Get started

WorkLeo Tolstoy

The Kingdom of God Is Within You

The case that no Christian can serve a state, since every state rests on soldiers, courts and prisons.

by Leo Tolstoy925 passages held

  • Russian, the original language
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work See it in context
Original title
Царство Божие внутри вас
First published
(aged 65)
Original language
Russian

Report a rights issue

Overview

In 1894 Mohandas Gandhi, then a young lawyer working in South Africa, read this book in English. In his autobiography he wrote that it overwhelmed him, and he credited it with making him a lasting believer in non-violence. Tolstoy had written it for other readers: the people who had answered What I Believe. After that book appeared, American Quakers wrote to tell him of their two centuries of refusing war, and the son of William Lloyd Garrison, the American campaigner against slavery, sent him the declaration of non-resistance his father had drawn up in 1838, of which Tolstoy had known nothing. Garrison's son told him that no such movement survived, yet Adin Ballou, a minister in Hopedale, Massachusetts, of whom Tolstoy had never heard either, had preached non-resistance for fifty years. The book began in 1890 as a preface to Ballou's catechism of non-resistance and grew over three years into a full treatise on Christianity and the state. Government, Tolstoy argues, rests on violence — conscription, taxes, courts and prisons — and anyone who takes the teaching of Jesus as a way of life rather than a mystical doctrine can take no part in it; the Kingdom of God is not an institution to be waited for but a change in each person. On 9 September 1892, as he was finishing, Tolstoy's train stopped beside a special train carrying the governor of Tula province, with soldiers, live cartridges and birch rods, on his way to punish starving peasants. The last chapter is built round that meeting. The Russian censors called it the most harmful book they had ever had to ban. It came out abroad, in French in Paris, in Russian in Berlin with passages cut, and in English in 1894 in Constance Garnett's translation. In Paris the Russian physician Maria Manaseina answered it in 1895 with a book calling its programme passive anarchy.

Key concepts

Why does Tolstoy say a Christian cannot serve the state?

Because the state rests on violence, and the teaching of Jesus forbids it. Conscription, taxes, courts and prisons are not side functions of government but what it is built on. Anyone who takes that teaching as a way of life, rather than as a doctrine to profess, therefore cannot take part in government without doing what the teaching forbids.

What does 'the Kingdom of God is within you' mean in Tolstoy's book?

It means the Kingdom is not an institution to be waited for but a change in each person. Nothing has to be built, founded or awaited for it to exist. If it is within, it begins the moment a person lives by the teaching of Jesus, and it depends on no state and no church to arrive.

What separates a way of life from a mystical doctrine in this book?

A doctrine is something one professes; a way of life is something one does. Held as a mystical doctrine, the teaching of Jesus can be professed by a soldier, a judge or a jailer without anything in their lives changing. Taken as a way of life, the same teaching makes those occupations impossible, which is why the distinction carries the whole argument against the state.

What does the governor's train stand for in the last chapter?

It stands for the violence behind government, gathered into a single scene. On 9 September 1892 Tolstoy's train stopped beside one carrying the governor of Tula province, with soldiers, live cartridges and birch rods, on the way to punish starving peasants. The last chapter is built round that meeting, because there the book's principle could be watched in practice.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Every State Rests on Soldiers, Courts and Prisons

Can a Christian serve a government whose every function is backed by force? Conscription, taxes, courts and prisons, the book answers, leave no innocent part of it to serve.

Government, Tolstoy argues, rests on violence: conscription, taxes, courts and prisons. Anyone who takes the teaching of Jesus as a way of life can therefore take no part in it. The last chapter makes the claim visible. On 9 September 1892 his train stopped beside a special train carrying the governor of Tula province, with soldiers, live cartridges and birch rods, on his way to punish starving peasants. The chapter is built round that meeting, where the state's violence could be seen sitting in a railway carriage.

  • state violence
  • political authority
  • political power
  • coercion
  • conscription
  • law
  • punishment
  • militarism
  • war
  • obedience

Enter a dialogue

The Non-Resistance Others Had Found First

Was Tolstoy's reading of the Gospel an eccentric's invention? The letters that answered What I Believe showed him that Quakers, Garrison and Ballou had reached it before him.

