Tolstoy excommunicated for love of the Gospel

Jean-Marie Muller

Translation Canon Tony Dickinson

TOLSTOY (1828 -1910) deeply committed to justice and peace, criticised the intolerances of the Orthodox Church and its indulgent attitude to war; in the end he was excommunicated. His reading of the Gospel led him to non-violence.

In 1869, Count Leon Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a happy man. He had just reached the age of 41; the wanderings and the turbulence of his youth were far-off. Married for seven years, the father of four children, he was leading a peaceful life on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana. For the past five years he had dedicated the greater part of his time to writing “War and Peace”, a novel which had brought him the greatest fame.

On the 2^nd September of that year he had decided to travel to the Volga region to buy an estate there. The journey was long and he stopped to spend the night in the inn of the town of Arzanyas. There he experienced a night of anguish as he thought about death.

This crisis brought him to a kind of religious conversion. But he was disappointed in the very lukewarm believers whom he met in his social circle. He decided then to draw near to the faith of the humble among the Russian people. Despite his reservations about dogma, he practiced all the popular devotions for three years (1877 – 1879).

It was not so much his difficulty in believing in the dogmatic teaching of the Church which was to lead him to break with it, as his inability to accept its behaviour. He revolted against the intolerance which the Church showed against everyone who did not rigorously share its faith, and he was scandalised by its complaisant attitude to war and the death penalty. He became literally a free thinker who exalted the absolute primacy of the rational human conscience over every external authority.

He set himself to read and re-read the Gospel. He experienced “enthusiasm and tender feelings” for the Sermon on the Mount. He convinced himself that living according to the will of God was not to place faith in incomprehensible dogma, nor in carrying out rituals, but in living according to the Gospel. And he was sharply critical of the teaching of the Orthodox Church which turned the faithful aside from a real search for the meaning of life.

This attitude of open hostility towards the Orthodox Church convinced the Church to condemn him publicly. His excommunication was made effective on the 24^th February, 1901 by a decree of the Holy Synod accusing him of being a false teacher “with a proud spirit” in “revolt against God, his Christ and his whole work”. On the 1^st April, Tolstoy replied to the Holy Synod “I have rejected the Church which calls itself Orthodox; that is perfectly true. But I have rejected the Church not because I am in revolt against God, but on the contrary because I have wished with all the strength of my soul to serve God”.

At the heart of this evangelical and anti-clerical Christianity is a radiant freedom and practice of non-violence which Tolstoy had discovered in the Sermon on the Mount. It is this ideal which was to lead him to oppose the militarism of the Tsarist state and the formidable structural injustice of serfdom in which the ordinary people of the countryside were held. For him the Gospel was a truth which must make people free.

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