The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (reading diary .txt) 📖
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Russia:
“Tiflis, October 2, 1818.
“In the morning the commandant told me that five peasants
belonging to a landowner in the Tamboff government had lately
been sent to Georgia. These men had been sent for soldiers,
but they would not serve; they had been several times flogged
and made to run the gauntlet, but they would submit readily to
the cruelest tortures, and even to death, rather than serve.
‘Let us go,’ they said, ‘and leave us alone; we will not hurt
anyone; all men are equal, and the Tzar is a man like us; why
should we pay him tribute; why should I expose my life to
danger to kill in battle some man who has done me no harm? You
can cut us to pieces and we will not be soldiers. He who has
compassion on us will give us charity, but as for the
government rations, we have not had them and we do not want to
have them’ These were the words of those peasants, who declare
that there are numbers like them Russia. They brought them
four times before the Committee of Ministers, and at last
decided to lay the matter before the Tzar who gave orders that
they should be taken to Georgia for correction, and commanded
the commander-in-chief to send him a report every month of
their gradual success in bringing these peasants to a better
mind.”
How the correction ended is not known, as the whole episode indeed
was unknown, having been kept in profound secrecy.
This was how the government behaved seventy-five years ago—this
is how it has behaved in a great cumber of cases, studiously
concealed from the people. And this is how the government behaves
now, except in the case of the German Mennonites, living in the
province of Kherson, whose plea against military service is
considered well grounded. They are made to work off their term of
service in labor in the forests.
But in the recent cases of refusal on the part of Mennonites to
serve in the army on religious grounds, the government authorities
have acted in the following manner:
To begin with, they have recourse to every means of coercion used
in our times to “correct” the culprit and bring him to “a better
mind,” and these measures are carried out with the greatest
secrecy. I know that in the case of one man who declined to serve
in 1884 in Moscow, the official correspondence on the subject had
two months after his refusal accumulated into a big folio, and was
kept absolutely secret among the Ministry.
They usually begin by sending the culprit to the priests, and the
latter, to their shame be it said, always exhort him to obedience.
But since the exhortation in Christ’s name to forswear Christ is
for the most part unsuccessful, after he has received the
admonitions of the spiritual authorities, they send him to the
gendarmes, and the latter, finding, as a rule, no political cause
for offense in him, dispatch him back again, and then he is sent
to the learned men, to the doctors, and to the madhouse. During
all these vicissitudes he is deprived of liberty and has to endure
every kind of humiliation and suffering as a convicted criminal.
(All this has been repeated in four cases.) The doctors let him
out of the madhouse, and then every kind of secret shift is
employed to prevent him from going free—whereby others would be
encouraged to refuse to serve as he has done—and at the same time
to avoid leaving him among the soldiers, for fear they too should
learn from him that military service is not at all their duty by
the law of God, as they are assured, but quite contrary to it.
The most convenient thing for the government would be to kill the
non-resistant by flogging him to death or some other means, as was
done in former days. But to put a man openly to death because he
believes in the creed we all confess is impossible. To let a man
alone who has refused obedience is also impossible. And so the
government tries either to compel the man by ill-treatment to
renounce Christ, or in some way or other to get rid of him
unobserved, without openly putting him to death, and to hide
somehow both the action and the man himself from other people.
And so all kinds of shifts and wiles and cruelties are set on foot
against him. They either send him to the frontier or provoke him
to insubordination, and then try him for breach of discipline and
shut him up in the prison of the disciplinary battalion, where
they can ill treat him freely unseen by anyone, or they declare
him mad, and lock him up in a lunatic asylum. They sent one man
in this way to Tashkend—that is, they pretended to transfer to
the Tashkend army; another to Omsk; a third him they convicted of
insubordination and shut up in prison; a fourth they sent to a
lunatic asylum.
Everywhere the same story is repeated. Not only the government,
but the great majority of liberal, advanced people, as they are
called, studiously turn away from everything that has been said,
written, or done, or is being done by men to prove the
incompatibility of force in its most awful, gross, and glaring
form—in the form, that is, of an army of soldiers prepared to
murder anyone, whoever it may be—with the teachings of
Christianity, or even of the humanity which society professes as
its creed.
So that the information I have gained of the attitude of the
higher ruling classes, not only in Russia but in Europe and
America, toward the elucidation of this question has convinced me
that there exists in these ruling classes a consciously hostile
attitude to true Christianity, which is shown pre-eminently in
their reticence in regard to all manifestations of it.
CHAPTER II.
CRITICISMS OF THE DOCTRINE OF NONRESISTANCE TO EVIL BY FORCE ON
THE PART OF BELIEVERS AND OF UNBELIEVERS.
