Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1908
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
The social conditions of life can only be improved by people exercising self-restraint.
It is said that one swallow does not make a summer, but can it be that because one swallow does not make a summer another swallow, sensing and anticipating summer, must not fly? If every blade of grass waited similarly summer would never occur. And it is the same with establishing the Kingdom of God: we must not think about whether we are the first or the thousandth swallow.
Live your life fulfilling God’s will and you will know for sure that it is only by following this path that you most fruitfully enhance the overall improvement of life.
The crushing heaviness of evil is weighing down on men. The people standing beneath this weight are becoming more and more crushed by it, and are searching for a means of freeing themselves from it.
They know they can lift the weight and throw it off through joint effort; but they cannot agree to do it all together. Everyone is sinking lower and lower, leaving the weight to rest on someone else’s shoulders; the weight is pressing on people more and more heavily and would have crushed them long ago if it were not for people who are guided not by concerns of the consequences of their outer acts, but by the inner accord of their acts with the call of their conscience. These kind of people are, and always have been, Christians because instead of setting themselves an external goal which needs the cooperation of others to be achieved, they set themselves an inner goal, which requires cooperation from no one else and which is the essence of Christianity in its true meaning. And this is why salvation from the enslavement in which the men of today find themselves is impossible for most of them, and can be, and is, achieved only through Christianity, by substituting the law of violence for the law of love.
‘The general purpose of life cannot be fully known’, says the Christian teaching, ‘and you only imagine that it is a continual approach towards universal well-being and the realization of the Kingdom of God. The purpose of your personal life is most certainly known to you and consists of the realization in yourself of the greatest perfection of love, which is necessary to the realization of the Kingdom of God. And this aim is always known to you and is always attainable.
You may not know the best individual external aims, there may be obstacles in the way of achieving them, but the approach to inner perfection and the increase of love within yourself and others cannot be stopped by anyone or anything.
A person only needs to set himself, instead of the false, external, social aim, the one true, irrefutable, and attainable inner aim of life for all the chains, by which he seemed so indissolubly bound, to fall apart, and he will feel perfectly free…
A Christian is not bound by civil law because he has no need of it, either for himself or for others, since he considers human life better provided for by the law of love which he professes, than by a law maintained by violence…
For a Christian who has recognized the demands of the law of love, not only the demands of the law of violence can’t be obligatory, but they are always seen as human errors which must be exposed and abolished…
The profession of Christianity in its true meaning, including nonresistance to evil, frees men from all external power. But it not only frees them from external power, it also gives them the possibility of attaining those improvements of life which they vainly seek through altering the external forms of life.
People think that the improvement of their condition is achieved by changes in life’s external forms, yet changes in life’s external forms are always a consequence of shifts in consciousness; life is only improved to the extent to which this change is based on modified consciousness.
All external changes of life’s forms that are not founded on shifts in consciousness not only fail to improve people’s situation but, by and large, worsen it. It was not government decrees that abolished child-beating, torture and slavery, but a change in people’s consciousness that called for the necessity of these decrees. And life is only improved as far as it is based on changes in consciousness; that is, to the extent that in people’s consciousness the law of violence is exchanged for the law of love. People think that if a shift in consciousness influences the forms of life, it must also work the other way, and since it is more pleasant, easy and the effect more apparent, to direct energy at external changes, they always prefer to direct their energy not at changing consciousness but at changing forms. Therefore for the most part they are preoccupied not with the essential matter, but with some semblance of it. The external, vain and useless activity based on establishing and adapting the external forms of life shields people from the essential inner activity, which alone can improve their lives. And this superstition, more than anything else, hinders the general improvement of people’s lives.
A better life can only come when the consciousness of men is changed for the better; and therefore, those who wish to improve life must direct all their efforts towards changing both their own and other people’s consciousness.
Christianity in its true meaning, and only this kind of Christianity, frees people from the slavery in which they find themselves today, and it is only this that affords men the possibility of genuine improvement in both their personal lives, and life in general.
It would seem obvious that only true Christianity, excluding violence, gives salvation to each individual person and provides the possibility of improving the overall life of humanity. But people could not accept this until life under the law of violence has been fully tasted, and until the field of delusions, cruelties and sufferings had been explored in every direction.
