Leo Tolstoy: Christ Without the Empire
A count sat down, late in life, to read the Sermon on the Mount.
He was not a theologian. He had a theologian’s library and none of a theologian’s training. He owned an estate. He owned the two greatest novels in the Russian language. He was, by every measure his century recognized, significant.
And he read four chapters of Matthew as though no one had ever read them before — as though the words were instructions, and not decoration.
He read: resist not evil. He read: swear not at all. He read: judge not. Then he asked the question a child would ask.
Did anyone mean this?
Leo Tolstoy — born in 1828 into the Russian aristocracy — wrote War and Peace and Anna Karenina, and then, in his fifties, fell into a crisis that none of his fame and none of his land could answer. He came out of it holding a single conviction: that Christ had said something plain, and that the entire apparatus of Christian civilization — its churches, its armies, its courts — had been built on the careful, centuries-long avoidance of that plain thing.
In 1894 he published The Kingdom of God Is Within You. The Russian Empire banned it. The Orthodox Church, in 1901, excommunicated him.
Decades later a young lawyer in South Africa read it, and what he took from it helped him take apart an empire. His name was Gandhi.
Tolstoy’s argument is not subtle, and he did not want it to be.
He read the commands of Christ as commands. Resist not evil had no state-violence exception. Swear not at all had no loyalty-oath exception. Call no man master carried no footnote exempting the priest.
And he watched a religion organized around those words become the chaplain of everything they forbid — the executioner, the conscription officer, the war.
How does that happen? Tolstoy answers as a matter of fact, not accusation:
“The Church as a church … cannot but strive for the same object … 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 understanding the true teaching of Christ, and what is the chief consideration, justifies the existence of priests supported at the people’s expense.”
That is the whole machine, named in one sentence. The institution does not fail to deliver Christ’s teaching. It succeeds at replacing it.
Tolstoy does not treat this as a Russian problem, or a Catholic problem, or a Protestant problem. He treats it as the nature of a church.
“A church is a body of men who assert that they are in possession of infallible truth. Heresy is the opinion of the men who do not admit the infallibility of the Church’s truth.”
Once you see it stated that plainly, the history reorganizes itself. Every living attempt to actually understand the teaching gets filed under heresy — because heresy is simply the name the institution gives to seeking it did not authorize.
“All effort after a living comprehension of the doctrine has been made by heretics. Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Huss, Savonarola, Helchitsky, and the rest were heretics. It could not be otherwise.”
It could not be otherwise. The people who went looking were, by definition, outside.
Tolstoy is specific about how the replacement is made to last. It is not the gold, the candles, the choirs, the hypnosis of ritual — though he names all of those.
It is the children.
“The chief and most pernicious work of the Church is that which is directed to the deception of children … From the very first awakening of the consciousness of the child they begin to deceive him, to instill into him with the utmost solemnity what they do not themselves believe in.”
A teaching that has to be installed before a person can reason is a teaching that cannot survive the person reasoning.
So what, exactly, was being concealed?
The book takes its title from the line Tolstoy placed on its final page, alone, as the last word:
“The kingdom of God cometh not with outward show; neither shall they say, Lo here! or, Lo there! for behold, the kingdom of God is within you.”
Within you. Not in the building. Not in the sacrament administered by the authorized hand. Not in the empire that flies the cross above its armies.
If that is true, the institution’s central product — mediated access — is not expensive. It is fictional.
“Christianity in its true sense puts an end to government. … it was for that cause that Christ was crucified.”
The thing worth holding from Tolstoy is not a politics. It is not a program you can join, and it is emphatically not a new church.
It is a refusal.
The refusal to grant that the words grew more complicated somewhere between the page and the pulpit. The refusal to accept that resist not evil requires an expert to explain why it cannot mean what it says.
Tolstoy was not a holy man, and he knew it — difficult, contradictory, hard on the people closest to him. That is nearly the point. He never asked to be believed because of who he was. He asked one question and refused to let go of it: did anyone mean this?
The Church’s answer was to strike his name from its rolls.
That is not a rebuttal. It is a confirmation.
The Kingdom of God Is Within You is in the public domain. Download the ePub.