Leo Tolstoy Archive
Written: 1895
Source: Original text from WikiSource.org, Translated: with God's spirit by EarthlyFireFlies.org, 2020.
Transcription/Markup: Andy Carloff
Online Source: RevoltLib.com; 2021
1. But, having freed himself from religious deception and escaped temptations, a human still falls into sins. A person with awakened consciousness knows that the meaning of his life is only in serving God, and yet he commits sins out of habit, impeding both the manifestation of love and the attainment of true well-being.
2. How can a person battle a sinful habit?
3. There are two means of battling sinful habits: first, to clearly understand the consequences of sins - that sins do not bring the purpose for which they are committed, and do not increase but rather decrease the animal well-being of the separate individual; secondly, to know which sins a human must begin to deal with, i.e. which to handle first, and which - after.
4. And therefore, firstly, it is always necessary to clearly understand and remember that the position of a human in the world is that every search for his personal well-being, once he woke up to the conscious awareness, deprives him of that well-being, and that, on the contrary, he receives well-being only when he does not think about his personal well-being and gives all his energy to serving God. “You must search for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the rest will be added onto you.”
5. And, secondly, to combat sinful habits more successfully, it is necessary to know to which sin we must direct our attention first: not to start battling from the sin which has its root in another unconquered sin, and to know the connection and the succession of the sins among themselves.
1. There is a connection and sequence of sins, according which one sin leads to others or interferes with liberation from them.
2. A person cannot get rid of any sins for as long as he falls into the sin of intoxication; he cannot free himself from the sin of ambition if he yields to that of greed; and cannot be freed from the sin of greed while he yields to the sin of idleness; he cannot be freed from sexual sin if he falls into the sin of lust and idleness; and he cannot be freed from the sin of ambition and greed so long as he yields to the sin of lust.
3. This does not mean that one should not strive against every sin at all times, but it means that for the success in battling sins it is necessary to know with which one to begin, or rather with which should not begin to make the battle successful.
4. It is only the battling sins in the wrong order that makes this battle unsuccessful and often leads the person battling sins into despair.
5. The sin indulging which makes conquering any other sin impossible is the sin of intoxication, any of it, whether it is by the means of stupefying substances, impressive surroundings, or fast vigorous movements; the intoxicated person can conquer neither laziness, nor lust, nor sexual propensities, nor lust for power. And therefore, to be able to fight other sins, a person must first free himself from the sin of intoxication.
6. The next sin from which a person must free himself in order to be able to battle with sensual lust, greed, ambition, sexual lust is the sin of idleness. The freer a person is from the sin of idleness, the easier it is for him to abstain from the sin of sensual lust, greed, ambition, sexual lust, and the lust for power: the person who works does not need more complex means of fulfilling his needs, does not indulge in possessions, is less eager to fall into the temptation of sexual lust, and has neither motives nor leisure time to fight.
7. The next after this is the sin of lust. The more abstemious a person is in food, clothing, housing, the easier it is for him to be free from the sin of greed, the lust for power, sexual lust. Satisfied with little, he does not need possessions, abstinence helps with conquering sexual lust, and, having little needs, he has no reasons to fight.
8. The next after these sins is the sin of greed. The freer will a person be from this sin, the easier it will be for him to refrain from the sin of sexual lust and the sin of fighting. Nothing encourages the sin of sexual lust as the superfluity of property, and nothing causes so much fighting among people.
9. Following after this, and the last one, is the sin of fighting, included in all sins, and is caused by all other sins, and the greatest liberation from which is only possible upon liberation from all the preceding sins.
1. It is only possible to combat sins in general by knowing the sequence of sins, by starting to fight, first of all, those without which we cannot fight the others.
2. But even in the fight against every single sin, one should start with those manifestations of sins refraining from which is in the power of the person, of which the person has not made the habit yet.
3. Such sins, among all kind of sins – of drunkenness, and idleness, and sensual lust, and greed, and power, and sexual lust - are the personal sins, the ones that a person makes for the first time, and have not yet made habits of them. And therefore, the person must free himself, first of all, from them.
4. Only having freed himself from these sins, i.e. having ceased to invent new means of increasing his personal pleasures, should the person start combating with habits, traditions, established in his environment sins.
