I
Judging by some memories, I never seriously believed, but only had confidence in what I was taught and in what the great ones confessed to me; but this trust was very shaky.
I remember that when I was about eleven years old, one boy, long dead, Volodenka M., who studied at the gymnasium, came to us on Sunday and, as the latest news, announced to us the discovery made at the gymnasium. The discovery was that there is no God and that everything we are taught is just fiction (this was in 1838). I remember how the older brothers became interested in this news and called me for advice. I remember we all became very animated and took this news as something very entertaining and very possible.
I also remember that when my eldest brother Dmitry, while at the university, suddenly, with the passion characteristic of his nature, surrendered to faith and began to go to all services, fast, and lead a pure and moral life, then all of us, even the elders, without ceasing They laughed at him and for some reason called him Noah. I remember Musin-Pushkin, who was then a trustee of Kazan University, inviting us to dance with him, mockingly persuaded his refusing brother by saying that David also danced in front of the ark. At that time I sympathized with these jokes of the elders and drew from them the conclusion that it is necessary to study the catechism, it is necessary to go to church, but one should not take all this too seriously. I also remember that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and his ridicule not only did not outrage me, but greatly amused me.
My falling away from the faith happened in me just as it happened and is happening now in people of our educational background. It seems to me that in most cases it happens like this: people live the way everyone else lives, and they all live on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with religious doctrine, but for the most part are opposite to it; religious doctrine is not involved in life, and you never have to deal with it in relationships with other people, and you never have to deal with it yourself in your own life; This creed is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independent of it. If you encounter it, then only as an external phenomenon, not related to life.
From a person’s life, from his deeds, both now and then, there is no way to know whether he is a believer or not. If there is a difference between those who clearly profess Orthodoxy and those who deny it, it is not in favor of the former. Both now and then, the obvious recognition and confession of Orthodoxy was mostly found among stupid, cruel and immoral people who considered themselves very important. Intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good nature and morality were mostly found in people who recognized themselves as non-believers.
The schools teach the catechism and send students to church; Officials are required to provide evidence of the existence of the sacrament. But a person of our circle, who no longer studies and is not in public service, and now, and even more so in the old days, could live for decades without ever remembering that he lives among Christians and is himself considered to profess the Christian Orthodox faith.
So, both now and before, a creed, accepted out of trust and supported by external pressure, gradually melts away under the influence of knowledge and life experiences that are contrary to the creed, and a person very often lives for a long time, imagining that the creed that was communicated to him is intact within him since childhood, while there is no trace of him for a long time.
S., an intelligent and truthful man, told me how he stopped believing. About twenty-six years old, once while camping for the night during a hunt, according to an old habit adopted from childhood, he began to pray in the evening. The older brother, who had been hunting with him, lay on the hay and looked at him. When S. finished and began to lie down, his brother said to him: “Are you still doing this?” And they said nothing more to each other. And from that day on S. stopped going to prayer and going to church. And now he hasn’t prayed, taken communion or gone to church for thirty years. And not because he knew his brother’s convictions and would have joined them, not because he decided anything in his soul, but only because this word spoken by his brother was like a finger pushing into a wall that was ready to to fall from one's own weight; this word was an indication that where he thought there was faith, there had long been an empty place, and that therefore the words that he spoke, and the crosses, and the bows that he made while standing in prayer, were completely meaningless actions. Realizing their senselessness, he could not continue them.
This was and is the case, I think, with the vast majority of people. I’m talking about people of our education, I’m talking about people who are truthful with themselves, and not about those who make the very object of faith a means to achieve any temporary goals. (These people are the most fundamental non-believers, because if faith for them is a means to achieve some worldly goals, then this is probably not faith.) These people of our education are in the position that the light of knowledge and life has melted an artificial building, and they either already noticed it and made room, or they haven’t noticed it yet.
