From the Diary of Fr. John of Kronstadt, in Denunciation of the False Teaching of Count L. Tolstoy

Instead of a Preface (from a Letter to the Editor)

A few days ago I received an anonymous letter from a Tolstoyan, in which he scolds me for having written a feeble refutation of Tolstoy’s ravings—that I am a pygmy standing up against a colossus, Tolstoy, and, having only one talent, wish to do battle on paper with a man who has ten (Tolstoy)… So as not to remain in debt before Tolstoy and his admirer, and to answer them both «more forcefully», I have resolved to print a little more—for truth is strong, and it is easy to defend it against those who fight it, even «colossi»—for the Tolstoyans do imagine themselves colossi, though I say it without meaning to offend them—with feet of clay… And it is true that Tolstoy is a colossus, but in his own sphere, in the field of the novel and the drama; in the field of religion he is a true pygmy, who understands nothing. And if I say still more in denunciation of Tolstoy and his comrades, I ask them not to be angered at the bare, harsh truth. I did not wish to answer Tolstoy’s mad utterances any further, but since I am sharply challenged to do so, then, out of duty before the Truth and the Church, I answer, giving to print excerpts from my diary containing my thoughts and feelings concerning the soul-destroying heresy of Tolstoy.

The present time is a time of struggle against sin, against the passionate flesh, against the world lying in evil, and against the devil, the author of sin—a time for training in every virtue: attentiveness to oneself, sobriety, self-denial, watchfulness, self-restraint, meekness, humility, freedom from malice, obedience, chastity, forbearance toward one’s neighbor, mercy; this is not a time to rest and give oneself over to pleasures, for our cunning, most malicious, crafty enemies never sleep for a single moment, and our adversary, the devil, prowls like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour (1Pet 5:8). This truth must be impressed on all Christians of every rank, order, sex, and age, especially on the youth being educated in various institutions. «Watch and pray, that you may not enter into temptation», the Lord says to His disciples, and He says the same to us (Mt 26:41). And what do we do? We doze and sleep. «While men slept, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and went away» (Mt 13:25). And here is Tolstoy too, diligently sowing his weed-teaching in the field of Christian hearts.

The Tolstoyans have rejected for themselves the covenant of God, as have other heretics, schismatics, sectarians, and all Christians who live ungodly lives. What covenant? The covenant of the salvation of the human race through the incarnation, the cross, and the death of the Son of God; the covenant concerning the need for repentance and partaking of the Holy Mysteries, and belonging to the one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church; the covenant concerning the celebrants of the Christian Mysteries—the pastors. All drunkards, adulterers, lovers of money, the unrepentant, reject the covenant of God for themselves, and perish. These thoughts have wrung tears from me!…

Writers of this world, wholly unversed in the things of God—come with trust and learn from us, teachers of the Spirit, and we will teach you. But you will not come; you will thrust us away with contempt; you cannot be devoted to us, for we teach a doctrine «not of this world», not drawn from your wisdom.

«To whom shall we go?» Peter asks himself, along with the other apostles. «You have the words of eternal life (Jn 6:68). Behold, we have left everything and followed You—what then shall we have?» (Mt 19:27). The Lord promised them a new life and eternal glory and the power to judge all the tribes of Israel (Mt 19:28). Tolstoyans! Where, then, are you going with Count Tolstoy, your teacher? Does he have words of life? Are they not, rather, words of madness, unbelief, blasphemy, cursing, and death? What, in the end, will become of you? Eternal condemnation and ruin! In his insolent writings, Tolstoy dreams of striking down Christianity and Christians, of reducing to nothing, by his bold denial and mockery, the Christianity that the holy universal Church has held for nearly twenty centuries now—Christianity glorified by God with an unfading eternal glory, which has shown the greatest vitality, strength, and beneficence. But he deals a mortal blow to himself and to his followers, for he has deprived both himself and them; for, having rejected the Savior, these heretics no longer have a sacrifice for sin remaining to them, but only a certain fearful expectation of judgment and a fury of fire ready to consume the adversaries (Hebr 10:27). Do the proud Tolstoyans think about this? «Vengeance is Mine», says the Lord, «I will repay» (Rom 12:19).

O Christ our God, how long will Leo Tolstoy go on mocking You and Your Church? How long will he go on leading Russia and Europe astray? Again he writes blasphemies against the Church and her servants, again he slanders us before the whole world! Show, at last, O Master, his hellish malice to the whole world! Let it be so! Through him half the world has been drawn into delusion and ruin. O forerunner of the antichrist!

Do you wish, Orthodox people, to know what I think of Leo Tolstoy? Here is what I think and say: he has declared war on the Orthodox Church and on all Christianity. And just as the morning star and Satan swept away with his tail a third of the stars of heaven—that is, the angels—and made them of one mind with himself, so our Lion, that son of disobedience, bearing his spirit within him, has swept away, by his «roaring and his tail» (Apok 12:4), nearly a third of the Russian educated class as well, especially of its youth, following after himself, after his godless teaching, his unbelief. His godless printed writings bear witness to this.

Do men gather grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? By their fruits you will know them, says the Lord (Lk 6:44). The thornbush of Russia and of the whole Christian world is the Russian count Tolstoy, a former novelist and then a self-appointed theologian, understanding nothing whatever of theology, who has dressed himself in a peasant’s clothes so as to mock his faith and Russia’s to his heart’s content, and the more easily to draw to his side, whether Russian or short-sighted foreigner, into his way of thinking, and the more easily pour his heretical poison into their souls.

Is there any father, the Lord says by way of example, who, when his son asks for bread, would give him a stone, or for a fish, would give him a serpent (Mt 7:9)—this is exactly what Tolstoy does. He offers a serpent instead of a fish, both to his own family and to all of Russia, and to Christians of every country and tongue. He wants to tear away from everyone their faith in the Savior, their faith in the Trinity, in the Church, and in all the saving truths that the holy Church has taught us to believe, without which no sound-minded person can live.

So, from the godless article published by Leo Tolstoy (in London) at the beginning of November 1902, titled «An Appeal to the Clergy», one sees the genuine Russian novelist, capable of writing only novels with a keen analysis of ordinary human life and human passions; but at the same time steeped to the marrow of his bones in self-conceit and pride, in lordly arrogance and hatred for everything that bears the mark of faith in Christ and the Church, with a devilish malice toward the clergy. The whole work consists of preconceived, false opinions about the clergy and its work. Tolstoy wants to destroy faith in everything holy and mysterious, in that by which a person lives, is saved, is comforted, is strengthened in spirit and body; everything that bears the mark of unshakable truth—faith in the Triune God, in the creation of the world, in the redemption of mankind by the Son of God—all of this he rejects as a fairy tale, subjects to mockery, and wants to remake all the Christian dogmas after his own fashion; he believes only in his own mind, credits himself alone with the discovery of truth, and acknowledges only himself as a teacher. But, alas, all his premises are false, and therefore all his conclusions are false as well.

Tolstoy thinks, speaks, and writes on the basis of godlessness and a complete denial of everything holy that bears in itself the mark of divine revelation; pride, self-conceit, self-deification, contempt for God Himself and for the Church—this is his true foundation; he has no other. Before us stands a sophist, and he can easily draw away from the true faith, and lead into ruinous unbelief, those unversed in the truths of the faith who have not experienced for themselves the saving power of the Christian faith.

In slandering the Church, Tolstoy wants to find for himself self-justification, praise, as a true hero of truth—and wants to draw everyone away from the Church, just as Satan swept a third of the angels away from God. Before writing a refutation of this work of Tolstoy’s, one must know (must analyze) the state of Tolstoy’s soul in which he writes his knowing falsehood, to which he strains to give the appearance of truth.

