by Stefan Zweig
THE ARTIFICIAL CHRISTIAN
Ah me, how hard it is to live only in God’s sight — to live as men have lived when lowered into a shaft, knowing that they would never get out of it, and that no one would ever learn how they had lived there. But one must, one must live like that, for only such a life is a life. Help me, Lord.
DIARY, NOVEMBER, 1900
“Grant me faith, Lord,” cries Tolstoy despairingly to the God he has hitherto denied. This God, it would seem, does not show indulgence towards those who seek him impetuously, instead of waiting humbly until his will is revealed to them. For Tolstoy brings impatience, his besetting sin, into the field of religion. He is not content to ask for faith. He must have it instantly, all complete, fitted like an axe, so that he can use it to clear away the thicket of his doubts. This nobleman is accustomed to servants who jump to obey his nod; he has been spoiled, too, by those keen senses of his, which have been wont in the twinkling of an eye to convey to him all the knowledge of the world. He is a passionate, capricious, self-willed man; such persons can never wait patiently. He will not be satisfied to wait, like a devout monk, abiding the time when the light will begin to shed its ray on him from above. He wants the full glare of day to shine instantly into his tenebrous soul. With one leap, his mettlesome spirit, unhindered by obstacles, is to press forward to the “meaning of life,” is to “know God,” to “think God,” as he expresses it almost arrogantly. Faith, the imitation of Christ, humility, absorption into the essence of God — these things he expects to learn as easily and swiftly as, though his hair is grey, he now learns Greek and Hebrew. He is to become an accomplished pedagogue, theologian, sociologist within six months, or at any rate within a year.
But how can he who does not already bear within himself the seeds of faith discover faith thus suddenly? How can a man between night and morning become sympathetic, kindly, humble, gentle as a good Franciscan, when for fifty years he has appraised the world with the aloofness of a man of science, when he is a nihilist of the Russian type, when to him the most important thing has ever been himself? How can a will of adamant be transformed in a hand’s turn into an accommodating love of mankind? Where can such a self-centered person learn the faith that will enable him to lose himself, and to undergo absorption into a higher, a superhuman power? “Surely,” says Tolstoy, to himself, “from those who already have such a faith, or say they have, from Mother Church, who for two thousand years has worn Christ’s signet!”
Instantly (for he will not brook a moment’s delay), Leo Tolstoy drops on his knees before the icons; he fasts, makes pilgrimage to monasteries, argues with popes and bishops, and flutters the pages of the gospels. For three years, he tries to be orthodox; but the incense-laden air of the churches strikes chill into a soul that is already shivering with cold. Soon, disillusioned once for all with orthodoxy, he shuts the doors behind him. The Church, he finds, is not in possession of the true faith; no, rather, the Church has allowed the waters of life to dry up or run away; in the Church, the teachings of religion have been falsified.
He seeks elsewhere. Perhaps the philosophers will know more about this mysterious “meaning of life.” At once, with berserker rage, Tolstoy, whose thoughts have never before been concerned with suprasensual matters, begins to read helter-skelter the writings of the philosophers of all ages, gulping down their words far too rapidly to digest their meaning. He begins with Schopenhauer, ever the chosen companion of those whose minds have been overcast with gloom; goes back to Socrates and Plato; gives Mohammed a turn; tries Confucius and Lao-tse; studies the mystics, the stoics, the skeptics; reads Nietzsche. He closes their books. They, too, have no other means of studying the universe than the one he has himself been using all these years, the keen, laboriously contemplative understanding; they, too, are questioners rather than knowers; they, too, are striving towards God, and have not yet found rest in God. They create systems for the mind, but do not bring peace to a troubled soul; they bestow knowledge, but do not give solace.
