Tolstoi was well acquainted with the phenomenon of “holy wanderer” or “strannik”: His estate Iasnaia Poliana was located close to the main road to Kyiv where each summer scores of pilgrims passed by. However, in the Russian strannik concept, the focus is not – as for the pilgrim – primarily on reaching a sacred site, but on the journey, on being underway. Wandering becomes a goal in its own right. This kind of spirituality appealed to Tolstoi and during one of his visits to Optina Pustyn he consciously emulated it: He set off on foot, wearing a peasant jacket, bast shoes tied with rags, knapsacks on his back, and with a wanderer’s staff in the hand. It would be misleading to say that Tolstoi simply took over a “form” and filled it with his own content. He was also concerned with and fascinated by the “content side” of holy wandering – the restless, seeking attitude that spurns the security of house and hearth and trusts that God will provide guidance where to go. But to Tolstoi, the inner journey was just as important as the physical. Between “Tolstoi the holy wanderer” and the age-old Orthodox wanderer tradition there is both rupture and continuity.

In the short story Father Sergius, Tolstoi tells about the guards officer Kasatskii who renounces his military career, enters a monastery, then leaves it again in order to become hermit. Finally, he ends up as a simple vagabond. The drama unfolds on the inner plane, but is reflected in three incidents when Kasatskii alias Father Sergius suddenly breaks away from his former life and finds new meaning in an existence that coincides with four traditional forms of Orthodox piety; monasticism, eldership, holy wandering. He ends up in holy foolishness, which combines elements of them all, as a life in the world, but not of the world. The life of Kasatskii alias Father Sergius is a circular motion. He starts in the world, withdraws from it, and finally returns to it. However, he has not come back to the starting point, for he is now equipped with new insights about God and life. These varieties of piety prove to be, with the words of Søren Kierkegaard, "stages on the path of life," hierarchically arranged. Despite the abrupt breaks between them, they must be understood as parts of a developmental process, all contributing to a cumulative maturation.

The Introduction presents the main scope and ideas of the book and discusses some theoretical approaches to the study of continuity and rupture in intellectual history, such as semiotics and sociology of knowledge, which can help to explain Tolstoi’s relationship to the Russian Church and to the religious environment in which he grew up. Although the impressions Tolstoi received from various non-Russian sources were indeed important, no thinker can be significantly influenced by all national cultures and all time periods. In important respects, the culture in which one has grown up retains cognitive primacy also for those who rebel against it. Any church influences its opponents both positively and negatively – by the elements they take over from it (usually without acknowledging this), and since such rebellion is provoked by precisely the features that are characteristic of that particular. Tolstoi was deeply imbued with Orthodox ways of thinking, and incorporated important elements of Orthodox spirituality into his own religious system. The elements he selected from Orthodox spirituality underwent a radical change of meaning when applied to his message. Thus, in determining the relationship of Tolstoi to the Orthodox Church we must emphasize both continuity and break at the same time.

In Russia in the nineteenth century, several Orthodox forms of spirituality flourished outside the established Church structures, in particular “the elder” (starets), “the holy wanderer” (strannik) and “the holy fool.” Tolstoi held these in high regard, also identifying with them, up to a point. Each of these spiritualities is examined in depth in Chapters 5 through 7, constituting a kind of triptych. Tolstoi was well-acquainted with these forms of spirituality through reading as well as by personal contact. The major center of elder piety in Russia at Tolstoi’s time was the Optina Monastery, located not far from his home at Iasnaia Poliana, and he visited the famous elder Makarii several times. Although his diaries show that he returned home with rather negative impressions, the fact that he returned suggests that he was seeking something here which he did not find elsewhere. What he took with him home was a specific model of spiritual guidance, and several contemporary authors noted that he set himself up as a secularized “elder” at Iasnaia Poliana. The elders’ abilities of prophesy and healing were now absent, as was the subjecting to spiritual authority: Tolstoi emerged as more of a modernized version of this kind of ministry.

