The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Nikoleyevich Tolstoy (readera ebook reader txt) 📕

to recognize it; that is, he can by refusing

to recognize the truth regard his action as necessary and

justifiable, or he may recognize the truth and regard his act as

wrong and censure himself for it.

 

Thus a gambler or a drunkard who does not resist temptation and

yields to his passion is still free to recognize gambling and

drunkenness as wrong or to regard them as a harmless pastime. In

the first case even if he does not at once get over his passion,

he gets the more free from it the more sincerely he recognizes the

truth about it; in the second case he will be strengthened in his

vice and will deprive himself of every possibility of shaking it

off.

 

In the same way a man who has made his escape alone from a house

on fire, not having had the courage to save his friend, remains

free, recognizing the truth that a man ought to save the life of

another even at the risk of his own, to regard his action as bad

and to censure himself for it, or, not recognizing this truth, to

regard his action as natural and necessary and to justify it to

himself. In the first case, if he recognizes the truth in spite

of his departure from it, he prepares for himself in the future a

whole series of acts of self-sacrifice necessarily flowing from

this recognition of the truth; in the second case, a whole series

of egoistic acts.

 

Not that a man is always free to recognize or to refuse to

recognize every truth. There are truths which he has recognized

long before or which have been handed down to him by education and

tradition and accepted by him on faith, and to follow these truths

has become a habit, a second nature with him; and there are

truths, only vaguely, as it were distantly, apprehended by him.

The man is not free to refuse to recognize the first, nor to

recognize the second class of truths. But there are truths of a

third kind, which have not yet become an unconscious motive of

action, but yet have been revealed so clearly to him that he

cannot pass them by, and is inevitably obliged to do one thing or

the other, to recognize or not to recognize them. And it is in

regard to these truths that the man’s freedom manifests itself.

 

Every man during his life finds himself in regard to truth in the

position of a man walking in the darkness with light thrown before

him by the lantern he carries. He does not see what is not yet

lighted up by the lantern; he does not see what he has passed

which is hidden in the darkness; but at every stage of his journey

he sees what is lighted up by the lantern, and he can always

choose one side or the other of the road.

 

There are always unseen truths not yet revealed to the man’s

intellectual vision, and there are other truths outlived,

forgotten, and assimilated by him, and there are also certain

truths that rise up before the light of his reason and require his

recognition. And it is in the recognition or non-recognition of

these truths that what we call his freedom is manifested.

 

All the difficulty and seeming insolubility of the question of the

freedom of man results from those who tried to solve the question

imagining man as stationary in his relation to the truth.

 

Man is certainly not free if we imagine him stationary, and if we

forget that the life of a man and of humanity is nothing but a

continual movement from darkness into light, from a lower stage of

truth to a higher, from a truth more alloyed with errors to a

truth more purified from them.

 

Man would not be free if he knew no truth at all, and in the same

way he would not be free and would not even have any idea of

freedom if the whole truth which was to guide him in life had been

revealed once for all to him in all its purity without any

admixture of error.

 

But man is not stationary in regard to truth, but every individual

man as he passes through life, and humanity as a whole in the same

way, is continually learning to know a greater and greater degree

of truth, and growing more and more free from error.

 

And therefore men are in a threefold relation to truth. Some

truths have been so assimilated by them that they have become the

unconscious basis of action, others are only just on the point of

being revealed to him, and a third class, though not yet

assimilated by him, have been revealed to him with sufficient

clearness to force him to decide either to recognize them or to

refuse to recognize them.

 

These, then, are the truths which man is free to recognize or to

refuse to recognize.

 

The liberty of man does not consist in the power of acting

independently of the progress of life and the influences arising

from it, but in the capacity for recognizing and acknowledging the

truth revealed to him, and becoming the free and joyful

participator in the eternal and infinite work of God, the life of

the world; or on the other hand for refusing to recognize the

truth, and so being a miserable and reluctant slave dragged

whither he has no desire to go.

 

Truth not only points out the way along which human life ought to

move, but reveals also the only way along which it can move. And

therefore all men must willingly or unwillingly move along the way

of truth, some spontaneously accomplishing the task set them in

life, others submitting involuntarily to the law of life. Man’s

freedom lies in the power of this choice.

