The bishop of Tula, with whom he had a conversation in December 1879, was much surprised to hear him say he would like to become a monk. Despite his visitor's resolute air, he dissuaded him from this project. Next, Tolstoy informed him that he was thinking of giving all his possessions to the poor. Kissing him on the forehead, the holy man mildly replied that this was "a dangerous course." Tolstoy withdrew, at once disappointed and relieved.
Less than ten days later the decidedly indefatigable Sonya gave birth to her seventh son, Michael.
"Although it no longer gives me the same sensation of wonder as when my first children were born, I am grateful that this time there were no complications," he wrote to his brother 011 December 21, 1879.
One morning a short time later, as he was preparing to take communion, the priest called upon him to affirm that the body and blood of Jesus Christ were literally present in the consecrated bread and
wine. He was suddenly disturbed and annoyed by this ritual question he had heard hundreds of times before; he felt something like a knife- thrust near his heart, and stammered out a faltering "yes"; but he knew as he came out of the little country church that he would never touch the bread of life again. One Wednesday—a fast-day—when the whole family was sitting down together for the evening meal, he pushed away his porridge and, pointing to a dish of meatballs that had been prepared for the two non-fasting tutors, frowned at his son Ilya and growled aggressively, "Pass the meat!" No one dared to express surprise. Before the entire mute but smirking table, the master of Yasnaya Polyana defiantly began to chew the forbidden food.
It was the declaration of war on orthodoxy. Tolstoy was not content with repudiating the Church. He felt as resentful as a deceived husband; he was itching to revenge himself, by word and pen, for the two years he had wasted believing in it. He covered the pages of his notebooks with vindictive entries: "From the third century to the present," he wrote on September 30, 1879, "the Church has been nothing but lies, cruelty and deceit. In the third century something gTcat was still lying hidden. But what? Is there really anything? Let us examine the Gospels. If the soul exists, then God's commandments exist. The question of the soul is the only question. What did the others have to say about it?"
And on October 28: "In this world there are heavy people, without wings. They lurch about here below. Among them there are strong men like Napoleon, who leave terrible marks on mankind, and sow discord among men, but all this happens at ground level. Then there are men who let their wings grow, who rise slowly from the earth and soar above it: the monks. And then there arc lighter men, who spring easily from the ground and fall back again: the good idealists. And there are men with broad, powerful wings who let themselves come to rest in the thick of the human crowd for the sheer pleasure of it, and then their wings are torn: I am one of those. Afterward the wounded wings beat the air, thrust upward and fall back again. My wings will heal. I shall fly very high. May God help me! And then there are men with celestial wings, who come down to earth on purpose and fold their wings out of love for their fellows, in order to help them learn to fly. Then, when they are no longer needed, they go back up into the sky: Christ."
On October 30 the government came under his fire: "Religion, as long as it is religion, cannot, by its very essence, be subjcct to authority. . . . Religion negates temporal authority (war, torture, plunder, theft, every tiling bound up with government). That is why a govern-
ment must make certain of its control over religion. If it docs not lock up this bird, the bird will fly away."22
At last he saw plainly what it was he had to do. Starting with the texts of the Gospels, he must think religion through again, separating the true from the false. "Now it is all clear," he told Sonya, "and, God willing, what I write will be very important." But it worried Sonya to see him continually plunged into books on theology. "His eyes art- strange and staring," she wrote to her sister. "He hardly speaks. lie seems not to be in this world and he is incapable of taking any interest in ordinary matters." He attacked the Church violently at table, to his wife's consternation. The most ordinary incidents of daily life were pretexts for vituperation and parable. "He often quarreled with Maman," his son Ilya later wrote, "and from the fun-loving, lively head of our family he was transformed before our eyes into a stern, accusatory prophet. . . . We would be planning an amateur play, everybody was animated, chatting away, playing croquet, talking of love, etc. Papa appeared and with one word, or worse, with one look, everything was spoiled: the gaiety was gone; we felt ashamed, somehow. It would have been better for him to have stayed away. The worst of it was that he felt it too." Yes, he would have preferred not to deflate this childish joy. But he could not resist: he had never been able to hide what he felt. He was doomed to l>c a kill-joy.
On a brief trip to St. Petersburg in January 1880, he called on Alexandra to explain his new position to her. 'Hie old spinster was aghast when she heard this rabid evangelist, his eyes like marbles and his face aflame, reviling the popes who had perverted the message of Christ and exhorting her to break with the aristocratic and pious circle in which she had been living blindly for so long. She demurred, became angry, he raised his voice, the discussion degenerated into an argument. Disrespectful words tumbled out of Tolstoy's mouth. In a paroxysm of rage he rushed out, slamming the door behind him, went home and was unable to sleep all night. The next day he set out for Yasnaya Polyana without seeing his dear aunt again, although he sent her a letter of apology: "To you, I cannot talk any other way than with my whole heart. I think you truly love God and goodness, and therefore you must understand where He is. I ask your pardon for my bad temper and rudeness. . . ."23
She replied the same day:
"Your precipitous departure annoyed, offended and pained me to the depths of my soul. There was cruclty in your action, and enmity, and I would almost say a desire for revenge. Such behavior would be unseemly in the young, but at our ages, when every parting may be
our last, it is unpardonable to separate on such terms, and it will be hard for me to forgive you."
Six days later, on January 29, she had recovered her serenity and wrote to tell him that she wanted to forget their quarrel, but would never change her mind because she was too happy in the peace she derived from her allegiance to the Orthodox Church. "Not one stone can be removed from the holy edifice without destroying the harmony of the whole." Touched by the conciliatory tone of this letter, Tolstoy elaborated upon his views:
"I can believe in something I can neither understand nor refute. But I cannot believe in something that seems to me to be a lie. Or better stilclass="underline" to persuade myself that I believe in something I cannot believe, something that is no use to me in understanding my soul and God and the relations between them, to persuade myself of that, I say, is an attitude diametrically opposed to true faith."
He went on to affirm that he was quite ready to respect the beliefs of Alexandra and the muzhiks, if they enabled them to accede to a knowledge of God. The only thing was, he was afraid his dear friend was looking toward God through spectacles borrowed from the Church, which were not right for her eyes: "Do those spectacles bother you or not? I cannot tell. A man as cultivated as you are could not tolerate them, that I am sure of, but a woman, I don't know. That is why I am sorry I said all those things. . . . The sense of my words was this: 'Look at the ice you are walking on; it might be wise to try to make a hole in it and test whether it is firm. If it gives way, it would be preferable to return to more solid ground.'"
For him, solid ground was the Gospels, and not another word: "I and all the rest of us live like animals, and we will die the same way. To escape from this excruciating situation, Christ offered us salvation. Who is Christ: a God or a man? He is what he says he is. He says he is the Son of God, he says he is the Son of Man, he says, 'I am what I tell vou I am. I am the truth and the life. . . And from the moment they began to mix it all up together and say he was God and the second person of the Trinity, the result was sacrilege, falsehood and nonsense. If he were that, he would have been capable of saying so. He offered us salvation. IIow? By teaching us to give a meaning to our lives that is not destroyed by death. . . . For me, the foundation of his teaching is that to achieve salvation it is neccssaiy, every day and every hour of every day, to think of God, of one's soul, and therefore to set the love of one's neighbor above mere bestial existence."24