Catholicism and Christianity

One must not confuse Christianity as a historical fact with the original source from which it arose. Only through unparalleled dishonesty could holiness be attributed to what is now called “the Catholic faith.” What did Christ deny? Precisely what is now called the Catholic Church.

The Catholic Church is the complete opposite of what served as the beginning of Christian teaching. Precisely what in the Catholic ecclesiastical sense is Christ’s is fundamentally un-Christlike. Instead of symbols, there in the church are objects and persons; instead of eternal events—history; instead of the practice of life—Catholic rules, rituals, and dogmas. Christianity in its essence is indifferent to cult, priests, church, and worship.

The practice of Christianity has no phantasmagories in it; it is a means of being happy:

“One must not make distinctions between strangers and one’s own. One must not be angry; no one should be humiliated. Give alms in secret. Do not swear. Do not judge. One must make peace and forgive. Pray in secret.”

Jesus turns directly to the essence of the matter, to the “kingdom of God” in the human heart, and the paths to it he indicates are not external, consisting in observance of the rules of the Jewish church, which he does not recognize, but internal. He thinks not of the outward but of the inward.

He relates in the same way to all crude methods of communion with God: he teaches how one must live in order to feel oneself “deified,” teaches that one cannot come to this state through self-torture. To become divine, the main thing is to renounce oneself.

Catholicism is something fundamentally different from what Christ did and wanted. Christianity represents a great anti-pagan movement; but this teaching, the life and word of Christ, was subjected to a completely arbitrary interpretation for purposes completely foreign to Christianity, and then was translated into the language of already existing religions.

Whereas Jesus taught peace and happiness, Catholicism turned out to be an expression of a gloomy attitude toward life—and moreover, the attitude of the weak, the infirm, the oppressed, the suffering.

The Gospel announces that the humbled and the poor have access to happiness; for this one need only free oneself from all the established guardianship of the higher classes. Property, acquisitions, fatherland, class and position, courts, police, state, church, education, art, army—all these are obstacles to achieving happiness—delusions, temptations of the devil, against which the Gospel threatens with the Last Judgment.

Catholicism made of Christianity a teaching that ultimately reconciles itself with the state: wages war, judges, tortures, swears, and hates. It needed to put forward the concept of guilt, sin; it needed not a new life according to the teaching of Christ, but a new cult, a new faith in miraculous transformation (“redemption” through faith).

Catholicism made of the history of Christ’s life and death the most arbitrary selection, emphasized everything here in its own way, everywhere shifting the centers of gravity—in a word, destroyed original Christianity.

The struggle against pagan and Jewish priests and the church was reduced, thanks to Catholicism, to the creation of new priests and theology—to a new ruling class—again to a church.

This is the whole humor, the tragic humor: Catholicism restored in general outline everything that Christ destroyed. In the end, when the Catholic Church was again created, it even took the state under its patronage.

Catholicism is precisely what Christ preached against and what he commanded his disciples to combat.

When the criminal, the robber on the cross, enduring a hard death, reasons: “It is right to suffer and die like Jesus, without complaint or anger, with goodness and submission”—he affirms the Gospel and enters paradise.

Christianity is realizable at any given moment; it needs neither metaphysics, nor asceticism, nor “natural sciences.” Christianity is life. It teaches how to act.

He who says: “I do not want to be a soldier,” “I have nothing to do with the courts,” “I do not need the police,” “I do not want to do anything that could disturb my inner peace,” and “if I suffer for this, nothing will pacify me so much as this suffering”—that person will be a true Christian.

—Nietzsche

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Translator’s Notes:

• Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was the German philosopher famous for his critique of Christianity and his concept of the Übermensch (overman). The Antichrist, from which this passage derives, was written in 1888 but not published until 1895.
• Tolstoy’s inclusion of Nietzsche in a religious anthology is remarkable given the fundamental opposition between their philosophies. Nietzsche famously declared “God is dead” and attacked Christian morality as “slave morality,” while Tolstoy devoted his later life to a radical Christianity based on the Sermon on the Mount.
• What united them here was their shared contempt for institutional Christianity, particularly the Catholic Church. Both saw the church as having betrayed the original message of Jesus.
• The passage shows Nietzsche distinguishing between Jesus himself—whom he portrays somewhat sympathetically as a teacher of inner peace—and the church built in his name. In The Antichrist, Nietzsche calls Jesus “the only real Christian” who died on the cross.
• The final paragraph about the true Christian who refuses military service, courts, and police perfectly aligned with Tolstoy’s own teaching in works like The Kingdom of God Is Within You and What I Believe.
• The quotations from Jesus’s teaching (“Do not swear,” “Do not judge,” etc.) are summaries of the Sermon on the Mount, the same text that formed the basis of Tolstoy’s own Christianity.
• This passage illustrates how Tolstoy, in compiling Circle of Reading, was willing to draw wisdom from the most unlikely sources—even from a philosopher whose overall worldview he would have rejected.