5. And only after overcoming these sins, can a person begin to battle the sins which are innate.
1. The purpose of a human life is the manifestation and increase of love. This increase occurs only after the person realizes his true divine self. The stronger his awareness of his true self, the greater is his well-being. And therefore anything that opposes this awareness, as any excitement does by increasing the false perception of his isolated life and weakens the consciousness of the true self (which any intoxication does), impedes the true well-being of a human.
2. But, in addition to the fact that any type of intoxication obstructs the true well-being of a person awakened to consciousness, any intoxication deceives the person and not only does not lead to increase of his individual well-being, which he seeks through the stimulation, but always deprives him from even the animal pleasures that he had.
3. A person who is still at the level of animal life, or a child with not yet awaken consciousness, indulging in any arousal - smoking, drinking, solemnity, dancing, - gets full satisfaction from the produced arousal and does not need the repetition of this arousal. But a person with awakened reason notices that any excitement suppresses the activity of his reason and removes the pain caused by contradiction between the demands of his animal and spiritual nature, and therefore he requires repetition and reinforcement of the intoxication, and requires more and even more of that, to completely quiet down that awakened reason in him, which is only possible to do by destroying completely, or at least partly, the bodily life. So a reasonable person, by getting indulged in this sin, not only does not receive the expected benefits, but falls into the most varied and cruel disasters.
4. A person who is free from intoxication uses for his bodily life all the powers of his mind that are given to him, and can reasonably choose what is best for the well-being of his animal existence, but a person indulging in intoxication loses even those mental powers which are given to an animal to avoid harm and receive pleasure.
5. Those are the consequences of the sin of intoxication for a person committing it; but for others the consequences of it are particularly harmful, firstly, because producing the effect of intoxication requires huge expenditure of efforts, so that a large share of labor of mankind is spent on the production of intoxicating substances and on the preparation and building of intoxicating ceremonial actions, processions, services, monuments, temples, all sorts of celebrations; secondly, because smoking, wine, exhilarating movements, and especially solemnity make thoughtless people under their influence to commit the most absurd, coarse, detrimental, and mean acts. This is what the person undergoing the temptation of any intoxication needs to know and always to keep in mind.
6. No one, while living in the body, can completely destroy in himself the possibility of raising of temporary intoxication from eating, drinking, or special environmental conditions, or exhilarating movements, and, as a result of these factors, the increase of animal perception and weakening of consciousness. But while a person cannot completely destroy this capability of arousal, everyone can bring it down to the lesser extent. And this is the essence of the upcoming battle of any person with the sin of intoxication.
7. In order to free himself from the sin of intoxication, a person must understand and remember that certain degree of excitement in certain times and under certain conditions is natural to a human as an animal, and that when his consciousness awakens, he should not only not look for these excitements, but try to avoid them and look for a more peaceful state, in which the activity of his mind can manifest itself in all its power, that activity, following which makes it possible to achieve the greatest well-being, both for himself as well as for people and creatures connected with him.
8. In order to achieve this state, a person must start with not growing in himself that sin of intoxication to which he is accustomed and which has become the habit of his life. If he has already included into his customary life certain habits of intoxication, repeated at certain times and recognized by all around him as necessary, let him keep these habits, but not to introduce new ones by imitating others or by inventing them himself: if he got used to smoking cigarettes, let him not get used to cigars or opium; if he got used to beer or wine, let him not get used to stronger intoxicants; if got used to doing low bows during prayers at home or in church, or to jumping and dancing during worship, let him not get used to new actions. If he got used to celebrate some holidays, let him not celebrate new. Let him not to increase those means of arousal to which he got used to, and he will have already done a lot for freeing himself and others from the sin of intoxication. If only people would not introduce new forms of sin, sin would vanish, because sin begins when there is no habit and it is easy to defeat it, and there are always have been, are, and will be people who freed themselves from sin.
9. If the person has already firmly acknowledged the insanity of the sin of drunkenness, and firmly decided not to increase those habits of intoxication which became habitual to him, let him quit smoking, drinking, if he has those habits; let him cease to participate in the festivities and celebrations in which he participated; let him stop doing the exhilarating movements, if he is accustomed to do them.
10. If the person frees himself from those artificial habits of intoxication, in which he has been living, let him begin to free himself from those states of arousal which certain food, drink, movements, and environment produce in him, which any human is prone to.
