TOLOSA, ARCHDIOCESE OF. – A city and archdiocese in the department of Haute-Garonne in France.
It has an area of 6,302 sq km with a population of 512,240, of whom 500,000 are Catholic; the archdiocese is divided into 4 archdeaconries: T., Villefranche, Muret and St-Gaudens, 4 archpriestships, 32 deaneries comprising 575 parishes served by 453 diocesan priests and 159 religious; it has a major and minor seminary, 12 male and 52 female religious communities (Ann. Pont. 1953, p. 426).
T. arose in a territory where the population was mixed: Ligurian and Iberian, and was the capital of the Volcae Tectosages. In 121 BC it was included in the new Roman Province and housed a Roman garrison; Caesar established a praesidium there in 52 BC; it then became an oppidum latinum. Little is known of its history during the Empire and under Diocletian; it was included first in the province of Narbonensis. It reappears in history during the barbarian invasions; it was sacked by Ataulf, king of the Visigoths, in 413, became a royal residence during their domination and in 506 the Lex Romana Visigothorum was promulgated there. In 507 it passed under Frankish rule. Throughout this period inscriptions are few in number, considering the city’s importance (Pauly-Wissowa, VI A, II, col. 1686). Ausonius mentions the red-brick walls that surrounded T., whose Capitolium stood where the church of Notre-Dame du Taur is today (E. Griffe, Le véritable emplacement du Capitole romain de Toulouse, in Bull. de littér. ecclés., 49 [1948], pp. 32-41). There is great uncertainty about its Christian origins and few inscriptions survive (for Christian sarcophagi cf. Wilpert, Sarcofagi, II, p. 231 ff. and passim). Around 250 the first bishop of T., Saturninus, is recorded (v.). Bishop Rodanius, exiled together with St Hilary of Poitiers in 355, died in Phrygia c. 358 (Sulpicius Severus, Chronicon, II, 39, 45). After him Hilary and Silvius are remembered; the latter began construction of the church of St Saturninus, completed by his successor Eusebius, who transferred the relics of the saint there; he received a letter from Pope Innocent I in 405 (Jaffé-Wattenbach, no. 203) and was in correspondence with St Jerome, who in 406 dedicated to him his commentary on the prophet Zechariah (PL 25, 1415 ff.). Of his successors Eralianus attended the Council of Agde in 506 and Magnulfus was represented at that of Mâcon in 585. Viligisilus took part in that of Paris in 614 and in that of Clichy in 627. T. suffered in the first half of the 8th century the consequences of Saracen raids; but its bishops maintained good relations with the Carolingians, participating in their affairs. T. was subsequently ruled by a dynasty of counts, the first of whom was Raymond, who was involved in struggles with the dukes of Aquitaine and in those of Henry II of Aquitaine with Louis VII of France. A severe blow to its prosperity was dealt by the religious disputes of the Albigensians, in which Raymond VI and Bishop Fulk (v.) found themselves opposed, the great promoter of St Dominic (v.). It never succeeded in becoming a true commune despite the privileges it obtained. With the end of the count’s dynasty under Raymond VII (1240), his daughter Joan brought what remained of her father’s inheritance to her husband Alfonso of Poitiers, brother of St Louis IX, until in 1271 T. was incorporated into the Kingdom of France and became the capital of Languedoc. In 1296-97 the see had as its bishop St Louis, a Franciscan, son of Charles II of Anjou, king of Naples. Boniface VIII carved out part of the Pamiers (v.); in compensation, John XXII on 25 July 1317 removed T. from the metropolitan jurisdiction of Narbonne and erected it as an archdiocese, assigning to it as suffragans Montauban, Pamiers, St-Papoul, Riez and Lombez.
The first archbishop was Raymond de Comminges (formerly bishop of Maguelonne) from 1309 to 1327, when he was created cardinal. He was succeeded by the Dominican William de Laudan (formerly bishop of Vienne); then Raymond de Carichale (1345-50), created cardinal in 1350; Cardinal Francis de Goize (1391-92), then Bernard de Rosier (1451-74), founder of the Collège de Foix; John of Orléans from 1503 to 1533, when he was created cardinal.
