Orthodoxy inside-out: how certain orthodox ideas are reflected in Lev Tolstoi’s religious thinking

Also after 1880, Tolstoi's intellectual biography must be characterized as a story of restless wandering, but in some respects it was like walking in circles. In his novels and stories, publicist writings, letters and diaries, he constantly returned to the same topics and mulled over the same paradoxes. Sometimes he contradicted himself egregiously: indeed, attempts to reconstruct Tolstoianism as a well-rounded, consistent system of thought must be dismissed as unsuccessful. Nevertheless, we can observe that Tolstoi from around 1882 to his death firmly adhered to certain crucial principles. This makes it possible to identify some key clusters of motifs that form a kind of mainstay in his thought structure.

Most of Tolstoi's main religious ideas were taken from the Christian heritage, but his selection of and creative elaboration on them show that his life's work did not consist in rediscovering Christ's unadulterated doctrine as it had been before the Church perverted it, such as Tolstoi himself claimed. Instead, it was basically a reinterpretation and alteration of the Christian faith that he had encountered in his own life.

Central evidence for this claim I find in Tolstoi's voluminous, combative text against Orthodox school theology, Examination of Dogmatic Theology. In this massive tome, in which Tolstoi the stylist is conspicuously absent, the polemic is so coarse and overplayed that few readers have managed to get through more than a few chapters before giving up. But even if we cannot learn much about Orthodox theology by reading this work, we can gain important information about Tolstoi's own theology by reading Examination “against the grain”, as it were.

A particularly significant influence from Tolstoi's reading of Orthodox literature can be traced in his theology in a narrow sense, i.e., in his doctrine about God. Of fundamental importance to any Orthodox understanding of God is the duality between apophatic (negative) and cataphatic (positive) theology. Using these two complementary approaches, Orthodox Christians believe that it is possible to maintain at the same time that God is completely inaccessible and fundamentally accessible to humans. This is very similar to Tolstoi's own understanding of God as, on the one hand, utterly unfathomable, and on the other, the fountainhead of love and the giver of meaning in life.

But even though Tolstoi's teaching exhibits clear affinities with mainstream Orthodox theology, he reorganized these common elements to such an extent that the end result was distinctly Tolstoian. Orthodox theology is strictly theocentric and understands man in light of God the Creator, while Tolstoi explicitly went in the opposite direction. For him, man is the given entity (which he knew primarily by means of introspection), whereas God is the unknown x which must be postulated in order to solve the calculation of human life (= give life meaning). This makes Tolstoianism a sort of “upside-down” or “inside-out” Orthodoxy.

Литература

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