Tolstoy's Novel Idea

By Steven Hickey

After two thousand years of Christianity, one might assume obedience to the Sermon on the Mount would be foundational for the Christian life and the starting point for every Christian's journey toward Christlikeness. Yet strict obedience to the Sermon on the Mount has a long history of being frowned upon-foolhardy and fanatical. One would be har

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mountainside Publishing
• Release date: Apr 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736933411

Steven Hickey

Steve Hickey (PhD University of Aberdeen) is a former pastor and state legislator presently serving as scholar in residence at Alaska Christian College. His other books include Second Tolstoy: The Sermon on the Mount as Theotactics (Pickwick) and Obtainable Expectations: Timely Exposition of Jesus' Sermon on the Mount (Bridge-Logos). Ways and Means: A Primer on Theotactics and the Emulation of Jesus is forthcoming. He and his beloved Kristen live in Soldotna, Alaska.

Book preview

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A CONTROVERSIAL PERSON MEETS A CONTROVERSIAL PASSAGE

OBEY THE SERMON ON THE MOUNT. What a novel idea.¹

After two thousand years of Christianity, one might assume obedience to the Sermon on the Mount would be foundational for the Christian life and the starting point for every Christian’s journey toward Christlikeness. After all, the Sermon on the Mount is what Christlikeness looks like. If order says anything about priority, that the Sermon on the Mount is the first of five blocks of teaching in the gospel of Matthew underscores its importance to the Christian lifestyle and how it is Christ’s primary strategy for the kingdom of God to come on earth. Yet even within, and perhaps even more within Christendom, strict obedience to the Sermon on the Mount has a long history of being frowned upon—foolhardy and fanatical. One would be hard-pressed to find a section of the Bible where Christians contort themselves more to get out from underneath the demands than Matthew 5–7. Obedience has become optional, abnormal, and atypical. And sadly, very little has been written about the obedience of Leo Tolstoy, though he is, as will be contended here, the most significant interpreter of the Sermon on the Mount since the days of Jesus. As this controversial person embraced this controversial passage, a much-needed catalyst for thy kingdom come emerged.

Count Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (1828–1910) is widely considered the author of the greatest novel ever written, War and Peace. However, the thesis of this monograph is that Tolstoy’s greatest contribution to the world was not his novels, but his novel idea: obey the Sermon on the Mount. When the greatest novelist came under the spell of the greatest sermon, the seeds of a new and sorely needed reformation were planted. After an in-depth analysis of the various aspects of his novel idea—obedience to the Sermon on the Mount—this monograph will end by envisioning an obedience movement, which—for shame—is something Christendom has yet to ever really see.

Some measure of familiarity with the life and literature of Leo Tolstoy and also with the Sermon on the Mount is presumed in the following pages. Though basic background and biographical details can be surmised in what follows, they will be kept to a minimum. By way of preliminary remarks, it is important to explain why this monograph is intentionally lacking in critical distance. Frankly, there is no need for any real distance to join in the chorus of criticism against the religious Tolstoy and the religion of Tolstoy. In his introduction to Religion from Tolstoy to Camus, Walter Kaufmann observed, "The world has been exceedingly kind to the author of War and Peace, but it has not taken kindly to the later Tolstoy."² In his literary comparison and essays in contrast of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, George Steiner similarly finds an intrinsic generosity toward literature: "Literary criticism should arise out of a debt of love. In a manner evident and yet mysterious, the poem or the drama or novel seizes our imaginings. We are not the same when we put down the work as when we took it up … I say this because contemporary criticism [of Tolstoy] is of a different cast … it often comes to bury rather than praise.³

A. N. Wilson, who wrote a more recent significant Tolstoy biography, began with a personal recollection about sitting in a 1967 R. V. Sampson lecture on Tolstoy when Sampson referenced a Jewish proverb: If God came to live on earth, people would smash his windows. Wilson wrote, Professor Sampson went on to say that people had been smashing Tolstoy’s windows ever since he had enunciated his great principles of life. I was amazed that anyone could speak of a novelist as if he were divine … that excitement, and that amazement continue to this hour. I have never got over Professor Sampson’s lecture. He will certainly regard the present book as an exercise in window-smashing.⁴

What follows in this monograph is not window-smashing. What is sorely lacking are Tolstoyan interpreters who press past all that was and is wrong with Tolstoy the man, and Tolstoyan Christianity, to engage what he got right. For this reason, this monograph is sympathetic and generous toward Tolstoy. It conceives of the possibility that one can make significant errors and mistakes along the way and still arrive at the right place. In the earliest days of the Christian faith, great diversity of mind and motive presented some measure of confusion and consternation, which drew out the following response from apostolic leadership: But what does it matter? The important thing is that in every way, whether from false motives or true, Christ is preached (Philippians 1:18). Furthermore, this monograph is admittedly written from within, not from the outside looking in. Written from within meant only in the sense that there is a shared belief with Tolstoy that the Sermon on the Mount is the job description for every Christian. In writing from within, forthcoming assessments may seem far too benevolent, and it may be that they are far too forgiving. For those who prefer that his transgressions be central, the bibliography included at the end is well stocked with volumes highlighting the religious Tolstoy’s trespasses. If indeed one would be ill-advised to get their Christology or eschatology from Tolstoy, there most definitely are other things he can teach us, even in his weak attempts to live them himself. There are a rare few examples of thorough scholarship wading through his negatives to retrieve these positives.⁵ Tolstoy’s critics may be correct in their assessment that he threw the baby out with the bathwater. However, in future analysis of the religious Tolstoy, care must be taken that one does not do the same.

