4,5

Tolgo mezza stellina perché Tolstoj è molto ripetitivo e perché la traduzione mantiene molti arcaismi che rendono la lettura poco scorrevole.

Detto ciò, da dove iniziare per parlare di questo capolavoro che fu scritto alla fine del XIX secolo ma è sotto molti punti di vista ancora attuale? Volevo leggere questo libro da quando lessi un'autobiografia di Gandhi in cui dice che iniziò una corrispondenza con Tolstoj scambiando opinioni sul concetto di non-violenza proprio dopo aver letto questo libro che lo toccò profondamente. Spesso si pensa che la non-violenza (ahimsa, ovvero assenza/astensione dal male) sia stata inventata da Gandhi, ma questo concetto si trova già negli Yoga Sutra di Patanjali (che rientra comunque nella tradizione ortodossa dell'induismo) e precisamente nei precetti etici e morali degli Yama (non-violenza, non mentire, non rubare, castità, non essere avidi). Ebbene, lo stesso concetto di non-violenza, ovvero la non-resistenza al male con la violenza (per intenderci il "ama anche il tuo nemico") viene espresso anche nel Sermone della Montagna. Ecco ciò che lega Tolstoj e Gandhi, ed ecco come sono arrivata alla decisione di cercare e leggere Il regno di Dio è in voi. Sembra un paradosso: battezzata e cresciuta in una cultura cattolica, mi ci è voluto lo Yoga e l'induismo per avvicinarmi di nuovo al cattolicesimo. Volevo aggiungere anche questo piccolo dettaglio perché Tolstoj parla anche del bigottismo che regna nel cristianesimo. Lo stesso bigottismo che aveva allontanato me dal cattolicesimo.

Se si inizia questo libro pensando di trovarvi una predica cristiana di Tolstoj, consigli su come ritrovare il regno di Dio in noi, si rimarrà delusi. Partendo dal concetto di non-resistenza al male con la violenza, Tolstoj fa un'analisi della società anche dal punto di vista politico. Anzi, si può considerare più un libro di politica che un sermone religioso. Parla delle ingiustizie della sua epoca, ma come accennato all'inizio della recensione, ciò che dice è ancora attuale: sono cambiati gli oppressori, ma gli oppressi ci sono ancora; sono cambiati i metodi per sottomettere, ingannare, derubare il popolo, ma i poveri e gli sfruttati ci sono ancora. Secondo Tolstoj, l'unico modo per cambiare radicalmente il mondo, è che tutti dovrebbero iniziare a seguire i precetti del Sermone della Montagna, soprattutto quello di non reagire al male con la violenza. Soltanto quando ogni essere umano sarà capace di vedere nel prossimo, anche nel nemico, un fratello, finiranno le oppressioni, lo sfruttamento e la mania di conquista e di potere.
Affronta anche il tema del bigottismo e ci va giù pesante con la Chiesa e con i preti che benedicevano anche gli eserciti che partivano per la guerra. Ce l'ha con chi si professa cristiano ma poi sfrutta il prossimo per arricchirsi, si arruola nell'esercito, condanna a morte o manda in prigione. Secondo Tolstoj ci hanno sempre fatto credere che le punizioni sono necessarie per vivere in una società più ordinata e civile, e noi continuiamo a farci ingannare mentre è sotto gli occhi di tutti che pena di morte o carcere non hanno eliminato assassini e ladri. Peggio ancora quando condanne e punizioni sono ingiuste e perpetrate verso innocenti. Secondo Tolstoj è più colpevole un giudice che si professa cristiano e condanna a morte piuttosto che uno squilibrato che uccide.
I ladri, gli assassini, i truffatori, che commettono degli atti riconosciuti come cattivi da loro stessi e da tutti gli altri uomini, sono l'esempio di ciò che non si deve fare. Invece, coloro che commettono gli stessi furti, violenze, uccisioni, dissimulandoli con ogni specie di giustificazioni religiose o scientifiche, come fanno tutti i proprietari, commercianti, fabbricanti e funzionari, provocano l'imitazione e fanno del male non solo a coloro che ne soffrono direttamente, ma anche a migliaia e milioni di uomini che pervertono e perdono, facendo sparire ogni distinzione fra il bene e il male.
Tolstoj affronta in modo dettagliato anche la questione della leva obbligatoria, di come questi ragazzi vengano mandati ad uccidere persone che non gli hanno mai fatto niente di male, e di come l'esercito venga utilizzato per far mantenere il potere e i privilegi a pochi potenti.
Un altro tema interessante è quello dei tre "piani" in cui si suddivide l'umanità. C'è il piano "naturale", selvaggio, in cui gli uomini non avevano ancora un ordinamento sociale; il piano "sociale", quello in cui viviamo anche noi ma dal quale dobbiamo affrancarci per costituire un piano superiore "divino" in cui si vive amando il prossimo e in cui non ci saranno più ingiustizie.
Il cristianesimo e i suoi valori, però, non possono essere imposti. Tolstoj crede che ogni essere umano, praticando questi valori, possa fare la differenza e dare l'esempio ad altri che si lamentano della situazione attuale ma non fanno niente per cambiarla perché convinti che una persona sola non può fare la differenza. E qui mi ricollego a Gandhi che disse Sii il cambiamento che vuoi vedere nel mondo.

