Interdependence: A Postcolonial Feminist Practical Theology: Kim-Cragg, HyeRan, Moore, Elizabeth Mary, Dube, Musa W.: 9781532617249: Amazon.com: Books
This book calls attention to an urgent need for postcolonial feminist approaches to practical theology. It not only advocates for the inclusion of colonialism as a critical optic for practical theology but also demands a close look at how colonialism is entangled with issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, disability, and sexual orientation.
Seeking to highlight the importance of the interdependence of life, the author challenges and contests the notion of independence as the desirable goal of the human being. Lifting up the experiences of overlooked groups--including children at adult-centered worship, queer and interracial youth in heterosexual and white normative family discourse, and non-human species in human-centered academic and theological realms--the book contributes to expanding the concerns of practical theology in ways that create healthy community for all human beings and non-human fellow creatures. It also takes up issues of multiple religious belonging and migration that practical theology has not sufficiently explored. These illuminating new possibilities promise to renew and even transform church communities through the inclusion of often-neglected groups with whom God is already present.
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Spirituality, Mind-Body, Gender, Ecology, Ageing, Peace, Scrapbook (in English and Korean)
2020/05/16
화엄일승법계도
화엄일승법계도
한국민족문화대백과
화엄일승법계도
[ 華嚴一乘法界圖 ]
이미지 크게보기
신라시대의 승려 의상이 화엄사상의 요지를 간결한 시로 축약한 글. 210자를 54각이 있는 도인에 합쳐서 만든 것이다. '화엄일승법계'란 '가지가지의 꽃으로 장엄된 일승의 진리로운 세계의 모습'을 의미하며 진숭, 법융, 균여 등의 고승들이 이 법계도에 주석을 달기도 했다.
이칭별칭 법계도, 법성게, 일승법계도
유형 문헌
시대 고대/남북국
성격 화엄사상축약시
편저자 의상(義湘)
제작시기 신라 시대
목차
정의
내용
정의
신라시대의 승려 의상(義湘)이 화엄사상의 요지를 간결한 시(詩)로 축약한 글.
내용
210자를 54각(角)이 있는 도인(圖印)에 합쳐서 만든 것이다.
‘갖가지 꽃으로 장엄된 일승(一乘)의 진리로운 세계의 모습’이라는 뜻이며, 『삼국유사』에서는 ‘법계도서인(法界圖書印)’이라고 하고, 이 밖에 ‘화엄일승법계도장(華嚴一乘法界圖章)’·‘화엄법계도(華嚴法界圖)’·‘일승법계도(一乘法界圖)’·‘법계도장(法界圖章)’·‘법성도(法性圖)’·‘해인도(海印圖)’ 등으로 부르기도 한다.
『화엄일승법계도』에는 저자의 이름이 기록되어 있지 않다. 다만, 이 책 끝에 “인연으로 생겨나는 일체의 모든 것에는 주인이 따로 있지 않음을 나타내기 위하여 저자명을 기록하지 않는다.”라고 그 이유를 설명하였을 뿐이다.
이로 인하여 뒷날 이 책의 저자를 당나라의 지엄(智儼) 혹은 현수(賢首) 또는 진숭(珍嵩)이라고 하는 등의 설이 생겨나기도 하였다.
그러나 고려의 균여(均如)는 그의 『일승법계도원통기(一乘法界圖圓通記)』에서 최치원(崔致遠)이 지은 「의상전(義湘傳)」으로부터 다음과 같은 내용을 인용하여, 이것의 저자가 의상임을 밝히고 있다.
의상이 스승 지엄의 문하에서 화엄을 수학할 때이다. 꿈속에 형상이 매우 기이한 신인(神人)이 나타나 의상에게 “네 자신이 깨달은 바를 저술하여 사람들에게 베풀어 줌이 마땅하다.”고 하였고, 또 꿈에 선재동자(善財童子)가 총명약(聰明藥) 10여 알을 주었으며, 청의동자(靑衣童子)가 세 번째로 비결(秘訣)을 주었다.
스승 지엄이 이 말을 듣고 “신인이 신령스러운 것을 줌이 나에게는 한 번이었는데 너에게는 세 번이구나. 널리 수행하여 그 통보(通報)를 곧 표현하도록 하라.” 하였다. 의상이 명을 따라 그 터득한 바 오묘한 경지를 순서를 따라 부지런히 써서 『십승장(十乘章)』 10권을 엮고, 스승에게 잘못을 지적해 달라고 청하였다.
지엄이 이를 읽어 본 후 “뜻은 매우 아름다우나 말은 오히려 옹색하다.”고 하였다. 이에 의상은 다시 번거롭지 않고 어디에나 걸림이 없게 고쳤다. 지엄과 의상이 함께 불전(佛前)에 나아가 그것을 불사르면서, “부처님의 뜻에 계합함이 있다면 원컨대 타지 말기를 바랍니다.”고 서원하였다.
불길 속에서 타고 남은 나머지를 수습하니 210자가 되었다. 의상이 그것을 모아 다시 간절한 서원을 발하며 맹렬한 불길 속에 던졌으나 마침내 타지 않았다.
지엄은 눈물을 흘리면서 감동하여 칭찬하였고, 의상은 그 210자를 연결하여 게(偈)가 되게 하려고 며칠 동안 문을 걸고 노력했다. 마침내 삼십 구절을 이루니 삼관(三觀)의 오묘한 뜻을 포괄하고 십현(十玄)의 아름다움을 드러내었다고 한다.
이와 같이 『법계도』는 의상 자신이 스스로 깨달은 자내증(自內證)의 경지를 기술한 것이고, 그 자내증은 완전히 부처의 뜻에 계합하는 것이기에 불후의 명저를 낳게 된 것이다.
『법계도』가 완성된 것은 스승 지엄이 입적하기 몇 달 전인 670년(문무왕 10)이다. 이것은 이 책 끝에 밝혀져 있고, 『삼국유사』의 기록과도 일치한다.
의상은 『법계도』 첫머리에서 이것을 짓게 된 동기를, “이(理)에 의하고 교(敎)에 근거하여 간략한 반시(槃詩)를 만들어 이름에만 집착하는 무리들로 하여금 그 이름마저도 없는 참된 근원으로 돌아가게 하고자 함이다.”라고 하였다.
의상의 『법계도』 원문은 크게 두 부분으로 구분된다. 첫째는 대의(大意) 및 도인, 둘째는 석문(釋文: 문장의 풀이)이다.
석문은 다시 총석인의(總釋印意: 총괄적인 圖印의 의미해석)와 별해인상(別解印相: 개별적인 圖印의 형상해석)으로 나누어지며, 별해인상은 ① 설인문상(說印文相: 도인의 글이 지니고 있는 모습에 대한 설명), ② 명자상(明字相: 문자의 형상에 관한 글), ③ 석문의(釋文意: 문장의 뜻풀이)로 구분하여 설명하고 있다.
이 중 「석문의」에 의하면 『법계도』를 구성하는 글은 칠언삼십구(七言三十句)를 이룬다. 「총석인의」에서는 인(印)이라는 형식을 취하여 법계도를 짓게 된 까닭을 밝혔다.
곧, “석가여래께서 가르치신 그물과 같은 교법(敎法)이 포괄하는 삼종의 세간(世間)을 해인삼매(海印三昧)를 좇아 드러내어 나타내기 때문이다.” 하여, 해인삼매에 들었을 때 나타나는 삼종의 세간인 기세간(器世間: 물질의 세계)과 중생세간(衆生世間: 인간들의 세계), 그리고 지정각세간(智正覺世間: 正覺에 의한 智慧의 세계)의 모습을 보여주기 위함이라고 하였다.
특히 『법계도』는 흰 종이 위에 붉은 도인의 길(줄)과 검은 글자를 써서 만들었는데, 이는 삼종세간을 나타내기 위함이었다. 『법계도』의 인은 사각형을 이루고 있고 중심의 ‘법(法)’ 자에서 시작하여 역시 같은 중심의 ‘불(佛)’ 자에 이르기까지 54개의 각을 이루면서 210자의 시가 한 줄로 연결되어 있다.
「별해인상」의 「설인문상」과 「명자상」에서, 의상은 스스로 “어째서 인문(印文)이 외줄로 되어 있는가？ 어째서 사면사각으로 되어 있는가？ 어찌하여 시의 글자에는 시작과 끝이 있는가？ 그리고 그 시작하는 글자와 끝 글자가 중앙에 위치하는가？ 또 시의 글에는 왜 굴곡이 많은가？”라고 질문한 다음 답을 내리고 있다.
그 내용을 함께 묶어 정리해 보면, “인문이 다만 하나의 길로 되어 있는 것은 여래(如來)의 일음(一音)을 표시하기 위한 것이다. 또 그 길이 번거롭게 굴곡을 나타내고 있는 까닭은 중생의 근기(根機)와 욕망이 같지 않기 때문이니, 삼승교(三乘敎)가 이에 해당한다. 그리고 이 하나의 길에 시작과 끝이 없는 것은 여래의 선교방편(善巧方便)에는 특정한 방법이 없고 대응하는 세계에 알맞게 융통성이 있음을 나타내는 것으로, 이는 원교(圓敎)에 해당한다. 사면사각으로 되어 있는 것은 사섭사무량(四攝四無量)을 나타낸 것이다. 이 인문은 삼승(三乘)에 의하여 일승을 드러내는 의미를 가지고 있다. 또 시의 글에는 시작과 끝이 있는데, 그것은 수행방편(修行方便)에는 원인과 결과가 따로 있기 때문이다. 그리고 글이 많은 굴곡을 보이는 까닭은 역시 삼승의 근기와 욕망이 꼭 같지 않고 차별이 있기 때문이다. 그리고 왜 첫 글자와 끝 글자가 중심에 와 있느냐 하면, 인과(因果)의 양위(兩位)는 법성가내(法性家內)의 진실한 덕용(德用)으로서 그 성(性)이 중도(中道)에 있기 때문이다.”라고 하였다.
「석문의」는 『법성도』의 뜻을 자세히 풀이하는 부분으로 이 책의 거의 대부분을 차지한다. 『법성게(法性偈)』의 전체적인 구성을 파악하기 위해서 「석문의」의 구분에 따라 조직내용을 도식화 할 수 있다.
의상은 이 『법계도』를 그 제자들에 대한 인가의 표시로 주기를 좋아하였다. 이러한 도(圖) 자체가 극히 독창적이요 한국적인 사고방식의 특성을 이룬다고 볼 수 있는데, 상징을 통하여 깊은 뜻을 간추리고 짧게 표현하기를 좋아하는 전통을 보여주고 있다.