One important reason why Tolstoi so fiercely rejected Orthodox dogmatics was that he considered a purely theoretical approach to faith, disconnected from the lives of the believers, to be useless. Therefore, he had far greater sympathy with the Orthodox mystic-ascetic devotional literature associated with the so-called Hesychast movement. Chapter 4 analyzes Tolstoi’s exposure to this Orthodox monastic spirituality and how it influenced his thinking. He had a well-thumbed copy of Philokalia (Dobrotoliubie), a basic text of Orthodox spirituality and the most important of the Hesychast writings. Here, Tolstoi found confirmation of his strongly negative views of the body and the passions. The Philokalia taught that we should not merely control but indeed extinguish our passions. Passionlessness, apatheia – a concept also found among the Stoics and in Buddhism – should be the aim of the Christian life. This was an ideal that Tolstoi preached and which informed many of his views, on the necessity of physical labor, nonresistance to evil, and abstention from property, drugs, alcohol and even sex. Moreover, also Tolstoi’s claim that the essence of human life is not only spiritual but divine has a clear affinity with the Orthodox doctrine of theosis, the deification of man.

Chapter 10 shows how the “Tolstoi phenomenon” was perceived by members of the Russian Church, why they saw him as a major threat, and how Orthodox believers discussed various strategies for combating this new heresy. Earlier, the Russian church had been confronted by various sectarian movements among the common people, on the one hand, and increasing atheism among the intelligentsia and the upper classes, on the other hand. When Tolstoi stood forth as a religious teaching, he combined elements of both these currents, and was therefore perceived as a far more formidable threat than either of them. It was therefore incumbent upon the Orthodox to stem the spread of his ideas. Among the tools available in this struggle was censorship – a well-established institution in Russian society, but one that was a double-edged sword that could also have severely deleterious consequences. It was no small matter to censor the country’s indisputably most famous writer: Therefore, only the most offensive of Tolstoi’s religious writings were totally forbidden, while many others passed through the screening with only certain sections and expressions deleted. In consequence, to the reading public in Russia, Tolstoi’s anti-Orthodox message was made to appear far more innocuous than it actually was.

In his first religious tract, A Confession (1884), Tolstoi claimed that for most of his adult life, until his “conversion,” he had been living as a “nihilist.” Closer reading of his diaries and letters, however, reveals a very different picture: Far more than most of his contemporaries in the Russian upper classes, Tolstoi had been preoccupied with religious questions, and for long periods of time had prayed regularly – also before his quest for meaning led him to embrace Orthodoxy temporarily. However, throughout his life, and also during his stint as a practicing Orthodox Christian, his relationship to the Russian Church was marked by ambivalence. As long as he professed the Orthodox faith, he practiced it with some “mental reservations”; conversely, when he later left the Church, he did not make a clean break with the religion of his forefathers, as virtually all Tolstoi scholars would have us believe. In fact, in A Confession he explicitly wrote that in the Russian Church he had found “truth interwoven with lies with the finest threads,” and he saw it as his task to disentangle these two elements in Orthodoxy from each other. How he went about doing that, I show in Chapter 3.

Examination of dogmatic theology was the title of a huge, unwieldy tome that Tolstoi wrote after having read all the major compendia of Orthodox dogmatics in use at his time. Tolstoi scholarship has ignored this book – and it is easy to understand why: The stylist Tolstoi is conspicuously absent; the polemics against Orthodox theologians are so coarse and overplayed that it is often difficult to take them seriously. But even if we cannot learn much about Orthodox theology from this work, there is important information about Tolstoi’s own thinking to be gained by reading it, as it were, “against the grain.” Such an approach reveals that Tolstoi’s mature theology contained some clearly Orthodox features. For instance, both Orthodox theology in the nineteenth century and Tolstoi operated with a sharply dualistic anthropology, and in their teaching about God they have both a “negative” (apophatic) and a “positive” (cataphatic) theology. Tolstoi even explicitly criticized the leading Russian theologian of the time, Metropolitan Makarii, for having forgotten apophaticism and of having “distorted the deep and sincere speech of the Apostles and Church Fathers.” This selective usage of Orthodox theology did not make Tolstoi an Orthodox, but an original thinker heavily influenced by Orthodoxy.

