A Confession by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (best sales books of all time txt) π
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seek my relation with Him; and again I imagined that God β our Creator in
Three Persons who sent His Son, the Saviour β and again that God, detached
from the world and from me, melted like a block of ice, melted before my
eyes, and again nothing remained, and again the spring of life dried up
within me, and I despaired and felt that I had nothing to do but to kill
myself. And the worst of all was, that I felt I could not do it.
Not twice or three times, but tens and hundreds of times, I reached those
conditions, first of joy and animation, and then of despair and
consciousness of the impossibility of living.
I remember that it was in early spring: I was alone in the wood listening to
its sounds. I listened and thought ever of the same thing, as I had
constantly done during those last three years. I was again seeking God.
βVery well, there is no God,β said I to myself; βthere is no one who is not
my imagination but a reality like my whole life. He does not exist, and no
miracles can prove His existence, because the miracles would be my
imagination, besides being irrational.
βBut my perception of God, of Him whom I seek,β I asked myself, βwhere has
that perception come from?β And again at this thought the glad waves of life
rose within me. All that was around me came to life and received a meaning.
But my joy did not last long. My mind continued its work.
βThe conception of God is not God,β said I to myself. βThe conception is
what takes place within me. The conception of God is something I can evoke
or can refrain from evoking in myself. That is not what I seek. I seek that
without which there can be no life.β And again all around me and within me
began to die, and again I wished to kill myself.
But then I turned my gaze upon myself, on what went on within me, and I
remembered all those cessations of life and reanimations that recurred
within me hundreds of times. I remembered that I only lived at those times
when I believed in God. As it was before, so it was now; I need only be
aware of God to live; I need only forget Him, or disbelieve Him, and I died.
What is this animation and dying? I do not live when I lose belief in the
existence of God. I should long ago have killed myself had I not had a dim
hope of finding Him. I live, really live, only when I feel Him and seek Him.
βWhat more do you seek?β exclaimed a voice within me. βThis is He. He is
that without which one cannot live. To know God and to live is one and the
same thing. God is life.β
βLive seeking God, and then you will not live without God.β And more than
ever before, all within me and around me lit up, and the light did not again
abandon me.
And I was saved from suicide. When and how this change occurred I could not
say. As imperceptibly and gradually the force of life in me had been
destroyed and I had reached the impossibility of living, a cessation of life
and the necessity of suicide, so imperceptibly and gradually did that force
of life return to me. And strange to say the strength of life which returned
to me was not new, but quite old β the same that had borne me along in my
earliest days.
I quite returned to what belonged to my earliest childhood and youth. I
returned to the belief in that Will which produced me and desires something
of me. I returned to the belief that the chief and only aim of my life is to
be better, i.e. to live in accord with that Will. and I returned to the
belief that I can find the expression of that Will in what humanity, in the
distant past hidden from, has produced for its guidance: that is to say, I
returned to a belief in God, in moral perfection, and in a tradition
transmitting the meaning of life. There was only this difference, that then
all this was accepted unconsciously, while now I knew that without it I
could not live.
What happened to me was something like this: I was put into a boat (I do not
remember when) and pushed off from an unknown shore, shown the direction of
the opposite shore, had oars put into my unpractised hands, and was left
alone. I rowed as best I could and moved forward; but the further I advanced
towards the middle of the stream the more rapid grew the current bearing me
away from my goal and the more frequently did I encounter others, like
myself, borne away by the stream. There were a few rowers who continued to
row, there were others who had abandoned their oars; there were large boats
and immense vessels full of people. Some struggled against the current,
others yielded to it. And the further I went the more, seeing the progress
down the current of all those who were adrift, I forgot the direction given
me. In the very centre of the stream, amid the crowd of boats and vessels
which were being borne down stream, I quite lost my direction and abandoned
my oars. Around me on all sides, with mirth and rejoicing, people with sails
and oars were borne down the stream, assuring me and each other that no
other direction was possible. And I believed them and floated with them. And
I was carried far; so far that I heard the roar of the rapids in which I
must be shattered, and I saw boats shattered in them. And I recollected
myself. I was long unable to understand what had happened to me. I saw
before me nothing but destruction, towards which I was rushing and which I
feared. I saw no safety anywhere and did not know what to do; but, looking
back, I perceived innumerable boats which unceasingly and strenuously pushed
across the stream, and I remembered about the shore, the oars, and the
direction, and began to pull back upwards against the stream and towards the
shore.
