Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1908
Source: From RevoltLib.com
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
The Christian teaching in its true meaning, acknowledging the SUPREME LAW of human life to be the law of love which in no instance permits violence between men, is so close to the heart of man and gives such undoubted freedom, such independent happiness to both the individual and groups of people, as well as to the whole of humanity, that it would seem this need only be known for all men to accept it as the guiding principle of their behavior. And, in spite of all the efforts of the Church to conceal this law, people have really come to understand this more and more and striven to realize it. But the unhappy fact is that at the time when the true meaning of the Christian teaching started becoming clearer to people, a large section of the Christian world has already become accustomed to regarding the truth as existing in external religious forms. And these forms not only hide the true meaning of the Christian teaching but uphold a system of government that is in direct opposition to it. Thus, in order to perceive the Christian teaching in its true meaning, the people of the Christian world, who have, to a greater or lesser extent, understood the truth of Christianity, must free themselves not only from their belief in the false forms of a perverted Christian teaching, but also from belief in the necessity and inevitability of that system of government that was founded on this false Church religion.
Thus, although liberation from false religious forms is taking place ever more frequently, the people of our time, having rejected belief in dogmas, sacraments, miracles, the sanctity of the Bible and other institutions of the Church, are nevertheless unable to free themselves from those false teachings of the State, founded on a perverted Christianity and hiding the true one.
Some people, the majority of the working people, following tradition, fulfill the requirements of the Church and, partially believing in that teaching, they BELIEVE, without the least doubt they literally believe, in that system of government founded on violence that stems from the Church faith and which can under no circumstance be compatible with the Christian faith in its true meaning. Other people, the so-called educated ones, who on the whole have long ceased to believe in the Church and consequently in any kind of Christianity, believe as unconsciously as the simple folk in the system of government founded on violence, which was introduced and established by the very Church Christianity they have long ceased to believe in.
And so, those who, like the working populace, believe in the lawfulness of the existing structure of society, as too the so-called educated people who try, either gradually or by revolutionary processes, to change the existing order, believe equally in the necessity of violence as a chief weapon for structuring society. And neither one of them either acknowledges, or is capable of imagining, a social structure other than one based on violence.
It is just this unconscious faith or, rather, the superstition the people of the Christian world have in the lawfulness of upholding the structure of the world by violence, as well as in lawfulness and the necessity of violence in itself; it is just this faith founded on perverted Christianity and directly opposed to the truth (although people who have freed themselves from belief in pseudo-Christianity fail to recognize this), that has been, and is still today, the chief obstacle to man’s acceptance of the Christian teaching in its real meaning – a meaning which is now becoming clearer and clearer.