The highly critical, and also some unbelieving interpreters, tend to assume the very worst of Tolstoy, or passing judgment from the outside looking in, they have no grid to comprehend his piety. In the 1970s the Russian KGB kicked philologist and polemicist Alexander Boot out of Russia. More recently Boot wrote a blistering and remarkably sarcastic and sour book-length rant against Tolstoy and Tolstoyan Christianity. He contends that even Tolstoy’s long white beard and simple robe were part of the intentionally calculated deception of a false prophet who viewed himself as God; his disheveled visage [was] deliberately modelled on the crude public perception of God’s appearance.⁶ Boot insists that as in modern marketing, Tolstoy was carefully repositioning and repackaging. (Let us not forget that Tolstoy was primarily a communicator, not a contemplator.) He had to make the world accept him not just as a writer but as a God-like figure, a Christ surrogate.⁷

Tolstoy was not Jesus. In fact, he would have vehemently rebuked any who even confused him with a Christian cleric. Were he still with us today, considering the ugly disintegration of his marriage and his later views on marriage and celibacy, no one would recommend him to do pastoral premarital counselling. Neither would he get many invitations to address congregations from the pulpit. However, to this day he presents a challenge to many in all the various streams of Christendom who, frankly, look and act nothing like Christ. For these reasons, he is a prophet worthy of a fair hearing. If one is looking for a prophetic voice or a philosopher who is completely consistent with watertight propositions, keep looking. There is much in Tolstoy to criticise. Yet it will be shown here how some of the criticism is a biased misreading of Tolstoy by those who begin their analysis of Tolstoy with either an animosity toward the Christian faith or, conversely, an animosity toward any who speak against an orthodox interpretation of it. When A. N. Wilson, that aforementioned award-winning Tolstoy biographer, refers to the Sermon on the Mount as a counsel of craziness, it seems apparent the way of Jesus is as much the rub as anything of Tolstoy himself:

It is possible to read the rest of Tolstoy’s life as a heroic attempt to live as Jesus Christ told his followers that they should live. That, up to a point, is what it was. But it is also possible to read the next thirty years as an extraordinary demonstration of the fact that the Sermon on the Mount is an unliveable ethic, a counsel of craziness which, if followed to its relentless conclusion as Tolstoy tried to follow it, will lead to the reverse of peace and harmony and spiritual calm which are normally thought of as concomitants of the religious quest. Tolstoy’s religion is ultimately the most searching criticism of Christianity which there is. He shows that it does not work.⁸

Though Wilson’s biography is quite good on many counts, Colm McKeogh of the University of Waikato in New Zealand summed up the entire biography saying, A. N. Wilson presents Tolstoy as a headstrong fool and sees little of worth outside his literature.⁹ Certainly, from the vantage point of the unbelieving world, the way of Christ is the way of fools. Tolstoy was a radicalised Christian, a holy fool who took the teaching of Jesus more seriously than most anyone else in his day, and our day. Tolstoyan criticism throughout the past century suffers on occasion from subjectivity from an unbelieving disposition. Discernment is needed first to ascertain if the critic is first and foremost a critic of Jesus, a critic of the reasonableness of living the Sermon on the Mount, or merely a critic of Tolstoy. Any hoped-for objective analysis becomes subjectively tainted by preconceived negations of the Sermon on the Mount lifestyle Tolstoy was weakly trying to emulate. Outside Russian Orthodoxy in the nineteenth century¹⁰, some of his earliest twentieth-century criticism, and the most unflattering ones were from violent Marxist revolutionaries such as Lyubov Axelrod and Georgi Plekhanov.¹¹ Of course they have nothing good to say about the nonviolence and pacifism of Tolstoyan religiopolitics. Perhaps deep down and unbeknownst to even themselves, he reminds them of the Jesus they reject. An analysis of Tolstoyan Christianity tends to result in some form analysis of own’s own self along the way.

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1In referring to his novel idea, some measure of jest is intended rather than a technically strict claim that obedience to the Sermon on the Mount was somehow original to Tolstoy. As Tolstoy himself discovered in the years between his first book on obedience to the Sermon on the Mount (My Religion, 1884) and his second (The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1893), he became aware of other Christians and sects who held similar convictions. He mentioned in his second book (chapter 1) that the writing of his first book prompted others to contact him to make him aware of those like the American Quakers, William Lloyd Garrison, Adin Ballou, and the Czech Helchitsky. That multiple others were independently arriving at the same conclusion from a simple reading of the text adds credibility to his reading of the doctrine of Christ. Alexandre Christoyannopoulos wrote, So for all his apparently unique radicalism, Tolstoy’s reading of Christianity has been at least partly shared by many Christians before him as well as after him. Where Tolstoy is fairly unique, however, is in that he wrote the first systematic and extended explanation. Alexandre J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos, Turning the Other Cheek to Terrorism: Reflections on the Contemporary Significance of Leo Tolstoy’s Exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount, Politics and Religion 1, no. 1 (2008): 49.

2Walter A Kaufmann, Religion from Tolstoy to Camus (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1961), 7.

3George Steiner, Tolstoy or Dostoevsky: An Essay in Contrast (London: Faber and Faber, 1959) 3–4.

4A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (London: Atlantic Books, 2012), ix.

5At this writing, apart from the research behind this monograph, Dr. Alexandre J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos of the University of Kent appears to be the only other academic engaging Tolstoyan religiopolitical literature for its positive contributions for the modern situation. "More specifically on the political implications of Christianity, Tolstoy raised several points that could offer interesting first steps on pathways for further thinking. His approach itself may