The Lion and the Honeycomb: The Religious Writings of Tolstoy

by Leo Tolstoy

A confession --
What I believe --
What then must we do? --
On life --
Why do men stupefy themselves? --
An afterword to "The Kreutzer Sonata' --
The kingdom of god is within you (1) --
The kingdom of god is within you (2) --
The first step --
The destruction of hell and its restoration --
A reply to the synod's edict --
The diaries and the letters.

Genres: Nonfiction

158 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.

His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.

Reviews

[ruby vozza]

In his reply to Edict of Excommunication (by the Russian Orthodox Church):

I do not believe my faith to be the one indubitable truth for all time, but I see no other that is plainer, clearer, or answers better to all the demands of my reason and my heart; should I find such a one I shall at once accept it...But I can no more return to that from which with such suffering I have escaped, than a flying bird can re-enter the egg shell from which it has emerged. “He who begins by loving Christianity better than truth, will proceed by loving his own sect or church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself (his own peace) better than all,” said Coleridge.

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