The creed taught to me from childhood disappeared in me just as in others, with the only difference being that since I began to read and think a lot very early, my renunciation of the creed became conscious very early. From the age of sixteen I stopped going to prayer and, on my own impulse, stopped going to church and fasting. I stopped believing in what I had been told since childhood, but I believed in something. What I believed, I could never say. I also believed in God, or rather, I did not deny God, but which god, I could not say; I did not deny Christ and his teaching, but I also could not say what his teaching was.
Now, remembering that time, I see clearly that my faith - what, in addition to animal instincts, moved my life - my only true faith at that time was faith in improvement. But what was the improvement and what was its purpose, I could not say. I tried to improve myself mentally - I learned everything I could and that life pushed me towards; I tried to improve my will - I made up rules for myself that I tried to follow; I improved myself physically, using all sorts of exercises to refine my strength and dexterity and, through all sorts of hardships, accustoming myself to endurance and patience. And I considered all this as improvement. The beginning of everything was, of course, moral improvement, but it was soon replaced by improvement in general, that is, the desire to be better not before oneself or before God, but the desire to be better before other people. And very soon this desire to be better in front of people was replaced by the desire to be stronger than other people, that is, more famous, more important, richer than others.
II
Someday I will tell the story of my life - both touching and instructive in these ten years of my youth. I think many, many people have experienced the same thing. I wanted with all my soul to be good; but I was young, I had passions, and I was alone, completely alone, when I was looking for what was good. Every time I tried to express what constituted my most sincere desires: that I wanted to be morally good, I was met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I indulged in vile passions, I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, lust for power, greed, lust, pride, anger, revenge - all this was respected. By surrendering to these passions, I became like a big man, and I felt that they were pleased with me. My kind aunt, the purest being with whom I lived, always told me that she would want nothing more for me than for me to have a connection with married woman: "Rien ne forme un jeune homme comme une liaison avec unt femme comme il faut"; She wished me another happiness - that I should be an adjutant, and best of all with the sovereign; and the greatest happiness is that I marry a very rich girl and that, as a result of this marriage, I have as many slaves as possible.
I cannot remember these years without horror, disgust and heartache. I killed people in war, challenged them to duels in order to kill them, lost at cards, ate up the labors of men, executed them, fornicated, deceived. Lies, theft, fornication of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder... There was no crime that I did not commit, and for all this I was praised, my peers considered and still consider me a relatively moral person.
I lived like this for ten years.
At this time I began to write out of vanity, greed and pride. In my writings I did the same thing as in life. In order to have the fame and money for which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and show the bad. That's what I did. How many times have I managed to hide in my writings, under the guise of indifference and even slight mockery, those of my aspirations for good, which constituted the meaning of my life. And I achieved this: I was praised.
When I was twenty-six years old, I came to St. Petersburg after the war and became friends with writers. They accepted me as one of their own and flattered me. And before I had time to look back, the class writers’ views on the life of those people with whom I became friends were internalized by me and had already completely erased in me all my previous attempts to become better. These views, under the licentiousness of my life, substituted a theory that justified it.
Lev Tolstoy
Confession
(Introduction to an unpublished essay)
I was baptized and raised in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it from childhood, and throughout my adolescence and youth. But when I left the second year of university at the age of 18, I no longer believed in anything that I was taught.
Judging by some memories, I never seriously believed, but only had confidence in what I was taught and in what the great ones confessed to me; but this trust was very shaky.
I remember that when I was about eleven years old, one boy, long dead, Volodenka M., who studied at the gymnasium, came to us on Sunday and, as the latest news, announced to us the discovery made at the gymnasium. The discovery was that there is no God and that everything we are taught is just fiction (this was in 1838). I remember how the older brothers became interested in this news and called me for advice. I remember we all became very animated and took this news as something very entertaining and very possible.
I also remember that when my eldest brother Dmitry, while at the university, suddenly, with the passion characteristic of his nature, surrendered to faith and began to go to all services, fast, and lead a pure and moral life, then all of us, even the elders, without ceasing They laughed at him and for some reason called him Noah. I remember Musin-Pushkin, who was then a trustee of Kazan University, inviting us to dance with him, mockingly persuaded his refusing brother by saying that David also danced in front of the ark. At that time I sympathized with these jokes of the elders and drew from them the conclusion that it is necessary to study the catechism, it is necessary to go to church, but one should not take all this too seriously. I also remember that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and his ridicule not only did not outrage me, but greatly amused me.