Fate of the Book “What I Believe”—Evasive Character of Religious
Criticisms of Principles of my Book—1st Reply: Use of Force
not Opposed to Christianity—2d Reply: Use of Force Necessary
to Restrain Evil Doers—3d Reply: Duty of Using Force in
Defense of One’s Neighbor—4th Reply: The Breach of the Command
of Nonresistance to be Regarded Simply as a Weakness—5th
Reply: Reply Evaded by Making Believe that the Question has
long been Decided—To Devise such Subterfuges and to take
Refuge Behind the Authority of the Church, of Antiquity, and of
Religion is all that Ecclesiastical Critics can do to get out
of the Contradiction between Use of Force and Christianity in
Theory and in Practice—General Attitude of the Ecclesiastical
World and of the Authorities to Profession of True
Christianity—General Character of Russian Freethinking
Critics—Foreign Freethinking Critics—Mistaken Arguments of
these Critics the Result of Misunderstanding the True Meaning
of Christ’s Teaching.
The impression I gained of a desire to conceal, to hush up, what I
had tried to express in my book, led me to judge the book itself
afresh.
On its appearance it had, as I had anticipated, been forbidden,
and ought therefore by law to have been burnt. But, at the same
time, it was discussed among officials, and circulated in a great
number of manuscript and lithograph copies, and in translations
printed abroad.
And very quickly after the book, criticisms, both religious and
secular in character, made their appearance, and these the
government tolerated, and even encouraged. So that the refutation
of a book which no one was supposed to know anything about was
even chosen as the subject for theological dissertations in the
academies.
The criticisms of my book, Russian and foreign alike, fall under
two general divisions—the religious criticisms of men who regard
themselves as believers, and secular criticisms, that is, those of
freethinkers.
I will begin with the first class. In my book I made it an
accusation against the teachers of the Church that their teaching
is opposed to Christ’s commands clearly and definitely expressed
in the Sermon on the Mount, and opposed in especial to his command
in regard to resistance to evil, and that in this way they deprive
Christ’s teaching of all value. The Church authorities accept the
teaching of the Sermon on the Mount on nonresistance to evil by
force as divine revelation; and therefore one would have thought
that if they felt called upon to write about my book at all, they
would have found it inevitable before everything else to reply to
the principal point of my charge against them, and to say plainly,
do they or do they not admit the teaching of the Sermon on the
Mount and the commandment of nonresistance to evil as binding on
a Christian. And they were bound to answer this question, not
after the usual fashion (i. e., “that although on the one side one
cannot absolutely deny, yet on the other side one cannot main
fully assent, all the more seeing that,” etc., etc.). No; they
should have answered the question as plainly as it was put
in my book—Did Christ really demand from his disciples
that they should carry out what he taught them in the Sermon on
the Mount? And can a Christian, then, or can he not, always
remaining a Christian, go to law or make any use of the law, or
seek his own protection in the law? And can the Christian, or can
he not, remaining a Christian, take part in the administration of
government, using compulsion against his neighbors? And—the most
important question hanging over the heads of all of us in these
days of universal military service—can the Christian, or can he
not, remaining a Christian, against Christ’s direct prohibition,
promise obedience in future actions directly opposed to his
teaching? And can he, by taking his share of service in the army,
prepare himself to murder men, and even actually murder them?
These questions were put plainly and directly, and seemed to
require a plain and direct answer; but in all the criticisms of my
book there was no such plain and direct answer. No; my book
received precisely the same treatment as all the attacks upon the
teachers of the Church for their defection from the Law of Christ
of which history from the days of Constantine is full.
A very great deal was said in connection with my book of my having
incorrectly interpreted this and other passages of the Gospel, of
my being in error in not recognizing the Trinity, the redemption,
and the immortality of the soul. A very great deal was said, but
not a word about the one thing which for every Christian is the
most essential question in life—how to reconcile the duty of
forgiveness, meekness, patience, and love for all, neighbors and
enemies alike, which is so clearly expressed in the words of our
teacher, and in the heart of each of us—how to reconcile this
duty with the obligation of using force in war upon men of our own
or a foreign people.
All that are worth calling answers to this question can be brought
under the following five heads. I have tried to bring together in
this connection all I could, not only from the criticisms on my
book, but from what has been written in past times on this theme.
The first and crudest form of reply consists in the bold assertion
that the use of force is not opposed by the teaching of Christ;
that it is permitted, and even enjoined, on the Christian by the
Old and New Testaments.
Assertions of this kind proceed, for the most part, from men who
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