11. Although a human, while in the body, will never completely escape the condition of arousal and intoxication produced by food, drink, movements, and surroundings - the degree of these conditions can be reduced to minimum. And the more the person, awakened to consciousness, will free himself of the condition of intoxication, the clearer will be his mind, the easier it will be for him to deal with all the other sins, the more he will receive the true well-being; and the more physical well-being will be added to him, the more he will be contributing to the well-being of other people.
1. A person with awakened consciousness is not an independent, self-satisfying creature that would be capable of having his own independent welfare, but a messenger of God, for whom well-being is only possible to the extent that he fulfills the will of God. And therefore for a human to serve his individual being is as unreasonable as it is unwise for an employee to serve his instrument of work, preserve his shovel or scythe, rather than to use it for intended work; as it is said in the Gospel: "who preserves his carnal life will lose his true life; and only by spending one’s carnal life you can obtain the true life".
2. To force other people to work to satisfy one’s own needs is as unreasonable as an unwise employee would destroy or spoil instruments of work of his coworkers in order to preserve or improve his own instrument which he must use to produce the work to which both he and his fellows are assigned.
3. But, in addition to the true well-being from which the person who frees himself from labor and dumps it on other people deprives himself, such a person also deprives himself of that bodily animal pleasures, which are intended for a human who does the normal physical work necessary for the satisfaction of his needs.
4. A person will get the greatest benefits for his separate being by exercising his strengths and rest, when he lives according to his instincts like an animal, working and resting just as much as it is required for his animal life. But as soon as he artificially dumps his work on others and arranges for himself artificial rest, he will not get pleasure from the rest.
5. The working person gets true satisfaction from rest; the idle person, instead of rest which he wants to arrange for himself, experiences constant uneasiness; and, in addition to that, this artificial idleness kills the source of his pleasure – his health, so that, by relaxing his own body, he deprives himself of the opportunity to work, and hence of the aftereffects of work – of true rest, and causes in himself severe diseases.
6. Those are the consequences of idleness for the person committing this sin; for other people the consequences of that sin are detrimental, 1) because, as the Chinese saying says, if there is one person who does not work, then there's another one dying of hunger; 2) because the thoughtless people, having not experienced that frustration which idle people have, try to imitate them, and, instead of good feelings toward them, they experience envious, unkind feelings. This is what every person wanting to battle the sin of idleness should know.
7. In order to get rid of the sin of idleness, a person must clearly understand and remember that every time he liberates himself from work that he used to do, he does not increase but reduces the well-being of his separate personality and produces unnecessary evil toward other people.
8. It is impossible to destroy in a separate human animal being the desire for rest and an aversion to work (according to the Bible, idleness was bliss, and work was punishment), but to reduce this sin and to bring it to the lowest degree is something that a human must strive for, in order to rid himself of this sin.
9. To rid himself from the habit of sin, a person should start from not avoiding any labor that he performed before: if he used to clean his dress, washed the linen, he should not dump it on somebody else; if he managed to live without some things, products of labor of other people, - he should not buy them; if he used to go about on foot, he should not ride; if he used to carry his own suitcase, he should not give it to porter etc. All of it may seem so insignificant, but if people avoided doing that, they would get rid of a large number of their own sins and misery resulting from them.
10. Only when a person is able to refrain from liberating himself from the work he used to perform earlier and from dumping it onto other people, he can successfully start battling the hereditary sin of idleness. If he is a peasant, then he should not force his feeble wife to do what he has leisure to do himself, not to hire an employee as he did before, not to buy the product of labor which he used to purchase and without which others manage to get around; if he is rich – to dismiss the servant and tidy up his things by himself, and not to buy expensive dresses if he used to do that before.
11. If a person has managed to conquer idleness he accustomed to from childhood, and descended to the working level at which people around him live, only then can this person begin to successfully combat the innate sin of idleness, i.e. work for the well-being of other people when others rest.
12. The fact that human life became so complicated as a result of the division of labor that a person cannot satisfy his own and his family's needs all by himself, and that it became now impossible in our world to avoid using the products of someone else's labor, still, this cannot prevent a person from striving toward the condition where he would give people more that he takes from them.