Under the raw impression of his excommunication from the Church, he resolved to pelt her with as much mud as he could—and Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, all divine worship, all the Mysteries, and especially the clergy of every church. Tolstoy, having distorted the meaning of the Gospel, has distorted the meaning of the Old Testament as well, and relates the distorted events in a mocking tone, undermining in his readers all respect for Holy Scripture; over everything dear to a Christian, everything he has been accustomed from childhood to regard with deep reverence and love as the Word of God, he insolently sneers.

Tolstoy carries his abuse over onto the clergy, the Church, the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, and the Lord Himself, and says: has there ever been such a harmful book in the world, one that has done so much evil, as the book of the Old and New Testaments… This applies directly to Tolstoy’s own writings—there has been nothing more harmful than they; Renans, Büchners, Schopenhauers, Voltaires—nothing compared to our godless Russian, Tolstoy. What Tolstoy has written in his «Appeal» is, from a Christian point of view, sheer madness.

Can one speak with a man out of his mind, who has lost common sense, sound faith, who denies a universally acknowledged living and life-giving truth, who denies that A is A, or that two times two is four, who does not acknowledge the Alpha and the Omega—with a man who takes human reason, clouded and perverted by sin, as the starting point of faith and knowledge? It is impossible! And that is exactly what Count Leo Tolstoy is—a man who rejects the revealed Word of God, the Bible and the Gospel, and sets his own short-sighted, perverted reason as the starting point of all knowledge, above the Bible and the Gospel, counting the Bible and the Gospel a fairy tale, as he does the lives of the saints.

In the sphere of religion, Tolstoy has shown the whole of his intellectual dullness, all his crawling on the earth, all his mental pettiness, unable to rise even a little to the height of religious contemplation. «If you will not believe, neither shall you understand», says the Lord. Tolstoy, having rejected faith in Revelation, in God, has indeed been deprived of the ability to understand the works of God’s wisdom.

How could Leo Tolstoy write his latest filthy work against the true, holy, apostolic, saving Church, glorified by God with countless signs and wonders, and still glorified by Him to this day? Yes—he could, but only through a complete loss of Christian conscience.

In Tolstoy’s work «An Appeal to the Clergy»—everything is shameless, brazen falsehood and slander, and from false basic premises, as I have already said, he draws false conclusions; in a word, in Tolstoy’s work the truth is distorted, the highest, indisputable, saving dogmas are presented in a mocking, ironic tone; Tolstoy does not believe in the truths revealed by God Himself and necessary for the salvation of every man, but believes only in human reason and in man’s perfecting of himself by his own strength, without the grace of God.

It is necessary that everyone, even one who does not believe in Christ, the Holy Trinity, and the Mysteries of the Christian faith, should deal honestly with the persons and objects of faith, because faith is the heartfelt, precious treasure of a countless multitude of people of every tongue, nation, rank, and condition—and not deal with them swinishly, as Leo Tolstoy does; and any Christian who is indifferent to one who blasphemes Christ, or the Holy Trinity, sincerely venerated by chosen people of every age, every nation, rank, and condition, is unworthy of the name of a human being—and that is exactly what Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans are, dealing swinishly with the priceless, most precious Name of the Lord Jesus Christ, of the Holy Trinity, of the Mother of God, and with the venerable images of Them and of all the Saints. Someone will say that it is improper and unbecoming to abuse in print a man to whom freedom of speech and of the press has been given, and who writes and prints whatever comes into his head. But I will ask both Tolstoy and his accomplices: to revile the most exalted Names of the Trinity, of Christ, of the Mother of God and the Saints, the holy wonderworking icons and relics, and to lead the Orthodox and non-Orthodox people astray—is that, in your view, permissible? Indeed, what punishment by law ought to be due to Tolstoy’s blasphemous tongue, and to his hand that writes blasphemous words? According to the Scripture, a man is tormented by the very thing by which he sins. Yet Tolstoy blasphemes unpunished, and is even honored as a renowned elder, as a great writer, as a well-born count, and is called Leo Nikolaevich; what kind of Leo Nikolaevich is he? He is not worthy of the Christian name. Would a Jew, one who sincerely believes in Jehovah, tolerate someone speaking unworthily of that Holy Name in his hearing; or a Mohammedan, one who reviled Muhammad in his hearing, though Muhammad is not what and who they take him to be? Yet Tolstoy freely reviles the Christian faith and its true, holy, saving teaching, and its holy, life-giving Mysteries—oh, a crime worthy of death (the Apostle, Juda 7-8)! Jewish and Roman law put blasphemers to death, and that is why the Jews cried out to Pilate: «by our law He must die, because He made Himself the Son of God» (Jn 19:7) (though He truly is the Son of God)—and yet Tolstoy, before the whole Russian people and before all Christian Europe, blasphemes Christ, who was declared the Son of God in power, according to the spirit of holiness, by His resurrection from the dead; believed on in the world, justified in the spirit, preached among the nations, taken up in glory (1Tim 3:16).

«By your own words I will judge you, you wicked servant», says the Lord in the Gospel (Lk 19:22), and I will say: by your own denials I will reject you, Leo Tolstoy, and I will turn your blasphemies back upon you.

Tolstoy has distorted the whole meaning of Christianity, has understood everything inside out, for a cunning human mind and heart can distort anything, calling light darkness and darkness light, the sweet bitter and the bitter sweet, the beautiful ugly and the reverse; after the manner of the ancient sophists, Tolstoy rejects the whole Creed, believes neither in the Trinity, nor the incarnation, nor Christ’s miracles, nor His redemptive sufferings, nor the resurrection, nor the ascension into heaven, nor Christ’s second coming, nor the future judgment, nor the Church, nor baptism, nor the resurrection of the dead, nor the life of the age to come. He wants people not to believe the Word of God, but to believe him, the self-appointed teacher Tolstoy, or to believe human reason alone, perverted, darkened, blind, short-sighted. Why, then, believe Tolstoy? What authority is he! Who does not know the blindness of human reason—how mankind wandered before Christ’s coming to earth, what darkness of ignorance of the true God there was, the darkness of idolatry. What light of reason shone forth with Christ’s coming to earth? What light is in the Gospel!

Leo Tolstoy bends all his blasphemous reasoning toward this end: to persuade, at least, short-sighted and self-conceited people, that in our knowledge and scientific inquiries the head of everything is our reason and the measure of its understanding, and whatever it does not understand—even if it be the highest and most incomprehensible object of our faith, the Lord God Himself—that he must not accept and must not believe, as not fitting the measure of reason; and that man can attain perfection without the help of God (he does not believe in God) by his own reason alone. But Tolstoy has shown, on himself, to what such a man can come: through his darkening by pride and self-conceit, his reason has arrived at absurd and senseless positions—unbelief in a Personal God, in God in the Trinity (Mk 1:10), in the creation of the world out of nothing, in the creation of man in the image and likeness of God (Gen 1:27), in the Creator’s original testing commandment, or the Creator’s entering into a covenant with a rational, freely willing creature, one in need of the covenant and of keeping it—in man’s free fall and his bold breaking of the covenant and of his own wholeness of soul and body, of his peace and blessed state; in the necessity of redemption by the God-man, in the promise and prophecies concerning Him in the books of the Law of Moses, in the coming of the promised Savior. His preaching and the whole work of redemption. Tolstoy has come to reject the absolute, necessary, all-saving truths, and will perish forever. This is a lesson for all who trust too much in their own reason and do not trust the testimony of Truth itself, of Jesus Christ Himself, who taught us the true doctrine of the Trinity, the creation of the world and of man, of temptation and the fall, of the necessity of repentance, of partaking of the Holy Mysteries, of the resurrection of the dead, of judgment, eternal torment, and the kingdom of heaven.

