Mohandas Gandhi wrote in his autobiography that Tolstoy's book "overwhelmed" him, and "left an abiding impression". Gandhi listed Tolstoy's book as one of the three most important modern influences in his life.

1-10 Takeaways:
1) Tolstoy shuddered at the idea of nation states taxing Christians to fund wars. "We are dying of hunger so as to secure the means of killing each other.” For Tolstoy, military conflict could not square with Christian thought (Tolstoy gave preference to the Sermon on the Mount rather than Deuteronomy or Leviticus). For example, a young boy in Sunday School is taught to love his enemies. And, if another boy strikes him, he is taught to not strike back but to reform him with love. Except, when that boy becomes a man and is forced to join the military, he will not love his enemy but instead run him through with a bayonet. "I think if it is a good thing for a boy to love his enemy, it is good for a grown-up man.” Instead of violence, Tolstoy taught "not to resist evil" by way of force (nonviolent protests/civil disobedience - Gandhi/MLK).
“Satan can never be driven out by Satan. Error can never be corrected by error, and evil cannot be vanquished by evil.”
2) Tolstoy taught that the great Truth ("love one another as I have loved you") was more important than any legal code. Legal code, Tolstoy warned, fostered state reliance/allegiance. Reliance/allegiance to the state was antithetical to Christian living seeing how the state not only had a monopoly on violence but a reliance on violence. For Christians in situations much larger than themselves, where violence is expected, Tolstoy taught: "There is one thing, and only one thing, in which it is granted to you to be free in life, all else being beyond your power: that is to recognize and profess the truth." The Truth being the need to love one another like Jesus loves us.
3) As an Anarchist, Tolstoy was unapologetic in his condemnation of the State as it perpetuated anti-Christian forces and conditions. "They (Governments) pretend to support temperance societies, while they are living principally on the drunkenness of the people; and pretend to encourage education, when their whole strength is based on ignorance; and to support constitutional freedom, when their strength rests on the absence of freedom; and to be anxious for the improvement of the condition of the working classes, when their very existence depends on their oppression; and to support Christianity, when Christianity destroys all government."
4) Tolstoy posited that all humans were to progress through three stages in life: Personal/Animal->Social/Pagan ->Universal/Divine. In the first two stages, human allegiance to their personal comforts or state laws would require some level of violence; but, in the third stage, humans were supposed to exercise moral courage and "sacrifice [their] personal and domestic and social good." Radically loving people is incredibly uncomfortable and so most Christians rationalize violence and selfishness as prudence and practicality. “[...most men do not try] to recognize the truth, but to persuade themselves that the life they are leading, which is what they like and are used to, is a life perfectly consistent with truth.”

1-10 Questions:
1) I've asked this question before but why is there a US Secretary of War but not a US secretary of Peace? (Tolstoy essentially answered this by pointing out that the State would dismantle the need for its existence if it aggressively pursued peace).

My dad and I read this book together. We both really liked it, and we had good conversations about it. In many places, Tolstoy writes the very idea that I would write about Christianity and about non-violent resistance, about Christian anarchy (a phrase he doesn't use, of course), about hypocrisy, about the degradation of our "civilization." The book is a little long, but Tolstoy lays out his argument and builds upon it until the end. The last chapter provides concrete examples of his day to illustrate his point, but he refers to books and to other people who believe in non-resistance to evil by force, and supports his claims and ideas very well with various types of evidence.
Tolstoy didn't convince me of anything, but he confirmed my beliefs and opinions. If I wasn't sure how I felt, he probably would have convinced me. He is very persuasive, and his ideas are laid out logically. He does attack the other side because he's Tolstoy and looks like a "modern"-day Moses on the cover of this edition, but he does so eloquently and doesn't come off, at least not to me, as some brash person who knows he's wrong bashing the other side because he has no personal evidence.
The sad irony of Tolstoy's book is that everything got worse when he predicted it would get better. He thought the wars of the nineteenth century were horrific...he died before World War I, so he didn't "get" to see how bad it became. With his comments on society and the treatment of the worker and the poor and the violence and the war and soldier/police brutality, he didn't see the worst. Or maybe he did. Things always look better in the past than they do in the present.
I highly recommend this book. It's enlightening and educational. If you're unsure how you feel about non-resistance, or if you know how you feel in a vague way, this is a good book for you.
Note: Tolstoy doesn't hold back, and his book was censored for a reason. Soldiers and police officers would be particularly vulnerable to take offense (as would Tzars, but I don't think there are too many of them hanging around anymore).