이 『법계도』의 근본정신은 『화엄경』의 근본정신이며, 그 이상의 다른 것이 아니라고 해야 마땅할 것이다. 문제는 의상이 그 방대한 『화엄경』의 정신을 이렇게 간결하게 요약할 수 있었다는 데 있다. 아무도 이만큼 적절하고 평이하게 그 어렵고 방대한 『화엄경』의 정신을 요약한 이가 없었다.
그것을 해냈기 때문에 의상은 위대한 것이며, 그의 위대한 학덕은 이 『법계도』에 의해서 증명되었다고 해도 과언이 아니다. 『법계도』는 현재 『대일본속장경(大日本續藏經)』 제8투(套) 및 『대정장경(大正藏經)』 제45권에 수록되어 있다.
또 이에 대한 우리나라 역대 고승의 주석서로는 진숭의 『일승법계도기(一乘法界圖記)』, 법융(法融)의 『법계도기(法界圖記)』, 균여의 『일승법계도원통기』, 작자 미상의 『법계도기총수록(法界圖記叢髓錄)』, 설잠(雪岑)의 『화엄일승법계도주(華嚴一乘法界圖註)』, 『법성게과주(法性偈科註)』 등이 있다.
참고문헌
『일승법계도원통기(一乘法界圖圓通記)』
『법계도기총수록(法界圖記叢髓錄)』
『한국의 불교사상』(이기영, 삼성출판사, 1976)
「화엄일승법계도의 근본사상」(이기영, 『신라가야문화』4, 영남대학교 신라가야문화연구소, 1972)
관련이미지
[네이버 지식백과] 화엄일승법계도 [華嚴一乘法界圖] (한국민족문화대백과, 한국학중앙연구원)
한국민족문화대백과
화엄일승법계도
[ 華嚴一乘法界圖 ]
이미지 크게보기
신라시대의 승려 의상이 화엄사상의 요지를 간결한 시로 축약한 글. 210자를 54각이 있는 도인에 합쳐서 만든 것이다. '화엄일승법계'란 '가지가지의 꽃으로 장엄된 일승의 진리로운 세계의 모습'을 의미하며 진숭, 법융, 균여 등의 고승들이 이 법계도에 주석을 달기도 했다.
이칭별칭 법계도, 법성게, 일승법계도
유형 문헌
시대 고대/남북국
성격 화엄사상축약시
편저자 의상(義湘)
제작시기 신라 시대
목차
정의
내용
정의
신라시대의 승려 의상(義湘)이 화엄사상의 요지를 간결한 시(詩)로 축약한 글.
내용
210자를 54각(角)이 있는 도인(圖印)에 합쳐서 만든 것이다.
‘갖가지 꽃으로 장엄된 일승(一乘)의 진리로운 세계의 모습’이라는 뜻이며, 『삼국유사』에서는 ‘법계도서인(法界圖書印)’이라고 하고, 이 밖에 ‘화엄일승법계도장(華嚴一乘法界圖章)’·‘화엄법계도(華嚴法界圖)’·‘일승법계도(一乘法界圖)’·‘법계도장(法界圖章)’·‘법성도(法性圖)’·‘해인도(海印圖)’ 등으로 부르기도 한다.
『화엄일승법계도』에는 저자의 이름이 기록되어 있지 않다. 다만, 이 책 끝에 “인연으로 생겨나는 일체의 모든 것에는 주인이 따로 있지 않음을 나타내기 위하여 저자명을 기록하지 않는다.”라고 그 이유를 설명하였을 뿐이다.
이로 인하여 뒷날 이 책의 저자를 당나라의 지엄(智儼) 혹은 현수(賢首) 또는 진숭(珍嵩)이라고 하는 등의 설이 생겨나기도 하였다.
그러나 고려의 균여(均如)는 그의 『일승법계도원통기(一乘法界圖圓通記)』에서 최치원(崔致遠)이 지은 「의상전(義湘傳)」으로부터 다음과 같은 내용을 인용하여, 이것의 저자가 의상임을 밝히고 있다.
의상이 스승 지엄의 문하에서 화엄을 수학할 때이다. 꿈속에 형상이 매우 기이한 신인(神人)이 나타나 의상에게 “네 자신이 깨달은 바를 저술하여 사람들에게 베풀어 줌이 마땅하다.”고 하였고, 또 꿈에 선재동자(善財童子)가 총명약(聰明藥) 10여 알을 주었으며, 청의동자(靑衣童子)가 세 번째로 비결(秘訣)을 주었다.
스승 지엄이 이 말을 듣고 “신인이 신령스러운 것을 줌이 나에게는 한 번이었는데 너에게는 세 번이구나. 널리 수행하여 그 통보(通報)를 곧 표현하도록 하라.” 하였다. 의상이 명을 따라 그 터득한 바 오묘한 경지를 순서를 따라 부지런히 써서 『십승장(十乘章)』 10권을 엮고, 스승에게 잘못을 지적해 달라고 청하였다.
지엄이 이를 읽어 본 후 “뜻은 매우 아름다우나 말은 오히려 옹색하다.”고 하였다. 이에 의상은 다시 번거롭지 않고 어디에나 걸림이 없게 고쳤다. 지엄과 의상이 함께 불전(佛前)에 나아가 그것을 불사르면서, “부처님의 뜻에 계합함이 있다면 원컨대 타지 말기를 바랍니다.”고 서원하였다.
불길 속에서 타고 남은 나머지를 수습하니 210자가 되었다. 의상이 그것을 모아 다시 간절한 서원을 발하며 맹렬한 불길 속에 던졌으나 마침내 타지 않았다.
지엄은 눈물을 흘리면서 감동하여 칭찬하였고, 의상은 그 210자를 연결하여 게(偈)가 되게 하려고 며칠 동안 문을 걸고 노력했다. 마침내 삼십 구절을 이루니 삼관(三觀)의 오묘한 뜻을 포괄하고 십현(十玄)의 아름다움을 드러내었다고 한다.
이와 같이 『법계도』는 의상 자신이 스스로 깨달은 자내증(自內證)의 경지를 기술한 것이고, 그 자내증은 완전히 부처의 뜻에 계합하는 것이기에 불후의 명저를 낳게 된 것이다.
『법계도』가 완성된 것은 스승 지엄이 입적하기 몇 달 전인 670년(문무왕 10)이다. 이것은 이 책 끝에 밝혀져 있고, 『삼국유사』의 기록과도 일치한다.
의상은 『법계도』 첫머리에서 이것을 짓게 된 동기를, “이(理)에 의하고 교(敎)에 근거하여 간략한 반시(槃詩)를 만들어 이름에만 집착하는 무리들로 하여금 그 이름마저도 없는 참된 근원으로 돌아가게 하고자 함이다.”라고 하였다.
의상의 『법계도』 원문은 크게 두 부분으로 구분된다. 첫째는 대의(大意) 및 도인, 둘째는 석문(釋文: 문장의 풀이)이다.
석문은 다시 총석인의(總釋印意: 총괄적인 圖印의 의미해석)와 별해인상(別解印相: 개별적인 圖印의 형상해석)으로 나누어지며, 별해인상은 ① 설인문상(說印文相: 도인의 글이 지니고 있는 모습에 대한 설명), ② 명자상(明字相: 문자의 형상에 관한 글), ③ 석문의(釋文意: 문장의 뜻풀이)로 구분하여 설명하고 있다.
이 중 「석문의」에 의하면 『법계도』를 구성하는 글은 칠언삼십구(七言三十句)를 이룬다. 「총석인의」에서는 인(印)이라는 형식을 취하여 법계도를 짓게 된 까닭을 밝혔다.
곧, “석가여래께서 가르치신 그물과 같은 교법(敎法)이 포괄하는 삼종의 세간(世間)을 해인삼매(海印三昧)를 좇아 드러내어 나타내기 때문이다.” 하여, 해인삼매에 들었을 때 나타나는 삼종의 세간인 기세간(器世間: 물질의 세계)과 중생세간(衆生世間: 인간들의 세계), 그리고 지정각세간(智正覺世間: 正覺에 의한 智慧의 세계)의 모습을 보여주기 위함이라고 하였다.
특히 『법계도』는 흰 종이 위에 붉은 도인의 길(줄)과 검은 글자를 써서 만들었는데, 이는 삼종세간을 나타내기 위함이었다. 『법계도』의 인은 사각형을 이루고 있고 중심의 ‘법(法)’ 자에서 시작하여 역시 같은 중심의 ‘불(佛)’ 자에 이르기까지 54개의 각을 이루면서 210자의 시가 한 줄로 연결되어 있다.
「별해인상」의 「설인문상」과 「명자상」에서, 의상은 스스로 “어째서 인문(印文)이 외줄로 되어 있는가？ 어째서 사면사각으로 되어 있는가？ 어찌하여 시의 글자에는 시작과 끝이 있는가？ 그리고 그 시작하는 글자와 끝 글자가 중앙에 위치하는가？ 또 시의 글에는 왜 굴곡이 많은가？”라고 질문한 다음 답을 내리고 있다.
그 내용을 함께 묶어 정리해 보면, “인문이 다만 하나의 길로 되어 있는 것은 여래(如來)의 일음(一音)을 표시하기 위한 것이다. 또 그 길이 번거롭게 굴곡을 나타내고 있는 까닭은 중생의 근기(根機)와 욕망이 같지 않기 때문이니, 삼승교(三乘敎)가 이에 해당한다. 그리고 이 하나의 길에 시작과 끝이 없는 것은 여래의 선교방편(善巧方便)에는 특정한 방법이 없고 대응하는 세계에 알맞게 융통성이 있음을 나타내는 것으로, 이는 원교(圓敎)에 해당한다. 사면사각으로 되어 있는 것은 사섭사무량(四攝四無量)을 나타낸 것이다. 이 인문은 삼승(三乘)에 의하여 일승을 드러내는 의미를 가지고 있다. 또 시의 글에는 시작과 끝이 있는데, 그것은 수행방편(修行方便)에는 원인과 결과가 따로 있기 때문이다. 그리고 글이 많은 굴곡을 보이는 까닭은 역시 삼승의 근기와 욕망이 꼭 같지 않고 차별이 있기 때문이다. 그리고 왜 첫 글자와 끝 글자가 중심에 와 있느냐 하면, 인과(因果)의 양위(兩位)는 법성가내(法性家內)의 진실한 덕용(德用)으로서 그 성(性)이 중도(中道)에 있기 때문이다.”라고 하였다.