 

This freedom within these narrow limits seems so insignificant to

men that they do not notice it. Some—the determinists—consider

this amount of freedom so trifling that they do not recognize it

at all. Others—the champions of complete free will—keep their

eyes fixed on their hypothetical free will and neglect this which

seemed to them such a trivial degree of freedom.

 

This freedom, confined between the limits of complete ignorance of

the truth and a recognition of a part of the truth, seems hardly

freedom at all, especially since, whether a man is willing or

unwilling to recognize the truth revealed to him, he will be

inevitably forced to carry it out in life.

 

A horse harnessed with others to a cart is not free to refrain

from moving the cart. If he does not move forward the cart will

knock him down and go on dragging him with it, whether he will or

not. But the horse is free to drag the cart himself or to be

dragged with it. And so it is with man.

 

Whether this is a great or small degree of freedom in comparison

with the fantastic liberty we should like to have, it is the only

freedom that really exists, and in it consists the only happiness

attainable by man.

 

And more than that, this freedom is the sole means of

accomplishing the divine work of the life of the world.

 

According to Christ’s doctrine, the man who sees the significance

of life in the domain in which it is not free, in the domain of

effects, that is, of acts, has not the true life. According to

the Christian doctrine, that man is living in the truth who has

transported his life to the domain in which it is free—the domain

of causes, that is, the knowledge and recognition, the profession

and realization in life of revealed truth.

 

Devoting his life to works of the flesh, a man busies himself with

actions depending on temporary causes outside himself. He himself

does nothing really, he merely seems to be doing something. In

reality all the acts which seem to be his are the work of a higher

power, and he is not the creator of his own life, but the slave of

it. Devoting his life to the recognition and fulfillment of the

truth revealed to him, he identifies himself with the source of

universal life and accomplishes acts not personal, and dependent

on conditions of space and time, but acts unconditioned by

previous causes, acts which constitute the causes of everything

else, and have an infinite, unlimited significance.

 

“The kingdom of heaven suffereth violence, and the violent take it

by force.” (Matt. xi. 12.)

 

It is this violent effort to rise above external conditions to the

recognition and realization of truth by which the kingdom of

heaven is taken, and it is this effort of violence which must and

can be made in our times.

 

Men need only understand this, they need only cease to trouble

themselves about the general external conditions in which they are

not free, and devote one-hundredth part of the energy they waste

on those material things to that in which they are free, to the

recognition and realization of the truth which is before them, and

to the liberation of themselves and others from deception and

hypocrisy, and, without effort or conflict, there would be an end

at once of the false organization of life which makes men

miserable, and threatens them with worse calamities in the future.

And then the kingdom of God would be realized, or at least that

first stage of it for which men are ready now by the degree of

development of their conscience.

 

Just as a single shock may be sufficient, when a liquid is

saturated with some salt, to precipitate it at once in crystals, a

slight effort may be perhaps all that is needed now that the truth

already revealed to men may gain a mastery over hundreds,

thousands, millions of men, that a public opinion consistent with

conscience may be established, and through this change of public

opinion the whole order of life may be transformed. And it

depends upon us to make this effort.

 

Let each of us only try to understand and accept the Christian

truth which in the most varied forms surrounds us on all sides and

forces itself upon us; let us only cease from lying and pretending

that we do not see this truth or wish to realize it, at least in

what it demands from us above all else; only let us accept and

boldly profess the truth to which we are called, and we should

find at once that hundreds, thousands, millions of men are in the

same position as we, that they see the truth as we do, and dread

as we do to stand alone in recognizing it, and like us are only

waiting for others to recognize it also.

 

Only let men cease to be hypocrites, and they would at once see

that this cruel social organization, which holds them in bondage,

and is represented to them as something stable, necessary, and

ordained of God, is already tottering and is only propped up by

the falsehood of hypocrisy, with which we, and others like us,

support it.

 

But if this is so, if it is true that it depends on us to break

down the existing organization of life, have we the right to

destroy it, without knowing clearly what we shall set up in its

place? What will become of human society when the existing order

of things is at an end?

 

“What shall we find the other side of the walls of the world we

are abandoning?

 

“Fear will come upon us—a void, a vast emptiness, freedom—how

are we to go forward not knowing whither, how face loss, not

seeing hope of gain?