Tolstoy does not believe in the corruption, the depravity of the human race and of every man at its very root (in Adam and Eve), in the depths of his being—that man by himself, without God’s help, cannot succeed in any virtue, that all his efforts of that kind, without God’s help, are vain—«without Me, it is said, you can do nothing» (Jn 15:5)—but believes instead, contrary to truth and to all common experience throughout the ages, that man can attain perfection by himself, with the help of modern science. Tolstoy is dangerously, ruinously mistaken, and leads astray the youth and mankind in general not yet established in the faith, turning it away from the Church, which possesses the true mind of God, for it is said—«we have the mind of Christ» (1Cor 2:16)—and forces his lie upon it, calling it true teaching.

In L. Tolstoy’s work there is a logical falsehood: the premise is false, and so are the conclusions. It is false to propose that the universal Creed is false (it, of all things, proceeding from the Spirit of Truth), that the Holy Trinity is not the Trinity, that God cannot be one in Trinity; it is false to propose that the Son of God was not incarnate and was not the Savior of the human race: was not incarnate, was not baptized, did not suffer, did not die, did not rise, did not ascend into heaven, will not come to judge, that there will be no resurrection, no second coming; it is false that there is no third Person, the Holy Spirit, that the Church is not true but false, and so on—all these propositions are false, and all the conclusions are false; it is a lie that the dogmas of the faith are taught at an age when children understand nothing, that it is pointless to teach them what is supposedly nonsense, supposedly fairy tales, or that it is pointless to teach the common people, who supposedly understand nothing or have no time for it; it is a false proposition that the Bible is a fairy tale, and the Gospel too; it is a false proposition that God—it is terrible even to say it—grows angry (righteous anger is another matter), that He is unjust; the premises are false too, that there will be no requital, no eternal torment for unrepentant sinners. False too is the position that the Church and the clergy preach falsehood, absurdity. It is Tolstoy who, in truth, preaches plain falsehood, and he must not be listened to; to believe him, as a malicious liar, is ruinous. He is a deliberate, malicious liar, and everything he asserts about the subjects of our faith is false.

In Tolstoy’s head there is neither Alpha nor Omega, no rational personal Creator, no creature, no sin, no virtue, no fall or rising of man, no Savior, no saved; no connection at all in the world and in the human race, neither historical, nor logical, nor material—a true chaos in everything. He does not acknowledge the priesthood, the divinely revealed account of the beginning of the world and of man and of the life of the human race before the Flood and after the Flood; he does not believe the account of the Flood and of the life of people after the Flood; he does not see the purpose of the Flood; he does not acknowledge the moral law, or the Lawgiver and Judge of the human race and of every individual person; he rejects everything, counts everything as a fairy tale: the connection of the Old Testament with the New, and the all-wise, righteous, and all-good judgments of God in the human race—the gradual preparation of mankind to receive the promised Messiah, the Savior, through promises, prophecies, and types—the coming into the world of the promised Savior, His seedless birth of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary; in a word, he rejects the God-manhood of Christ and all the dogmas of the Christian faith. With such an unbeliever, one who has blinded himself of his own free will, one cannot speak seriously about anything holy.

«No one knows the Son except the Father, nor does anyone know the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wills to reveal Him» (Mt 11:27)—we read in the Holy Gospel. Without God’s revelation, the fallen human mind cannot know the mystery of the Holy Trinity. And God reveals this mystery to those who believe in simplicity of heart, so far as this incomprehensible nature can be revealed. To Tolstoy, because of his pride, his cunning, and his unbelief, this mystery has not been revealed, and he does not believe it and mocks it. In his blasphemous pamphlet he takes away everything dear, holy, righteous, comforting, saving, enlightening—everything by which the Christian soul lives, breathes, is strengthened—and in place of what he has taken away, he gives nothing himself, and leaves the soul in chaos, emptiness, darkness, in a state without comfort and without light. This is willful madness; in him, in Tolstoy, there is a trampling of every law of thought, of all truth and rightness; in him there is a satanic falsehood, full of shamelessness, cunningly woven, mocking our holy things.

In his Appeal, Tolstoy insolently summons popes, cardinals, bishops, superintendents, priests, pastors, and the whole Christian clerical estate to a contest with himself, and accuses all of them of tendentious falsehood and deceit; he asserts that the truth is his alone, Tolstoy’s alone; that he alone possesses true reason, that from him alone one must learn the truth—that the whole Bible, the whole Gospel, is a lie, that all Church history, all Church teaching, all the councils, all the definitions of faith, all the canons of the ecumenical and local councils and of the holy fathers, are a deliberate deception. Gracious sirs and gracious ladies, men and women of the Christian race! Tolstoy wants to make fools of you all. But surely we are in our right minds, in sound sense; our whole life lived, our own hearts, assure us that we know the truth, that we have found the true faith and are saved by it, are comforted by it, and look for the life of the age to come. How, then, will this impostor Tolstoy convince us that the truth is supposedly on his side? No—Tolstoy is a complete ignoramus where religion is concerned. He does not know the all-wise plan of God’s providential dispensation for the salvation of the human race; he does not admit the fall of the first people into sin, and does not believe in the corruption and darkening by sin of the whole human race; he does not believe in God’s tutelage over fallen mankind through the millennia, and its redemption by the incarnate Son of God—and everything that Tolstoy rejects, namely the religious instruction of children and their knowledge of the history of the Old and New Testaments, is especially necessary, both for Tolstoy and for all children—and he, Tolstoy, does not know this necessary thing, this Christian ABC, and shows himself a religious ignoramus, though one cannot help acknowledging him a novelist, and along with that a skillful, well-known talker, able to weave together sayings beautiful on the surface and enticing to the short-sighted, drawing them into anti-theological snares. Here, with Tolstoy, as with a man out of his mind who has an idée fixe, one cannot speak; he believes only in himself and in people like himself, with preconceived notions like his own; here he has a devilish, incorrigible pride, and he will die with it. By whatever judgments You know, do You Yourself, longsuffering Lord, save this darkened man!

I have already said that Tolstoy breathes an irreconcilable hatred toward the Church and her organs, the clergy; he does not acknowledge their divine right to teach, to celebrate the Mysteries, to lead the rational flock entrusted to them toward virtue and toward God; he rejects the truth and the saving power of their teaching; he does not acknowledge the Church’s teaching as divinely revealed; he asserts an absurd equality of all people, does not allow the subordination of the younger to the elder, of subordinates to authority, of loyal subjects to the Tsar; in a word, he produces a kind of confusion and muddle in everything, and, rejecting everything, gives nothing in place of what he has rejected, leaving people only reason—reason so well known for its absurd errors through all the past millennia—while asserting that people can attain perfection by their own reason. So Tolstoy has arrived at absurdity, at unheard-of pride and insolence, having rejected all divinely revealed, saving, Christian teaching, and the Church founded on earth by God.

Tolstoy is unheard-of pride and insolence made flesh. He belittles all popes, cardinals, metropolitans, bishops, superintendents, pastors, and priests, and judges them, setting himself up as the judge of all; he accuses all of them of being false preachers and teachers, deceivers, preaching what they themselves supposedly do not believe, and only pretending to believe. This is truly a case, as they say, of blaming the healthy for the sick man’s own ailment. And how many are there who sincerely believe among clergy of other confessions, not to speak of the Orthodox clergy! Excommunicated from the Church, Tolstoy has come to hate her and her servants even more.