13. In order to ensure that, the person must, firstly, perform for himself and for his family all he can get done; and, secondly, while serving other people, choose not the work he likes and which many people want to do, as it comes to everything related to managing people, lecturing, entertaining them; but those works that are routinely needed, unattractive, and from doing which all people refuse, as with any kind of tough and dirty work.
1. The purpose of a human is to serve God by increasing love in himself. The less needs the person will have, the easier it will be for him to serve God and people, and therefore the more true benefits he will receive through the increase of love in himself.
2. But in addition to the benefits of true life, which a human receives in proportion to the degree of his freedom from the sin of lust, his condition in the world is such that if he gives in to his needs only to the extent that is necessary, and does not direct his mind to the increase of the pleasures of satisfying his needs, then this satisfaction gives him the greatest well-being attainable in this regard. But with each increase of his needs, whether they are satisfied or not, the welfare of worldly life inevitably diminishes.
3. The greatest benefit from satisfaction of his needs – in food, drink, sleep, clothing, shelter – a person receives when he satisfies them like an animal, instinctively, and not to get pleasure but in order to eliminate the growing dissatisfaction: the greatest pleasure from food a human gets not when he eats refined foods but when he is hungry, and from clothing - not when it is very beautiful but when he is cold, and from home - not when it is luxurious but when he takes refuge in it from the weather.
4. A person who uses rich dinner, clothes, or home exceeding his needs receives less pleasures than a person who uses the simplest food, clothing, home but after he gets hungry, cold, wet; so complicating the means of satisfying needs and their abundance do not increase the well-being of a personal life but reduces it.
5. Excess in satisfying needs deprives a person from the most source of the pleasure in satisfying needs: it destroys the health of the organism; no food brings pleasure to the patient with weakened stomach, no clothes and no home can warm up bloodless delicate bodies.
6. Those are the consequences of the sin of sensual lust for the person committing them; for people surrounding him its impacts are that, firstly, people in need are deprived of those goods which are consumed by the ones who are in luxury; secondly, all those cowardly people, who see the excesses of the extravagant ones yet do not see their sufferings, lured by their status and are tempted by the same sin, and, instead of experiencing natural joyful brotherly feelings toward all, they experience painful jealousy and dislike toward the extravagant ones. That is what a person must know in order to successfully combat the sin of sensual lust.
7. It is impossible to eliminate the desire to increase pleasure of satisfying needs in a separate human being while he lives in the body, but a person can bring this desire down to minimum, and this the essence of battling the sin.
8. For the greatest liberation from the sin of lust, a person must first clearly understand and remember that any sophistication in satisfying one’s own needs will not only increase but reduce his will-being and produce unnecessary evil in other people.
9. To free himself from the habits of this sin, a person should start with the decision not to increase his own needs, not to change what he was accustomed to, not to imitate and not to invent new wants; not to start drinking tea when he lived and was healthy without tea; not to build new palace when he lived in the old one. This refraining may seem so little, but if only people would just refrain from doing that, 90 percent of human sins and sufferings would have disappear.
10. Only by firmly refraining from introducing new luxuries in his life can a person begin to battle the inherited sins; a person who is used to drink tea and eat meat, or a person accustomed to the champagne and fine horses, little by little, can unlearn that what is superfluous, and transition from more luxurious habits to more frugal ones.
11. And, only by having unlearned the luxury habits and descended down to the degree of the poorest people, can the person begin to deal with the innate sins of sensual lust, i.e. reduce his needs to the level even with the most poor and moderate people.
1. The true well-being of a human is in the manifestation of love, and at the same time a human is put in a position that he never knows when he will die, and so every hour of his life can be the last one; and so no one reasonable person can violate love in the present for the sake of providing for the future, which may never come. But this is exactly what most people do by trying to acquire possessions and to keep them away from other people, to secure the future for themselves and their families.
2. But, in addition to the fact that people, by doing so, deprive themselves of true well-being, they do not attain even those benefits for their separate being that are always accessible to a human.
3. It is in human nature to satisfy his needs by his own labor, and even to store objects for his needs as some animals do, and, by doing so, a human attains the highest possible well-being for his separate being.
4. But as soon as the person starts to claim exclusive rights to those stored or otherwise acquired articles, the well-being of his individual does not only decrease, but is being replaced by the suffering of this being.
