Tolstoy’s Christian Non-Resistance

by David S. D’Amato

Tolstoy’s radical Christianity led him to a pacifistic, anarchistic political

philosophy that rejected the state as incompatible with Christ’s teachings.
Leo Tolstoy is best known as among history’s greatest novelists, authoring monuments of
literary fiction such as War and Peace and Anna Karenina; yet Tolstoy was also a thoughtful and
discerning political thinker, sensitive to the plight of the oppressed and offering deep and
essentially libertarian criticisms of government power. From his Christian beliefs, Tolstoy
arrived at an anarchist political philosophy centered on the conscience of the individual, on the
importance of independent action and moral judgment. For Tolstoy, governments were an
instantiation of human fallibility, their powers necessarily based on the human individual’s
propensity to abuse, subjugate, and enslave his fellow man. Born into aristocratic privilege,
Tolstoy saw firsthand that the landholding nobility were simply glorified freeloaders, living
dissolutely, parasites on the labor of those who tilled the soil, made things with their hands, and
fed people. Tolstoy’s many largely unremembered nonfiction works are a unique blend of
theological, political, and historical arguments. His political theory is inseparable from his
spirituality; both embrace an individualistic stance that emphasizes the rational judgment of each
person. But Tolstoy’s individualism is not egoistic. On the contrary, in his thought, reason
demands a kind of asceticism, his definition of love entailing self-abnegation and renunciation.
To force one to exert his talents in the service of others, however, is to void the virtue in service.
Each individual must decide for himself whether he will heed “rational consciousness” and
dedicate himself to higher values.
Thus is Tolstoy’s Christianity—his adherence to the teachings of Christ—decidedly not a
product of faith, but of reason; rational choice, always guided by reason (as opposed to “the
bestial personality”), is at the center of his thought. Tolstoy’s Christianity was controversial and
explicitly unorthodox. He called “nonsense” traditional Christian tenets such as the divinity of
Jesus, the Trinity, and the idea of salvation through faith. His beliefs are correspondingly anti-
clericalist, based on the idea that “the churches have always been not merely alien but downright
hostile to the teaching of Christ.” For Tolstoy, the various Christian sects as institutions are
necessarily “anti-Christian,” having “yielded to the world” and its evil essence. Also at the center
of Tolstoy’s Christianity is the individual, his spirit, and his conscience, each person enjoying
direct access to God and possessing the ability to understand God’s laws. These laws are not
foreign and arcane mysteries the proper understanding of which requires the mediation of an
exalted few with sacerdotal training. Rather than pursuing spiritual enlightenment and absolution
through ritualistic exercises and the search for the miraculous, Tolstoy believed that Christians
ought to look within—that “the kingdom of God is within you.”
The consequence of Tolstoy’s radically anti-authoritarian creed (for which he was
excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church) was a unique, though not entirely
unprecedented, variety of anarchism. This Christian anarchism is redolent of its American
counterpart, the nonresistance philosophy of radical abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison.
Indeed, Garrison’s son wrote to Tolstoy to remark on the similarities between Garrisonian
nonresistance and Tolstoy’s philosophy of peace, appending to his letter the “Declaration of
Non-resistance” (actually “Declaration of Sentiments”) that Garrison had written for his 1838
Peace Convention). In his 1894 tract The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Tolstoy quoted at
length from both the Declaration and from the writings of another notable Christian nonresistant,
Adin Ballou, to whom Tolstoy had written in admiration. Tolstoy followed Garrison and Ballou
in the belief that all human governments were founded on principles contrary to those taught by
Jesus, in particular, those expressed in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount—the source of the
nonresistance doctrine. For Tolstoy, Jesus’s admonitions to love your enemies and to resist not
evil were “incompatible with violence, which forms an indispensable condition of power.”
Unlike some professed anarchists, then, Tolstoy vehemently opposed violent forms of
propaganda of the deed, denouncing political assassinations and lamenting “the mania for
murder” that dominated his native Russia.
In an article for The Advocate of Peace, Tolstoy defended his philosophy of consistent
nonviolence and argued that “the murder of kings, emperors, and rulers in general is senseless,
since the state organization cannot be altered by such murders.” Tolstoy was, therefore, no
spokesman for revolution, seeing the state itself as the enemy of humankind. He observes that
while the principle of nonresistance “is most terrible and most dangerous for every despotism,”
revolutionaries have throughout history preferred to combat evil with evil, to attempt the
overthrow of power with violence. Tolstoy was similarly skeptical of attempts at practical
political reform. As the eminent libertarian scholar Robert Higgs notes, “The Kingdom of God Is
Within Youcontains many anticipations of ideas later developed in economics and public choice.”
Tolstoy gives no sanctuary to romanticized or idealized notions of the political process. He
writes, “[W]e all know how our laws are made. We have all been behind the scenes, we know
