Another undoubted condition of happiness is work; in the first place voluntary work which one is fond of, and, secondly, physical work which gives one an appetite and sound, restful sleep. Again, the more good fortune people have secured according to the world’s teaching, the more are they deprived of this second con- dition of happiness. All the fortunate ones of the world, the men in important places, and the rich, either live like prisoners, quite deprived of work and vainly struggling with diseases that arise from the absence of physical labour, and still more vainly with the ennui which over- comes them (I say vainly, because work is only joyous when it is undoubtedly needful — and they need nothing), or they do work they hate, as bankers, public prosecutors, governors, or ministers, while their wives arrange drawing- rooms, china, and costumes for themselves and lOCC ‘ MY YOKE IS EASY ' their children. (I say hateful because I have ' never yet met one of them who praised his occupation, or did it with even as much pleasure as that with which a porter clears away the snow from before the house.) All these fortunate people are either deprived of work or are burdened with work they dislike — that is to say, they find themselves in the position in which prisoners are placed.
The third indubitable condition of happiness is a family. And again, the further people have advanced in worldly success the less is that happiness accessible to them. Most of them are adulterers, and consciously renounce the happiness of a family, submitting only to its inconveniences. If they are not adulterers, still their children are not a joy to them, but a burden, and they deprive themselves of them, trying in every way — often by most tormenting means— to make their marital unions barren. Or, if they have children, they are deprived of the joy of intercourse with them. They, by their rules, have to hand them over to strangers, for the most part quite alien people; first to foreigners,1 and then to the Government instructors 2; so that their family only causes them grief, their children from infancy becoming as unhappy as their parents, and having only one feeling towards their parents — a desire 1 This is a reference to the common Russian practice of having a foreign nurse, governess, or tutor for young children, that they may learn a foreign language in the nursery.
2 The Russian schools are State institutions.
WHAT I BELIEVE for their death in order to inherit their property.1 They are not shut up in prison, but the consequences of their life, in regard to their family, are more tormenting than the deprivation of family life to which prisoners are exposed.
The fourth condition of happiness is free, amicable intercourse with all the different people in the world. And again, the higher the rank attained by men of the world the more are they deprived of this chief condition of happiness: the higher, the narrower, and the more restricted is the group of people with whom it is possible for them to associate, and the lower in mental and moral development are the few people who form the enchanted circle from which there is no escape. For a peasant and his wife inter- course is open with the whole world of mankind, and if one million people do not wish to have intercourse with him he still has eighty millions of people such as himself, labouring people, with whom, from Archangel to Astrakhan, 1 The defence of such a life which one often hears from parents is amazing. ‘ I want nothing,’ say the parents; ‘ this kind of life is hard for me, but, as I love my children, I bear it for their sakes.’ That is to say, I know by undoubted experience that our life is unhappy, and therefore...I educate my children so that they should be as unhappy as I am. And there- fore, out of my love for them, I place them in the full physical and moral contagion of a town; I hand them over to strangers who have only a mercenary aim in educating them; and so physically, morally, and mentally I take pains to injure my children, And this contention has to serve as justification for the irrational life the parents themselves lead 1 — L. T.
fit rei< ta ■to b ;FC ‘lei fth [of th or 1 ca ¥ hi k n h ri a a 1 t a 4 MY YOKE IS EASY ' without waiting for visits or introductions, he can at once enter into the closest brotherly relations. For an official with his wife there are hundreds of people on the same level as himself; but those above him do not receive him, and those below him are all separated from him. For a rich man of the world and his wife a few dozen worldly families are accessible; all the rest are cut off from him. For a Minister of State, or a millionaire, and his family, there are a single dozen similarly important or wealthy people. For Emperors and Kings the circle is yet more restricted. Is not this a form of imprisonment, in which the prisoner can only have intercourse with two or three warders?
Finally, a fifth condition of happiness is a healthy and painless death. And again, the higher people stand on the social ladder the more are they deprived of this condition of happiness. Take, for example, a moderately rich man and his wife and an average peasant and his wife, notwithstanding all the hunger and excessive toil which, not by his fault but by the cruelty of man, a peasant has to bear, and you will see that the lower the healthier, and the higher the sicklier are men and women.
