ON LIFE AND ESSAYS ON RELIGION BY LEO TOLST6Y Translated with an Introduction by AYLMER MAUDE D. P. R. 1. cc. No. OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS LONDON HUMPHREY MILFORD LEO TOLSTOY Born, Yasnaya Polyana, Tula August 28 old style September 9, n. s., 1828 Died, Astap6vo, Riazdn November 9 old style November 22, n. s., 1910 I 0n Life was first published in 1887, and the essays between 1894. and 1909. In The Worlds Classics Mr. Aylmer Maudes translation was first published in 1934. 7.-00 PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN CONTENTS INTRODUCTION BY AYLMER MAUDE . vii ON LIFE. 1887 i RELIGION AND MORALITY. 1894 . . 168 REASON AND RELIGION. 1894 . . 199 HOW TO READ THE GOSPELS. 1896 . 205 PREFACE TO THE CHRISTIAN TEACHING 1 . 1898 . . . . . .209 A REPLY TO THE SYNODS EDICT OF EXCOM MUNICATION. 1901 . . . .214 WHAT IS RELIGION 1902 . . .226 AN APPEAL TO THE CLERGY. 1302 . . 282 THE RESTORATION OF HELL. 1903 . . 309 CHURCH AND STATE. 1904 . . .331 THE TEACHING OF JESUS. 1909 . . 347 INDEX 410 INTRODUCTION ON LIFE is Tolst6ys statement of the conclusions he had reached by 1887 after ten years devoted to thought and study on religion. No one acquainted with his life and works can reasonably doubt - that he was one of the frankest and sincerest men who ever lived, but if further evidence on that point were needed, this work would supply it, considering the circumstances under which it was written. By a careful study of the Church creeds Tolstoy had reached the conclusion that they consist of meaningless verbiage and incredible statements which afford no real guidance for life. An even more intense and prolonged study of the Gospels convinced him that the understanding of life held by Jesus was reasonable, andaffords the best possible guidance for life. But it seemed to him that the Church, by declaring the sixty-six books in the Bible to be all equally inspired by God, had reduced them to one dead level, so that the precepts of Jesus are presented as no more divine than the legends of the Old Testament, or the record of the cruel deeds of a jealous Jehovah. More than that, he was convinced that the essential teaching of Jesus has been twisted to link it up with the Jewish Scriptures, and with records interspersed with miracles to attract the belief of an evil and adulterous generation seeking after a sign, and has been misinterpreted in order to secure authority for a Church which when persecuting its rivals has not scrupled to slay thousands of human beings. He therefore defines the Church as power in the hands of certain men. At the very peak of literary success he devoted viii INTRODUCTION ten years of his life to this study of religion, and to clarify his conclusions wrote the works contained in this and another volume, well knowing that their publication would be prohibited, and that even if clandestinely circulated they would call down on him the ridicule of the advanced section of Russian society, then for the most part under the influence of the materialistic philosophy which, following on the success of Darwins teaching, expected ere long to be able to explain man by mechanics and demon strate the senselessness of all religion. To them the fact that the author of War and Peace seriously occupied himself with religion seemed almost to indicate that he had taken leave of his senses. On the other hand the Orthodox Russo-Greek Church, under the guidance of Pobedon6stsev, the lay Headof the Most Holy Synod, actively persecuted dis senters, suppressed books it disapproved of, and though, after some hesitation, it refrained from physically molesting Tolstoy, he knew that he was exposing himself and his friends to danger and incurring the grave displeasure of the authorities of Church and State. He also incurred the dis approval and hostility of his wife, to whom the favour of the powers-that-be was of much concern...

Vale of Tears: New Essays in Religion and Reconstruction offers a window into the exciting work being done by historians, social scientists, and scholars of religious studies on the epoch of Reconstruction. A time of both peril and promise, Reconstruction in America became a cauldron of transformation and change. This collection argues that religion provided the idiom and symbol, as often the very substance, of those changes. The authors of this collection examine how African Americans and white Southerners, New England Abolitionists and former Confederate soldiers, Catholics and Protestants on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line brought their sense of the sacred into collaboration and conflict. Together, these essays mark an important new departure in a still-contested period of American history. Interdisciplinary in scope and content, it promises to challenge many of the traditional parameters of Reconstruction historiography. The range of contributors to the project, including Gaines Foster and Paul Harvey, will draw a great deal of attention from Southern historians, literary scholars, and scholars of American religion.

