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A Confession by Leo Tolstoy

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I'm so excited to discover this little window into Tolstoy's faith! How have I missed it? I love his commonsensical approach to faith: Start from bare experience; pay attention to what works--that is, what gives meaning to life--and from there draw conclusions about the nature of God and the place of the church. Faith is a response to the questions of life (64), not a social construct or a proscribed creed. I wish more writers laid bare their inner struggles with such clarity.

"But I do want to understand in order that I might be brought to the inevitably incomprehensible; I want all that is incomprehensible to be such not because the demands of the intellect are not sound (they are sound, and apart from them I understand nothing) but because I perceive the limits of the intellect. I want to understand, so that any instance of the incomprehensible occurs as a necessity of reason and not as an obligation to believe."
--Tolstoy, Confession, 91




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