Eric Voegelin (13)

Tolstoy and Christian pacifism

(From Enlightenment to Revolution, pp 219–222.) Tolstoy, unlike other revolutionaries of his time, recognized that "the devising of new institutions is no substitute for the metanoia, for the change of heart." Reform requires enlightenment and the arousing of the conscience. Superficially this seems like a Christian attitude; and Tolstoy understood himself as advocating a return to the primitive Christian ethics of the Gospel. Nevertheless, Voegelin rejects this claim to Christianity. For him, Tolstoy is "substantially ... quite as anti-Christian as ... Bakunin"—which is harsh criticism, considering that Voegelin elsewhere characterizes Bakunin's anarchism as "Satanism ... visible".

Voegelin holds that Tolstoy rejects the spiritual substance of Christianity while accepting its ethics. This moralization of Christianity is a trend that has been underway since the Enlightenment; Tolstoy, however, radicalizes and isolates it.

The conception of Christ as a "progressive" moral thinker, the secularization of Christianity and its reduction to a code of ethics, is a general Western movement that has deeply corroded Christian sectarian life. The typical consequences of such despiritualization are to be found in Tolstoi. Christian ethics without Christian love is prone to produce righteousness and critique of the sinner. We have to recall that the Sermon on the Mount is not a code for the life in the "world"; it is addressed to men who live between the worlds in eschatological expectation. In historical existence, entangled in the network of social obligation, man has to pay his debt to nature and is obliged to commit acts in violation of the Sermon. If he is struck on the right cheek, he will not turn his left, but hit back in defense of his life, his family and his community. But in hitting back, he will do good [well?], as a Christian, to remember the Sermon, and to be aware that in defense he is involved in guilt and that the man who struck him may have had quite as excellent "worldly" reasons for the attack as he has for the defense. Both are involved in a common guilt, both are engulfed in the inscrutable mystery of evil in the world, and in their enmity both have to respect in each other the secret of the heart that is known only to God.

This Christian attitude is not the attitude of Tolstoi. He falls into the series of fallacies which a revolutionary of the nineteenth century does not seem able to avoid: (1) the concrete evil in social relations and institutions is not accepted as emanating from the nature of man, to be remedied as far as possible in concrete instances but not to be abolished on principle, (2) the concrete evil is generalized, in a next step, into an abstract evil that attaches to institutions, not to man, and, in a last step, (3) the abstract evil attaching to institutions is attributed as a personal guilt to those men who by biographical circumstance happen to be the bearers of the institutions. In his political tracts Tolstoi points his accusing finger at the evil of governmental institutions and at the men who are responsible for it and he presents the evils so vividly that his accusations could be taken over by the radical, violent anarchist groups for their propaganda-pamphlets inciting to revolt. Tolstoi's admonitions to practice "pardoning love" are in vain in face of the unpardoning, critical content of his writings, and in vain are his assertions that the use of his writings for revolutionary purposes would be like setting a village on fire by means of a gospel-book .... [T]he difference between the gospel-book and Tolstoi's writings is that the gospel-book contains nothing that would justify incendiary action.

His Christianity is in substance an extreme form of enlightened Puritanism. Tolstoi occupies a most conveniently situated island of righteousness: it is close enough to the "world" to hurl his accusations of guilt at it, but far enough from the "world" to deny responsibility for his acts as acts in the "world."

Such strictures also apply to subsequent "passive resisters" such as Gandhi, who, Voegelin believes, brought about a considerable amount of violence through his nonviolent agitation. Gandhi's non-Christian origins make little difference: "Tolstoi could rest his anarchism on the prestige of the Gospel, while Gandhi successfully developed a halo of Eastern saintliness." Both are political actors, not saints.