「석문의」는 『법성도』의 뜻을 자세히 풀이하는 부분으로 이 책의 거의 대부분을 차지한다. 『법성게(法性偈)』의 전체적인 구성을 파악하기 위해서 「석문의」의 구분에 따라 조직내용을 도식화 할 수 있다.
의상은 이 『법계도』를 그 제자들에 대한 인가의 표시로 주기를 좋아하였다. 이러한 도(圖) 자체가 극히 독창적이요 한국적인 사고방식의 특성을 이룬다고 볼 수 있는데, 상징을 통하여 깊은 뜻을 간추리고 짧게 표현하기를 좋아하는 전통을 보여주고 있다.
이 『법계도』의 근본정신은 『화엄경』의 근본정신이며, 그 이상의 다른 것이 아니라고 해야 마땅할 것이다. 문제는 의상이 그 방대한 『화엄경』의 정신을 이렇게 간결하게 요약할 수 있었다는 데 있다. 아무도 이만큼 적절하고 평이하게 그 어렵고 방대한 『화엄경』의 정신을 요약한 이가 없었다.
그것을 해냈기 때문에 의상은 위대한 것이며, 그의 위대한 학덕은 이 『법계도』에 의해서 증명되었다고 해도 과언이 아니다. 『법계도』는 현재 『대일본속장경(大日本續藏經)』 제8투(套) 및 『대정장경(大正藏經)』 제45권에 수록되어 있다.
또 이에 대한 우리나라 역대 고승의 주석서로는 진숭의 『일승법계도기(一乘法界圖記)』, 법융(法融)의 『법계도기(法界圖記)』, 균여의 『일승법계도원통기』, 작자 미상의 『법계도기총수록(法界圖記叢髓錄)』, 설잠(雪岑)의 『화엄일승법계도주(華嚴一乘法界圖註)』, 『법성게과주(法性偈科註)』 등이 있다.
참고문헌
『일승법계도원통기(一乘法界圖圓通記)』
『법계도기총수록(法界圖記叢髓錄)』
『한국의 불교사상』(이기영, 삼성출판사, 1976)
「화엄일승법계도의 근본사상」(이기영, 『신라가야문화』4, 영남대학교 신라가야문화연구소, 1972)
관련이미지
[네이버 지식백과] 화엄일승법계도 [華嚴一乘法界圖] (한국민족문화대백과, 한국학중앙연구원)
알라딘: [전자책] 조선불교유신론
알라딘: [전자책] 조선불교유신론
[eBook] 조선불교유신론 - 민족 지성 한용운이 제시한 한국 불교의 길
| 청소년 철학창고 36 
한용운 (지은이),정은주풀빛2019-02-25
전자책 미리 읽기 
종이책으로 미리보기제공 파일 : ePub(1.55 MB)
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종이책 페이지수 296쪽, 약 18.2만자, 약 4.8만 단어
책소개
시인, 승려이자 독립운동가인 민족 지성 만해(萬海) 한용운(韓龍雲)이 집필한 불교 개혁론이다. 생소한 불교 용어나 고전 문구가 나올 때마다 원서에 없는 해석과 배경지식을 병기하고 한용운이 저술한 다른 논설 자료나 시 등도 다각도로 참고했다. 원서는 서론부터 결론까지 17장으로 나누어 서술되었지만, 이 책에서는 주제별로 묶어 6장으로 재구성해 청소년들이 더 쉽게 이해하도록 했다.
‘유신(維新)’은 낡은 제도나 관습을 청산하고 항상 새롭게 바꾸어 나간다는 의미다. 한용운은 불과 서른두 살이던 1910년에 당시 불교의 타락상과 나태함을 하나하나 파헤쳐 비판하고 대안을 모색한 <조선불교유신론>을 완성했다. 당시 불교계는 조선 시대부터 시작된 억불숭유(抑佛崇儒) 정책으로 쌓여 온 무기력과 무질서, 각종 인습과 폐단으로 얼룩져 있었다.
<조선불교유신론>은 정치·사회 모든 분야에 변화와 혁신이 활발한데 오직 조선 불교만이 미신, 기복, 은둔 등 인습에 젖어 있다는 문제의식에서 출발한다. 불교 교리와 철학에서 시작해 승가 교육과 수행, 참선, 불교의식 간소화, 의례나 포교 방식 혁신, 불교를 통괄하는 조직 기구 구성, 심지어 승려의 혼인 문제 등 일제 식민 치하 당시 불교계의 당면 문제에 대해 과감하고 파격적인 대안을 모색했다. 한용운은 불교를 동양과 서양의 주요 종교 철학 사상과 비교해 논했고, 불교가 깊은 산중이 아닌 대중 안에서 함께 호흡해야 한다고 주장했다.
<조선불교유신론>에는 불교개혁 의지뿐 아니라 만해 한용운이 지닌 역사의식과 세계관, 시대상이 담겨 있다. 종교적인 열정을 바탕으로 불교 전반에 걸친 예리한 관찰과 비판, 시대에 뒤떨어진 우리 불교를 개혁할 새로운 방향과 대안을 제시해 우리 사상계에 큰 영향을 남긴 명저로 손꼽힌다. 오늘날 종교계와 사회상까지도 돌아보도록 이끄는 혜안과 과감한 대안을 통해, 진정한 온고지신(溫故知新)을 모색하는 계기가 될 것이다.
목차
‘청소년 철학창고’를 펴내며
들어가는 말
머리말
1장 서론
2장 불교의 근본과 혁신
1. 불교의 성질
2. 불교의 주의(主義)
3. 불교의 유신은 파괴가 먼저
3장 승가의 혁신
1. 승려 교육
2. 승려의 인권 회복과 생산
3. 승려의 결혼 문제
4. 승려의 단결 문제
4장 수행과 포교의 혁신
1. 참선
2. 염불당의 폐지
3. 포교
5장 사찰과 의례의 혁신
1. 사찰의 위치
2. 불교에서 숭배하는 조각과 그림
3. 불교 의례
4. 사찰 주지 선거법
5. 사찰의 관리
6장 결론
《조선불교유신론》, 불교 개혁의 상징이 되다
한용운 연보
접기
저자 및 역자소개
한용운 (지은이)
저자파일
최고의 작품 투표
신간알림 신청
충남 홍성군 결성면 성곡리에서 한응준과 온양 방씨 사이에서 차남으로 태어났다. 자(字)는 정옥(貞玉), 속명은 유천(裕天), 법명(法名)은 용운(龍雲), 법호(法號)는 만해이다. 어려서 서당에서 한학을 수학한 뒤, 향리에서 훈장으로 학동을 가르치는 한편 부친으로부터 때때로 의인들의 기개와 사상을 전해 듣고 큰 감명을 받았다.
기울어 가는 국운 속에서 홍주에서 전개되었던 동학농민전쟁과 의병운동을 목격하면서 집을 나서 여러 곳을 전전하다가 설악산 오세암으로 들어갔다. 여기서 불교의 기초지식을 섭렵하면서 수도하다가 다른 세계에 대한... 더보기
최근작 : <님의 침묵>,<님의 침묵 (큰글씨책)>,<님의 침묵> … 총 230종 (모두보기)
정은주
저자파일
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█ 불교개혁과 새 시대를 향한 한용운의 열망과 사상이 담긴 명저 《조선불교유신론》
《조선불교유신론》은 구한말에서 식민지 시대 초기에 우리 불교가 처했던 여러 문제점을 지적하면서 한국 불교가 나아가야 할 개혁 방향을 제시한 책이다. 그 핵심은 전통 불교의 미신적·기복적·은둔적 모습을 과감하게 탈피하고 불교 본래의 철학적·종교적·대중적 정신을 회복해 근대화 시대에 걸맞게 새로운 불교로 거듭나자는 것, 즉 유신(維新)을 하자는 것이었다.
1913년 출간된 《조선불교유신론》은 총 17장을 내용 구분 없이 쭉 나열하는 서술 방식이었다. 따라서 전체 개요를 파악하기가 쉽지 않아, 청소년 철학창고 36번으로 출간된 이 책 《조선불교유신론, 민족 지성 한용운이 제시한 한국 불교의 길》에서는 유신의 내용을 주제별로 서론, 불교의 근본과 혁신, 승가의 혁신, 수행과 포교의 혁신, 사찰과 의례의 혁신, 결론 등 총 6장으로 재구성했다.
서론에서는 먼저 당시 모든 분야에서 근대화를 향한 변화와 유신의 기운이 차오르고 있는데 오직 조선 불교만이 ‘유신’을 외면하고 있다고 한탄한다. 그 책임을 종단이나 사찰보다는 ‘나’라는 개인에 있음을 강조하며 여러 승려의 각성을 촉구했다. 이어서 한용운은 불교의 근본과 그 안에 담긴 사상을 들여다본다. 불교는 단순한 미신이나 철학이 아니라 시대와 지역을 초월한 위대한 사상으로, 동서양과 현재와 미래를 동시에 이끌어 갈 철학이자 종교적인 가르침이라는 사실을 강조한다. 평등주의와 구세주의가 불교의 근본 사상으로, 이는 서양에서 정치 민주화와 과학 발전을 이끈 자유주의 사상과도 통한다고 보았다. 시대에 뒤처진 구습이나 인습을 타파하려면 먼저 파괴가 선행되어야 한다고 과감한 주장을 펼치고 있다.
또한, 당시 품위가 떨어지고 타락한 승려들의 자질을 개선하려면 근대적인 승려 교육이 절실하다고 한용운은 주장했다. 기초 학문인 보통학, 자연계와 인문계를 포괄한 사범학, 한문과 지식의 발전과 교류를 위한 유학 등이 그가 제시한 개선책이다. 또한 승려들이 신도의 보시에만 의존해 구차하게 지내지 말고 경제적으로 자립하고 사찰도 수익 사업을 통해 자활할 때 승려 인권이 회복된다고 보았다. 지금까지도 《조선불교유신론》에서 가장 많은 논쟁을 불러온 승려 혼인 주장도 이러한 맥락을 잇는다. 한용운은 승려 혼인이 불교 계율에서 금지한 사항이긴 하지만, 계율이란 득도를 위한 방편이기 때문에 시대와 상황에 따라 탄력적으로 운용해야 한다고 보았다. 승려가 독신 생활을 계속하면 사회 윤리에 해롭고, 인구가 줄어 국가적으로 손실이며, 포교에도 해롭고, 풍속에 해롭다는 네 가지 이유를 들어 승려 개인의 선택에 맡기자는 주장이다.
