I

From 1879 until his death in 1910 Leo Tolstoy wrote a series of texts on religious and moral issues that had a far-ranging impact. They were published and promulgated, legally and illegally, by mainstream publishers and radical presses, notably those organised by Tolstoy's secretary and confidant, Vladmir Chertkov.Footnote ¹ Tolstoy had always been in some sense a seeker, but the focus of his vigorous energy moved from novel writing in the 1860s and 1870s, to the project of articulating his religious views. This change, crisis or conversion has remained divisive among his biographers and critics.Footnote ² Scholars of Russian literature have tended to interpret Tolstoy's religious views as unique and in some sense incongruous with those of his time.Footnote ³ Philosophers have been dismissive of the substantive claims of Tolstoy's philosophy, which has been understood as an anomaly that soon perished in the nineteenth century's ‘ideological battleground’.Footnote ⁴ For example, Isaiah Berlin depicts the mature Tolstoy as an original but stubborn thinker doomed to failure – ‘a desperate old man, beyond human aid, wandering self-blinded at Colonus’.Footnote ⁵

However, like those from Western Europe with whose thought he engaged, such as Coleridge, Arnold, Carlyle, Mill and Comte, Tolstoy can be understood as one of the great pathfinders that characterised his age.Footnote ⁶ As were his contemporaries, Tolstoy was heavily influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, plagued with doubts about orthodox Christianity, dissatisfied with the philosophy of materialism, and horrified by the social impact of industrialisation. His solution to the problems posed by the times was to give up on both materialism and religious orthodoxy to finally adopt a kind of unitarian universalism, or, as one commentator calls it, ‘a kind of ethical consciousness’Footnote ⁷ . Tolstoy was deeply reflective about the course of this intellectual and spiritual journey (which he reconstructs in A confession).Footnote ⁸ In the reply to his later public excommunication, he compared its course to Coleridge's, declaring that ‘I began by loving my Orthodox faith more than my peace, then I loved Christianity more than my Church, and now I love truth more than anything in the world.’Footnote ⁹

Owen Chadwick argues that Tolstoy's writings had a part to play in the ‘something’ that ‘happened to religious people which affected their attitude to the world’ during the secularisation that occurred in the late nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰ In a manner similar to Mark Bevir's treatment of Annie Besant in this Journal, I argue that by considering Tolstoy's intellectual and spiritual path, we can understand the reasons why some people began to eschew orthodox Christian beliefs and practices in order to take up a new understanding of spirituality, and how beliefs about the equality and sameness of religions became widespread.Footnote ¹¹ Bevir observes that, although intellectual biography cannot account for the impact of the enormous political, economic and social changes of the nineteenth century, a study of the course of one individual's thought can enable valuable analyses of the choices made in answer to the dilemmas raised by these changes. A study of Tolstoy is appropriate in this regard because his story shows how the spiritual journeying of elites can be interrelated, how their ideas may be received, mutate, but pass across generations, and how they may impact on wider society. For Tolstoy was not at all alone in his journey or in the elements of its conclusions; others followed him at all levels of society. Admirers who are key to his bilateral connections to the Anglophone world were Louise and Aylmer Maude, his English translators, and the American, Ernest Crosby.Footnote ¹² They shared in common the impulse to start a new life as a consequence of reading Tolstoy – a vocation enthusiastically taken up by the Tolstoyan colonists led by John Kenworthy.Footnote ¹³ Those elites and radical thinkers in the subsequent generation who also engaged with, and drew upon, Tolstoy, as they forged their own distinct intellectual trajectories, include some of the twentieth century's leading international figures: John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gilbert Murray, members of the Bloomsbury group and Mohandas K. Gandhi.Footnote ¹⁴ Tolstoy's influence on Gandhi and pacifists has been thoroughly demonstrated (it can be traced across generations, from Tolstoy [1828–1910], to Gandhi [1869–1948], to Martin Luther King [1929–68], for example).Footnote ¹⁵ The purpose of this paper is to gain further conceptual purchase on Tolstoy's understanding of world religions, how he came to this position, and how it may relate to other threads in the nineteenth century's rich tapestry and their further continuance into the twentieth. By drawing upon some unconsidered primary sources, I emphasise in particular two hitherto unexamined connections in this regard: Tolstoy's links with British Unitarians, and his influence upon Sir Francis Younghusband, the founder of the World Congress of Faiths, the first interfaith organisation in Britain.