5. The person who relies, in ensuring of his future, on his own work, on the mutual assistance of people, and, most importantly, on such arrangement in the world in which people are just as provided in their life as celestial birds or wild flowers are, he can peacefully give in to all the joys of life; but the person who started securing his own future property, cannot have a moment of peace.
6. First of all, a human never knows for how long he will need to provide for himself: for one month, one year, ten years, for the next generation; secondly, the cares about his property distract him more and more from simple joys in life; thirdly, he is always afraid of possibility that those possessions can be captured by other people, and always struggles to keep and increase the goods he has acquired, and, by giving his whole life to taking care of the future, he loses his real life.
7. Those are the consequences of the sin of property for the person committing it; and for the people around him its effects are: deprivations as a result of the seizures.
8. It is almost impossible to eliminate in oneself the desire to retain exclusively for oneself the essential items - clothing, tools, a piece of bread for tomorrow; but to bring this inclination to a minimum is possible, and in this bringing the sin of property down to the lowest degree is the essence of battling this sin.
9. And therefore, in order to free himself of the sin of property, an individual should clearly understand and remember that the ensuring of his future by acquisition and retention of possessions will not increase his well-being but will diminish it, and will cause great unnecessary evil to those people among whom these possessions are acquired and withheld.
10. And in order to deal with the habit of this sin, you need to begin with not increasing the assets you have in an attempt of ensuring future, whether it be millions of pounds or dozens of bags of rye for a year's consumption. If only people understood that their well-being and life, even animal life, is not secured by possessions, they would not increase at the expense of others that what everyone considers his own, and then a big part of the disasters that afflict humans would disappear.
11. Only when a person is already able to refrain from increasing his property, can he successfully start freeing himself from what he owns, and, only having freed himself from everything inherited, can he begin to battle the inborn sin, i.e. to give others what is considered necessary for the support of life itself.
1. "Kings reign over the nations and exercise their authorities over them, but not what it shall be among you, - who wants to be first, he shall be the servant to all," the Christian teaching says. According to the Christian teaching, a human is sent to the world in order to serve God; and serving God is fulfilled by manifesting love. And love can only be manifested through serving people, and therefore every struggle of a person, awakened to conscious awareness, with other beings, i.e. violence, the desire to make another person commit an act contrary to his own will, is opposite to human purpose and obstructs his true well-being.
2. But, in addition to the fact that the person, awakened to conscious awareness and coming to grips with other beings, deprives himself of the benefits of true life, he does not even reach those benefits for his single being which he aspires to.
3. A human, living only animal life, like a child or an animal, fights with other creatures only for as long as his animal instincts require this struggle: robs a piece from another only when he is hungry, and drives the other one away from his place only when he has no place, applies only physical strength for this fight, and, after defeating or being defeated in the fight, stops it. And, in doing so, he gets the highest welfare which is available for him as a single being.
4. But that is not what happens to a person with awakened reason, coming into the fight: the person with awakened reason, coming into the fight, uses for it all his mind and makes fighting his purpose, and therefore he never knows when he will stop it, and after his victory, he gets carried away by the desire for further victories, triggering hate in the defeated, which poisons his life if he is the winner; or if he gets defeated, he suffers himself from humiliation and hatred. So a Homo sapiens, by entering a fight against other creatures, not only does not increase the benefits of his individual being, but reduces it by the sufferings he has himself produced.
5. A person who avoids fighting, who is submissive, firstly, is free and can put his efforts into what attracts him, secondly, by loving others and humbling himself before them, causes love in them and therefore can enjoy those benefits of worldly life which he encounters; but a person with awakened reason who enters a fight inevitably gives already his whole life to the efforts to fight, and, secondly, by fighting, he causes fighting back and hatred in other people, and cannot peacefully enjoy those benefits he won by the fight, so he has to protect them nonstop.
6. These are the consequences of the sin of fighting for the person committing it; for those around him the consequences of the sin are in all kinds of sufferings, deprivations, experienced by the defeated, and most importantly, in the feeling of hatred that they cause in people instead of natural loving brotherly feeling.
7. Although a human will never, while he lives, free himself from the conditions of contention, but the more he succeeds in liberating himself from them according to his powers, the more true well-being he attains, the more earthly well-being will follow him, and the more he will contribute to the good of the world.
