The Gospel in Brief
by Leo Tolstoy
(translated by Louise and Aylmer Maude)
(from Wikisource http://en.wikisource.org)
Preface
THIS short
exposition of the Gospel is a summary of a large work which exists in
manuscript and cannot be published in Russia
An account
(Confession) of the course of my own life and of the thoughts which led me to
the conviction that the Christian teaching contains the truth.
An
examination of the Christian teaching: first according to its interpretation by
the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church
An
examination of Christian teaching not according to those interpretations but
solely according to what has come down to us of Christ's teaching, as ascribed
to him in the Gospels.
An exposition
of the real meaning of Christ's teaching, the reasons why it has been
perverted, and, the consequences to which it should lead.
From the
third of those parts the present account as been compiled.
The
harmonization of the four Gospels has been in accord with the sense of the
teaching. In making it I hardly had to digress from the order in it is set down
in the Gospels, so that there are not more but fewer transpositions of the
verses than in most of the concordances known to me, or than in Grechulevich's
arrangement of the Four Gospels. In my treatment of the Gospel of John there
are no transpositions, but everything follows the order of the original.
The
division of the Gospel into twelve chapters (or six if each two be united) came
about of itself from the sense of the teaching. This is the meaning of those
chapters:
Man is the son of an infinite source: a son of that Father not by the
flesh but by the spirit.
Therefore man should serve that source in spirit.
The life of all men has a divine origin. It alone is holy.
Therefore man should serve that source in the life of all men. Such is
the will of the Father.
The service of the will of that Father of life gives life.
Therefore the gratification of one's own will is not necessary for life.
Temporal life is food for the true life.
Therefore the true life is independent of time: it is in the present.
Time is an illusion of life; life in the past and in the future conceals
from men the true life of the present.
Therefore man should strive to destroy the illusion of the temporal life
of the past and future.
True life is life in the present, common to all men and manifesting
itself in love.
Therefore, he who lives by love in the present, through the common life
of all men, unites with the Father, the source and foundation of life.
So each two chapters are related as cause and effect.
In addition
to these twelve chapters an introduction from the first chapter of the Gospel
of John is added, in which the writer of that Gospel speaks, in his own name,
as to the meaning of the whole teaching, and a conclusion from the same
writer's Epistle (written probably before the Gospel) containing a general
deduction from all that precedes.
These two
parts do not form an essential part of the teaching, but though they both might
be omitted without losing the sense of the teaching (the more so as they come
in the name of John and not of Jesus) I have retained them because in a
straightforward understanding of Christ's teaching these parts, confirming one
another as the whole,
furnish, in contradiction to the queer interpretation of the Churches, the plainest
indication of the meaning that should be ascribed to the teaching.
At the
beginning of each chapter, besides a brief indication of its subject, I have
given the words which correspond to that chapter from the prayer Jesus taught
his disciples.
When I had
finished my work I found to my surprise and joy that the Lord's Prayer is
nothing but a very concise expression of the whole teaching of Jesus in the
very order in which I had arranged the chapters, and that each phrase of the
prayer corresponds to the meaning and sequence of the chapters:
1. Our Father, Man is a son of God
2. Which art in Heaven, God is the infinite spiritual source of life.
3. Hallowed be Thy Name, May this source of life be held holy
4. Thy Kingdom come, May his power be realized in all men
5. Thy will be done, as in heaven, May the will oft his infinite source
be fulfilled as it is in himself
6. So on earth, so also in the bodily life.
7. Give us our daily bread, Temporal life is the food of the true life.
8. Each day. True life is in the present.
9. And forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, And let not the
mistakes and errors of the past hide that true life from us.
10. And lead us not into temptation, And may they not lead us into
delusion,
11. But deliver us from evil, And so there shall be no evil.
12. For thine is the kingdom the power, and the glory, And may thy
power, and strength, and wisdom, prevail.
In the full
exposition, in the third part, everything in the Gospels is set down without
any omissions. But in the present rendering the following are omitted: the
conception and birth of John the Baptist, his imprisonment and death, the birth
of Jesus, his genealogy, his mother's flight with him to Egypt; his miracles at
Cana and Caperaum; the casting out of the devils; the walking on the sea; the
blasting of the fig-tree; the healing of the sick; the raising of the dead; the
resurrection of Christ himself, and the references to prophecies fulfilled by
his life.