Then, like a sick man who can get no help from the accredited practitioners, and therefore gives the herbalists and the village wiseacres a trial, Tolstoy, who has the best intelligence of all the Russians of his day, turns in the sixth decade of his life to the peasants, to the “folk,” that from them, the unlearned, he may learn the true faith, may draw wisdom from the sources of unwisdom. They, the unlearned, who have never been confused or corrupted by the written word; they, the poor and afflicted, who toil uncomplainingly, and who, when their hour comes, slink into a corner to die like dumb beasts; they, who do not doubt because they do not think, because they are endowed with sancta simplicitas — they must have a secret which enables them without a murmur to bow their necks beneath the iron yoke of poverty. They, in their stupidity, must know something which is hidden from the keen intelligence of the wise, something thanks to which, though backward in matters of reason, they are leaders in the world of the soul. “The way we live is wrong, and the way they live is right.” That is why God shines visibly out of their patient existence, while those who have nothing better than a “vain, voluptuous greed for knowledge” have turned away from the true source of light, which is in the heart. Had they not a solace of their own, had they not a magical amulet, they could not so cheerfully, so light-heartedly endure an existence as pitiful as theirs. Thinking these thoughts, the impatient and unruly man lusts to discover this arcanum of the simple. From them, from them alone, from “God’s own people,” Tolstoy is now convinced that he will learn the secret of how to live “rightly,” will learn the art of patient self-surrender to a harsh life and a still harsher death.
Let him enter into communion with them, get into close touch with their life, that he may pluck the divine mystery from them! Off with the gentleman’s coat and on with the peasant’s smock; away from the table that is laden with costly viands and useless books. Henceforward he will nourish himself on innocent herbs and bland milk, and will learn humility, the wisdom of the simple. In this spirit he now sets to work, Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy, lord of Yasnaya Polyana and other manors, the author whose writings have made him lord of millions of readers. He drives the plow; shoulders the cask in which water is carried from the well; toils indefatigably in the harvest field side by side with his own peasants. The hand which wrote Anna Karenina and War and Peace now devotes itself to cutting out and stitching shoes, to the handling of duster and broom, to the making of garments. Swiftly, swiftly, let him get into close contact with his “brothers.” Leo Tolstoy hopes to become one of the “folk,” and thus to make himself a true Christian. He goes into the village, to gather there with those who are still little more than serfs, and who still, when he draws near, pull off their caps from force of habit. He summons them to his house, where, in their heavy boots, they stump awkwardly and timidly across the polished floor, and draw a breath of relief when they find that the barin, “His Worship,” has no complaint to make of them, and does not, as they had feared, propose to raise their rents. How strange, he wants to talk to them about God, always about God! They scratch their heads, perplexed. The good fellows remember that the count had had a fad of this kind once before. For a whole year, until he wearied of it, he had taught the youngsters in the school. What can he be up to now? They listen to him suspiciously, for in truth this nihilist disguised as a peasant can hardly fail to seem a government spy to these members of the “folk” when he is trying to learn the secret of their humility, to discover the key of their faith, to learn from them what he must learn if he is to be successful in the campaign leading to God.
But the revelations of the peasants are of use only to art and to the artist. The best of Tolstoy’s writings are embellished with the results of these rural conversations, and henceforward his phrasing is vivified and strengthened by peasant metaphors. The wisdom of the simple is not to be learned. When Anna Karenina was published, Dostoevsky clairvoyantly said concerning Levin, the impersonation of Tolstoy in that novel: “Such men as Levin may live wi
th the folk as long as they please, but they can never become part of the folk. No powers of determination, of will, or of imagination will enable a man to accomplish his object in going down among the people.” The brilliant visionary hits the bull’s-eye, pierces to the core of the Tolstoyan metamorphosis, discloses the true nature of the artificial Christianity of a man who, in desperation and not from love, in bitter spiritual need and not from spontaneous brotherliness, has gone down among the people. Tolstoy the intellectual may put on peasant attire and may do his utmost to assume the dull mentality of a peasant, but he will never be able to rid himself of the wide experience which has given him his specific outlook on the universe, will never be able to animate his body with a peasant’s soul, will never reduce the mentality of one who has been searching for truth decade after decade to the simpler mentality, to the implicit faith, of a genuine son of the soil.
