The Kingdom of God is within you by Leo Tolstoy

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The treatment of this subject by the learned historian of
Christianity, E. de Pressense, in his "Histoire du Dogme" (Paris,
1869), under the heading "Ubi Christus, ibi Ecclesia," may serve
as an illustration of the complete absence of anything like a
definition of what is understood by the word heresy. Here is what
he says in his introduction (p. 3):

"Je sais que l'on nous conteste le droit de qualifier ainsi
[that is, to call heresies] les tendances qui furent si
vivement combattues par les premiers Peres. La designation
meme d'heresie semble une atteinte portee a la liberte de
conscience et de pensee. Nous ne pouvons partager ce scrupule,
car il n'irait a rien moins qu'a enlever au Christianisme tout
caractere distinctif." [see Footnote]

[Footnote: "I know that our right to qualify thus the
tendencies which were so actively opposed by the early
Fathers is contested. The very use of the word heresy
seems an attack upon liberty of conscience and thought.
We cannot share this scruple; for it would amount to
nothing less than depriving Christianity of all
distinctive character."

And though he tells us that after Constantine's time the Church
did actually abuse its power by designating those who dissented
from it as heretics and persecuting them, yet he says, when
speaking of early times:

"L'eglise est une libre association; il y a tout profit a se
separer d'elle. La polemique contre l'erreur n'a d'autres
ressources que la pensee et le sentiment. Un type doctrinal
uniforme n'a pas encore ete elabore; les divergences
secondaires se produisent en Orient et en Occident avec une
entiere liberte; la theologie n'est point liee a d'invariables
formules. Si au sein de cette diversite apparait un fonds
commun de croyances, n'est-on pas en droit d'y voir non pas un
systeme formule et compose par les representants d'une
autorite d'ecole, mais la foi elle-meme dons son instinct le
plus sur et sa manifestation la plus spontanee? Si cette meme
unanimite qui se revele dans les croyances essentielles, se
retrouve pour repousser telles ou telles tendances ne serons
nous pas en droit de conclure que ces tendances etaient en
desacord flagrant avec les principes fondamentaux du
christianisme? Cette presomption ne se transformerait-elle
pas en certitude si nous reconnaissons dans la doctrine
universellement repoussee par l'Eglise les traits
caracteristiques de l'une des religions du passe? Pour dire
que le gnosticisme ou l'ebionitisme sont les formes legitimes
de la pensee chretienne il faut dire hardiment qu'il n'y a pas
de pensee chretienne, ni de caractere specifique qui la fasse
reconnaitre. Sous pretexte de l'elargir, on la dissout.
Personne au temps de Platon n'eut ose couvrir de son nom une
doctrine qui n'eut pas fait place a la theorie des idees; et
l'on eut excite les justes moqueries de la Grece, en voulant
faire d'Epicure ou de Zenon un disciple de l'Academie.
Reconnaissons donc que s'il existe une religion ou une
doctrine qui s'appelle christianisme, elle peut avoir ses
heresies." [see Footnote]

[Footnote: "The Church is a free association; there is much to
be gained by separation from it. Conflict with error has no
weapons other than thought and feeling. One uniform type of
doctrine has not yet been elaborated; divergencies in
secondary matters arise freely in East and West; theology is
not wedded to invariable formulas. If in the midst of this
diversity a mass of beliefs common to all is apparent, is one
not justified in seeing in it, not a formulated system, framed
by the representatives of pedantic authority, but faith itself
in its surest instinct and its most spontaneous manifestation?
If the same unanimity which is revealed in essential points of
belief is found also in rejecting certain tendencies, are we
not justified in concluding that these tendencies were in
flagrant opposition to the fundamental principles of
Christianity? And will not this presumption be transformed
into certainty if we recognize in the doctrine universally
rejected by the Church the characteristic features of one of
the religions of the past? To say that gnosticism or
ebionitism are legitimate forms of Christian thought, one must
boldly deny the existence of Christian thought at all, or any
specific character by which it could be recognized. While
ostensibly widening its realm, one undermines it. No one in
the time of Plato would lave ventured to give his name to a
doctrine in which the theory of ideas had no place, and one
would deservedly have excited the ridicule of Greece by trying
to pass off Epicurus or Zeno as a disciple of the Academy.
Let us recognize, then, that if a religion or a doctrine
exists which is called Christianity, it may have its
heresies."

