Tolstoy himself was deeply troubled over his inability to live up to the Sermon on the Mount. He wrote in a letter to a friend: It is true that I have not fulfilled one thousandth part of them, and I am ashamed of this, but I have failed to fulfill them not because I did not wish to, but because I was unable to. 27 Tolstoy took the demands of Jesus seriously. When he read the Sermon on the Mount, he didn’t blithely say, “I love the Sermon on the Mount” (like some might say today) as if it were just some impossibly beautiful ideal. Tolstoy took Jesus at his word—“Love your enemy,” “Pray for
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