Tolstoy’s Pacifism By Colm McKeogh

beneath the peasant beard and under the democratic smock, there lurked the aristocrat always, with haughtiness of manner, nobility of gesture, and sharpness of tongue. The aristocratic demeanor remained, the sport of the hunt attracted him still, and Russia's wars could stir up a fervor and partisanship in himself of which he immediately felt ashamed. But Tolstoy remained steadfast in his renunciation of violence. His absolute pacifism was, for him, clearly commanded by Christ and was part of the law of love that gave Tolstoy's life a meaning and a purpose. Yet the clarity and simplicity of the prohibition also attracted a man who had long sought a rule to follow. The self-sacrifice it entailed showed his commitment to Christ's teachings and his fidelity to the divine revelation. The absolutism of nonresistance appealed to this instinctive dissident and fiercely independent ascetic in another way too. For an absolutist position preserves one's autonomy. A nonabsolutist position lessens one's autonomy in that one can be made to act in a certain way by prevailing circumstances or by the actions of others. If a robber makes to kill the child, then one is made to take the robber's life; if an even worse evil is threatened, then one is made to perform an evil act that one would otherwise abhor. The “lesser evil” approach to personal and political ethics can make us marionettes of circumstance, and we cannot declare that there is an act we would never do, for there is no act that we would not commit if an even worse outcome were the only alternative. Tolstoy's absolutist approach to pacifism put him on a path from which circumstance and his fellow men could do nothing to deflect him.

Tolstoy's new approach to life was supported neither by his wife nor by most of his children, and his marriage deteriorated after his spiritual crisis and rebirth. There have been many instances of lifelong and happy marriages between Christians of different denominations and between Christians and non-Christians, but the Tolstoys' was not to be one. Respect for the convictions of the other must play a major role in such relationships, and the great writer had little of that. The difficulties were compounded too by the centrality to Tolstoy's Christianity of the way in which one lived one's daily life. Sofya's Christian beliefs remained orthodox, and she never followed her husband in his unconventional