L. N. TOLSTOY IN SEARCH OF SPIRITUAL SENSE OF HUMAN

Purpose. To turn to the diaries and journalistic works by Leo Tolstoy, to study the content and method of his religious and ethical search. To doubt the faithfulness of his interpretation of the evangelical message of Christ. Theoretical basis. The author proceeded from the necessity of a dialectical understanding of the concepts of nonviolence, mercy, justice and a cultural-historical focus on the possibilities of society in realizing the spirituality principles. Originality. The author focuses on the unilateral nature of the methodology that Leo Tolstoy uses to deny violence, as well as on the ambiguous role of Tolstoy’s ideology in the morality of society. Conclusions. The spiritual activities an individual person is able to do and that are instructive for society from the point of view of its moral influence may not be sufficient means for educating moral responsibility in a society as a whole. Tolstoy’s methodological approach to justifying the absoluteness of nonviolence principle is one-sided and not productive for a true interpretation of the spiritual nature of the Christ’s message about love and mercy.


Introduction
The use and limitation of violence is almost an "archetypal" problem of philosophical anthropology.Humanity created a repressive civilization, so the issue of regulating violence in society, especially in our time, has become a question of the moral dignity and spiritual status of man as such, his ability to exercise good and responsible will.
In the Hindu moral code, the principle of "ahimsa i.e. renouncing violence is one of the most important".It is no coincidence that it was in Delhi where a book about nonviolence as a life path appeared.Different authors studied questions of history, theory and practice of nonviolence in this book (Cicovacki, & Hess, 2017, p. 299).It can be seen from the articles of the book that the interest in Tolstoy and his theory of non-resistance to evil by violence has not been decreased.Olga Artemyeva focuses on the difference between Tolstoy's and Brodsky's approaches to this problem (Leo Tolstoy and Joseph Brodsky on Resistance to Evil).Brodsky's connects the need to counteract evil with its concrete manifestations, going beyond the limits of a purely moral interpretation of the violence inadmissibility.He regards the identification of violence with evil as a "fundamental" error of Tolstoy (Cicovacki, & Hess, 2017, p. 307).Extracting the lesson from the difference in views on the violence of L. Tolstoy and I. Brodsky, Artemyeva concludes that the opposition to evil cannot be understood outside the context of multifaceted reality in which evil, according to Brodsky, is often hidden behind specious masks.Abstract speculation about non-violence outside the search for ways to counteract evil reduces the moral value of non-resistance (Cicovacki, & Hess, 2017, p. 310).
It seems that this "victory" over Tolstoy, with all the credibility of the arguments put forward, was still too easy.Both the moral authority of Tolstoy, not as a private person, but as a person as such, and the instructiveness of life itself, in which the mighty spirit of non-resistance often prevails over the rudeness of violence, convince that reflection upon nonviolence at the level of the universality of the categorical imperative has a fair amount of sense.And Christ leaves reason to think about nonviolence within a priori non-presupposition of "heavenly" moral consciousness.

Purpose
The idea of nonviolence cannot be rejected, because it is violence being humiliation of humanity in a human that is evil.Therefore, it is necessary to understand what implies the onesidedness of Tolstoy's view of violence, which he sets equal to evil.

Statement of basic material
Reading L. N. Tolstoy, you can see how thorny his spiritual path was.Religion strengthened his confidence in the correct understanding of man's moral duty, whereas culture, "pampering of robbers and parasites" (Tolstoy, 1998, p. 119) more disappointed him in the hope of finding meaningful human life.Belief in progress, science, art, dogmatic worship, Orthodox piety, simple folk life and much more were approbated by Tolstoy to spiritual sense and morality, and, apparently, he could not find a safe haven for his restless conscience.The diaries with their disclosed intimacy and publicistic works show especially clear how difficult it was for him to combine love with condemnation and how much Tolstoy himself suffered from a lack of qualities that he considered as merits of true followers of Christ.It is this painful splitting of moral consciousness, which, apparently, everyone has, that provokes interest to Tolstoy.
Tolstoy confesses that he rarely met a man more gifted with all vices: voluptuousness, selfinterest, anger, vanity and, most importantly, self-love and thanks God for knowing it and fighting with all this abomination (Tolstoy, 1998, p. 404).With this definition of "abomination", it is difficult to see in it the properties of human nature, which make people not only vicious from its excess, but also unhappy from its lack.When it is no longer "abomination", but natural inclinations, without satisfaction of which life turns into a gloomy fast, questioning the simple and complex, subtle and elementary joys of life.
