Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

light of the post-1880 theological ones. ⁴⁸ Rimvydas Silbajoris too sees an essential unity in Tolstoy's career, though also a “constant struggle of opposites.” ⁴⁹ The crisis of the late 1870s was not spurious, writes Silbajoris, but neither did it mark a decisive break in Tolstoy's life, a life that was and would remain always one of opposing attitudes in contention. The lines of continuity in Tolstoy's life and thought are undoubtedly strong. What occurred around 1880 was not so much a volte face as a final acceptance of many trends of thought and belief that had been present from childhood. But Gustafson's claim of no “radical shift in attitudes or theoretical understanding” is unsustainable when the focus is on Tolstoy's politics and pacifism. ⁵⁰ From the perspective of pacifism, the crisis did bring a huge change in Tolstoy's proclaimed stance. Before it, he was not a pacifist; after it, he was. Tolstoy was constant in his search for meaning in life through love and community, but he changed markedly in his views of the means to achieve it.

Many elements of Tolstoy's experience of conversion have precedents in Christian history. The desperate quest for meaning in life, the futile search for it in rational philosophy, the approach to the very brink of the abyss of despair, the sudden illumination, followed by the total rejection of one's previous way of life, and the instant full certainty of having found the way: all these feature in other converts' accounts of their journey to Christianity. Like others before him, Tolstoy had long sought the truth through his powers of reason and enquiry; now it had found him by nonrational means. The crisis of his existence ceased once “I felt God clearly for the first time; that He existed and that I existed in Him; that the only thing that existed was I in Him; in Him like a limited thing in an unlimited thing, in Him also like a limited thing in which He existed.” ⁵¹ Tolstoy had received a truth superior to his human power of discursive reasoning. The revealed truth could not be discovered by reason nor could it be argued—he could never convince others of its truth by rational means. But its absolute truth was obvious to him, and it instantly lifted him from the brink of the abyss and suddenly gave