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The Kingdom of God is within you by Leo Tolstoy

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> The Kingdom of God is within you




This was spoken of the Pharisees, who fulfilled all the external
observances prescribed by the law, and therefore the words
"whatsoever they bid you observe, that observe and do," refer to
works of mercy and goodness, and the words "do not ye after their
works, for they say and do not," refer to their observance of
ceremonies and their neglect of good works, and have exactly the
opposite meaning to that which the Churchmen try to give to the
passage, interpreting it as an injunction to observe ceremonies.
External observances and the service of truth and goodness are for
the most part difficult to combine; the one excludes the other.
So it was with the Pharisees, so it is now with Church Christians.

If a man can be saved by the redemption, by sacraments, and by
prayer, then he does not need good works.

The Sermon on the Mount, or the Creed. One cannot believe in both.
And Churchmen have chosen the latter. The Creed is taught and is
read as a prayer in the churches, but the Sermon on the Mount is
excluded even from the Gospel passages read in the churches, so
that the congregation never hears it in church, except on those
days when the whole of the Gospel is read. Indeed, it could not
he otherwise. People who believe in a wicked and senseless God--
who has cursed the human race and devoted his own Son to
sacrifice, and a part of mankind to eternal torment--cannot
believe in the God of love. The man who believes in a God, in a
Christ coming again in glory to judge and to punish the quick and
the dead, cannot believe in the Christ who bade us turn the left
cheek, judge not, forgive these that wrong us, and love our
enemies. The man who believes in the inspiration of the Old
Testament and the sacred character of David, who commanded on his
deathbed the murder of an old man who had cursed him, and whom he
could not kill himself because he was bound by an oath to him, and
the similar atrocities of which the Old Testament is full, cannot
believe in the holy love of Christ. The man who believes in the
Church's doctrine of the compatibility of warfare and capital
punishment with Christianity cannot believe in the brotherhood of
all men.

And what is most important of all--the man who believes in
salvation through faith in the redemption or the sacraments,
cannot devote all his powers to realizing Christ's moral teaching
in his life.

The man who has been instructed by the Church in the profane
doctrine that a man cannot be saved by his own powers, but that
there is another means of salvation, will infallibly rely upon
this means and not on his own powers, which, they assure him, it
is sinful to trust in.

The teaching of every Church, with its redemption and sacraments,
excludes the teaching of Christ; most of all the teaching of the
Orthodox Church with its idolatrous observances.

"But the people have always believed of their own accord as they
believe now," will be said in answer to this. "The whole history
of the Russian people proves it. One cannot deprive the people of
their traditions." This statement, too, is misleading. The
people did certainly at one time believe in something like what
the Church believes in now, though it was far from being the same
thing. In spite of their superstitious regard for ikons,
housespirits, relics, and festivals with wreaths of birch leaves,
there has still always been in the people a profound moral and
living understanding of Christianity, which there has never been
in the Church as a whole, and which is only met with in its best
representatives. But the people, notwithstanding all the
prejudices instilled into them by the government and the Church,
have in their best representatives long outgrown that crude stage
of understanding, a fact which is proved by the springing up
everywhere of the rationalist sects with which Russia is swarming
to-day, and on which Churchmen are now carrying on an ineffectual
warfare. The people are advancing to a consciousness of the
moral, living side of Christianity. And then the Church
comes forward, not borrowing from the people, but zealously
instilling into them the petrified formalities of an extinct
paganism, and striving to thrust them back again into the
darkness from which they are emerging with such effort.

"We teach the people nothing new, nothing but what they believe,
only in a more perfect form," say the Churchmen. This is just
what the man did who tied up the full-grown chicken and thrust it
back into the shell it had come out of.

I have often been irritated, though it would be comic if the
consequences were not so awful, by observing how men shut one
another in a delusion and cannot get out of this magic circle.

The first question, the first doubt of a Russian who is beginning
to think, is a question about the ikons, and still more the
miraculous relics: Is it true that they are genuine, and that
miracles are worked through them? Hundreds of thousands of men
put this question to themselves, and their principal difficulty in
answering it is the fact that bishops, metropolitans, and all men
in positions of authority kiss the relics and wonder-working
ikons. Ask the bishops and men in positions of authority why they
do so, and they will say they do it for the sake of the people,
while the people kiss them because the bishops and men in
authority do so.

