them, as he knows how to defend; defends them by attacking those whom he calls “the Scribes” and “the Pharisees”; by attacking the established Churches and the representatives of arrogant science, or rather of “scientific philosophism.” Not that he appealed from reason to revelation. Once escaped from the period of distress described in his Confessions, he remained essentially a believer in Reason; one might indeed say a mystic of Reason.
“In the beginning was the Word,” he says, with St. John; “the Word, Logos, that is, Reason.”[1]
A book of his entitled Life (1887) bears as epigraph the famous lines of Pascal:[2]
“Man is nothing but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed… All our dignity resides in thought… Let us then strive to think well: that is the principle of morality.”
The whole book, moreover, is nothing but a hymn to Reason.
It is true that Tolstoy’s Reason is not the scientific reason, the restricted reason “which takes the
- ↑ Tolstoy protests that he does not attack true science, which is modest and knows its limits. (Life, chap. iv. There is a French version by Countess Tolstoy.)
- ↑ Tolstoy often read the Pensèes during the period of this crisis, which preceded the Confessions. He speaks of Pascal in his letters to Fet (April 14, 1877, August 3, 1879), recommending his friend to read the Pensèes.
for Christianity. If I have been particularly attracted by the teaching of Jesus, it is (1) because I was born and have lived among Christians, and (2) because I have found a great spiritual joy in disengaging the pure doctrine from the astonishing falsifications created by the Churches.”
