A Confession

Summary

A Confession is Leo Tolstoy's short spiritual autobiography, written in 1879–1880, when he was about fifty and already world-famous as the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina. It tells how a man who had everything the world admires lost all sense of why he was living, and how he found his way back to faith in God. Tolstoy begins with his childhood in the Orthodox Church and explains that by eighteen he no longer believed what he had been taught. He describes the vanity of his years as a young officer and celebrated writer, his faith in "progress", and the shocks that shook it, among them a public execution he witnessed in Paris and the death of his brother. Then, in the midst of a happy family life and literary success, he was stopped by questions he could not answer: why live, and what will come of my whole life? He searched the sciences and philosophy and found that the wisest teachers, from Solomon in Ecclesiastes to Socrates, the Buddha and Schopenhauer, only confirmed that life without an answer to these questions is vanity. He retells the Eastern fable of a traveler hanging in a well above a dragon while mice gnaw at the twig that holds him, and he confesses that the thought of ending his own life haunted him for a time. The turning point comes when he looks beyond the educated people of his own class to the millions of ordinary working people who live and die in faith. He concludes that faith is what makes life possible, that the meaninglessness he felt belonged to his own idle way of life, and that "to know God and to live is one and the same thing." He returns to the Orthodox Church, keeping its fasts and receiving communion. In the last chapters he describes his growing difficulty with some of the church's teachings and practices and resolves to examine them; a short dream, added in 1882, closes the book with an image of being held up by faith. Tolstoy's later views went far beyond this book: he rejected much Orthodox doctrine and was excommunicated in 1901. A Confession nonetheless remains one of the most honest accounts ever written of a modern man's despair and his search for God.

Plot or Argument

• Childhood faith lost (Ch. I–II)

  Baptized and raised Orthodox, Tolstoy drifts from belief as a youth and gives himself to ambition, pleasure and the pursuit of fame, a life he later recalls with shame.

• Faith in progress (Ch. II–III)

  As a successful writer he believes in progress and in teaching others, until an execution in Paris and his brother's death expose the emptiness of that creed.

• The arrest of life (Ch. III–IV)

  With a loving family, wealth and fame, he is stopped by the questions 'Why?' and 'What next?', and life seems a cruel joke.

• The search through knowledge (Ch. V–VII)

  Science and philosophy cannot answer; Solomon, Socrates, the Buddha and Schopenhauer agree that life is vanity. He lists the ways his own class escapes the question: ignorance, pleasure, suicide, or simply clinging on.

• The faith of ordinary people (Ch. VIII–XI)

  He sees that the great mass of working people live with a faith that gives their lives meaning, and he concludes that his despair came from the idle, self-serving life of his circle.

• God is life (Ch. XII–XIII)

  In the woods in early spring he realizes that he truly lives only when he believes in and seeks God, and he returns to the practices of the Orthodox Church.

• Doubts and resolution (Ch. XIV–XVI)

  He is troubled by the church's hostility to other believers and by its blessing of war and executions, and resolves to study its teaching to separate truth from error. A dream of being upheld over an abyss ends the book.

Characters

• Leo Tolstoy, protagonist

  The author, looking back on his life from about the age of fifty.

• His brother, minor

  An elder brother (Nikolai, unnamed in the text) whose painful death after a long illness Tolstoy recalls as a blow to his faith in progress.

• The working people, minor

  Peasants, pilgrims and monks whose simple faith turns Tolstoy back toward God.

Lessons

• The question that success cannot answer

  Tolstoy had fame, wealth and a happy family, and still could not say why he should live. The book teaches that the deepest human questions are not settled by achievement, and that taking them seriously is the beginning of wisdom.

  • Why do the questions 'Why?' and 'What next?' stop Tolstoy when everything is going well?
  • Why does he think most people of his class avoid these questions?

• Faith as the strength of life

  Tolstoy concludes that every person who lives believes in something, and that faith is what gives a finite life meaning in relation to the infinite. He comes to see that his reasoning had left God out and so could only end in despair.

  • What does Tolstoy mean by calling faith 'the strength of life'?
  • Why did reason alone fail to answer his question?

• Learning from humble believers

  Tolstoy, the great intellectual, learns the meaning of life from peasants, pilgrims and monks. Their patience in labor, suffering and death shows him the faith he had lost.

  • What does Tolstoy notice about how ordinary believers face hardship and death?
  • Where in your own life have you learned from someone with less education or status?

• For the Christian reader

  A Confession can be read beside Ecclesiastes and Augustine's Confessions: like the Preacher, Tolstoy finds all things under the sun to be vanity, and like Augustine he finds rest only in God. Readers should also know that Tolstoy later rejected the divinity of Christ, the creeds and the sacraments of the church; his story of returning to faith is genuine, but it does not end in orthodox belief, and the book invites careful, charitable discernment.

  • Where does Tolstoy's search resemble the Preacher's in Ecclesiastes?
  • What warning signs of his later departure from church teaching can you find in the last chapters?

Context

In the Russia of Alexander II, educated nobles were often skeptical of the Orthodox faith that the peasants and the state church still held. Tolstoy, living on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana with a large family, had finished Anna Karenina in 1877 and was famous across Europe.