After What I Believe appeared, American Quakers wrote to tell Tolstoy of their two centuries of refusing war, and William Lloyd Garrison's son sent the declaration of non-resistance his father had drawn up in 1838, of which Tolstoy had known nothing. Adin Ballou had preached non-resistance for fifty years, though Garrison's son said no such movement survived. The book began in 1890 as a preface to Ballou's catechism. In 1894 a young lawyer in South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi, read it and credited it with making him a lasting believer in non-violence.

  • nonviolence
  • pacifism
  • conscientious objection
  • civil disobedience
  • peace
  • public opinion
  • moral progress
  • social change

Enter a dialogue

A Kingdom Not to Be Waited For

Is the Kingdom of God an institution that will one day come, or a change that happens in each person now? The book's title stakes everything on the second.

The Kingdom of God, for this book, is not an institution to be waited for but a change in each person. That is why the teaching of Jesus must be taken as a way of life rather than a mystical doctrine: a doctrine can be professed by a man who serves the state, a way of life cannot. The argument ends in individual refusal, not in a programme of reform, and in 1895 the Russian physician Maria Manaseina answered it with a book calling that programme passive anarchy.

  • christianity
  • christian ethics
  • religion
  • religious authority
  • conscience
  • love
  • hypocrisy
  • moral responsibility
  • truth

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
925
distinct concepts
806
by passages held, corpus-wide
#68

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “christian ethics” and “nonviolence”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 26 pairings. 85 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
christian ethicsnonviolence39
violencewar16
christianitynonviolence12
consciencepolitical authority11
political authoritystate violence10
christianitywar9
christian ethicsconscience8
nonviolencepolitical authority8
nonviolencewar8
christian ethicswar7
christian ethicsstate violence6
christianityviolence6
consciencenonviolence6
political authorityviolence6
christian ethicspolitical authority5
conscienceviolence5
political authoritywar5
christian ethicsviolence4
christianitypolitical authority4
consciencestate violence4
consciencewar4
nonviolenceviolence4
nonviolencestate violence3
christianityconscience2
christianitystate violence1
state violencewar1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1884 A Confession (Исповедь)

    Tolstoy submitted it as an introduction to a larger, then-unpublished work, his critique of church theology and his own reading of the Gospels, and it stands at the door of everything he wrote after his conversion.

     RU
  2. 1885 What I Believe (В чём моя вера?)

    A statement of positive faith, written between 1882 and 1884: where A Confession ends at the threshold of belief, this book sets out what the belief is.

     RU
  3. 1886 What Then Must We Do? (Так что же нам делать?)

    Of all Tolstoy's post-conversion books, this is the one that starts in the street: it turns the religious conclusions of What I Believe onto money, work and the city he was living in.

     RU
  4. 1888 On Life (О жизни)

    After the social criticism of What Then Must We Do?, it gives Tolstoy's religious turn the form of a philosophical treatise, tried out first on Moscow's university philosophers.

     RU
  5. 1892 The Four Gospels Harmonized and Translated (Соединение и перевод четырёх Евангелий)

    The workshop behind What I Believe and everything after it, and the long study that A Confession was written to introduce: a work of translation and commentary rather than argument.

     RU
  6. 1893 Religion and Morality (Религия и нравственность)

    In the same year he finished The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy set down here, in compact form, what he meant by religion.

     RU
  7. 1893 The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Царство Божие внутри вас) you are here RU
  8. 1897 What Is Art? (Что такое искусство?)

    Standing apart from the religious and political writing around it, this is Tolstoy's treatise on aesthetics.

     RU
  9. 1900 Patriotism and Government (Патриотизм и правительство)

    It follows "Christianity and Patriotism" (1894) and "Patriotism or Peace?" (1896), and goes further than either, from the feeling itself to the governments that live by it.

     RU
  10. 1908 I Cannot Be Silent (Не могу молчать!)

    Two years before his death, Tolstoy turned from the treatise to the newspaper page: a signed article addressed to everyone who ordered, carried out or lived by the executions of 1908.

     RU
Sign in or subscribe to discuss this work

— or open another of their works