È un libro veramente sostanzioso, e secondo me non è rivolto soltanto ai credenti. Ovvio, la soluzione di Tolstoj è quella di seguire le parole di Gesù, ma l'amore e il rispetto per il prossimo possono essere praticati da chiunque.

Did I just become an anarchist?

This is a book I think everyone should read, but with the warning that it's like Pandora's box, once you open it there's no putting everything back inside. This book clearly and logically explains that the time for government and organized religion has had its time and place which are now both past, and that the singular way forward is with an ironclad commitment to love and nonviolence.

The subtitle of this book really puts it best. You won't find any mysticism or even any spirituality in this book, only an explanation for why nobody can make sense of our modern society anymore, a new way of seeing the world, and a path for making it fair and uplifting for everyone.

This book, was a complicated mixed bag. Reading Tolstoy's philosophy of a supposed dawning age of "real" Christianity, sometimes sounding profoundly insightful, sometimes sounding like utter nonsense, I oscillated wildly from emphatic agreement to emphatic disagreement, sometimes within the same page or even the same sentence.

Such ambivalence started right from the get-go. Tolstoy dismisses the supernatural elements of Christian doctrine, considering them a distraction from the implicitly world-changing divine words of Jesus. Also dismissing the corrupted institution of the church itself, Tolstoy curiously creates a dichotomy between the "Sermon on the Mount" and the "creed," claiming we cannot have both. He has strong, pointed defenses of Christ's commands of non-violence ("Occasions for fulfilling the commandment of non-resistance to evil by force are taught for the most part as occasions for not fulfilling it"). Yet none of his responses to his contemporary critics told me how his exegetical approach applied to the sermon's portions about cutting off eyes or arms.

Amidst the oversimplified logic dressed up in compelling narrative (too many times he too hastily concludes "It could not be otherwise"), there are also a lot of interesting and thought-provoking discussions. One amusing quote:

The most difficult subjects can be explained to the most slow-witted man if he has not formed any idea of them already; but the simplest thing cannot be made clear to the most intelligent man if he is firmly persuaded that he knows already, without a shadow of doubt, what is laid before him.

Tolstoy includes many interesting quotes from other writers as well. In a discussion of the relentless military build-ups of the end of the 19th century, it was quite haunting to read this knowing what came twenty years later: "the most trifling pretext will be sufficient to throw the whole of Europe into the fire of universal war".

Indeed, the pacifistic discussions of conscientious objection were the book's strongest elements for me. He picks apart various contemporary attitudes to the bellicosity of his day, wondering why no one asks, not what ought this or that government to do, but what he considers the real question: "Ought I to participate in it?" He has wonderfully polemic attacks on universal conscription, arguing that to resist it is better no matter how you slice it, because, after all, forced service is not really that different from the prison sentence you might get for refusing, except that besides being a virtual slave to your commanding officers you might also have the horror of being ordered to kill people who haven't done anything to you! While it's easy to dismiss his rambling and contradictory conjectures about what would happen broadly if everyone dismantled all their armies, it was certainly interesting to read this during Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine and think about what might have been different if more individual Russians had accepted Tolstoy's positions. His poetic quotes and descriptions of the horrors of war were also moving and timely ("The young recruits, moving about in lines yonder, are destined to death like the flocks of sheep driven by the butcher along the road. They will fall in some plain with a saber cut in the head, or a bullet through the breast. And these are young men who might work, be productive and useful. Their fathers are old and poor. Their mothers, who have loved them for twenty years, worshiped them as none but mothers can, will learn in six months' time, or a year perhaps, that their son, their boy, the big boy reared with so much labor, so much expense, so much love, has been thrown in a hole like some dead dog, after being disemboweled by a bullet, and trampled, crushed, to a mass of pulp by the charges of cavalry. Why have they killed her boy, her handsome boy, her one hope, her pride, her life? She does not know. Ah, why?").

