A Confession, Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy [ereader for android TXT] 📗

A Confession

 

by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy

I

I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught

it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth. But when I abandoned

the second course of the university at the age of eighteen I no longer

believed any of the things I had been taught.

 

Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them, but had merely

relied on what I was taught and on what was professed by the grown-up people

around me, and that reliance was very unstable.

 

I remember that before I was eleven a grammar school pupil, Vladimir

Milyutin (long since dead), visited us one Sunday and announced as the

latest novelty a discovery made at his school. This discovery was that there

is no God and that all we are taught about Him is a mere invention (this was

in 1838). I remember how interested my elder brothers were in this

information. They called me to their council and we all, I remember, became

very animated, and accepted it as something very interesting and quite

possible.

 

I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitriy, who was then at the

university, suddenly, in the passionate way natural to him, devoted himself

to religion and began to attend all the Church services, to fast and to lead

a pure and moral life, we all — even our elders — unceasingly held him up to

ridicule and for some unknown reason called him “Noah”. I remember that

Musin-Pushkin, the then Curator of Kazan University, when inviting us to

dance at his home, ironically persuaded my brother (who was declining the

invitation) by the argument that even David danced before the Ark. I

sympathized with these jokes made by my elders, and drew from them the

conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the catechism and go to

church, one must not take such things too seriously. I remember also that I

read Voltaire when I was very young, and that his raillery, far from

shocking me, amused me very much.

 

My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our level of

education. In most cases, I think, it happens thus: a man lives like

everybody else, on the basis of principles not merely having nothing in

common with religious doctrine, but generally opposed to it; religious

doctrine does not play a part in life, in intercourse with others it is

never encountered, and in a man’s own life he never has to reckon with it.

Religious doctrine is professed far away from life and independently of it.

If it is encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from

life.

 

Then as now, it was and is quite impossible to judge by a man’s life and

conduct whether he is a believer or not. If there be a difference between a

man who publicly professes orthodoxy and one who denies it, the difference

is not in favor of the former. Then as now, the public profession and

confession of orthodoxy was chiefly met with among people who were dull and

cruel and who considered themselves very important. Ability, honesty,

reliability, good-nature and moral conduct, were often met with among

unbelievers.

 

The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church, and

government officials must produce certificates of having received communion.

But a man of our circle who has finished his education and is not in the

government service may even now (and formerly it was still easier for him to

do so) live for ten or twenty years without once remembering that he is

living among Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the orthodox

Christian Church.

 

So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on trust and

supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually under the influence of

knowledge and experience of life which conflict with it, and a man very

often lives on, imagining that he still holds intact the religious doctrine

imparted to him in childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.

 

S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how he ceased to

believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already twenty-six, he once,

at the place where they put up for the night, knelt down in the evening to

pray — a habit retained from childhood. His elder brother, who was at the

hunt with him, was lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished

and was settling down for the night, his brother said to him: “So you still

do that?”

 

They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S. ceased to say

his prayers or go to church. And now he has not prayed, received communion,

or gone to church, for thirty years. And this not because he knows his

brother’s convictions and has joined him in them, nor because he has decided

anything in his own soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother

was like the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own

weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was faith, in

reality there had long been an empty space, and that therefore the utterance

of words and the making of signs of the cross and genuflections while

praying were quite senseless actions. Becoming conscious of their

senselessness he could not continue them.

 

So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of people. I am

speaking of people of our educational level who are sincere with themselves,

and not of those who make the profession of faith a means of attaining

worldly aims. (Such people are the most fundamental infidels, for if faith

is for them a means of attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not

faith.) these people of our education are so placed that the light of

knowledge and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they

have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they have not

yet noticed it.

 

The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in me as in

others, but with this difference, that as from the age of fifteen I began to

read philosophical works, my rejection of the doctrine became a conscious

one at a very early age. From the time I was sixteen I ceased to say my

prayers and ceased to go to church or to fast of my own volition. I did not

believe what had been taught me in childhood but I believed in something.

What it was I believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God,

or rather I did not deny God — but I could not have said what sort of God.

Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his teaching consisted

in I again could not have said.

 

Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith — my only real

faith — that which apart from my animal instincts gave impulse to my life

— was a belief in perfecting myself. But in what this perfecting consisted

and what its object was, I could not have said. I tried to perfect myself

mentally — I studied everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I

tried to perfect my will, I drew up rules I tried to follow; I perfected

myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts of

exercises, and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by all kinds of

privations. And all this I considered to be the pursuit of perfection. the

beginning of it all was of course moral perfection, but that was soon

replaced by perfection in general: by the desire to be better not in my own

eyes or those of God but in the eyes of other people. And very soon this

effort again changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more

famous, more important and richer than others.

II

Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history of my life

during those ten years of my youth. I think very many people have had a like

experience. With all my soul I wished to be good, but I was young,

passionate and alone, completely alone when I sought goodness. Every time I

tried to express my most sincere desire, which was to be morally good, I met

with contempt and ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was

praised and encouraged.

 

Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger, and

revenge — were all respected.

 

Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and felt that

they approved of me. The kind aunt with whom I lived, herself the purest of

beings, always told me that there was nothing she so desired for me as that

I should have relations with a married woman: ‘Rien ne forme un juene homme,

comme une liaison avec une femme comme il faut’. [1] Another happiness she

desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-camp, and if possible

aide-de-camp to the Emperor. But the greatest happiness of all would be that

I should marry a very rich girl and so become possessed of as many serfs as

possible.

 

I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache. I

killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost

at cards, consumed the labor of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments,

lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds,

drunkenness, violence, murder — there was no crime I did not commit, and in

spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and

consider me to be a comparatively moral man.

 

So I lived for ten years.

 

During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness, and pride. In

my writings I did the same as in my life. to get fame and money, for the

sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and to display the

evil. and I did so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the

guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards

goodness which gave meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this and was

praised.

 

At twenty-six years of age [2] I returned to Petersburg after the war, and

met the writers. They received me as one of themselves and flattered me. And

before I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set

of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated all my

former strivings to improve — they furnished a theory which justified the

dissoluteness of my life.

 

The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship, consisted in

this: that life in general goes on developing, and in this development we

— men of thought — have the chief part; and among men of thought it is we

— artists and poets — who have the greatest influence. Our vocation is to

teach mankind. And lest the simple question should suggest itself: What do I

know, and what can I teach? it was explained in this theory