II

There were many influences on Tolstoy's religious thought. His energetic intellect and his universalism prompted a wide engagement with multiple texts and authors. What are of interest in the first instance are its founding principles, which he shared with a nexus of nineteenth- century universalist and unitarian thinkers. By these uncapitalised terms, I mean thinkers who rejected orthodox Trinitarian doctrine; emphasised the innate ability of all human persons to experience God by intuition and experience; and believed that non-Christian religions express at least some aspects of the same human experience of God as Christianity. Notable contemporaneous thinkers in this vein, who influenced, and came to similar conclusions as Tolstoy, included William Emery Channing, James Martineau, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

It should be noted that while Tolstoy grew up in a Russian Orthodox household, he was exposed to Protestant ideas from a young age. One vignette beloved by Tolstoy's biographers for its prophetic synergy with Tolstoy's later life (perhaps so because he recollected it after having set out his religious views concretely) is the ‘ant brothers’ game he played as a child. This consisted of making a den out of furniture with his siblings in a spirit of affection and imagining the world was free of suffering. Tolstoy, who lost his mother and father at a young age, describes this as his first experience of love, and his first experience of God – ‘the love of love, the love of God’.Footnote ¹⁶ The English term ‘ant brothers’ is a translation of the Russian ‘muraveinye bratya’ which was a corruption of ‘moravskie bratya’ or Moravian Brethren.Footnote ¹⁷ This game originated in the ideas of Tolstoy's older brother who had heard of the Protestant movement. It is pertinent that Tolstoy should go on to develop dissenting views not unlike those of Protestant minorities, and that the final conclusion of his philosophy should be the all-encompassing commandment to love.Footnote ¹⁸ In his famous essay ‘The kingdom of God is within you’, Tolstoy presented his views in the historical tradition of Hus and Chelčicky (the early reformers who influenced the Moravian Church) as well as Luther and the condemned fifteenth-century Dominican, Girolamo Savonarola.Footnote ¹⁹ He considered these figures to have preserved the otherwise lost moral imperatives of the Gospels which had been corrupted by mainstream Christianity.

While Tolstoy repudiated Trinitarian Christianity, it is without doubt that the most enduring and forceful influence upon him were the Gospels, in particular the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew v–vii). Tolstoy's exegetics took Protestantism's ‘dangerous idea’ to its extreme; he believed that the individual's personal interpretation of the Bible was paramount.Footnote ²⁰ He first began translating the Bible into the vernacular while experimenting in his own progressive school for peasant children before writing War and peace.Footnote ²¹ This rested on Tolstoy's belief that, as Christ's teaching is intuitively known, if not consciously, one should only believe the parts of the Bible that one finds straightforward and easily understood.Footnote ²² It is for this reason Tolstoy continued to use peasant children's understanding of the Bible (or at least his romanticised view of their understanding) as a hermeneutic tool until his last works.Footnote ²³ Tolstoy's method of reading the Bible, as in the Unitarian traditions, led him to believe that following Jesus did not require belief in Jesus’ divinity, miracles, the resurrection or the sacraments, but his ethical commandments. Jesus was a moral and ethical teacher, much like the enlightenment Jesus of Jefferson.Footnote ²⁴

Philosophical roots common to Tolstoy and his British and American universalist counterparts were Rousseau and German idealism. Tolstoy was an early disciple of Rousseau, choosing at the age of fifteen to wear a medallion portrait of him rather than an Orthodox cross.Footnote ²⁵ Tolstoy first encountered German idealism at the University of Kazan when studying for a degree in Oriental Languages that he never completed.Footnote ²⁶ He continued to read Kant throughout his life and considered his thought essential for religious reform. Another important figure is Friedrich Schleiermacher. This link has perhaps been overlooked by scholars because Tolstoy does not refer to Schleiermacher explicitly in his most systematic work of philosophy, On life, but only in a later essay of 1902.Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, Tolstoy enthusiastically read Schleiermacher along with Luther during his pedagogical experiments of the early 1860s, and two volumes of Schleiermacher's collected works can be found at Yasnaya Polyana.Footnote ²⁸ Similarities with Schleiermacher can be readily observed in the definition of religion fundamental to the argument Tolstoy develops in all his religious essays after 1887. Footnote ²⁹ Tolstoy defined religion as a relation to life, the direction of intention prior to rational justification, dependent on the experience of living: ‘Religion is a certain relation established by man between his separate personality and the infinite universe or its source.’Footnote ³⁰ Schleiermacher, almost a century before, had likewise defined religion as the intuition of the universe or an individual's experience of dependency upon the infinite.Footnote ³¹