The author's whole argument amounts to this: that every opinion
which differs from the code of dogmas we believe in at a given
time, is heresy. But of course at any given time and place men
always believe in something or other; and this belief in
something, indefinite at any place, at some time, cannot be a
criterion of truth.

It all amounts to this: since ubi Christus ibi Ecclesia, then
Christus is where we are.

Every so-called heresy, regarding, as it does, its own creed as
the truth, can just as easily find in Church history a series of
illustrations of its own creed, can use all Pressense's arguments
on its own behalf, and can call its own creed the one truly
Christian creed. And that is just what all heresies do and have
always done.

The only definition of heresy (the word [GREEK WORD], means a
part) is this: the name given by a body of men to any opinion
which rejects a part of the Creed professed by that body. The
more frequent meaning, more often ascribed to the word heresy, is
--that of an opinion which rejects the Church doctrine founded and
supported by the temporal authorities.

[TRANSCRIBIST'S NOTE: The GREEK WORD above used Greek letters,
spelled: alpha(followed by an apostrophe)-iota(with accent)-
rho-epsilon-sigma-iota-zeta]

There is a remarkable and voluminous work, very little known,
"Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-Historie," 1729, by Gottfried
Arnold, which deals with precisely this subject, and points out
all the unlawfulness, the arbitrariness, the senselessness, and
the cruelty of using the word heretic in the sense of reprobate.
This book is an attempt to write the history of Christianity in
the form of a history of heresy.

In the introduction the author propounds a series of questions:
(1) Of those who make heretics; (2) Of those whom they made
heretics; (3) Of heretical subjects themselves; (4) Of the method
of making heretics; and (5) Of the object and result of making
heretics.

On each of these points he propounds ten more questions, the
answers to which he gives later on from the works of well-known
theologians. But he leaves the reader to draw for himself the
principal conclusion from the expositions in the whole book. As
examples of these questions, in which the answers are to some
extent included also, I will quote the following. Under the 4th
head, of the manner in which heretics are made, he says, in one of
the questions (in the 7th):

"Does not all history show that the greatest makers of
heretics and masters of that craft were just these wise men,
from whom the Father hid his secrets, that is, the hypocrites,
the Pharisees, and lawyers, men utterly godless and perverted
(Question 20-21)? And in the corrupt times of Christianity
were not these very men cast out, denounced by the hypocrites
and envious, who were endowed by God with great gifts and who
would in the days of pure Christianity have been held in high
honor? And, on the other hand, would not the men who, in the
decline of Christianity raised themselves above all, and
regarded themselves as the teachers of the purest Christianity,
would not these very men, in the times of the apostles and
disciples of Christ, have been regarded as the most shameless
heretics and anti-Christians?"

He expounds, among other things in these questions, the theory
that any verbal expression of faith, such as was demanded by the
Church, and the departure from which was reckoned as heresy, could
never fully cover the exact religious ideas of a believer, and
that therefore the demand for an expression of faith in certain
words was ever productive of heresy, and he says, in Question 21:

"And if heavenly things and thoughts present themselves to a
man's mind as so great and so profound that he does not find
corresponding words to express them, ought one to call him a
heretic, because he cannot express his idea with perfect
exactness?"

And in Question 33:

"And is not the fact that there was no heresy in the earliest
days due to the fact that the Christians did not judge one
another by verbal expressions, but by deed and by heart, since
they had perfect liberty to express their ideas without the
dread of being called heretics; was it not the easiest and most
ordinary ecclesiastical proceeding, if the clergy wanted to get
rid of or to ruin anyone, for them to cast suspicion on the
person's belief, and to throw a cloak of heresy upon him, and
by this means to procure his condemnation and removal?