T. continued its life until the Revolution, disturbed in the 16th century for a time by Huguenot troubles; from 1534 to 1550 it was Châtillon (v.), deprived in March 1563 of all rank and benefice for heresy; then by Francis de Joyeuse (1584-1605); Louis de Nogaret (1614-27); Peter de Marca (1652-62); Peter de Bonzi (1672-73); Arthur R. Dillon (1758-63); Stephen Charles Loménie de Brienne (1763-89); Antoine J. de Clermont-Tonnerre (1820-30); P. T. D. d’Astros (1830-35), created cardinal in 1850; Julius F. Desprez (1859-95), created cardinal in 1879; François Desiré Mathieu (1896-99); since 1928 Jules-Gérard Saliège, created cardinal on 18 February 1946.
In the new diocesan circumscription fixed by the Concordat of 1801, T. was preserved as an archdiocese, extended to include that of Narbonne (v.), and by the bull of Pius VII of 22 July 1822 territories were added from the suppressed dioceses of Rieux and Comminges and parts of those of Montauban, Lavaur, St-Papoul, Mirepoix and Lombez, so as to correspond to the department of Haute-Garonne. Its suffragans were the dioceses of Montauban, Pamiers and Carcassonne. On 19 January 1935 the archbishop of T. was granted the faculty of adding to his title that of Narbonne together with those of St-Bertrand de Comminges and Rieux (AAS, 27 [1935], p. 78).
The cathedral dedicated to St Stephen traces its origins to Bishop Eusebius of the 5th century and had a cloister (destroyed in 1812-17); rebuilt in 1078 by Bishop Izarn, in 1272 Bishop Bertrand de l’Isle-Jourdain gave it the form which makes it the prototype of other southern Gothic brick churches; in 1286 the same bishop erected the choir in stone from Roquefort. It preserves stained glass from the 14th-16th centuries and sculptures from the 17th century, as well as a rich series of tapestries from the 16th-17th centuries in the baptismal chapel (L. Vié, La métropole St-Etienne de T., Toulouse 1950). Destroyed by the Saracens in 721, the church erected in honour of St Saturninus was rebuilt in the following age thanks to donations from Bishop Hugh (960) and Raymond, count of Rouergue (961). A new building was begun c. 1060, construction being interrupted several times. The monks of the abbey of Bazie in 1076 adopted the Rule of St Augustine, aiming to become independent of Bishop Izarn, who in 1082 ceded the church to Abbot Unando of Moissac. But Gregory VII on 23 July 1083 re-established the canons there. Pope Urban II consecrated the high altar in 1096, which still survives, and Callistus II a second altar in 1119; construction of the building continued until in the mid-13th century the choir was raised, the crypts modified and the Romanesque structure reinforced. At the level of the transept three storeys of the bell tower were erected, to which two more were later added. During the Revolution the cloister and monastic buildings were demolished; they were restored in 1852-55. Medieval sculptures and capitals are preserved there (A. Auriol et R. Rey, La basilique de St-Sernin de T., Toulouse 1930; M. Aubert, L’église de St-Sernin de T., Paris 1933).
Notre-Dame de la Daurade (deaurata), said to have been founded by Bishop Exuperius, had attached to it a monastery, a female one, which passed to monks in 843. In 1077 Bishop Izarn ceded it to St Hugh of Cluny, and in 1627 it passed to the Congregation of St Maur. It took its name from its mosaics with a gold background, which were lost when the church was demolished in the 18th century, but an 18th-century manuscript (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, no. 12608) described their subjects, which in three superimposed tiers represented scenes from the life of Christ, archangels, prophets, Evangelists, Apostles (cf. J. Degert, *La plus ancienne mosaïque de la Gaule*, in *Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique de Toulouse*, 1905, pp. 3-15; id., *Démolitions et reconstructions à la Daurade au XVIIIe siècle*, in *Bulletin de la Société archéologique du Midi*, 1905, pp. 296-98; H. Woodroff, *The iconography and date of the mosaics of la Daurade*, in *The Art Bulletin*, 13 [1931], pp. 80-104; R. Rey, *Le sanctuaire paléochrétien de la Daurade et ses origines orientales*, in *Annales du Midi*, 61 [1949], pp. 249-73; E. Mâle, *Les mosaïques de la Daurade*, in *Mélanges Ch. Picard*, II, Paris 1949, p. 682).
