Leo Tolstoy

Shakespeare: The Christian Teaching Letters and Introduction Leo Tolstoy

This volume of supplementary writings of Leo Tolstoy is about equally divided between controversial and literary topics. His convictions, deeply rooted in his studies of the teachings of Jesus, as he interpreted them, cause his arraignments of both Church and State. The Church, with its theological doctrines of the Trinity, of the Sacraments, of the hierarchy, is a blind leader of the blind. Pretending to be Christian, it has entirely departed from the ideals of Christ. The State, necessarily founded on violence or force, and safeguarded in the interests of the few by these few who seize all the power to compel the many to carry out their autocratic and arbitrary will, is the personification of Anti-Christ. Not merely the State as represented by a monarchy or an Empire but even a so-called democracy, if a majority, however preponderant, brought any pressure on the minority to carry out its will, this would be in his opinion, contrary to the teachings of the Gospels. Therefore, it is the duty of every right-thinking man to refuse to pay taxes, to serve in the army or in a police-force, to hold a position in the pay of the State.

He was a philosophical anarchist. No doubt if the whole population of any country consisted in men who absolutely followed the Golden Rule, lived by the labor of his own hands, asked nothing from his neighbors, was contented with a perfectly simple life, there would be no need of taxes, or of a police-force or of an army or of a central Government. Indeed, most of us are in that sense of the word practically anarchists most of the time and do not even know it. We are unconscious of any force applied to us.