By invoking the binary of the universe or world, and the intuition and orientation of the individual, Tolstoy dismisses philosophy, because one has to assume a relation to the universe before one can embark on philosophy that conceptually supports one's relationship. It is for this reason that Tolstoy ultimately dispenses with the ‘pessimistic’ thought of Schopenhauer, which had otherwise impressed him.Footnote ³² Schleiermacher's observation of the disconnection between the learned classes and popular culture also pre-empted Tolstoy's views on the disingenuousness of the upper classes in comparison to the moral and spiritual integrity of the peasantry. Ilya Repin's famous painting, Leo Tolstoy Barefoot, shows in one neat image the remarkable consequences of Tolstoy's beliefs in all these respects. He stands in peasant garb, his own religious writings in his pocket, solitarily at prayer in the woods, contemplating his inner self and communing with nature, defiantly challenging modernity as well as the established religious, social and economic order.Footnote ³³

Chadwick identifies the appeal of the ‘Russian novel’ in nineteenth-century Europe as the subtle way in which religion permeated literary themes while being ‘hardly articulated’.Footnote ³⁴ Although not returning to traditional religious orthodoxy, Russian literature affirmed fundamental truths inexplicable to Victorian materialism. This pertains to the literary vignettes to be later considered in this paper, and accords with the interpretation of Tolstoy as in some sense unitarian. However, it is not the ‘Russian’ aspect of the novel that necessarily lends this quality. Tolstoy's religious views were compatible with popular strands within Western European and North American thought, and indeed with British literature, such as Dickens. Tolstoy's commentators have sometimes overlooked the subtle religious meaning in his novels that contrast with his more obvious later writings, attributing the latter to the madness of his ‘inconstant genius’.Footnote ³⁵ However, an alternative analysis is more cogent. That is, that the creative investigation of protagonists’ spiritual sentiments and experiences in the novels are powerful examples of the universalism that he would later articulate more overtly. Indeed, Tolstoy's psychology, appropriated from Rousseau and German idealism, can be seen as the premise upon which his famous descriptions of the interior lives of his protagonists are based.Footnote ³⁶ According to this interpretation, his religious views espoused after the novels represent a change of degree rather than category.

Tolstoy shares with the American Transcendentalists and romantic poets the project of investigating the subjective experiences of Kantian categories –that is, moments when ordinary life breaks to allow God to be apprehended through wonder at the glory of the created order, and the force of the innate categories of moral understanding.Footnote ³⁷ There are many examples. Here I consider only two vignettes. The first of these appears in Youth, one of Tolstoy's earliest works, written in 1857.Footnote ³⁸ As part of a wider treatment of the young protagonist's moral and social development in the tradition of Bildungsroman, the narrator, Nikolai, looks up to the moon and feels the presence of God in the power and grandeur of nature:

This passage shows the Schleiermachean (and Tolstoyan) ‘sense of union of the individual with the universe’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nikolai comes to a moral conclusion about his orientation to the universe – that of love – through both an aesthetic experience of that which is without him, and through a consideration of his conscience within him, brought about by that experience. All of Tolstoy's single male protagonists go through similar experiences which can be juxtaposed with their experience of organised religion. This is most apparent in Tolstoy's depiction of the sacraments, the most extreme example being his satire on the eucharist in Resurrection, which precipitated his public excommunication.Footnote ⁴¹

A second pertinent example illustrates how Tolstoy's view of the primacy of religious experience pertains to his universalism. At the end of Anna Karenina, Levin stands out on the terrace of his country house (resembling Yasnaya Polyana) pondering the awesome power and unfathomable nature of God. As Levin looks at the Milky Way he begins to question the meaning and implications of the existence of non-Christian religions in relation to his experience. He thinks to himself:

Levin in the context of his innate sense of right and wrong is concerned by the tension between the exclusive truth claims of religion revealed through Scripture, and the existence of other religions. In his non-fiction, Tolstoy identified and rejected two principal ways in which this dilemma could be reconciled. All religions could be rejected, as suggested by the progressive secularists, or only one could be embraced, as urged by religious conservatives. Tolstoy polemically labels these vying groups as the ‘Scribes’ and ‘Pharisees’ respectively.Footnote ⁴³ Faced with these two belief options, Tolstoy chooses a third option that falls between them, that is, a revised Christianity compatible with reason freed from the fetters of authority (particularly the unjust State) and crucially, one that is compatible with other religions.Footnote ⁴⁴ According to Tolstoy, the existence of other religions need not undermine belief in God, but rather give more reason to believe in God, providing the various claims of the religions may be reduced to the same truths. Thus the centrality of conscience and intuition as the essence of religion entailed Tolstoy's answer to the problem of other religions. The existence of other religions must point to a universal religion. These conclusions consolidated Tolstoy's universalism. For in finding the correct religion, that is, the correct relationship between the universe, it followed that knowledge of God may be gained through each of the world's religious traditions because they each reflect universal truths about the nature of God, morality and the human condition.

Tolstoy's universalism came to its most obvious conclusion in his last major work, The calendar of wisdom.Footnote ⁴⁵ On each page several quotations are arranged, to be read on a daily basis. Tolstoy places prophets, philosophers and religious thinkers alongside each other, including Moses, Muhammad, Jesus, Krishna, the Buddha and Universalists and Unitarians. All of the selected thoughts enshrine the principle of Tolstoy's vision of the unity of the world's religions: there is a ‘true and unchanging law, the law which gives us true direction and forbids us to commit sin’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The significance of these works to their author cannot be underestimated, even though they have been largely ignored by Tolstoy scholars. They are Tolstoy's antidote to thinking that the existence of different religions entails the abnegation of religion, or the need to found a new religion. Tolstoy stressed this to the bishop of Tula when he visited Yasnaya Polyana in January 1909 to urge Tolstoy to come back to Orthodoxy. Tolstoy read passages of The calendar to the bishop, including Channing, Emerson, Thoreau and Kant to prove his desire to increase the piety of ordinary people by showing them the unity between the religions.Footnote ⁴⁷

III

It has been suggested that Tolstoy's conclusions to his philosophical and religious quest were not on the ‘continuum’ of ideologies available in his time.Footnote ⁴⁸ However, Tolstoy was consciously aware of his position in the context of contemporaneous writers and movements. He read voraciously and widely in English, French and German. His religious essays refer to key thinkers of the nineteenth century who tackled the same questions (albeit in a variety of ways), such as Comte, Blavatsky, Schopenhauer, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer and Müller. While Tolstoy could be hastily critical of these and other thinkers of the time, he endorsed the ‘Unitarians, Universalists, Quakers’ and other ‘so-called rationalistic sects’ as ‘manifestations’ of ‘the highest religious teaching known to us’.Footnote ⁴⁹ Tolstoy's knowledge of these and other dissenting and heterodox movements increased with the publication of his religious essays, which prompted further correspondence globally, a constant stream of visitors to Yasnaya Polyana and communication with several American preachers and writers with liberal and progressive views.Footnote ⁵⁰ The Yasnaya Polyana library bears testament to this interaction, for it contains radical literature from the era, such as an extensive collection of the sermons of the defrocked Anglican-turned-radical, Charles Vosey.Footnote ⁵¹