That shore was God; that direction was tradition; the oars were the freedom
given me to pull for the shore and unite with God. And so the force of life
was renewed in me and I again began to live.
XIIII turned from the life of our circle, acknowledging that ours is not life
but a simulation of life β that the conditions of superfluity in which we
live deprive us of the possibility of understanding life, and that in order
to understand life I must understand not an exceptional life such as our who
are parasites on life, but the life of the simple labouring folk β those who
make life β and the meaning which they attribute to it. The simplest
labouring people around me were the Russian people, and I turned to them and
to the meaning of life which they give. That meaning, if one can put it into
words, was as follows: Every man has come into this world by the will of
God. And God has so made man that every man can destroy his soul or save it.
The aim of man in life is to save his soul, and to save his soul he must
live βgodlyβ and to live βgodlyβ he must renounce all the pleasures of life,
must labour, humble himself, suffer, and be merciful. That meaning the
people obtain from the whole teaching of faith transmitted to them by their
pastors and by the traditions that live among the people. This meaning was
clear to me and near to my heart. But together with this meaning of the
popular faith of our non-sectarian folk, among whom I live, much was
inseparably bound up that revolted me and seemed to me inexplicable:
sacraments, Church services, fasts, and the adoration of relics and icons.
The people cannot separate the one from the other, nor could I. And strange
as much of what entered into the faith of these people was to me, I accepted
everything, and attended the services, knelt morning and evening in prayer,
fasted, and prepared to receive the Eucharist: and at first my reason did
not resist anything. The very things that had formerly seemed to me
impossible did not now evoke in me any opposition.
My relations to faith before and after were quite different. Formerly life
itself seemed to me full of meaning and faith presented itself as the
arbitrary assertion of propositions to me quite unnecessary, unreasonable,
and disconnected from life. I then asked myself what meaning those
propositions had and, convinced that they had none, I rejected them. Now on
the contrary I knew firmly that my life otherwise has, and can have, no
meaning, and the articles of faith were far from presenting themselves to me
as unnecessary β on the contrary I had been led by indubitable experience to
the conviction that only these propositions presented by faith give life a
meaning. formerly I looked on them as on some quite unnecessary gibberish,
but now, if I did not understand them, I yet knew that they had a meaning,
and I said to myself that I must learn to understand them.
I argued as follows, telling myself that the knowledge of faith flows, like
all humanity with its reason, from a mysterious source. That source is God,
the origin both of the human body and the human reason. As my body has
descended to me from God, so also has my reason and my understanding of
life, and consequently the various stages of the development of that
understanding of life cannot be false. All that people sincerely believe in
must be true; it may be differently expressed but it cannot be a lie, and
therefore if it presents itself to me as a lie, that only means that I have
not understood it. Furthermore I said to myself, the essence of every faith
consists in its giving life a meaning which death does not destroy.
Naturally for a faith to be able to reply to the questions of a king dying
in luxury, of an old slave tormented by overwork, of an unreasoning child,
of a wise old man, of a half-witted old woman, of a young and happy wife, of
a youth tormented by passions, of all people in the most varied conditions
of life and education β if there is one reply to the one eternal question of
life: βWhy do I live and what will result from my life?β β the reply, though
one in its essence, must be endlessly varied in its presentation; and the
more it is one, the more true and profound it is, the more strange and
deformed must it naturally appear in its attempted expression, conformably
to the education and position of each person. But this argument, justifying
in my eyes the queerness of much on the ritual side of religion, did not
suffice to allow me in the one great affair of life β religion β to do
things which seemed to me questionable. With all my soul I wished to be in a
position to mingle with the people, fulfilling the ritual side of their
religion; but I could not do it. I felt that I should lie to myself and mock
at what was sacred to me, were I to do so. At this point, however, our new
Russian theological writers came to my rescue.
According to the explanation these theologians gave,
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