32 pages • 1 hour read
Leo TolstoyA Confession
Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 1880A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 9-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 9 Summary
Tolstoy says he realized that reason is unable to answer questions like “Why should I live?” or “What kind of meaning can my finite existence have in this infinite universe?” (58). He found that his questions searched for meaning “beyond space, time, and causation” (58), while the answers proposed by reason relate to meaning within space, time, and causation. In the end, Tolstoy’s reason could not provide an answer to the question of life but only a declaration that the answer “remains indefinite” (60) from the point of view of reason.
A proper solution would find a relationship between the finite and the infinite, and only answers provided by faith, an irrational type of knowledge, can do that. Tolstoy concluded that denying faith on the grounds of reason was unhelpful and that only faith had a chance of providing an adequate response to life’s most urgent questions.
Chapter 10 Summary
The author studied various faiths, especially the Christianity typical of well-to-do believers, and concluded that their faith was unacceptable. It was based on motivations outside of the need to answer Tolstoy’s burning questions and revealed no meaning. These Christians were even more greedy and fearful of death than nonbelievers. If these believers’ actions revealed something about the meaning of life, Tolstoy might have been convinced, but he found nothing.
Tolstoy came to realize that the masses of common folk who have managed to “sustain life and instill it with meaning” (66) must have a more genuine idea of faith. He became close with the poor, uneducated believers of his country and through an examination of their lives decides that their faith “provided them with the meaning and possibility of life” (66). While the elite lived idly and were unsatisfied with life, the common believer worked hard, was at peace, and approached death with equanimity.
After two years of such reflections, Tolstoy felt that the lives of the rich were like “the overindulgences of a spoiled child” (68) and meaningless. He wholeheartedly embraced the lives of the laboring class and the meaning that filled their lives.
Chapters 9-10 Analysis
Tolstoy says that he was able to accept faith as a possible route to the meaning of life once he accomplished a complicated philosophical calculus demonstrating why his reason was unable to get the job done. He was unable to abandon reason completely, however, writing that he would take on any faith “as long as it did not demand of me a direct denial of reason, for such a denial would be a lie” (64). Once Tolstoy realized that he was asking a question that reason alone could never properly answer, he began to explore faith’s answer, which was to live “according to the law of God” and to achieve “union with the infinite God, paradise” (60). This answer required elaboration before Tolstoy felt satisfied with it, but his commitment to discovering meaning in the faith of the poor was complete by this point in the narrative.
Tolstoy’s disaffection with affluent religious people is on full display in Chapter 10. He saw hypocrisy on the side of the wealthy compared to the authentic, genuine faith of the poor. He writes that “the actions of the laboring people, of those who create life, began to appear to me as the one true way. I realized that the meaning provided by this life was truth, and I embraced it” (68). Although Tolstoy turned to the peasant class in his search for meaning, he remained undeniably a member of the noble class.
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By Leo Tolstoy