The church of N.-D. de la Dalbade or La Dalbade derived its name from the fact that its walls were faced with whitewash (dealbata). It was rebuilt from 1503 to 1542 in southern Gothic style and consecrated in 1548; it was badly damaged in 1926 by the collapse of the bell tower. On the portal (1537) is inscribed the distich: «Chrestien, si mon amour est en ton coeur gravé, ne diffère en passant de me dire une Ave» (16th cent.); in the tympanum is a painted terracotta copy of the *Coronation of the Virgin* by the Blessed Angelico; the three statues of the Madonna, St Catherine and St Barnabas are modern. The interior is a single nave of 19 x 24 m, with side chapels. A new bell tower is under construction.
St-Papoul, in the district of Castelnaudary, is the title of an ancient Benedictine abbey founded in 817 and dependent on St Victor of Marseilles. The name is Gallo-Roman from the 6th century, and the cult of that saint is said to have replaced that of St Peter (cf. *Acta SS. Novembris*, I, Paris 1887, p. 587). John XXII in 1317 raised it to a bishopric; it was rebuilt in the 14th century and secularised in 1670. The church has a fine Romanesque choir and a cloister with Gothic columns and capitals (E. Regnaud, *Fouilles dans l'église de St-Papoul*, in *Bulletin de la Société archéologique du Midi*, 1905, pp. 259-60; Cottineau, II, cols. 2834-35; E. Griffe, *Autour du nouveau Propre diocésain de T.*, in *Revue d'histoire de l'Église de France*, 28 [1942], pp. 75-79).
The church ‘des Jacobins’ was built in 1230-92 after the Dominicans established themselves in St-Romain had acquired the site; it had two naves, one to the north, called the friars’ church, the other to the south, the laity’s church, with five bays. A first enlargement took place in 1314-40 through the work of Cardinal de Peyre de Godin, and a second in 1369-85 on the occasion of the translation from Italy of the relics of St Thomas Aquinas granted by Urban V (Ch. Higounet, *La chronologie de la construction de l'église des Jacobins de T.*, in *Bulletin monumental*, 107 [1949], pp. 85-100; E. Lambert, *L'église et le couvent des Jacobins de T. et l'architecture dominicaine*, 141-86).
Some of the most important sacred buildings have been turned to secular uses. In the former collegiate church of St-Raymond, dating from the early 16th century, a museum has been arranged which houses Roman archaeological material and collections of Visigothic and medieval art down to the reign of Henry IV. The Natural History Museum is housed in the former 17th-century convent of the Discalced Carmelites, where material relating to prehistory and ethnography is also kept. The magnificent cloister of ‘des Augustins’ has also been adapted as a museum.
Enrico Josi
THE CULTURAL CENTRE. — Toulouse has always been, from Gallo-Roman antiquity onwards, a centre of culture, hence its epithet ‘Palladia T.’ (Martial, IX, 100 [99], 3; Ausonius, *Parent.*, 3, 11). Lively literary activity, between the 12th and 13th centuries, took place at the court of the counts of Toulouse, munificent patrons of troubadour art.
### The Ancient University
The Treaty of Paris (12 Apr. 1229) imposed upon Count Raymond VII, also at the advice of Cardinal Romano of S. Egidio, legate of Gregory IX, the obligation to provide for masters for a Studium to be immediately established at Toulouse for the preservation of the faith against the Albigensian heresy. The Studium was solemnly inaugurated on 24 May 1229; Gregory IX, with the bull *Olim operante Illo* (27 Apr. 1233), confirming what had been established in 1229 by the legate Cardinal Romano, granted to the Studium of Toulouse the privileges of the University of Paris (*Bull. Rom.*, III, Turin 1858, pp. 480-81). The *Studium Tolosanum* thus constitutes the first example of a university arising through papal initiative. Innocent IV was regarded as its new founder by virtue of the bull *In civitate Tolosana* of 22 Sept. 1245 (M. Fournier, op. cit. in bibliography, no. 523).
