Leo Tolstoy’s Philosophy: Non-Resistance, Christian Anarchism, and Influence on Gandhi

Leo Tolstoy is best known for War and Peace and Anna Karenina, two of the greatest novels ever written. But behind the celebrated author was a troubled soul-a man who, despite fame, wealth, and a large family, found himself on the brink of despair. In his later years, Tolstoy transformed from literary giant to moral philosopher, developing a radical interpretation of Christianity that rejected state violence, denounced private property, and championed non-resistance. His ideas would ripple across continents, most notably shaping the philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi and, through Gandhi, the course of twentieth-century nonviolent resistance movements.

Tolstoy’s spiritual crisis and turn to faith 🔗

By 1880, Leo Tolstoy seemed to have everything-celebrity status, a large estate, a devoted wife, several children, and the promise of literary immortality. Yet he found himself contemplating suicide. In his autobiographical work A Confession, Tolstoy described his existential anguish: he could breathe, eat, and perform daily activities, but felt there was no genuine purpose to any of it. The questions haunted him relentlessly: “What will come of what I am doing today? What will come of my whole life?”

Tolstoy turned to philosophy for answers, studying Socrates, the Buddha, the author of Ecclesiastes, and Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy portrayed human beings as blindly pulsating wills driven by insatiable desires-a view that initially deepened Tolstoy’s nihilism rather than relieving it. Yet Schopenhauer’s idealism also planted seeds that would later help Tolstoy find his way out of the darkness.

What finally rescued Tolstoy was his observation of common peasants. Unlike the intellectuals whose reason led them to despair, ordinary working people found meaning through a simple, irrational faith. Tolstoy came to understand that faith-not the dogmatic religion of the Orthodox Church, but an intuitive knowledge connecting the finite to the infinite-provided the only satisfactory answer to life’s fundamental questions. This realization marked the beginning of his spiritual transformation and his departure from conventional Christianity toward a radical reinterpretation of Jesus’s teachings.

The lineage of Christian non-resistance thinkers 🔗

Tolstoy did not develop his philosophy of non-resistance in isolation. In the opening chapter of The Kingdom of God Is Within You, he acknowledged discovering that Quakers had been preaching similar doctrines for over two centuries. His correspondence with American Quakers after publishing What I Believe revealed a hidden thread of Christian thought that had consistently advocated literal obedience to Jesus’s command to turn the other cheek.

Among those who most deeply influenced Tolstoy was Adin Ballou, an American Universalist minister who spent fifty years writing and preaching on Christian non-resistance. Ballou founded the Hopedale Community in Massachusetts and articulated a comprehensive theory of pacifism in his 1846 work Christian Non-Resistance. Tolstoy was astonished that Ballou’s extensive writings remained largely unknown despite their profound importance. He corresponded with Ballou in the final year of Ballou’s life and even called him the greatest American writer.

William Lloyd Garrison, the famous abolitionist, also shaped Tolstoy’s thinking. Garrison’s 1838 “Declaration of Sentiments” for the New England Non-Resistance Society proclaimed that Christians must withdraw from governments based on violence. Tolstoy additionally drew from the fifteenth-century Bohemian reformer Petr Chelčický, whose work The Net of Faith argued that true Christians could not participate in ruling, soldiering, or owning property. These thinkers formed what Tolstoy saw as a suppressed tradition within Christianity-one that the institutional church had deliberately buried to protect its alliance with state power.

Tolstoy’s core philosophical principles 🔗

Tolstoy’s mature philosophy rested on a distinctive interpretation of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. He understood Jesus’s commandments to love others and abstain from violence as the true essence of Christianity, which had been distorted by churches seeking to maintain their institutional interests. For Tolstoy, the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed were mutually exclusive-one could follow Jesus’s actual teachings or embrace orthodox doctrine, but not both.

Love beyond social boundaries 🔗

Tolstoy distinguished between what he called restrictive social love and limitless Christian love. Social love extends only to family, tribe, or nation-it creates divisions and ultimately leads to conflict. Christian love, by contrast, embraces all humanity without distinction. This universal compassion formed the foundation for his rejection of nationalism, war, and class divisions.

Striving toward divine perfection 🔗

For Tolstoy, life represented a continuous striving toward infinite divine perfection. Human beings could never achieve complete moral purity, but the direction of their effort mattered profoundly. His own awakening came through recognizing that his earlier pursuit of personal perfection-being seen as better than others-had been spiritually barren. True meaning emerged through connection with something transcendent, what he described simply as “God is Life.”

