RELIGION AND POLITICS
Tolstoy never renounced his art. A great artist cannot, even if he
would, abandon the reason of his existence. He can, for religious
reasons, cease to publish, but he cannot cease to write. Tolstoy
never interrupted his work of artistic creation. M. Paul Boyer, who
saw him, during the last few years, at Yasnaya Polyana, says that he
would now give prominence to his evangelistic works, now to his works
of imagination; he would work at the one as a relaxation from the
other. When he had finished some social pamphlet, some _Appeal to the
Rulers_ or _to the Ruled,_ he would allow himself to resume one of the
charming tales which he was, so to speak, in process of recounting to
himself; such as his _Hadji-Mourad,_ a military epic, which celebrated
an episode of the wars of the Caucasus and the resistance of the
mountaineers under Schamyl.[1] Art was still his relaxation, his
pleasure; but he would have thought it a piece of vanity to make a
parade of it. With the exception of his _Cycle of Readings for Every
Day of the Year_ (1904-5),[2] in which he collected the thoughts of
various writers upon _Life and the Truth_--a true anthology of the
poetical wisdom of the world, from the Holy Books of the East to the
works of contemporary writers--nearly all his literary works of art,
properly so called, which have been written later than 1900 have
remained in manuscript.[3]
On the other hand he was boldly and ardently casting his mystical and
polemical writings upon the social battlefield. From 1900 to 1910
such work absorbed the greater part of his time and energy. Russia
was passing through an alarming crisis; for a moment the empire of
the Tsars seemed to totter on its foundations and about to fall in
ruin. The Russo-Japanese war, the disasters which followed it, the
revolutionary troubles, the mutinies in the army and the fleet, the
massacres, the agrarian disorders, seemed to mark "the end of a
world," to quote the title of one of Tolstoy's writings. The height of
the crisis was reached in 1904 and 1905. During these years Tolstoy
published a remarkable series of works: _War and Revolution, The Great
Crime, The End of a World._ During the last ten years of his life
he occupied a situation unique not only in Russia but in the world.
He was alone, a stranger to all the parties, to all countries, and
rejected by his Church, which had excommunicated him.[4] The logic of
his reason and the revolutionary character of his faith had "led him
to this dilemma; to live a stranger to other men, or a stranger to the
truth." He recalls the Russian proverb: "An old man who lies is a rich
man who steals," and he severs himself from mankind in order to speak
the truth. He tells the whole truth, and to all. The old hunter of lies
continues, unweariedly, to mark down all superstitions, religious or
social, and all fetishes. The only exceptions are the old maleficent
powers--the persecutrix, the Church, and the imperial autocracy.
Perhaps his enmity towards them was in some degree appeased now that
all were casting stones at them. They were familiar; therefore they
were already not so formidable! After all, too, the Church and the
Tsar were carrying on their peculiar trades; they were at least not
deceptive. Tolstoy, in his letter to the Tsar Nikolas II.,[5] although
he speaks the truth in a manner entirely unaccommodating to the man as
sovereign, is full of gentleness for the sovereign as man; addressing
him as "dear brother," praying him to "pardon him if he has hurt him
unintentionally," and signing himself, "Your brother who wishes you
true happiness."
What Tolstoy can least find it in him to pardon--what he denounces with
the utmost hatred--are the new lies; not the old ones, which are no
longer able to deceive; not despotism, but the illusion of liberty. It
is difficult to say which he hates the more among the followers of the
newer idols: whether the Socialists or the "Liberals."
He had a long-standing antipathy for the Liberals. It had seized upon
him suddenly when, as an officer fresh from Sebastopol, he found
himself in the society of the literary men of St. Petersburg. It had
been one of the causes of his misunderstanding with Tourgenev. The
arrogant noble, the man of ancient race, could not support these
"intellectuals," with their profession of making the nation happy,
whether by its will or against it, by forcing their Utopian schemes
upon it. Very much a Russian, and of the old stamp,[6] he instinctively
distrusted all liberal innovations, and the constitutional ideas which
came from the West; and his two journeys abroad only intensified his
prejudices. On his return from his first journey he wrote:
"To avoid the ambition of Liberalism."
On his return from the second:
"A privileged society has no right whatsoever to educate in its own way
the masses of which it knows nothing."
