A Confession

What will come of any of it? Tolstoy put it to his own life at the height of success: whatever he did, his work, his family, his estates, what would it amount to in the face of death? He could find no answer, and without one he could not see why he should go on living. The whole book is the search for an answer that makes life possible.

It is an Eastern fable that Tolstoy found described his condition exactly. A traveller hangs inside a well, licking drops of honey from the branch that holds him, while two mice gnaw through it. The picture holds the whole crisis of the book: the sweetness of a life still being tasted, and its end in plain view, coming closer with every bite. Once the mice have been seen, the honey is no longer enough.

Faith is the knowledge of what life means, by which a person is able to go on living. It is not agreement with what one has been told, and it is not the acceptance of a doctrine. Tolstoy found it not in the learned but in the peasants around him, who lived and died without terror. The test of faith, on this account, is that a life can rest on it.

Because their best answers only confirmed that it would all come to nothing. Tolstoy searched through science and philosophy, from Solomon and the Buddha to Socrates and Schopenhauer, and found his own despair repeated by the wisest people he could read. Reason, pursued honestly, led him to the edge of suicide rather than away from it, which is why the answer had to come from somewhere reason had not looked.

Because the church failed the test of its own teaching. Tolstoy kept every Orthodox rite for a time, but he could not accept a church that blessed war and was hostile to Old Believers, Molokans and Catholics whose lives he admired. A faith that lets people live, he concluded, could not belong to one confession that condemned others living by it.