Those
passages are omitted in the present short exposition because, containing
nothing of the teaching but only describing events that took place before,
during, or after the period in which Jesus taught, they complicate the
exposition. Those verses, however they may be understood, do not contain either
contradiction or confirmation of the teaching. Their sole significance for
Christianity was to prove the divinity of Jesus to those who did not believe in
it. But for one who understands that a story of miracles is unconvincing, and
who also doubts that the divinity of Jesus is asserted in his teaching, those
verses drop away of themselves as superfluous.
In the
larger work every deviation from the ordinary version, as well as every
inserted comment and every omission, is explained and justified by comparison
of the different variants of the Gospels, by examination of contexts, and by
philological and other considerations. In the present brief rendering all such
proofs and refutations of the false understanding of the Churches, as well as
the detailed notes and references, are omitted, on the ground that however
exact and correct the discussions of each separate passage may be, they cannot
carry conviction as to the true understanding of the teaching. The justness of
the understanding of the teaching is better proved not by the discussion of
particular passages but by its own unity, clarity, simplicity and completeness,
and by its accordance with the inner feeling of all who seek the truth. In
respect of all the divergences of my rendering from the Church's authorized
text, the reader should not forget that the customary conception that the four
Gospels with all their verses and syllables are sacred books is a very gross
error.
The reader
should remember that Jesus never wrote any book himself, as Plato, Philo, or
Marcus Aurelius did; nor even, like Socrates, transmitted his teaching to
educated men, but that he spoke to many uneducated men and only long after his
death did people begin to write down what they had heard about him. The reader
should remember that there were very many such accounts from among which the
Churches selected first three Gospels and then one more, and that in selecting
those best Gospels as the proverb,-'There is no stick without knots' says-they
had to take in many knots with what they selected from the whole mass of
writings about Christ, and that there are many passages in the canonical
Gospels just as poor as in the rejected apocryphal ones.
The reader
should remember that it is the teaching of Christ which may be sacred, but
certainly not any definite number of verses and syllables, and that certain
verses picked out from here to there cannot become sacred merely because people
say they are.
Moreover
the reader should remember that these selected Gospels are also the work of
thousands of different human brains and hands, that they have been selected,
added to, and commented on, for centuries, that all the copies that have come
down to us from the fourth century are written in continuous script without
punctuation, so that even after the fourth and fifth centuries they have been
subject to very diverse readings, and that there are not less than fifty
thousand such variations of the Gospels.
This should
all be borne in mind by the reader, that he may not be misled by the customary
view that the Gospels in their present form have come to us direct from the
Holy Ghost.
The reader
should remember that far from it being blameworthy to discard useless passages
from the Gospels and elucidate some passages by others, it is on the contrary
irrational not to do so and to hold a certain number of verses and syllables as
sacred.
On the
other hand I beg readers to remember that if I do not regard the Gospels as
sacred books that have come down to us from the Holy Ghost, even less do I
regard them as mere historical monuments of religious literature. I understand
the theological as well as the historical view of the Gospels, but regard them
myself differently, and so I beg the reader not to be confused either by the
church view or by the historical view customary in day among educated people,
neither of which I hold.
I regard
Christianity neither as an inclusive divine revelation nor as an historical
phenomenon, but as a teaching which-gives us the meaning of life. I was led to
Christianity neither by theological nor historical investigations but by
this-that when I was fifty years old, having asked myself and all the learned
men around me what I am and what is the meaning of my life, and received the
answer that I am a fortuitous concatenation of atoms and that life has no
meaning but is itself an evil, I fell into despair and wanted to put an end to
my life; but remembered that formerly in childhood when I believed, life had a
meaning for me, and that for the great mass of men about me who believe and are
not corrupted by riches life has a meaning; and I doubted the validity of the
reply given me by the learned men of my circle and I tried to understand the
reply Christianity gives to those who live a real life. And I began to seek
Christianity in the Christian teaching that guides such men's lives. I began to
study the Christianity which I saw applied in life and to compare that applied
Christianity with its source.
The source
of Christian teaching is the Gospels, and in them I found the explanation of
the spirit which guides the life of all who really live. But together with this
source of the pure water of life I found, wrongfully united with it, mud and
slime which had hidden its purity from me: by the side of and bound up with the
lofty Christian teaching I found a Hebrew and a Church teaching alien to it. I
was in the position of a man who receives a bag of stinking dirt, and only
after long struggle and much labor finds that amid that dirt lie priceless
pearls; and he understands that he was not to blame for disliking the stinking
dirt, and that those who have collected and preserved these pearls together
with the dirt are also not to blame but deserve love and respect.