Tolstoy was encouraged and influenced by other Universalists; they were also encouraged and influenced by him. This is illustrated by his correspondence with the American Unitarian, Adin Ballou, for example.Footnote ⁵² In England, the dissenting Churches were the grass-roots base from which the English Tolstoyan colonies were formed. The most famous of these, affiliated with the Brotherhood Church in London, was at Purleigh, Essex, where Chertkov and the Maudes were associates. This was not the first Tolstoyan community, however. A Unitarian minister, Herbert Mills, founded one in Starnthwaite, Kendal, before it became associated with Kenworthy's consortium.Footnote ⁵³ Tolstoy's friendship with Louise and Aylmer Maude was probably his most significant link with Britain; through them he became personally acquainted with English Quakerism and English religious movements more generally (Aylmer was the son of an Anglican clergyman, but his wife Louise was a Quaker). The extraordinary efforts of the Maudes and Tolstoy in the evacuation of the Doukhobors to Canada show their dedication to shared liberal Christian beliefs and their support in England. Although not a completely homogeneous group in terms of doctrine, the Doukhobors were monotheistic, stressing the Christ ‘within’ and rejecting the need for a priestly order and church hierarchy. They were persecuted by the Russian government for refusing the military draft. It is unsurprising that Tolstoy, the Tolstoyans and English Quakers took interest in their plight. (As Aylmer Maude observed, the ‘Doukhobors were, in the eyes of the Tolstoyans, a folk who had well-nigh realised the Christian ideal’.Footnote ⁵⁴ ) It was in order to relocate the Doukhobors from the Russian Empire to Canada that Tolstoy returned to novel writing, aided by Louise's English translation and Aylmer's mediation, setting aside the proceeds from Resurrection for the cost of chartering transatlantic steam ships.Footnote ⁵⁵

Hitherto unexplored links between Tolstoy and British Unitarianism further demonstrate Tolstoy's relationships with unitarian and universalist traditions. First there is Tolstoy's love of Charles Dickens, whom Tolstoy saw read A Christmas carol and The boots of the Holly Tree Inn at St James's Hall, Piccadilly and whose portrait hangs above Tolstoy's desk in Yasnaya Polyana.Footnote ⁵⁶ Tolstoy connected with Dickens's novels because he considered them to extol ‘the true Christian spirit’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Indeed, in Dickens we see the same preoccupation with ethical themes of morality, justice, social criticism and what could be called brotherhood, without recourse to the rituals and doctrines of traditional Christianity, as we do in Tolstoy. Dickens's religion is understated – like Tolstoy he bore no denominational affiliation – but he did have Unitarian sympathies. He attended Little Portland Street Unitarian Chapel and visited one of Tolstoy's heroes, William Emery Channing, on his visit to America.Footnote ⁵⁸ A corollary of Tolstoy's universalism was his dislike of division among believers, or exclusive claims to truth. Consequently, he disbelieved in any necessity for, or virtue in, a new religion. To create a sect was paradoxical, a belief he seems to have shared with Dickens and Martineau.Footnote ⁵⁹ (This is the reason Tolstoy never encouraged the founding of the Tolstoyan communities.)

Tolstoy also valued English attitudes to child rearing (according to one source because English methods impressed upon the child the ‘consciousness of its powerlessness in the presence of nature’).Footnote ⁶⁰ It is for this reason that Tolstoy employed several English governesses at Yasnaya Polyana.Footnote ⁶¹ At least one of these seems to have been a Unitarian. An 1883 edition of the British Unitarian organ, The Inquirer, includes a letter from the charismatic Unitarian minister Robert Rodolph Suffield, explaining how a member of his congregation in Reading had been tending to Tolstoy's children; how Tolstoy had reached similar conclusions as Unitarianism; and that he was searching for a replacement au pair.Footnote ⁶² Suffield does not mention the name of the ‘young lady’ from his congregation in his letter, but in the archive of Harris Manchester College, Oxford, a copy of a hand-written ledger includes the additional information of the name Emily Tabor.Footnote ⁶³ Tolstoy's children remember Tabor. Tatyana says that she was the niece of the sister-in-law of the Tolstoys’ favourite English governess, Hannah Tarsey.Footnote ⁶⁴ More significantly, Tatyana says that her mother communicated with the same clergyman – presumably Suffield – to find Tabor, who had also arranged Tarsey's appointment.Footnote ⁶⁵ Although we cannot be sure what influence, if any, the governesses had upon Tolstoy's religious views, the similarity of Tolstoy's religious position and that of British and American Unitarians cannot be disputed.Footnote ⁶⁶ By 1909 Tolstoy was advocating Channing's views to the extent that he thought they should be taught to children as a matter of course.Footnote ⁶⁷ The connection with Suffield is apposite as it shows how other people were making religious choices similar to Tolstoy's – and for similar reasons. Suffield had left the Dominican order after corresponding with Martineau and then attracted huge congregations as minister at Reading Unitarian Chapel.Footnote ⁶⁸ Like Tolstoy, he had been impressed by Rousseau at an early age and believed in the unity of humankind and of the religions. (They all belonged to ‘the Cosmic Faith, the universal foundation, the universal religion’.Footnote ⁶⁹ )