한용운은 제도 개선의 필요성 또한 놓치지 않는다. 승려들은 대부분 외딴 산사에서 고립되어 살기 때문에 독선적이고 이기적인 성향이 되기 쉬우며, 따라서 승려들도 서로 단결되지 못한다고 한탄했다. 조직과 체계를 갖춘 중앙 교단을 만들고 승려들 개인은 봉사 정신을 갖고 뭉쳐야만 한다. 따라서 주지가 개인 이익을 추구할 수 없도록 선거를 통해 선발하고 전체 사찰과 재산을 통괄하는 기구를 수립하자고 그는 역설했다. 시험을 통해 선발된 자들만 선방에서 수행할 수 있도록 하며, 모든 불교 의식을 간소화하고 제사 등은 폐지하고 미신 요소가 많은 각종 탱화나 상들도 철거하자고 주장했다. 거짓된 염불과 유행처럼 번지던 염불당을 폐지하자는 주장도 같은 맥락이다. 또한 당시 열성으로 포교하며 각종 사회사업으로 교세를 확대하던 서양 기독교의 포교 활동을 본받아, 조선 불교도 산사에서 나와 도심지에서 대중 포교를 하며 중생과 교류를 넓혀야 구세주의가 완수된다고 보았다.
《조선불교유신론》은 한용운이 일본의 조동종계 불교 대학에 잠시 유학했다가 돌아와 1909년에 집필을 시작했는데, 통쾌하고 속 시원한 개혁을 주장했기 때문에 열렬한 지지를 받기도 했지만 그 주장의 비현실성 탓에 반대하는 이들도 많았다. 그러나 이 책에서 가장 주목할 점은 당시 불교의 타락상과 안일함을 낱낱이 파헤친 비판 정신이다. 또 승가 교육이나 수행, 의례나 포교 방식의 혁신 등 불교계 당면 문제에 대해 파격적이고 과감한 대안을 모색했다는 점도 주목할 지점이다.
█ 시인이자 승려, 독립운동가로 온 생애를 바쳐 시대를 이끌어 간 민족 지성 한용운
《조선불교유신론》을 집필한 한용운은 서정 시인인 동시에 저항 시인, 민족 시인으로 한국 현대 문학사에서 처음 모습을 드러내기 시작했다. 그러나 만해 한용운은 문학이라는 범주로만 한정할 수 없는 폭넓은 삶을 산 인물이다. 시와 소설, 평론을 남긴 문인이기도 했지만 설악산, 금강산 등 고요한 산중에 은거하며 부처의 가르침을 실천한 선불교의 승려였고, 3·1 운동에서는 불교계 대표로서 일제에 날카롭게 저항한 독립운동가였다. 시대를 이끈 이런 선각자다운 모습은 1932년 조선 불교의 대표 인물 선정에서 1위에 오를 만큼 당대에도 높이 인정되었다.
한용운은 1897년, 조선 초기 세도가 한명회의 후손인 양반 가문이었으나 가난한 선비 집안에서 태어났다. 한용운의 학력은 어릴 적 서당에서 배운 한학과 출가 뒤 설악산에서 배운 불교 경전 수업 그리고 일본 여행 도중 잠시 조동종 대학에서 공부한 경험이 전부였다. 하지만 독서의 폭이 넓었고 지적인 재능을 타고났기 때문에 독학으로 유교나 불교 등 지식을 터득할 수 있었고, 뛰어난 선각자 스님들을 통해 중국이나 서구 근대사상도 접할 수 있었다.
한용운은 19세 즈음 처음으로 집을 떠나 1903년 25세 무렵 완전히 출가해, 설악산 백담사로 가 27세에 법명을 받았다. 폭넓은 독서를 통해 세계의 움직임을 간파한 그는 한반도를 넘어 시베리아 대륙 여행을 감행하기도 했고, 당대 유명한 학생이던 이학암 스님, 만화 스님 등 스승들을 통해 참선하며 불교 사상과 수행 체계를 정립해 학문의 깊이를 더했다. 근대 한국 불교의 선구자들이라고 할 박한영, 방한암, 송만공과 같은 수행자들과 두루 사귀면서 그의 불교 사상은 더욱 깊이 발전했고,《음빙실문집》, 《영환지략》 등 중국 개화 서적들을 통해 19세기 말 격동하는 세계의 움직임에 눈을 뜨고 서구 근대사상에 대한 학문 욕구 또한 싹트기 시작했다. 당시 메이지유신으로 근대화에 앞서가던 일본으로 유학 갈 기회를 잡은 한용운은 선진 의식으로 가득 찬 유학생들을 통해 민족 독립의 열정을 키우고, 민족 사상이나 불교 사회주의 사상도 접했다. 이 만남들은 그를 조선 불교 개혁과 3·1 운동으로 이끈 중요한 계기가 되었다.
적극적으로 항일운동에 뛰어든 한용운은 불교계를 대표해 3·1 운동에 앞장섰고 그 결과 1919년 3월 1일부터 1922년 3월까지 만 3년간 옥고를 치른다. 이후 주로 선학원에서 지내며 불교 대중화 사업에 몰두했고 조선 불교 청년회 총재에도 취임하지만, 일제의 압박이 심해져 활동이 여의치 않게 되자 만해는 다시 설악산 오세암으로 들어간다. 이때 그를 일약 유명 시인의 반열에 올려놓은 <님의 침묵>을 완성했다. 그 뒤 신간회, 조선 불교 총동맹 등을 통해 독립운동과 불교 단체의 사회 운동을 활발히 했고 월간지 <불교>를 인수해 불교 대중화와 독립 사상 고취에 힘썼으나, 1930년대 일제의 탄압이 심해지면서 공개적인 민족운동은 불가능해졌다. 불교계 청년 운동가들이 비밀결사 ‘만당’을 조직해 한용운을 총재로 추대했으나 불교계 내분 등으로 자진 해산하기에 이른다.
이후 한용운은 서울 성북동 산기슭에 작은 한옥 심우장을 지어 수행자로 정진하고 글을 쓰며 지냈다. 생활은 가난하고 고독했지만 지조를 지키며 정진한 한용운은 1944년 66세로 세상을 떠나는데, 독립운동가이자 시인이며 불교계의 저명인사였던 인물로서는 지극히 초라한 장례식이었다고 한다.
해방 뒤에도 한용운은 식민지 치하 고난의 시대를 서릿발 같은 기상과 높은 절개로 살다 간 위대한 ‘민족 지성’으로서 자리매김 되었다. 한용운의 정신적인 고향이라 할 설악산 백담사 기슭에는 만해 마을이 조성되었고 해마다 만해 축전이 개최되고 있으며 민족 문학의 상징이라는 차원에서 만해문학상까지 제정되었다. 심지어 ‘만해학’이라는 학문 분야가 생길 정도로 한용운의 사상과 업적에 대한 학문적 고찰이 이루어졌고 그를 기리는 다양한 사업들이 활발히 전개되고 있다.
█ 《조선불교유신론》에 담긴 만해 한용운의 선구적인 사상과 실천 정신
이렇듯 만해는 평생 식민지 조국의 독립과 발전을 위해 실천적인 삶을 살다 갔다. 《조선불교유신론》 또한 불교 혁신을 통해 조국 근대화와 사회 발전에 기여하고자 하는 다짐이자 모두에게 각성을 촉구하는 결과물이었다. 그 핵심은 전통 불교의 미신·기복·은둔적인 성격을 탈피해 불교 본래의 정신, 즉 중생 구제와 자유평등 실현을 회복하는 것, 시대에 맞고 나아가 시대를 선도해 가는 근대 불교로 새롭게 태어나자는 주장이었다. 오늘날 《조선불교유신론》이 근대 한국 불교의 개혁 정신을 밝힌 탁월한 저술로 평가받는 이유는, 구한말부터 일제 강점기에 이르기까지 조선 불교를 총체적·다각적으로 진단하고 비판을 가했다는 점, 근대사상과 불교 사상을 토대로 논리적이고 혁신적인 대안을 내놓았다는 점, 현재는 물론 미래에까지도 한국 불교가 해야 할 종교·사회적 역할을 올바르게 분석하고 예견한 점 등에 있다.
물론 《조선불교유신론》에도 비판의 여지가 있다. 당시 교단의 현실 고충을 깊이 파악하지 못한 채 혁신에만 조급했다는 점, 승가의 계율 문제를 중추원, 통감부 같은 식민지 권력에 의지해 해결하려 한 점, 대안으로 제시한 방안들이 실현 가능성이 희박하다는 점 등이다. 그러나 《조선불교유신론》은 한국 근현대 불교가 나아갈 방향과 대안을 제시한 보기 드문 걸작이며, 한용운이라는 인물 자체가 근대 불교 개혁에 앞장서고 그 실천을 위해 평생을 바친 열렬한 지도자요 뛰어난 선각자였다는 점은 분명하다.
한용운은 중생과 더불어 깨달음을 강조하는 불교에 대해 철학적 종교이며 미래에 도덕과 문명의 원천이 될 위대한 종교라고 보았다. 그러나 당시 미신적이며 왜곡된 불교를 혁신하고 본래 불교 정신을 회복하지 않는다면 불교의 미래를 기약할 수 없다고 생각했기 때문에, 불교의 본래 정신을 회복하자는 차원에서 《조선불교유신론》을 집필한 것이다. 《조선불교유신론》의 사상적 기초는 참다운 믿음의 대상은 밖이 아니라 우리 내면에 있다는 깨달음을 향한 선종 본래 정신을 회복하자는 데 있다. 당시 불교는 너무나 해결해야 할 문제가 많았기 때문에 한용운은 부단한 개혁을 촉구했지만, 결국은 중생과 더불어 해탈에 이른다는 선(禪) 불교의 정신을 회복하자는 것이야말로 유신의 근본 해법임을 잊지 않았다.
만해는 일본에 잠시 유학하면서 메이지유신을 통해 봉건 사회에서 근대사회로 급격히 탈바꿈한 일본의 발전상을 목격했고, 일본 불교의 근대적 발전을 관찰하면서 많은 것을 느끼고 돌아온 뒤 《조선불교유신론》을 집필했다. 1909년에 집필을 끝냈지만 그 파격적인 주장이 몰고 올 충격과 파장을 의식했던지 출간을 늦추어 1913년 간행한다. 예상대로 승려 결혼이나 의례의 간소화 등 급진적인 주장 때문에 불교계뿐 아니라 사회 전체에 큰 반향을 일으켰지만 만해가 주장하는 불교 혁신은 상당 부분 올바른 방향이었다. 그러나 식민지 치하의 불리한 정세, 불교계의 보수적이고 안일한 자세로 인해 《조선불교유신론》의 개혁안은 현실적인 성과를 얻지는 못했다.
