The Essence of Christian Teaching

From the most ancient times, people have felt the calamity, instability, and meaninglessness of their existence, and have sought salvation from this calamity, instability, and meaninglessness through faith in a god or gods who could deliver them from various misfortunes in this life and grant them in a future life the good they desired but could not obtain in this one. And so from ancient times among different peoples there have been different preachers who taught people about the nature of the god or gods who could save them, and about what must be done to please this god or these gods in order to receive rewards in this life or the next.

Some religious teachings taught that this god is the sun and is embodied in various animals; others taught that the gods are heaven and earth; still others taught that God created the world and chose from among all peoples one beloved nation; a fourth group taught that there are many gods who participate in human affairs; a fifth taught that God, having taken on human form, descended to earth. And all these teachers, mixing truth with falsehood, demanded of people, besides abstaining from actions considered bad and performing deeds considered good, also mysteries, sacrifices, and prayers, which above all else were supposed to ensure people their good in this world and the next.

But the longer people lived, the less and less these religious doctrines satisfied the demands of the human soul.

People saw, first of all, that the happiness in this world toward which they strove was not achieved despite fulfilling the requirements of god or the gods. Second, as enlightenment spread, trust in what the religious teachers preached about God, about the future life and rewards in it, not coinciding with clarified conceptions of the world, grew ever weaker. If formerly people could believe without hesitation or doubt that God created the world six thousand years ago, that the earth is the center of the universe, that hell exists beneath the earth, that God descended to earth and then flew up to heaven, and so forth—now this can no longer be believed, because people know with certainty that the world has existed not six thousand years but hundreds of thousands of years, that the earth is not the center of the world but only a very small planet compared to other heavenly bodies, and they know that nothing can exist beneath the earth since it is a sphere; they know that one cannot fly up to heaven because there is no heaven, only an apparent celestial vault.

Third, and most importantly, trust in these various teachings was undermined by the fact that people, entering into closer communion with one another, learned that in each country the religious teachers preach their own special doctrine, recognizing only their own as true and denying all others.

And people, knowing this, naturally drew the conclusion that none of these teachings is truer than another, and therefore none of them can be accepted as indubitable and infallible truth.

The unattainability of happiness in this life, the ever-spreading enlightenment of humanity, and the communion of people with one another through which they learned the religious teachings of other peoples—all this caused people’s trust in the doctrines taught to them to grow ever weaker. Meanwhile, the need to explain the meaning of life and to resolve the contradiction between the striving for happiness and life on the one hand, and the ever clearer awareness of the inevitability of misfortune and death on the other, became more and more urgent.

Man desires good for himself, sees in this the meaning of his life, and the longer he lives, the more he sees that this good is impossible for him; man desires life, its continuation, and sees that both he and everything existing around him is doomed to inevitable destruction and disappearance; man possesses reason and seeks a rational explanation of life’s phenomena, and finds no rational explanation either of his own life or of the lives of others. If in ancient times the awareness of this contradiction between human life, which demands good and its continuation, and the inevitability of death and suffering was accessible only to the best minds—Solomon, Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu, and others—then in later times this became a truth accessible to all; and therefore the resolution of this contradiction became more necessary than ever before.

And precisely at the time when the resolution of the contradiction between the striving for good and life and the awareness of their impossibility became especially painfully necessary for humanity, it was given to people through Christian teaching in its true meaning.

The ancient religious doctrines, with their assurances about the existence of a God who is creator, provider, and redeemer, tried to conceal the contradiction of human life; Christian teaching, on the contrary, shows people this contradiction in all its force, shows them that it must exist, and from the recognition of the contradiction derives its resolution. The contradiction consists in the following.

Indeed, on the one hand man is an animal and cannot cease to be an animal while living in the body; on the other hand, he is a spiritual being that negates all the animal demands of man.

In the first period of his life, man lives without knowing that he lives, so that it is not he himself who lives, but through him lives that force of life which lives in everything we know. Man begins to live himself only when he knows that he lives. And he knows that he lives when he knows that he desires good for himself and that other beings desire the same. This knowledge is given to him by the reason that has awakened in him.

Having learned that he lives and desires good for himself and that other beings desire the same, man inevitably learns also that the good he desires for his separate being is unattainable by him, and that instead of the good he desires, inevitable sufferings and death await him, and that the same awaits all other beings. And a contradiction arises for which man seeks a resolution whereby his life, such as it is, would have rational meaning. He wants life to continue being what it was before the awakening of his reason—that is, entirely animal—or to become already entirely spiritual. Man wants to be either a beast or an angel but cannot be either.

And here appears the resolution of this contradiction that Christian teaching provides. It tells man that he is neither beast nor angel, but an angel being born from a beast—a spiritual being being born from an animal. That our entire sojourn in this world is nothing other than this birth.

As soon as man awakens to rational consciousness, this consciousness tells him that he desires good; and since his rational consciousness awakened in his separate being, it seems to him that his desire for good relates to his separate being. But that same rational consciousness which showed him himself as a separate being desiring good also shows him that this separate being does not correspond to that desire for good and life which he attributes to it; he sees that this separate being can have neither good nor life.

“What then has true life?” he asks himself, and sees that true life belongs neither to him nor to the beings surrounding him, but only to that which desires good. And having recognized this, man ceases to acknowledge as himself his separate, bodily, and mortal being, and acknowledges as himself that being which is undivided from others, spiritual, and therefore immortal, which is revealed to him by his rational consciousness.

In this consists the birth in man of a new spiritual being.

The being revealed to man by his rational consciousness is the desire for good—the very same desire for good that previously constituted the goal of his life, but with the difference that the desire for good of the former being related to a separate, single bodily being and was not conscious of itself, whereas the present desire for good is conscious of itself and therefore relates not to anything separate but to all that exists.

At first, upon the awakening of reason, it seems to man that the desire for good which he is conscious of as himself relates only to the body in which it is enclosed. But the clearer and firmer reason becomes, the clearer it becomes that man’s true being, his true “I,” as soon as he is conscious of himself, is not his body, which has no true life, but the desire for good in itself—in other words, the desire for good of all that exists. And the desire for good of all that exists is that which gives life to all that exists—that which we call God.

So the being revealed to man by his consciousness, the being being born, is that which gives life to all that exists—is God.

According to the former teachings, to know God man had to believe what other people told him about God, about how God supposedly created the world and people and then manifested himself to people; but according to Christian teaching, man knows God directly through his consciousness within himself. Within himself consciousness shows man that the essence of his life is the desire for good of all that exists—something inexplicable and inexpressible in words, yet at the same time the closest and most comprehensible thing to man.

The beginning of the desire for good appeared in man first as the life of his separate animal being; then as the life of those beings he loved; then, from the time his rational consciousness awakened, it manifested itself as the desire for good of all that exists. And the desire for good of all that exists is the beginning of all life, is love, is God—as it is said in the Gospel that God is love.

—L. Tolstoy

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Translator’s Notes:

• This reading is entirely Tolstoy’s own composition, not an adaptation of another author’s work.
• The essay represents Tolstoy’s mature religious philosophy, articulating his understanding that Christianity resolves the fundamental human contradiction through spiritual rebirth.
• The reference to “God is love” comes from 1 John 4:8.
• Tolstoy’s list of ancient sages (Solomon, Buddha, Socrates, Lao Tzu) reflects his view that all great teachers recognized the same fundamental truths.