Leo Tolstoy on Pacifism and Non-Resistence to Evil

Leo Tolstoy, 1897

A conscientious objector is an individual who refuses to perform military service or participate in armed conflict due to deeply held ethical, moral, or religious beliefs. The concept is rooted in the conviction that certain actions, particularly those involving violence and killing, are fundamentally incompatible with one's principles. 

For Leo Tolstoy, pacifism and non-resistance to evil were fundamental beliefs rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ, specifically Matthew 5:39, "Resist not evil." 

 

Tolstoy's influence went beyond being one of the greatest and most influential authors of all time, nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature each year from 1902-1906. He was also nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize. (1901, 1902 and 1909.) His novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina have often been cited as two of the greatest books of all time.

Though Count Tolstoy grew up in upper crust society, in his mid-forties he underwent a moral crisis that resulted in his embrace a life of self-renunciation and anarchism, which at that time meant owing no allegiance to any state or political power. His ideas on non-violent resistance had a profound impact on future leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Dr. Martin Luther King, and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. It was a stance toward life that he took seriously.

It is also a conviction that stands at odds with many other Christian leaders throughout the centuries. The first who came to mind, and the reason I decided to write about this, was C.S. Lewis, who in his writings defended the idea that Christians could participate in war, especially in the defense of justice and in resisting evil. One of his radio talks during World War II addressed this and was later published in a small volume titled The Weight of Glory.

Saint Augustine supported the notion of war under certain conditions.He made a distinction between just and unjust wars. This notion of "Just War Theory" was expanded upon in greater detail by Thomas Aquinas eight centuries later. Martin Luther viewed military service as acceptable for Christians as a form of service to lawful authority. And Dietrich Bonhoffer participated in a plot to assassinate Hitler.

In short, these and many other Christians has found ways to reconcile their faith with military service. But who is right? 

Tolstoy stands in separate camp. His understanding of the teachings of Jesus, especially as delineated in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7) forbids Christians from taking up arms to go to war.

 

In the year 1884 Tolstoy wrote a book titled "What I Believe," in which he made a sincere statement of his beliefs. The response to this book prompted to amplify his convictions with a follow-up titled "The Kingdom of God Is Within You." The preface begins as follows:

In affirming my belief in Christ's teaching, I could not help explaining why I do not believe, and consider as mistaken, the Church's doctrine, which is usually called Christianity.

Among the many points in which this doctrine falls short of the doctrine of Christ I pointed out as the principal one the absence of any commandment of non-resistance to evil by force. The perversion of Christ's teaching by the teaching of the Church is more clearly apparent in this than in any other point of difference.

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Many Christians today would find Tolstoy's ideas so radical that they are not worth the slightest consideration. I myself feel challenged by them. Would any of the original Apostles become soldiers for the Roman Empire had they been recruited for military service?

The entire document is online courtesy of the Gutenberg Project. Here is a link followed by a couple excerpts.

TOLSTOY’S “The Kingdom of God Is Within You"

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43302/43302-h/43302-h.htm

"Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."—John viii. 32.

THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL BY FORCE HAS BEEN PROFESSED BY A MINORITY OF MEN FROM THE VERY FOUNDATION OF CHRISTIANITY.

Among the first responses called forth by my book were some letters from American Quakers. In these letters, expressing their sympathy with my views on the unlawfulness for a Christian of war and the use of force of any kind, the Quakers gave me details of their own so-called sect, which for more than two hundred years has actually professed the teaching of Christ on non-resistance to evil by force, and does not make use of weapons in self-defense. The Quakers sent me also their pamphlets, journals, and books, from which I learnt how they had, years ago, established beyond doubt the duty for a Christian of fulfilling the command of non-resistance to evil by force, and had exposed the error of the Church's teaching in allowing war and capital punishment.

In a whole series of arguments and texts showing that war—that is, the wounding and killing of men—is inconsistent with a religion founded on peace and good will toward men, the Quakers maintain and prove that nothing has contributed so much to the obscuring of Christian truth in the eyes of the heathen, and has hindered so much the diffusion of Christianity through the world, as the disregard of this command by men calling themselves Christians, and the permission of war and violence to Christians.