그러나 만해의 정신은 과거나 현재나 여전히 우리 속에 살아 숨 쉬고 있다. 그 핵심은 부처의 중생 구제 정신 실현, 민족의 자주독립과 발전, 불교와 사회의 근대화와 개혁이다. 이러한 면에서 《조선불교유신론》은 자라나는 우리 청소년들에게 불교의 참다운 정신과 중요성과 현대성, 또 우리 근대 역사가 당면했던 개혁과 발전의 과제가 무엇인지 알려 준다. 《조선불교유신론》은 여전히 개혁과 발전이 절실히 필요한 오늘날 불교계뿐만 아니라 우리 사회 전체에서, 과거를 통해 시대를 조명하는 거울과 같은 책이다.
미국의 계관시인 로버트 핀스키는 “1920년대에서 1930년대에 이르는 시기의 동양에, 이렇게 심오한 사상을 지닌 시인이 존재했다는 사실이, 게다가 식민지였던 조선에 그런 인물이 있었다는 사실이 믿기지 않는다.”며 만해 한용운의 사상과 문학의 깊이에 찬탄을 보냈다고 한다. 그런 만해 한용운의 선구적인 사상을 응축한 결과물인 《조선불교유신론》은, 오늘날 우리 종교와 사회에서도 ‘유신’해야 할 과제들을 끊임없이 되찾고 개혁의 길을 모색하는 길잡이가 될 것이다. 접기
The Origins of Non-violence Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Settings Martin Green
The Origins of Non-violence
The Origins of Non-violence
Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Settings
Martin Green
The Origins of Non-violence
Tolstoy and Gandhi in Their Historical Settings
Martin Green
Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir - Los Angeles Review of Books
Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir - Los Angeles Review of Books
Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir
By Thomas Larson
JANUARY 13, 2017
I.
TWO THINGS ARE TRUE about Leo Tolstoy in 1879. First, he had mostly given up on fiction, having published his two titanic novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The latter book exhausted him physically and morally: not long after its appearance, he termed his saga of adultery “an abomination.” He found novel writing to be a poor substitute for confronting religious issues and his existential lot. Second, because of his early literary acclaim and the immoral lifestyle it had spawned and enabled, he was miserable. He was so ashamed of himself that post-Karenina his ambivalent atheism collapsed and he sought a new relationship to the “truth.” He abdicated the throne of novelist and took up the mantle of religious critic — on the side of Christianity and against it.
Raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy lost his religion at 18. After a life of debauchery, in his early 50s, he wanted religion — or some source of intellectual security — back. In 1882, he published his Confession, a retrospective analysis of the previous five years in which his midlife crisis of faith unbalanced his literary and philosophical bearing. It is among the oddest of Christian tell-alls, a treatise searching for its own focal truth. Throughout, he hungers for spiritual fortitude: “Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” Readers note that the title has no “a” or “the” attached. (There are no articles in Russian, but this particular absence in English is meaningful.) The singular noun by itself emphasizes its currency.
Early on in the book, he asserts, in defiance, that “Christian teaching plays no part in life; one never comes across it in one’s relations with others and one never has to deal with it in one’s own life.” He pegs believers as “stupid, cruel, and immoral people who think themselves very important.” He tags unbelievers as the finest people he knows: they have “[i]ntelligence, honesty, uprightness, goodness of heart, and morality.” He renounces religion in favor of “reading and thinking” — in essence, reason — and recalls that five years prior “my only real faith […] was a faith in self-perfection.”
Of course, reason means progress, and progress, for an egoist like Tolstoy, entails an unchecked liberality in one’s behaviors. At this, the young Tolstoy, an aristocrat and braggart, more than excelled. Here’s part of his resume:
I killed people in war, I challenged people to duels in order to kill them, I lost at cards, I consumed the labor of peasants, I punished them, I fornicated, I deceived. Lies, theft, adultery of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder. … There was no crime I did not commit, and for all this my contemporaries praised me and thought me a relatively moral man, as they still do.
But the hyper-observant and self-obsessed Tolstoy suffers, despite his ego, a debilitating paranoia. He believes that people ridicule him because of his alcoholic, adulterous, and arrogant excesses. He has often imagined he’s dying: the darkness is drawing close, and he must find a purpose, because soon, for him, “nothing will remain but stink and worms.” (The death-obsessed Russian lived another 30 years after Confession.) At times, despair clings to his words like a rose vine: “You can only live as long as you’re drunk with life; but when you sober up, you can’t help but see that all this is just a fraud, and a stupid fraud. Precisely that: there’s nothing even amusing or witty about it; it’s simply cruel and stupid.” He says he doesn’t know why the universe exists. He is tortured by the question. He wants it answered; he can’t bear living in an untended and unintended cosmos.
By mid-book, Tolstoy’s searching starts to change — not just his focus but his sensibility. To unburden his longing, he quotes Bible passages, an Indian sage, and nuggets from the saints and the martyrs, honoring what he said earlier were useless “teachings of faith.” He wonders if to feel secure all we need is the wisdom of the ancients. These teachings have, he argues, lasted this long. His disclosures work him into a lather, and he declares that a pure belief in reason, without room for God as ultimate mystery, leads to insanity and suicide. A worrywart, Tolstoy plunges on with the tone of a querulous depressive. Moreover, he shifts, as it suits his gain, the blame for who should tow his anguish: from pagan nihilists to scientific rationalists to Orthodox dogmatists to jurisprudent bureaucrats — these last, the Ivan Ilyiches of the world. The only blameless one, he decides, is he who lives as Jesus lived. And yet, he counters, who can? It’s impossible.
Tolstoy decides that no faith is truer than the Christian peasant’s, whose “irrational knowledge” paves the road to happiness. Irrational knowledge is faith, he posits. Peasants should know. They are (though he aspires to join up, Tolstoy is definitely not one of them) the “great mass of people, the whole of mankind” — the nonindividuated mass, whom he lauds but who also rise, in his characterization, no higher than type. Uniformly, he writes in Chapter VIII, they believe God is “one and three,” father, son, spirit, “creation in six days, devils and angels and everything I couldn’t accept as long as I didn’t go mad.” That odd admission, with its tortuous grammar and emphatic final clause — as long as I didn’t go mad — is a performative leap away from his natural inclinations. He needs to believe something that transcends his inherent, incessant self-questioning, and he decides to do so. For him, peasant certainty is true because he, the great literary arbiter of truth, has arrived at it, not because Christianity has told him to accept it.
II.
Thus, with a thunderclap, Tolstoy’s short and intensely self-defensive polemic turns into a classic Christian conversion story, worthy of Augustine’s tale of tribulation. After weighing all the possibilities, mad or not, Tolstoy drapes the crucifix around his neck. As one of his best biographers, Martine de Courcel, writes, he has, rather Christianly, “admitted his sins and proclaimed his faith.” Saved, he declares that his actions from now on will embody his intentions — he will attend church, participate in sacraments, live frugally, leave his bourgeois habits, love God and peasant equally.
But wait. Opening faith’s creaking door hardly calms his restlessness. Though Tolstoy says he erred “not so much because I thought wrongly as because I lived badly,” the insight is not enough. He cannot settle his thoughts. Try as he might, Tolstoy, a self-cleansing fanatic, cannot rid himself of his deviant past or his disputatious nature. He can neither forgive himself nor stop analyzing the demands of Christian belief. As long as he keeps writing pages, he’s not sure about Christ as savior or about divine intervention. His belief demands more and more tuning.
The faith wedge splits him in two, before and after this, his so-called religious rebirth. Without God, Tolstoy has lived a life of pain and deceit. He declares he is now, with God, living a life free from such pain. But that’s too easy. Resolving each query brings another, and each time he squirms. De Courcel faults him. She writes that in “abandoning the dogmas of the Church, he thought he was freeing himself; in fact, he was about to become captive to the dogmas of his own making.” This is Tolstoy, the self-disappointment artist, his pattern, his personality. He confesses and converts — that is, he purifies religion down to what he finds valuable and cries, “Eureka!” But then he admits, often right away, that the conversion’s center cannot hold. Statement and counterstatement cancel each other out.
I think the critical point here is that “the dogmas of [our] own making” come to writers because personal writing is testimony — what I affirm or doubt can become as scriptural as a so-called sacred text. The problem with religious autobiography before Tolstoy is that it had to be based on Biblical reasoning (alas, not a clear field of study) and, apparently, required the author’s God-directed epiphany mid-confession. And yet almost all autobiographers of faith after Count Leo realize they are primarily writers of personal, not religious, revelation.
The final five chapters of Confession embroil us in his hemming-and-hawing conversion and deconversion. Tolstoy sides with Christianity only to oppose it, again and again, the combat all his, faith dispersing like a noble gas — free, loose, unbonded. What’s remarkable in Tolstoy is not his conversion but the way he evaluates his confession while he’s confessing.
Tolstoy’s energy comes from his questions, which often crowd out or undermine his answers. His telling has power, though it’s not the power we get from the dramatic narrative of a novel or a contemporary memoir. It’s something else. There’s little attempt in Confession to show action or deed, no scenes, no reportage, no exchanges with others, and few stories. Analysis trumps narrative. And yet it’s not all rhetoric. There is a dialectic — a reasoned discussion in which Tolstoy debates himself. What’s going on is a mélange of preaching virtues to the reader and arguing vices with himself, the self who can’t figure out what he should believe.
III.
To illustrate his mastery of fictional drama, consider Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, written just after Confession. The character of Ilyich comes vividly to life via thought and action: we hear about the offstage pettiness of his family and the bureaucratic sycophants who eagerly await his death and we participate in moments of tenderness between him and a loyal, pure-hearted peasant during Ilyich’s final months. For the most intense scenes, we’re inside Ilyich’s head as he seethes and self-deludes, undone by his illness and repulsed by his approaching death. Nothing tempers his fervid anxiety:
He wept for his helplessness, for his horrible loneliness, for people’s cruelty, for God’s cruelty, for God’s absence.
“Why have you done all this? Why have you brought me here? Why, why do you torment me so horribly?”