Unfortunately, it's the book's attempts to go beyond a personal critique of military service into universal concepts of humanity that severely weaken it. Tolstoy has a simplistic model of human history progressing from an individual "pagan conception of live" to a group "social conception of life" to (beginning now but not quite realized) a universal "Christian conception of life". But wasn't it more primitive societies that were more collective and modern society that's more individualistic? He doesn't see any fundamental advantages to republics over dictatorships (which perhaps were less obvious in the 1800's, but which also mutes the relevance of his arguments to my modern wondering about making exceptions for resisting invasion...) While emphatically rejecting the revolutionary Marxists of his day just as strongly as he rejected all forms of existing government, he did have a simplistic Marxist philosophical view of capitalism as inherently oppressive. Lacking nuance or an understanding of other perspectives, he sometimes claims his arguments are obvious to everyone, and sometimes claims people don't see them because they've been hypnotized by the various powers that be. He tries to refute the idea that good rulers are necessary to stop evil by saying that ruling is inherently evil, but he assumes his conclusion by using his definition of what is evil, not his opponent's. His final monologues about how the old order of war and violence persists but is also being slowly undermined mostly sounds like nonsense, especially knowing what was to come in the following century. (The sentence I found the most insane: "Power selects and attracts the worst elements of society, transforms them, improves and softens them, and returns them to society.")

And yet.

His descriptions of the possible hesitations, up and down the chain of command, to follow through on orders to kill because of one's internal recognition of the wrongness, feels strangely prescient, not of war itself, but at least of the restraint in using nuclear weapons during the Cold War. And the description of growing doubts among whole ranks of soldiers as to the justness of their role comes to mind when thinking of the disastrous Russian performance in this very invasion of Ukraine, what with desertions, abandoned vehicles, internal sabotage, and the like. Modern tales of unmotivated Russian conscripts ruining their superiors' strategies due to their lack of desire to kill their Ukrainian brothers actually sounds... quite Tolstoyian. Indeed, universal conscription has largely disappeared in the rest of the modern world and seems unlikely to ever come back. Is humanity finally, over a century later, beginning to reach a point of universal Christlike love that actually renders the ugliness of mass warfare untenable, as never before? Perhaps that's still a fantasy, as the reality of the destruction that has still managed to occur in Ukraine can attest, to say nothing of the other conflicts ravaging other parts of the globe. But perhaps we can dream.

I rarely give five stars to a book. Given our current political and socioeconomic interest in this country, Tolstoy's reminder that humans have an ethical responsibility to fight injustice in our societies had been a sobering realization for me.

This ground-breaking discussion of the principals of nonviolence exerted a powerful influence on the 20th century and beyond. Written as an extension of his book, “What I Believe”, Tolstoy answers his critics and extends his political and philosophical arguments. He details his awakening to the Quaker movement as well as his correspondence with the son of William Lloyd Garrison, who tells him of his father’s work to emancipate enslaved people through non-resistance. Tolstoy develops his political and spiritual arguments through their input and addresses the wider significance of non-violence against repressive regimes.

It is satisfying that Gandhi was able to tell Tolstoy of his profound influence on him before Tolstoy’s death and let him know about the great work he had begun as a result. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired in turn by Gandhi. The seeds were planted. This book’s core logic starts a chain reaction of insight and inspiration that echoes through us today.

Three stars means "liked it," and I did like it, but this book was definitely a disappointment. I had been tracing nonviolent Christian thought back through a few works, from Yoder's "The Politics of Jesus" through King's "Strength to Love" and Gandhi's "Hind Swaraj," and I was excited to read the thoughts of the great Leo Tolstoy, who had been a direct inspiration for Gandhi.

Unfortunately, KG was a dry and mostly uninspiring work, with none of the power that graces the writing of Yoder or King. It is essentially Tolstoy's articulation of why nonviolent resistance should be paramount for Christians. Yet Tolstoy, despite his obvious approval of the teachings of Jesus, comes across as quite non-religious--a doubting Thomas Jefferson who would strike all reference to Jesus' divinity, if he could, and consider him only as "a great teacher." This, I think, is the drain that robs the book of power.

