A Confession

“When I saw how the head was severed from the body and heard the thud of each part as it fell into the box, I understood, not with my intellect but with my whole being, that no theories of the rationality of existence or of progress could justify such an act; I realized that even if all the people in the world from the day of creation found this to be necessary according to whatever theory, I knew that it was not necessary and that it was wrong. Therefore, my judgments must be based on what is right and necessary and not on what people say and do; I must judge not according to progress but according to my own heart.”

This passage accomplishes two things: it provides context for Tolstoy’s deep suspicion about the beliefs and habits of his contemporaries, and it provides an early-life example of Tolstoy’s struggle with understanding the limits of reason. In this visceral experience, Tolstoy comes to understand morality based on an intuition that transcends rationality. The middle of A Confession can be read as a decades-long lapse in which he forgets this essential truth only to recover it toward the end of the narrative.

“The truth was that life is meaningless […] It was as though I had lived a little, wandered a little, until I came to the precipice, and I clearly saw that there was nothing ahead except ruin. And there was no stopping, no turning back, no closing my eyes so I would not see that there was nothing ahead except the deception of life and of happiness and the reality of suffering and death, of complete annihilation.”

Implicit in this passage is the idea that people who do not push their intellectual boundaries, who do not heed Socrates’s advice to examine their own lives, will never see the “truth” about the meaninglessness of life; they will live and die without seeing the precipice of human understanding. Despite Tolstoy’s wish to abandon the privilege and hypocrisy of his class, he frequently shows his allegiance to it with comments like this about his knowledge relative to that of the masses.

“I enjoyed looking at life in the mirror of art. But when I began to search for the meaning of life, when I began to feel the need to live, this mirror became either tormenting or unnecessary, superfluous and ludicrous.”

For Tolstoy, the search for life’s meaning made art feel silly. The common-sense understanding is that a search for meaning is the driving force behind the endeavors of great artists. Tolstoy’s search for meaning confronted him as an all-encompassing struggle that had to be resolved rationally before anything else could be taken seriously. A generous interpretation of Tolstoy’s thought is that he takes the search for meaning more seriously than other artists who might use it to create meaningless art. A less favorable take is that Tolstoy during this time was stumbling over his unique attachment to reason.

“Experimental science, then, is concerned only with positive knowledge and reveals the greatness of the human intellect whenever its investigations do not enter into ultimate causes. And, on the other hand, speculative science reveals the greatness of the human intellect only when it completely removes all questions concerning the sequence of causal phenomena and examines man only in relation to an ultimate cause.”

The author is keen to put science in its place. Tolstoy undoubtedly embarks on this task to diminish the egos of scientists who believe they have all the answers. He declares that “hard” sciences like math and physics have much to say about material cause and effect but nothing to say about metaphysics or “why” questions. Meanwhile, philosophy and the social sciences (which come in for special criticism later in the book) have nothing to say about cause and effect, but much to say about why things are the way they are. Tolstoy concludes that “speculative science” is interesting as far as it goes, but ultimately it cannot provide a satisfying answer regarding the meaning of life.

“[I]f I wanted to live and to understand the meaning of life, I had to seek this meaning not among those who have lost it and want to destroy themselves but among the millions of people, living and dead, who created life and took upon themselves the burden of their lives as well as our own.”

Here, Tolstoy begins the process of abandoning his “class” and looking to the laboring masses for answers to the meaning of life. In his assessment, affluent intellectuals live bad and parasitical lives while poor workers are the unacknowledged foundation of human efforts. To write that laborers “[take] upon themselves the burden of their lives” is complementary in a sense, suggesting that such people live life honestly by working through their struggles and not shirking away. However, the author’s heavy romanticization of the poor is on full display in this passage.

“It turned out that all of humanity had some kind of knowledge of the meaning of life which I had overlooked and held in contempt. It followed that rational knowledge does not give meaning to life, that it excludes life; the meaning that millions of people give to life is based on some kind of knowledge that is despised and considered false […] As presented by the learned and the wise, rational knowledge denies the meaning of life, but the huge masses of people acknowledge meaning through an irrational knowledge. And this irrational knowledge is faith, the one thing that I could not accept. This involves the God who is both one and three, the creation in six days, devils, angels and everything else that I could not accept without taking leave of my senses.”

After nearly 50 pages demonstrating how seriously he takes rationality and how rigorously he applies it, Tolstoy surprises us with the admission that reason cannot bridge a gap to meaning; in fact, the opposite of reason is necessary. Tolstoy has not yet fully explained why faith is necessary, but it is interesting that he immediately indicates that the Christian God of the Holy Trinity is the answer. Elsewhere, Tolstoy indicates that he is willing to explore all faiths for solutions to the meaning of life, but he lands quickly on a version of Christianity. Perhaps it is not so surprising, as access to Orthodox Christian materials and believers, as well as familiarity with the faith, would have made Christianity an obvious choice.

“The mistake was that my thinking did not correspond to the question I had raised. The question was: Why should I live? Or: Is there anything real and imperishable that will come of my illusory and perishable life? Or: What kind of meaning can my finite existence have in this infinite universe? In order to answer this question, I studied life […] My question, no matter how simple it may seem at first glance, entails a demand to explain the finite by means of the infinite and the infinite by means of the finite. I asked, ‘What is the meaning of my life beyond space, time, and causation?’ And I answered, ‘What is the meaning of my life within space, time, and causation?’ After a long time spent in the labor of thought, it followed that I could reply only that my life had no meaning at all.”