Tolstoy's views and the publication of his religious essays also led to his engagement with religious reformers and groups outside Christianity, including Chinese and Indian religious traditions.Footnote ⁷⁰ Initiating interlocution with non-Christian religions was à la mode among Universalists and some Unitarians. The Parliament of World's Religions, held in Chicago in 1893, is recognised as the first attempt to bring the world's religions together. This inspired other meetings, including one held in Paris in 1900 organised by Bonet Maury, a French Unitarian and participant at the Chicago Parliament, to which Tolstoy declined his invitation – stressing that he believed that religion should be an individual activity.Footnote ⁷¹ It is of note that Tolstoy had for some years preceding his conversion discussed religion with Jews and Muslims – in the latter case with Sunni Bashkir nomads during his visits to the steppes. An example of Tolstoy's speculative and idiosyncratic approach to interreligious encounters is given in an account of a local Jewish visitor to Yasnaya Polyana in 1902, who on asking questions about Tolstoy's religion, prompted an impromptu comparison of the Talmud and Matthew xxii, from which Tolstoy inferred that the parable of the marriage feast was relevant to the international democratisation of the kingdom of Heaven.Footnote ⁷²

Tolstoy showed a particular interest in religious movements and figures who held beliefs similar to, or compatible with, his own. Of these, Tolstoy's correspondence with Gandhi is well known (Gandhi had written to his pacifist mentor from ‘Tolstoy Farm’ which he had founded in South Africa after reading The kingdom of God is within you).Footnote ⁷³ Two of Tolstoy's lesser known interactions were with the Baha'i and the Ahmadiyya movements. Both had emerged out of Islamic cultures in Tolstoy's lifetime and shared his project of synthesising the world's religions into an overarching narrative of shared spiritual foundations. Tolstoy read about Baha'i in a pamphlet given to him by his Turkish translator.Footnote ⁷⁴ A companion of Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (considered a messianic figure by the Ahmadiyya), Dr Mufti Muhammad Sadiq, sent Tolstoy two photographs and a copy of Review of Religions – a periodical which contains studies of world religions from an Ahmadiyya perspective.Footnote ⁷⁵ Tolstoy may have been confused about the two movements; he wrote to the editor of the Ahmadiyya Review of Religions and asked for more information about the Baha'i.Footnote ⁷⁶ He later voiced disagreements with both, although his letters show a polite endorsement of the universalist principles that they espoused.

Tolstoy's vision of the unity of the world's religions lasted beyond his own lifetime and his own correspondence. One pertinent example of the transference of his ideas across generations in this respect is his influence upon the life and work of Sir Francis Younghusband.Footnote ⁷⁷ Like Tolstoy, Younghusband was first a soldier. His early career was spent exploring the remote Himalayas between the British and Russian Empires, dallying in the Great Game, and then, when promoted to colonel, leading the disastrous British mission to Tibet in 1904. His black leather notebook written in Chitral in the summer of 1894 demonstrates the extraordinary effect of Tolstoy's writings upon him (although this did not prevent his later controversial military campaign).Footnote ⁷⁸ After falling from his horse and reading The kingdom of God is within you during convalescence, Younghusband began to question everything. His first entry in his notebook, for 27 August, shows some resistance to Tolstoy's pacifism, perhaps unsurprising for a colonial officer at the height of British imperialism, but by 31 August he had resolved, in Tolstoyan fashion to