At the beginning of the fourteenth century, Philip the Fair, in his conflict with Boniface VIII, consulted the Studium, and while the University of Paris had pronounced in favor of the Pope, that of Toulouse sided with the King (cf. ibid., nos. 536 and 537). The general statutes date from the fourteenth century (1309-29) and already show a tendency to free themselves from the jurisdiction of the chancellor and the bishop. The specific statutes of the Faculty of Theology, reorganized in 1366-89, were granted; Urban V, an alumnus and professor, granted to the church of the University (of the Dominicans) the body of St. Thomas Aquinas (bull *Cum ex certis*, of 1367), which was translated there on 28 Jan. 1369. The fame and prestige of the Studium were greatly enhanced by the numerous colleges for poor students. Its constitution, while presenting the characteristics of the Universities of Bologna and Paris, constitutes a type of its own: a type later imitated by other French universities such as Cahors, Orléans, Poitiers, and Bordeaux, to which Toulouse communicated its privileges and statutes.
The Hundred Years' War (1339-1453) and the unfortunate reform of the apostolic commissioners (1394-1425) shook the prestige of the University of Toulouse, which by the mid-fifteenth century passed under the direct influence of civil authority and remained primarily a university for law. It disappeared with the Revolution (15 Dec. 1793), revived under the Napoleonic reform (1808), and was reconstituted as a modern university following the law of 10 July 1866; characteristic of it is the Institute of Southern Studies.
### The Catholic University
The *Institut Catholique de Toulouse* considers itself the spiritual heir of the ancient University; organized following the Dupanloup law (12 July 1875), it was inaugurated as a “free higher education institute” on 15 Nov. 1877, with the Faculty of Law and courses of apologetic lectures, which soon developed into the Faculties of Letters (16 Nov. 1878) and Theology (25 Nov. 1879). The latter received canonical erection by decree of the Sacred Congregation of Studies on 15 Oct. 1889, and apostolic letter *Eximi saecularum* on 20 Dec. 1889 (*Leonis XIII Acta*, IX [1889], 277-80); subsequently, the Faculties of Philosophy and Canon Law were erected, with approval of their statutes (decrees of the Sacred Congregation of Studies, 30 June 1899; cf. Pius X, letter *Quae nuper*, 2 Apr. 1913: *AAS*, 5 [1913], pp. 179-80). The “harshness of the times” led, in 1886, to the suppression of the Faculty of Civil Law; the Institute, however, was able to establish a Higher School of Science (3 Nov. 1882), a Higher School of Agriculture (13 Nov. 1919), and a Higher School of Economic and Social Sciences (17 Nov. 1926). The new statutes, following the apostolic constitution *Deus scientiarum Dominus* (v.), were approved by the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities of Studies on 15 June 1936.
A Catholic University for southwestern France, the Institute encompasses a jurisdiction of 17 dioceses within the ecclesiastical provinces of Toulouse, Albi, Auch, and Bordeaux. The 17 bishops, considered “protectors” or patrons, form the “episcopal assembly,” with a permanent commission of 4 archbishops and one suffragan chosen by the assembly; the Grand Chancellor is the Archbishop of Toulouse. At the initiative of the Institute, the *Université Internationale d'Été* was founded in 1951, and it publishes the *Annuaire*; the *Bulletin de Littérature ecclésiastique*, a scholarly journal founded in 1880 and renewed by P. Batiffol in 1899, which also contains much information on the history of the Institute and its professors; and the *Chronique* of the University itself.
### The Major Seminaries
The ancient diocesan seminary was reconstituted in 1805 by Archbishop Primat. For the ecclesiastical students of the Athenaeum, the following are now open within its own premises, since Oct. 1932: the Leo XIII Seminary, which continues the former “Séminaire de l’Institut” (1879) for students already ordained, and the Pius XI Seminary, for seminarians preparing to receive Holy Orders. Their direction is entrusted to the Sulpician Fathers.
### Other Cultural Institutions
The Academy of Sciences, Inscriptions, and Fine Arts (1640), which has published *Mémoires* since 1782; the ancient Academy “des Jeux-Folaux,” founded in 1323 and reorganized in 1694; the Archaeological Society “du Midi de la France” (1831), which has also published volumes of *Mémoires* (1832 ff.) and a *Bulletin* (1869 ff.).