My falling away from the faith happened in me just as it happened and is happening now in people of our educational background. It seems to me that in most cases it happens like this: people live the way everyone else lives, and they all live on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with religious doctrine, but for the most part are opposite to it; religious doctrine is not involved in life, and you never have to deal with it in relationships with other people, and you never have to deal with it yourself in your own life; This creed is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independent of it. If you encounter it, then only as an external phenomenon, not related to life.
From a person’s life, from his deeds, both now and then, there is no way to know whether he is a believer or not. If there is a difference between those who clearly profess Orthodoxy and those who deny it, it is not in favor of the former. Both now and then, the obvious recognition and confession of Orthodoxy was mostly found among stupid, cruel and immoral people who considered themselves very important. Intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good nature and morality were mostly found in people who recognized themselves as non-believers.
The schools teach the catechism and send students to church; Officials are required to provide evidence of the existence of the sacrament. But a person of our circle, who no longer studies and is not in public service, and now, and even more so in the old days, could live for decades without ever remembering that he lives among Christians and is himself considered to profess the Christian Orthodox faith.
So, both now and before, a creed, accepted out of trust and supported by external pressure, gradually melts away under the influence of knowledge and life experiences that are contrary to the creed, and a person very often lives for a long time, imagining that the creed that was communicated to him is intact within him since childhood, while there is no trace of him for a long time.
S., an intelligent and truthful man, told me how he stopped believing. About twenty-six years old, once while camping for the night during a hunt, according to an old habit adopted from childhood, he began to pray in the evening. The older brother, who had been hunting with him, lay on the hay and looked at him. When S. finished and began to lie down, his brother said to him: “Are you still doing this?” And they said nothing more to each other. And from that day on S. stopped going to prayer and going to church. And now he hasn’t prayed, taken communion or gone to church for thirty years. And not because he knew his brother’s convictions and would have joined them, not because he decided anything in his soul, but only because this word spoken by his brother was like a finger pushing into a wall that was ready to to fall from one's own weight; this word was an indication that where he thought there was faith, there had long been an empty place, and that therefore the words that he spoke, and the crosses, and the bows that he made while standing in prayer, were completely meaningless actions. Realizing their senselessness, he could not continue them.
This was and is the case, I think, with the vast majority of people. I’m talking about people of our education, I’m talking about people who are truthful with themselves, and not about those who make the very object of faith a means to achieve any temporary goals. (These people are the most fundamental non-believers, because if faith for them is a means to achieve some worldly goals, then this is probably not faith.) These people of our education are in the position that the light of knowledge and life has melted an artificial building, and they either already noticed it and made room, or they haven’t noticed it yet.
The creed taught to me from childhood disappeared in me just as in others, with the only difference being that since I began to read and think a lot very early, my renunciation of the creed became conscious very early. From the age of sixteen I stopped going to prayer and, on my own impulse, stopped going to church and fasting. I stopped believing in what I had been told since childhood, but I believed in something. What I believed, I could never say. I also believed in God, or rather, I did not deny God, but which god, I could not say; I did not deny Christ and his teaching, but I also could not say what his teaching was.
Now, remembering that time, I see clearly that my faith - what, in addition to animal instincts, moved my life - my only true faith at that time was faith in improvement. But what was the improvement and what was its purpose, I could not say. I tried to improve myself mentally - I learned everything I could and that life pushed me towards; I tried to improve my will - I made up rules for myself that I tried to follow; I improved myself physically, using all sorts of exercises to refine my strength and dexterity and, through all sorts of hardships, accustoming myself to endurance and patience. And I considered all this as improvement. The beginning of everything was, of course, moral improvement, but it was soon replaced by improvement in general, that is, the desire to be better not before oneself or before God, but the desire to be better before other people. And very soon this desire to be better in front of people was replaced by the desire to be stronger than other people, that is, more famous, more important, richer than others.