In spite of all the external varnish of modernity, learning, and
spirituality which the members of the Church begin nowadays to
assume in their works, their articles, their theological journals,
and their sermons, the practical work of the Russian Church
consists of nothing more than keeping the people in their present
condition of coarse and savage idolatry, and worse still,
strengthening and diffusing superstition and religious ignorance,
and suppressing that living understanding of Christianity which
exists in the people side by side with idolatry.

I remember once being present in the monks' bookshop of the Optchy
Hermitage while an old peasant was choosing books for his
grandson, who could read. A monk pressed on him accounts of
relics, holidays, miraculous ikons, a psalter, etc. I asked the
old man, "Has he the Gospel?" "No." "Give him the Gospel in
Russian," I said to the monk. "That will not do for him,"
answered the monk. There you have an epitome of the work of our
Church.

But this is only in barbarous Russia, the European and American
reader will observe. And such an observation is just, but only so
far as it refers to the government, which aids the Church in its
task of stultification and corruption in Russia.

It is true that there is nowhere in Europe a government so
despotic and so closely allied with the ruling Church. And
therefore the share of the temporal power in the corruption of the
people is greatest in Russia. But it is untrue that the Russian
Church in its influence on the people is in any respect different
from any other church.

The churches are everywhere the same, and if the Catholic, the
Anglican, or the Lutheran Church has not at hand a government as
compliant as the Russian, it is not due to any indisposition to
profit by such a government.

The Church as a church, whatever it may be--Catholic, Anglican,
Lutheran, Presbyterian--every church, in so far as it is a church,
cannot but strive for the same object as the Russian Church.
That object is to conceal the real meaning of Christ's teaching
and to replace it by their own, which lays no obligation on them,
excludes the possibility of understanding the true teaching of
Christ, and what is the chief consideration, justifies the
existence of priests supported at the people's expense.

What else has Catholicism done, what else is it doing in its
prohibition of reading the Gospel, and in its demand for
unreasoning submission to Church authorities and to an infallible
Pope? Is the religion of Catholicism any other than that of the
Russian Church? There is the same external ritual, the same
relics, miracles, and wonder-working images of Notre Dame, and the
same processions; the same loftily vague discussions of
Christianity in books and sermons, and when it comes to practice,
the same supporting of the present idolatry. And is not the same
thing done in Anglicanism, Lutheranism, and every denomination of
Protestantism which has been formed into a church? There is the
same duty laid on their congregations to believe in the dogmas
expressed in the fourth century, which have lost all meaning for
men of our times, and the same duty of idolatrous worship, if not
of relics and ikons, then of the Sabbath Day and the letter of the
Bible. There is always the same activity directed to concealing
the real duties of Christianity, and to putting in their place an
external respectability and cant, as it is so well described by
the English, who are peculiarly oppressed by it. In Protestantism
this tendency is specially remarkable because it has not the
excuse of antiquity. And does not exactly the same thing show
itself even in contemporary revivalism--the revived Calvinism and
Evangelicalism, to which the Salvation Army owes its origin?

Uniform is the attitude of all the churches to the teaching of
Christ, whose name they assume for their own advantage.

The inconsistency of all church forms of religion with the
teaching of Christ is, of course, the reason why special efforts
are necessary to conceal this inconsistency from people. Truly,
the need only imagine ourselves in the position of any grown-up
man, not necessarily educated, even the simplest man of the
present day, who has picked up the ideas that are everywhere in
the air nowadays of geology, physics, chemistry, cosmography, or
history, when he, for the first time, consciously compares them
with the articles of belief instilled into him in childhood, and
maintained by the churches--that God created the world in six
days, and light before the sun; that Noah shut up all the animals
in his ark, and so on; that Jesus is also God the Son, who created
all before time was; that this God came down upon earth to atone
for Adam's sin; that he rose again, ascended into heaven, and
sitteth on the right hand of the Father, and will come in the
clouds to judge the world, and so on. All these propositions,
elaborated by men of the fourth century, had a certain meaning for
men of that time, but for men of to-day they have no meaning
whatever. Men of the present day can repeat these words with
their lips, but believe them they cannot. For such sentences as
that God lives in heaven, that the heavens opened and a voice from
somewhere said something, that Christ rose again, and ascended
somewhere in heaven, and again will come from somewhere on the
clouds, and so on, have no meaning for us.

A man who regarded the heavens as a solid, finite vault could
believe or disbelieve that God created the heavens, that the
heavens opened, that Christ ascended into heaven, but for us all
these phrases nave no sense whatever. Men of the present can only
believe, as indeed they do, that they ought to believe in this;
but believe it they cannot, because it has no meaning for them.