Count over in your memory the rich men and their wives you have known or now know, and you will notice that most of them are ill. Among them a healthy man, who is not undergoing treatment continually or periodically summer after summer, is as much an exception as is a WHAT I BELIEVE WHAT I BELIEVE sick man among the peasantry. All these fortunate people, without exception, begin with onanism (which has become in their class a natural condition of development), they all have bad teeth, are all grey or bald at an age when a workman is just reaching his full strength. They are nearly all subject to nervous, digestive, and sexual illnesses from gluttony, drunkenness, debauchery, and doctoring, and those who do not die young spend half their life in being doctored and taking injections of morphia, or are shrivelled cripples, unfitted to live by their own exertions and capable of existing only like parasites or like those ants who are fed by slave-ants. Consider their deaths: this one shot himself; that one rotted with syphilis; another old man died from the effects of a stimulant, while another died young from a flogging to which he submitted in his desire for sex-stimu- lation; one was eaten alive by lice, another by worms; one drank himself to death, another died of over-eating; one from morphia, and another from producing an abortion. They perish one after another for the sake of the world’s teaching. And the crowd throngs after them and seeks, like martyrs, for suffering and destruction.
One life after another is flung under the chariot-wheels of that god: the chariot passes on tearing them to pieces, and fresh and fresh victims, with groans, cries, and curses, fall beneath it!
To fulfil the teaching of Christ is hard! Christ says: ‘ Let him that would follow me fane jctc h hoi lift f fi( oi .P till f jf( ur or fc cc in fc ei 4 MY YOKE IS EASY ' leave house, and fields, and brothers, and follow me, God, and he shall receive in this world a hundred times more houses, fields, and brothers, and besides that shall gain eternal life/ And no one follows him. But the teaching of the world says: 4 Abandon house, and fields, and brothers, and go from the village to the rotten town. Live all your life as a naked bath-attendant, soaping other people's backs amid the steam, or serve in a money-changer's basement-office, all your life counting other people's pence; or live as a public prosecutor, spending your whole life in the courts, over law-papers, and devoting yourself to making miserable people's fate yet worse; or as a Minister of State, signing unnecessary papers in a hurry all your life; or as a colonel, killing people all your life — - live such a monstrous life as this, always ending in a painful death, and you will neither get anything in this world nor will you receive life eternal.' And every one follows this course. Christ said: 4 Take up your cross and follow me ' — that is to say, endure submis- sively the fate that has befallen you and obey me, God; and no one follows him. But the first abandoned man wearing epaulets, and fit for nothing but murder, into whose head it enters, says: 4 Take, not a cross, but a knapsack I and rifle, and follow me to all kinds of torment and to certain death' — and all follow him.
Having abandoned their families, parents, wives, and children, and having been dressed up like fools and submitted themselves to WHAT I BELIEVE the authority of the first man of higher rant that they happened to meet: cold, hungry J and exhausted by forced marches, they gc like a herd of bullocks to the slaughter; yet they are not bullocks, but human beings. Thej cannot but know that they are being driven j to slaughter with the question unanswered—! Why? And with despair in their hearts they are go, and die of cold, hunger, and infectious] diseases, till they are placed under a shower of bullets and cannon-balls and ordered to kill people who are unknown to them. They slay and are slain. And no one of the slayers knows why or wherefore. The Turks roast them alive on the fire, skin them, and tear out their entrails. And to-morrow some one will again whistle, and again all will follow to horrible sufferings, to death, and to obvious evil. And no one considers this hard! Neither those who endure the sufferings, nor their fathers and mothers, consider this difficult. The parents even themselves advise their children to go. It seems to them that not only is this necessary and unavoidable, but that it is also good and moral.
It would be possible to believe that the fulfilment of Christ's teaching is difficult and terrible and tormenting, if the fulfilment of the world's teaching were easy, safe, and pleasant. But, in fact, the fulfilment of the world's teaching is much more dangerous and tormenting than the fulfilment of Christ's teaching.
There used, it is said, to be Christian martyrs, ‘ MY YOKE IS EASY ' 315 but they were the exception; they have been reckoned at 380,000 — voluntary and involun- tary, in 1,800 years. But count the worldly martyrs, and for each Christian martyr you will find a thousand worldly martyrs whose sufferings are a hundred times more terrible. Those slain in war, during the present century, are reckoned at SCbOOCbOOO.1 Now these were all martyrs to the world's teaching, who needed not even to follow the teaching of Christ but simply to abstain from following the teaching of the world, in order to have escaped from suffering and death.
