or when people were required to have passports to cross boarders. And this was a crisis not for everyone, but primarily among the rich and the children of the rich. They controlled the American Socialist Party, and even the American Communist Party. We had a liberal movement, alive and well, until what we call the First World War came along, and put an end to all that.
Recently I had the opportunity to review some of the work of an important and influential precursor of the European storm as evidenced in the last essays of the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910). Tolstoy was a born aristocrat, with land, money and power at his beck and call. Yet in his later years he repudiated his position and turned all his powers to the liberation and brotherhood of all people.
Many know of Tolstoy’s work through his great novels, like “War and Peace” or “Anna Karenina.” These works are still available today, available in paperback editions in almost any bookstore. Yet Tolstoy would never had wished for such a situation. This was because Tolstoy had undergone an inner sea-change that would redirect his life and work until the end. He now wrote works of a religious and philosophical nature, with titles like “A Confession,” or “Religion and Morality” or “The Law of Love and the Law of Violence.” This “new” Tolstoy was immediately and officially censored, in spite of his fame and power. He was put under constant surveillance, excommunicated from the church, and his followers persecuted. What warranted this?
In “A Confession,” Tolstoy describes the “sea-change” that eventually transformed him: he went through a severe depression. “And then,” he says, “what happens to everyone stricken with a fatal inner disease happened to me.” There is no mention, of course, considering the times, of neurobiology or medication. He considered the “disease” to be of a spiritual nature, and it was through the spirit that he would finally free himself from the abyss of depression.
The onset of Tolstoy’s illness occurred when he took very seriously the perennial question, What is the meaning of life? This question became a major theme to later Russian novelists, and seems to be particularly important to scholars of the Northern Climes. I think the Dane, Kirkegaard expressed the issues involved best in his classic work, “Fear & Trembling”: “If there were no eternal consciousness in a man; if at the bottom of everything there were only a wild ferment…if an unfathomable, insatiable emptiness lay hid beneath everything, what would life be but despair?”
The only acceptable answer for Tolstoy had to involve the individual’s relationship to religion, and if no answer was forthcoming, then it was not worth living.
Fortunately, Tolstoy worked out his beliefs in the form of a kind of simplified, humanistic Christianity. He thought that although there were many diverse religions, they differed primarily in their external expression and not in their underlying basic principles. Every religion had in common the basic principles he came up with: “that there is a God who is the origin of everything; that there is an element of this divine origin in every person, which he can diminish or increase through his way of living; that in order for someone to increase this source he must suppress his passions and increase the love within himself; that the practical means of achieving this consist in doing to others as you would wish them to do to you.”
Simple enough, but they implied for Tolstoy an entire code of conduct and the cure to the evils of a world racked by violence and the rule of the few over the many. They also implied a philosophy of non-violence (in regard to which M. K. Gandhi became a most influential disciple).
His writings predict what would happen if the hypocrites and the hypnotized did not pay heed to his simple truths, and the incredible brutal history of the 20/21st centuries bear him out. His words are relevant today, sounding like a profound echo of the drumbeat of truth, if we had but ears to hear him. In the passing of the liberal storm of which Tolstoy sounded loudly, let us not forget the precious road he showed us.
Puzzle
1. I noticed something about the four digits of my PIN. If I considered them as three different numbers, then the sum of the first two numbers is equal to twice the square of the third. Can you find the numbers?
