him up in a lunatic asylum. They sent one man

in this way to Tashkend—that is, they pretended to transfer to

the Tashkend army; another to Omsk; a third him they convicted of

insubordination and shut up in prison; a fourth they sent to a

lunatic asylum.

 

Everywhere the same story is repeated. Not only the government,

but the great majority of liberal, advanced people, as they are

called, studiously turn away from everything that has been said,

written, or done, or is being done by men to prove the

incompatibility of force in its most awful, gross, and glaring

form—in the form, that is, of an army of soldiers prepared to

murder anyone, whoever it may be—with the teachings of

Christianity, or even of the humanity which society professes as

its creed.

 

So that the information I have gained of the attitude of the

higher ruling classes, not only in Russia but in Europe and

America, toward the elucidation of this question has convinced me

that there exists in these ruling classes a consciously hostile

attitude to true Christianity, which is shown pre-eminently in

their reticence in regard to all manifestations of it.

 

CHAPTER II.

 

CRITICISMS OF THE DOCTRINE OF NONRESISTANCE TO EVIL BY FORCE ON

THE PART OF BELIEVERS AND OF UNBELIEVERS.

 

Fate of the Book “What I Believe”—Evasive Character of Religious

Criticisms of Principles of my Book—1st Reply: Use of Force

not Opposed to Christianity—2d Reply: Use of Force Necessary

to Restrain Evil Doers—3d Reply: Duty of Using Force in

Defense of One’s Neighbor—4th Reply: The Breach of the Command

of Nonresistance to be Regarded Simply as a Weakness—5th

Reply: Reply Evaded by Making Believe that the Question has

long been Decided—To Devise such Subterfuges and to take

Refuge Behind the Authority of the Church, of Antiquity, and of

Religion is all that Ecclesiastical Critics can do to get out

of the Contradiction between Use of Force and Christianity in

Theory and in Practice—General Attitude of the Ecclesiastical

World and of the Authorities to Profession of True

Christianity—General Character of Russian Freethinking

Critics—Foreign Freethinking Critics—Mistaken Arguments of

these Critics the Result of Misunderstanding the True Meaning

of Christ’s Teaching.

 

The impression I gained of a desire to conceal, to hush up, what I

had tried to express in my book, led me to judge the book itself

afresh.

 

On its appearance it had, as I had anticipated, been forbidden,

and ought therefore by law to have been burnt. But, at the same

time, it was discussed among officials, and circulated in a great

number of manuscript and lithograph copies, and in translations

printed abroad.

 

And very quickly after the book, criticisms, both religious and

secular in character, made their appearance, and these the

government tolerated, and even encouraged. So that the refutation

of a book which no one was supposed to know anything about was

even chosen as the subject for theological dissertations in the

academies.

 

The criticisms of my book, Russian and foreign alike, fall under

two general divisions—the religious criticisms of men who regard

themselves as believers, and secular criticisms, that is, those of

freethinkers.

 

I will begin with the first class. In my book I made it an

accusation against the teachers of the Church that their teaching

is opposed to Christ’s commands clearly and definitely expressed

in the Sermon on the Mount, and opposed in especial to his command

in regard to resistance to evil, and that in this way they deprive

Christ’s teaching of all value. The Church authorities accept the

teaching of the Sermon on the Mount on nonresistance to evil by

force as divine revelation; and therefore one would have thought

that if they felt called upon to write about my book at all, they

would have found it inevitable before everything else to reply to

the principal point of my charge against them, and to say plainly,

do they or do they not admit the teaching of the Sermon on the

Mount and the commandment of nonresistance to evil as binding on

a Christian. And they were bound to answer this question, not

after the usual fashion (i. e., “that although on the one side one

cannot absolutely deny, yet on the other side one cannot main

fully assent, all the more seeing that,” etc., etc.). No; they

should have answered the question as plainly as it was put

in my book—Did Christ really demand from his disciples

that they should carry out what he taught them in the Sermon on

the Mount? And can a Christian, then, or can he not, always

remaining a Christian, go to law or make any use of the law, or

seek his own protection in the law? And can the Christian, or can

he not, remaining a Christian, take part in the administration of

government, using compulsion against his neighbors? And—the most

important question hanging over the heads of all of us in these

days of universal military service—can the Christian, or can he

not, remaining a Christian, against Christ’s direct prohibition,

promise obedience in future actions directly opposed to his

teaching? And can he, by taking his share of service in the army,

prepare himself to murder men, and even actually murder them?

 

These questions were put plainly and directly, and seemed to

require a plain and direct answer; but in all the criticisms of my

book there was no such plain and direct answer. No; my book

received precisely the same treatment as all the attacks upon the

teachers of the Church for their defection from the Law of Christ

of which history from the days of Constantine is full.

 

A very great deal was said in connection with my book of my having

incorrectly interpreted this and other passages of the Gospel, of

my being in error in not recognizing the Trinity, the redemption,

and the immortality of the soul. A very great deal was said, but

not a word about the one thing which for every Christian is the

most essential question in life—how to reconcile the duty of

forgiveness, meekness, patience, and love for all, neighbors and

enemies alike, which is so clearly expressed in the words of our

teacher, and in the heart of each of us—how to reconcile this

duty with the obligation of using force in war upon men of our own

or a foreign people.

 

All that are worth calling answers to this question can be brought

under the following five heads. I have tried to bring together in

this connection all I could, not only from the criticisms on my

book, but from what has been written in past times on this theme.

 

The first and crudest form of reply consists in the bold assertion

that the use of force is not opposed by the teaching of Christ;

that it is permitted, and even enjoined, on the Christian by the

Old and New Testaments.

 

Assertions of this kind proceed, for the most part, from men who