Editor’s Introduction

In 1901 the Most Holy Synod formally declared that Leo Tolstoy had fallen away from the Orthodox Church: a public reckoning with a novelist whose late-life religious writings had already been read by millions. This is Father John of Kronstadt’s direct answer to one of those writings, Tolstoy’s pamphlet Appeal to the Clergy, and it is not a measured theological rebuttal so much as a public prosecution, delivered point by point against Tolstoy’s own arguments: his rejection of the Nicene Creed, his mockery of the Old and New Testaments as fable, his contempt for repentance, his substitution of human progress for the need of a Redeemer.

Kronstadt does not pretend to charity here, and says so directly, quoting Solomon’s proverb on answering a fool according to his folly and taking it as license. The piece is worth reading less as an argument aimed at persuading Tolstoy (Kronstadt plainly believes that impossible) than as a full, undisguised statement of how one of the era’s most influential churchmen saw the era’s most influential heretic, at the height of a controversy that gripped Russia.