Chapter 4 - Tolstoi, Orthodoxy and Asceticism

Summary

One important reason why Tolstoi so fiercely rejected Orthodox dogmatics was that he considered a purely theoretical approach to faith, disconnected from the lives of the believers, to be useless. Therefore, he had far greater sympathy with the Orthodox mystic-ascetic devotional literature associated with the so-called Hesychast movement. Chapter 4 analyzes Tolstoi’s exposure to this Orthodox monastic spirituality and how it influenced his thinking. He had a well-thumbed copy of Philokalia (Dobrotoliubie), a basic text of Orthodox spirituality and the most important of the Hesychast writings. Here, Tolstoi found confirmation of his strongly negative views of the body and the passions. The Philokalia taught that we should not merely control but indeed extinguish our passions. Passionlessness, apatheia – a concept also found among the Stoics and in Buddhism – should be the aim of the Christian life. This was an ideal that Tolstoi preached and which informed many of his views, on the necessity of physical labor, nonresistance to evil, and abstention from property, drugs, alcohol and even sex. Moreover, also Tolstoi’s claim that the essence of human life is not only spiritual but divine has a clear affinity with the Orthodox doctrine of theosis, the deification of man.