This idea ultimately came to fruition through Gandhi's organization of nationwide nonviolent strikes and protests during the years 1918–1947. In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, which Gandhi would read, and which outlined the notion that only by using love as a weapon through passive resistance could the native Indian people overthrow the colonial British Empire. Reading this book opened up the mind of the world-famous Tolstoy to Gandhi, who was still a young protester living in South Africa at the time. Gandhi listed Tolstoy's book, as well as John Ruskin's Unto This Last and the poet Shrimad Rajchandra (Raychandbhai), as the three most important modern influences in his life. Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth ( Part II, Chapter 15) that Tolstoy's book "overwhelmed" him, and "left an abiding impression". Gandhi and other residents of Tolstoy Farm (a colony established as part of the Tolstoyan movement), South Africa, 1910 But one may at least be sure that his destructive criticism of the present social and political regime will become a powerful force in the work of disintegration and social reconstruction which is going on around us." Reception Tolstoy's relationship with Mohandas Gandhi "One cannot of course anticipate that English people, slow as they are to be influenced by ideas, and instinctively distrustful of all that is logical, will take a leap in the dark and attempt to put Tolstoy's theory of life into practice. In 1894, Constance Garnett, who translated the work into English, wrote the following in her translator's preface:
"That this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society that still greater disaster would ensue if this organization were destroyed all this is said only by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer from it – and they are ten times as numerous – think and say quite the contrary." In particular, he confronts those who seek to maintain status quo:
Tolstoy presented excerpts from magazines and newspapers relating various personal experiences, and gave keen insight into the history of non-resistance from the very foundation of Christianity, as being professed by a minority of believers. "Nowhere nor in anything, except in the assertion of the Church, can we find that God or Christ founded anything like what churchmen understand by the Church." In reading Jesus' words in the Gospels, Tolstoy notes that the modern church is a heretical creation: Tolstoy advocated nonviolence as a solution to nationalist woes and as a means for seeing the hypocrisy of the church. As the Russian Orthodox Church was at the time an organization merged with the Russian state which fully supported the state's policies, Tolstoy sought to separate its teachings from what he believed to be the true gospel of Christ, specifically the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy discusses Ballou and Garrison's texts and biographies at length in the book, including a whole excerpt of Ballou's Non-Resistance Catechism (originally published in 1844). Tolstoy was largely inspired by the writings of American Christian anarchists Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison, who also shared his viewpoint that all governments who waged war were an affront to the New Testament and Christian ethics. "How can you kill people, when it is written in God's commandment: 'Thou shalt not murder'?" Tolstoy rejects the interpretation of Roman and medieval scholars who attempted to limit its scope. When Christ says to turn the other cheek, Tolstoy asserts that Christ means to abolish violence, even the defensive kind, and to give up revenge. In the book, Tolstoy speaks of the principle of nonviolent resistance when confronted by violence, as taught by Jesus Christ. The title of the book originates from Luke 17:21. The first edition of The Kingdom of God Is Within You, 1894. The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a key text for Tolstoyan proponents of nonviolence, of nonviolent resistance, and of the Christian anarchist movement. It is the culmination of 30 years of Tolstoy's thinking, and lays out a new organization for society based on an interpretation of Christianity focusing on universal love. A Christian anarchist philosophical treatise, the book was first published in Germany in 1894 after being banned in his home country of Russia. Tsárstvo Bózhiye vnutrí vas) is a non-fiction book written by Leo Tolstoy. Russia (written)/Germany (first published)Ĭhristian theology, philosophy, anarchism The first English edition of The Kingdom of God Is Within You.
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