Leo Tolstoy
1828-1910 · Russian Religious Thought · Household name
Tolstoy was the Russian novelist who wrote War and Peace. He read the Sermon on the Mount in later life and took it at its word, and the radical Christian anarchism of his last decades follows from that: never meet evil with force, work with your hands, own little, obey no state that kills. Gandhi, who exchanged letters with him, carried that nonresistance out into a mass movement.
Signature
The position Tolstoy is most identified with in the Profiler:
- War
- strongly leans Pacifism
- Government
- Anarchy
Positions on the 2 axes the sources answer
- War
- strongly leans Pacifism (0 on a 0–100 scale from Pacifism to Militarism)
- Allegiance
- strongly leans Global (100 on a 0–100 scale from Local to Global)
18 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Tolstoy refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Non-Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Government
- Anarchy
What is your ideal form of government? - Highest Good
- Love
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Moral Realism
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Knowledge
- Grounded in God
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Divine Command
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Libertarian Free Will
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Time
- Linear Progressive
What is the fundamental shape of time? - Economy
- Subsistence Economy
What is the ideal organization of economic life? - Authority
- Divine Revelation
What is the legitimate source of authority? - Law
- Divine Law
What is the ultimate source of legitimate law? - Death
- Unconditional Salvation
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Virtue to Cultivate
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Innate Good
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- Humanity
What is your primary bond and loyalty?