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A Confession
by Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy
I
I was baptized and brought up in the Orthodox Christian faith.
I was taught it in childhood and throughout my boyhood and youth.
But when I abandoned the second course of the university at the age
of eighteen I no longer believed any of the things I had been
taught.
Judging by certain memories, I never seriously believed them,
but had merely relied on what I was taught and on what was
professed by the grown-up people around me, and that reliance was
very unstable.
I remember that before I was eleven a grammar school pupil,
Vladimir Milyutin (long since dead), visited us one Sunday and
announced as the latest novelty a discovery made at his school.
This discovery was that there is no God and that all we are taught
about Him is a mere invention (this was in 1838). I remember how
interested my elder brothers were in this information. They called
me to their council and we all, I remember, became very animated,
and accepted it as something very interesting and quite possible.
I remember also that when my elder brother, Dmitriy, who was
then at the university, suddenly, in the passionate way natural to
him, devoted himself to religion and began to attend all the Church
services, to fast and to lead a pure and moral life, we all -- even
our elders -- unceasingly held him up to ridicule and for some
unknown reason called him "Noah". I remember that Musin-Pushkin,
the then Curator of Kazan University, when inviting us to dance at
his home, ironically persuaded my brother (who was declining the
invitation) by the argument that even David danced before the Ark.
I sympathized with these jokes made by my elders, and drew from
them the conclusion that though it is necessary to learn the
catechism and go to church, one must not take such things too
seriously. I remember also that I read Voltaire when I was very
young, and that his raillery, far from shocking me, amused me very
much.
My lapse from faith occurred as is usual among people on our
level of education. In most cases, I think, it happens thus: a
man lives like everybody else, on the basis of principles not
merely having nothing in common with religious doctrine, but
generally opposed to it; religious doctrine does not play a part in
life, in intercourse with others it is never encountered, and in a
man's own life he never has to reckon with it. Religious doctrine
is professed far away from life and independently of it. If it is
encountered, it is only as an external phenomenon disconnected from
life.
Then as now, it was and is quite impossible to judge by a
man's life and conduct whether he is a believer or not. If there
be a difference between a man who publicly professes orthodoxy and
one who denies it, the difference is not in favor of the former.
Then as now, the public profession and confession of orthodoxy was
chiefly met with among people who were dull and cruel and who
considered themselves very important. Ability, honesty,
reliability, good-nature and moral conduct, were often met with
among unbelievers.
The schools teach the catechism and send the pupils to church,
and government officials must produce certificates of having
received communion. But a man of our circle who has finished his
education and is not in the government service may even now (and
formerly it was still easier for him to do so) live for ten or
twenty years without once remembering that he is living among
Christians and is himself reckoned a member of the orthodox
Christian Church.
So that, now as formerly, religious doctrine, accepted on
trust and supported by external pressure, thaws away gradually
under the influence of knowledge and experience of life which
conflict with it, and a man very often lives on, imagining that he
still holds intact the religious doctrine imparted to him in
childhood whereas in fact not a trace of it remains.
S., a clever and truthful man, once told me the story of how
he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already
twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night,
knelt down in the evening to pray -- a habit retained from
childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was
lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was
settling down for the night, his brother said to him: "So you
still do that?"
They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S.
ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not
prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years.
And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has
joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own
soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like
the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own
weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was
faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that
therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the
cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions.
Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue
them.
So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of
people. I am speaking of people of our educational level who are
sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession
of faith a means of attaining worldly aims. (Such people are the
most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of
attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.) these
people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge
and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they
have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they
have not yet noticed it.
The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in
me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of
fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the
doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. From the time
I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church
or to fast of my own volition. I did not believe what had been
taught me in childhood but I believed in something. What it was I
believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or
rather I did not deny God -- but I could not have said what sort of
God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his
teaching consisted in I again could not have said.
Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith --
my only real faith -- that which apart from my animal instincts
gave impulse to my life -- was a belief in perfecting myself. But
in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could
not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally -- I studied
everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I tried to
perfect my will, I drew up rules I tried to follow; I perfected
myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts
of exercises, and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by
all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be the
pursuit of perfection. the beginning of it all was of course moral
perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general:
by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but
in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again
changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more
famous, more important and richer than others.