"True though it may be that there were sins and errors among
the so-called heretics, it is no less true and evident," he
says farther on, "from the innumerable examples quoted here
(i. e., in the history of the Church and of heresy), that there
was not a single sincere and conscientious man of any
importance whom the Churchmen would not from envy or other
causes have ruined."

Thus, almost two hundred years ago, the real meaning of heresy was
understood. And notwithstanding that, the same conception of it
has gone on existing up to now. And it cannot fail to exist so
long as the conception of a church exists. Heresy is the obverse
side of the Church. Wherever there is a church, there must be the
conception of heresy. A church is a body of men who assert that
they are in possession of infallible truth. Heresy is the opinion
of the men who do not admit the infallibility of the Church's
truth.

Heresy makes its appearance in the Church. It is the effort to
break through the petrified authority of the Church. All effort
after a living comprehension of the doctrine has been made by
heretics. Tertullian, Origen, Augustine, Luther, Huss,
Savonarola, Helchitsky, and the rest were heretics. It could not
be otherwise.

The follower of Christ, whose service means an ever-growing
understanding of his teaching, and an ever-closer fulfillment of
it, in progress toward perfection, cannot, just because he is a
follower, of Christ, claim for himself or any other that he
understands Christ's teaching fully and fulfills it. Still less
can he claim this for any body of men.

To whatever degree of understanding and perfection the follower of
Christ may have attained, he always feels the insufficiency of his
understanding and fulfillment of it, and is always striving toward
a fuller understanding and fulfillment. And therefore, to assert
of one's self or of any body of men, that one is or they are in
possession of perfect understanding and fulfillment of Christ's
word, is to renounce the very spirit of Christ's teaching.

Strange as it may seem, the churches as churches have always been,
and cannot but be, institutions not only alien in spirit to
Christ's teaching, but even directly antagonistic to it. With
good reason Voltaire calls the Church l'infame; with good reason
have all or almost all so-called sects of Christians recognized
the Church as the scarlet woman foretold in the Apocalypse; with
good reason is the history of the Church the history of the
greatest cruelties and horrors.

The churches as churches are not, as many people suppose,
institutions which have Christian principles for their basis, even
though they may have strayed a little away from the straight path.
The churches as churches, as bodies which assert their own
infallibility, are institutions opposed to Christianity. There is
not only nothing in common between the churches as such and
Christianity, except the name, but they represent two principles
fundamentally opposed and antagonistic to one another. One
represents pride, violence, self-assertion, stagnation, and death;
the other, meekness, penitence, humility, progress, and life.

We cannot serve these two masters; we have to choose between
them.

The servants of the churches of all denominations, especially of
later times, try to show themselves champions of progress in
Christianity. They make concessions, wish to correct the abuses
that have slipped into the Church, and maintain that one cannot,
on account of these abuses, deny the principle itself of a
Christian church, which alone can bind all men together in unity
and be a mediator between men and God. But this is all a mistake.
Not only have churches never bound men together in unity; they
have always been one of the principal causes of division between
men, of their hatred of one another, of wars, battles,
inquisitions, massacres of St. Bartholomew, and so on. And the
churches have never served as mediators between men and God. Such
mediation is not wanted, and was directly forbidden by Christ, who
has revealed his teaching directly and immediately to each man.
But the churches set up dead forms in the place of God, and far
from revealing God, they obscure him from men's sight. The
churches, which originated from misunderstanding of Christ's
teaching and have maintained this misunderstanding by their
immovability, cannot but persecute and refuse to recognize all
true understanding of Christ's words. They try to conceal this,
but in vain; for every step forward along the path pointed out for
us by Christ is a step toward their destruction.