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And a little further on:

Conscientious objectors at Camp Pike, AK

But in the recent cases of refusal on the part of Mennonites to serve in the army on religious grounds, the government authorities have acted in the following manner:

To begin with, they have recourse to every means of coercion used in our times to "correct" the culprit and bring him to "a better mind," and these measures are carried out with the greatest secrecy. I know that in the case of one man who declined to serve in 1884 in Moscow, the official correspondence on the subject had two months after his refusal accumulated into a big folio, and was kept absolutely secret among the Ministry.

They usually begin by sending the culprit to the priests, and the latter, to their shame be it said, always exhort him to obedience. But since the exhortation in Christ's name to forswear Christ is for the most part unsuccessful, after he has received the admonitions of the spiritual authorities, they send him to the gendarmes, and the latter, finding, as a rule, no political cause for offense in him, dispatch him back again, and then he is sent to the learned men, to the doctors, and to the madhouse. During all these vicissitudes he is deprived of liberty and has to endure every kind of humiliation and suffering as a convicted criminal. (All this has been repeated in four cases.) The doctors let him out of the madhouse, and then every kind of secret shift is employed to prevent him from going free—whereby others would be encouraged to refuse to serve as he has done—and at the same time to avoid leaving him among the soldiers, for fear they too should learn from him that military service is not at all their duty by the law of God, as they are assured, but quite contrary to it.

The most convenient thing for the government would be to kill the non-resistant by flogging him to death or some other means, as was done in former days. But to put a man openly to death because he believes in the creed we all confess is impossible. To let a man alone who has refused obedience is also impossible. And so the government tries either to compel the man by ill-treatment to renounce Christ, or in some way or other to get rid of him unobserved, without openly putting him to death, and to hide somehow both the action and the man himself from other people. And so all kinds of shifts and wiles and cruelties are set on foot against him. They either send him to the frontier or provoke him to insubordination, and then try him for breach of discipline and shut him up in the prison of the disciplinary battalion, where they can ill treat him freely unseen by anyone, or they declare him mad, and lock him up in a lunatic asylum. They sent one man in this way to Tashkend—that is, they pretended to transfer him to the Tashkend army; another to Omsk; a third they convicted of insubordination and shut up in prison; a fourth they sent to a lunatic asylum.

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The position of Christian humanity with its prisons, galleys, gibbets, its factories and accumulation of capital, its taxes, churches, gin-palaces, licensed brothels, its ever-increasing armament and its millions of brutalized men, ready, like chained dogs, to attack anyone against whom their master incites them, would be terrible indeed if it were the product of violence, but it is pre-eminently the product of public opinion. And what has been established by public opinion can be destroyed by public opinion—and, indeed, is being destroyed by public opinion.

The time will come and is inevitably coming when all institutions based on force will disappear through their uselessness, stupidity, and even inconvenience becoming obvious to all.

The time must come when the men of our modern world who fill offices based upon violence will find themselves in the position of the emperor in Andersen's tale of "The Emperor's New Clothes," when the child seeing the emperor undressed, cried in all simplicity, "Look, he is naked!" And then all the rest, who had seen him and said nothing, could not help recognizing it too.

The story is that there was once an emperor, very fond of new clothes. And to him came two tailors, who promised to make him some extraordinary clothes. The emperor engages them and they begin to sew at them, but they explain that the clothes have the extraordinary property of remaining invisible to anyone who is unfit for his position. The courtiers come to look at the tailors' work and see nothing, for the men are plying their needles in empty space. But remembering the extraordinary property of the clothes, they all declare they see them and are loud in their admiration. The emperor does the same himself. The day of the procession comes in which the emperor is to go out in his new clothes. The emperor undresses and puts on his new clothes, that is to say, remains naked, and naked he walks through the town. But remembering the magic property of the clothes, no one ventures to say that he has nothing on till a little child cries out: "Look, he is naked!"

This will be exactly the situation of all who continue through inertia to fill offices which have long become useless, directly as someone who has no interest in concealing their uselessness exclaims in all simplicity: "But these people have been of no use to anyone for a long time past!"

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What do you think? Is Christianity compatible with military service? Can a nation armed to the teeth with missiles and bombs, and supplying such to the rest of the world, be considered a Christian nation?