Beautiful, challenging philosophy from Tolstoy in his final years. His central premise is the importance of aspiring to be truly Christian even as we live in a world controlled by corrupt governments and religions. In Tolstoy's perfect world, nations would disband all governments, courts, militaries, and even the concept of nationhood itself, as all of these entities contribute to division and conflict - inherently un-Christian realities. But it is not the concept of this perfect world that differentiates Tolstoy from other great philosophers. It is his claim about how to build such a world: Every individual must recognize for herself what is true [i.e. Christian] and what is false. This act of recognition presents the greatest challenge to Christians living in the modern world as governments and religions effectively obscure our understanding of Christ's teaching.

"The sole meaning of life is to serve humanity by contributing to the establishment of the kingdom of God, which can only be done by the recognition and profession of the truth by every man." (p. 368)

ينطلق تولستوي في هذا الكتاب من فكرة عدم مقاومة الشر بالعنف داعياً الناس إلى نبذ كل ما من شأنه أن يحولهم إلى جلادين منومين خانعين يضطهدون الناس ويعذبونهم تحت تأثير شعارات البطولة والواجب المقدس وبذريعة العجز عن تغيير الوضع القائم، كما يدعوهم إلى اعتناق الحقيقة وهو ما يراه واجب الإنسان الأجدر بالاهتمام في عالم هش من الأكاذيب الكثيرة صنعه المنافقون كل من موقعه.

Tolstoy is my favorite writer.
'The Kingdom of God Is Within You' is a book that heavily influenced Gandhi in his epic battle for justice and compassion within and, then, against the British Empire.

It is not what you might think though. It is heavily censorious of prevailing assumptions in Christianity as they were practiced in the 18th century.

Tolstoy is a radical and allows Christians no wriggle room. You are either a believer and follow the spirit and teachings of Jesus or you are not. It is only in living by the teachings that one becomes a Christian. He gives very little attention to any Christologies. What one may believe about the afterlife has very little sway here.

His main criticism of religion is that it might actually serve as an obfuscation and hinder one in ascertaining the real message and value of Jesus' teachings. Religion might prevent Jesus from coming into one's life. Christ is what most people want; a simple affirmation. But, to Tolstoy, belief requires more.
Hence, a point of view: no Jesus, no Christ.

This book contains quite an admixture of positives and negatives. This review will attempt to disentangle some of the most significant.

The good: This book is polemic done well, stirring and appealing to the noblest human sentiments. Tolstoy is keen to impress his readers with the contradiction between the coercion at the base of the social order (of his time and ours) and the light of the Christian way. His insistence that Christ really did mean what he said is refreshing, given how much effort has been put forward over centuries to attenuate his sharper rhetoric and turn Christianity into a comfortable moralism. Though Tolstoy allows defenders of the present world order to have their say, he also smolders with the injustices inflicted on the wretched of the earth, and he is quite clear in his conviction that this universal edifice of states, armies, laws, wealth, and wars is hostile to God and destined to perish, not through bloody retribution but compassion and meekness. There is, indeed, something reminiscent in this of the spirit of the primitive Church at its best, standing athwart the principalities and powers and dethroning them by submissive love and truth.

The bad: Tolstoy’s conviction that the world was on the verge of a tremendous interior Christianization now seems hopelessly naive. The war he feared came to pass, and recurred, and it has if anything heightened the coercive power of states and institutions of wealth. The twentieth century was not only brutal, but in most places saw the further alienation of spirituality from public life, with attempts at reintegration turning inward and eroding within a generation or descending into vulgar partisanship. Moreover, relatively few today need maintain power by mass execution, torture, and the draft, which Tolstoy assumed to be critical bricks in the dam against anarchy; genuine dependency on governments has deepened, and public opinion has proved pliable in most circumstances, easily shaped and manipulated by oligarchs and politicians. This understandable failure of foresight is not the only thing that undermines his thesis; his Marcionist approach to Christ and Christianity is likewise problematic. For some even now, Tolstoy’s reductionism may seem attractive—keep Christ’s prophetic idealism, drop the encrustations of dogma and the Church’s own complicity in the status quo. But it strains credulity to assert, as Tolstoy does, that the same apostles who faithfully preserved the Sermon on the Mount misunderstood it completely. Simply because this great discourse is key to the Gospel message does not mean it can be ripped from its context of tradition and sacred community without some measure of loss and distortion. One could note some other issues that mar the work in less significant ways: the volume reads like an excessively long tract, and Tolstoy’s understanding of Christian history is trite, sometimes inaccurate, and Whiggish. For all that…