Tolstoy exacerbates the duality of tendencies in the social life phenomena, without hesitation, singling out negative ones, delivers a judgment close to the medieval spiritual mentality.Counting the belief in progress as superstition, he belittles the possibilities of the moral influence of science on society.
Almost all people taking public education as their vocation are considered by him as immoral.Recognizing intellectual and aesthetic subtlety as the pleasure of a lower order in comparison with moral satisfaction, he considers many writers, poets, musicians to be simply harmful.Nietzsche has pompous, incoherent chatter.I read Kuprinvery bad, unnecessary, dirty.Gorky is a fake; he is like Nietzsche a harmful writer (Tolstoy, 1983, p. 225, p. 320, p. 364), etc.One can agree or object to Tolstoy in assessing the aesthetic properties and moral tendencies of certain works, but it is obvious that his judgments are derived from the context of the relations of determination and justification by the logic of cultural history.Tolstoy does not look at culture sociologically.He measures it according to the absolute moral criterion that even geniuses who "produce really great works or even rubbish, referring to Shakespeare, Goethe, Beethoven, Bach, etc. cannot withstand" (Tolstoy, 1998, p.117).
Such a black and white approach to observing cultural phenomena is possible and even necessary, especially when it comes to spirituality, but it cannot remain the only one.If philosophy, science, art, public morality, the church have sinned in something, then it must be remembered that the whole history of culture has not yet fulfilled its tasks.Everyone is to blame, not just the autocracy, the rich, educated class, the practice of executions, or the benighted common people.
Having come to the conviction that the deepest wisdom of mankind is in the faith, Tolstoy is passionately and even with academic meticulousness plunges into God-seeking.He does not accept reason without religion.But also ordinary piety, and most importantly, the blatant discord of Christ's teaching with real morality depresses Tolstoy even more.It seems strange to him: to believe in Christ and not to believe in the implementation of his moral legislation.
Intellectual efforts of learned theologians, their mystical intuitions spent on the formation of the Christian faith, did not suit him.Where there is a religion, there is violence, murder in the name of faith (Tolstoy, 1998, p. 66).The result of his spiritual quest was the religious and ethical treatise "What is my faith?"where Tolstoy formulates the foundations of his faith, extracting the true Christ, the pure truth of his teaching from the layers of dogmatic interpretations.
Even with such truthful motivation, the excessive distrust of the great writer to the theological tradition, which led to the formulation of religious dogma and the external order of church life, confuses.Tolstoy does not investigate the question of whether a religious consciousness, immersed in a historical context, and subject to its structural necessity, can do without a dogmatic catechism and church.He is more focused on the fact that the church and the whole organization of religious life contradict the teachings of Christ and do not agree with his testaments.
The Church, of course, is not without sin, but to throw all the sins onto the church in the cultural history of society is wrong methodologically.Forms of social consciousness as branches of a tree grow from a single trunk.Any reproaches directed at philosophy, religion, art, science, or the giving prominence to one of the opposite sides in relation to the other in order to emphasize their exclusive advantage or lack of a person's spiritual development testify to the absence of a dialectical vision of reality.
The person in the perspective of spiritual evolution uses different organs, often opposing them to each other: scienceto religion, religiosityto free thinking, artto science, liberationto corporeality, exalted spirituality, etc.But it would be a mistake in such opposition to go too far, losing the sense of independent significance of each of the necessary manifestations of human life.
Seeing that people's lives do not conform to the principles of their creeds, he refers to a careful study of the Holy Scriptures.In full confidence that the meaning of the Gospel is self-evident, he would prohibit its interpretation.However, Tolstoy's (1991, p. 121) literalism in the perception of the Bible, in our view, shows that he himself was a disputable interpreter.In the Gospel he was touched and moved by the preaching of love, humility, retribution by good for evil.This emotion, apparently, was the reason for not always convincing coincidence of his enlightened conscience with the divine injunctions of Christ.The first thing that raises the question: can the text in general have a universal literal meaning, in addition to the interpreter and its semantic context of life?Of course, we are dealing with Tolstoy's understanding, from which he forms his doctrine of nonresistance to evil by violence, identifying it with the teaching of Christ on the principle of absolute faith in the coincidence of his conscience with that of the God.