Asceticism and rejection of private property 🔗

Tolstoy believed that overcoming sins like sensuality and ambition required ascetic discipline. He adopted vegetarianism, wore peasant clothing, and insisted on performing manual labour despite his aristocratic status. He renounced his copyrights and tried to give away his property, viewing private ownership as fundamentally unjust. In his analysis, economic exploitation was simply violence in a more subtle form-the accumulation of wealth through taxation and rent represented theft from working people.

The four links in the chain of state violence 🔗

Tolstoy developed a systematic critique of how governments maintain power over their populations. He identified four interconnected methods that form what he called the “chain of violence.”

Intimidation operates through the spectacle of brutal punishment. The state presents itself as sacred and immutable, using prisons, police, and public executions to demonstrate the consequences of disobedience. Tolstoy had personally witnessed a public execution in Paris in 1857, an experience that left him deeply shaken and contributed to his later rejection of state authority.

Corruption functions through taxation, which Tolstoy viewed as systematic robbery. The state extracts wealth from working people and uses it to purchase the loyalty of officials. Those who serve government interests become richer the more submissively they carry out its will, creating a class whose prosperity depends on maintaining the existing system.

Hypnotisation occurs through education and religious indoctrination. State authorities deliberately deceive the masses, promoting patriotic sentiments that destroy any sense of individual moral responsibility. People are conditioned from childhood to accept violence as legitimate when performed by the state and to view their nation’s interests as paramount.

Brutalisation completes the cycle through mandatory military conscription. Citizens are forced to become instruments of violence themselves, transformed into soldiers willing to kill on command. The army then perpetuates intimidation, creating a self-reinforcing system. As Tolstoy summarized it: intimidation, corruption, and hypnotization bring people into a condition where they willingly become soldiers, and the soldiers then enable all three methods to continue.

Tolstoy’s excommunication and unwavering commitment 🔗

Tolstoy’s radical teachings brought him into direct conflict with the Russian Orthodox Church. In 1901, the Church officially excommunicated him for rejecting Jesus’s divinity, denying the sacraments, and challenging ecclesiastical authority. Rather than recanting, Tolstoy continued writing prolifically on Christian anarchism and nonviolence until his death in 1910. His censored works circulated abroad before eventually reaching Russian readers, and communities inspired by his teachings began forming throughout Russia and beyond.

Tolstoy’s direct impact on Gandhi and satyagraha 🔗

Gandhi first encountered The Kingdom of God Is Within You in the 1890s while working as a young lawyer in South Africa. In his autobiography, Gandhi wrote that the book “overwhelmed” him and “left an abiding impression.” He identified it, along with John Ruskin’s Unto This Last and the writings of the poet Raychandbhai, as one of the three most important modern influences on his life.

In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, which argued that India could overthrow British colonial rule not through armed revolt but through love expressed as passive resistance. Gandhi was deeply moved by this letter and sought permission to republish it in Gujarati. This initiated a correspondence between the two men that continued until Tolstoy’s death in November 1910. Tolstoy’s final letter was addressed to Gandhi, praising his work as the practical application of the universal law of love.

In 1910, Gandhi established Tolstoy Farm near Johannesburg, South Africa. This ashram served as headquarters for the satyagraha campaign against discrimination toward Indians in the Transvaal. Named after his spiritual mentor, the farm became a laboratory for Gandhi’s experiments in communal living, nonviolent resistance, and education. The 1,100-acre settlement integrated manual labour with learning and housed approximately eighty-five permanent residents committed to the principles Gandhi had absorbed from Tolstoy.

Gandhi later credited Tolstoy with transforming his approach to resistance. Before reading Tolstoy, Gandhi admitted he had been “a votary of violence.” The Kingdom of God Is Within You eliminated his lack of faith in nonviolence. When asked which world figure had exercised the greatest influence on the twentieth century, Gandhi answered without hesitation: “Tolstoy. He alone.” Gandhi took Tolstoy’s essentially religious philosophy and gave it a mass political base, demonstrating through the Indian independence movement that nonviolent resistance could challenge the mightiest empires.

The lineage continued beyond Gandhi. Martin Luther King Jr. drew inspiration from Gandhi’s success with nonviolent activism, creating a direct connection between Tolstoy’s Christian anarchism and the American civil rights movement. Through this chain of influence-from Adin Ballou to Tolstoy to Gandhi to King-the nineteenth-century doctrine of Christian non-resistance became one of the most powerful political forces of the modern era.

What do you think? Tolstoy argued that governments inherently depend on violence and deception-do you believe his analysis still applies to modern democracies? And can the principle of non-resistance to evil truly work as a political strategy, or does it require exceptional circumstances to succeed?

References

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