Leo Tolstoy mocks all Christian beliefs, insults the Christians of every age, mocks all the holy patriarchs, prophets, apostles, hierarchs, martyrs, venerable and righteous ones, and even the Mother of God herself, more honorable than the Cherubim and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim, and the whole Christian worldview. Leo Tolstoy is the most vicious and insolent heretic of all the heretics there have ever been. The whole Holy Gospel, the whole Orthodox Christian faith and Church, carry in themselves the proof of their origin from God, and in themselves they contain «yes and amen»—they are spirit and life. «Do you also want to leave Me?» (Jn 6:67), the Lord God asked His disciples, when many of them, offended at His teaching, which seemed incompatible with their notions and habits, went away from Him. And Peter answered: «to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.» So we too, having tasted the whole vitality, the whole soul-saving sweetness of our faith and Church, say with full confidence, with full conviction of heart: to whom shall we go but to You, O Lord? You have the words of eternal life. Only in You is the source of life; only in Your light shall we see light; and apart from You we shall find it nowhere—and certainly still less in Leo Tolstoy, wandering, sunk in the impenetrable darkness of error.

A word about the necessity of teaching children sacred history. Teaching about the right, saving faith, about the fall of the first people, about the corruption of sin in the whole human race, about the Savior’s redemptive work, is necessary, in the most accessible form, for everyone, and especially for children. The first thing that must be impressed on children is the teaching about God the Creator and Savior—and this is exactly what our godless man will not allow. Count Tolstoy is an example of a complete lack of upbringing in the Christian sense, a spoiled lord from infancy; not everyone can be raised in the manner of this favorite of fortune, born with a silver spoon, in a noble and wealthy house; not everyone can be a count, with his uncommon mind, which would have been worthy of better employment; not everyone can write the notorious novels «War and Peace» and «Anna Karenina», without which, in truth, mankind could easily have done, and felt not the slightest need of them—but to teach children, in a simple, accessible form, the biblical and Church history of God glorified in the Trinity as the Creator of the world and of man, and the common Provider and Savior of all, of the creation of man and of all creatures, of man’s fall and the hereditary corruption of sin in the whole human race, of the appearance in the world of the promised Savior, of His life, teaching, and miracles, of His saving sufferings for us, His redemptive death, His resurrection from the dead—this is a necessity and a common need for all Christian children. And it is precisely because Leo Tolstoy was never taught these elementary Christian truths that he has turned into such a vicious lion, roaring against the faith and the Church of Christ, seeking whom he may devour (and he has, unfortunately, devoured many). Should we fail to teach children the doctrine of faith and the fear of God from their tender years, then in them, because of the common sinful corruption of the human race, every sinful instinct will develop and take root—malice, caprice, willfulness, disobedience, rebelliousness, envy, pride, laziness in prayer and piety, coldness toward God and the Church of God, lying, deceit, cunning and craftiness, secret sins of the flesh, and the like. What, then, will come of them? What kind of children, what kind of fathers and mothers, what kind of sons of the fatherland, subjects and servants of the tsar, what kind of defenders of the fatherland, what kind of writers, what kind of loyal officials and functionaries of the various branches of government, what kind of farmers, what kind of craftsmen? People without the fear of God, without conscience, without civic honesty and loyalty, with every kind of bad inclination. Only faith and the fear of God keep a person at the height of his Christian and civic dignity; take away his faith and the fear of God, and you will find nowhere any honest, self-sacrificing people, people of duty, of honest service, devoted to the tsar and the fatherland; the prisons will fill with criminals of every kind, and you will bring about the downfall of society and the state. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people, says the Wise One.

In his pride and free-thinking, Tolstoy rejects and tears down the two divine Testaments, the Old and the New, and has despised and set at nothing all the counsels of God for the salvation of the human race, and has scorned, as though it were nothing, all the all-wise, all-good, and righteous care of God for us. And therefore God will destroy you utterly and blot out your memory from the land of the living… You say, Tolstoy, that children ought not to be taught the law of God, and that they supposedly do not understand the works of God; but they are wiser than you, for it is said: «out of the mouths of babes and infants You have brought forth praise» (Mt 21:16). The Pharisees and scribes blasphemed the Lord, as you do today, Leo Tolstoy, and the guileless children praised Him with understanding and with a sincere heart. What will you say to this, Tolstoy? Or will you say that this too is just a fairy tale, a fable and nothing more? Well?

From Count Tolstoy’s blasphemous writings it is plain that the all-saving Christian faith has not touched his proud, unbelieving heart in the least, has had no beneficial effect on him whatsoever, and he has remained a genuine atheist. «You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding and revealed them (the mystery of faith) to infants» (Mt 11:25).

Tolstoy mocks the Holy Scripture of the Old and New Testaments, which is an unshakable sanctity for all Christian peoples, and mocks its being taught to children or to the common people, who supposedly do not understand this history—though this is absurd—while he himself preaches nonsense and absurdity, and wants children and the common people to memorize his ravings, his godless thoughts, so that everyone would thereby become godless and morally savage, worse than the pagans of old and of today who bow down to a piece of wood, or offer sacrifices to idols, as though their whole well-being depended on them (the idols). Tolstoy mocks the Russian people in the basest way, wishing to bring everyone into a state of savagery and to draw everyone away from the ancestral, saving faith; in a word, he wants to lead everyone with him into hell, thinking: if we must perish, let all perish, and not I alone. Your Excellency, you had better go alone by your own broad road, which leads to the bottom of hell. Why lead others after you? There are more than enough people like you already. Wide is the gate that leads to destruction, and many go in by it after you.

Tolstoy rejects the Old Testament and the prophets, whereas the fulfillment of the prophecies in Jesus Christ irrefutably proves His divine-human dignity and the saving power of the Christian faith and of the Church He planted on earth; in a word—Tolstoy rejects everything, both the Old Testament and the New, and from false premises draws false conclusions.

Tolstoy rejects the beginning of all things—the Word of God the Father, the Son of God, by whom all things were made, who is the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end (Apok 1:8).

Tolstoy, in denying the Personal, Triune God—all-good, without beginning, ever-existing, all-wise, righteous, holy, blessed, all-perfect, almighty—admits only a mysterious, impersonal first principle that gave life to man (strange, how an impersonal being could give rise to a personal one—this is Tolstoy’s own absurdity), while refusing to admit His justice, which must punish the insolent blasphemers of His holiness and truth—for example, this same Leo Tolstoy, who proclaims to the whole world that God is the author of evil.

Man’s destiny is eternal life with God and in God (Phil 1:23); but God will receive no one into fellowship with Himself who does not repent and does not abandon his attachment to sin; «the wicked shall not dwell with Him, nor shall the lawless stand before His eyes» (Ps 5:5-6), says the Psalmist David. «What fellowship has light with darkness, righteousness with lawlessness?» (2Cor 6:14). And since we are all sinners, we must all repent, and come to hate sin, and turn away from sin, and no longer be its slaves. And to turn away from sin, to no longer be sin’s slaves, we have received from God every kind of strength and means: free will, a natural reason, a conscience that approves the good and condemns evil; the special grace of God in baptism and chrismation, in repentance and communion; we have the God-given fast; a moving divine service that disposes us to repentance; the living and active Word of God; the teachings of pastors; civil laws that assist the right course of social life. So, then, God will receive no one to Himself with sin upon him. This we must all firmly remember: no proud man, no unbeliever of the sort of L. Tolstoy or the Tolstoyans, no one given over to envy, fornication, intemperance, gluttony, and drunkenness, no thief, extortioner, or lover of money, no one given over to laughter—for it is said: «woe to you who laugh, for you shall wail and weep» (Lk 7:25).