Tolstoy gives an extremely rational explanation for why reason will never suffice to answer questions related to the meaning of life. The realms of knowledge governed by reason do not interact with the realms of knowledge governed by faith. Human reason does not have access to the knowledge and insight furnished by faith. Tolstoy indicates that his conclusion that life was meaningless was more accurately an experience of despair that his reason was at the end of its rope. At this stage in the narrative, he experiments with dropping the rope altogether and finding something else to hold.

“No matter what answers a given faith might provide for us, every answer of faith gives infinite meaning to the finite existence of man, meaning that is not destroyed by suffering, deprivation, and death. Therefore, the meaning of life and the possibility of living may be found in faith alone […] Faith is the knowledge of the meaning of human life, whereby the individual does not destroy himself but lives. Faith is the force of life. If a man lives, then he must have faith in something. If he did not believe that he had something he must live for, then he would not live. If he fails to see and understand the illusory nature of the finite, then he believes in the finite; if he understands the illusory nature of the finite, then he must believe in the infinite. Without faith it is impossible to live.”

This is the most thorough discussion Tolstoy provides thus far regarding how faith gives meaning to life. The key is that faith transcends the death and suffering of normal human life and is therefore the only way that a person can live fully without being crushed by the dread of meaningless and death. Faith is a nonrational answer to the question of meaning, but this is precisely why it is valid; a rational response leads to despair since reason dictates that life is meaningless, while faith brings the believers into a realm beyond reason where meaning can be found.

“I realized that I had lost my way and how I had lost my way. My straying had resulted not so much from wrong thinking as from bad living. I realized that the truth had been hidden from me not so much because my thoughts were in error as because my life itself had been squandered in the satisfaction of lusts, spent under the exceptional conditions of epicureanism. I realized that in asking, ‘What is my life?’ and then answering, ‘An evil,’ I was entirely correct.”

Tolstoy realized that the selfish actions he has taken and the decisions he has made were the major reason he has been unfulfilled and unsatisfied. Previously, he made the mistake of assuming this meant life itself was wretched and evil because he generalized from his own experiences. Only his life and the lives of the other parasites of his class were wretched and evil, while the lives of working people were different and meaningful.

“I would say to myself. ‘He exists.’ And as soon as I acknowledged this for an instant, life immediately rose up within me, and I could sense the possibility and even the joy of being. But again I would shift from the acknowledgment of the existence of God to a consideration of my relation to him, and again there arose before me the God who is our creator, the God of the Trinity, who sent his son, our Redeemer. And again, isolated from me and from the world, God would melt away before my eyes like a piece of ice; again nothing remained, again the source of life withered away.”

Tolstoy makes a fascinating and subtle observation about spirituality. To come to faith like a child, as Jesus recommends in the Gospels, leads to joy. To consider one’s relation to God is to delve into theology and differing viewpoints, which leads to despair. Tolstoy advocates a simple faith that refuses to hold dogmatically to one denomination. He explains this view more explicitly later in the narrative (see quote 14).

“I renounced the life of our class and recognized that this is not life but only the semblance of life, that the conditions of luxury under which we live make it impossible for us to understand life, and that in order to understand life I must understand not the life of those of us who are parasites but the life of the simple working people, those who create life and give it meaning.”

Tolstoy’s earnest and respectable wish to abandon his status as a member of the elite to live a worthy life as a laborer is doomed to fail. There is a tradition of wise men who grow sick of their cushy surroundings and throw it all away to achieve a better life, but it is always more difficult to abandon one’s “class” than it seems, especially if, like Tolstoy, there is fame or notoriety involved. There is no faulting Tolstoy’s eagerness to find answers to the meaning of life, however, and there is no reason to doubt his sincerity.

“Many times I have envied the peasants for their illiteracy and their lack of education. They could see nothing false in those tenets of faith which to me seemed to have arisen from patent nonsense; they could accept them and believe in the truth, the same truth I believed in. But unhappily for me, it was clear that the truth was tied to a lie with the finest of threads and that I could not accept it in such a form.”

It is difficult to take the sentiment in this passage seriously. Tolstoy’s romanticization of the poor leads him to wish for their allegedly simple worldviews that make blind, childlike faith so much easier. Even if we take a charitable view of Tolstoy’s words, the Russian laborer is unfairly belittled and patronized. Implicit in the message is that the illiterate, uneducated farmer is lucky to be that way. It is difficult to believe that the illiterate, uneducated farmer would agree if he or she were given the same opportunities as Tolstoy.

“I have said that for any unbelievers returning to faith (and here I have in mind our entire younger generation), the first question to be posed is: why does the truth lie not in the Lutheran or in the Catholic Church but in the Orthodox Church? One is taught in high school and cannot help but know what the peasant does not know—namely, that the Protestants and the Catholics make exactly the same claim to the one and only truth that our own faith does. Historical proofs perverted by each creed to suit its own purpose are insufficient. Is it not possible, as I have suggested, that in attaining a higher level of understanding the differences would disappear, just as they do for those who are genuine believers?”

Tolstoy advocates for a kind of Christian ecumenicism that was hinted at earlier in the narrative. The important point about Christianity is not the rituals and beliefs that denominations highlight, but the simple, childlike faith and belief in God that provides meaning. Tolstoy is critical of Russian Orthodox adherents who insist that their form of faith is the only valid form and that everyone else is damned. Tolstoy comes to this conclusion using his reason, judging that religious beliefs and rituals are human constructions that are fallible and susceptible to critique.