In _Anna Karenin_ he freely expresses his contempt for Liberals in
general. Levine refuses to associate himself with the work of the
provincial institutions for educating the people, and the innovations
which are the order of the day. The picture of the elections to the
provincial assembly exposes the fool's bargain by which the country
changes its ancient Conservative administration for a Liberal
_régime_--nothing is really altered, except that there is one lie the
more, while the masters are of inferior blood.
"We are not worth very much perhaps," says the representative of the
aristocracy, "but none the less we have lasted a thousand years."
Tolstoy fulminates against the manner in which the Liberals abuse the
words, "The People: The Will of the People." What do they know of the
people? Who are the People?
But it is more especially when the Liberal movement seemed on the
point of succeeding and achieving the convocation of, the first
Duma that Tolstoy expressed most violently his disapprobation of its
constitutional ideas.
"During the last few years the deformation of Christianity has given
rise to a new species of fraud, which has rooted our peoples yet more
firmly in their servility. With the help of a complicated system of
parliamentary elections it was suggested to them that by electing their
representatives directly they were participating in the government,
and that in obeying them they were obeying their own will: in short,
that they were free. This is a piece of imposture. The people cannot
express its will, even with the aid of universal suffrage--1, because
no such collective will of a nation of many millions of inhabitants
could exist; 2, because even if it existed the majority of voices would
not be its expression. Without insisting on the fact that those elected
would legislate and administrate not for the general good but in order
to maintain themselves in power--without counting on the fact of the
popular corruption due to pressure and electoral corruption--this fraud
is particularly harmful because of the presumptuous slavery into which
all those who submit to it fall.... These free men recall the prisoners
who imagine that they are enjoying freedom when they have the right
to elect those of their gaolers who are entrusted with the interior
policing of the prison.... A member of a despotic State may be entirely
free, even in the midst of the most brutal violence. But a member of a
constitutional State is always a slave, for he recognises the legality
of the violence done him.... And now men wish to lead the Russian
people into the same state of constitutional slavery in which the other
European peoples dwell!"[7]
In his hostility towards Liberalism contempt was his dominant feeling.
In respect of Socialism his dominant feeling was--or rather would have
been--hatred, if Tolstoy had not forbidden himself to hate anything
whatever. He detested it doubly, because Socialism was the amalgamation
of two lies: the lie of liberty and the lie of science. Does it not
profess to be founded upon some sort of economic science, whose laws
absolutely rule the progress of the world?
Tolstoy is very hard upon science. He has pages full of terrible irony
concerning this modern superstition and "these futile problems: the
origin of species, spectrum analysis, the nature of radium, the theory
of numbers, animal fossils and other nonsense, to which people attach
as much importance to-day as they attributed in the Middle Ages to
the Immaculate Conception or the Duality of Substance." He derides
these "servants of science, who, just as the servants of the Church,
persuade themselves and others that they are saving humanity; who,
like the Church, believe in their own infallibility, never agree among
themselves, divide themselves into sects, and, like the Church, are
the chief cause of unmannerliness, moral ignorance, and the long delay
of humanity in freeing itself from the evils under which it suffers;
for they have rejected the only thing that could unite humanity:
the religious conscience."[8] But his anxiety redoubles, and his
indignation bursts its bounds, when he sees the dangerous weapon of the
new fanaticism in the hands of those who profess to be regenerating
humanity. Every revolutionist saddens him when he resorts to violence.
But the intellectual and theoretical revolutionary inspires him with
horror: he is a pedantic murderer, an arrogant, sterile intelligence,
who loves not men but ideas.[9]
Moreover, these ideas are of a low order.
"The object of Socialism is the satisfaction of the lowest needs of
man: his material well-being. And it cannot attain even this end by the
means it recommends."[10]
At heart, he is without love. He feels only hatred for the oppressors
and "a black envy for the assured and easy life of the rich: a greed
like that of the flies that gather about ordure."[11] When Socialism
is victorious the aspect of the world will be terrible. The European
horde will rush upon the weak and barbarous peoples with redoubled
force, and will enslave them, in order that the ancient proletariats of
Europe may debauch themselves at their leisure by idle luxury, as did
the people of Rome.[12]
Happily the principal energies of Socialism spend themselves in
smoke--in speeches, like those of M. Jaurès.