I did not
know the light and had thought there was no light of truth to be found in life,
but having convinced myself that men live by that light alone, I began to look
for its source and found it in the Gospels, despite the false Church
interpretations. And on reaching that source of light I was dazzled by it, and
found full replies to my questions as to the meaning of my own life and that of
others-answers in full agreement with those I knew of from other nations, but
which in my opinion were superior to them all.
I was
looking for an answer to the question of life and not to theological or
historical questions, and so for me the chief question was not whether Jesus
was or was not God, or from whom the Holy Ghost proceeded and so forth, and
equally unimportant and unnecessary was it for me to know when and by whom each
Gospel was written and whether such and such a parable may, or may not, be
ascribed to Christ. What was important to me was this light which has
enlightened mankind for eighteen hundred years and which enlightened and still
enlightens me; but how to name the source of that light, and what materials he
or someone else had kindled, did not concern me.
On that
this preface might end were the Gospels recently discovered books and had
Christ's teaching not suffered eighteen hundred years of false interpretation.
But now to understand the teaching of Jesus it is necessary to know clearly the
chief methods used in these false interpretations. The most customary method of
false interpretation, and one which we have grown up with, consists of
preaching under the name of Christianity not what Christ taught but a church
teaching composed of explanations of very contradictory writings into which
Christ's teaching enters only to a small degree, and even then distorted and
twisted to fit together with other writings. According to this false
interpretation Christ’s teaching is only one link in a chain of revelations beginning with the
commencement of the world and continuing in the Church until now. These false
interpreters call Jesus God; but the fact that they recognize him as God does
not make them attribute more importance to his words and teaching than to the
words of the Pentateuch, the Psalms, the Acts of the Apostles, the Epistles,
the Apocalypse, or even to the decisions of the Councils and the writings of
the Fathers of the Church.
These false
interpreters do not admit any understanding of the teaching of Jesus which does
not conform to the previous and subsequent revelations; so that their aim is
not to explain the meaning of Christ's teaching, but as far as possible to
harmonize various extremely contradictory writings, such as the Pentateuch, the
Psalms, the Gospels, the Epistles, and the Acts-that is, all that is supposed
to constitute the Holy Scriptures.
Such
explanations aiming not at truth but at reconciling the irreconcilable, namely,
the writings of the Old and the New Testament, can obviously be innumerable, as
indeed they are. Among them are the Epistles of Paul and the decisions of the
Councils (which begin with the formulary: 'It has pleased Us and the Holy
Ghost'), and such enactments as those of the Popes, the Synods, the pseudo-Christs,
and all the false interpreters who affirm that the Holy Ghost speaks through
their lips. They all employ one and the same gross method of affirming, the
truth of their interpretations by the assertion that their interpretations are
not human utterances but revelations from the Holy Ghost. Without entering on
an examination of these beliefs, each of which calls itself the true one, one
cannot help seeing that by the method common to them all of acknowledging the
whole immense quantity of so-called scriptures of the Old and New Testament as
equally sacred, they themselves impose an insuperable obstacle to an
understanding of Christ's teaching; and that from this mistake arises the
possibility and inevitability of endlessly divergent interpretations of the
teaching. The reconcilement of a number of revelations can be infinitely
varied, but the interpretation of the teaching of one person (and one looked
upon as God) should not occasion discord.
If God
descended to earth to teach people, his teaching, by the very purpose of his
coming, cannot be understood in more than one way. If God came down to earth to
reveal truth to men, at least he would have revealed it so that all might
understand: if he did not do that he was not God; and if the divine truths are
such that even God could not make them intelligible to mankind, men certainly
cannot do so.
If Jesus is
not God, but a great man, then still less can his teaching produce discord. For
the teaching of a great man is only great because it expresses intelligibly and
clearly what others have expressed unintelligibly and obscurely. What is
incomprehensible in a great man's teaching is not great, and therefore a great
man's teaching does not engender sects. Only an exposition which affirms that
it is a revelation from the Holy Ghost and is the sole truth, and that all
other expositions are lies, gives birth to discord and to the mutual
animosities among the Churches that result therefrom. However much the various
Churches affirm that they do not condemn other communities, that they have no
hatred of them but pray for union, it is untrue. Never, since the time of
Arius, has the affirmation of any dogma arisen from any other cause than the
desire to condemn a contrary belief as false. It is a supreme degree of pride
and ill will to others to assert that a particular dogma is a divine revelation
proceeding from the Holy Ghost: the highest presumption because nothing more
arrogant can be said than that the words spoken by me are uttered through me by
God; and the greatest ill will because the avowal of oneself as in possession
of the sole indubitable truth implies an assertion of the falsity of all who
disagree. Yet that is just what all the Churches say, and from this alone flows
and has flowed all the evil which has been committed and still is committed in
the world in the name of religion.
