Comparative literature; Degeneration; Europe -- Intellectual life
Thus we see that, though Tolstoi supposes he has succeeded in his
attempt to explain life’s problems by the Christian faith of the
masses, he has, on the contrary, fallen into its very opposite,
namely, Pantheism. The reply of the ‘wise,’ that he ‘is an accidental
concatenation of parts, and that there is no significance in life,’
‘drove him almost to suicide’; he is, on the contrary, quite tranquil
in the knowledge that[164] ‘the true life is ...not the life which is
past, nor that which will be, but is the life which now is, that which
confronts everyone at the present minute’; he expressly denies in _My
Religion_ the resurrection of the body and the individuality of the
soul, and does not notice that the teaching which contents him is quite
the same as that of the ‘wise,’ who ‘almost drove him into suicide.’
For if life exists only in the present, it can have no aim, since this
would refer to the future; and if the body does not rise again, and the
soul has no individual existence, then the ‘wise’ are quite right to
call the human being (certainly not accidental, but necessary, because
causally conditioned) ‘a concatenation of parts.’
Tolstoi’s theory of life, the fruit of the despairing mental labour
of his whole life, is therefore, nothing but a haze, a failure to
comprehend his own questions and answers, and hollow verbiage. His
ethics--on which he himself lays a far greater stress than on his
philosophy--is not in much better case than the latter. He comprises
them[165] in five laws, of which the fourth is the most important: ‘Do
not resist evil; suffer wrong, and do more than men ask; and so judge
not, nor suffer to be judged....’ To avenge one’s self only teaches to
avenge one’s self. His admirer, M. de Vogüé, expresses Tolstoi’s moral
philosophy in this form:[166] ‘Resist not evil, judge not, kill not.
Consequently no courts of justice, no armies, no prisons, no public
or private reprisals. No wars nor judgments. The world’s law is the
struggle for existence; the law of Christ is the sacrifice of one’s own
existence for others.’
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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