He didn’t expect an answer, but he also wept because there wasn’t and couldn’t be an answer. The pain increased again but he didn’t move or call anyone. He said to himself, “More, go on, beat me! But why? What have I done to you, why?”
The message is that fiction like Ivan Ilyich possesses a verisimilitude to life we recognize and an actual character who breaks down and dies, slowly, through story-time, while the nonfiction Confession shapes the verisimilitude of thought, the analytical riding on didactic summary and blatant assertion. Both types of writing (they can be equally emotional and purgative) feel necessary from Tolstoy — while exhausting one form, he seems to invite the other.
Narrative is what I find missing in Confession, scenes and torments from Tolstoy’s life, which, of course, got into his fiction and which, for better or worse, I’ve grown accustomed to reading in the contemporary memoir. If only he had shown us the depth of his suicidal despair, the effect on himself and others when he cheated them in gambling, when he felt hollowed out by his adultery (“of every kind”), when he killed a man in a duel — in short, narrative drama might have been more persuasive than exposition. As a result, we might have sympathized with the moral disease he suffers in Confession — as we do with Ivan Ilyich. (And as we do with Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.) I sympathize not with the meaning of Ilyich’s struggle; I sympathize with the felt struggle itself. For example, in a moment of physical pain (he doesn’t know he has cancer), he says:
It’s not a case of the appendix or of the kidney, but of life … and death. Yes, I had life and now it’s passing, passing, and I can’t hold it back. That’s it. Why deceive oneself. Isn’t it obvious to everyone but myself that I am dying, and it’s only a question of the number of weeks, days — maybe now.
I feel the fact of Ilyich’s dying terrorize him. And that terror expresses itself, in Tolstoy’s handling, as a contentious belief Ilyich cannot shake. As long as we are alive, death cannot transform us. There is no death, an idea Tolstoy or any of us want to believe. It doesn’t matter that we are deceiving ourselves; we need to avoid death’s psychic pain. But Ilyich is bursting with psychic pain. So, too, we feel, is Tolstoy himself. Religions say there’s no end, but we know there is. Despite our belief in a resurrected Christ and the immortality we are promised, the sight of death insists that death is final. Tolstoy refused to mute the existential turmoil of his literary character. And if Ilyich couldn’t settle that turmoil, neither could Tolstoy. His way forward was to shift forms and go deeper in his next venture, a play, The Power of Darkness.
IV.
The more I study Confession, the more apparent Tolstoy’s conflicts become. (He becomes less a religious author than a spiritual one — less dogmatic and more interesting to read as he interrogates his leaky faith.) On one hand, I could fault Tolstoy, in this book, for abandoning the drama of narrative propulsion. On the other hand, I recognize the book he has written represented a major risk: to argue for uncertainty and identify faith-based deception in oneself and in the state was apostasy.
Several examples nail this yes/but rhetoric of Tolstoy’s bristling hostility: “To comprehend the truth one must not stand apart, and in order not to stand apart one must love and accept what one may not agree with”; “In the Mass the most important words for me were: ‘Let us love one another of one mind …’ The following words, ‘We believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,’ I omitted because I could not understand them”; “How often I envied the peasants for their illiteracy and lack of education. The statements of faith, which for me produced nonsense, for them produced nothing false.” And,
[T]he more I began to be imbued with these truths [Christian dogma] I was studying and the more they became the foundation of my life, the more burdensome and painful these conflicts became and the sharper became the dividing line between what I didn’t understand and what couldn’t be understood except by lying to myself.
We hear an almost effortless aversion to faith in these quotations (truths are “conflicts”). We also hear (“except by lying to myself”) how much the Orthodox Church, whose religious audacities are “interwoven by the thinnest of threads with lies,” repulses him.
Indeed, in the final pages of Confession, Tolstoy states that those “teachings of faith,” which have enraged him and to which he has submitted, cannot be true. “But where did the falsehood come from,” he writes, “and where did the truth come from? Both falsehood and truth had been handed down by what is called the church. Both falsehood and truth are contained in tradition, in the so-called sacred tradition and holy writ.” The only alternative is to drop out of organized religion, which Tolstoy will do, while his anti-Orthodox screeds will mount up — another way was via the privately circulating book A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology — before the church excommunicates him in 1901.
In 2013, Peter Carson’s translations of Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilyich were published in one volume, from which I’ve been quoting. In her introduction, Mary Beard raises the problem any life-writer faces when her subject is turning personal faith into textual description. “[A]utobiography is never quite transparent,” Beard writes, “and […] first-person spiritual memoirs are always partly constructions — retrospective and simplifying fictions imposed on the confusing stream of memories and on intellectual doubts and dilemmas.” That’s true of any memoir: the writing subdues and revamps the rawness of life. Beard’s view, however, doesn’t capture the unique quality of Tolstoy’s work. With Tolstoy, the core story is his confusion, his grappling with what’s unresolved, his placing “doubts and dilemmas” at the center of his soul’s inquiry. He’s trying not to simplify or fictionalize his faith-crumbling point of view: he is confessing the trauma of his spiritual crisis. That’s why he’s writing. This is nothing like Augustine’s hang-ups with sin, which in the Confessions lead him shamefully and self-loathingly to accede to God’s plan. If anything, Tolstoy is contending with his own unexamined life in Christianity, and it’s that which is making him so ornery or, if you like, a nonfictional Tolstoyan character.
The real issue, I think, is rhetorical: how does one persuade others of what one believes without listing unevidenced expository statements, whether agnostic or affirmed, which end up sounding simplistic, though they may not be simplistic at all? I like Robert Jensen’s tack in Arguing for Our Lives: “[W]hile faith experiences can be described to others, and patterns in faith experiences can be evaluated, a faith experience is not evidence in the sense we use that term in intellectual life — it can’t be replicated or presented to others to examine.” Faith is opinion, not fact. It is wished for, not verified. Christ was born of a virgin, did not die, and was resurrected? Just believe it. Once you do, these feel like facts, making emotional sense. Imagine there’s a videotape of the resurrection, for instance. We see the body, soul on board, leave the tomb together; the soul’s separation comes in a later “Caught on Camera” moment. But there isn’t any videotape — which is the point. There is only the scriptural claim. It’s why there’s only a scriptural claim. If you accept it, you accept two things: one, that the Immaculate Conception “can’t be replicated or presented to others to examine,” and two, such a truth is wholly a province of text.
Which, again, is not fact. But a reader and writer like Tolstoy or like us is highly susceptible to believing it, because it is written down — and to disbelieving it or, at least, questioning it, by way of the very writing with which we interrogate the validity of beliefs in the first place.
Testaments of common faith, ritualized in human ceremony and endowed in textual statements, take on the strange actuality of a religious experience. Thus, one’s doctrine can be one’s experience. Muslims need only say, “There is only one God and Allah is his name,” and you’re in. Christians need to say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior,” and you’re in. What are you “in”? You are in the secure club of the people who have asserted the creed. In fact, the most secure bond of the tribe is its reliance on religious language. In Confession, Tolstoy’s great insight is that when he himself had to assert Orthodox creeds, he couldn’t turn such statements into religious experience. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief. He had to speak out and write against any dogma he couldn’t practice. Exploring the enigma of religious language — that what you say is true because you assert it and you believe it — led Tolstoy to, in a sense, give up on literature, though not entirely. Fiction couldn’t assuage his spiritual dryness. But anti-religious and pro-spiritual polemics, his forte as a writer for the rest of his life, offered a tonic to the most vexatious questions about how to live.
V.
Here’s the writerly difference between Augustine and Tolstoy, separated by more than 14 centuries: Augustine exsanguinates his body of sin until he aligns with Christian teaching, over-loathing himself to be overcompensated by God’s love. Tolstoy wrestles with Christian discourse and rejects much of it in favor of his own salvational plan. He will be a better man when he serves the poor, abnegates attachment, and adopts peasant deprivations, many abject, some unattainable — but so be it. These values culminate in one that he himself creates: spiritual self-reliance. Though he’s salvaged Christ’s call to social justice, Tolstoy is convinced that he is the originator of his post-Christian beliefs. If others follow suit, they often do so because of the writer’s textual prowess. It is an odd by-product of any religious confession — the idea that autobiographers are promulgating a reformed path for likeminded readers or adepts (think Gandhi or Deepak Chopra) because they themselves have refined the faith, made it more workable in the contemporary world.
For life-writers, Tolstoy offers existential scrutiny of religion; like Kierkegaard, he is a pioneer in this “field.” He rejects the package: a church, a religion, and the political system that underpins it. His is a writerly means to spiritual understanding: the author, ever-free, ever-seeking, ever-burdening himself, denies that any other source can change him. In effect, he spiritualizes himself. As such, Tolstoy births a primitive or nascent or proto-subgenre of the memoir, life-writing whose purpose is to lead the self away from its own and the world’s deceptions. The self on the page knows. Sometimes that self knows best. Not God. Not Jesus. Not the Bible. Not the clergy. The “I” I create via the writing.
Perhaps, you say, this skirts history and community and tradition, and thus is deeply flawed. But the authority of religious autobiography would need no Tolstoyan reformation had the form ensouled the values of the writer’s inner authority. Today, with the memoir explosion and its focus on narrative self-disclosure (mixing strategies of scenic fiction with those of nonfiction discourse), we have new ways for autobiographers to enact their religious and spiritual quandaries. There are more than just formal reasons for this change.
In one sense, Tolstoy’s imperative-driven form — listen to me confess — has had scant legacy, if any at all, in European and American literature. For the most part, literary writers have found religious confession irrelevant — because most writers and artists of the past century and a half have viewed Christian life, belief, and tradition as unrewarding, to say the least. Excepting the (very) Catholic Thomas Merton and the pan-religionist Alan Watts, in the United States we’ve had few writerly souls bent by the ferocity of a Leo Tolstoy. Indeed, some of the best writing on religion and spirituality has been unrelentingly critical or disestablishing of traditional faith. While beloved, C. S. Lewis’s many books on Christianity, including his religious autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), are works of pious Christianity, which is, in many ways, a ship that has sailed into the sunset. Much to Lewis’s consternation, the foundational writers of the last two centuries — Paine, Whitman, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Twain, Russell, Camus — have been anti-religious or nonreligious in the extreme. Despite Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, and Anne Lamott in the United States and Roger Scruton and Don Cupitt in England, Christian themes are moribund, like coal deposits in Wyoming. There but unexcavated.