Conclusion: It has its failings, and these are not small, but The Kingdom of God Is Within You remains worth reading and, to a considerable extent, topical. The poor are still with us, and there remain many to do the bidding of the rich and powerful. We may long be on the border of Tolstoy’s quiet revolution, and yet not cross it. Tolstoy’s concluding chapter, the best in the book and the main reason I give it four stars, raises the question of how ordinary, decent Christian people could be complicit in the violence exhibited by states on other human beings; his answers include regard for one’s own advantage, the intoxications of power and prestige, the dilution of guilt through mass participation, and indoctrination through churches and other institutions. Tolstoy’s trust in human freedom and the snowball transformation of public opinion may be misplaced, but he recognizes at least that as long as we fail to look within and take apart the stories we tell ourselves to justify inhumanity, and apply the same standards to our institutions, the blindness of the god of this world is upon us.

Tolstoy felsefesinin başyapıtı , anarşizm anlamak için okumanızı tavsiye ederim.

Tolstoy presents both a challenging interpretation of Jesus's command to "not resist an evildoer" as well as a particularly cutting critique of centralized government, which he argues inevitably resorts to force, war, and torture. Some of Tolstoy's logic seems a bit simplistic, although he should be credited for methodically answering the arguments of his critics in a dialogue-like fashion.

I think Tolstoy rightly glimpsed the revolution that Jesus started, but he overtly refuses to paint a vision of a world without force and violence. Perhaps this is the one critique he could not overcome, only offering that the next stage of human society could not be accurately anticipated. It's reminiscent of something Dallas Willard wrote, that when a society practices the way of Jesus, the need for bureaucracies will gradually fade away.

While Tolstoy also spends a good deal of time criticizing the organized church and its interpretations of the Sermon on the Mount, he fails to provide a wholistic biblical framework that could undergird his philosophy of non-resistance. Perhaps he has done so elsewhere, but I think it would have been helpful to his argument here.

There is certainly plenty of evidence throughout the Hebrew Scriptures--which Jesus would have been quite familiar with--that the biblical authors were highly skeptical of idolatrous power structures, war, and violence.

A sincere deconstruction of the great hypocrisies of modern society that has exponentially increased human suffering. Nothing escapes the critical and thorough reflections of Tolstoi. What's left is whether we are as individuals ready to shed the familiar warmth and safety provided by the ignorance of our hypocrisies and embrace the unknown path forward.

It's been almost a month since i finished this book, and i still think about it every day. It has greatly impressed and inspired me. I am not good at writing reviews, especially about great books, that's why i have been putting it off. But it deserves some praise from my side, since it's the best book i've read this year.
I love Tolstoy's honest and raw way of writing and arguing. His vision on non-resistence to evil which is present throughout the whole book, is wonderfully radical and inspiring.
He saw and clearly argued that the church got Jesus' message all wrong.
I did not agree with everything. For example, he claims that believing the things of the bible that go against science is merely supersition and a way of the church leaders to gain power over people. I think there are things in life that cannot be explained by science, but whose existence we cannot deny.
Not agreeing with everything, for me, is not a hindrance in learning from and being changed for the better by a book and this is a great example of that.

I particularly loved this part:

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The essence of every religious teaching does not consist in the desire to express the forces of Nature symbolically, or in the fear of them, or in the demand for the miraculous, or in the external forms of its manifestation, as the men of science imagine. The essence of religion lies in the property of men prophetically to foresee and point out the path of life, over which humanity must travel, in a new definition of the meaning of life, from which also results a new, the whole future activity of humanity.

This property of foreseeing the path on which humanity must travel is in a greater or lesser degree common to all men, but there have always, at all times, been men, in whom this quality has been manifested with particular force, and these men expressed clearly and precisely what was dimly felt by all men, and established a new comprehension of life, from which resulted an entirely new activity, for hundreds and thousands of years.