A creature can exist and flourish in no other way than by firmly keeping the Creator’s laws. Look at nature, at the heavens, the sun, the moon and the stars, at the earth, at every creature, how exactly it keeps the Creator’s laws. Leo Tolstoy has rejected the Creator, and struck the word creature out of the Russian language, because he does not acknowledge that creatures are creatures, created by a personal, rational First Principle.

The height of Tolstoy’s insolence lies in this: that even in view of his approaching death, he does not fear God and His judgment, and considers himself right, along with his disciples, and sets no limit to his blasphemy—if he must blaspheme, let him blaspheme to the end, if he must rave, let him rave to the end! This is heroism of a purely satanic kind, and in the superlative degree at that, for even Satan himself fears God and trembles at the torments prepared for him, while his pupil has surpassed even his own teacher. This, then, is the outcome of «War and Peace» and «Anna Karenina» and the rest of Leo Tolstoy’s writings!

What towering pride! Know our Lion, who has come forth from Yasnaya Polyana and roars mightily, not only over the whole meadow, but over the whole world. A mighty maw; iron nerves. And this, at the very edge of the grave! And what will there be beyond the grave? All hell will awaken. All the Pharaohs will rise, and the Rephaim will stir; all the Neros, Caligulas, Decii, Domitians, Julians—all the persecutors of Christ and of Christianity—will say: ah, the Russian Lion of the last times, you have far surpassed even us: from among Christians has come forth the most arrogant, the most cunning persecutor of the Mother Church who reared you. Join us, then, forever, and drink the cup you have prepared for yourself; burn in the unquenchable fire prepared for your father, the devil, whom you served so zealously.

«Whoever falls on that stone will be broken to pieces, but on whomever it falls, it will crush him» (Mt 21:44). Tolstoy, an unclean wave, has dashed himself insolently against the unbreakable Rock, Christ, and has burst into foul-smelling spray, splattering all his followers with putrid mud.

Tolstoy’s followers are all people who neither fast nor commune—the so-called learned men of this age—freethinkers who consider themselves supermen. And Tolstoy himself is a rotten fruit of Western freethinking scholarship. The world lies in evil, and barks at its own God.

A student at the technical school—an unbeliever from having read too much Tolstoy. A teacher at the district school—an unbeliever from fascination with Tolstoy, but wishing to be a believer. The poison of Tolstoy’s teaching is at work in families; mothers and fathers weep over their unbelieving children, who have abandoned the Church and will not submit to or honor their parents; young women, students at the higher courses, unbelieving and doing battle for Tolstoy; contributors to the liberal newspapers, such as the Astrakhan paper, taking up arms for Tolstoy and abusing us.

You have hidden these things from the wise and understanding (Tolstoy and writers like him) and revealed them to infants. For such was Your good pleasure (Mt 11:25). Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes and prudent in their own sight. Has not God turned the wisdom of this world into foolishness (1Cor 1:20)? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through its own wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what is preached to save those who believe (1Cor 1:21).

Tolstoy could not know God in His wisdom by his own vain wisdom, but has become altogether foolish in his darkening; he has imagined himself wise, and has exalted himself above every so-called god or object of worship, so as to seat himself in the temple of God, proclaiming himself to be God (2Thes 2:4)—for, having rejected the Gospel, he compels everyone to believe in him as in God. Understand him, then, you educated people: he is, above all, making fools of you yourselves, laughing at you.

«Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him» (Prov 26:12). Leo Tolstoy, having spent his whole life occupied exclusively with secular literature, and with spiritual literature only critically and skeptically, with methods biased not toward accepting and submitting to the Word of God but toward disputing and reviling it, and not knowing true Church worship, has fallen into religious savagery, into dullness and unthinking with regard to everything spiritual, at the devil’s prompting; he has fallen into unbelief, into mockery of everything that bears the mark of the Church and the divine, of all divine worship, the Mysteries, the rites, the sacred vestments (established by God in the Old Testament).

So too all who follow him in unbelief toward the true God and toward the Light of Christ, which enlightens every man coming into the world—the educated class and the secular writers—have fallen into savagery and spiritual unthinking; for God hides His wisdom from the wise and understanding of this world, as unworthy of it, and reveals it to simple, believing souls.

Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved… (Act 4:12). He is Lord of all. The one and only source of life is the Lord and His Church.

To whom shall we go, ask today’s educated people? To Tolstoy, let us go to Tolstoy—and they go to the present-day idol, Tolstoy, and learn from him, not from Christ, from his blasphemies, his sophistries, how to live, and how to blaspheme the Holy Church and Her saving Mysteries. Of this I have become convinced myself.

If anyone causes one of these little ones to stumble, then, by the word of the Divine Teacher, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck and he were thrown into the depths of the sea (Mt 18:6). Leo Tolstoy has caused, and continues to cause, tens of thousands of people to stumble, printing and distributing in great numbers his blasphemous writings, with the aim of leading astray especially the youth in school, chiefly those of secondary and higher education, and through them a multitude of young men and women have been poisoned! What, then, by God’s justice, does our Russian heretic deserve, how many punishments? And what do those deserve who allow him to spread his ruinous pamphlets and give him full freedom to say whatever he wishes? Many who took part in this indulgence toward him will perish through Tolstoy.

You have many accomplices, Leo Tolstoy, in your ruinous teaching. First, the prince of darkness himself, who is the devil and Satan, who deceives the whole world. Tolstoy does not believe in evil spirits, whom he calls devils; but it is they who taught him, and go on teaching him, from his youth until now, every sin, every lie and wrong; it is they who taught him to reject Revelation, God in the Trinity, Christ the Savior, the Church, the Mother of God, the Saints, and to go against every truth; it is they who produce all the confusion in his head; it is they who teach people every sin; it was to save believing people from their lie that Christ came, to save them from the hell prepared for them and their servants; and it is they who will meet Tolstoy after his death, which awaits him impatiently, and they who stand ready, with greedy eagerness, with gnashing of teeth and terrible laughter, to seize Tolstoy and men like him. Hear this, all Christians!

Second, your accomplices, Leo Tolstoy, are all those like you, men such as Chertkov and the multitude of half-educated Russians like you, led astray by your senseless teaching. Third, you are aided by your own old, unclean rags, inherited from your father—I mean that wicked leaven on which you were conceived and formed into the man you are—that misshapen moral undevelopment and the environment in which you grew up; the complete moral lack of upbringing in which you grew up; that unbelief and that estrangement from the Church in which you grew up, that unbelief and that estrangement from the Church in which you lived and did as you pleased. It is impossible for people to inherit the kingdom of God who have not prepared themselves for it by faith, repentance and amendment, and virtue. Remember the parable of those invited to the banquet: «Not one of those men who were invited shall taste My banquet (Lk 14:24); for many are called, but few are chosen» (Mt 22:1-14).

Leo Tolstoy is playing at half-measures, going against human common sense, against every law of logic, only so as to pour out his bile against Christ, against the Christian faith, against the Church. How base, how absurd he is in his reasoning! One cannot sink lower than this; there is, it seems, no one more senseless than Tolstoy. Read his latest pamphlet impartially, and be convinced. To what has the author of «War and Peace» come! Having wandered into a garden strange and unfamiliar to him, he has broken his own neck and head. He has gone on to the point of madness, of absurdity! «He who rejects Me and does not receive My words has a judge; the word that I have spoken will judge him on the last day» (Jn 12:48).