8. And therefore, in order to get rid of the sin of fighting, a human must clearly understand and remember that his true spiritual as well as temporal animal well-being will be the more abundant the less he will fight with people and all other creatures; and the more submissive and humble he will be, the more he will develop a habit of turning the other cheek to whoever hits him, and of giving his coat to whoever takes his shirt.
9. In order not to fall into the habit of sin, a person should start with not increasing in himself that sin of fight in which he lives: if a person is already in a fight with animals or human beings to the degree that all his life is supported by this fight, then let him continue this fight without increasing it, but let him not enter into the fight against other creatures, and he will have already done a lot to rid himself of the sin of fight. If only people would not increase their fight, fighting would be further and further eliminated, because there are always people who further and further refrain from fighting.
10. If a person has attained that level of living without increasing of fighting with those around him, then let him work to reduce, weaken the condition of inherited fight in which every person coming into life lives.
11. If the person will be able to free himself from the fight in which he grew up, let him then endeavor to free himself from that tendency to strive innate in every person.
1. The purpose of a human is to serve God through the manifestation of love to all creatures and people; but a human who yields to the lust of love weakens his strengths and distracts himself from serving God and therefore, by indulging in sexual lust, deprives himself of the well-being of true life.
2. But, in addition to the fact that a person who yields to sexual lust in any form deprives himself of true well-being, he does not even obtain the benefits he is looking for.
3. When a person lives in a faithful marriage, engages in sexual intercourse only when there can be children, and responsibly raises children, inevitable result for the mother becomes sufferings and cares, for the father - cares about the mother and child, and mutual - cooling of affection and frequent quarrels between spouses, and between parents and children.
4. But when a person enters into sexual intercourse not with the goal of having and upbringing children, avoids having them, and when he, having children, does not take care of them, and changes the objects of his love, then the attainment of his individual well-being becomes less possible, and the person inevitably undergoes sufferings, the more brutal the more he yields to the sexual passion: resulting in the weakness of his physical and spiritual powers, in quarrels, and in illnesses. And there is no consolation that spouses living in the rightful marriage have – of family, all its help and joy.
5. Those are the consequences of the sin of sexual lust for the committing it; for other people they are in the following; firstly, the person with whom the sin is committed bears the same consequences of the sin: the loss of both true and temporary well-being, and the same suffering and illnesses; to the rest they are: in the destruction of children in the bud, infanticide, abandonment of children without care and education, and the terrifying evil destroying human souls - prostitution.
6. No one living creature can eliminate in himself the desire for sex, including human, except in rare cases. It cannot be otherwise, since this sexual lust is responsible for the existence of the human race, and therefore, while the Higher Will needs the existence of the human race, lechery will take place in it.
7. But the sexual lust can be reduced to the lowest extent, and some people can bring it to a complete chastity. And in this reduction and bringing it to the lowest degree, and even to chastity for some people, as it is said in the Gospel, is the essence of battling with the sin of sexual lust.
8. And therefore, in order to get rid of the sin of sexual lust, a person must understand and remember that sex is the necessary condition of life of any animal and human as animal, but the awakened consciousness aroused in the human requires from him the opposite, i.e. complete abstinence, total celibacy, and the more he will indulge in sex, the less he will receive not only true but also temporary animal well-being and the more he will bring suffering to himself and to other people.
9. And, in order to combat the habit of sin, a person should start with not increasing in himself that sin of sexual lust in which he is now. If the person is chaste, let him not violate his chastity; if he is married, let he remains faithful to his spouse; if he has intercourse with many, let he continues to live that way but not to invent unnatural sexual practices. Let he do not change his condition and do not increase his sin of sexual lust. If only people did that, their sufferings would end.
10. If the person has succeeded in refraining from new sins, then let him work to reduce that sin of sexual lust in which he abides now: let the chaste person in practice battle with his mental sin of sexual lust, let the married one strive to reduce and regulate his sexual interaction. Let the one who knows many women, and a woman who knows many men become faithful to their chosen partners.
11. And if the person is able to free himself from those habits of sexual lust in which he currently abides, then let him strive to break free from those inborn tendency to sexual lust with which each human is born.
12. Although only rare people can be completely chaste, let each person understand and remember that he can always be more chaste than he was before, and can return to the chastity he has violated, and, according to his strengths, the more he will be able to reach the complete chastity, the more he will attain the true well-being, and the more earthly welfare will follow him, and the more he will contribute to the well-being of people.