The Kingdom of God is Within You
First published in 1894 in Germany after being banned in Leo Tolstoy’s native Russia, ‘The Kingdom of God is Within You’ is, in the words of the introduction, “one of the most remarkable studies of the social and psychological condition of the modern world”. Thirty years in the making, Tolstoy expounds upon his earlier work “What I Believe” and argues that nonviolence is the very foundation of Christianity. Tolstoy believed that the teaching of Christ to turn the other cheek was Christ’s most important message and that Christianity was a religion of peace and love and prohibited all violence, including self-defense. To support his argument, Tolstoy traced the history of non-violent resistance by a small minority throughout the history of the religion. He drew a sharp contrast between the teachings of Christ, such as in the “Sermon on the Mount”, and modern church doctrine, in which he found the absence of any commandment against violence a perversion of Christ’s message. Tolstoy also criticized all governments that waged war as violating Christian principles. This masterpiece of Christian thought would become the foundation of the philosophy of non-violent resistance and be profoundly influential to such important world figures as Mahatma Gandhi.
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About the Author
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and social reformer.
His literal interpretation of the ethical teachings of Jesus, centering on the Sermon on the Mount, caused him in later life to become a fervent Christian anarchist and anarcho-pacifist. His ideas on nonviolent resistance, expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God Is Within You, were to have a profound impact on such pivotal twentieth-century figures as Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.