Blasphemy against the Spirit will not be forgiven to men. If anyone speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but if anyone speaks against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him, either in this age or in the age to come. Either make the tree good and its fruit good, or make the tree bad and its fruit bad, for the tree is known by its fruit. Brood of vipers! How can you speak good, when you are evil? For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks. The good man brings good things out of his good treasure, and the evil man brings evil things out of his evil treasure. I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every idle word they speak (or print, or write) (Mt 12:31-36). Tolstoy blasphemes the Christian faith and the Church. But how can a man’s tongue bring itself to blaspheme what is true, beautiful, life-giving, saving? The tree is known by its fruits: what fruits, then, has the Christian faith borne? The very best fruits, as the whole history of the Church bears witness.

Secular writers look only at the earth, and do not lift the eye of their heart above it; but man was created chiefly for heaven, not for earth alone, and his very frame and bodily eyes are turned toward the sky. Worldly writers are too one-sided and incomplete, and when they do wish to speak of the subjects of faith, they speak, for the most part, only in order to mock them, and to interpret them according to their own one-sided, mistaken understanding, as Count Tolstoy and men like him do. How is a Tolstoy possible in our time? How is such a writer possible? Such a madman? Such a repeat offender? How are such blasphemies possible against everything holy, which man holds dearer than his own life?

Who, then, is this Tolstoy, who judges everyone like a dictator and sets himself above the common judgment, ascribing to himself, as it were, a divine infallibility! Who is this man who so insolently sets his own judgment against the sound, right, pure sense of all that God has made wise, chosen, and refined by a pure, high life throughout humanity, mocking unshakable truths, commonly proven, life-giving, firm as an immovable rock and as a pillar firmly set! This is a man spiritually not raised at all, a pauper of thought and moral instability from his very youth, as he himself confesses, a man utterly unversed in religious truths, a nihilist to the marrow of his bones, believing in no one and nothing except himself, as a Russian count, a celebrated writer; he asserts, for example, that Russia ought not to war with anyone or spill anyone’s blood, except in the one case when robbers attack him, Count Tolstoy, or Yasnaya Polyana—in which case the government must defend the estate by force of arms and spill soldiers’ blood, so that no count’s blood be spilled at Yasnaya Polyana, since it has always had the look and character of a bright, and not a gloomy, meadow. What do you think—is a count who reasons in this way, by the name of Tolstoy, in his right mind? Do not scold me for this irony; I do not at all wish to be ironic, but his own words call it forth of themselves; I speak only the truth. Has Tolstoy not simply lost sight of the laws of sound thinking? So it appears, Leo Nikolaevich! But you are joking altogether too much at the expense of sound, universal human sense. Have mercy—with your lion’s paw you strike popes and cardinals, pastors and priests across the face, and all of them, in your view, are deceivers and scoundrels, while you are a righteous, sincere man, supposedly telling the truth to all these clergy, rulers, and authorities. Well, if you are sane and not mad, then you certainly ought to be judged most severely for this abuse of persons honored by their rank (it is not your place to judge them for their deeds—you are not called to that): you laugh publicly and think to go unpunished! No, this cannot be! You will bear a strict punishment—you lead astray not merely one of the little ones, but whole Christian nations, accustomed by divine right to look with respect on these persons. According to Scripture, a stone ought to be hung around your neck and you ought to be sunk with it into the depths of the sea; you ought to have no place on earth.

Consider: a well-fed, untroubled, wealthy Russian count wants to tear away from all Russians, and even from the French, Italians, Germans, Austrians, and even the English, their faith in the Savior of sinners, who has the words of eternal life, their faith in the Physician of all weak, believing mankind, in the never-setting Sun of righteousness, in the sole Comforter of all who mourn and believe. Russian people, and all the educated multitude, and indeed all Christian mankind! Learn from the fruits Tolstoy has presented to you what his teaching is, what kind of teacher he is. Son of Gehenna! Do not laugh, Count, and all you Tolstoyans, at this fearful word—you will soon be sated with it, and sunk into it for the whole of eternity (if you do not repent); the Count wants to draw everyone into it, like Satan, to deprive everyone of the One who alone can deliver from it, as it is said: fear Him who, after He has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear Him (Mt 10:28). So then, by the fruits of this godless man, this reviler of all Christian mankind, you will know who he is. He is an antichrist—he is the beast risen out of the abyss (Apok 11:7), with ten horns (Apok 13:1), goring on all four sides, in every direction, so as, if it can be done, to drag at least a few down with it into that abyss for all eternity. If the Count had tasted even a little of the fruits of the Christian faith, he would never have come to mock it and us so—but as it is plain, he was never, even for an hour, a true Christian, and was always a godless man. I cannot help but marvel how such a serpent, full of deadly poison, could have appeared in Russia—let heaven marvel, let all the Angels of God and all the Saints of mankind marvel, how a Russian count could become a vessel of Satan and take into himself the whole fullness of Satan, all his apostasy from God, all his enmity against God and against those who believe in God.

Just as the ancient sophists and philosophers turned the gift of speech, which ought to express truth, into a game of words, calling white black and black white, or calling virtue sin and sin virtue, so too has Leo Tolstoy lost all respect for the word, for truth, and for rightness, and has turned his writer’s talent into a game of words—worse than that, into the boldest, most satanic blasphemy; indeed, he has surpassed Satan himself: for Satan believes in God, and trembles before Him (Jac 2:19)—and the demons believed in Jesus Christ, and openly acknowledged Him the Son of God (Lk 4:34)—but Tolstoy does not believe in the Son of God, and laughs at the truth of the Gospel. The Church unceasingly blesses the Lord, Creator, Provider, Savior, and righteous Judge, day and night, while Leo Tolstoy dares in his writings to blaspheme Him, calling Him cruel and the author—it is terrible even to say it—of terrible calamities among men. Hear this, Orthodox people. These are Tolstoy’s own words; I have taken them from his printed leaflets, published in England by Chertkov, a Russian renegade and turncoat. Tell me, has L. Tolstoy not become possessed by Satan? He counts the books of the Old and New Testaments lower than any fairy tale, calls them immoral fables, and calls it a mad, immoral thing to teach them to children—while calling himself a great, true teacher. What a teacher—a godless man, an atheist, and an antichrist!

How it wounds the heart, when before your very eyes men revile the sanctity by which you live and breathe, which has been your comfort from your very youth—revile what forms the sanctity of Christian mankind of every age, for which countless hosts of martyrs, hierarchs, venerable ones, and all the saints—in general, the best and most noble of human beings—suffered with joy; what forms the unshakable truth by which the mind and heart and the whole being of a sincerely believing person are enlightened, nourished, and strengthened? And Leo Tolstoy, like a swine (forgive the word), tramples all of this underfoot, before the eyes of all Christians. The pagan writers Celsus and Porphyry did not revile the Christian faith as Leo Tolstoy reviles it.

The count of Yasnaya Polyana is in the grip of a great spiritual delusion of self-deception, seriously thinking himself to be right. Oh, how Satan has blinded him for his pride and arrogance! And how many people have fallen into delusion through him!

How swiftly the animal instincts develop and demand satisfaction in godless and churchless Tolstoyans, and how, in them, the old man works his ungodly work—the old man whom the Church teaches every Christian to put off; while they, the godless, follow him instead and fulfill his lusts! Convert them, Lord, and give them understanding, and put Your light into them, if they are capable of receiving it, before the darkness of hell covers them altogether.