Composition

Tolstoy wrote the book in 1879–1880 as the introduction to a larger study of dogmatic theology and the Gospels. A Moscow journal set it in type in 1882, but church censorship removed it from the issue; it was printed in Geneva in 1884 and legally in Russia only in 1906. Aylmer Maude, a friend of Tolstoy, published the English translation used here in 1921.

Reception

The book circulated widely in copies and translations and is discussed at length in William James's The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902). It remains one of the best-known modern accounts of a crisis of meaning and a return to faith.

Comparisons

• Confessions

  Augustine's Confessions is the model for every later spiritual autobiography: a restless heart that finds rest in God.

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich

  Tolstoy's 1886 story turns the questions of A Confession into fiction: a successful official confronts death and the emptiness of his life.

• Pensees

  Pascal, like Tolstoy, asks how a person can live in the face of death and argues that reason alone cannot find God.

• The Brothers Karamazov

  Dostoevsky's novel explores doubt and faith in the same Russian world, through Ivan's arguments and the elder Zosima's love.

• The Imitation of Christ

  Thomas à Kempis's devotional classic counsels the humble, practical faith that Tolstoy found among the peasants.

• The Pilgrim's Progress

  Bunyan's allegory and Tolstoy's memoir both trace a soul's journey from despair toward God.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The two questions 'Why?' and 'What next?' and when they first appear.
• The fable of the traveler in the well and what each part stands for.
• The difference Tolstoy sees between the believers of his own class and the working people.
• The scene in the woods in early spring.
• His growing doubts about the church in the final chapters.

Key terms and names

Orthodox Church

The Eastern Christian church to which most Russians belonged, the state church of the Russian Empire.

Nihilism

The belief that life has no meaning or value, much discussed in Russia in Tolstoy's day.

Epicureanism

Here, Tolstoy's name for living for pleasure while ignoring the question of life's meaning.

Ecclesiastes

The Old Testament book of the Preacher, traditionally Solomon, whose refrain is 'vanity of vanities'.

Spiritual autobiography

A life story told as the history of a soul's relation to God.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What did Tolstoy believe in as a young writer, and what shook that belief?
2. Comprehension What are the four ways people of his class deal with the meaninglessness of life?
3. Interpretation Why does Tolstoy decide that his despair came from his way of life rather than from life itself?
4. Interpretation What does the final dream suggest about where his security lies?
5. Big Question Can a person live without believing in something?
6. Big Question Does Tolstoy's later rejection of church teaching change how we should read his account of returning to faith?

Faith Connections

• Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12:13 (Scripture)

  Tolstoy quotes Solomon's 'vanity of vanities' at length; the Preacher's conclusion, 'Fear God, and keep his commandments', is the answer Tolstoy's search points toward.

• Augustine, Confessions I.1 (Church Fathers)

  Augustine's famous opening prayer, that God made us for himself and our hearts are restless until they rest in him, describes Tolstoy's long restlessness.

• Matthew 11:25 (Scripture)

  Jesus thanks the Father for hiding these things from the wise and revealing them to babes, as Tolstoy learns faith from unlettered peasants.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Reason and science cannot tell us why to live; every living person rests on some faith; the faith of humble believers gives life a meaning that death cannot destroy; therefore to live truly is to seek God.

Rhetorical device: Parable (the traveler in the well). The Eastern fable of the man clinging to a twig above a dragon while mice gnaw it captures his situation in one memorable image.

Debate: Resolved: Tolstoy is right that reason alone cannot answer the question of life's meaning.

Memory Work

Faith is the strength of life. If a man lives he believes in something.

Live seeking God, and then you will not live without God.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Explain how Tolstoy moves from despair to faith, and evaluate whether his reasons are convincing.

Comparison with Confessions: Compare the conversions described by Augustine and by Tolstoy: what each was seeking, what turned him, and where each found rest.

Medical Lens

Tolstoy describes what would now be called a severe depression in mid-life: loss of meaning and pleasure, a sense that life is a 'stupid and spiteful joke', and suicidal thoughts that he resisted. William James used the book as a case of 'the sick soul'. Any reading of it as a diagnosis is interpretive; Tolstoy himself understood it as a spiritual crisis.

• Chapter IV

  The 'arrest of life': questions he cannot answer and his struggle against the thought of suicide.

  Melancholia Depression Suicide
• Chapter V

  The Eastern fable of the traveler in the well, with the dragon below and the mice gnawing the twig.

  Melancholia Depression
• Chapter XII

  Recovery of the will to live through faith in God.

  Philosophy AS Therapy

Creative Prompts

• Essay

  Compare Tolstoy's four 'ways out' in Chapter VII with the answer he finally reaches. Which does he think is the most honest, and why does he reject it?

• Fiction

  Write a short scene in which one of the peasants Tolstoy admired explains, in his own words, why he does not despair.

• Classroom

  Read Ecclesiastes 1–2 and Chapter VI of A Confession together and discuss what Tolstoy takes from Solomon and what he misses.

Further Reading

• What I Believe, Leo Tolstoy

  Sequel in which he sets out the views that later led to his excommunication.

• The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy

• The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James

  Lectures VI–VII, 'The Sick Soul', discuss A Confession.

• The Life of Tolstoy, Aylmer Maude

• Confessions, Augustine of Hippo