These aims remain a theme in Younghusband's notebook (and indeed his life thereafter), but he deliberates as to the best practical way in which to achieve his goals. His resolutions, jotted at the back of the book, indicate his tentative plans to live self-sufficiently in a cottage, to explore religions other than Christianity, to travel all over the world, and to try and find deep insights into human nature. Tolstoy is preoccupying him throughout this period, subverting even his supervision of a military parade: ‘I can never even look at soldiers now without thinking of Tolstoy's saying that they are “hypnotised men”.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Younghusband's ideals and activity finally came to fruition in the founding of the first interreligious organisation in the British Empire, the World Congress of Faiths.Footnote ⁸¹ The organisation still exists, and its work in the 1930s, when Younghusband was still alive, was highly influential. Congresses held in London, Oxford and Cambridge between 1936 and 1939 comprised representatives of all the world's main religious traditions (including luminaries such as the first President of India and the Professor of Eastern Philosophy at Oxford, Sir Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Dr Suzuki, the celebrated Japanese Zen Buddhist).Footnote ⁸² In a book about his motivations for this enterprise, written forty years after his diary entries of 1894, Younghusband still cited Tolstoy as a key inspiration.Footnote ⁸³ In retrospect, he puts Tolstoy's influence into the context of others, such as Emerson and the Sermon on the Mount, and further experiences (and Tolstoyan interpretations of those experiences) that revealed to him ‘the closeness of the unity of men’.Footnote ⁸⁴ These experiences included being hit by a motor car; experiencing ‘unbearable ecstasy’ alone on a Tibetan mountainside; and one night in bed being overpowered by ‘the Spirit’. Younghusband explains, echoing Tolstoy's definition of religion, that over time these experiences and ideas distilled into a coherent ‘conception of the universe and our relationship to it.’Footnote ⁸⁵

Given Younghusband's high regard for Tolstoy, it is perhaps not surprising that, at the 1937 Congress of Faiths held in Oxford, Aylmer Maude was an active participant. Records show Maude representing and articulating the views of Tolstoy (the ‘real religious force’ of Russia), which he felt were relevant to several debates.Footnote ⁸⁶ These contributions were broadly unitarian in perspective in that ethics were necessarily connected with religion; that religion should be based on reason; that God was one and indivisible; and that somehow sense of God had been lost through organised religion. The coherence of these ideas, and the diverse nexus of people who sympathised with them, mean that Tolstoy can be considered as part of the proliferation of universalism in wider British thought. Furthermore, the knock-on influence of Younghusband and the World Congresses is germane. For here was Tolstoyan universalism at work on the fringes of the British Establishment, with considerable consequences for the mainstream. For example, one participant at the London Congress, Alan Watts, would go on to to take an active role in the organisation, and to become one of the twentieth century's most influential proponents of Buddhism in Western popular culture.Footnote ⁸⁷ Another interesting outcome of Younghusband's endeavours was his effect on the artist, explorer and philanthropist Emily Georgiana Kemp, who, inspired by him in part, donated a universalist-style chapel to Somerville College, Oxford, where members of the 1937 Congress met, and thereby also impacting upon generations of young women, including Margaret Thatcher who sometimes attended liberal Christian services there in order to listen to the Principal, Helen Darbishire, preach.Footnote ⁸⁸

IV

Despite Tolstoy's influence, and the similar views of others at the time, universalism has not gained popularity as a viable theology of religions in mainstream Christian denominations. In the twentieth century the foundations of liberal Christianity were critiqued by Karl Barth. Increased meetings between the religions also found the premise of universalism wanting as a method of coming together. (This is illustrated by the experiences of participants of the 1937 World Congress of Faiths who found that communal acts of worship were problematic.)Footnote ⁸⁹ Indeed, syntheses such as Tolstoy's do not account for the diversity of the world's religions, but rather give a syncretistic narrative that supplants them. For this reason, following the Second Vatican Council, the word ‘dialogue’ has been increasingly used to describe a mode of interreligious interaction that does not necessitate a convergence of perspectives, but fosters a good conversation.Footnote ⁹⁰ However, Tolstoy's religious thought and its legacy present a good example of how universalism may pertain to what Owen Chadwick identifies as the secularisation of the ‘European mind’. For while also being dependent on aspects of traditional Christianity, particularly the Gospels, Tolstoy's writings illuminate in detail how Christianity, when interpreted through Kant and Rousseau, can transmute into something distinct from, even opposed to, Trinitarian Christianity.

