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

the fundamental dogma

of our faith is the infallibility of the Church. From the admission of that

dogma follows inevitably the truth of all that is professed by the Church.

The Church as an assembly of true believers united by love and therefore

possessed of true knowledge became the basis of my belief. I told myself

that divine truth cannot be accessible to a separate individual; it is

revealed only to the whole assembly of people united by love. To attain

truth one must not separate, and in order not to separate one must love and

must endure things one may not agree with.

 

Truth reveals itself to love, and if you do not submit to the rites of the

Church you transgress against love; and by transgressing against love you

deprive yourself of the possibility of recognizing the truth. I did not then

see the sophistry contained in this argument. I did not see that union in

love may give the greatest love, but certainly cannot give us divine truth

expressed in the definite words of the Nicene Creed. I also did not perceive

that love cannot make a certain expression of truth an obligatory condition

of union. I did not then see these mistakes in the argument and thanks to it

was able to accept and perform all the rites of the Orthodox Church without

understanding most of them. I then tried with all strength of my soul to

avoid all arguments and contradictions, and tried to explain as reasonably

as possible the Church statements I encountered.

 

When fulfilling the rites of the Church I humbled my reason and submitted to

the tradition possessed by all humanity. I united myself with my

forefathers: the father, mother, and grandparents I loved. They and all my

predecessors believed and lived, and they produced me. I united myself also

with the missions of the common people whom I respected. Moveover, those

actions had nothing bad in themselves (“bad” I considered the indulgence of

one’s desires). When rising early for Church services I knew I was doing

well, if only because I was sacrificing my bodily ease to humble my mental

pride, for the sake of union with my ancestors and contemporaries, and for

the sake of finding the meaning of life. It was the same with my

preparations to receive Communion, and with the daily reading of prayers

with genuflections, and also with the observance of all the fasts. However

insignificant these sacrifices might be I made them for the sake of

something good. I fasted, prepared for Communion, and observed the fixed

hours of prayer at home and in church. During Church service I attended to

every word, and gave them a meaning whenever I could. In the Mass the most

important words for me were: “Let us love one another in conformity!” The

further words, “In unity we believe in the Father, the Son, and Holy

Ghost”, I passed by, because I could not understand them.

XIV

In was then so necessary for me to believe in order to live that I

unconsciously concealed from myself the contradictions and obscurities of

theology. but this reading of meanings into the rites had its limits. If the

chief words in the prayer for the Emperor became more and more clear to me,

if I found some explanation for the words “and remembering our Sovereign

Most-Holy Mother of God and all the Saints, ourselves and one another, we

give our whole life to Christ our God”, if I explained to myself the

frequent repetition of prayers for the Tsar and his relations by the fact

that they are more exposed to temptations than other people and therefore

are more in need of being prayed for — the prayers about subduing our

enemies and evil under our feet (even if one tried to say that sin was the

enemy prayed against), these and other prayers, such as the “cherubic

song” and the whole sacrament of oblation, or “the chosen Warriors”, etc.

— quite two-thirds of all the services — either remained completely

incomprehensible or, when I forced an explanation into them, made me feel

that I was lying, thereby quite destroying my relation to God and depriving

me of all possibility of belief.

 

I felt the same about the celebration of the chief holidays. To remember the

Sabbath, that is to devote one day to God, was something I could understand.

But the chief holiday was in commemoration of the Resurrection, the reality

of which I could not picture to myself or understand. And that name of

“Resurrection” was also given the weekly holiday. [9] And on those days the

Sacrament of the Eucharist was administered, which was quite unintelligible

to me. The rest of the twelve great holidays, except Christmas, commemorated

miracles — the things I tried not to think about in order not to deny: the

Ascension, Pentecost, Epiphany, the Feast of the Intercession of the Holy

Virgin, etc. At the celebration of these holidays, feeling that importance

was being attributed to the very things that to me presented a negative

importance, I either devised tranquillizing explanations or shut my eyes in

order not to see what tempted me.

 

Most of all this happened to me when taking part in the most usual

Sacraments, which are considered the most important: baptism and communion.

There I encountered not incomprehensible but fully comprehensible doings:

doings which seemed to me to lead into temptation, and I was in a dilemma

— whether to lie or to reject them.