In our time, spiritual and nonreligious memoirists embrace doubt and disbelief. For them, remaining in doubt is not a hostile act, but a way to unlock the numinous, parlay the transcendent, in the writing life of the author. This would not be incongruent to Tolstoy, who, for the most part, killed off the religious autobiography. For contemporary writers, the spiritual is that which wrestles itself free from religion to become an act of self-reclamation, and perhaps of cultural reclamation as well. Each body that comes into the world comes in with a soul, intact. An Edenic unity. Under no prior system. Despite the parents’ wishes or those of the state. What is the moral geography of this individual’s inner life? That’s the door in each of us Tolstoy pushed open.
¤
Critic, memoirist, and essayist, Thomas Larson is the author of three books: The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. Larson teaches in the MFA Program at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. His website is www.thomaslarson.com.
Leo Tolstoy and the Origins of Spiritual Memoir
By Thomas Larson
JANUARY 13, 2017
I.
TWO THINGS ARE TRUE about Leo Tolstoy in 1879. First, he had mostly given up on fiction, having published his two titanic novels, War and Peace and Anna Karenina. The latter book exhausted him physically and morally: not long after its appearance, he termed his saga of adultery “an abomination.” He found novel writing to be a poor substitute for confronting religious issues and his existential lot. Second, because of his early literary acclaim and the immoral lifestyle it had spawned and enabled, he was miserable. He was so ashamed of himself that post-Karenina his ambivalent atheism collapsed and he sought a new relationship to the “truth.” He abdicated the throne of novelist and took up the mantle of religious critic — on the side of Christianity and against it.
Raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, Tolstoy lost his religion at 18. After a life of debauchery, in his early 50s, he wanted religion — or some source of intellectual security — back. In 1882, he published his Confession, a retrospective analysis of the previous five years in which his midlife crisis of faith unbalanced his literary and philosophical bearing. It is among the oddest of Christian tell-alls, a treatise searching for its own focal truth. Throughout, he hungers for spiritual fortitude: “Is there any meaning in my life that wouldn’t be destroyed by the death that inevitably awaits me?” Readers note that the title has no “a” or “the” attached. (There are no articles in Russian, but this particular absence in English is meaningful.) The singular noun by itself emphasizes its currency.
Early on in the book, he asserts, in defiance, that “Christian teaching plays no part in life; one never comes across it in one’s relations with others and one never has to deal with it in one’s own life.” He pegs believers as “stupid, cruel, and immoral people who think themselves very important.” He tags unbelievers as the finest people he knows: they have “[i]ntelligence, honesty, uprightness, goodness of heart, and morality.” He renounces religion in favor of “reading and thinking” — in essence, reason — and recalls that five years prior “my only real faith […] was a faith in self-perfection.”
Of course, reason means progress, and progress, for an egoist like Tolstoy, entails an unchecked liberality in one’s behaviors. At this, the young Tolstoy, an aristocrat and braggart, more than excelled. Here’s part of his resume:
I killed people in war, I challenged people to duels in order to kill them, I lost at cards, I consumed the labor of peasants, I punished them, I fornicated, I deceived. Lies, theft, adultery of every kind, drunkenness, violence, murder. … There was no crime I did not commit, and for all this my contemporaries praised me and thought me a relatively moral man, as they still do.
But the hyper-observant and self-obsessed Tolstoy suffers, despite his ego, a debilitating paranoia. He believes that people ridicule him because of his alcoholic, adulterous, and arrogant excesses. He has often imagined he’s dying: the darkness is drawing close, and he must find a purpose, because soon, for him, “nothing will remain but stink and worms.” (The death-obsessed Russian lived another 30 years after Confession.) At times, despair clings to his words like a rose vine: “You can only live as long as you’re drunk with life; but when you sober up, you can’t help but see that all this is just a fraud, and a stupid fraud. Precisely that: there’s nothing even amusing or witty about it; it’s simply cruel and stupid.” He says he doesn’t know why the universe exists. He is tortured by the question. He wants it answered; he can’t bear living in an untended and unintended cosmos.
By mid-book, Tolstoy’s searching starts to change — not just his focus but his sensibility. To unburden his longing, he quotes Bible passages, an Indian sage, and nuggets from the saints and the martyrs, honoring what he said earlier were useless “teachings of faith.” He wonders if to feel secure all we need is the wisdom of the ancients. These teachings have, he argues, lasted this long. His disclosures work him into a lather, and he declares that a pure belief in reason, without room for God as ultimate mystery, leads to insanity and suicide. A worrywart, Tolstoy plunges on with the tone of a querulous depressive. Moreover, he shifts, as it suits his gain, the blame for who should tow his anguish: from pagan nihilists to scientific rationalists to Orthodox dogmatists to jurisprudent bureaucrats — these last, the Ivan Ilyiches of the world. The only blameless one, he decides, is he who lives as Jesus lived. And yet, he counters, who can? It’s impossible.
Tolstoy decides that no faith is truer than the Christian peasant’s, whose “irrational knowledge” paves the road to happiness. Irrational knowledge is faith, he posits. Peasants should know. They are (though he aspires to join up, Tolstoy is definitely not one of them) the “great mass of people, the whole of mankind” — the nonindividuated mass, whom he lauds but who also rise, in his characterization, no higher than type. Uniformly, he writes in Chapter VIII, they believe God is “one and three,” father, son, spirit, “creation in six days, devils and angels and everything I couldn’t accept as long as I didn’t go mad.” That odd admission, with its tortuous grammar and emphatic final clause — as long as I didn’t go mad — is a performative leap away from his natural inclinations. He needs to believe something that transcends his inherent, incessant self-questioning, and he decides to do so. For him, peasant certainty is true because he, the great literary arbiter of truth, has arrived at it, not because Christianity has told him to accept it.
II.
Thus, with a thunderclap, Tolstoy’s short and intensely self-defensive polemic turns into a classic Christian conversion story, worthy of Augustine’s tale of tribulation. After weighing all the possibilities, mad or not, Tolstoy drapes the crucifix around his neck. As one of his best biographers, Martine de Courcel, writes, he has, rather Christianly, “admitted his sins and proclaimed his faith.” Saved, he declares that his actions from now on will embody his intentions — he will attend church, participate in sacraments, live frugally, leave his bourgeois habits, love God and peasant equally.
But wait. Opening faith’s creaking door hardly calms his restlessness. Though Tolstoy says he erred “not so much because I thought wrongly as because I lived badly,” the insight is not enough. He cannot settle his thoughts. Try as he might, Tolstoy, a self-cleansing fanatic, cannot rid himself of his deviant past or his disputatious nature. He can neither forgive himself nor stop analyzing the demands of Christian belief. As long as he keeps writing pages, he’s not sure about Christ as savior or about divine intervention. His belief demands more and more tuning.
The faith wedge splits him in two, before and after this, his so-called religious rebirth. Without God, Tolstoy has lived a life of pain and deceit. He declares he is now, with God, living a life free from such pain. But that’s too easy. Resolving each query brings another, and each time he squirms. De Courcel faults him. She writes that in “abandoning the dogmas of the Church, he thought he was freeing himself; in fact, he was about to become captive to the dogmas of his own making.” This is Tolstoy, the self-disappointment artist, his pattern, his personality. He confesses and converts — that is, he purifies religion down to what he finds valuable and cries, “Eureka!” But then he admits, often right away, that the conversion’s center cannot hold. Statement and counterstatement cancel each other out.
I think the critical point here is that “the dogmas of [our] own making” come to writers because personal writing is testimony — what I affirm or doubt can become as scriptural as a so-called sacred text. The problem with religious autobiography before Tolstoy is that it had to be based on Biblical reasoning (alas, not a clear field of study) and, apparently, required the author’s God-directed epiphany mid-confession. And yet almost all autobiographers of faith after Count Leo realize they are primarily writers of personal, not religious, revelation.
The final five chapters of Confession embroil us in his hemming-and-hawing conversion and deconversion. Tolstoy sides with Christianity only to oppose it, again and again, the combat all his, faith dispersing like a noble gas — free, loose, unbonded. What’s remarkable in Tolstoy is not his conversion but the way he evaluates his confession while he’s confessing.
Tolstoy’s energy comes from his questions, which often crowd out or undermine his answers. His telling has power, though it’s not the power we get from the dramatic narrative of a novel or a contemporary memoir. It’s something else. There’s little attempt in Confession to show action or deed, no scenes, no reportage, no exchanges with others, and few stories. Analysis trumps narrative. And yet it’s not all rhetoric. There is a dialectic — a reasoned discussion in which Tolstoy debates himself. What’s going on is a mélange of preaching virtues to the reader and arguing vices with himself, the self who can’t figure out what he should believe.
III.
To illustrate his mastery of fictional drama, consider Tolstoy’s novella, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, written just after Confession. The character of Ilyich comes vividly to life via thought and action: we hear about the offstage pettiness of his family and the bureaucratic sycophants who eagerly await his death and we participate in moments of tenderness between him and a loyal, pure-hearted peasant during Ilyich’s final months. For the most intense scenes, we’re inside Ilyich’s head as he seethes and self-deludes, undone by his illness and repulsed by his approaching death. Nothing tempers his fervid anxiety:
He wept for his helplessness, for his horrible loneliness, for people’s cruelty, for God’s cruelty, for God’s absence.
“Why have you done all this? Why have you brought me here? Why, why do you torment me so horribly?”
He didn’t expect an answer, but he also wept because there wasn’t and couldn’t be an answer. The pain increased again but he didn’t move or call anyone. He said to himself, “More, go on, beat me! But why? What have I done to you, why?”
The message is that fiction like Ivan Ilyich possesses a verisimilitude to life we recognize and an actual character who breaks down and dies, slowly, through story-time, while the nonfiction Confession shapes the verisimilitude of thought, the analytical riding on didactic summary and blatant assertion. Both types of writing (they can be equally emotional and purgative) feel necessary from Tolstoy — while exhausting one form, he seems to invite the other.
Narrative is what I find missing in Confession, scenes and torments from Tolstoy’s life, which, of course, got into his fiction and which, for better or worse, I’ve grown accustomed to reading in the contemporary memoir. If only he had shown us the depth of his suicidal despair, the effect on himself and others when he cheated them in gambling, when he felt hollowed out by his adultery (“of every kind”), when he killed a man in a duel — in short, narrative drama might have been more persuasive than exposition. As a result, we might have sympathized with the moral disease he suffers in Confession — as we do with Ivan Ilyich. (And as we do with Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov.) I sympathize not with the meaning of Ilyich’s struggle; I sympathize with the felt struggle itself. For example, in a moment of physical pain (he doesn’t know he has cancer), he says:
It’s not a case of the appendix or of the kidney, but of life … and death. Yes, I had life and now it’s passing, passing, and I can’t hold it back. That’s it. Why deceive oneself. Isn’t it obvious to everyone but myself that I am dying, and it’s only a question of the number of weeks, days — maybe now.