A series of tales drawn from his war experiences: *Il taglio del bosco*, *L'incursione*, etc. Promoted to ensign in January 1854, he was later transferred to Sebastopol, where he fought during the siege and derived the impressions that inspired the trilogy *Sebastopoli nel dicembre 1854*, *Sebastopoli nel maggio 1855*, and *Sebastopoli nell'agosto 1855*. Discharged in 1856 with the rank of lieutenant, he settled in St. Petersburg, where, thanks to his social standing and reputation as a writer, the doors of literary and high-society circles were opened to him; but after less than a year, weary of everything, he left for abroad with a profound faith in the social and individual evolution of humanity, in “progress”: “At that time it seemed to me that this word expressed something” (*Confession*). Yet on 6 April 1857, after witnessing a public execution in Paris, even this new conviction collapsed: “I understood, not with reason, but with my whole being, that no theory of rational progress could justify that act” (*ibid.*). Western Europe found in him anything but an admirer: the impression he drew from it was, on the whole, negative. During his stay abroad (1857 and 1860–61), however, he took the opportunity to study certain pedagogical systems, thanks to which (though his own method was to have no method and to follow the principle of “free education”) he organized a popular school at Yasnaya Polyana and became its teacher. Beginning in 1862, T. began publishing a pedagogical journal, *Yasnaya Polyana*, in which, alongside theoretical articles, he started printing stories and fables for children. A very important article, inasmuch as it prepares and justifies T.’s future abandonment of the so-called artistic style in favor of a popularizing one, is *Chi ha da imparare a scrivere, e da chi: i ragazzi dei contadini da noi, o noi dai ragazzi dei contadini?*, in which he expresses his admiration for the compositions of his peasant pupils.
In 1862 T. married Sofya A. Behrs, and for several years conjugal happiness absorbed him completely; *War and Peace* (1864–65) dates to this period, a novel completed with extraordinary speed given its breadth and the extraordinary care with which T. worked (some chapters exist in up to seven drafts). From 1873 to 1877 he wrote *Anna Karenina*, a work that, for its perfect structure, constant stylistic tension, and psychological insight, should be considered his masterpiece in comparison even with *War and Peace*—a work of brilliant conception but uneven poetic force and flawed, prolix construction. The central theme of both novels is the search for the purpose of human existence, which T. identifies in living “according to God” and in love of neighbor, formulas whose content, however, remains unclear in both novels.
Having lost faith in “progress,” T. set himself the religious problem anew: “Through two years of intellectual torment I discovered an old and simple truth... that immortality exists, that love exists, and that one must live for others if one wishes to be eternally happy. These discoveries surprised me by their analogy with Christian religion... I began to search the Gospel, but found little. I have found neither God, nor the Redeemer, nor the mysteries: nothing” (letter to A. Tolstaya, 3 May 1859). Some time later, in Hyères in 1860, he had witnessed his brother Nikolai’s death agony and asked himself what purpose life itself had: either it had a why, a meaning that eluded him, or, if its sole end was annihilation, it was an evil, and in that case it was not worth “deceiving oneself”: death is preferable to life—one must free oneself from the latter” (*Confession*; cited in *Anna Karenina* in Levin’s thoughts on suicide).
Tolstoy’s pessimism (tinged with Schopenhauerian hues) is characteristic of the first period, when T. tries to reach God through reason, by studying religious doctrines and philosophy. Later he would learn, through an immediate feeling, that God “here he is: he is here, he is everywhere”; and reason, science, all culture would henceforth appear to him not only as inadequate paths to God but as diverging from Him. It is precisely in this “immediate feeling,” however, that Tolstoy’s great error lies; for while the rational T. leans toward the Christian doctrine of love of neighbor, the “immediate,” instinctive T. (and hence above all the artist) inclines, on the contrary, toward a pagan conception of the world.
T.’s religious anxiety stems from two impulses: one, the fear of death as the annihilation of the self; the other, the love of life; and while the former drives him to seek a hidden meaning in the transience of existence, the latter finds the fullness of being and its immortality in the almost physical, Virgilian attainment of harmony with created things, through a pantheistic perception of the world. Particularly significant in this regard is the tale *The Cossacks* (1852–63), in which this pantheistic perception of the world dominates Olenin during the hunt and in the deer’s lair, while the yearning for self-sacrifice and love of neighbor begins to manifest itself in him as soon as, realizing he is lost, he is seized by the fear of death.