“The fact that Christ’s teaching has been known to man for nineteen hundred years, and yet has only been adopted in its external forms,” is often cited as the most convincing proof of the falsity and especially the impracticability of Christ’s teaching. People say: “If it has been known for so long and has still not become the guiding force in people’s lives, if so many martyrs and professed Christians have died in vain, without having transformed the existing order, this clearly indicates that the teaching is untrue and impracticable.”
To think this and say it is much the same as saying that if seeds that are sown fail to blossom and give fruit, but lie in the soil and rot, this proves that the seed is not genuine and fertile, and should, and must, be trampled underfoot.
The fact that the Christian teaching was not adopted in its full meaning at the time of its appearance, but was only adopted in its external, perverted aspects, was both inevitable and necessary.
A doctrine that undermined the entire existing order of the world could not have been accepted at the time of its appearance, but could only have been accepted in an external, distorted form.
The great majority of people at the time were in no position to understand Christ’s teaching by following the spiritual path alone. It was necessary to bring them to an understanding of it by experiencing the truth, that all deviations from the Christian teaching are disastrous, and by learning this the hard way.
The teaching was adopted in the only form it could be: as an external worship of deity that replaced paganism, while life continued further and further along the heathen path. But this perverted teaching was inextricably bound to the Gospels and, despite all their efforts, the priests of false Christianity could not conceal from people the essence of the teaching which, against their will, gradually revealed itself to men, and entered their consciousness.
Over the course of eighteen centuries this dual trend has continued: the positive and the negative. On the one hand is the ever-increasing alienation of man from the possibility of a good and reasonable life; on the other, the ever-increasing elucidation of the true meaning of the teaching.
And today this process has reached the point where the Christian truth, formerly only recognized by a few, endowed with a keen religious sentiment, has been made accessible, in some of its aspects, to even the simplest people, through the doctrines of the Socialists; and yet life contradicts this truth at every step in the most crude and obvious way.
The condition of our European humanity, with its private landowners, taxes, clergy, prisons, guillotines, fortresses, cannons, dynamite, millionaires and beggars, looks truly terrible. But it only appears so. In truth, all these things, all these horrors that are happening now, as well as those we await, are things that we do and are prepared to do ourselves. And this must cease. In order to conform to human consciousness this must not be so. For power does not lie in the forms of life but in human consciousness. And human consciousness is in an extremely tense condition, drawn between two opposite poles, full of screaming contradictions. Christ said that He conquered the world, and indeed He did. Evil, however dreadful it is, no longer exists, because it no longer exists in people’s consciousness.
The growth of consciousness proceeds at an even pace rather than in leaps and bounds, and it is never possible to pin-point the feature that separates one period of existence from another, although that feature exists, just as there is a dividing line between childhood and youth, winter and spring, etc. If there is no definite dividing line, there is a transitory period. And it is this sort of transitory period that mankind is passing through at the moment. Everything is ready to make the transition from one condition to another. Only a slight push is needed in order to complete the change. And this push could be given at any moment. Society’s awareness has already rejected the former way of life and has long been ready to adopt the new one. Everyone alike knows and feels this. But the inertia of the past and timidity of the future can sometimes create a situation whereby what has long been consciously known takes a while to be put into practice. At such moments one word is sometimes enough for consciousness to be consolidated: that all important force in human life – public opinion – may suddenly turn the existing order inside out without struggle or violence…
The salvation of men from oppression, enslavement and ignorance will not be achieved through revolutions, nor through trade unions or world congresses, but through the simplest way: by every single person who is called upon to participate in violence over his fellow men and his own self recognizing the true spiritual “I” within himself, and asking in amazement, “Well, why should I do that?”
It is neither revolutions, nor the cunning, clever Socialist and Communist structures of unions, arbitrations, etc., that will save mankind, but only when this spiritual awareness becomes widespread.
It is really only necessary for man to rouse himself from the hypnosis that shields him from the true Christian vocation in order for him not only to refuse to comply with the demands the government makes of him, but to feel terrible surprise and indignation at the fact of these demands being made.
“And this awakening can occur at any moment,” - this is what I wrote fifteen years ago. Today I can boldly write that this awakening is taking place. I, with my eighty years, know that I will not see it, but as surely as I know that spring follows winter and day follows night, I know that the time has come for Christian humanity.