I feel the fact of Ilyich’s dying terrorize him. And that terror expresses itself, in Tolstoy’s handling, as a contentious belief Ilyich cannot shake. As long as we are alive, death cannot transform us. There is no death, an idea Tolstoy or any of us want to believe. It doesn’t matter that we are deceiving ourselves; we need to avoid death’s psychic pain. But Ilyich is bursting with psychic pain. So, too, we feel, is Tolstoy himself. Religions say there’s no end, but we know there is. Despite our belief in a resurrected Christ and the immortality we are promised, the sight of death insists that death is final. Tolstoy refused to mute the existential turmoil of his literary character. And if Ilyich couldn’t settle that turmoil, neither could Tolstoy. His way forward was to shift forms and go deeper in his next venture, a play, The Power of Darkness.
IV.
The more I study Confession, the more apparent Tolstoy’s conflicts become. (He becomes less a religious author than a spiritual one — less dogmatic and more interesting to read as he interrogates his leaky faith.) On one hand, I could fault Tolstoy, in this book, for abandoning the drama of narrative propulsion. On the other hand, I recognize the book he has written represented a major risk: to argue for uncertainty and identify faith-based deception in oneself and in the state was apostasy.
Several examples nail this yes/but rhetoric of Tolstoy’s bristling hostility: “To comprehend the truth one must not stand apart, and in order not to stand apart one must love and accept what one may not agree with”; “In the Mass the most important words for me were: ‘Let us love one another of one mind …’ The following words, ‘We believe in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,’ I omitted because I could not understand them”; “How often I envied the peasants for their illiteracy and lack of education. The statements of faith, which for me produced nonsense, for them produced nothing false.” And,
[T]he more I began to be imbued with these truths [Christian dogma] I was studying and the more they became the foundation of my life, the more burdensome and painful these conflicts became and the sharper became the dividing line between what I didn’t understand and what couldn’t be understood except by lying to myself.
We hear an almost effortless aversion to faith in these quotations (truths are “conflicts”). We also hear (“except by lying to myself”) how much the Orthodox Church, whose religious audacities are “interwoven by the thinnest of threads with lies,” repulses him.
Indeed, in the final pages of Confession, Tolstoy states that those “teachings of faith,” which have enraged him and to which he has submitted, cannot be true. “But where did the falsehood come from,” he writes, “and where did the truth come from? Both falsehood and truth had been handed down by what is called the church. Both falsehood and truth are contained in tradition, in the so-called sacred tradition and holy writ.” The only alternative is to drop out of organized religion, which Tolstoy will do, while his anti-Orthodox screeds will mount up — another way was via the privately circulating book A Criticism of Dogmatic Theology — before the church excommunicates him in 1901.
In 2013, Peter Carson’s translations of Confession and The Death of Ivan Ilyich were published in one volume, from which I’ve been quoting. In her introduction, Mary Beard raises the problem any life-writer faces when her subject is turning personal faith into textual description. “[A]utobiography is never quite transparent,” Beard writes, “and […] first-person spiritual memoirs are always partly constructions — retrospective and simplifying fictions imposed on the confusing stream of memories and on intellectual doubts and dilemmas.” That’s true of any memoir: the writing subdues and revamps the rawness of life. Beard’s view, however, doesn’t capture the unique quality of Tolstoy’s work. With Tolstoy, the core story is his confusion, his grappling with what’s unresolved, his placing “doubts and dilemmas” at the center of his soul’s inquiry. He’s trying not to simplify or fictionalize his faith-crumbling point of view: he is confessing the trauma of his spiritual crisis. That’s why he’s writing. This is nothing like Augustine’s hang-ups with sin, which in the Confessions lead him shamefully and self-loathingly to accede to God’s plan. If anything, Tolstoy is contending with his own unexamined life in Christianity, and it’s that which is making him so ornery or, if you like, a nonfictional Tolstoyan character.
The real issue, I think, is rhetorical: how does one persuade others of what one believes without listing unevidenced expository statements, whether agnostic or affirmed, which end up sounding simplistic, though they may not be simplistic at all? I like Robert Jensen’s tack in Arguing for Our Lives: “[W]hile faith experiences can be described to others, and patterns in faith experiences can be evaluated, a faith experience is not evidence in the sense we use that term in intellectual life — it can’t be replicated or presented to others to examine.” Faith is opinion, not fact. It is wished for, not verified. Christ was born of a virgin, did not die, and was resurrected? Just believe it. Once you do, these feel like facts, making emotional sense. Imagine there’s a videotape of the resurrection, for instance. We see the body, soul on board, leave the tomb together; the soul’s separation comes in a later “Caught on Camera” moment. But there isn’t any videotape — which is the point. There is only the scriptural claim. It’s why there’s only a scriptural claim. If you accept it, you accept two things: one, that the Immaculate Conception “can’t be replicated or presented to others to examine,” and two, such a truth is wholly a province of text.
Which, again, is not fact. But a reader and writer like Tolstoy or like us is highly susceptible to believing it, because it is written down — and to disbelieving it or, at least, questioning it, by way of the very writing with which we interrogate the validity of beliefs in the first place.
Testaments of common faith, ritualized in human ceremony and endowed in textual statements, take on the strange actuality of a religious experience. Thus, one’s doctrine can be one’s experience. Muslims need only say, “There is only one God and Allah is his name,” and you’re in. Christians need to say, “I believe that Jesus Christ is my personal savior,” and you’re in. What are you “in”? You are in the secure club of the people who have asserted the creed. In fact, the most secure bond of the tribe is its reliance on religious language. In Confession, Tolstoy’s great insight is that when he himself had to assert Orthodox creeds, he couldn’t turn such statements into religious experience. He couldn’t suspend his disbelief. He had to speak out and write against any dogma he couldn’t practice. Exploring the enigma of religious language — that what you say is true because you assert it and you believe it — led Tolstoy to, in a sense, give up on literature, though not entirely. Fiction couldn’t assuage his spiritual dryness. But anti-religious and pro-spiritual polemics, his forte as a writer for the rest of his life, offered a tonic to the most vexatious questions about how to live.
V.
Here’s the writerly difference between Augustine and Tolstoy, separated by more than 14 centuries: Augustine exsanguinates his body of sin until he aligns with Christian teaching, over-loathing himself to be overcompensated by God’s love. Tolstoy wrestles with Christian discourse and rejects much of it in favor of his own salvational plan. He will be a better man when he serves the poor, abnegates attachment, and adopts peasant deprivations, many abject, some unattainable — but so be it. These values culminate in one that he himself creates: spiritual self-reliance. Though he’s salvaged Christ’s call to social justice, Tolstoy is convinced that he is the originator of his post-Christian beliefs. If others follow suit, they often do so because of the writer’s textual prowess. It is an odd by-product of any religious confession — the idea that autobiographers are promulgating a reformed path for likeminded readers or adepts (think Gandhi or Deepak Chopra) because they themselves have refined the faith, made it more workable in the contemporary world.
For life-writers, Tolstoy offers existential scrutiny of religion; like Kierkegaard, he is a pioneer in this “field.” He rejects the package: a church, a religion, and the political system that underpins it. His is a writerly means to spiritual understanding: the author, ever-free, ever-seeking, ever-burdening himself, denies that any other source can change him. In effect, he spiritualizes himself. As such, Tolstoy births a primitive or nascent or proto-subgenre of the memoir, life-writing whose purpose is to lead the self away from its own and the world’s deceptions. The self on the page knows. Sometimes that self knows best. Not God. Not Jesus. Not the Bible. Not the clergy. The “I” I create via the writing.
Perhaps, you say, this skirts history and community and tradition, and thus is deeply flawed. But the authority of religious autobiography would need no Tolstoyan reformation had the form ensouled the values of the writer’s inner authority. Today, with the memoir explosion and its focus on narrative self-disclosure (mixing strategies of scenic fiction with those of nonfiction discourse), we have new ways for autobiographers to enact their religious and spiritual quandaries. There are more than just formal reasons for this change.
In one sense, Tolstoy’s imperative-driven form — listen to me confess — has had scant legacy, if any at all, in European and American literature. For the most part, literary writers have found religious confession irrelevant — because most writers and artists of the past century and a half have viewed Christian life, belief, and tradition as unrewarding, to say the least. Excepting the (very) Catholic Thomas Merton and the pan-religionist Alan Watts, in the United States we’ve had few writerly souls bent by the ferocity of a Leo Tolstoy. Indeed, some of the best writing on religion and spirituality has been unrelentingly critical or disestablishing of traditional faith. While beloved, C. S. Lewis’s many books on Christianity, including his religious autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955), are works of pious Christianity, which is, in many ways, a ship that has sailed into the sunset. Much to Lewis’s consternation, the foundational writers of the last two centuries — Paine, Whitman, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, Marx, Twain, Russell, Camus — have been anti-religious or nonreligious in the extreme. Despite Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, Marilynne Robinson, and Anne Lamott in the United States and Roger Scruton and Don Cupitt in England, Christian themes are moribund, like coal deposits in Wyoming. There but unexcavated.
In our time, spiritual and nonreligious memoirists embrace doubt and disbelief. For them, remaining in doubt is not a hostile act, but a way to unlock the numinous, parlay the transcendent, in the writing life of the author. This would not be incongruent to Tolstoy, who, for the most part, killed off the religious autobiography. For contemporary writers, the spiritual is that which wrestles itself free from religion to become an act of self-reclamation, and perhaps of cultural reclamation as well. Each body that comes into the world comes in with a soul, intact. An Edenic unity. Under no prior system. Despite the parents’ wishes or those of the state. What is the moral geography of this individual’s inner life? That’s the door in each of us Tolstoy pushed open.
¤
Critic, memoirist, and essayist, Thomas Larson is the author of three books: The Sanctuary of Illness: A Memoir of Heart Disease, The Saddest Music Ever Written: The Story of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings,” and The Memoir and the Memoirist: Reading and Writing Personal Narrative. Larson teaches in the MFA Program at Ashland University, Ashland, Ohio. His website is www.thomaslarson.com.
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