Drawing on a deep knowledge of history and human affairs, the essays pinpoint the key issues facing Christians and non-believers in determining the future of modern democratic life

Michael Oakeshott's interest in religion and theology was especially prominent in his essays of the 1920s and 1930s. This book consists of four important unpublished pieces, together with six essays by Oakeshott that originally appeared in remote and inaccessible journals. Much of the collection was written early in his career and reveals not only Oakeshott's initial intellectual preoccupations but the idiosyncratic nature of his religious outlook and the moral convictions that governed his own life. The opening essay, "Religion and the World," which dates from 1925, reflects his view of what it means to live "religiously" in the world and prefigures arguments later elaborated in Experience and Its Modes. All the essays probe the meaning of words commonly--but often inappropriately--used in the discussion of political life. Thus Oakeshott explores meanings of religion and worldliness, society and sociality, authority and the state, political activity, and the character of political ideas and political philosophy. His writing is persuasive and compelling, and the essays are distinguished by great clarity and a genuinely philosophic spirit. In a substantial introduction, Timothy Fuller provides the first full explanation of Oakeshott's religious ideas, setting them within their philosophical and political contexts. He shows how, over a thirty-year period, Oakeshott elaborated the implications of Experience and Its Modes, worked out his political theory as summarized in Rationalism in Politics, and gradually assembled his own philosophical account of the ideal that European civilization had made concrete in history--civil association under the rule of law--and to which he gave definitive expression in On Human Contact. Timothy Fuller is Dean of the College, Colorado College, and editor of The Voice of Liberal Learning: Michael Oakeshott on Education.

Essays in Religion and Morality brings together a dozen papers of varying length to these two themes so crucial to the life and thought of William James. Reflections on the two subjects permeate, first, James's presentation of his father's Literary Remains; second, his writings on human immortality and the relation between reason and faith; third, his two memorial pieces, one on Robert Gould Shaw and the other on Emerson; fourth, his consideration of the energies and powers of human life; and last, his writings on the possibilities of peace, especially as found in his famous essay "The Moral Equivalent of War." These speeches and essays were written over a period of twenty-four years. The fact that James did not collect and publish them himself in a single volume does not reflect on their intrinsic worth or on their importance in James's philosophical work, since they include some of the best known and most influential of his writings. All the essays, throughout their varied subject matter, are consistently and characteristically Jamesian in the freshness of their attack on the problems and failings of humankind and in their steady faith in human powers.

The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Contemporary American Fiction examines four postmodern texts whose authors play with the material conventions of "the book": Joseph McElroy's Plus (1977), Carole Maso's AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula's VAS (2003). By demonstrating how each of these works calls for an affirmative engagement with literature, Flore Chevaillier explores a centrally important issue in the criticism of contemporary fiction. Critics have claimed that experimental literature, in its disruption of conventional story-telling and language uses, resists literary and social customs. While this account is accurate, it stresses what experimental texts respond to more than what they offer. This book proposes a counter-view to this emphasis on the strictly privative character of innovative fictions by examining experimental works' positive ideas and affects, as well as readers' engagement in the formal pleasure of experimentations with image, print, sound, page, orthography, and syntax. Elaborating an erotics of recent innovative literature implies that we engage in the formal pleasure of its experimentations with signifying techniques and with the materiality of their medium. Such engagement provokes a fusion of the reader's senses and the textual material, which invites a redefinition of corporeality as a kind of textual practice.

This volume of essays, written with the authors trademark elegance and wit, tackles subjects such as Action and Contemplation, Religion and Time, Reflections on the Lord's Prayer, and Notes on Zen.

The noted German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel wrote a number of essays that deal directly with religion as a fundamental process in human life. These essays set forth Simmel's mature reflections on religion and its relation to modernity, personality, art, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and science. They also include his views on methods in the study of religion and his thoughts on achieving a broader perspective on religion. Originally published between 1898 and 1918, the last twenty years of Simmel's life, the essays are collected here in English for the first time. The essays provide an excellent picture of the development of the characteristic doctrines of Simmel's thought as applied to religion, based on phenomenological analysis of human experience that emphasizes the subjective dimensions of life.

This volume presents a selection of essays by the late Philip Quinn, one of the world's leading philosophers of religion. Quinn left behind an influential body of work on a wide variety of topics. He was the author of Divine Commands and Moral Requirements (1978) and of more than two hundred papers in philosophy. Fourteen of his best and most influential contributions to the philosophy of religion are gathered here. The papers have been organized around the following topics: religious epistemology, religious ethics, religion and tragic dilemmas, religion and political liberalism, topics in Christian philosophy, and religious diversity.