Part Eight: Chapter 12

by Leo Tolstoy

　　Levin strode along the highroad, absorbed not so much in histhoughts (he could not yet disentangle them) as in his spiritualcondition, unlike anything he had experienced before.

　　The words uttered by the peasant had acted on his soul like anelectric shock, suddenly transforming and combining into a singlewhole the whole swarm of disjointed, impotent, separate thoughtsthat incessantly occupied his mind. These thoughts hadunconsciously been in his mind even when he was talking about theland.

　　He was aware of something new in his soul, and joyfully testedthis new thing, not yet knowing what it was.

　　"Not living for his own wants, but for God? For what God? Andcould one say anything more senseless than what he said? He saidthat one must not live for one's own wants, that is, that onemust not live for what we understand, what we are attracted by,what we desire, but must live for something incomprehensible, forGod, whom no one can understand nor even define. What of it?Didn't I understand those senseless words of Fyodor's? Andunderstanding them, did I doubt of their truth? Did I think themstupid, obscure, inexact? No, I understood him, and exactly ashe understands the words. I understood them more fully andclearly than I understand anything in life, and never in my lifehave I doubted nor can I doubt about it. And not only I, buteveryone, the whole world understands nothing fully but this, andabout this only they have no doubt and are always agreed.

　　"And I looked out for miracles, complained that I did not see amiracle which would convince me. A material miracle would havepersuaded me. And here is a miracle, the sole miracle possible,continually existing, surrounding me on all sides, and I nevernoticed it!

　　"Fyodor says that Kirillov lives for his belly. That'scomprehensible and rational. All of us as rational beings can'tdo anything else but live for our belly. And all of a sudden thesame Fyodor says that one mustn't live for one's belly, but mustlive for truth, for God, and at a hint I understand him! And Iand millions of men, men who lived ages ago and men living now--peasants, the poor in spirit and the learned, who have thoughtand written about it, in their obscure words saying the samething--we are all agreed about this one thing: what we must livefor and what is good. I and all men have only one firm,incontestable, clear knowledge, and that knowledge cannot beexplained by the reason--it is outside it, and has no causes andcan have no effects.

　　"If goodness has causes, it is not goodness; if it has effects, areward, it is not goodness either. So goodness is outside thechain of cause and effect.

　　"And yet I know it, and we all know it.

　　"What could be a greater miracle than that?

　　"Can I have found the solution of it all? can my sufferings beover?" thought Levin, striding along the dusty road, not noticingthe heat nor his weariness, and experiencing a sense of relieffrom prolonged suffering. This feeling was so delicious that itseemed to him incredible. He was breathless with emotion andincapable of going farther; he turned off the road into theforest and lay down in the shade of an aspen on the uncut grass.He took his hat off his hot head and lay propped on his elbow inthe lush, feathery, woodland grass.

　　"Yes, I must make it clear to myself and understand," he thought,looking intently at the untrampled grass before him, andfollowing the movements of a green beetle, advancing along ablade of couch-grass and lifting up in its progress a leaf ofgoat-weed. "What have I discovered?" he asked himself, bendingaside the leaf of goat-weed out of the beetle's way and twistinganother blade of grass above for the beetle to cross over ontoit. "What is it makes me glad? What have I discovered?

　　"I have discovered nothing. I have only found out what I knew.I understand the force that in the past gave me life, and now toogives me life. I have been set free from falsity, I have foundthe Master.

　　"Of old I used to say that in my body, that in the body of thisgrass and of this beetle (there, she didn't care for the grass,she's opened her wings and flown away), there was going on atransformation of matter in accordance with physical, chemical,and physiological laws. And in all of us, as well as in theaspens and the clouds and the misty patches, there was a processof evolution. Evolution from what? into what?--Eternal evolutionand struggle.... As though there could be any sort of tendencyand struggle in the eternal! And I was astonished that in spiteof the utmost effort of thought along that road I could notdiscover the meaning of life, the meaning of my impulses andyearnings. Now I say that I know the meaning of my life: 'Tolive for God, for my soul.' And this meaning, in spite of itsclearness, is mysterious and marvelous. Such, indeed, is themeaning of everything existing. Yes, pride," he said to himself,turning over on his stomach and beginning to tie a noose ofblades of grass, trying not to break them.

　　"And not merely pride of intellect, but dulness of intellect.And most of all, the deceitfulness; yes, the deceitfulness ofintellect. The cheating knavishness of intellect, that's it," hesaid to himself.

　　And he briefly went through, mentally, the whole course of hisideas during the last two years, the beginning of which was theclear confronting of death at the sight of his dear brotherhopelessly ill.

　　Then, for the first time, grasping that for every man, andhimself too, there was nothing in store but suffering, death, andforgetfulness, he had made up his mind that life was impossiblelike that, and that he must either interpret life so that itwould not present itself to him as the evil jest of some devil,or shoot himself.

　　But he had not done either, but had gone on living, thinking, andfeeling, and had even at that very time married, and had had manyjoys and had been happy, when he was not thinking of the meaningof his life.

　　What did this mean? It meant that he had been living rightly,but thinking wrongly.

　　He had lived (without being aware of it) on those spiritualtruths that he had sucked in with his mother's milk, but he hadthought, not merely without recognition of these truths, butstudiously ignoring them.

　　Now it was clear to him that he could only live by virtue of thebeliefs in which he had been brought up.

　　"What should I have been, and how should I have spent my life, ifI had not had these beliefs, if I had not known that I must livefor God and not for my own desires? I should have robbed andlied and killed. Nothing of what makes the chief happiness of mylife would have existed for me." And with the utmost stretch ofimagination he could not conceive the brutal creature he wouldhave been himself, if he had not known what he was living for.

　　"I looked for an answer to my question. And thought could notgive an answer to my question--it is incommensurable with myquestion. The answer has been given me by life itself, in myknowledge of what is right and what is wrong. And that knowledgeI did not arrive at in any way, it was given to me as to allmen, given, because I could not have got it from anywhere.

　　"Where could I have got it? By reason could I have arrived atknowing that I must love my neighbor and not oppress him? I wastold that in my childhood, and I believed it gladly, for theytold me what was already in my soul. But who discovered it? Notreason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence, and thelaw that requires us to oppress all who hinder the satisfactionof our desires. That is the deduction of reason. But lovingone's neighbor reason could never discover, because it'sirrational."