"What an admirable orator! There is something of everything in his
speeches--and there is nothing.... Socialism is a little like our
Russian orthodoxy: you press it, you push it into its last trenches,
you think you have got it fast, and suddenly it turns round and tells
you: 'No, I'm not the one you think, I'm somebody else.' And it slips
out of your hands.... Patience! Let time do its work. There will be
socialistic theories, as there are women's fashions, which soon pass
from the drawing-room to the servants' hall."[13]
Although Tolstoy waged war in this manner upon the Liberals and
Socialists, it was not--far from it--to leave the field free for
autocracy; on the contrary, it was that the battle might be fought in
all its fierceness between the old world and the new, after the army
of disorderly and dangerous elements had been eliminated. For Tolstoy
too was a believer in the Revolution. But his Revolution was of a very
different colour to that of the revolutionaries; it was rather that of
a believer of the Middle Ages, who looked on the morrow, perhaps that
very day, for the reign of the Holy Spirit.
"I believe that at this very hour the great revolution is beginning
which has been preparing for two thousand years in the Christian
world--the revolution which will substitute for corrupted Christianity
and the system of domination which proceeds therefrom the true
Christianity, the basis of equality between men and of the true liberty
to which all beings endowed with reason aspire."[14]
What time does he choose, this seer and prophet, for his announcement
of the new era of love and happiness? The darkest hour of Russian
history; the hour of disaster and of shame! Superb power of creative
faith! All around it is light--even in darkness. Tolstoy saw in death
the signs of renewal; in the calamities of the war in Manchuria, in
the downfall of the Russian armies, in the frightful anarchy and the
bloody struggle of the classes. His logic--the logic of a dream!--drew
from the victory of Japan the astonishing conclusion that Russia
should withdraw from all warfare, because the non-Christian peoples
will always have the advantage in warfare over the Christian peoples
"who have passed through the phase of servile submission." Does this
mean the abdication of the Russian people? No; this is pride at its
supremest. Russia should withdraw from all warfare because she must
accomplish "the great revolution."
"The Revolution of 1905, which will set men free from brutal
oppression, must commence in Russia. It is beginning."
Why must Russia play the part of the chosen people? Because the
new Revolution must before all repair the "Great Crime," the great
monopolisation of the soil for the profit of a few thousands of
wealthy men and the slavery of millions of men--the cruellest of
enslavements;[15] and because no people was so conscious of this
iniquity as the Russian people.[16]
Again, and more especially, because the Russian people is of all
peoples most thoroughly steeped in the true Christianity, so that
the coming revolution should realise, in the name of Christ, the
law of union and of love. Now this law of love cannot be fulfilled
unless it is based upon the law of non-resistance to evil.[17] This
non-resistance (let us mark this well, we who have the misfortune
to see in it simply an Utopian fad peculiar to Tolstoy and to a few
dreamers) has always been an essential trait of the Russian people.
"The Russian people has always assumed, with regard to power, an
attitude entirely strange to the other peoples of Europe. It has never
entered upon a conflict with power; it has never participated in it,
and consequently has never been depraved by it. It has regarded power
as an evil which must be avoided. An ancient legend represents the
Russians as appealing to the Varingians to come and govern them. The
majority of the Russians have always preferred to submit to acts of
violence rather than respond with violence or participate therein. They
have therefore always submitted.
"A voluntary submission, having nothing in common with servile
obedience.[18]
"The true Christian may submit, indeed it is impossible for him not to
submit without a struggle to no matter what violence; but he could not
obey it--that is, he could not recognise it as legitimate."[19]
At the time of writing these lines Tolstoy was still subject to the
emotion caused by one of the most tragical examples of this heroic
nonresistance of a people--the bloody manifestation of January 22nd in
St. Petersburg, when an unarmed crowd, led by Father Gapon, allowed
itself to be shot down without a cry of hatred or a gesture of
self-defence.
For a long time the Old Believers, known in Russia as the _Sectators_,
had been obstinately practising, in spite of persecution, non-obedience
to the State, and had refused to recognise the legitimacy of its
power.[20] The absurdity of the Russo-Japanese war enabled this state
of mind to spread without difficulty through the rural districts.
