Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
Art is a human activity that unites people in one and the same feeling. If these feelings are good, then the activity of art is beneficial; and vice versa.
In every age and in every human society there is always a religious consciousness, shared by everyone in that society, which tells people what is good and what is bad, and it is this religious consciousness that determines the merit of the feelings transmitted by art.
Christian art must make it so that the feelings of fraternity and love for one’s neighbors, which are currently accessible only to the best people of society, become habitual, that they become everyone’s instinct. By evoking the feelings of fraternity and love in people’s imagination, Christian art will teach them to experience those same feelings in reality. It lays down the rails in people’s souls upon which will naturally flow the deeds of those who had been fostered by such art.
The essence of Christian consciousness consists in the recognition of every person of his sonship to God and in the unity of people with God and with each other that flows from this, just as it is said in the gospel (John 17:21), and that is why the content of Christian art is feelings that promote the unity of people with God and with each other.
Works of Christian art can only be those works which unite all people, without exception; or those that make people aware of the likeness of their condition in relation to God and their neighbor; or those which evoke in people one and the same feeling, even the simplest one, that is not contrary to Christianity and which everyone shares.
Christian teaching has changed people’s ideal so much that, as the gospel says, what people deemed great became an abomination to God. The ideal became not the grandeur of the pharaoh and the Roman emperor, not the beauty of the Greeks or the riches of Phoenicia, but humility, chastity, compassion and love.
The hero became not a rich man, but the poor Lazarus; Mary of Egypt not at the time of her beauty, but at the time of her penitence; not the seekers of wealth, but those who reject it, who live not in palaces but in huts and catacombs.
The purpose of art in our time is to transfer from the domain of reason into the domain of emotion the truth that people’s welfare lies in uniting with each other, and that the current reign of violence must be replaced by the kingdom of heaven, i.e. of love, which we all see as humankind’s highest goal.
The diversity of feelings that flow from a religious consciousness is infinite, and all of them are new because a religious consciousness is nothing other than an indication of a human being’s new relationship to the world, whereas the feelings that flow from a desire for pleasure are not only limited, but had been expressed and experienced a long time ago. And this is why the atheism of European upper classes has led them to the most impoverished content in art.
Perhaps in the future, ideals even higher than today’s will reveal themselves to art, and art will work to realize them; but in our time, the purpose of art is clear and definite.
The purpose of Christian art is to evoke in people feelings of fraternal unity.