The Religion of Love

Tolstoy's God is not the personal God of conventional Christianity — a being who hears prayers, intervenes in history, and will judge the dead at the end of time. His God is closer to what John's Gospel means when it says that God is love: the principle of conscious unity that underlies all existence and is actualised whenever human beings genuinely love one another. This is not quite pantheism and not quite theism but something in between — a functional theology in which "God" names the deepest structure of reality and the deepest demand of rational consciousness.

Tolstoy wanted a Christianity that did not require belief in miracles, resurrection, or the literal truth of the Gospels' supernatural accounts — because he found he could not honestly believe these things, and dishonesty seemed to him the gravest possible sin against religion. What he found was that the moral and practical core of the teaching was perfectly independent of the supernatural framework. The commandment to love your neighbour is binding and life-transforming regardless of whether Jesus rose from the dead. The requirement to forgive your enemies does not depend on the virgin birth. The religion of love stands without the miracles.

Tolstoy found essentially the same teaching — love, non-harm, compassion — at the core of Buddhism, Islam, and the moral traditions of every major civilisation. This convergence was evidence for him that the religion of love was not a specifically Christian insight but a universal perception of the structure of human existence available to any person in any culture willing to look honestly at what reason and experience teach. The specifics of Christian myth and ritual were local and contingent; the teaching of love was universal and necessary. This ecumenical conclusion horrified the Russian Orthodox Church, which eventually excommunicated him in 1901.

Tolstoy's excommunication by the Russian Orthodox Church (1901) was the formal institutional response to views he had held for nearly twenty years. He responded with a calm and reasoned statement of his actual beliefs that is itself a small masterpiece of religious writing.