Refusals of military service became more and more general; and the
more brutally they were punished the more stubborn the revolt grew
in secret. In the provinces, moreover, whole races who knew nothing
of Tolstoy had given the example of an absolute and passive refusal
to obey the State--the Doukhobors of the Caucasus as early as 1898
and the Georgians of the Gouri towards 1905. Tolstoy influenced these
movements far less than they influenced him; and the interest of his
writings lies in the fact that in spite of the criticisms of those
writers who were of the party of revolution, as was Gorky,[21] he was
the mouthpiece of the Old Russian people.
The attitude which he preserved, in respect of men who at the peril
of their lives were putting into practice the principles which he
professed,[22] was one of extreme modesty and dignity. Neither to
the Doukhobors and the Gourians nor to the refractory soldiers did he
assume the pose of a master or teacher.
"He who suffers no trials can teach nothing to him who does so suffer."
He implores "the forgiveness of all those whom his words and his
writings may have caused to suffer."[23]
He never urges any one to refuse military service. It is a matter for
every man to decide for himself. If he discusses the matter with any
one who is hesitating, "he always advises him not to refuse obedience
so long as it would not be morally impossible." For if a man hesitates
it is because he is not ripe; and "it is better to have one soldier
the more than a renegade or hypocrite, which is what becomes of those
who undertake a task beyond their strength."[24] He distrusts the
resolution of the refractory Gontcharenko. He fears "that this young
man may have been carried away by vanity and vainglory, not by the love
of God."[25] To the Doukhobors he writes that they should not persist
in their refusal of obedience out of pride, but "if they are capable of
so doing, they should save their weaker women and their children. No
one will blame them for that." They must persist "only if the spirit
of Christ is indeed within them, because then they will be happy to
suffer."[26] In any case he prays those who are persecuted "at any cost
not to break their affectionate relations with those who persecute
them."[27] One must love even Herod, as he says in a letter to a
friend: "You say, 'One cannot love Herod.'--I do not know, but I feel,
and you also, that one must love him. I know, and you also, that if I
do not love him I suffer, that there is no life in me."[28]
The Divine purity, the unvarying ardour of this love, which in the end
can no longer be contented even by the words of the Gospel: "Love thy
neighbour as thyself," because he finds in them a taint of egoism![29]
Too vast a love in the opinion of some; and so free from human egoism
that it wastes itself in the void. Yet who more than Tolstoy distrusts
"abstract love"?
"The greatest modern sin: the abstract love of humanity, impersonal
love for those who are--somewhere, out of sight.... To love those
we do not know, those whom we shall never meet, is so easy a thing!
There is no need to sacrifice anything; and at the same time we are so
pleased with ourselves! The conscience is fooled.--No. We must love our
neighbours--those we live with, and who are in our way and embarrass
us."[30]
I have read in most of the studies of Tolstoy's work that his faith
and philosophy are not original. It is true; the beauty of these ideas
is eternal and can never appear a momentary fashion. Others complain
of their Utopian character. This also is true; they are Utopian, the
New Testament is Utopian. A prophet is a Utopian; he treads the earth
but sees the life of eternity; and that this apparition should have
been granted to us, that we should have seen among us the last of the
prophets, that the greatest of our artists should wear this aureole
on his brow--there, it seems to me, is a fact more novel and of far
greater importance to the world than one religion the more, or a new
philosophy. Those are blind who do not perceive the miracle of this
great mind, the incarnation of fraternal love in the midst of a people
and a century stained with the blood of hatred!
[1] _Le Temps_, November 2, 1902.
[2] Tolstoy regarded this as one of his most important works. "One of
my books--_For Every Day_--to which I have the conceit to attach a
great importance...." (Letter to Jan Styka, July 27 August 9, 1909).
[3] These works should shortly appear, under the supervision of
Countess Alexandra, Tolstoy's daughter. The list of them has been
published in various journals. We may mention _Hadji-Mourad, Father
Sergius,_ the psychology of a monk; _She Had Every Virtue,_ the study
of a woman; the _Diary of a Madman,_ the _Diary of a Mother,_ the
_Story of a Doukhobor,_ the _Story of a Hive,_ the _Posthumous Journal
of Theodore Kouzmitch, Aliocha Govchkoff, Tikhon and Melanie, After the
Ball, The Moon shines in the Dark, A Young Tsar, What I saw in a Dream,
Who is the Murderer?_ (containing social ideas), _Modern Socialism,_ a
comedy; _The Learned Woman, Childish Wisdom,_ sketches of children who
converse upon moral subjects; _The Living Corpse,_ a drama in seventeen
tableaux; _It is all her Fault,_ a peasant comedy in two acts, directed
against alcohol (apparently Tolstoy's last literary work, as he wrote
it in May-June, 1910), and a number of social studies. It is announced
that they will form two octavo volumes of six hundred pages each.