We know three such conceptions of life: two of them humanity has already outlived, and the third is the one through which we are now passing in Christianity. There are three, and only three, such conceptions, not because we have arbitrarily united all kinds of life-conceptions into these three, but because the acts of men always have for their base one of these three life-conceptions, because we cannot understand life in any other way than by one of these three means.

The three life-conceptions are these: the first — the personal, or animal; the second — the social, or the pagan; and the third — the universal, or the divine.

According to the first life-conception, man’s life is contained in nothing but his personality; the aim of his life is the gratification of the will of this personality. According to the second life-conception, man’s life is not contained in his personality alone, but in the aggregate and sequence of personalities — in the tribe, the family, the race, the state; the aim of life consists in the gratification of the will of this aggregate of personalities. According to the third life-conception, man’s life is contained neither in his personality, nor in the aggregate and sequence of personalities, but in the beginning and source of life, in God.

These three life-conceptions serve as the foundation of all past and present religions.

The savage recognizes life only in himself, in his personal desires. The good of his life is centred in himself alone. The highest good for him is the greatest gratification of his lust. The prime mover of his life is his personal enjoyment. His religion consists in appeasing the divinity in his favor, and in the worship of imaginary personalities of gods, who live only for personal ends.

A pagan, a social man, no longer recognizes life in himself alone, but in the aggregate of personalities — in the tribe, the family, the race, the state — and sacrifices his personal good for these aggregates. The prime mover of his life is glory. His religion consists in the glorification of the heads of unions — of eponyms, ancestors, kings, and in the worship of gods, the exclusive protectors of his family, his race, his nation, his state. [The unity of this life-conception is not impaired by the fact that so many various forms of life, as that of the tribe, the family, the race, the state, and even the life of humanity, according to the theoretical speculations of the positivists, are based on this social, or pagan, life-conception. All these various forms of life are based on the same concept that the life of the personality is not a sufficient aim of life and that the meaning of life can be found only in the aggregate of personalities.]

The man with the divine life-conception no longer recognizes life to consist in his personality, or in the aggregate of personalities (in the family, the race, the people, the country, or the state), but in the source of the everlasting, immortal life, in God; and to do God’s will he sacrifices his personal and domestic and social good. The prime mover of his religion is love. And his religion is the worship in deed and in truth of the beginning of everything, of God.

The whole historical life of humanity is nothing but a gradual transition from the personal, the animal life-conception, to the social, and from the social to the divine. The whole history of the ancient nations, which lasted for thousands of years and which came to a conclusion with the history of Rome, is the history of the substitution of the social and the political life-conception for the animal, the personal. The whole history since the time of imperial Rome and the appearance of Christianity has been the history of the substitution of the divine life-conception for the political, and we are passing through it even now.

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I love his optimism in this view. He believes we as humanity are at a turning point; things will gradually change for the better, society will pass into a state where there are no ruling powers, violence and force no longer exist, a society based on mutual aid, and all our actions will spring from love and the realization we are all brothers and sisters.
It's a beautiful idea. But i can't help wondering if he would have written the same thing after the two world wars. And if his argument for non-resistence to evil would still stand when he learned of the demonic ISIS.
It doesn't mean i disagree or think him naieve. I just wish i could find a version of his philosophy that could actually be realized in a world like this. I strongly agree that violence is never the answer. But turning the other cheek would never have worked to stop Hitler. Right?

Really did change my world view but how can Tolstoy use Jesus’ teachings as a basis for the whole book and then turn around and say don’t pay taxes to a government using them for war? Render unto Caesar!

Things your ordinary citizen thinks when he hears "Leo Tolstoy":

-Some damn commie Russian
-Yeah, I think I heard some of them literary people mention him. Whatever. Speaking of literature, I need to go buy new Dan Brown.
-That dude who wrote that long-ass book about war or something no one ever really finished. LBR, they all use Cliffnotes for book reports.
-The one who wrote that famous tragic forbidden love story between a married woman and a hot officer. I've seen the movie(s) (KK is my homegurl!), but then I opened the book and it was full of some guy talking about peasants and shit. It was a bore. The movie was much better.
-A very important Russian writer. I've tried reading some of his work, but it's not for me.


Things I wish more people would know about Leo Tolstoy:
-He was an anarchist
-He might have been Christian, but he was not a fan of the way Church has been interpreting the religion. Thus, this book was born.
-One day, a young lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi read this book.

Onto the Part 2

(FLAG AWAY!)