Homie!
I LOVED Tolstoy's Confession. It really impacted me as a thinker.
What was your opinion of it? (And feel free to give a several-paragraph exegesis if the mood strikes you.) It is certainly in my top ten favorite books.
Ha, I’m not qualified to give an exegesis I’m afraid. I’d have to do some more thinking and probably some more research for that. I came to Tolstoy via War and Peace, and then Anna Karenina. So I’ll start by saying that as a novelist, I consider Tolstoy to be peerless; he is to the novel what Shakespeare is to dramatic verse, even though he did not consider War and Peace to be a novel at all, but something else; it’s not entirely clear what he intended by this observation tbh.
Anyway, the tension he addresses in A Confession is there in the novels; how to intellectually justify the urge to satisfy a spiritual yearning felt deep in the soul? To understand the force of Tolstoy’s personal dilemma, I think it’s important to recognise that the man who wrote War and Peace was a profoundly spiritual person; we are dealing with an artist who was in touch with his soul, and with the God consciousness within. There are several passages in War and Peace that testify to this; perhaps most notably, Prince Andrei’s battlefield epiphany at Borodino.
So A Confession has to be read in that context, I think. Tolstoy’s religiosity was problematic for him, but his spirituality was real, something deeply felt, something he couldn’t live without. And the only avenue he had for exploring that collectively was through the Russian Orthodox Church, which he found riddled with superstition and hypocrisy. So he was in a bind. And of course he couldn’t but be familiar with Nietzsche and your boy Spinoza, but I don’t know how much of an influence they may have been on his thinking. You may be better informed and have something to say about that perhaps?
I value most in the essay, Tolstoy’s observation that science can answer many questions with great accuracy; but that there are questions it cannot even ask, such as “who am I, where am I going, what should I do”; that philosophy addresses all the big questions, but that it cannot answer them with conviction; and that religion offers perhaps the only means of resolving these questions, but at the cost of not inconsiderable intellectual discomfort to the rational man or woman.