that they are the product of covetousness, trickery, and party struggles; that there is not and
cannot be any real justice in them.” To these unjust, cruel, artificial laws Tolstoy contrasts the
laws of God, which prescribe love and compassion between all members of the human race. For
Tolstoy, there can be no obligation to observe an edict that contradicts this most fundamental
law. If a law offends one’s conscience or conflicts with Christ’s exhortations, he should simply
ignore it, confident in his ability to distinguish right from wrong.
If Tolstoy was influenced by radical thinkers such as Garrison, Ballou, and Henry George, then
his distinctive theory of nonresistance went on to inform the thought of the famed American
lawyer Clarence Darrow, Gandhi, and countless others. Darrow, for his part, credited Tolstoy as
the principal source of the ideas expressed in his remarkable book Resist Not Evil, the preface of
which praises Tolstoy for “plac[ing] the doctrine of non-resistance upon a substantial basis.”
Like Tolstoy, Darrow confronts the argument that nonresistance is simply impractical, a utopian
idea that “can only be held by dreamers and theorists.” And also like Tolstoy, Darrow concludes
that in fact it is the state, founded on false principles of war, conquest, and patriotism, that is
impractical, that has wrought misery for the many throughout history. Though a lawyer, an
officer of the court sworn to uphold the Constitution and defend the judicial system, Darrow
nevertheless insists on the impossibility of a just judgment within the existing legal and political
order. Tolstoy had likewise charged “learned jurists” and prosecutors with perpetuating a
“parody of justice,” with concocting elaborate sophistries to “justify the violence of authority.”
Both Tolstoy and Darrow believed that it was the state, the institutionalization of war and
violence, that was to blame for most of the crimes and injustices in the world. The question of
“how to be without a State” is, Tolstoy argues, directly inverse to the question that ought to drive
our thinking about politics and government. Shifting the burden of proof, we might instead
consider the practical effects of statism and its concomitants. For Tolstoy, then, the state does not
deserve the benefit of the doubt; born of violent conquest, government has remained true to its
brutal, iniquitous pedigree. “The champions of government,” Tolstoy observes, assert that
without it the wicked will oppress and outrage the good, and that the power of the government
enables the good to resist the wicked. But in this assertion the champions of the existing order of
things take for granted the very proposition they want to prove. When they say that except for the
government the bad would oppress the good, they take it for granted that the good are those who
at the present time are in possession of power, and the bad are those who in subjection to it. But
this is just what wants proving.
Nothing is beyond the reach of Tolstoy’s penetrating radicalism, and he reserves especially
scathing critiques for the subjects of war and the “savage superstition” of patriotism. In its
categorical rejection of force and violence as means of ordering and administrating human
society, Tolstoyan nonresistance must be regarded as a form of libertarianism. Outspoken in his
opposition to warfare and militarism, however rationalized, the political writings of Tolstoy’s
late life have often drawn the attention of the censors, beginning with the Russia of his own day
and later in Nazi Germany. Even where they have been freely available, they have reposed in
relative obscurity. But Tolstoy’s sagacious nonfiction has much to teach the contemporary
libertarian, offering a bold indictment of politics itself and testing the platitudes of conventional
wisdom. Tolstoy’s libertarian observations demonstrate that at least as much as it is an ideology
or a political philosophy, anarchism is a temperament: a visceral resistance to authority, a heart
for the enslaved and oppressed, a hatred of war. And this is the manner in which Tolstoy treats
social and economic theory, not as cautious scholar, but as artist, sensitive rather than detached.
Such an approach leads, perhaps, to what Higgs rightly calls a “curiously uneven command of
different aspects of his subject.” On economics, for example, Tolstoy reveals a regrettable, if
pardonable, ignorance, wrongly identifying trade and exchange with exploitation, profit motive
with greed. Like other late nineteenth century anarchists, Tolstoy believed that the problems of
political authority were fundamentally and inextricably connected to those of widespread poverty
and economic exploitation. But he repeatedly confuses coercive economic privilege, which he
rightly condemns, with honest commerce. Still, while Tolstoy could have benefitted from a
lesson in elementary economics, he nevertheless demonstrates an understanding of the fact that it
is state violence against which we must always strive. “Christianity,” he writes, “destroys the
state.” Governmental authority, for Tolstoy, compels us to live a lie or a contradiction, to place
the mere edicts of the powerful and cunning above the dictates of reason and conscience. Love
and mutual respect, once fully understood and acted upon, would replace the criminal
governments of the present with proper communities of equals. The lesson is one that has always
been important to libertarians: The remedy for the political is not this candidate or that reform,
but the simple recognition of the generally applicable moral principle to treat other people as you
would want to be treated, respecting their dignity and autonomy.