Even if all these phrases ought to be interpreted in a figurative
sense and are allegories, we know that in the first place all
Churchmen are not agreed about it, but, on the contrary, the
majority stick to understanding the Holy Scripture in its literal
sense; and secondly, that these allegorical interpretations are
very varied and are not supported by any evidence.

But even if a man wants to force himself to believe in the
doctrines of the Church just as they are taught to him, the
universal diffusion of education and of the Gospel and of
communication between people of different forms of religion
presents a still more insurmountable obstacle to his doing so.

A man of the present day need only buy a Gospel for three copecks
and read through the plain words, admitting of no
misinterpretation, that Christ said to the Samaritan woman "that
the Father seeketh not worshipers at Jerusalem, nor in this
mountain nor in that, but worshipers in spirit and in truth," or
the saying that "the Christian must not pray like the heathen, nor
for show, but secretly, that is, in his closet," or that Christ's
follower must call no man master or father--he need only read
these words to be thoroughly convinced that the Church pastors,
who call themselves teachers in opposition to Christ's precept,
and dispute among themselves, constitute no kind of authority, and
that what the Churchmen teach us is not Christianity. Less even
than that is necessary. Even if a man nowadays did continue to
believe in miracles and did not read the Gospel, mere association
with people of different forms of religion and faith, which
happens so easily in these days, compels him to doubt of the truth
of his own faith. It was all very well when a man did not see men
of any other form of religion than his own; he believed that his
form of religion was the one true one. But a thinking man has
only to come into contact--as constantly happens in these days--
with people, equally good and bad, of different denominations, who
condemn each other's beliefs, to doubt of the truth of the belief
he professes himself. In these days only a man who is absolutely
ignorant or absolutely indifferent to the vital questions with
which religion deals, can remain in the faith of the Church.

What deceptions and what strenuous efforts the churches must
employ to continue, in spite of all these tendencies subversive of
the faith, to build churches, to perform masses, to preach, to
teach, to convert, and, most of all, to receive for it all immense
emoluments, as do all these priests, pastors, incumbents,
superintendents, abbots, archdeacons, bishops, and archbishops.
They need special supernatural efforts. And the churches do, with
ever-increasing intensity and zeal, make such efforts. With us in
Russia, besides other means, they employ, simple brute force, as
there the temporal power is willing to obey the Church. Men who
refuse an external assent to the faith, and say so openly, are
either directly punished or deprived of their rights; men who
strictly keep the external forms of religion are rewarded and
given privileges.

That is how the Orthodox clergy proceed; but indeed all churches
without exception avail themselves of every means for the purpose
--one of the most important of which is what is now called
hypnotism.

Every art, from architecture to poetry, is brought into
requisition to work its effect on men's souls and to reduce them
to a state of stupefaction, and this effect is constantly
produced. This use of hypnotizing influence on men to bring them
to a state of stupefaction is especially apparent in the
proceedings of the Salvation Army, who employ new practices to
which we are unaccustomed: trumpets, drums, songs, flags,
costumes, marching, dancing, tears, and dramatic performances.

But this only displeases us because these are new practices. Were
not the old practices in churches essentially the same, with their
special lighting, gold, splendor, candles, choirs, organ, bells,
vestments, intoning, etc.?

But however powerful this hypnotic influence may be, it is not the
chief nor the most pernicious activity of the
Church. The chief and most pernicious work of the Church is that
which is directed to the deception of children--these very
children of whom Christ said: "Woe to him that offendeth one of
these little ones." From the very first awakening of the
consciousness of the child they begin to deceive him, to instill
into him with the utmost solemnity what they do not themselves
believe in, and they continue to instill it into him till the
deception has by habit grown into the child's nature. They
studiously deceive the child on the most important subject in
life, and when the deception has so grown into his life that it
would be difficult to uproot it, then they reveal to him the whole
world of science and reality, which cannot by any means be
reconciled with the beliefs that have been instilled into him,
leaving it to him to find his way as best he can out of these
contradictions.

If one set oneself the task of trying to confuse a man so that he
could not think clearly nor free himself from the perplexity of
two opposing theories of life which had been instilled into him
from childhood, one could not invent any means more effectual than
the treatment of every young man educated in our so-called
Christian society.