II
Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history
of my life during those ten years of my youth. I think very many
people have had a like experience. With all my soul I wished to be
good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when
I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere
desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and
ridicule, but as soon as I yielded to low passions I was praised
and encouraged.
Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride,
anger, and revenge -- were all respected.
Yielding to those passions I became like the grown-up folk and
felt that they approved of me. The kind aunt with whom I lived,
herself the purest of beings, always told me that there was nothing
she so desired for me as that I should have relations with a
married woman: 'Rien ne forme un juene homme, comme une liaison
avec une femme comme il faut'. [Footnote: Nothing so forms a
young man as an intimacy with a woman of good breeding.] Another
happiness she desired for me was that I should become an aide-de-
camp, and if possible aide-de-camp to the Emperor. But the
greatest happiness of all would be that I should marry a very rich
girl and so become possessed of as many serfs as possible.
I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and
heartache. I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in
order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labor of the
peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and
deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds,
drunkenness, violence, murder -- there was no crime I did not
commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my
contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively
moral man.
So I lived for ten years.
During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness,
and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. to get
fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to
hide the good and to display the evil. and I did so. How often in
my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or
even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness which gave
meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this and was praised.
At twenty-six years of age [Footnote: He was in fact 27 at the
time.] I returned to Petersburg after the war, and met the writers.
They received me as one of themselves and flattered me. And before
I had time to look round I had adopted the views on life of the set
of authors I had come among, and these views completely obliterated
all my former strivings to improve -- they furnished a theory which
justified the dissoluteness of my life.
The view of life of these people, my comrades in authorship,
consisted in this: that life in general goes on developing, and in
this development we -- men of thought -- have the chief part; and
among men of thought it is we -- artists and poets -- who have the
greatest influence. Our vocation is to teach mankind. And lest
the simple question should suggest itself: What do I know, and what
can I teach? it was explained in this theory that this need not be
known, and that the artist and poet teach unconsciously. I was
considered an admirable artist and poet, and therefore it was very
natural for me to adopt this theory. I, artist and poet, wrote and
taught without myself knowing what. For this I was paid money; I
had excellent food, lodging, women, and society; and I had fame,
which showed that what I taught was very good.
this faith in the meaning of poetry and in the development of
life was a religion, and I was one of its priests. To be its
priest was very pleasant and profitable. And I lived a
considerable time in this faith without doubting its validity. But
in the second and still more in the third year of this life I began
to doubt the infallibility of this religion and to examine it. My
first cause of doubt was that I began to notice that the priests of
this religion were not all in accord among themselves. Some said:
We are the best and most useful teachers; we teach what is needed,
but the others teach wrongly. Others said: No! we are the real
teachers, and you teach wrongly. and they disputed, quarrelled,
abused, cheated, and tricked one another. There were also many
among us who did not care who was right and who was wrong, but were
simply bent on attaining their covetous aims by means of this
activity of ours. All this obliged me to doubt the validity of our
creed.
Moreover, having begun to doubt the truth of the authors'
creed itself, I also began to observe its priests more attentively,
and I became convinced that almost all the priests of that
religion, the writers, were immoral, and for the most part men of
bad, worthless character, much inferior to those whom I had met in
my former dissipated and military life; but they were self-
confident and self-satisfied as only those can be who are quite
holy or who do not know what holiness is. These people revolted
me, I became revolting to myself, and I realized that that faith
was a fraud.
But strange to say, though I understood this fraud and
renounced it, yet I did not renounce the rank these people gave me:
the rank of artist, poet, and teacher. I naively imagined that I
was a poet and artist and could teach everybody without myself
knowing what I was teaching, and I acted accordingly.
From my intimacy with these men I acquired a new vice:
abnormally developed pride and an insane assurance that it was my
vocation to teach men, without knowing what.
To remember that time, and my own state of mind and that of
those men (though there are thousands like them today), is sad and
terrible and ludicrous, and arouses exactly the feeling one
experiences in a lunatic asylum.
We were all then convinced that it was necessary for us to
speak, write, and print as quickly as possible and as much as
possible, and that it was all wanted for the good of humanity. And
thousands of us, contradicting and abusing one another, all printed