Lev Tolstoy
"Confession"
I was baptized and raised in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it from childhood, and throughout my adolescence and youth. But when I left the second year of university at the age of 18, I no longer believed in anything that I was taught.
Judging by some memories, I never seriously believed, but only had confidence in what I was taught and in what the great ones confessed to me; but this trust was very shaky.
I remember that when I was about eleven years old, one boy, long dead, Volodenka M., who studied at the gymnasium, came to us on Sunday and, as the latest news, announced to us the discovery made at the gymnasium. The discovery was that there is no God and that everything we are taught is just fiction (this was in 1838). I remember how the older brothers became interested in this news and called me for advice. I remember we all became very animated and took this news as something very entertaining and very possible.
I also remember that when my eldest brother Dmitry, while at the university, suddenly, with the passion characteristic of his nature, surrendered to faith and began to go to all services, fast, and lead a pure and moral life, then all of us, even the elders, without ceasing They laughed at him and for some reason called him Noah. I remember Musin-Pushkin, who was then a trustee of Kazan University, inviting us to dance with him, mockingly persuaded his refusing brother by saying that David also danced in front of the ark. At that time I sympathized with these jokes of the elders and drew from them the conclusion that it is necessary to study the catechism, it is necessary to go to church, but one should not take all this too seriously. I also remember that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and his ridicule not only did not outrage me, but greatly amused me.
My falling away from the faith happened in me just as it happened and is happening now in people of our educational background. It seems to me that in most cases it happens like this: people live the way everyone else lives, and they all live on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with religious doctrine, but for the most part are opposite to it; religious doctrine is not involved in life, and you never have to deal with it in relationships with other people and never have to cope with it in your own life; This creed is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independent of it. If you encounter it, then only as an external phenomenon, not related to life.
From a person’s life, from his deeds, both now and then, there is no way to know whether he is a believer or not. If there is a difference between those who clearly profess Orthodoxy and those who deny it, it is not in favor of the former. Both now and then, the obvious recognition and confession of Orthodoxy was mostly found in people who were stupid, cruel and immoral and who considered themselves very important. Intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good nature and morality were mostly found in people who recognized themselves as non-believers.
The schools teach the catechism and send students to church; Officials are required to provide evidence of the existence of the sacrament. But a person of our circle, who no longer studies and is not in public service, and now, and even more so in the old days, could live for decades without ever remembering that he lives among Christians and is himself considered to profess the Christian Orthodox faith.
So, both now and before, a creed, accepted out of trust and supported by external pressure, gradually melts away under the influence of knowledge and life experiences that are contrary to the creed, and a person very often lives for a long time, imagining that the creed that was communicated to him is intact within him since childhood, while there is no trace of him for a long time.
S., an intelligent and truthful man, told me how he stopped believing. About twenty-six years old, once while camping for the night during a hunt, according to an old habit adopted from childhood, he began to pray in the evening. The older brother, who had been hunting with him, lay on the hay and looked at him. When S. finished and began to lie down, his brother said to him: “Are you still doing this?”
And they said nothing more to each other. And from that day on S. stopped going to prayer and going to church. And now he hasn’t prayed, taken communion or gone to church for thirty years. And not because he knew his brother’s convictions and would have joined them, not because he decided anything in his soul, but only because this word spoken by his brother was like a finger pushing into a wall that was ready to to fall from one's own weight; this word was an indication that where he thought there was faith, there had long been an empty place, and that therefore the words that he spoke, and the crosses, and the bows that he made while standing in prayer, were completely meaningless actions. Realizing their senselessness, he could not continue them.
Lvyonok Yasnopolyanskiy 07.10.2016 15:33:22
In the magazine “Russian Thought” No. 5 for 1882, “Confession” was published under the title “Introduction to an unpublished work”; spiritual censorship imposed a ban on this work, the number was confiscated. A separate edition of “Confession” was published only in 1884 abroad, in Geneva, in the publishing house of M. K. Elpidin.
