The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy [books to read fiction .TXT] 📗

give him money, and

several times in the year to bring the ikons from the church, and

to carry them slung on his shoulders through the fields and

houses. It is instilled into him that on his deathbed a man must

not fail to eat bread and wine with a spoon, and that it will be

still better if he has time to be rubbed with sacred oil. This

will guarantee his welfare in the future life. After his death it

is instilled into his relatives that it is a good thing for the

salvation of the dead man to place a printed paper of prayers in

his hands; it is a good thing further to read aloud a certain book

over the dead body, and to pronounce the dead man’s name in church

at a certain time. All this is regarded as faith obligatory on

everyone.

 

But if anyone wants to take particular care of his soul, then

according to this faith he is instructed that the greatest

security of the salvation of the soul in the world is attained by

offering money to the churches and monasteries, and engaging the

holy men by this means to pray for him. Entering monasteries too

and kissing relics and miraculous ikons, are further means of

salvation for the soul.

 

According to this faith ikons and relics communicate a special

sanctity, power, and grace, and even proximity to these objects,

touching them, kissing them, putting candles before them, crawling

under them while they are being carried along, are all efficacious

for salvation, as well as Te Deums repeated before these holy

things.

 

So this, and nothing else, is the faith called Orthodox, that is

the actual faith which, under the guise of Christianity, has been

with all the forces of the Church, and is now with especial zeal,

instilled into the people.

 

And let no one say that the Orthodox teachers place the essential

part of their teaching in something else, and that all these are

only ancient forms, which it is not thought necessary to do away

with. That is false. This, and nothing but this, is the faith

taught through the whole of Russia by the whole of the Russian

clergy, and of late years with especial zeal. There is nothing

else taught. Something different may be talked of and written of

in the capitals; but among the hundred millions of the people this

is what is done, this is what is taught, and nothing more.

Churchmen may talk of something else, but this is what they teach

by every means in their power.

 

All this, and the worship of relics and of ikons, has been

introduced into works of theology and into the catechisms. Thus

they teach it to the people in theory and in practice, using every

resource of authority, solemnity, pomp, and violence to impress

them. They compel the people, by overawing them, to believe in

this, and jealously guard this faith from any attempt to free the

people from these barbarous superstitions.

 

As I said when I published my book, Christ’s teaching and his very

words about nonresistance to evil were for many years a subject

for ridicule and low jesting in my eyes, and Churchmen, far from

opposing it, even encouraged this scoffing at sacred things. But

try the experiment of saying a disrespectful word about a hideous

idol which is carried sacrilegiously about Moscow by drunken men

under the name of the ikon of the Iversky virgin, and you will

raise a groan of indignation from these same Churchmen. All that

they preach is an external observance of the rites of idolatry.

And let it not be said that the one does not hinder the other,

that “These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other

undone.” “All, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that

observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and

do not” (Matt. xxiii. 23, 3).

 

This was spoken of the Pharisees, who fulfilled all the external

observances prescribed by the law, and therefore the words

“whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do,” refer to

works of mercy and goodness, and the words “do not ye after their

works, for they say and do not,” refer to their observance of

ceremonies and their neglect of good works, and have exactly the

opposite meaning to that which the Churchmen try to give to the

passage, interpreting it as an injunction to observe ceremonies.

External observances and the service of truth and goodness are for

the most part difficult to combine; the one excludes the other.

So it was with the Pharisees, so it is now with Church Christians.

 

If a man can be saved by the redemption, by sacraments, and by

prayer, then he does not need good works.

 

The Sermon on the Mount, or the Creed. One cannot believe in both.

And Churchmen have chosen the latter. The Creed is taught and is

read as a prayer in the churches, but the Sermon on the Mount is

excluded even from the Gospel passages read in the churches, so

that the congregation never hears it in church, except on those

days when the whole of the Gospel is read. Indeed, it could not

he otherwise. People who believe in a wicked and senseless God—

who has cursed the human race and devoted his own Son to

sacrifice, and a part of mankind to eternal torment—cannot

believe in the God of love. The man who believes in a God, in a

Christ coming again in glory to judge and to punish the quick and

the dead, cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left

cheek, judge not, forgive these that wrong us, and love our

enemies. The man who believes in the inspiration of the Old

Testament and the sacred character of David, who commanded on his

deathbed the murder of an old man who had cursed him, and whom he

could not kill himself because he was bound by an oath to him, and

the similar atrocities of which the Old Testament is full, cannot

believe in the holy love of Christ. The man who believes in the

Church’s doctrine of the compatibility of warfare and capital

punishment with Christianity cannot believe in the brotherhood of

all men.

