Perfection

It is impossible for man to attain the perfection of God, but he must constantly make efforts to draw ever closer to it. This is the path that has been prescribed for the human race since ancient times. It is a thorny and difficult path because of the obstacles encountered at every step. But it is a consoling and joyful path because of the fruits it bears, the last of which is brotherly peace—the kingdom of peace and love on earth.

Then the final great unity will come. But unity is nothing other than the merging of each person’s life with the life of all, and therefore there is no other means to achieve this unity than renunciation of oneself insofar as unity requires it—the voluntary rejection of everything that divides and isolates. In this lies the entire teaching of the Gospel. It is all about mercy, about universal love that includes God and all His creatures. And in all God’s creatures, everything changes primarily in this direction. From self-love flow pride, greed, sensual desires, envy, anger, and hostility; from the sense of shared life, the foundation of which is God, are born gentleness, self-denial, inner peace—pure joys that transform earthly sufferings into undisturbed blessedness.

But remember: the further you advance along this path, the greater the obstacles you will encounter from the children of this age, the subjects of the king of the past. They will hate you and persecute you—drag you into courts and cast you into prisons in order to stifle good in its infancy, that good whose seeds you are scattering around you—in order to continue the evil they serve. Strengthen yourselves in your hearts, fortify yourselves in courage so as not to fall in this sacred struggle. Bequeath this struggle as the most cherished part of your inheritance to those who follow you. Rest will come after the battle; but the battle will continue until the day when it will be said: God has conquered, His kingdom is established on earth, and His children have a homeland.

—Lamennais

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The moral law—“love your neighbor as yourself,” as stated in the Gospel—will not pass away until it is fulfilled. This is a law as inevitable as the law of gravity, the law of chemical bonds, and all other physical laws.

One might suppose that even physical laws once wavered, were not universal to all natural phenomena, and were still being worked out, but eventually became necessity. The same is true of the moral law: it is being worked out by us.

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The nearest purpose of life in the world, as it appears to a reasonable person, is the unification of all beings in the world. At first, only some people, as they increasingly submit to the law of reason, will understand that the good of life is achieved not by each being striving for its own personal good, but by each being striving for the good of all others; and later, all other beings will understand this more and more, or will be led to this understanding.

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Translator’s Notes:

• The reading is attributed primarily to Lamennais in the Jubilee Edition index. Tolstoy selected and edited this passage from Lamennais’s writings.
• The final two paragraphs (after the Lamennais attribution) are Tolstoy’s own additions that extend the reading’s themes.
• “Children of this age” and “king of the past” are Lamennais’s terms for those attached to the old order who resist spiritual progress.
• The phrase about the moral law “not passing away until fulfilled” echoes Matthew 5:18, connecting Lamennais’s thought to the Sermon on the Mount.