But besides
the temporary evil which such an interpretation by the Churches and the sects
produces, it has another important inner defect which gives an obscure,
indefinite, and insincere character to their assertions. This defect consists
in the fact that all the Churches-having acknowledged the latest revelation of
the Holy Ghost, who descended on the apostles and has passed and still passes
to the supposedly elect-nowhere define directly, definitely, and finally, in
what that revelation consists; and yet they base their belief on that
supposedly continuing revelation and call it Christian. All the churchmen who
acknowledge the revelation from the Holy Ghost recognize (like the Mohammedans)
three revelations: that of Moses, of Jesus, and of the Holy Ghost. But in the
Mohammedan religion it is believed that after Moses and Jesus, Mahomet is the
last of the prophets and that he explained the revelations of Moses and Jesus,
and this revelation of Mahomet every True Believer has before him.
But it is
not so with the Church faith. That also, like the Mohammedan, acknowledges
three revelations: that of Moses, of Jesus, and of the Holy Ghost, but it does
not call itself Holy Ghostism after the name of the last revealer, but affirms
that the basis of its faith is the teaching of Christ. So that while preaching,
its own doctrines it attributes their authority to Christ. Churchmen
acknowledging the last revelation explaining all previous ones, should say so
and call their religion by the name of whoever received the last revelation-
acknowledging it to be that of Paul, or of this or that Council of the Church,
or of the Pope, or of the Patriarch. And if the last revelation was that of the
Fathers, a decree of the Eastern Patriarchs, a Papal encyclical, or the
syllabus or catechism of Luther or of Philaret-they should say so and call
their religion accordingly, because the last revelation which explains all the
preceding is always the most important one. But they do not do so, but while
preaching doctrines quite alien to Christ's teaching, affirm that their
doctrine was taught by Christ. So that according to their teaching Jesus
declared that by his blood he had redeemed the human race ruined by Adam's
sins; that God is three persons; that the Holy Ghost descended upon the
apostles and was transmitted to the priesthood by the laying on of hands; that
seven sacraments are necessary for salvation; that communion should be received
in two kinds, and so on. They would have us believe that all this is the
teaching of Jesus, whereas in reality there is not a word about any of it in
his teaching. Those false teachers should call their teaching and religion the
teaching, and religion of the Holy Ghost but not of Christ; for only that faith
can be called Christian which recognizes the revelation of Christ reaching us
in the Gospels as the final revelation. It would seem that the matter is plain
and not worth speaking about, but, strange to say, up to now the teaching of
Christ is not separated on the one side from an artificial and quite
unjustifiable amalgamation with the Old Testament, and on the other from the
arbitrary additions and perversions made in the name of the Holy Ghost.
To this day
there are some who, calling Jesus the second person of the Trinity, do not
conceive of his teaching otherwise than in conjunction with those pseudo
revelations of the third Person which they find in the Old Testament, the
Epistles, the decrees of the Councils and the decisions of the Fathers, and
they preach the strangest beliefs, affirming them to be the religion of Christ.
Others not acknowledging Jesus as God, similarly conceive of his teaching not
as he could have taught it but as understood by Paul and other commentators.
While regarding Jesus not as God but as a man, these commentators deny him a
most legitimate human right, that of answering only for his own words and not
for false interpretations of them. Trying to explain his teaching, these
learned commentators attribute to Jesus things he never thought of saying. The
representatives of this school of interpreters-beginning with the most popular
of them, Renan-without troubling to separate what Jesus himself taught from
what the slanders of his commentators have laid upon him, and without troubling
to understand his teaching more profoundly, try to understand the meaning of
his appearance and the spread of his teaching by, the events of his life and
the circumstances of his time.