A man need only do what he wishes to do — refuse to go to war, — he will be set to dig trenches: but will not be tormented in Sevas- topol or Plevna. A man need but disbelieve the world's teaching that he must wear over- shoes 2 and a watch-chain and have a drawing- room he does not need, and that he must do all the stupid things demanded of him by the world's teaching, and he will not be exposed to excessive toil and suffering, never-ending cares, and work without rest or aim; he will not be deprived of intercourse with nature, will not be deprived of congenial work, of family, and of health, and will not perish by a senseless and tormenting death.
1 This book was written in 1884; and the figures relate to the nineteenth century.
2 The wearing of over shoes or goloshes to keep one’s feet dry and warm, and to be able, on entering a house, to kick them off and have clean feet, is here instanced as a sign of distinction from the peasant, who usually wears nothing over his high boots.
WHAT I BELIEVE mor WHAT I BELIEVE mor It is not necessary to be a martyr in Christ'i name — that is not what he teaches. He onl} bids us cease to torment ourselves in the name i! of the world's false teaching.
Christ's teaching has a profound metaphysical meaning, it has an all-human meaning, and it has the simplest, clearest, and most practical) meaning for the life of every single man.! That last meaning can be expressed thus Christ teaches men not to commit stupidities. Therein lies the simplest meaning of Christ's teaching, accessible to all.
Christ says: Do not be angry, do not consider any one your inferior — to do so is stupid. If you get angry and insult people it will be the worse for you. Christ also says: Do not run after women, but unite with one woman and live with her — it will be better for you so. He also says: Do not promise anything to any one or else they will oblige you to do stupid and evil actions. He also says: Do not return evil for evil, or the evil will return to you yet more bitterly than before: like the heavy log suspended over the store of honey, which kills the bear.1 2 He also says: Do not consider th th 1 We have here one of Tolstoy’s sweeping conclu-; tl sions, and one which caused a great deal of trouble g( in the Tolstoy movement and among those who | t arranged Tolstoy Colonies. These all fell to pieces largely for lack of definite understanding as to what: ( each man might expect of his fellow-colonists.
2 The reference is to the practice of hanging a r heavy block, or log, over a deposit of honey. When i i a bear tries to take the honey he knocks himself j 1 against the log, which swings back and hits him.
4 MY YOKE IS EASY ' $ men foreign to you merely because they live in another country and speak another language. If you consider them as enemies, and they consider you such, it will be worse for you. So do not commit all these stupidities, and it will be better for you.
4 Yes/ people reply, 4 but the world is so arranged that to resist its arrangements is more painful than to live in accord with them. If a man refuses military service he will be sent to a fortress, and perhaps shot. If a man does not safeguard his life by acquiring the property he and his family need, he and they will die of hunger/ So people say, trying to defend the world's arrangement, but they do not think so themselves. They only speak so because they cannot deny the justice of the teaching of Christ, in whom they are supposed to believe, and they must justify themselves in some way for not fulfilling that teaching. They not only do not think this, but they have never even thought about the matter at all. They believe the world's teaching and merely employ the excuse the Church has taught them, to the effect that if one fulfils Christ's teaching one must endure great suffering; and therefore they have never even tried to fulfil it. We see the innumerable sufferings people endure for the sake of the world's teaching, but in our time we never see sufferings for the sake of The^bear then strikes the log more fiercely, and it, rebounding, strikes him still more heavily, and so on, until,, it is said, the bear is sometimes killed by the blows he receives.
WHAT I BELIEVE Christ's teaching at all. Thirty millions have perished for the world's teaching in warfare thousands of millions have pined in a tormenting! to life for the sake of the world's teaching, while not only no millions, but not even thousands or dozens, or even one single man, do I know who has perished by death or by a painful life of hunger and cold for the sake of Christ's teaching. It is only a ridiculous excuse, showing to what a degree Christ's teaching is unknown to us. Not only do we not share it; we have never even seriously considered it. The Church has been at pains to explain Christ's teaching so that it has appeared to us not as a teaching of life, but as a bugbear.
Christ calls men to a spring of water which is there beside them. Men are tormented by thirst, eat dirt, and drink one another's blood, but their teachers tell them that they will perish if they go to the spring to which Christ directs them. And people believe this; they suffer and die of thirst at two steps from the water, not daring to go to it. But it is only necessary to believe Christ, that he has brought blessing on earth, and that he gives us who thirst a spring of living water, and to come to him, to see how insidious is the Church's deception, and how insensate are our sufferings when salvation is so near at hand. It is only necessary to accept Christ's teaching, simply and plainly, for the terrible deception in which we all and each are living to become clear.