To argue for Jesus' teaching without recognizing Jesus' divinity, Tolstoy is forced into the awkward position of arguing that the way of nonviolent resistance is a rational optimum that should be adopted by any thinking man, Christian or otherwise, because of its obvious superiority to the pro-violence logic of the world-as-it-is. The problem is, there is not much empirical evidence supporting this (and particularly there was not at the time Tolstoy was writing, pre-Gandhi and pre-King). I think that adopting non-violence must require a great deal of religious faith that it is truly the right thing to do and consistent with the Kingdom of God (I say probably because I cannot claim to have adopted it myself, given that I still pay taxes to the U.S. government). King (along with Jesus, I'd say) is more rhetorically powerful because he faces head-on the fact that being non-violent is very likely to cause you immense hardship and, if you achieve any success in it, is very likely to lead to your death. Tolstoy loses my trust by trying to deny this reality.

This brings me to another criticism of Tolstoy's book, which is that it is completely individualist. He is highly critical of all Christian churches (and I would imagine all organized religion), and focuses his entire argument on what an individual ought to do on the strength of his own conviction. This approach has merit in that it denies excuses based on collective action problems, but again it is weak because it does not take seriously the extreme hardship involved in adopting a way of life that is in direct opposition to the logic of the world. I can only see this being successful in the context of a strong community of believers supporting one another and coming together for regular spiritual renewal.

I also see Tolstoy's single-minded focus on individualistic nonviolence as a narcissistic vision of Christianity, focused excessively on essentially legalistic individual purification. By focusing so strongly on this one aspect of Christianity, he neglects other parts, and gives the impression that if only you'll refuse to serve in the army and refuse to pay your taxes, you've checked the box and are a certifiably successful Christian--no matter how you live your life in any other way. I'm not sure that Tolstoy meant it to come across this way, but it does.

Tolstoy's arguments in general come across as a bit dated. Writing in Russia at the end of the 19th century, he talks at length of the horrors of forced conscription, blatant exploitation and regular physical torture of peasants. I do not want to argue at all that modern society has solved the problems that are at the root of Tolstoy's critique, but it does a much better job of papering them over or making them appear less egregious. If Tolstoy were writing today, I think his argument would have to look much different. Perhaps this is part of why I find King much more compelling than him.

At the end of the day, though, I feel mostly convinced by the argument (advanced by Tolstoy as well as others such as Jacques Ellul) that Christianity is fundamentally anarchistic. This does not mean that Christianity actively works toward the abolition of governments, but rather that it is simply inconsistent with pre-committing to allegiance to any earthly power--even, I would emphasize, if this power were a nominally Christian theocracy. It's like Orwell's rules for writing: The state may have rules that seem broadly consistent with Christianity, but one must always be prepared to "break any of these rules before doing something barbarous."

(Note that my feeling convinced by this argument is not the same as my conforming my life to it. The fact remains that I am simultaneously quite horrified at the idea of not paying my taxes.)

Tolstoy's take on religion in general and Christianity in particular. In this lengthy essay, he sets forth his contention that a proper understanding of Jesus leads one to conclude that non-violence, even in the face of evil, is the only philosophy consistent with Christianity. It is a well reasoned argument, set out in exhaustive fashion, and certainly makes one think. It is certainly well worth reading. Being a lesser man than Tolstoy or Jesus, however, I am still planning to shoot to kill if I have to.

It's only not a five stars because Tolstoy needed a serious editor to come in and cut at least 150 repetitive pages, as well as some sentences with too many clauses. But the main ideas here are absolutely golden. Feel like it would be better to hand this out (or at least the first four chapters and the very last) than Mere Christianity as a primer on the faith.

I deeply admire all of Tolstoy's writings, so when I found out that Gandhi named this book as his biggest influence, I felt forced to read it as well. Even though a good part of it seems a little hard to read, not applying anymore to our modern world, it is still a surprisingly revolutionary and refreshing interpretation of Christianity. I wasn't expecting anything like this, Tolstoy combines an ardent defense of the Christian principles, specially the non-resistance principle, with a ferocious criticism of all Churches, and he does so in a remarkably coherent and convincing way. I find that anyone interested in religion and morality would profit immensely from reading this. I certainly did.