It does not suffice to throw oneself into a cell, like Verlaine, and to pray: “Mon Dieu, donne-moi de la simplicité.” This alone will not make humility ripen in the heart. Faith must be something lived and experienced; one cannot merely “profess” it. Neither a union with the common people by the bonds of sympathy, nor yet the appeasement of conscience by a genuine religious sentiment, can be made to irradiate the soul by some such simple process as turning an electric switch. Wearing a peasant smock, drinking kvass, mowing crops — these outward forms of equalization with the tillers of the soil can easily be adopted, without a moment’s delay. But a Beotian dullness of mind cannot be assumed at will; the intelligence cannot be lowered as one lowers a gas flame. Luminosity and alertness of mind are inalienable treasures; they dominate the will, and cannot be dominated thereby; and they assert themselves all the more vigorously when they feel that their sovereignty is threatened. Just as little as any spiritualistic legerdemain can equip us with knowledge transcending the inborn possibilities of experience, just so little can the intellect take a step back towards simplicity at the prompting of a sudden decision.
It was impossible that Tolstoy, a man of keen and far-reaching intelligence, should not speedily recognize that a damping down of his spiritual complexity to become complacent simplicity was beyond the powers even of such a will as his. In later years he said: “The attempt to constrain the spirit is like the attempt to catch a sunbeam; shut it up as tight as you please, it will always find its way out.” In the long run he could not fail to be aware that his stubborn, contentious, overbearing intelligence made enduring humility impossible to him. Nor did the peasants ever really accept him as one of themselves, though he wore their dress and adopted their habits. As for the world at large, it merely considered him to be dressing up, and did not believe that there could be a genuine transformation of his mind. His closest associates, his wife, his children, the other members of his household, and his real friends (not the professional Tolstoyans), contemplated with uneasiness this attempt on his part to force himself into an environment that was unnatural to him. Turgenev, writing on his deathbed, appealed to the “greatest of Russian writers” to return to the world of art. Countess Tolstoy, the victim of her husband’s spiritual struggles, remarked to him at this time: “You used to say you were uneasy because you had no faith. Why, then, are you not happy now, when you say you have found it?” The argument was simple and unanswerable. There is nothing to show that Tolstoy, after his conversion to the folk God, had thereby attained peace of mind, the power to rest in the bosom of his newly found deity. On the contrary, whenever he speaks of his new doctrine, we cannot but feel that he is trying to hide the unsteadiness of his faith by vociferating that nothing can shake his conviction. During the days that followed the conversion, all Tolstoy’s sayings and doings had a disagreeable stridency. There was something ostentatious, forced, cantankerous, bigoted about them. His Christianity brayed like a trumpet, his humility strutted like a peacock. Anyone with a fine ear could detect in the exaggerations of his abasement the old note of Tolstoyan arrogance, could discern the pride which had assumed the mask of humility. Read the famous passage in his confession where he is endeavoring to “prove” his conversion by vilifying his life of earlier days: “I killed men in war, I fought duels, I squandered at the gaming table the money extorted from the peasants and I oppressed them cruelly, I went whoring after light women, and betrayed men. Lying, theft, adultery, all kinds of drunkenness and bestiality, every possible infamy, did I commit; there is no crime which cannot be laid to my charge.” Lest any should excuse his offenses on the ground that he is an artist, he goes on to say: “During these days I began to scribble, moved thereto by vanity, greed, and arrogance. In pursuit of fame and wealth, I repressed the good in my nature, and wallowed in sin.”
