Leo Tolstoy

Tolstoy and the Biology of Despair

I felt that something had broken within me in which my life had always rested, that I had nothing left to hold on to, and that morally my life had stopped. An invincible force compelled me to get rid of that existence. . . It was a force like my old aspiration to live, only it impelled me in the opposite direction.

All this took place at a time when so far as my outer circumstances went, I ought to have been completely happy. I had a good wife who loved me and whom I loved; good children and a large property . . . I was respected by kinsfolk . . . and loaded with praise by strangers. Moreover, I was neither insane nor ill. On the contrary, I possessed a physical and mental strength, which I have rarely met in persons of my age.

And yet I could give no reasonable meaning to any actions of my life . . . I sought for an explanation in all the branches of knowledge acquired by men . . . I sought like a man who is lost and seeks to save himself -- and I found nothing. I became convinced, moreover, that all those before me who had sought for an answer in the science have also found nothing. And not only this, but that they have recognized that the very thing which was leading me to despair -- the meaningless absurdity of life -- is the only incontestable knowledge accessible to me. ~ Page 179

Excerpt: “On being Certain” -- Believing You Are Right Even when You’re Not Author Robert Burton M.D

Of great and disorienting importance in the Tolstoyan vision is the effective absence of God. Steiner devotes a portion of chapter four to this seeming paradox: a deeply religious thinker who constructs his Christian theology without the Church, and his Christ without a heavenly Father. A partial answer might be found, again, in the Homeric model. Tolstoy is a pagan, Steiner insists, of the most sophisticated and ethically responsible sort. Within such a world view, neither concession as a sacrament nor faith in the miracle-world view, neither confession as a sacrament nor faith in a miracle-working savior can remedy human error; error is righted only through something akin to stoic resolve, a willingness to change one’s life as a result of pained contemplation of the act of an isolated conscience. We should not be mislead by the superficial frivolity of the Greek gods and their irresponsible antics on and off Mount Olympus. The continuum of Homer’s world -- its ultraheroism for human beings and its semidivinity of gods -- suggests precisely the sort of leveling of the secular and the divine that we would expect from the author of a treatise entitled ‘The Kingdom of God Is within You.’ ~ Page 78