To hear and to read the sermons and articles in which Church
writers of later times of all denominations speak of Christian
truths and virtues; to hear or read these skillful arguments that
have been elaborated during centuries, and exhortations and
professions, which sometimes seem like sincere professions, one is
ready to doubt whether the churches can be antagonistic to
Christianity. "It cannot be," one says, "that these people who
can point to such men as Chrysostom, Fenelon, Butler, and others
professing the Christian faith, were antagonistic to
Christianity." One is tempted to say, "The churches may have
strayed away from Christianity, they may be in error, but they
cannot be hostile to it." But we must look to the fruit to judge
the tree, as Christ taught c us. And if we see that their fruits
were evil, that the results of their activity were antagonistic to
Christianity, we cannot but admit that however good the men were--
the work of the Church in which these men took part was not
Christian. The goodness and worth of these men who served the
churches was the goodness and worth of the men, and not of the
institution they served. All the good men, such as Francis of
Assisi, and Francis of Sales, our Tihon Zadonsky, Thomas a Kempis,
and others, were good men in spite of their serving an institution
hostile to Christianity, and they would have been still better if
they had not been under the influence of the error which they were
serving.

But why should we speak of the past and judge from the past, which
may have been misrepresented and misunderstood by us? The
churches, with their principles and their practice, are not a
thing of the past. The churches are before us to-day, and we can
judge of them to some purpose by their practical activity, their
influence on men.

What is the practical work of the churches to-day? What is their
influence upon men? What is done by the churches among us, among
the Catholics and the Protestants of all denominations--what is
their practical work? and what are the results of their practical
work?

The practice of our Russian so-called Orthodox Church is plain to
all. It is an enormous fact which there is no possibility of
hiding and about which there can be no disputing.

What constitutes the practical work of this Russian Church, this
immense, intensely active institution, which consists of a
regiment of half a million men and costs the people tens of
millions of rubles?

The practical business of the Church consists in instilling by
every conceivable means into the mass of one hundred millions of
the Russian people those extinct relics of beliefs for which there
is nowadays no kind of justification, "in which scarcely anyone
now believes, and often not even those whose duty it is to diffuse
these false beliefs." To instill into the people the formulas of
Byzantine theology, of the Trinity, of the Mother of God, of
Sacraments, of Grace, and so on, extinct conceptions, foreign to
us, and having no kind of meaning for men of our times,
forms only one part of the work of the Russian Church. Another
part of its practice consists in the maintenance of idol-worship
in the most literal meaning of the word; in the veneration of holy
relics, and of ikons, the offering of sacrifices to them, and the
expectation of their answers to prayer. I am not going to speak
of what is preached and what is written by clergy of scientific or
liberal tendencies in the theological journals. I am going to
speak of what is actually done by the clergy through the wide
expanse of the Russian land among a people of one hundred
millions. What do they, diligently, assiduously, everywhere
alike, without intermission, teach the people? What do they
demand from the people in virtue of their (so-called) Christian
faith?

I will begin from the beginning with the birth of a child. At the
birth of a child they teach them that they must recite a prayer
over the child and mother to purify them, as though without this
prayer the mother of a newborn child were unclean. To do this the
priest holds the child in his arms before the images of the saints
(called by the people plainly gods) and reads words of exorcizing
power, and this purifies the mother. Then it is suggested to the
parents, and even exacted of them, under fear of punishment for
non-fulfillment, that the child must be baptized; that is, be
dipped by the priest three times into the water, while certain
words, understood by no one, are read aloud, and certain actions,
still less understood, are performed; various parts of the body
are rubbed with oil, and the hair is cut, while the sponsors blow
and spit at an imaginary devil. All this is necessary to purify
the child and to make him a Christian. Then it is instilled into
the parents that they ought to administer the sacrament to the
child, that is, give him, in the guise of bread and wine, a
portion of Christ's body to eat, as a result of which the child
receives the grace of God within it, and so on. Then it is
suggested that the child as it grows up must be taught to pray.
To pray means to place himself directly before the wooden boards
on which are painted the faces of Christ, the Mother of God, and
the saints, to bow his head and his whole body, and to touch his
forehead, his shoulders and his stomach with his right hand,
holding his fingers in a certain position, and to utter some words
of Slavonic, the most usual of which as taught to all children
are: Mother of God, virgin, rejoice thee, etc., etc.