A terrible confession, this; heartrending in its moral pathos! Nevertheless, to speak frankly, has anyone ever really despised Leo Tolstoy because, in wartime, he discharged his duties as artillery officer, because, being a man of strong passions, he lived in his bachelor days the life led by other young men of his class; did anyone else ever look upon him as he looked upon himself, “a vile and sinful person,” as a “louse”? Have we not a feeling that he protests too much? Can we fail to surmise that one expressing such excessive penitence, such arrogant humility, is inventing sins? Are we not forced to suspect that a soul yearning to bear testimony is assuming the burden of non-existent crimes as a way of “taking up the cross”? Are we not forced to suspect that in this way Tolstoy is trying to “prove “ his Christian humility? Does not the urgent desire for such proof, so convulsive a parade of self-vilification, imply that there is no real humility, assured and equable, in this tortured soul? Do we not actually sense the existence of a dangerously perverted vanity? As soon as the first uncertain spark of faith begins to glow within him, the impatient convert is eager to set the whole of mankind ablaze with it, like the Germanic chiefs of long ago who, before the drops of baptismal water had dried on their heads, seized axes to hew down the sacred oaks, and hastened with fire and sword to fall upon their unconverted neighbors. With leaps and bounds, with titanic energy, Tolstoy storms onward towards the faith; but there is nothing to show that he has really attained it. For, if faith signifies rest in God, and if to be a Christian means to lead a life full of tranquility, then this man fired with splendid impatience was never a believer, this man glowing with discontent was never a Christian. Not unless we term an unquenchable thirst for religiosity, religion, and not unless we call a burning desire for God, Christ-like, must this seeker after God be numbered among the faithful.
For the very reason that he was only half successful in his quest, for the very reason that he never achieved real conviction, Tolstoy’s crisis passes beyond the bounds of an individual experience to become a memorable example, teaching us that even the most iron-willed of men is unable to alter his primary disposition, unable, by any outburst of energy, to transform himself into his opposite. Our inherited disposition may be bettered in certain directions, may be modified or intensified. A moral passion may incite us to improve ourselves by deliberate effort. But it is impossible to erase the fundamental lineaments of character, or to rebuild body and mind upon a new architectural plan. When Tolstoy tells us that we can “wean ourselves from selfishness as from tobacco,” or that love can be “conquered,” faith “compelled,” we note in contradiction the modest results in these directions he himself achieved at the cost of frenzied endeavor. There is no evidence to show that Tolstoy, the violent, unsympathetic, and nihilistic observer, the choleric being “whose eyes flashed at the least hint of contradiction,” became in a moment a kindly, gentle, affectionate, socially disposed Christian, a “servant of God,” and “brother” to all those he termed his brethren. No doubt his “transformation” had brought about a change in his outlooks, his opinions, his words; but not in his nature. After the “awakening,” as before, his uneasy spirit was overshadowed, gloomy, prone to self-torment. Tolstoy was not born to be contented. For the very reason that he was so headstrong, God would not immediately �
��grant” him the gift of faith; and during the thirty years that followed the crisis, down to the last hour of his life, he had to continue the struggle. His Damascus was not over and done with in a night, nor yet in a year. To the end, Tolstoy found no answer that would satisfy him, no faith in which he could rest. To the last moment of his life, he felt life to be a mystery.
Thus his leap towards God fell short. But the artist who is unable to cross a gulf has always one resource. He can project his own need into humanity at large, thus universalizing it. In this way Tolstoy rises above the selfish cry of terror, “what will happen to me?” to ask, “what will happen to us?” Unable to convince himself, he wants to persuade others. Unable to change himself, he tries to change mankind. Such has ever been the origin of religion. These great endeavors to better the world have arisen (Nietzsche knew it well) out of an individual’s “flight from himself.” A storm-tossed soul, seeking relief from the question that tortures it, generalizes that question, transforming a personal unrest into a worldwide unrest. Tolstoy, the passionate man who could have no illusions, the man whose heart was consumed with doubt, never succeeded in becoming a pious Christian after the Franciscan model; but his intimate knowledge of the torment of unfaith led him to attempt more earnestly and persistently than any other of our day to save the world from the abyss of nihilism, to make the world more believing than he himself was ever able to become. “The only refuge from despair is to project one’s ego into the world.” Tolstoy’s questing ego writes large the terrible problems which assail it, that they may serve as warning and instruction for all mankind.