The theme of self-sacrifice and love of neighbor, of redemption from selfishness through such love, and of redemption from sin through that sacrifice, underpins the novel *Resurrection* (completed in 1899). Though rich in merits in its details and in individual parts, it is as a whole a failed work; yet even ideologically it concludes negatively with the practical uselessness of sacrifice. *Resurrection* represented T.’s return to literature after a period during which he had abandoned it, considering it, like every form of art, a means of seducing the senses. In his final years his literary activity took on an increasingly moralistic tone and was aimed at preaching love and nonresistance to evil (*In What My Faith Consists*, *Critique of Dogmatic Theology*, *What Is Art?*, etc.).
As his fame and the influence of his doctrine grew (Yasnaya Polyana had become, toward the end of the century, almost a pilgrimage site), it began to worry the political and religious authorities. Though Alexander III dared not take any measures for fear of the unfavorable worldwide resonance it would have, the Holy Synod excommunicated T. in 1901. At the end of that same year, following a severe attack of pneumonia, T. moved for a time to Crimea, where he often had occasion to meet with Chekhov and Gorky. Returning to Yasnaya, he resided there uninterruptedly until the day when, no longer able to bear the conflict between the principles he professed and the life he led, he resolved to abandon family and home. Death overtook him at Astapovo station during that flight, on 7 November 1910.
It is difficult to resign oneself to explaining the stylistic diversity that runs through TOLSTOY’S works with the very words of T.: “I know that every great artist must also create his own means of expression. If the content of works of art can be infinitely varied, so too can their means of expression.” It is nonetheless evident that while he wrote his first three novels in a style of exquisite literary ambition that finds no further echo in any other of his works, he was simultaneously composing the Sebastopol tales, where a restrained freedom guides the choice of expressive means, and where alongside greater austerity there is less vigilance. Thus, again, after a novel like War and Peace, in which the lack of continuous control over form means that perfect pages alternate with others that are angular, even of chancellery script (as SKLOVSKY noted), Anna Karenina transports us into a stylistic climate in which simplicity, the apparent austerity, and almost schematic quality of expression acquire a flavour of immediacy and sheer miracle. Later (e.g., in the tale What Men Live By, 1881), T. moves with equal ease among the cadences of popular storytelling, using without affectation or effort the humble materials of everyday speech, a spare and elementary syntax, and managing to transform that manner of delivery, as the people do, into a way and world of poetry. This prophetic aspect of his writing is, however, a phenomenon much more of surface than of substance. The unity of Tolstoy’s style resides in a unity of temperament rather than of taste; in a particular disposition in accepting things, rather than in changing and seeking them to his own measure and image. T. did not refashion the universe in his own likeness; he limited it to those aspects that most resembled him, and in them he reflected himself from every angle of incidence. But what kept him from crystallizing his sensibility into a verbal style was also a preconceived aversion that he felt toward every “literary” aspect of literature; for he never regarded the latter as something that could satisfy or be satisfied in itself, but as a means of communicating an inner problematic, in the face of whose gravity every stylistic decorum seemed to him frivolous. Because of his interest in that problematic, T. may be considered an essentially autobiographical and content-driven writer, though one must strip from this assertion whatever of premeditated and programmatic intent it may seem to imply to the detriment of art; for he almost never had theses already resolved to exemplify, but problems in a state of drama. The very formulae of “living according to God” and of “self-sacrifice” for the sake of one’s neighbour, which seem to represent points of arrival, solutions to the question posed, even judging by the insistence with which he returned to them in every new work, reveal themselves as partial convictions, and far more rational than profound and absolute. But it was precisely this impossibility of catharsis, and the consequent persistence of his problems in an emotional state, that prevented him from lapsing into programmatic and thesis-driven literature; just as, at the same time, it was his content-driven approach that conditioned his detachment from the modes of the traditional art-novel, understood as the biography of a hero. The true plot of each of his works is never, in fact, or very rarely, a human peripeteia, but an internal current of thought that moves the entire action. A typical example is Anna Karenina, where Levin’s story ends up achieving even a spatial preponderance over the biography of the eponymous heroine.
In Levin and Anna is adumbrated the same problem (which is in fact the one that sums up all Tolstoy’s ideology): the search for happiness; but, in the face of T.’s true interest, Anna’s negative experience, directed toward a selfish solution, ends up taking second place to Levin’s, who has arrived at the true key to the solution: existence “according to God.”