The English expression “holy fool” is a somewhat misleading translation of the Russian phenomenon of iurodstvo. The word “fool” suggests that antirationalism was an essential element of this traditional folk spirituality. However, in the Orthodox understanding, asceticism, in the shape of struggle against the passions and a strive for moral perfection, was a far more important aspect of this piety. This corresponds also to Tolstoi’s understanding of “holy foolishness.” The holy fools preached their moral and social message indirectly, in a hidden and symbolic way, through actions and not by proclamations. They broke the social norms of society, and thereby incurred people’s contempt and derision. The fools renounced not only the security of home, hearth and material security but even cleanliness. In his debut novel Childhood, Tolstoi portrayed with great sympathy the holy fool Grisha, modeled on several fools who visited their home. To Tolstoi the outer form of holy foolishness, however, was far less important than the inner attitude of breaking with the world. In his diaries, he several times referred to holy fool as an example of holiness to emulate, but never explicitly identified with it. Many of his contemporaries, however, did exactly that, usually to scorn him.

In the book I do not give a full treatment of Tolstoi’s social ideas but concentrate on how his social teaching was influenced by Orthodox sources, in particular by the extremely popular fifth-century saint John Chrysostomus, who preached a kind of anarchist socialism surprisingly akin to that of Tolstoi. In his first religious tract after his spiritual crisis, What I Believe (1884), Tolstoi referred to Chrysostom several times, but only to criticize him: This bishop, Tolstoi claimed, was willing to compromise with the state and secular society in a way that the first Christians did not. This, however, clearly distorted John Chrysostomus’s message as it was recorded in numerous homilies, also those that Tolstoi had read. In their polemics against Tolstoi, several Orthodox authors referred to Chrysostomus to show that the Church already had a true apostle of nonresistance to evil and abnegation of all property, and thus had no need of Tolstoi’s socialism. However, when a Russian professor of Church history and expert on patristic theology claimed that Tolstoi conveyed the ideals of Chrysostomus better than the Russian Church did, the professor was summarily dismissed from his university chair – a strong indication of how sensitive the issue had become.

The final chapter in the saga of the Russian Church and its relationship to Tolstoi came with the prolonged polemics over his burial in 1910. This controversy started immediately after the promulgation of the Circular Letter, which laid down a ban on burial with Church rites. The chapter contains a wealth of new material: Probably the most important concerns the solution eventually agreed by the Church leadership in an attempt to extricate itself from the predicament in which it had placed itself with the requiem ban: While Tolstoi was drawing his last breath at the Astapovo railway station, the prelates finally decided to grant him burial in consecrated soil – with non-Orthodox, non-confessional but still Christian rites. However, this decision was not put into effect, or published, due to opposition from Tolstoi’s family. In that way, Tolstoi’s wish not to have any priests at the graveside during the burial was respected. However, the story did not end here, as an anonymous priest three years after his death turned up at Iasnaia Poliana and asked permission from the widow, Sof’ia Andreeva, to perform a requiem at the grave. When this was granted and became public, a new round of polemics ensued.

Nicholas Berdiaev, Metropolitan Anatolii (Khrapovitskii), anti-Tolstoian pamphlets

For most people today, in Russia and elsewhere, all they know about Tolstoi’s relationship to the Orthodox Church is the Circular Letter that the Holy Synod issued against him in February 1901, usually referred to as his “excommunication.” The promulgation of this document was perhaps the most egregious miscalculation made by the Russian Church leadership in its struggle against Tolstoi, and repercussions of this “scandal” continue to reverberate even today. The background and intentions underlying this spectacular act have been widely misunderstood, primarily for two reasons. Firstly, Soviet researchers – who for a long time were the only ones with access to Soviet archives – systematically misrepresented their findings, attempting to prove that the initiative to this public announcement had been taken by tsarist state authorities, not by the church leaders. However, the archival documents they referred to and selectively quoted clearly show that the decision was taken in the offices of the Holy Synod itself. Secondly, the Church was trying to do two things at once: to warn the faithful against Tolstoi’s pernicious teachings, and to lure him back into the fold. As a result, they tried to present their Circular as being both an excommunication, and not an excommunication.