In February 1901 the Holy Synod, the governing body of the Russian Orthodox Church, decreed that the church no longer counted Count Leo Tolstoy as a member and would not until he repented. The man it shut out had written War and Peace and Anna Karenina. In April he replied that the decree was correct: he had renounced the church in order to serve God better. By then he had spent twenty years arguing a single claim. Jesus meant exactly what he said in the Sermon on the Mount, and when he told his hearers not to resist evil, he ruled out violence of every kind, including the armies, courts, prisons and executions on which every state depends.
The claim grew out of a crisis. At the end of the 1870s Tolstoy was nearing fifty, with a loving wife, children, large estates and both great novels behind him, and he could not answer one question: what would come of any of it? He took a cord out of his room so that he would not hang himself from a beam. Philosophy gave him no help: Schopenhauer, the German pessimist he had read with delight ten years earlier, now seemed only to confirm that life had no meaning. What brought him back was the example of the peasants around him, who lived and died without being tormented by the question. In A Confession he concluded that faith is not agreement with what one has been told but knowledge of what life means — the knowledge that lets a person go on living.
One conviction was older than the crisis. In Paris in 1857 he watched a man guillotined, and he wrote later that the sight showed him no theory of progress could justify such an act: the judge of what is good was neither public opinion nor progress but his own heart. That rule, to trust a plain moral perception over any system that explains it away, runs through what he wrote after the crisis. He went back to the Greek text of the Gospels to learn what Jesus had taught, setting aside what the church said about it, and came to deny that Jesus was God. In The Kingdom of God Is Within You (1893) he drew the political conclusion: government rests on force, so anyone who takes the teaching as a way of life can take no part in it.
The Doukhobors, a pacifist sect, were persecuted after they burned their weapons in 1895. When they were allowed to leave Russia, Tolstoy gave the royalties from his novel Resurrection to pay about a third of the cost of their emigration, and some 7,500 of them reached Canada in 1899. Most of his religious books were banned at home. They appeared in Geneva, Paris and England and passed through Russia in handwritten copies, and the censors called The Kingdom of God Is Within You the most harmful book they had ever banned.
The book's best-known reader found it abroad: in 1894 Mohandas Gandhi, then a young lawyer in South Africa, read it in English and credited it with making him a lasting believer in non-violence. Tolstoy's ideas on non-violent resistance later reached Martin Luther King Jr., the American civil-rights leader, largely through Gandhi. In 1895 the Russian physician Maria Manaseina answered the book by calling its programme passive anarchy. In 1914 the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, then a volunteer in the Austro-Hungarian army, bought Tolstoy's The Gospel in Brief at a bookshop in Tarnów and carried it everywhere; his comrades called him the man with the Gospels. Isaiah Berlin, the Oxford historian of ideas, argued in 1951 that Tolstoy's gift was for seeing the world in countless separate particulars, while his conviction was that one ought to see it through a single idea.
In May 1908, at seventy-nine, he read that peasants had been hanged at Kherson and wrote the article "I Cannot Be Silent", arguing that the hangings were carried out in his name. That July every Russian newspaper that printed excerpts from it was fined. Late in October 1910 he left his estate, Yasnaya Polyana, secretly at night. He caught pneumonia on the journey and died at Astapovo, a small railway station, ten days after leaving home.