Like branches of the living tree (the Ecumenical Creed), Tolstoy has hacked away with his insolent pen at every article of the Christian Creed, and wants—furiously, madly wants—to deprive mankind, and especially the Christian world, of the saving faith that gives every sincere believer the greatest comfort and support in all the hardships and sorrows of life. He who climbs in by another way (unlawfully) is a thief and a robber (Jn 10:1). Tolstoy breaks into the sheepfold of the Orthodox Church by an underhanded route, printing his blasphemous writings abroad in England and spreading them by the tens of thousands in Russia. This is a true thief and robber. By his fruits every believer can know that this is exactly what he is. Figs are not gathered from thorns, nor grapes picked from a bramble bush (Lk 6:44).

Tolstoy is caught in an impenetrable mental fog, in the darkness and shadow of death—and this in the midst of the sunlit day of the Gospel—and he wants to spread this fog, this shadow of death, over everyone.

He does not acknowledge revelation, does not believe in the divine inspiration of Holy Scripture, and counts it a fairy tale, and Church history likewise; he counts all divinely revealed teaching a lie, and himself alone, his own reason, his own word—his word alone—the truth (his own roaring, his own writings). He does not believe that A is A, and teaches that everyone who confesses the Christian faith is deluded, deceived, or self-deceived, that they are victims of hypnosis, that they need to be awakened, so as to learn Tolstoy’s ravings—which, in his understanding, is the truth—so as to hold up as the source of perfection man’s supposedly philosophical reason and the romantic ravings of learned unbelievers.

Even the demons believe in God, and shudder (Jac 2:19)—but Tolstoy does not believe in God, only in a mysterious, impersonal first principle; and in his speculations he arrives at absurdity. What is his purpose in his waste-paper pamphlets, breathing his utmost hatred against the Church? To shake the Church at her foundation, by destroying Christians’ faith in the Bible and the Gospel, in divine worship and the Mysteries, and in the grace of the priesthood.

Tolstoy blasphemes the Christian faith and her ministers in every way, not knowing and not wishing to know her righteous, impartial history; he reviles her as though she had been recently invented by some ordinary man for his own selfish purposes. To know any ordinary worldly institution at all, one must know its actual history and origin, and only then judge of it rightly; but Tolstoy does not wish to know the history of the Christian faith and Church, or does not trust it, and sins against the laws of reason and justice, and wants to see in the Christian faith only falsehood and deceit, and even absurdity and complete contradiction of human reason.

Now I put this question: in order rightly to know Tolstoy’s psychological and literary character, must one not turn to his past life, to his earlier writings, in which his cast of mind and his worldview can be seen, and from which his latest blasphemous writings have degenerated? Yes, it is necessary to know Tolstoy’s earlier life, which he himself described under his pen name. And what, then, do we see from it?

We see his complete unfitness and incapacity for religious reflection and writing, his complete ignorance of the Christian faith, of the doctrine of the faith, of the history of the Christian saints and saving dogmas, of the history of the Church; he was fit only to write «War and Peace», «Anna Karenina», and other novels of that kind—and it was not his business to interpret the Gospel and understand it according to his own worldly outlook. Tolstoy, as a natural man and not a spiritual one, does not accept what is of the Spirit of God, and therefore counts it foolishness, and cannot understand it, because it must be discerned spiritually (1Cor 2:14).

Tolstoy does not believe in a personal, holy, righteous God who justly punishes sinners, and therefore mocks Him whenever he reads or hears of His righteous punishment of sinners, and counts the Old Testament plagues on the wicked as an expression of His cruelty and malice. May the tongue of the one who roars against God Himself rot away.

Rotten idol, do you truly imagine that everyone will listen to your rotten, arrogant speeches?

Whether you sit down, go out, or come in, I know it all, I know your insolence against Me. Because of your insolence against Me, and because your arrogance has come up to My ears, I will put My ring in your nose and My bit in your mouth, as one does to a horse (Is 37:28). The Bible teaches us, through its divinely inspired writers, especially through the prophets, that God is the Creator, Provider, and the righteous, longsuffering Judge of all the peoples of the earth and of all human kingdoms, and that He punishes one nation through another. Tolstoy does not acknowledge this; he does not acknowledge a personal God, but some mysterious, impersonal first principle, indifferent to everyone and everything, including Tolstoy himself.

The heretic of Yasnaya Polyana has forgotten, or lost sight of, the law of cause and effect in the world’s events and phenomena, and has let chaos into world history: thus he does not acknowledge the creation of the world by a personal, all-wise, beginningless, all-good, and almighty Creator—His covenant with the rational creature, the breaking of the covenant, the appointment of punishment, the curse, the expulsion from paradise, labor by the sweat of the brow, the impoverishment of nature’s gifts, the devil’s hold over people, the loss of the inward kingdom of God, the darkening of the mind, the weakness of man’s will toward good, ignorance of the true God, the inclination toward evil, the serving of the creature instead of the Creator—sorrows, sicknesses, temporal and eternal death, the promise of the Savior under the name of the Seed of the woman, the prophecy concerning Him, the various and numerous types that foreshadowed Him, the fulfillment of God’s promise, the coming of the Savior, His temptation in the wilderness by the devil, the Gospel preaching of repentance, the Redeemer’s baptism for our sake, His teaching and that of the apostles, His various miracles, the founding of the Church on the rock, which is Christ, the Transfiguration, the sufferings, the cross and death of the Savior for the sake of victory over death, His resurrection, His remaining on earth forty days and His appearances, risen, to the disciples and to many believers, and the ascension of Jesus Christ into heaven. All of this Tolstoy has let slip from view—more than that, he does not acknowledge it, and in his self-delusion imagines that he has made an astonishing discovery in the world, in the realm of thought and faith, a discovery that no one before him ever reached—and that he alone, possessing, as it were, a colossal mind, has discovered what other people, crawling upon the earth, supposedly could never have discovered. Colossal madness! Wild folly! Tolstoy has built his whole false system of thought on thin air, without any sufficient foundation whatever, and all his speculation is castles in the air, vanishing at once in the true light of reason and of the Word of God.

Tolstoy does not believe in the Word of God, does not believe in the Church, in her teaching and Mysteries, in her all-saving, all-pacifying worship, and, together with his followers, is perishing in his apostasy from God, in his pride, in his unbelief, in his lawless, vicious life. If Tolstoy and the Tolstoyans fear the eternal misfortune that awaits them after death, they must at once return to the path of truth, of the true faith from which they have fallen away, and repent from the heart of their infatuation with the antichrist’s teaching. It is a great misfortune for erring children to live without a mother’s guidance and nourishment, without the light of truth, which the holy Church alone possesses and which she alone pours out on all who believe in her and are devoted to her sincerely, humbly, without proud inquisitiveness and insolent questioning. The mystery of God is hidden from those who fancy themselves wise and understanding, and is revealed to simple, guileless, humble minds and hearts.

With especially loathsome abuse does L. Tolstoy rise up, in his latest works, against the great Mystery of the Body and Blood of Christ—for he knows not what he does (Lk 22:34)…

Since sin and corruption entered human nature through disobedience, through eating of the forbidden fruit, and for this reason it fell subject to death and slavery to the devil, so too righteousness, incorruption, and life had to be re-established in people who believe and are obedient to the Word of God, through eating the fruit of life—that is, the most pure Body and Blood of Christ the Giver of Life (Jn 6:54), God and Man, who fulfilled for us the whole righteousness of the law, offered Himself as a redemptive sacrifice on the Cross, and redeemed us from sin, the curse, and death. The serpent’s venom, the venom of sin and death, which entered the whole of human nature through the belly, had to be driven out of it by a powerful antidote, and this antidote is communion, with faith and repentance, of the most pure Body and Blood of Christ; and this great Mystery is not only an antidote, but also the impartation to man of righteousness and holiness and the life of Christ, the divine life—that is, deification. Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him. «Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day», says the Lord (Jn 6:54). This is our Christian, divine philosophy, and our Christian, saving theology. This is our answer to the godless man who has lost his faith and his common sense, Leo Tolstoy, who blasphemes our Divine Mysteries.

«Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it», said Christ! (Mk 10:15). Do you hear, Leo Tolstoy, cunning serpent? How crooked you have become! You have grown proud, like Satan, reviling the Holy Gospel, the Holy Trinity, the Christ of God, the Mother of God, the Saints, and the all-saving Mysteries.

In examining L. Tolstoy’s latest work, «An Appeal to the Clergy», one must bear in mind the reasons why he addresses the clergy of the whole Christian world so brazenly, and reproaches the Church so insolently with her supposed falsehood and wrongs. Tolstoy, recently excommunicated from the Church by a formal act of the Synod, published everywhere, could not forgive her for that act of excommunication, and so he hurls abuse and the most brazen slanders at the Christian churches and the representatives of the churches of the whole world, reviling the whole Church for wrongness of doctrine, and her clergy for supposedly knowing falsehood and neglect of the good of Christian peoples—and mocks, above all, the Orthodox Church, which lawfully excommunicated him, cut him off from her body, as a rotten member fallen unto death. Instead of humbling himself and repenting of his apostasy, Tolstoy grew still more proud, proud with a truly satanic pride, and with satanic laughter mocked the Church, which «is the pillar and ground of the truth» (1Tim 3:15).

By your words you will be justified, and by your words you will be condemned. Tolstoy, and many writers, have written and go on writing against themselves; their own words will condemn them on the day of judgment (Mt 12:30-37, Jn 8:24).

Tolstoy and Tolstoyans! By your mad resistance to the truth of God, and by your mockery of it, you are laughing, unhappy men, at yourselves and at mankind, which naturally thirsts for truth and is deprived of it through you. But it has been foretold you by the Truth: «woe to you who laugh now, for you shall weep». Hear the fearsome word of the Truth: «God is not mocked» (Gal 6:7). And the Lord will show forth His righteous wrath upon you, to blot you out from the face of the earth. The truth cost mankind an immeasurably great price: the descent to earth of the Son of God, His becoming man, His teaching and countless miracles, His sufferings and death, and His resurrection from the dead. The Savior Himself said: «For this I came, to bear witness to the truth; everyone who is of the truth hears My voice» (Jn 18:37). And you reject, mock, and scoff at this truth, which cost mankind so dearly. But God is not mocked—the Lord will mock you in return.

It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. The Lord will come with myriads of His holy angels to convict people of all their deeds of ungodliness (Juda 1:14-15), and of all the harsh words which ungodly sinners have spoken against Him.

Nearly two thousand years have passed of Christian history and of the glory of Christ and His followers, and of the holy, glorious, saving Church He founded on earth, and of His glorious, victorious struggle against every kind of enemy—Herods, Caesars, writers such as Celsus and Porphyry, heretics, schismatics, sectarians, iconoclasts, enemies and persecutors of every age—and the holy Church has remained true, glorious, unconquerable, saving, to this day; and to this day her word shines to every corner of the world. But the insolent, senseless heretic of Yasnaya Polyana, who knew how to write only light, playful novels, has taken it into his head to enter into a struggle against our glory, our faith and Church, defended and kept by God and glorified from generation to generation, in order to pour out upon it his bile and his slander, along with his accomplices—Chertkov and the like. Will our Church be blackened, then? Does she not have her own glorious history—and even now, is she not glorious in herself?

In overthrowing faith in God, in Christ, in the Church, you Tolstoyans are overthrowing Russia, you are preparing her political ruin, for Russia grew great and became strong, enlightened, and respected by her enemies only through the Orthodox faith, through the intercession and protection of the Mother of God (To You, the Champion Leader, we, your servants, having been delivered from evils, offer hymns of thanksgiving, O Mother of God) and of the holy servants of God, and above all through the power of the Cross of the Lord.

After all this, what do you think, Orthodox people, of the Russian Leo Tolstoy, who acknowledges neither a personal God nor a personal, immortal human soul! This is a bold madman and disbeliever in mankind, an enemy not only of Russians but of all humanity. Not believing in a personal God, Tolstoy considers prayer—which people of every age, every condition, and every cult have recognized as necessary—to be senseless and foolish. This madman attaches no meaning to the words Creator and creature, refusing to acknowledge a rational Creator; he does not even consider himself a creature, but some sort of evolutionary product; and he attaches no meaning to many other biblical words either—for instance, the words Savior, sinner—since he considers sin a mere word, something that does not exist, and considers himself sinless, having no need whatsoever of a Savior, while imagining, moreover, that he will attain perfection by himself. And this man considers himself the wisest of all, and his followers and admirers consider him the same; he laughs at all people who believe in God, in Christ, in redemption, in their salvation in Christ, in the resurrection, in immortality, in judgment, in paradise and in hell. Count Tolstoy has been driven mad by pride, by his title as a writer, by his rank as a count! He poses as a peasant, a man of bast shoes, but this is a deception, a posturing, a throwing of dust in the eyes of all whom, in his opinion, are fools—both those who actually hold that peasant rank and people of every other dignity and rank. He mocks even the rank of the Orthodox peasant, and mockingly imitates it. And by what has he led everyone into deception? By the skill of speaking smoothly and eloquently—that is, by learned, worldly eloquence, which, it must be noted, comes easily to anyone naturally gifted with intelligence who has studied grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and has read a great deal of worldly eloquence. This, in my view, is who Count Leo Tolstoy is. He was born, was raised, grew up, and was permitted by Providence for the exposure of the people of our present time—faithless, frivolous, given over to vanity and every passion—for the exposure of their unbelief, their senselessness, their religious godlessness. Scripture says that in the last days, the days of the antichrist, God «will send upon people a working of delusion, that they should believe the lie» (2Thes 2:11). And so it is that they believe Tolstoy…

The form of this world is passing away—that is, of everything elemental and material, of all earthly order and disorder; all kingdoms will pass away, all tongues, all sects, schisms, superstitions, human errors; wars for the dominance of races and nations; there will be no more separate territories for Russia, Germany, England, and the various tribes and peoples; strife, quarrels, and unrest will cease—every passion that now holds sway over people; writing and printing will cease, and the endless babbling and chatter of talkers; an end will come to all the works of human hands; there will be one kingdom of God, one people of God, one language, unlike any of the present earthly languages, which have had only a temporary, passing significance since the confusion at Babel; there will be one King and Father of the age to come—Christ, over whom the godless, with Count Tolstoy at their head, now scoff. There will be one God, all in all; He alone will unite everyone into one kingdom, one household, whose image is now served by the Orthodox Church of Christ, with her one infallible, most holy, eternal, and almighty Head. This will be the eternal kingdom of righteousness and peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

All kingdoms will pass away, with their earthly, temporal ordinances and laws, with their institutions, estates, ranks, and offices; the rich of the earth will be stripped of all their earthly riches (Revelation), and every earthly dignity will come to its end; deeds will be required, and each will be judged according to his deeds—as a man, as a creature made in the image of God and endowed with reason, conscience, an inward and an outward law, as a citizen, as a child of his own parents and of the heavenly Father. And this time, this judgment, will show forth in all its nakedness the evil of Tolstoy and of every evil thing. Be terrified, Tolstoy and Tolstoyans, of this time and this judgment, the dread and final judgment! «Unless you repent… you will all likewise perish» (Lk 13:3).