Generation after generation we labour to pa ‘ MY YOKE IS EASY ' secure life by means of violence and by safe- guarding our property. Our happiness seems to us to lie in obtaining the maximum of power and the maximum of property. We are so accustomed to this that Christ's teaching that a man's happiness cannot depend on his power or his estate, and that a rich man cannot be happy, seems to us like a demand to make a sacrifice for the sake of future bliss. But Christ did not think of calling us to sacrifice; on the contrary, he teaches us not to do what is worse, but to do what is better for us, here in this life. Christ, loving men, teaches them to refrain from securing themselves by violence and by property, just as others who love men teach them to refrain from brawling and drunkenness. He says that men, if they live without resisting others and without property, will be happier; and by the example of his own life he confirms this. He says that a man living in accord with his teaching must be prepared to die at any moment by the violence of others, by cold or hunger, and cannot be sure of a single hour's life. And we imagine this to be a terrible demand of sacrifice; but it is only a declaration of the conditions in which 3very man always and inevitably lives. Christ's disciple must be prepared at any moment for suffering and death. But is not a disciple of the world in the same position % We are so accustomed to our pretence that all we do for :he imaginary security of our life — our armies, ‘ortifications, stores, clothes, and doctoring, )ur property and our money — seems to us WHAT I BELIEVE real, and as something that seriously secures! our life. We forget, though it is obvious tot every one, what happened to the man who planned to build barns in order to be safe for! many years. He died that same night. Indeed! all we do to safeguard our life is just what anj ostrich does, standing still and hiding its! head in order not to see how it is being killed. We do worse than the ostrich: doubtfully to safeguard our doubtful life in a doubtful future, we certainly destroy our certain life in the certain present.
The deception consists in the false conviction that our life can be secured by strife against j others. We are so accustomed to this deception — an imaginary safeguarding of our life and property- — that we do not notice all we lose by it. And we lose all — our whole life. Our whole life is absorbed in cares for this safe- guarding of life, this preparation for life, so that no life at all is left us.
We need but for a moment discard our habits and regard our life from outside, to see that all • we do for the supposed safeguarding of our life we really do not at all to safeguard our life, but only, by busying ourselves with these things, I to forget that life is never secured. But not only do we deceive ourselves and spoil our real life for the sake of an imaginary one; we gene- rally in this effort to make ourselves safe, ruin the very thing we wish to secure. The French armed themselves to secure their life in 1870, ft se m v lif si ta w w h ie te l)i in ai \s 0 l n { t l i i and in consequence of this safeguarding hun- dreds of thousands of Frenchmen perished.
‘ MY YOKE IS EASY ’ The same is done by all nations that arm them- selves. The rich man secures his life by having money, and that very money attracts a robber who kills him. A nervous man safeguards his life by undergoing a cure, and the cure itself slowly kills him, or, if it does not kill him, cer- tainly deprives him of life, like that sick man who did not live for thirty-eight years, but waited for the angel at the pool (John v.
Christ’s teaching that life cannot be made safe, but that one must always, at each moment, be ready to die, is certainly better than the world’s teaching that one must secure one’s life: it is better because the inevitability of death and the insecurity of life remain the same whether one adopts the world’s teaching or that of Christ; but life itself, by Christ’s teaching, is not all absorbed without any remainder, in the useless occupation of pseudo-safeguarding one’s life, but becomes free and can be devoted to its one natural aim, the welfare of one’s self and one’s fellows. A disciple of Christ will be poor. Yes; that is to say, he will always make use of all those blessings which God has given him. He will not ruin his life. We have called poverty,1 which is a happiness, by a word that indicates misfortune, but the reality of the matter is not altered thereby. To be poor means that a man 2 1 Poverty, in Russian, is bednost, from the same root as beda, a misfortune.
2 Tolstoy has in mind a Russian country peasant, whom he contrasts with a rich townsman, and the description relates to things as they were under the Tsars in the pre-Revolutionary days.
M WHAT I BELIEVE will not live in a town but in a village, and will not I sit at home but will work in the woods or fields; | will see the light of the sun, the earth, the sky, j and animals; will not consider what he can eat 1 1 n to arouse his appetite, and how to get his bowels to move, but will be hungry three times a day; ll to will not toss about on soft cushions, wondering jj st how he is to escape from sleeplessness, but will sleep; he will have children and will live with them; will have free intercourse with all men,; c and above all will not do things he does not wish to do, and will not be afraid of what will happen I d to him. He will sicken, suffer, and die as every n one does (though, to judge by the way poor men sicken and die, it will be better for him than it is for the rich); but he will certainly live i more happily. To be poor, to be indigent and a vagrant (th-o^os means vagrant) is what Christ taught; that without which it is impos- sible to enter the kingdom of God, without which it is impossible to be happy here on earth.
