Leo Tolstoy
After disappointing postponements caused by the weather, illness, and other forces hostile to conviviality, our Montreal branch—younger son Luke, Melanie, and grandkids John Henry and Hazel—were at last able to make a Christmas visit to Princeton a couple of weeks ago. The visit was short but jolly, and coincided with a magical but manageable snowfall that allowed the kids to practice their various Canadian chops in the lakeside forest behind our house. Who could imagine that suburban New Jersey would have anything to teach Montrealers about snow? I think the woods made the difference.
Luke’s present for me was a paperback book of modest appearance and size: The Gospel in Brief, by Leo Tolstoy.* Luke knew I have found myself deeply interested in the literary evidences of the influence of the nineteenth-century “historical” or demythologized Jesus, especially that of Ernest Renan, whose Life of Jesus (1863) brought down upon his head Pius IX’s execration as “the arch-blasphemer of Europe” but probably allowed thousands of others the route to a viable personal reconstruction of their own inherited faith. By the time Tolstoy entered his intensely religious period, Renan’s approach was “mainstream” among European intellectuals.
Tolstoy’s remarkable book, of which I am embarrassed to say I was previously unaware, presents a single continuous narrative of Jesus’s life as Tolstoy had abstracted and unified it from the four gospels, making narrative adjustments in the first three designed to increase the sense of a sequential story. He found to his delight that John’s gospel already had the clear and accurate chronology of his rearrangement of the synoptics. But that was by no means all he did. He edited out all the miraculous episodes, and many of his “translations” are in fact radical reformulations in which it is difficult to discern the textual skeleton of the original texts. The actual structuring principal of the book is based on the sequential phrases of the Lord’s Prayer (paternoster). But the book is so “heretical” that it stood absolutely no chance of being tolerated by any of the churches, and certainly not by the Orthodox Church. He not so much as tried to publish it in Russia, and in fact it was not published even in Western Europe until after his death. In its organizational principles it is a brilliant literary tour-de force. The Bible is the most widely published, and the most widely written about book in the world. It is not easy to do something fundamentally new with it. But it is far more than literary cleverness and innovation. It is a profoundly reverent and honest emblem of a great mind and a great heart struggling with the claims of Christianity. It is likely to challenge any Christian believer—and I am one—to examine what it is, precisely that he or she actually believes. For it is also an essay on the meaning of belief. Tolstoy is everywhere alert to the liveliness of spirit and moribundity of letter. What is the meaning for a “believer” in, say, Judges 9:8? (“The trees went forth on a time to anoint a king over them; and they said to the olive tree, ‘Reign thou over us’.”)
I don’t like simply to gush about books, but in this instance I find support in one of the A-List intellectuals of the twentieth century. Luke supplemented his gift of the book with an anecdote—well known to students of philosophy, perhaps, but new to me. Today’s graduate students in my line of work—that is, the analysis of works of literature as possibly illuminated by the intellectual, philosophical, and linguistic contexts in which they are created—find they must also confront a phalanx of famed German-language philosophers, theologians, political analysts, linguistic theorists, and social critics whose works, when translated into English, still seem somehow to remain in German. I refer to such intellectual heavy-weights and cultural superstars as Adorno, Buber, Carnap, Dilthey, Engels, Feuerbach, and Gadamer. It appears that the importance of knowing what these people have had to say is equalled only by the difficulty in fully grasping their mode of saying it. There must be at least one such genius for every letter of the alphabet, but as I cannot off the top of my head come up for one with “I”, let me skip directly to “W” where we find, among others, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951), generally regarded as among the most important of twentieth-century philosophers. He dealt with big issues, as might be suggested by the unfriendly title of his most frequently name-dropped work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Wittgenstein was an Austrian nominal Catholic of extraordinary intellectual acuity and distinguished social background. He was also a person of emphatic social presence. In 1911 he sought out the already famous Bertrand Russell in Cambridge, with whom he studied, argued, and collaborated. Russell would later write of him that “He was perhaps the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating.” The first World War broke out in his late twenties. Though the very epitome of international European intellectuality, he served with distinction in the army of the collapsing Austro-Hungarian army. As he was readying himself to be sent off to his military duties he was in the small old city of Tarnow, now in Poland. At the last minute he hurriedly tried to find a good book to while away the journey he faced. Time was short and options limited. He went into some kind of bric-a-brac shop where there was to be found for sale precisely one book; so he bought it. It was Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. It blew his mind, as we used to say. He carried it with him throughout his war service, including its final phase as a prisoner of war in Italy, rereading and studying it as opportunity allowed. It eventually displaced his superficial and abandoned childish Christian formation. What it replaced it with is not easy to pin down. His reaction was a stage in some kind of a religious conversion, but not an easy or conventional one. Well, if the gospel in Tolstoy’s book could catch a whale like Ludwig Wittgenstein, I feel justified in my own minnow-level amazement at its discovery.
I spent a career in large part trying to convince young people that the world’s literature is an inexhaustible treasure and that its masterpieces carry no “sell by” date. In truth the idea required no hard sell. Still, one of the pleasures of old age—and there are a few—is to confirm the validity of my own clichés peddled to students throughout my own life. Others have expressed the idea far better than I ever could. It would be difficult to improve on the famous words of John Milton, a man who knew a good deal about books. “A good book is the precious lifeblood of a master spirit, embalmed and treasured up on purpose to life beyond life.”
There are many “master spirits,” remembering always that the primary sense of the Latin from which the word master derives is “teacher.” Our great literary teachers come in both sexes, and from many times and many lands. They have left their gifts in many languages. Leo Tolstoy was a master spirit in more than one sense; but he is probably most widely known as the author of the world’s greatest novel. Whether there even is such a thing as the world’s greatest novel is irrelevant, but I am more than willing to entertain the hypothesis. And I think I’ll devote my next essay to it—sort of.
*Leo Tolstoy, The Gospel in Brief , trans. Dustin Condren (NY:Harper, 2011), pp. 180
