The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / MiscellaniesTolstoy, Leo, graf
Religion
The Kingdom of God is Within You / Christianity and Patriotism / Miscellanies
Tolstoy, Leo, graf
Russian literature -- Translations into English
After these commandments there must and will follow higher and
higher ones on the path to perfection, which is indicated by the
teaching.
And so it is the peculiarity of the Christian teaching that it makes
higher demands than those which are expressed in these commandments,
but under no condition minimizes the demands, either of the ideal
itself, or of these commandments, as is done by people who judge
the teaching of Christianity free from the standpoint of the social
conception of life.
Such is one misconception of the scientific men concerning the
meaning and significance of Christ's teaching; the other, which
flows from the same source, consists in the substitution of the love
and service of men, of humanity, for the Christian demand for loving
God and serving Him.
The Christian teaching of loving God and serving Him, and (only in
consequence of this love and this service) of the love and service
of our neighbour, appears obscure, mystical, and arbitrary to the
men of science, and they completely exclude the demand of love of
God and of serving Him, assuming that the teaching about this love
of men, of humanity, is much more intelligible and firm and better
grounded.
The men of science teach theoretically that the good and sensible
life is only the life of serving the whole of humanity, and in this
alone do they see the meaning of the Christian teaching; to this
teaching do they reduce the Christian teaching; for this their
teaching do they seek a confirmation in the Christian teaching,
assuming that their teaching and the Christian teaching are one and
the same.
This opinion is quite faulty. The Christian teaching, and that of
the positivists, communists, and all the preachers of a universal
brotherhood of men, which is based on the profitableness of such a
brotherhood, have nothing in common among themselves, and differ
from one another more especially in this, that the Christian
teaching has firm, clear foundations in the human soul, while the
teaching of the love of humanity is only a theoretical deduction
from analogy.
The teaching of the love of humanity alone has for its basis the
social conception of life.
The essence of the social conception of life consists in the
transference of the meaning of our personal lives into the life of
the aggregate of personalities,--the tribe, the family, the race,
the state. This transference has taken place easily and naturally in
its first forms, in the transference of the meaning of life from the
personality to the tribe, the family. But the transference to the
race or nation is more difficult and demands a special education for
it; and the transference of the consciousness to the state forms the
limit of such a transference.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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