What I Believe

One verse, Tolstoy wrote, became the key to all the rest: the passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus sets aside the old law of retaliation and tells his hearers not to resist the one who does them evil. The churches had spent centuries explaining why those words could not mean what they say. This book takes them literally, and from them and the rest of the Sermon on the Mount draws five plain commandments: do not be angry, do not put away your wife, swear no oaths, do not resist evil by force, and treat no nation as your enemy. If they are commandments, then law courts, oaths of allegiance, armies and prisons are exactly what Christians have been told not to take part in, and the Christianity of church and state has turned the teaching upside down. The book opens with Tolstoy at fifty-five: thirty-five adult years lived without any faith, and a life that had turned round five years before. He dated the last page Moscow, 22 January 1884. By arrangement with the editors of Russkaya Mysl, who expected the ban, fifty copies were printed without waiting for the censor. The book was banned, though not burned, and the copies were taken to St Petersburg to be examined. It reached its readers abroad instead. In 1885 it came out in Paris in French as Ma religion, in Leipzig in German, and in London in English as What I Believe, while at home it passed from hand to hand in handwritten and lithographed copies. Church journals spent the following years refuting it, and the letters Tolstoy received from its readers, American Quakers among them, became the starting point of The Kingdom of God Is Within You.