But does Christ have conscience?Can he be ashamed, embarrassed, indecisive?Because he is the Son of God and acts according to the will of the Father, he has someone to be responsible to.He is also responsible to people whom he reports his divine science, after all, going to the intended sacrifice.In moments of weakness, however, he wanted to avoid this fate.As a God-man, Christ is the embodiment of a pure conscience and at the same time as the Messiah, He personifies a painful problem.In his consciousness, there is a division into God and human, the firmness of the Holy Spirit resists the vibrations of spiritual inclination.
Let alone the people who have divine morality, the truth of which they cannot doubt, and freedom, which, being a necessary condition for the adoption of divine legislation, simultaneously tempts them with a play of natural inclination.Tolstoy does not seem to notice that for the spiritual growth of a person the "geological" time of the history of culture is required, he cannot accept that the Son of God knew in advance how difficult it is for a man to realize his teaching.
How come it is the law of God, and it is impossible to fulfill it?Christ, he assures, does not exaggerate anything, but only clearly says, do not resist evil, do good to your offenders.
But how thoughtful was Tolstoy's principle of retribution by good for evil?Does not Tolstoy cover the irresponsible starry-eyed idealism with imaginary depth?Does he not substitute fair compensation with malicious revenge, and mercy with frivolous connivance?Indeed, what is retribution by good for evil?Justice cannot be violated and requires retribution.Then retribution by good for evil should not be an approval of evil and a rejection of justice.Christ, appealing to mercy, did not come to break the law.Therefore, mercy is not a violation of justice and does not cancel retribution.Tolstoy cultivates nonviolence, identifying it with mercy, but mercy and nonviolence are not the same, as not the same are mercy and violence.Mercy, presupposing justice, presupposes violence, but it also contains forgiveness, which opens the path of moral growth to the convicted individual and to the society that condemned him.Merciful violence is the highest expression of just punishment.Wisdom and kindness of mercy are the unity of punishment and forgiveness.When neither society, nor the criminal in fair requital is humiliated in human dignity.
The society, in the measure of just punishment, cannot do without a measure of just forgiving, since paying off the offender for his guilt it generates criminals, and pays for its own moral immaturity.Everybody is guilty.In courts, not only criminals are condemned and justified, but society as a whole.And here it does not matter whether the criminals will repent and mend their way, punishment does not guarantee this, but it is important that society does not suffer moral damage from unsatisfied justice.If violence and mercy are unified in justice, then outside justice they are evil.Mercy becomes the encouragement of crime, connivance, and violence becomes vengeance.The author has already addressed the problem of the correlation between crime and punishment in the light of justice and mercy in his article (Gromov, 2017, p. 16) and expresses confidence in the need for its dialectical and holistic understanding in both ethics and moral consciousness of society.
The great Kant claimed that an unconditional moral law cannot be performed without free will.But we must remember that Kant's free will is holy, requires great spiritual actions and consciousness.It is easier to indulge conditioning in temptation to get an illusory sense of freedom for a lesser price than to seek sanctity in the hope of divine approval.Therefore, society cannot reach the level of absolute divine legislation.The human and the divine are one, but not blended.In their intense non-blending and interaction, unity and the opposite of good and evil, magnanimity and vengeance, fair reckoning and iniquity are realized.
It has long been noted that a person's great dependence on passions, conditioned by society and nature, leads to satiety or unhappiness, and begins to be realized as vanity or tormenting longing.The acute experience of the emptiness of life led even Tolstoy to thoughts of suicide even when he, being a recognized writer, could be inspired by his merits in the literary field.However, without an absolute "metaphysical" justification, without a clear understanding that, with high creative freedom and independence, man is a divine product, it is impossible to comprehend its "metaphysical" meaning rooted in the Universe.A creature that relates itself to the world's whole and asks itself about the causes of the origin of being is difficult to be satisfied with meanings that are limited by the interests of survival.Without God, people have no greater meaning than worms, cats and dogs.