But the essential work as yet unpublished is Tolstoy's _Journal,_ which
covers forty years of his life, and will fill, so it is said, no less
than thirty volumes.
[4] The excommunication of Tolstoy by the Holy Synod was declared on
February 22, 1901. The excuse was a chapter of _Resurrection_ relating
to Mass and the Eucharist. This chapter has unhappily been suppressed
in the French edition.
[5] On the nationalisation of the soil. _(The Great Crime,_ 1905.)
[6] "A 'Great-Russian,' touched with Finnish blood." (M.
Leroy-Beaulieu.)
[7] _The End of a World_ (1905-6). See the telegram addressed by
Tolstoy to an American journal: "The agitation in the Zemstvos has as
its object the limitation of despotic power and the establishment of a
representative government. Whether or no they succeed the result will
be a postponement of any true social improvement. Political agitation,
while producing the unfortunate illusion of such improvement by
external means, arrests true progress, as may be proved by the example
of all the constitutional States--France, England, America, &c."
(Preface to the French translation of _The Great Crime_, 1905.)
In a long and interesting letter to a lady who asked him to join
a _Committee for the Propagation of Reading and Writing among the
People_, Tolstoy expressed yet other objections to the Liberals: they
have always played the part of dupes; they act as the accomplices of
the autocracy through fear; their participation in the government
gives the latter a moral prestige, and accustoms them to compromises,
which quickly make them the instruments of power. Alexander II.
used to say that all the Liberals were ready to sell themselves for
honours if not for money; Alexander III. was able, without danger,
to eradicate the liberal work of his father. "The Liberals whispered
among themselves that this did not please them; but they continued to
attend the tribunals, to serve the State and the press; in the press
they alluded to those things to which allusion was allowed, and were
silent upon matters to which allusion was prohibited." They did the
same under Nikolas II. "When this young man, who knows nothing and
understands nothing, replies tactlessly and with effrontery to the
representatives of the people, do the Liberals protest? By no means ...
From every side they send the young Tsar their cowardly and flattering
congratulations." (_Further Letters._)
[8] _War and Revolution._
In _Resurrection,_ at the hearing of Maslova's appeal, in the Senate,
it is a materialistic Darwinist who is most strongly opposed to the
revision, because he is secretly shocked that Nekhludov should wish,
as a matter of duty, to marry a prostitute; any manifestation of duty,
and still more, of religious feeling, having the effect upon him of a
personal insult.
[9] As a type, take Novodvorov, the revolutionary leader in
_Resurrection,_ whose excessive vanity and egoism have sterilised a
fine intelligence. No imagination; "a total absence of the moral and
æsthetic qualities which produce doubt."
Following his footsteps like a shadow is Markel, the artisan who has
become a revolutionist through humiliation and the desire for revenge;
a passionate worshipper of science, which he cannot comprehend; a
fanatical anticlerical and an ascetic.
In _Three More Dead_ or _The Divine and the Human_ we shall find a few
specimens of the new generation of revolutionaries: Romane and his
friends, who despise the old Terrorists, and profess to attain their
ends scientifically, by transforming an agricultural into an industrial
people.
[10] Letters to the Japanese Izo-Abe, 1904. (_Further Letters_).
[11] Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in
_Revolutionaries,_ 1906).
[12] Conversations, reported by Teneromo (published in
_Revolutionaries,_ 1906).
[13] Conversation with M. Paul Boyer. (_Le Temps_, November 4, 1902.)
[14] _The End of a World_.
