* June, 1890.
This is a strong title, and it requires a justification. We have to
plead that nothing else would serve our purpose. But is our purpose
a sound one? That will appear in the course of this article. Let the
reader finish what we have to say before he forms a judgment.
We purpose to criticise the view of Christianity recently put forth
by the greatest writer in Russia. Count Leo Tolstoi enjoys an European
fame. He is one of the classics of modern fiction. His work in
imaginative literature, as well as his work in religion, said the late
Matthew Arnold, is "more than sufficient to signalise him as one of
the most marking, interesting, and sympathy-inspiring men of our time."
Whatever such a man writes deserves the closest attention. Not, indeed,
that this needs to be bespoken for him. He has the qualities that compel
it. There is the stamp of power on all his productions. We pause at them
involuntarily, as we turn to look at a physical king of men who passes
us in the street.
For some years Count Tolstoi discontinued his work as a novelist. His
mind became occupied with social and religious problems. He ceased to be
a man of the world and became a Christian; and his being a most sincere
nature, endowed with a certain large simplicity which is characteristic
of the Russian mind, he did not rest in ecclesiastical Christianity. He
embraced the religion of Christ, and began working it out to legitimate
issues. To him the Sermon on the Mount is divine teaching, not in a
metaphorical sense, but in its literal significance. Accordingly he
tells the Christian world, in such volumes as _My Religion_ and _My
Confession_, that it is all astray from the religion of Christ. He
points to what its Savior said, takes his words in their honest meaning,
and brands as un-Christian the whole framework of Christian society,
with its armies, its police, its law courts, its wealth, and its
institution of property. The Bishop of Peterborough and Count Tolstoi
are at one in believing that if the Sermon on the Mount were carried out
the State would go to ruin; only the Bishop of Peterborough shrinks from
this, and jesuitically narrows the scope of Christ's teaching, while
Count Tolstoi accepts it loyally and calls on Christians to square their
practice with their profession.
Mirabeau said of Robespierre, "He is in earnest, he will go far." This
is what we felt with respect to Count Tolstoi. Sooner or later he was
certain to follow Jesus to the bitter end. After property comes the
institution of marriage, upon which the teaching of Jesus may be
found in the gospels. Count Tolstoi now insists on this teaching being
practised. He has written a novel, _The Kreutzer Sonata_, to show the
evils, not only of marriage, but of all sexual relations. Since then he
has written a sober article to justify the sentiments of the hero, or
the protagonist, of that terrible story. It is no longer possible to
say that Pozdnischeff's ideas are those of a person in a drama. Count
Tolstoi accepts the full responsibility of them, and presses them still
further. He is now the un-blenching apostle of real Christianity--not
the Christianity of the Churches, but the Christianity of Christ; and
his new evangel will alarm the growing army of "advanced Christians,"
who are always canting, in their sentimental way, the very phrase which
he develops in all its terrific meaning. To be a Christian, he tells
them, is to crucify the body, to kill the animal passions, to live the
pure life of the spirit, and, in short, to practise every austerity of
asceticism.
Tolstoi did not jump to this conclusion. Writing on his novels, Mr. W.
E. Henley called him "the great optimist." The _Kreutzer Sonata_ is the
work of a profound pessimist. Concluding _What To Do_, Tolstoi wrote a
noble passage on the sacredness of motherhood. Now all that is changed.
Motherhood must go too. It will take time, for the old Adam is strong
in us. But go it must, and when we have all brought our bodies under, no
more children will be born. The race will expire, having perfected its
imitation of Christ, and the animals that remain will hold the world
in undisputed possession; unless, indeed, they catch the contagion, and
wind up the whole terrestrial business.
Before we treat Tolstoi's evangel in detail we must remark that he does
not explain the "primeval command" of Jehovah to Adam and Eve--"Be
ye fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth." This is very
inconsistent with the gospel of absolute chastity. Jehovah says, "Get as
many children as you can." Christ says, "Get none at all." If it was the
same God who gave both orders he changed his mind completely, and having
changed it once he may change it again. In that case the Koran will
succeed the New Testament, and the _Imitation of Christ_ give place to
the _Arabian Nights_.
_Revenons a nos moutons_. The _Kreutzer Sonata_ is a terrible story,
but like all novels with a purpose, it is inartistic. Othello kills
Desdemona without moralising on the sinfulness of marriage, and
Pozdnischeff stabs his wife from sheer jealousy. All the preaching is by
the way. It might be cut out without affecting the work, and that is its
condemnation. When the preacher steps forward the artist retires. And
as we are dealing with Tolstoi the preacher we shall go straight to his
article in the _Universal Review_.
Tolstoi admits that what he now teaches is incompatible with what he
taught before. When writing the _Kreutzer Sonata_, he says: "I had not
the faintest presentiment that the train of thought I had started would
lead me whither it did. I was terrified by my own conclusion, and was at
first disposed to reject it; but it was impossible not to hearken to the
voice of my reason and my conscience." This is the language of earnest
sincerity.
The conclusion is this--"Even to contract marriage is, from a Christian
point of view, not a progress but a fall. Love and all the states that
accompany and follow it, however we may try in prose and verse to prove
the contrary, never do and never can facilitate the attainment of an aim
worthy of men, but always make it more difficult."
This is sufficiently dogmatic. Chapman thought otherwise.