Man, however, cannot lose himself in God.By relating himself to Him as His "transcendental project" he must fulfil his "own" in order to satisfy the Supreme Presence.Religion, being a link between the divine and the human, expresses the ontological unity and distinction between God and man, and is the means of seeking a form of human existence pleasing to God.Tolstoy, however, imbued with the high meaning of the Gospel doctrine, does not want to see the difference between the divine and the human, absolute and relative.He insists on the necessity of unconditional fulfilment of the laws of Christ, as if people have already become angels or holy fools.But then religion is superfluous."Not anarchism is the teaching that I live by.But the execution of the eternal law, which does not allow violence and participation in it".And will it be "slavery under the yoke of a Japanese or a German?"I do not know this and do not want to know" (Tolstoy, 1998, p. 373).In fact, Tolstoy does not want to admit that from the reckless application of the principle of nonviolence in life, one gets only the yoke of chaos and irresponsibility.
Christ gives the principle, and as a Messiah deserves absolute trust.But man is not a god, the freedom of will, to which he is endowed with divine grace and the original sin of the knowledge of good and evil not only bring him closer, but also distance him from God.The belief of a person in his involvement in the divine requires spiritual efforts that, in the history of culture, accumulate or skew, depending on historical conditions, the personal qualities of people and the emerging cultural paradigms.
Is it then possible to fulfil the law of Christ?Contrary to Tolstoy, who impute pharisaic denial of its fulfilment to the Church's, one can confidently say that it is possible, while clarifyingto what extent according to the measure of God-likeness in the available individuals.According to Tolstoy, however, the divine and the human are outlying, and there is the depressing uselessness of the "rule of Christ", which only prevents a person from being an animal (Tolstoy, 1998, p. 138).Indeed, why should a man have a divine law if he chooses an animal's destiny?Eager for a clean conscience and appealing to love, Tolstoy, in his maximalism, loses both the common sense and the mercy of the Christian towards imperfect people.
According to Tolstoy (1991, p. 176), if you follow the Old Testament talion law, but you acknowledge the law of Christ, then you are hypocrites and the product of vipers.It is impossible to recognize the law of Moses and the law of Christ at the same time as true.The essence of the matter, however, is that they are one and complementary, and their correlation in the definitions of responsibility depends on the level of spiritual development of society.God in the Old Testament gives the law not for a time, but for ever.Christ does not abrogate the law of the Father, as Tolstoy maintains, but informs him of a form in which justice is rethought in connection with the increased self-awareness of people and their ability to reckon with the imperfection of human nature.In these circumstances, the leniency of the court or the forgiveness by victims of their abusers may prove to be a more effective means of moral influence on criminals and society than direct forms of violent action.
But in order to refuse to inflict a straightforward measure of justice, it is necessary to have a developed and influential spiritual will, a high level of inner freedom of an individual.In society, it is required not so much from the judicial institution of the court as from individuals with broad worldview horizons and a developed sense of "metaphysical guilt" for the presence in the being of an imperfect humanity.Such people have always been in society, forming a morally authoritative minority.But if the registration of conditions and courts are cancelled in favour of the unconditional law of mercy, it will result only in iniquity and cruelty.
Considering the ratio of Old and evangelical moral laws in the cultural and historical context, one can see how the moral meaning of human actions is transformed in the mobile relation of the approved, tolerant and unacceptable.In this process, man, being the subject of the realization of freedom as his essential potency, not only grows spiritually, but in conditionality, which cannot be avoided even in the monastery walls, stumbles and falls.
Антропологічні виміри філософських досліджень, 2018, Вип. 13 АНТРОПОЛОГІЧНА ПРОБЛЕМАТИКА В ІСТОРІЇ ФІЛОСОФІЇ doi: 10.15802/ampr.v0i13.132561© V. E. Gromov, 2018 In general, people belonging to being must obey its laws.Following material need is one of the definitions of successful human activity.However, the satisfaction of necessity is both subordination and freedom as a form of necessity.Such are the horizons of freedom in conditionality, where people, following the interests of material existence, either fight or agree on the rules and boundaries of their claims.An agreement is a way that transforms enmity into peacefulness.This is where the Old Testament principle of balanced justice is required.Equality of competing parties before the law is the ideal expression of goodwill in conditionality.In a positive sense, conditioning makes people the heroes of justice.In the negative sensethe criminals in freedom from justice.Some individuals claim the right to a prosperous existence; others treacherously or by cowardice violate the universality of this right.Refusal to fight for justice under the guise of undesirability of violence or under the pretext of humility is a denial of justice and leads to bad consequences.Mercy, identified with nonviolence, actually covers the consent to live in fetters of humiliation and inferiority.