The problem
that confronts them is this: eighteen hundred years ago a certain pauper
appeared and said certain things. He was flogged and executed. And ever since
that time (though there have been numbers of just men who died for their
faith), milliards of people, wise and foolish, learned and ignorant, have clung
to the belief that this man alone among men was God. How is this amazing fact
to be explained? The churchmen say that it occurred because Jesus was God. In
that case it is all understandable. But if he was not God how are we to explain
that everyone looked upon just this common man as God? And the learned men of
that school assiduously explore every detail of the life of Jesus, without
noticing that however much they explore those details (in reality they have
gathered none), even if they were able to reconstruct his whole life in the
minutist detail, the question why he, just he, had such an influence on people
would still remain unanswered. The answer is not to be found in knowledge of
the society Jesus was born into, or how he was educated, and so on, still less
is it to be found in knowledge of what was being done in Rome, or in the fact
that the people of that time were inclined to superstition, but only by knowing
what this man preached that has caused people, from that time to this, to
distinguish him from all others and to acknowledge him as God. It would seem
that the first thing to do is to try to understand that man's teaching, and
naturally his own teaching and not coarse interpretations of it that have been
spread since his time. But this is not done. These learned historians of
Christianity are so pleased to have understood that Jesus was not God and are
so anxious to prove that his teaching is not divine and is therefore not
obligatory, that forgetting that the more they prove him to have been an
ordinary man and his teaching not to be divine the further they are from
solving the problem before them-they strain all their strength to do so. To see
this surprising error clearly, it is worth recalling an article by Havet, a
follower of Renan's, who affirms that “Jesus n'avait rien de chrétien,” or
Souris , who enthusiastically argues that
Jesus Christ was a very coarse and stupid man.
The
essential thing is, not to prove that Jesus was not God and that therefore his
doctrine is not divine, or to prove that he was a Catholic, but to know in all
its purity what constituted that which was so lofty and so precious to men that
they, have acknowledged and still acknowledge its preacher to have been God.
And so if
the reader belongs to the great majority of educated people brought up in the
Church belief but who have abandoned its incompatibilities with common sense
and conscience-whether he has retained a love and respect for the spirit of the
Christian teaching or (as the proverb puts it 'has thrown his fur coat into the
fire because he is angry with the bugs') considers all Christianity a harmful
superstition-I ask him to remember that what repels him and seems to him a
superstition is not the teaching of Christ; that Christ cannot be held
responsible for that monstrous tradition that has been interwoven with his
teaching and presented as Christianity: that to prejudge of Christianity, on
the teaching of Christ as it has come down to us must be learned -that is, the
words and actions attributed to Christ and that have an instructive meaning.
Studying the teaching of Christ in that way the reader will convince himself
that Christianity, far from being a mixture of the lofty and the low, or a
superstition, is a very strict, pure, and complete metaphysical and ethical
doctrine, higher than which the reason of man has not yet reached, and in the
orbit of which (without recognizing the fact) human activity-political,
learned, poetic, and philosophic-is moving.
If the
reader belongs to that small minority of educated people who hold to the Church
religion and profess it not for outward purposes but for inward tranquillity, I
ask him to remember that the teaching of Christ as set forth in this book
(despite the identity of name) is quite a different teaching from that which he
professes, and that therefore the question for him is not whether the doctrine
here offered agrees or disagrees with his belief, but is simply, which best
accords with his reason and conscience-the Church teaching composed of
adjustments of many scriptures, or the teaching of Christ alone? The question
for him is merely whether he wishes to accept the new teaching or to retain his
own belief.
But if the
reader is one of those who outwardly profess the Church creed and values it not
because he believes it to be true but because he considers that to profess and
preach it is profitable to him, then let him remember that however many
adherents he may have, however powerful they may be, on whatever thrones they
may sit, and by whatever great names they may call themselves, he is not one of
the accusers but of the accused. Let such readers remember that there is
nothing for them to prove, that they have long ago said what they had to say
and that even if they could prove what they wish to, they would only prove,
each for himself, what is proved by all the hundreds of opposing Churches; and
that it is not for them to demonstrate, but to excuse themselves: to excuse
themselves for the blasphemy of adjusting the teaching of the God-Christ to
suit the teaching of Ezras, of the Councils, and Theophilacts, and allowing
themselves to interpret and alter the words of God in conformity with the words
of men; to excuse themselves for their libels on God by which they have thrown all
the fanaticism they had in their hearts onto the God-Jesus and given it out as
his teaching; to excuse themselves for the fraud by which, having hidden the
teaching of God who came to bestow blessing on the world, they have replaced it
by their own blasphemous creed, and by that substitution have deprived and
still deprive milliards of people of the blessing Christ brought to men, and
instead of the peace and love he brought have introduced into the world sects,
condemnations, murders, and all manner of crimes.
For such
readers there are only two ways out: humble confession and renunciation of
their lies, or a persecution of those who expose them for what they have done
and are still doing.
If they
will not disavow their lies, only one thing remains for them: to persecute
me-for which I, completing what I have written, prepare myself with joy and
with fear of my own weakness.
LEO
TOLSTOY.
YASNAYA
POLYANA, 1883.
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