Confession in church false Christianity means one of the so-called. church "sacraments", namely the "sacrament" of repentance. The church idolater repented before priests and idols painted on boards, in the hope of receiving forgiveness and remission of sins “from above.” The story of one's sins was the content of confession, repentance was its meaning, and remission of sins was its goal.
Of course, the churchmen and their flock do not and will never recognize Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy’s “Confession” as a “real,” Christian-religious confession that does not require the mediation of priests or objects of idolatry. On an equal basis with two other works of the same name famous in the history of literature - “Confession” by St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau - they classify Lev Nikolaevich’s “Confession” exclusively as secular, and not Christian spiritual literature.
Late 1870s was for Tolstoy a time of acute mental crisis, when he not only sought answers to questions about the meaning and purpose of life, but sought them with all passion “in every book, in every conversation, in every person.” At the end of 1879, he began to present his religious views and his attitude towards the false teaching of “Orthodoxy.” At first he wrote only for himself, with great effort from everyone. mental strength, without even intending to publish his magnificent, but at the same time sharply obscene writings. In the letters of that time to N.N. Strakhov one can feel Lev Nikolaevich’s complete absorption in the work he had begun: “I am very busy, very excited about my work. The work is not artistic and not for publication.” “I’m very busy and very stressed. My head still hurts."
Among his family new job I didn’t find any understanding. Sofya Andreevna, Tolstoy’s wife, moderately committed to the false teachings and idolatry of “Orthodoxy,” said that he was writing “some kind of religious reasoning,” incomprehensible and unnecessary to anyone, and wanted Lev Nikolaevich’s Christian inspiration not only not to increase, but it would pass quickly, “like a disease.”
Tolstoy began his first complete exposition of religious views with the words: “I grew up, grew old and looked back on my life.” Having barely finished it, he began reworking it, and from the first chapter a work called “Confession” emerged. There is no such name in the manuscript; it appears in the letters and diary of S. A. Tolstoy, but the author subsequently agreed with it, and it was fixed during publication.
“Confession” begins: “I was baptized and raised in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it from childhood and throughout my adolescence and youth. But when I left the second year of university at the age of 18, I no longer believed in anything that I was taught.”
In childhood and early youth, there lived in him “some kind of religious love for good, a desire for moral improvement,” he believed that this was a “consequence” of his “childhood faith” “I wanted with all my soul to be good; but I was young, I had passions, and I was alone, completely alone, when I was looking for what was good.”
Having become a writer, Tolstoy continued, he, like those poets and artists who surrounded him, thought that their “vocation is to teach people.” And he did so and began to write “out of vanity, greed and pride.” Tolstoy talks about his teaching activities with peasant children, his travels abroad, his marriage and his 15th birthday. family life-He had everything that is considered perfect happiness. “And in this situation I came to the conclusion that I could not live and, fearing death, had to use tricks against myself so as not to take my life.”
To convey the horror of his condition, Tolstoy retells an Eastern parable about a traveler caught in the steppe by an angry beast. Fleeing from the beast, the traveler jumps into a waterless well, at the bottom of which he sees a dragon with its mouth open to devour the traveler. And he grabs the branches of a wild bush growing in the crevices of the well and hangs on it. His hands weaken, he feels that he is about to fall, and while he is holding on, he looks around and sees that two mice, one black, the other white, are evenly undermining the trunk of the bush and it is about to break off...
Mice, black and white, are day and night, a dragon is death, fragile bushes are life. A very transparent allegory.
Tolstoy wrote that “this is not a fable, but this is a true, undeniable and understandable truth to everyone.” Asking himself questions about the meaning of life, he did not find an answer in the life around him and came to the conclusion that life is meaningless. Neither science, nor the official church, nor even all the sages of the world gave the answer Tolstoy needed, nor Schopenhauer, nor Sakia-Muni (Buddha), nor Solomon.