Then it is instilled into the child as it is brought up that at
the sight of any church or ikon he must repeat the same action--i.
e., cross himself. Then it is instilled into him that on holidays
(holidays are the days on which Christ was born, though no one
knows when that was, on which he was circumcised, on which the
Mother of God died, on which the cross was carried in procession,
on which ikons have been set up, on which a lunatic saw a vision,
and so on)--on holidays he must dress himself in his best clothes
and go to church, and must buy candles and place them there before
the images of the saints. Then he must give offerings and prayers
for the dead, and little loaves to be cut up into three-cornered
pieces, and must pray many times for the health and prosperity of
the Tzar and the bishops, and for himself and his own affairs, and
then kiss the cross and the hand of the priest.
Besides these observances, it is instilled into him that at
least once a year he must confess. To confess means to go to the
church and to tell the priest his sins, on the theory that this
informing a stranger of his sins completely purifies him from
them. And after that he must eat with a little spoon a morsel of
bread with wine, which will purify him still more. Next it is
instilled into him that if a man and woman want their physical
union to be sanctified they must go to church, put on metal
crowns, drink certain potions, walk three times round a table to
the sound of singing, and that then the physical union of a man
and woman becomes sacred and altogether different from all other
such unions.

Further it is instilled into him in his life that he must observe
the following rules: not to eat butter or milk on certain days,
and on certain other days to sing Te Deums and requiems for the
dead, on holidays to entertain the priest and give him money, and
several times in the year to bring the ikons from the church, and
to carry them slung on his shoulders through the fields and
houses. It is instilled into him that on his death-bed a man must
not fail to eat bread and wine with a spoon, and that it will be
still better if he has time to be rubbed with sacred oil. This
will guarantee his welfare in the future life. After his death it
is instilled into his relatives that it is a good thing for the
salvation of the dead man to place a printed paper of prayers in
his hands; it is a good thing further to read aloud a certain book
over the dead body, and to pronounce the dead man's name in church
at a certain time. All this is regarded as faith obligatory on
everyone.

But if anyone wants to take particular care of his soul, then
according to this faith he is instructed that the greatest
security of the salvation of the soul in the world is attained by
offering money to the churches and monasteries, and engaging the
holy men by this means to pray for him. Entering monasteries too
and kissing relics and miraculous ikons, are further means of
salvation for the soul.

According to this faith ikons and relics communicate a special
sanctity, power, and grace, and even proximity to these objects,
touching them, kissing them, putting candles before them, crawling
under them while they are being carried along, are all efficacious
for salvation, as well as Te Deums repeated before these holy
things.

So this, and nothing else, is the faith called Orthodox, that is
the actual faith which, under the guise of Christianity, has been
with all the forces of the Church, and is now with especial zeal,
instilled into the people.

And let no one say that the Orthodox teachers place the essential
part of their teaching in something else, and that all these are
only ancient forms, which it is not thought necessary to do away
with. That is false. This, and nothing but this, is the faith
taught through the whole of Russia by the whole of the Russian
clergy, and of late years with especial zeal. There is nothing
else taught. Something different may be talked of and written of
in the capitals; but among the hundred millions of the people this
is what is done, this is what is taught, and nothing more.
Churchmen may talk of something else, but this is what they teach
by every means in their power.

All this, and the worship of relics and of ikons, has been
introduced into works of theology and into the catechisms. Thus
they teach it to the people in theory and in practice, using every
resource of authority, solemnity, pomp, and violence to impress
them. They compel the people, by overawing them, to believe in
this, and jealously guard this faith from any attempt to free the
people from these barbarous superstitions.

As I said when I published my book, Christ's teaching and his very
words about non-resistance to evil were for many years a subject
for ridicule and low jesting in my eyes, and Churchmen, far from
opposing it, even encouraged this scoffing at sacred things. But
try the experiment of saying a disrespectful word about a hideous
idol which is carried sacrilegiously about Moscow by drunken men
under the name of the ikon of the Iversky virgin, and you will
raise a groan of indignation from these same Churchmen. All that
they preach is an external observance of the rites of idolatry.
And let it not be said that the one does not hinder the other,
that "These ought ye to have done, and not to leave the other
undone." "All, therefore, whatsoever they bid you observe, that
observe and do; but do not ye after their works: for they say, and
do not" (Matt. xxiii. 23, 3).

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