The particular nature of Tolstoy’s novels, substantially different both from biographical novels and from thesis-driven ones; the fact that their real plot is never laid bare but unfolds through as many secret channels as there are destinies of the characters—main and secondary—that frequent them, have been the cause of an erroneous judgment regarding their construction, found wanting, or even altogether missing. Another factor also barred T. from the paths of the biographical novel: his philosophy could not conceive of the “hero.” He knew that life has its own reason, but that this reason is the law of life itself; and whether man arrived at discovering it or not, he remained equally enslaved by II. The discovery redeemed him from his condition of “brute,” illuminating his conscience, but it did not lead him to freedom. This is why in War and Peace (and certainly not because of any extravagant attitude toward history on his part) he regarded men who, like Napoleon, consider themselves makers of destiny, as “heroes,” simply instruments of a will that transcends their own. For T., man is not only not the creator of destinies, but within certain limits not even of his own destiny; thus, every time he attempts to exercise his free will, “law” (or, as some have said of Anna Karenina, “fate”) hastens to strike him. It is perhaps from this conception of human non-heroism that the modes of Tolstoy’s psychology derive, never intended to weave an epic of the sentiments, to organize them into a solar system around which the world revolves and from which things draw light; their story never unfolds consequentially, orderly along a continuous thread, for T. communicates a character’s soul not through the results of his psychological process, already refined and clarified, but through the process itself in its raw state, in its discontinuous, chaotic becoming. This bold realism, which reduces passions from a sublimated and romantic aura to an everyday truth, constitutes one of the greatest innovations introduced by T. into the modern novel. Deeply realistic, T. also proved himself in his descriptions of nature, which represent one of the most characteristic aspects of his work. T. never romanticizes the landscape, nor does he ever render it anthropomorphic, even if at times he makes it a mirror of pathos, or, conversely, uses it as a stimulus to provoke II. In nature he perceives a primal goodness in which man rediscovers and renews his own innocence, harmony with all created things, and direct communion with God. He perceives it as something mysteriously alive, animated, consonant with himself and confused with him both spiritually and physically. All the adjectives he uses in such descriptions, more than defining the object represented, mediate an almost sensual adherence to II. And it is in these descriptions that T., more than anywhere else, betrays his fundamentally, instinctively pagan nature; it is in them, moreover, that his style unfailingly finds and preserves a register and a vocabulary perfectly consistent.
TOLSTOY’S RELIGION — Tolstoy did not create a new religious system; his religion is a mixture of the Gospel—especially the Sermon on the Mount—with strong doses of agnosticism, fideism, rationalism, and most often pantheism. He was, however, not a consistent pantheist who would push his practical applications to their extreme conclusions; nor could he have been otherwise, since his rationalism, whenever it came to stating something positive on religious matters, was joined to a profound aversion to logic.
Here are the principal aphorisms of his religious beliefs: true religion is the relation of the soul to universal life in which it is immersed, to God who is infinite and impersonal life and goodness. Man has the duty to awaken the divine within himself. One must become conscious of the fact that earthly life is but a moment in the infinite series of lives. To assert that God is the creator of the world is blasphemy; it is equivalent to denying that God is infinite love, of which I am a part. One must love everything: “the dog, the grass, your mother.” The purpose of life is to drown one’s own will in that of God. What matters in religion is morality, conduct, and relations with one’s neighbor, in conformity with the precepts of the Gospel. Christian doctrine and dogmas must be repudiated; even the historical personality of Jesus Christ matters little, the christological dogmas are absurdities; the moral doctrine expounded in the Gospel suffices for everything. All men are equal; therefore no one has the right to punish his neighbor. One should not resist evil with violence. The Church, every Church, is harmful; the same must be said of everything it offers: dogmatic definitions, sacraments, rites. No one may interpose between man and God. The cult of images and relics is immoral. Priests serve only their own interests. Authority in religious matters is absolutely inadmissible.
Tolstoy’s fundamental error consists in this: he confuses the abuses of historical Christianity with the Church itself and does not reflect that what offends him—and rightly so—is not the Church but rather the infidelities to II. His tragedy is the same as that of all dissenters: by undermining the supernatural basis of Christianity, Tolstoy rendered a great service to Soviet atheism, which, while showing recognition, ironizes his moral doctrine.
STANISLAUS TYSZKIEWICZ