After achieving success and fame and fortune and land and animals and a fine family, he still finds himself to be subject to depression, even countless thoughts of suicide. His main reasoning falls like this: he has achieved his goals, he is regarded as a genius, he has a family that loves him, but is there any meaning to his life that will not be destroyed by his death? And if not, then what is the purpose of life? It is essentially the age old question of "why are we here". What's the point? Is there a point?
Tolstoy's problem expands as he comes to the conclusion through logic and research that there really is no point to existence and that a person can do one of four things: the first is to just be ignorant of the facts and not really pursue such knowledge, the second is to "eat, drink, and be merry" and follow Solomon's and Schopenhauer's advice regarding the pointlessness of life, the third is to just follow logic to it's ultimate end and kill oneself, and the fourth is to put up with the knowledge and just live through it, bearing the burden. Add to that the weight of responsibility, since Tolstoy was a practicer of perfectionism, constantly turning life into a competition and wanting to be the best at everything and to know all there is to know. So, he felt a weight of pressure, a weight of guilt for everything wrong he had ever done, and the weight of time on his shoulders.
William Blake, Pilgrim Reading his Book
"If there is no God, everything is permitted." Another heavy thinking Russian author, Dostoevsky, sums up what Tolstoy is struggling with in a simple sentence. The whole time I was reading Confession, I kept thinking, 'why are you not putting God in the equation, or at least faith?'. Tolstoy found the idea of God completely unreasonable and therefore put Him out of the picture entirely. It was to be a journey of the mind, and to Tolstoy, God and faith were not logical and could not be reconciled to a world based upon logic and reason. Eventually, he does pursue the study of faith and something strange and wonderful happens to him. Read the dang book.
"If there is no God, everything is permitted."
The book reminded me of Chesterton's "Orthodoxy". This is another very interesting autobiographical account that tells the tale of a man who pursued logic, reason, science, and art, and in the end found God. It wasn't through the denial of any one of these realms of reality or the ignorance of any, but through the acceptance, research, and application of them that Chesterton found God. If you have not read Chesterton, do so now. I will wait. He was one of the wittiest and funniest writers of the English language.
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
Yesterday I was listening to Matt Chandler, the pastor of The Village in Texas. He is the Brian Regan of pastors, in that he makes a lot of jokes and they are all in the style of Regan. Give him a listen. It's amazing how things often line up so mysteriously in our lives. I just wanted Chandler to have a face to face with Tolstoy, because the things that they were discussing were so in line. Chandler has terminal cancer and will die someday soon, so he has wrestled with the large questions that Tolstoy was wrestling with in his old age (and in the phenomenal book The Death of Ivan Ilyich). But Chandler's answer was Christ. That's how we're here, that's why we're here, that's where we're going, that's the answer to our pain and sin and struggles and loss and tears and mistakes. There is no other answer. There is no other way out.
Chandler doing tai-chi? Maybe shadow puppets.
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