 

Never shall I forge the painful feeling I experienced the day I received the

Eucharist for the first time after many years. The service, confession, and

prayers were quite intelligible and produced in me a glad consciousness that

the meaning of life was being revealed to me. The Communion itself I

explained as an act performed in remembrance of Christ, and indicating a

purification from sin and the full acceptance of Christ’s teaching. If that

explanation was artificial I did not notice its artificiality: so happy was

I at humbling and abasing myself before the priest — a simple, timid country

clergyman — turning all the dirt out of my soul and confessing my vices, so

glad was I to merge in thought with the humility of the fathers who wrote

the prayers of the office, so glad was I of union with all who have believed

and now believe, that I did not notice the artificiality of my explanation.

But when I approached the altar gates, and the priest made me say that I

believed that what I was about to swallow was truly flesh and blood, I felt

a pain in my heart: it was not merely a false note, it was a cruel demand

made by someone or other who evidently had never known what faith is.

 

I now permit myself to say that it was a cruel demand, but I did not then

think so: only it was indescribably painful to me. I was no longer in the

position in which I had been in youth when I thought all in life was clear;

I had indeed come to faith because, apart from faith, I had found nothing,

certainly nothing, except destruction; therefore to throw away that faith

was impossible and I submitted. And I found in my soul a feeling which

helped me to endure it. This was the feeling of self-abasement and humility.

I humbled myself, swallowed that flesh and blood without any blasphemous

feelings and with a wish to believe. But the blow had been struck and,

knowing what awaited me, I could not go a second time.

 

I continued to fulfil the rites of the Church and still believed that the

doctrine I was following contained the truth, when something happened to me

which I now understand but which then seemed strange.

 

I was listening to the conversation of an illiterate peasant, a pilgrim,

about God, faith, life, and salvation, when a knowledge of faith revealed

itself to me. I drew near to the people, listening to their opinions of life

and faith, and I understood the truth more and more. So also was it when I

read the Lives of Holy men, which became my favourite books. Putting aside

the miracles and regarding them as fables illustrating thoughts, this

reading revealed to me life’s meaning. There were the lives of Makarius the

Great, the story of Buddha, there were the words of St. John Chrysostom, and

there were the stories of the traveller in the well, the monk who found some

gold, and of Peter the publican. There were stories of the martyrs, all

announcing that death does not exclude life, and there were the stories of

ignorant, stupid men, who knew nothing of the teaching of the Church but who

yet were saves.

 

But as soon as I met learned believers or took up their books, doubt of

myself, dissatisfaction, and exasperated disputation were roused within me,

and I felt that the more I entered into the meaning of these men’s speech,

the more I went astray from truth and approached an abyss.

 

[9] In Russia Sunday was called Resurrection-day.—A.M.

XV

How often I envied the peasants their illiteracy and lack of learning! Those

statements in the creeds which to me were evident absurdities, for them

contained nothing false; they could accept them and could believe in the

truth — the truth I believed in. Only to me, unhappy man, was it clear that

with truth falsehood was interwoven by finest threads, and that I could not

accept it in that form.

 

So I lived for about three years. At first, when I was only slightly

associated with truth as a catechumen and was only scenting out what seemed

to me clearest, these encounters struck me less. When I did not understand

anything, I said, “It is my fault, I am sinful”; but the more I became

imbued with the truths I was learning, the more they became the basis of my

life, the more oppressive and the more painful became these encounters and

the sharper became the line between what I do not understand because I am

not able to understand it, and what cannot be understood except by lying to

oneself.

 

In spite of my doubts and sufferings I still clung to the Orthodox Church.

But questions of life arose which had to be decided; and the decision of

these questions by the Church — contrary to the very bases of the belief by

which I lived — obliged me at last to renounce communion with Orthodoxy as

impossible. These questions were: first the relation of the Orthodox Eastern

Church to other Churches — to the Catholics and to the so-called sectarians.

At that time, in consequence of my interest in religion, I came into touch

with believers of various faiths: Catholics, protestants, Old-Believers,

Molokans [10] , and others. And I met among them many men of lofty morals

who were truly religious. I wished to be a brother to them. And what

happened? That teaching which promised to unite all in one faith and love

— that very teaching, in the person of its best representatives, told me

that these men were all living a lie; that what gave them their power of

life was a temptation of the devil; and that we alone possess the only

possible truth. And I saw that all who do not profess an identical faith

with themselves are considered by the Orthodox to be heretics, just as the

Catholics and others consider the Orthodox to be heretics. And i saw that

the Orthodox (though they try to hide this) regard with hostility all who do

not express their faith by the same external symbols and words as

themselves; and this is naturally so; first, because the assertion that you

are in