The Kingdom of God is Within You; What is Art?. Лев Толстой

by the Revelation; it is not without reason that the history of the Church is the history of cruelties and horrors.

      Churches in themselves are, as some persons believe, institutions based upon a Christian principle, from which they have deviated to a certain extent; but considered in the light of churches, of bodies of men claiming infallibility, they are anti-Christian institutions. Between churches in the ecclesiastical sense and Christianity, not only is there nothing in common except the name, but they are two utterly contradictory and hostile elements. One is pride, violence, self-assertion, inertia, and death. The other is meekness, repentance, submission, activity, and life.

      No man can serve these two masters at the same time; he must choose either the one or the other.

      The servants of the churches of every creed, especially in these modern times, strive to represent themselves as the partisans of progress in Christianity; they make concessions, they try to correct the abuses that have crept into the Church, and protest that it is wrong to deny the principle of the Christian Church on account of these abuses, because it is only through the medium of the Church that unity can be obtained, and that the Church is the only mediator between God and man. All this is untrue. So far from fostering the spirit of unity, the churches have ever been the fruitful source of human enmity, of hatred, wars, conflicts, inquisitions, Eves of St. Bartholomew, and so on; neither do the churches act as the mediators between God and man—an office, moreover, quite unnecessary, and directly forbidden by Christ himself, who has revealed his doctrine unto each individual; it is but the dead formula, and not the living God, which the churches offer to man, and which serves rather to increase than diminish the distance between man and his Creator. The churches, which were founded upon a misconception, and which preserve this misconception by their immutability, must of necessity harass and persecute any new conception, because they know, however they may try to conceal it, that every advance along the road indicated by Christ is undermining their own existence.

      Whenever one reads or listens to the essays and sermons in which ecclesiastical writers of modern times belonging to the various creeds discuss the Christian truths and virtues, when one hears and reads these artificial arguments, these exhortations, these professions of faith, elaborated through centuries, that now and then sound sincere, one is almost ready to doubt if the churches can be inimical to Christianity. "It cannot be possible that men like John Chrysostom, Fénelon, Butler, and other Christian preachers, could be inimical to it." One would like to say, "The churches may have gone astray from Christianity, may have committed errors, but they cannot have been hostile to it." But one must first see the fruit before he can know the tree, as Christ has taught, and one sees that their fruits were evil, that the result of their works has been the distortion of Christianity; and one cannot help concluding that, however virtuous the men may have been, the cause of the church in which these men served was not Christian. The goodness and virtue of certain individuals who served the churches were peculiar to themselves, and not to the cause which they served. All these excellent men, like Francis of Assisi and Francis de Sales, Tichon Zadònsky, Thomas à Kempis, and others, were good men, even though they served a cause hostile to Christianity; and they would have been still more charitable and more exemplary had they not yielded obedience to false doctrines.

      But why do we speak of, or sit in judgment on, the past, which may be falsely represented, and is, in any event, but little known to us? The churches, with their principles and their works, are not of the past; we have them with us to-day, and can judge them by their works and by their influence over men.

      What, then, constitutes their power? How do they influence men? What is their work in the Greek, the Catholic, and in all the Protestant denominations? and what are the consequences of such work?

      The work of our Russian so-called Orthodox Church is visible to all. It is a factor of primary importance, which can neither be concealed nor disputed.

      In what manner is the activity of the Russian Church displayed—that vast institution which labors with so much zeal, that institution which numbers among its servants half a million of men, and costs the people tens of millions?

      The activity of the Church consists in forcing, by every means in its power, upon the one hundred millions of Russian people, those antiquated, time-worn beliefs which have lost all significance, and which were formerly professed by foreigners, with whom we had nothing in common, beliefs in which nearly every man has lost his faith, even in some cases those very men whose duty it is to inculcate them.

      The endeavor to force upon the people those formulas of the Byzantine clergy, marvelous to them and senseless to us, concerning the Trinity, the Virgin, the sacraments, grace, and so forth, embraces one province of the activity of the Russian Church; another function is the encouragement given to idolatry, in the literal sense of the word: the veneration of holy relics and holy images, the sacrifices offered to them in the faith that they will hear and grant prayers. I will pass over in silence what is written in the ecclesiastical magazines by the clergy who possess a semblance of learning and liberality, and will speak only of what is really done by the clergy throughout the immense extent of Russia, among its one hundred millions of inhabitants. What is it that is taught to the people with such unremitting pains and endeavor, and with so much earnestness? What is required of them for the sake of the so-called Christian religion?

      I will start at the beginning, with the birth of the child. When a child is born, we are taught that a prayer must be read over the mother and child, in order to purify them, for without that prayer the mother remains unclean. For that purpose, and facing the ikons of the saints, whom the common people simply call gods, the priest takes the infant in his arms, reads the exhortation, and by that means he is supposed to cleanse the mother. Then the parents are instructed, nay, even ordered, under penalty of punishment in the event of non-compliance, to christen the child—that is, to let the priest immerse it three times in the water, while words unintelligible to all present are read, and still less intelligible ceremonies are performed, such as the application of oil to different parts of the body, the cutting of the hair, the blowing and spitting of the sponsors at the imaginary devil. All this is necessary to cleanse the child, and make a Christian of him. Then the parents are told that the child must receive the holy sacrament—that is, he is to swallow, in the form of bread and wine, a particle of the body of Christ, by which means the child will receive the blessing of Christ, and so on. Then they are told that as the child grows it must be taught to pray, which means that he is to stand in front of boards upon which the faces of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints are painted, bow his head and body, while with his right hand, his fingers being folded in a peculiar manner, he touches his forehead, his shoulders, and his stomach, and utters certain Slavonic words, the commonest of which, those which all children learn, are the following: "Mother of God, … Virgin, rejoice," etc. Then the child is taught that he must repeat this—that is, that he must make the sign of the cross whenever he sees a church or an ikon. Furthermore, he is taught that on a holiday (holidays are either the day on which Christ was born, although no one knows when that took place, or the day of his circumcision, or that on which the Virgin died, or when the cross or the ikon was brought, or when some fanatic beheld a vision, etc.) he should array himself in his best clothes, go to church, buy candles, and set them up before the ikons of the saints, give to the priest memoranda bearing the names of the dead who are to be prayed for, receive bread with triangular pieces cut out of it, pray repeatedly for the health and welfare of the Czar and bishops, as well as for himself and his own affairs, and then kiss the cross and the hand of the priest.

      Thus is he taught to pray; and besides this, he is also taught that he must perform his devotions once a year. To perform one's devotions means to go to church and tell one's sins to the priest, it being assumed that this recital of one's sins to a stranger will have a purifying effect on a man; then he is to swallow a spoonful of bread and wine, which will purify him still more. Moreover, men are told that if a man and woman desire to have their sexual relation sanctified they must come to church, put crowns of metal upon their heads, swallow some wine, walk three times round a table, accompanied by the sound of singing, and this will make their sexual relation holy and entirely different from any others.

      In daily life the observation of the following rules is enjoined: to eat no meat nor drink no milk on certain days, to say Te Deums and Requiems