Religion and Morality

Georg von Gizycki, a Berlin professor of philosophy who had helped found the German Society for Ethical Culture and edited its journal, wrote to Tolstoy in 1893 with two questions: what did he understand by the word religion, and did he think a morality independent of religion was possible? Gizycki's society existed to answer the second question yes, with an ethics for people who had left the churches. Tolstoy's reply took several months, grew from a letter into an essay, and says no. The word religion, he points out, is usually taken in one of three senses: a revealed truth, a heap of superstitions, or a useful fiction for keeping the masses in order. He rejects all three. Religion is the relation each person establishes between himself and the infinite world, or its source, and morality is the standing guidance for life that follows from that relation. Without it, morality is only the custom of a group, and a band of robbers has customs too; ethics without religion is a plant stuck in the ground without a root. While he was writing, a Russian translation appeared of a lecture by Thomas Huxley, the English biologist, on evolution and ethics, given at Oxford that year, and Tolstoy turned on it. Huxley had set an ethical process against the struggle for existence, and Tolstoy's objection is that he never says where that ethical process comes from. The essay appeared first in German, in Sophie Behr's translation, in Gizycki's journal Ethische Kultur at the end of 1893, and in English in the Contemporary Review in 1894. In Russia the journal Severny Vestnik (The Northern Herald) printed it in 1895 with heavy cuts and distortions, and a separate edition was forbidden.