Tolstoy on Religion: The Rational Relationship to Life

The Quote

"True religion is that relationship, in accordance with reason and knowledge, which man establishes with the infinite world around him and within him, and which binds his life to that infinity and guides his actions... The essence of any religion consists solely in the answer to the question: why do I live, and what is my relationship to this infinite world?" So Leo Tolstoy, in A Confession, defined the religion he had come to after the crisis that nearly killed him.

Context

Tolstoy's A Confession (written 1879-1882) is one of the great documents of the modern spiritual crisis. By his early fifties, Tolstoy had achieved everything the world counts as success: he was the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, a landowner, a celebrated public figure, a family man. And he found that none of it answered the question that pressed on him with increasing force: why live? Reason, he argued, could not answer the question. In the finite terms that reason can handle — pleasure, achievement, reputation, the perpetuation of the species — life is meaningless, because death annihilates the one who lives, and the question of meaning is a question for the one who lives. Tolstoy came to the brink of suicide — he describes, in A Confession, the struggle to keep himself from carrying a rope into his study. The answer he found lay in what he called religion: not the dogma of the Orthodox church he had abandoned, but the relationship to the infinite that ordinary believers, in every tradition, lived by. The passage states his definition.

Meaning

The definition has three features. First, religion is rational — "in accordance with reason and knowledge" — not a flight from reason. This is subtle. Reason can show that life, in finite terms, has no meaning; but reason cannot show that life has no meaning at all, because the question of meaning is not a finite question. Religion, for Tolstoy, is the rational acknowledgment that the question of meaning exceeds reason's competence, and the response — the relationship to the infinite — that this acknowledgment makes possible. Second, religion is a relationship — not a set of propositions but a way of connecting the finite life to the infinite world. The relationship is what binds the life to the infinity and guides the actions; it is practical before it is theoretical. Third, the essence of religion is the answer to the question of meaning: "why do I live, and what is my relationship to this infinite world?" Religion that does not answer this question is not, for Tolstoy, religion at all, however elaborate its ritual.

Philosophical Interpretation

Tolstoy's account of religion is distinctive in the modern period because it refuses the two dominant options. It refuses the rationalist option — that reason alone can answer the question of life's meaning — because reason, Tolstoy argued, can only show that life in finite terms is meaningless. And it refuses the fideist option — that religion is a leap against reason — because religion, for Tolstoy, is "in accordance with reason and knowledge." The third way is the one Tolstoy names: religion is the response to the question that reason cannot answer but cannot stop asking, and the response is rational in that it acknowledges the question and does not pretend to have solved it on reason's terms. This places Tolstoy in the company of Pascal, who argued that the human being is suspended between the misery of the godless and the happiness of the godly, and that the wager of life must be made in that condition. It also places Tolstoy in tension with the dogmatic theism he rejected: he did not return to the Orthodox church, and his later religious writings — What Is Religion? (1902), The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1894) — define religion so broadly that they include Buddhism, Confucianism, and the rational theism of the Enlightenment alongside Christianity, while rejecting the doctrines that distinguish them.

The Question That Reason Cannot Answer

The deepest move in Tolstoy's account is the claim that the question of life's meaning is a question that reason cannot answer but cannot stop asking. Reason, Tolstoy argued, can handle finite questions: how to build a bridge, how to grow wheat, how to organize a society. But the question "why live?" is not a finite question; it asks about the whole of life, and there is no standpoint outside the whole from which reason can answer it. The attempt to answer the question on reason's terms leads, Tolstoy found, to the conclusion that life is meaningless — because reason can only handle life in finite terms, and in finite terms, life is meaningless (death annihilates the one who lives). The way out is not to force an answer on reason's terms but to acknowledge that the question exceeds reason, and to respond — to relate the finite life to the infinite world — in a way that reason permits but does not dictate. This is what Tolstoy calls religion.

Legacy

Tolstoy's religious writings had an enormous influence, both philosophical and practical. Philosophically, they shaped the existentialist tradition's concern with the question of meaning — the question that Camus would later call the only serious philosophical problem, whether to live or to die. Practically, they shaped the tradition of Christian anarchism and nonviolence — Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God Is Within You was a major influence on Gandhi, who carried the Tolstoyan insistence on nonresistance into the Indian independence movement. The deeper mark of Tolstoy's influence is the reframing of the relation between religion and reason: religion is not the enemy of reason but its completion, the response to the question that reason cannot answer but cannot stop asking. This reframing has been taken up by the existentialist theologians (Tillich, Buber) and by the modern philosophy of religion, which has learned to take seriously the question of meaning as a question that cannot be settled by the methods of science alone.

The Deeper Lesson

The deepest lesson of Tolstoy's passage is that the question of life's meaning is not a question that can be answered by more information. Tolstoy had all the information a life could want — fame, wealth, achievement, family — and the question pressed on him anyway. The question is not "what is there?" but "what does it mean?" — and the second question is not a version of the first. It is a question about the whole of life, and it requires a response that engages the whole person, not just the part that gathers information. Tolstoy's wisdom is the wisdom of the honest questioner: do not pretend to have answered the question when you have not; do not accept an answer that does not engage the question; and do not refuse the response that the question, asked honestly, makes available. The relation to the infinite — however it is named, and in whatever tradition it is practiced — is, for Tolstoy, the response that the question of meaning makes possible. Whether that response is theism, or Buddhism, or the rational religion of the Enlightenment, or something else, is a further question. But the first question — why do I live? — is the one that Tolstoy insists we cannot afford not to ask.

Relations

This quote articulates a distinctive account of faith as the completion of reason and a reframing of the philosophy of religion around the question of meaning. It belongs to Tolstoy, stands alongside Pascal's account of the human condition between faith and reason, and anticipates the existentialist concern with religious experience as the response to the question of life's meaning. It connects to the wisdom of God and the wisdom of reverence in its insistence that the question of the infinite is the question that gives life its point.

Sources

1. "Leo Tolstoy." Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tolstoy/
2. Leo Tolstoy. A Confession (1882). Translated by Aylmer Maude. In: A Confession and Other Religious Writings. London: Oxford University Press, 1940.
3. Leo Tolstoy. What Is Religion? (1902). Translated by Aylmer Maude. In: What Is Religion? and Other Essays. London: Oxford University Press, 1915.