Without love
All beauties bred in women are in vain,
All virtues born in men lie buried;
For love informs them as the sun doth colors:
And as the sun, reflecting his warm beams
Against the earth, begets all fruits and flowers,
So love, fair shining in the inward man,
Brings forth in him the honorable fruits
Of valor, wit, virtue, and haughty thoughts,
Brave resolution and divine discourse.
Thus the great Elizabethan. Now for the laureate of the Victorian age.
For indeed I knew Of no more subtle master under heaven
Than is the maiden passion for a maid,
Not only to keep down the base in man,
But teach high thought, and amiable words
And courtliness, and the desire of fame,
And love of truth, and all that makes a man.
Chapman's strain is higher than Tennyson's, but they harmonise.
Tolstoi's is a harsher note. He vilifies the flesh to exalt the spirit,
as though the two never mingled. He would abolish the springs of life to
purify its stream! He bids us see in our passions "foes to be conquered
rather than friends to be encouraged." Why not try to establish a just
harmony between them? Is there no medium? Must the passions be kings or
slaves, in prison or on the throne? "It is thought an injury to reason,"
wrote Diderot, "to say a word in favor of her rivals; yet it is only the
passions, and strong passions, that can lift the soul to great things;
without them there is nothing sublime, whether in conduct or in
productions--art becomes childish and virtue trivial."
But let us hear Tolstoi simply as a follower of Christ. We cannot do
better than reproduce some of his sentences _in extenso_.
"Christ not only never instituted marriage, but, if we search for formal
precept on the subject, we find that he rather disapproved it than
otherwise. ('And every one that hath forsaken houses, or brethren, or
sisters, or father, or mother, or wife, or children, or lands for my
name's sake, shall receive an hundredfold, and shall inherit everlasting
life.' Matthew xix. 29, Mark z. 29, 30, Luke xviii. 29,30). He only
impressed upon married and unmarried alike the necessity of striving
after perfection, which includes chastity in marriage and out of it."
"There is not and cannot be such an institution as Christian
marriage.... This is what was always taught and believed by true
Christians of the first and following centuries.... In the eyes of a
Christian, sexual relations in marriage not only do not constitute
a lawful, right, and happy state, as our society and our churches
maintain, but, on the contrary, are always a fall, a weakness, a sin."
"Such a thing as Christian marriage never was and never could be. Christ
did not marry, nor did he establish marriage; neither did his disciples
marry."
"A Christian, I say, cannot view sexual intercourse otherwise than as
a deviation from the doctrine of Christ--as a sin. This is clearly laid
down in Matt. v. 28, and the ceremony called Christian marriage does not
alter its character one jot. A Christian will never, therefore, desire
marriage, but will always avoid it."
"In the Gospel it is laid down so clearly as to make it impossible to
explain it away, that he who is already married when he discovers and
accepts the truth, must abide with her with whom he has been living,
i.e., must not change his wife, and must live more chastely than before
(Matt. v. 32, xix. 8-12), that he who is single should remain unmarried
and continue to live chastely (Matt. xix. 10, 12), and that both the one
and the other, in their yearning and striving after perfect chastity,
are guilty of sin if they look on a woman as an object of pleasure
(Matt. v. 28, 29)."
Pozdnischeff, at the close of the _Kreutzer Sonata_, clinches all this
by saying--"People should understand the true significance of the words
of St. Matthew as to looking upon a woman with the eye of desire; for
the words apply to woman in her sisterly character--not only to another
man's wife, but also, and above all, to one's own."
If this view of marriage prevailed, and perfect chastity obtained,
the human race would come to an end. Tolstoi says he cannot help that.
Carnal love perpetuates the race, and spiritual love will extinguish
it. But what if it does? It is a familiar religious dogma that the world
will have an end, and science tells us that the sun is losing its heat,
the result of which must in time be the extinction of the human race.
The great Russian does not shrink from the logic of Christ's teaching.
He follows Christ as St Paul did; as St. Peter did, who forsook his
wife; as the Fathers did in crying up virginity and running down
marriage; as the monks and nuns did who severed themselves from the
world and the flesh, though they often fell into the hands of the
Devil. Still there is another step for Count Tolstoi to take. He has not
pressed one important saying of Christ, and it is this--
"For there are some eunuchs, which were born so from their mother's
womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and
there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven's sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it" (Matt.
xix. 12).
The great Origen followed this advice and emasculated himself. Nor was
he alone in the practice. All the disciples of his contemporary, Valens
of Barathis, made themselves eunuchs. Mantegazza considers them the
spiritual fathers of the Skopskis, a Russian sect dating from the
eleventh century. They have been persecuted, but they number nearly six
thousand, and regard themselves as the real Christians, the only true
followers of Christ. They castrate themselves, and sometimes amputate
the genitals entirely; the women even mutilate their breasts as a mark
of their sex.
Will Count Tolstoi take the final step? It seems logically necessary
even without the text on eunuchs, for the only certain way to avoid
sexual intercourse is to make it impossible. In any case we are very
much obliged to him for holding up the _real_ Christianity, as far as he
sees it, to the purblind and hypocritical mob of professed Christians.
It will fortify Freethinkers in their scepticism, and warn the healthy
manhood and womanhood of Europe against this oriental asceticism which
pretends to be a divine message to the robust Occident. When Tolstoi
goes the one step farther, and embraces the teaching of Jesus in its
entirety, he will be the most powerful enemy of Christianity in the
world. By demonstrating it to be a religion for eunuchs he will array
against it the deepest instincts of mankind.