[15] "The cruellest enslavement is to be deprived of the earth, for the
slave of a master is the slave of only one; but the man deprived of the
land is the slave of all the world." (_The Great Crime_)
[16] Russia was actually in a somewhat special situation; and although
Tolstoy may have been wrong to found his generalisations concerning
other European States upon the condition of Russia, we cannot be
surprised that he was most sensible to the sufferings which touched
him most nearly. See, in _The Great Crime,_ his conversations on the
road to Toula with the peasants, who were all in want of bread because
they lacked land, and who were all secretly waiting for the land to
be restored to them. The agricultural population of Russia forms 80
per cent, of the nation. A hundred million of men, says Tolstoy, are
dying of hunger because of the seizure of the soil by the landed
proprietors. When people speak to them of remedying their evils through
the agency of the Press, or by the separation of Church and State, or
by nationalist representation, or even by the eight-hours day, they
impudently mock at them:
"Those who are apparently looking everywhere for the means of bettering
the condition of the masses of the people remind one of what one sees
in the theatre, when all the spectators have an excellent view of an
actor who is supposed to be concealed, while his fellow-players, who
also have a full view of him, pretend not to see him, and endeavour to
distract one another's attention from him."
There is no remedy but that of returning the soil to the labouring
people. As a solution of the property question, Tolstoy recommends the
doctrine of Henry George and his suggested single tax upon the value
of the soil. This is his economic gospel; he returns to it unwearied,
and has assimilated it so thoroughly that in his writings he often uses
entire phrases of George's.
[17] "The law of non-resistance to evil is the keystone of the whole
building. To admit the law of mutual help while misunderstanding the
precept of non-resistance is to build the vault without sealing the
central portion." (_The End of a World._)
[18] In a letter written in 1900 to a friend (_Further Letters_)
Tolstoy complains of the false interpretation given to his doctrine
of non-resistance. "People," he says, "confound _Do not oppose evil
by evil_ with _Do not oppose evil_: that is to say, _Be indifferent
to evil._ ..." "Whereas the conflict with evil is the sole object of
Christianity, and the commandment of non-resistance to evil is given as
the most effectual means of conflict."
[19] _The End of a World._
[20] Tolstoy has drawn two types of these "Sectators," one in
_Resurrection_ (towards the end) and one in _Three More Dead._
[21] After Tolstoy's condemnation of the upheaval in the Zemstvos,
Gorky, making himself the interpreter of the displeasure of his
friends, wrote as follows: "This man has become the slave of his
theory. For a long time he has isolated himself from the life of
Russia, and he no longer listens to the voice of the people. He hovers
over Russia at too great a height."
[22] It was a bitter trial to him that he could not contrive to be
persecuted. He had a thirst for martyrdom; but the Government very
wisely took good care not to satisfy him.
"They are persecuting my friends all around me, and leaving me in
peace, although if any one is dangerous it is I. Evidently I am not
worth persecution, and I am ashamed of the fact." (Letter to Teneromo,
1892, _Further Letters.)_
"Evidently I am not worthy of persecution, and I shall have to die like
this, without having ever been able to testify to the truth by physical
suffering." (To Teneromo, May 16,1892, _ibid._)
"It hurts me to be at liberty." (To Teneromo, June i, 1894, _ibid._)
That he was at liberty was, Heaven knows, no fault of his! He insults
the Tsars, he attacks the fatherland, "that ghastly fetish to which men
sacrifice their life and liberty and reason." (_The End of a World._)
Then see, in _War and Revolution,_ the summary of Russian history. It
is a gallery of monsters: "The maniac Ivan the Terrible, the drunkard
Peter I., the ignorant cook, Catherine I., the sensual and profligate
Elizabeth, the degenerate Paul, the parricide Alexander I. [the only
one of them for whom Tolstoy felt a secret liking], the cruel and
ignorant Nikolas I.; Alexander II., unintelligent and evil rather than
good; Alexander III., an undeniable sot, brutal and ignorant; Nikolas
II., an innocent young officer of hussars, with an _entourage_ of
coxcombs, a young man who knows nothing and understands nothing."
[23] Letter to Gontcharenko, a "refractory," January 17, 1903.
(_Further Letters._)
[24] Letter to a friend, 1900. (_Correspondence_.)
[25] To Gontcharenko, February 2, 1903 (_ibid._).
[26] To the Doukhobors of the Caucasus, 1898 (_ibid._).
[27] To Gontcharenko, January 17, 1903 (_ibid._).
[28] To a friend, November, 1901. (_Correspondence_).
[29] "It is like a crack in a pneumatic machine; all the vapour of
egoism that we wish to drain from the human soul re-enters by it." He
ingeniously strives to prove that the original text has been wrongly
read; that the exact wording of the Second Commandment was in fact
"Love thy neighbour as _Himself_ (as God)." (_Conversations with
Teneromo._)
[30] _Conversations with Teneromo._