4 But no one will feed you, and you will die of hunger,' is said in reply to this. To the ob- j jection that a man living according to Christ’s teaching will die of hunger Christ replied by one brief sentence (the one which is interpreted as a justification for the idleness of the clergy, Matt, i He said: 4 Take no wallet for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staff: for the labourer is wnrthy of his food.5 4 In that same! house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give, for the labourer is worthy of his hire.5 I 4 MY YOKE IS EASY ' The labourer is worthy,1 literally means: can and should have his subsistence. It is a very short saying; but for any one who understands it as Christ did, it admits of no further argument to the effect that a man who has no property will die of hunger. To under- stand these words in their real meaning one must first of all quite renounce the supposition (which has become so common among us as a consequence of the dogma of the redemption) that man’s welfare consists in idleness. One must return to the conception natural to all unperverted people, that the necessary con- dition of happiness for man is not idleness, but work; that a man cannot reject work; that not to work is dull, wearisome, and hard, as it is dull and hard for an ant, a horse, or any other animal not to work. One must forget our savage superstition that the position of a man with an inexhaustible purse — that is to say, with a Government post, the ownership of land, or of bonds bearing interest, which make it pos- sible for him to do nothing — is a naturally happy condition. One must restore in one’s imagina- tion that view of work which all unperverted 1 In both the Geneva and Christchurch editions of the Russian the word ££ecm is here inserted. It does not occur in either of the Gospel texts referred to, and it perplexes the present translator, who omits it as meaningless. If anyone can furnish a clue to its presence, such assistance will be much appreciated. Possibly, as the work could not be printed in Russia, the proofs may have been passed with inadequate revision. Tolstoy’s MS. was often untidy and rather illegible, and an error may have crept in which cannot now be traced to its source.
WHAT I BELIEVE people have, and which Christ had when he said that the labourer was worthy of his sub- sistence. Christ could not imagine people who would regard work as a curse, and therefore could not imagine a man who did not work, or did not wish to work. He always supposes that his disciples work. And therefore he says: ‘ If a man works, then his work will feed him.’ If another man takes the produce of this man’s labour, then the other man will feed the worker, just because he reaps the ad- vantage of his labour. And so the worker will receive his subsistence. He will not have property, but there can be no doubt about his subsistence.
The difference between Christ’s teaching and the teaching of our world about work lies in this, that, according to the world’s teaching, work is man’s peculiar merit for which he keeps account with others, and considers that he has a right to the more subsistence the more he works; while, according to Christ’s teaching, work is a necessary condition of man’s life, and subsistence is the inevitable consequence of work. Work produces food, food produces work, that is the unending circle: the one is the consequence and the cause of the other. However evil a master may be, he will feed his workman as he will feed the horse that works for him; and will feed him so that the workman may produce as much as possible; in other words, can co-operate in that which provides the welfare of man.
‘ The Son of man came not to be ministered 4 MY YOKE IS EASY ’ unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ran- som for many.’ According to the teaching of Christ each individual man, independently of what the world may be like, will have the best kind of life if he understands that his vocation is not to demand work from others, but to devote his own life to working for others, and to give his life a ransom for many. A man who acts so, says Christ, is worthy of his subsistence — that is to say, cannot but receive it. In a word, man does not live that others should work for him, but that he should work for others. Christ sets up the basis which undoubtedly ensures man’s material existence, and by the words, 4 The labourer is worthy of his subsistence,’ he sets aside that very common objection to the possibility of fulfilling his teaching which says that a man carrying out Christ’s teaching among people who do not carry it out will perish of hunger and cold. Christ shows us that a man ensures his subsistence, not by taking it from others, but by doing what is useful and necessary for others. The more necessary he is to others the more safe will be his existence.
Under the existing arrangements of the world people who do not fulfil Christ’s law, but who work for their neighbours and have no property, do not die of hunger. How, then, can one make it an objection to Christ’s teaching that those who obey it — that is to say, those who work for their neighbours — will die of hunger? A man cannot die of hunger while the rich have bread. In Russia, at any given moment, there are WHAT I BELIEVE always millions of people living without any property, simply by their labour.
Among the heathen a Christian will be pro- vided for as among Christians. He works for others, consequently they need him, and there- fore he will be fed. Even a dog that is wanted is fed and cared for; how then should a man not be fed and cared for, who is of use to every one?