Many agape-justice conflicts reflect the competing demands of universal love (agape) versus kin-particularistic love (justice). It is a clash between impartial and partial love. However, this conflict is not about choosing either agape or justice, but about how much of agape and justice’s claims to mix. The main issue is not one of priorities, but one of superfluity, that is, arriving at what is enough for one’s nearest and dearest. The task is in identifying the threshold that allows one to start satisfying the claims of agape after having fulfilled the claims of justice to one’s own kin.

Tolstoy’s biography embodied the fundamental Romantic mythology of the modern age, which synthesizes the biblical myths of the Lost Paradise and the Prodigal Son with the classical myth of the Golden Age. His was full of abrupt ruptures perceived both as an exile and as an escape. He longed to leave behind the confines of his social upbringing, his earthly pursuits and fame, his family, and finally his mortal body in an ardent desire to return home to the eternal and universal unity of “general life.” His vision of this unity underwent many changes but his urge to join it was always unwavering. He searched for it in the recollections of childhood, wild life in natural environment, romantic love, marriage and family life, literary and pedagogical pursuits, peasant lifestyle, and an escape from everything he cherished.