It is terrible to think what the churches do to men. But
if one imagines oneself in the position of the men who constitute
the Church, we see they could not act differently. The churches
are placed in a dilemma: the Sermon on the Mount or the Nicene
Creed--the one excludes the other. If a man sincerely believes in
the Sermon on the Mount, the Nicene Creed must inevitably lose all
meaning and significance for him, and the Church and its
representatives together with it. If a man believes in the Nicene
Creed, that is, in the Church, that is, in those who call
themselves its representatives, the Sermon on the Mount becomes
superfluous for him. And therefore the churches cannot but make
every possible effort to obscure the meaning of the Sermon on the
Mount, and to attract men to themselves. It is only due to the
intense zeal of the churches in this direction that the influence
of the churches has lasted hitherto.

Let the Church stop its work of hypnotizing the masses, and
deceiving children even for the briefest interval of time, and men
would begin to understand Christ's teaching. But this
understanding will be the end of the churches and all their
influence. And therefore the churches will not for an instant
relax their zeal in the business of hypnotizing grown-up people
and deceiving children. This, then, is the work of the churches:
to instill a false interpretation of Christ's teaching into men,
and to prevent a true interpretation of it for the majority of so-
called believers.




CHAPTER IV.

CHRISTIANITY MISUNDERSTOOD BY MEN OF SCIENCE.

Attitude of Men of Science to Religions in General--What Religion
is, and What is its Significance for the Life of Humanity--
Three Conceptions of Life--Christian Religion the Expression of
the Divine Conception of Life--Misinterpretation of
Christianity by Men of Science, who Study it in its External
Manifestations Due to their Criticising it from Standpoint of
Social Conception of Life--Opinion, Resulting from this
Misinterpretation, that Christ's Moral Teaching is Exaggerated
and Cannot be put into Practice--Expression of Divine
Conception of Life in the Gospel--False Ideas of Men of Science
on Christianity Proceed from their Conviction that they have an
Infallible Method of Criticism--From which come Two
Misconceptions in Regard to Christian Doctrine--First
Misconception, that the Teaching Cannot be put into Practice,
Due to the Christian Religion Directing Life in a Way Different
from that of the Social Theory of Life--Christianity holds up
Ideal, does not lay down Rules--To the Animal Force of Man
Christ Adds the Consciousness of a Divine Force--Christianity
Seems to Destroy Possibility of Life only when the Ideal held
up is Mistaken for Rule--Ideal Must Not be Lowered--Life,
According to Christ's Teaching, is Movement--The Ideal and the
Precepts--Second Misconception Shown in Replacing Love and
Service of God by Love and Service of Humanity--Men of Science
Imagine their Doctrine of Service of Humanity and Christianity
are Identical--Doctrine of Service of Humanity Based on Social
Conception of Life--Love for Humanity, Logically Deduced from
Love of Self, has No Meaning because Humanity is a Fiction--
Christian Love Deduced from Love of God, Finds its Object in
the whole World, not in Humanity Alone--Christianity Teaches
Man to Live in Accordance with his Divine Nature--It Shows that
the Essence of the Soul of Man is Love, and that his Happiness
Ensues from Love of God, whom he Recognizes as Love within
himself.


Now I will speak of the other view of Christianity which hinders
the true understanding of it--the scientific view.

Churchmen substitute for Christianity the version they have framed
of it for themselves, and this view of Christianity they regard as
the one infallibly true one.

Men of science regard as Christianity only the tenets held by the
different churches in the past and present; and finding that these
tenets have lost all the significance of Christianity, they accept
it as a religion which has outlived its age.

To see clearly how impossible it is to understand the Christian
teaching from such a point of view, one must form for oneself an
idea of the place actually held by religions in general, by the
Christian religion in particular, in the life of mankind, and of
the significance attributed to them by science.

Just as the individual man cannot live without having some theory
of the meaning of his life, and is always, though often
unconsciously, framing his conduct in accordance with the meaning
he attributes to his life, so too associations of men living in
similar conditions--nations--cannot but have theories of the
meaning of their associated life and conduct ensuing from those
theories. And as the individual man, when he attains a fresh
stage of growth, inevitably changes his philosophy of life, and
the grown-up man sees a different meaning in it from the child, so
too associations of men--nations--are bound to change their
philosophy of life and the conduct ensuing from their philosophy,
to correspond with their development.

