Tolstoi was much troubled by the suffering of men. He himself saw, felt and
described an immense amount of this suffering in various forms. The problem
of happiness was his most cherished problem. He believed that men can be
made happy in this life, and even more--that they are created in order to
be happy. He refused quite definitely the idea of atonement as
inconceivable and contrary to the idea of God. Human life has been normal
and happy as long as men lived their simple life without towns and without
all urban complications. Life can again be made a normal and happy one as
God wills, if we only return to the primitive simplicity of the peasants.
The Holy Synod was not opposed to the happiness of men, but they did not
believe either that happiness is attainable in this world or that it is the
aim of our life on earth. Did it not occur quite in the beginning of the
world's history that there lived on earth two brothers, Cain and Abel, two
farmers, without any burden of culture, and with all the Tolstoian
simplicity of life? Yet is it not reported that one killed the other?
Life is a drama, a tragic drama even, and not at all a metaphysical
immobility or a quasi-mobility, or even an eternal _circulus viciosus_.
There are three stages of human life: the first stage before the sin, in
God-like _naïveté_, the second in sin, and the third after the atonement,
life in perfection, when there will be "a new earth and a new heaven." We
are in the middle stage, where life means sin and atonement, therefore in
the most tragic stage. Life in the first and third stages may consist
entirely in contemplation, but the life which we are actually living
consists of deeds, of sins and virtues, _i.e._, of the struggle between
good and evil, of suffering and purification, of a tragic heroism, of
atonement.