 

And what is most important of all—the man who believes in

salvation through faith in the redemption or the sacraments,

cannot devote all his powers to realizing Christ’s moral teaching

in his life.

 

The man who has been instructed by the Church in the profane

doctrine that a man cannot be saved by his own powers, but that

there is another means of salvation, will infallibly rely upon

this means and not on his own powers, which, they assure him, it

is sinful to trust in.

 

The teaching of every Church, with its redemption and sacraments,

excludes the teaching of Christ; most of all the teaching of the

Orthodox Church with its idolatrous observances.

 

“But the people have always believed of their own accord as they

believe now,” will be said in answer to this. “The whole history

of the Russian people proves it. One cannot deprive the people of

their traditions.” This statement, too, is misleading. The

people did certainly at one time believe in something like what

the Church believes in now, though it was far from being the same

thing. In spite of their superstitious regard for ikons,

housespirits, relics, and festivals with wreaths of birch leaves,

there has still always been in the people a profound moral and

living understanding of Christianity, which there has never been

in the Church as a whole, and which is only met with in its best

representatives. But the people, notwithstanding all the

prejudices instilled into them by the government and the Church,

have in their best representatives long outgrown that crude stage

of understanding, a fact which is proved by the springing up

everywhere of the rationalist sects with which Russia is swarming

to-day, and on which Churchmen are now carrying on an ineffectual

warfare. The people are advancing to a consciousness of the

moral, living side of Christianity. And then the Church

comes forward, not borrowing from the people, but zealously

instilling into them the petrified formalities of an extinct

paganism, and striving to thrust them back again into the

darkness from which they are emerging with such effort.

 

“We teach the people nothing new, nothing but what they believe,

only in a more perfect form,” say the Churchmen. This is just

what the man did who tied up the full-grown chicken and thrust it

back into the shell it had come out of.

 

I have often been irritated, though it would be comic if the

consequences were not so awful, by observing how men shut one

another in a delusion and cannot get out of this magic circle.

 

The first question, the first doubt of a Russian who is beginning

to think, is a question about the ikons, and still more the

miraculous relics: Is it true that they are genuine, and that

miracles are worked through them? Hundreds of thousands of men

put this question to themselves, and their principal difficulty in

answering it is the fact that bishops, metropolitans, and all men

in positions of authority kiss the relics and wonder-working

ikons. Ask the bishops and men in positions of authority why they

do so, and they will say they do it for the sake of the people,

while the people kiss them because the bishops and men in

authority do so.

 

In spite of all the external varnish of modernity, learning, and

spirituality which the members of the Church begin nowadays to

assume in their works, their articles, their theological journals,

and their sermons, the practical work of the Russian Church

consists of nothing more than keeping the people in their present

condition of coarse and savage idolatry, and worse still,

strengthening and diffusing superstition and religious ignorance,

and suppressing that living understanding of Christianity which

exists in the people side by side with idolatry.

 

I remember once being present in the monks’ bookshop of the Optchy

Hermitage while an old peasant was choosing books for his

grandson, who could read. A monk pressed on him accounts of

relics, holidays, miraculous ikons, a psalter, etc. I asked the

old man, “Has he the Gospel?” “No.” “Give him the Gospel in

Russian,” I said to the monk. “That will not do for him,”

answered the monk. There you have an epitome of the work of our

Church.

 

But this is only in barbarous Russia, the European and American

reader will observe. And such an observation is just, but only so

far as it refers to the government, which aids the Church in its

task of stultification and corruption in Russia.

 

It is true that there is nowhere in Europe a government so

despotic and so closely allied with the ruling Church. And

therefore the share of the temporal power in the corruption of the

people is greatest in Russia. But it is untrue that the Russian

Church in its influence on the people is in any respect different

from any other church.

 

The churches are everywhere the same, and if the Catholic, the

Anglican, or the Lutheran Church has not at hand a government as

compliant as the Russian, it is not due to any indisposition to

profit by such a government.

 

The Church as a church, whatever it may be—Catholic, Anglican,

Lutheran, Presbyterian—every church, in so far as it is a church,

cannot but strive for the same object as the Russian Church.

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