“Vanity of vanities,” says Solomon, “vanity of vanities, everything is vanity!” Tolstoy, echoing him, says: “There is no point in deceiving yourself. Everything is vanity. Happy is he who is not born, death better than life; we need to get rid of it." In search of a way out, he examines the situation of the people in his circle and assumes that four exits are possible for them. The first is the way out of ignorance, it consists in not knowing and not understanding that life is evil and nonsense. He is not suitable for Tolstoy, who knows that life is evil. The second way out is epicureanism, that is, you need to drink and have fun, knowing all the hopelessness of life. This is how most people in his circle live, but he had too vivid an imagination to forget about the “dragon - death.” The third way out is the way out of strength and energy, which consists in realizing that life is evil and destroying it. And Tolstoy, recognizing this as the most worthy way out, wanted to do so. There is also a fourth way out - weakness: it is to, understanding the evil and meaninglessness of life, continue to live, knowing that death is better than life. Tolstoy considers himself to be in this category of people.
Having gone through the search for faith through the study of Christianity, Buddhism, Mohammedanism from books and from living people around him, Tolstoy turned to the faith of ordinary people, ordinary people, which consisted in living according to God, “working, humble yourself, endure and be merciful." And I fell in love with these people. In “Confession” he explained it this way: “... a revolution happened to me, which had been preparing in me for a long time and the makings of which were always in me. What happened to me was that the life of our circle - the rich, the scientists - not only became disgusting to me, but lost all meaning. All our actions, reasoning, science, arts - all this appeared to me as pampering.<...>The actions of the working people, creating life, seemed to me to be one real thing. And I realized that the meaning given to this life is the truth, and I accepted it.”
The way of life of the common people became Tolstoy’s conviction, achieved as a result of a spiritual crisis, because only simple people they knew the meaning of life and death, “they worked calmly, endured hardships and suffering, lived and died, seeing in this not vanity, but goodness.”
“Confession,” according to Tolstoy’s plan, became the first part of a “great work” of a religious and philosophical nature. The other three parts are “A Study of Dogmatic Theology”, “The Connection and Translation of the Four Gospels”, “What is My Faith?”
A servant of the priests and the government, spiritual censorship banned the publication of the Confession. Pages with the text of Tolstoy's work were barbarously cut out from an issue of an already printed magazine and... were distributed throughout Russia in thousands of copies made from proofreads, and many of his contemporaries still heard his call from Lev Nikolaevich to God and Christ.
Having completed work on “Confession,” Tolstoy wrote to N. N. Strakhov on October 11, 1882: “I have not changed at all; but the difference between my last year’s condition and the present one is the same as between a person under construction and one who has been built. I hope to remove the scaffolding, clean up the rubbish around the house and live quietly and quietly.”
But that was only next stage both in the life of the writer and in his search for truth.
*****
BASED ON THE BOOK:
Panchenko A. A few pages from the history of the Russian soul // Tolstoy L. N. Confession. What is my faith? - L., 1991. P. 346-360.
______________________________________________
I was baptized and raised in the Orthodox Christian faith. I was taught it from childhood, and throughout my adolescence and youth. But when I left the second year of university at the age of 18, I no longer believed in anything that I was taught.
Judging by some memories, I never seriously believed, but only had confidence in what I was taught and in what the great ones confessed to me; but this trust was very shaky.
I remember that when I was about eleven years old, one boy, long dead, Volodenka M., who studied at the gymnasium, came to us on Sunday and, as the latest news, announced to us the discovery made at the gymnasium. The discovery was that there is no God and that everything we are taught is just fiction (this was in 1838). I remember how the older brothers became interested in this news and called me for advice. I remember we all became very animated and took this news as something very entertaining and very possible.
I also remember that when my eldest brother Dmitry, while at the university, suddenly, with the passion characteristic of his nature, surrendered to faith and began to go to all services, fast, and lead a pure and moral life, then all of us, even the elders, without ceasing They laughed at him and for some reason called him Noah. I remember Musin-Pushkin, who was then a trustee of Kazan University, inviting us to dance with him, mockingly persuaded his refusing brother by saying that David also danced in front of the ark. At that time I sympathized with these jokes of the elders and drew from them the conclusion that it is necessary to study the catechism, it is necessary to go to church, but one should not take all this too seriously. I also remember that I read Voltaire when I was very young, and his ridicule not only did not outrage me, but greatly amused me.