Tolstoy's fame and literary talent make it possible to trace the complex reception of his ideas in the social, artistic, intellectual and political context of his time. This influence goes beyond his impact upon immediate emulators and the Tolstoyan colonists (who, as he predicted, were in most cases a short-lived fad). For Tolstoy's belief in private spirituality, his assertion of the unity to be found at the heart of the world's religions, his obsession with personal ethics, and his rejection of organised religion, are some of the principal ingredients of the ‘global pluralism’ that has since emerged in the West.Footnote ⁹¹ Elements of these milieux include the popularity of non-Christian religions; the turn to Religious Studies from Theology in education; the use of ‘spirituality’ in opposition to ‘religion’; and the ongoing efforts at interreligious dialogue and ecumenism among the Christian Churches.Footnote ⁹²

It is difficult to separate or survey all the various influences at play during this period. There are, of course, other relevant figures, and movements, such as Theosophy, that developed independently from Tolstoy (although Blavatsky claimed Tolstoy as a Theosophist).Footnote ⁹³ These quests for faith, at first extant among elites, then arguably became more widespread with Tolstoy. Tolstoy became a paradigmatic example of a seeker, and one who gained immense popular appeal. Indicative of his reception by some in the Western intelligentsia, it is notable that William James, in his classic treatment of the psychology of conversion, sees Tolstoy's trajectory as an example of positive religious experience, that led from doubt and melancholy to a fruitful resolution of ‘unity and level’.Footnote ⁹⁴

The prevalence of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century seekers perhaps demonstrates that something was needed that could not be found in the available religious order. It could also indicate that there was a new perceived worth in the very process of seeking. Though many nineteenth-century trailblazers ended up with comparable non-conformist conclusions, once they had gone their own way, subsequent generations could go theirs. The emergence of unconventional spiritual seekers in the establishment, such as Younghusband, enabled similar searches for those in different social classes, and religious quests in different directions. This characterises one difference between the world after Tolstoy and the one before him. He was part of a chain of intellectuals who followed their own paths, who then enabled further generations to strike their paths across wider horizons of possibilities. One possible such construction, for example, runs from Kant (1724–1804), to Schleiermacher (1768–1834), to Tolstoy (1828–1910), Younghusband (1863–1942) and then Watts (1915–73). In the space of four generations from Kant we can therefore see how popular and influential cultural movements such as New Age, western Buddhism, or the Beat Generation are possible. Thus, I suggest that Tolstoy's thought may be located in the development of the present ‘secular age’ – what Charles Taylor identifies as a complex condition whereby, with orthodox religious participation faltering, people may conduct a personal search for meaning, being able understand themselves only in the context of multiple, and often opposing, religious positions.Footnote ⁹⁵

This narrative of Tolstoy's ‘secularisation story’Footnote ⁹⁶ gives one partial account of how increased ‘religious variation’Footnote ⁹⁷ may have come to be possible in the present. It certainly does not show that modernity has led to the absence of religious beliefs. Tolstoy earnestly and steadfastly wished to preserve what he considered the most important aspects of Christianity. Most of all, he did not want to dispense with God or Christian morality as he conceived it. Indeed, it is because of his theistic principles and his disgust at contemporary moral and social problems that he dispensed with the Church. From this standpoint, helped by the popularity of his literature, he then encountered and communicated with other universalist thinkers. If we zoom out from Tolstoy's story, we see that it is located within a web of other similar narratives that we have only touched upon here – Martineau, Suffield, Maude, Younghusband. In all these cases we see how more traditional kinds of Christianity gave way to something more universal.

In regard to contemporaneous figures, Tolstoy's relationships can be understood as ‘reciprocal’.Footnote ⁹⁸ Other universalists bolstered Tolstoy's views, while Tolstoy was considered to add credibility to theirs. This can be seen in Tolstoy's correspondence, his reading and in the public identification of other religious movements with Tolstoy's views. Moreover, we see that Tolstoy's position shares the same roots as many of these connections – the post-Enlightenment turn in Protestant Christianity. This comprised a move from an understanding of Christianity as revealed religion based on Scripture, to one that stressed the primacy of conscience and the importance of individual experience over church authority. Tolstoy's various writings comprehensively articulate this theological perspective. Thus, in answer to that Tolstoyan question, as famously posed in the epilogue to War and peace, of whether a person changes history, or just plays a minimal part in it, we can see Tolstoy's place in history. Even if he were the author of some of the most beautiful and cogent articulations of a more global pattern, perhaps he is best understood as a label we can tag on to an emergent intellectual trend rather than as an odd and isolated religious thinker, with no real antecedent, and little relevance to the present.Footnote ⁹⁹