The difference, as regards this, between the individual man and
humanity as a whole, lies in the fact that the individual, in
forming the view of life proper to the new period of life on which
he is entering and the conduct resulting from it, benefits by the
experience of men who have lived before him, who have already
passed through the stage of growth upon which he is entering. But
humanity cannot have this aid, because it is always moving along a
hitherto untrodden track, and has no one to ask how to understand
life, and to act in the conditions on which it is entering and
through which no one has ever passed before.

Nevertheless, just as a man with wife and children cannot continue
to look at life as he looked at it when he was a child, so too in
the face of the various changes that are taking place, the greater
density of population, the establishment of communication between
different peoples, the improvements of the methods of the struggle
with nature, and the accumulation of knowledge, humanity cannot
continue to look at life as of old, and it must frame a new
theory of life, from which conduct may follow adapted to the new
conditions on which it has entered and is entering.

To meet this need humanity has the special power of producing men
who give a new meaning to the whole of human life--a theory of
life from which follow new forms of activity quite different from
all preceding them. The formation of this philosophy of life
appropriate to humanity in the new conditions on which it is
entering, and of the practice resulting from it, is what is called
religion.

And therefore, in the first place, religion is not, as science
imagines, a manifestation which at one time corresponded with the
development of humanity, but is afterward outgrown by it. It is a
manifestation always inherent in the life of humanity, and is as
indispensable, as inherent in humanity at the present time as at
any other. Secondly, religion is always the theory of the
practice of the future and not of the past, and therefore it is
clear that investigation of past manifestations cannot in any case
grasp the essence of religion.

The essence of every religious teaching lies not in the desire for
a symbolic expression of the forces of nature, nor in the dread of
these forces, nor in the craving for the marvelous, nor in the
external forms in which it is manifested, as men of science
imagine; the essence of religion lies in the faculty of men of
foreseeing and pointing out the path of life along which humanity
must move in the discovery of a new theory of life, as a result of
which the whole future conduct of humanity is changed and
different from all that has been before.

This faculty of foreseeing the path along which humanity must
move, is common in a greater or less degree to all men. But in
all times there have been men in whom this faculty was especially
strong, and these men have given clear and definite expression to
what all men felt vaguely, and formed a new philosophy of life
from which new lines of action followed for hundreds and thousands
of years.

Of such philosophies of life we know three; two have already been
passed through by humanity, and the third is that we are passing
through now in Christianity. These philosophies of life are three
in number, and only three, not because we have arbitrarily brought
the various theories of life together under these three heads, but
because all men's actions are always based on one of these three
views of life--because we cannot view life otherwise than in these
three ways.

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Turkey is restoring the citizenship of its most famous 20th century poet Nazim Hikmet over 50 years after it branded him a traitor.

Hikmet, a communist who died in exile in Moscow in 1963, was imprisoned in Turkey for more than a decade. He was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 1951 because of his communist views, but despite a ban on his poetry which remained in place until 1965, has remained one of Turkey's best-loved poets. His work, much of which was written in prison, including his masterpiece Human Landscapes, has been translated into more than 50 languages.

"This is very good news," said Richard McKane, Hikmet's English translator. "The restoration of his Turkish citizenship is long overdue: the people of Turkey and his readers are owed that."

Immortalised by Pablo Neruda, with whom he shared the Soviet Union's International Peace Prize in 1950, with the lines "Thanks for what you were and for the fire / which your song left forever burning", Hikmet was also supported by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, when given the editorship for a day of Turkish newspaper Radikal two years ago, used the example of Hikmet in his cover story to criticise the lack of freedom of expression in Turkey. In 2000, 500,000 Turks petitioned the government to restore Hikmet's citizenship rights and repatriate his remains.

Deputy prime minister Cemil Cicek told the Associated Press that it was time for the government to change its mind about Hikmet. "The crimes which forced the government to strip him of his citizenship at that time are no longer considered a crime," the BBC quoted him as saying.

Hikmet, whose remains are currently in Russia, had said that he wished to be buried in Turkey in his 1953 poem Testament, translated by Ruth Christie. "Friends if it's not my lot to see the day / of independence... / if I die before that day / - and it seems I will - / bury me in a village graveyard in Anatolia / and if it's fitting / and a plane tree grows at my head, / then there's no need for a gravestone or anything else."

Cicek said that Hikmet's family would now decide whether to ship his remains back to his homeland.

Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkey in the 1930s, with his themes ranging from war to love. Despite his imprisonment he retained a deep passion for Turkey. "I love my country", he wrote in one of his poems. "I swung in its lofty trees, I lay in its prisons. Nothing relieves my depression like the songs and tobacco of my country."

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