My falling away from the faith happened in me just as it happened and is happening now in people of our educational background. It seems to me that in most cases it happens like this: people live the way everyone else lives, and they all live on the basis of principles that not only have nothing in common with religious doctrine, but for the most part are opposite to it; religious doctrine is not involved in life, and you never have to deal with it in relationships with other people and never have to cope with it in your own life; This creed is professed somewhere out there, far from life and independent of it. If you encounter it, then only as an external phenomenon, not related to life.
From a person’s life, from his deeds, both now and then, there is no way to know whether he is a believer or not. If there is a difference between those who clearly profess Orthodoxy and those who deny it, it is not in favor of the former. Both now and then, the obvious recognition and confession of Orthodoxy was mostly found in people who were stupid, cruel and immoral and who considered themselves very important. Intelligence, honesty, straightforwardness, good nature and morality were mostly found in people who recognized themselves as non-believers.
The schools teach the catechism and send students to church; Officials are required to provide evidence of the existence of the sacrament. But a person of our circle, who no longer studies and is not in public service, and now, and even more so in the old days, could live for decades without ever remembering that he lives among Christians and is himself considered to profess the Christian Orthodox faith.
So, both now and before, a creed, accepted out of trust and supported by external pressure, gradually melts away under the influence of knowledge and life experiences that are contrary to the creed, and a person very often lives for a long time, imagining that the creed that was communicated to him is intact within him since childhood, while there is no trace of him for a long time.
S., an intelligent and truthful man, told me how he stopped believing. About twenty-six years old, once while camping for the night during a hunt, according to an old habit adopted from childhood, he began to pray in the evening. The older brother, who had been hunting with him, lay on the hay and looked at him. When S. finished and began to lie down, his brother said to him: “Are you still doing this?”
And they said nothing more to each other. And from that day on S. stopped going to prayer and going to church. And now he hasn’t prayed, taken communion or gone to church for thirty years. And not because he knew his brother’s convictions and would have joined them, not because he decided anything in his soul, but only because this word spoken by his brother was like a finger pushing into a wall that was ready to to fall from one's own weight; this word was an indication that where he thought there was faith, there had long been an empty place, and that therefore the words that he spoke, and the crosses, and the bows that he made while standing in prayer, were completely meaningless actions. Realizing their senselessness, he could not continue them.
This was and is the case, I think, with the vast majority of people. I’m talking about people of our education, I’m talking about people who are truthful with themselves, and not about those who make the very object of faith a means to achieve any temporary goals. (These people are the most fundamental non-believers, because if faith for them is a means to achieve some worldly goals, then this is probably not faith.) These people of our education are in the position that the light of knowledge and life has melted an artificial building, and they either already noticed it and made room, or they haven’t noticed it yet.
The creed taught to me from childhood disappeared in me just as in others, with the only difference being that since I began to read and think a lot very early, my renunciation of the creed became conscious very early. From the age of sixteen I stopped going to prayer and, on my own impulse, stopped going to church and fasting. I stopped believing in what I had been told since childhood, but I believed in something. What I believed, I could never say. I also believed in God, or rather, I did not deny God, but which God I could not say; I did not deny Christ and his teaching, but I also could not say what his teaching was.
Now, remembering that time, I see clearly that my faith is what, in addition to animal instincts, moved my life - my only true faith at that time was faith in improvement. But what was the improvement and what was its purpose, I could not say. I tried to improve myself mentally - I learned everything I could and what life pushed me towards; I tried to improve my will - I made up rules for myself that I tried to follow; I improved myself physically, using all sorts of exercises to refine my strength and dexterity and, through all sorts of hardships, accustoming myself to endurance and patience. And I considered all this as improvement. The beginning of everything was, of course, moral improvement, but it was soon replaced by improvement in general, i.e. the desire to be better not before oneself or before God, but the desire to be better before other people. And very soon this desire to be better in front of people was replaced by the desire to be stronger than other people, i.e. more famous, more important, richer than others.