It is impossible to avoid conditionality and not desire freedom as a form of reconciliation with necessity.Such reconciliation implies generosity, the ability to accept weaknesses and attachments of people.In the Old Testament, for example, divorce is not prohibited.Tolstoy (1998), relying on Christ, insists on the moral superiority of the inviolability of the marriage.Violent fetters of marriage in order to avoid temptations, must protect society from sexual promiscuity, he believes."Only then the marriage is not evil when it is not expugnable" (p.133).But if the marriage is not expugnable, then this is violence.It took centuries of cultural development, so that the society in moral self-consciousness to tie the institution of marriage closer to the principle of love and to allow the possibility of its dissolution.It seems that, while objecting to violence, in the case of marriage, even if it is disgusted, Tolstoy prefers its violent inviolability.Delights and torments of love passions must retreat before the need to comply with sexual regulations.But where is the sympathy for a man who is seized by passion, feels more the profane love, than the sacred one?Perhaps the lack of mercy prompted Tolstoy to push Anna Karenina under the wheels of the train, in contrast to Christ, who saved an unfaithful wife from being beaten?
Why does Christ insist on the inviolability of the carnal union?If one proceeds from the fact that the Son of God did not come to violate the law of the Father, his message is not to forbid the dissolution of marriages, but to "not make fun of their lusts".Christ does not reject carnal love, but points out to it an appropriate place in a lasting marriage.But not in the unconditional imperative of conjugal fidelity is the meaning of the message of Christ.The Son of God opens the prospect of raising sexuality from the egoistic level to a higher level, when the energy of restrained lust is sublimated into an unselfish, chaste experience.Love is only love when it is without violence, Tolstoy says.But if the meaning of the Christian faith is in the unity of the Old and New Testaments, is it not correct to admit the inevitability of a contradiction in love itself, which, being a condition for freedom and the happy well-being of individuals, is itself the strongest form of restriction of freedom.You cannot love by force, but you cannot get rid of love without pain.If, however, Tolstoy within the marriage raises love from the emotional to the spiritual level, then it already goes beyond the limits of egoistic intentions, becomes the resolution of unconditional love not only for the close ones, but for all, including the imperfect, fallen, that is, the universal divine love.

Originality
The author saw in the irreconcilable attitude of Leo Tolstoy to violence how the concept of nonviolence from the moral category turns into a blinding categorical existential.Being under its absolute authority, it is hardly possible for the moral motive of the Christian love to make an effective stimulus for the development of the morality of society under certain empirical conditions.The dogma of nonviolence with such a methodology of understanding the correlation of moral factors instead of strengthening morality gives the opposite result: it leads to disorientation and corruption in false tolerance and in false intransigence.

Conclusions
Love as a universal idea is difficult to master.In the society for millennia before Christ, and until now, there is a prevailing belief about the inevitability of enmity and violence between "us" and "them".The Messiah gave a new idea to humanity.In morality, he sets people to unselfishness and love for everyone and everything.The Spiritual love is an ideological, semantic phenomenon that is ontologically rooted in a person's ability to go beyond the limit of practical necessity, showing reasonable refusal or restraint in much of what is determined by the interests of people's lives in conditioning.But, guided only by spiritual love, you will not get married, you will not find close friends, and marriage will be useless, you will get the weaken strength of positive life motivation, sense and understanding of the meaning of human presence in the material world.
In freedom and expediency, spirituality must be divided into conditionality, and conditionality into spirituality, so that a sound balance can be obtained, which, in our opinion, is called culture, the productive mastery of a person's meaningful and responsible existence.Tolstoy (1991, p. 225) creates an ambivalent text that affects and awakens inconsistency.In the end, he decides that if people do not follow the teachings of Christ, and do not see the light that is in them, then he is ready to follow it personally.Tolstoy's diaries and publications, however, show how difficult this choice was for him.As the result of a strenuous search for moral integrity and true faith, he did not generate a calm, confident conscience.Pursuing a high spiritual goal, he did not see that his dogmatic attitude of non-resistance to evil makes morality defenseless, weakening the potential of nonviolence as a way to fight evil.