I just heard what, if the title of the book is an accurate summary of its contents, is a really dreadful idea: "Christianity Not as a Mystic Religion but as a New Theory of Life."
At first glance, I glossed over the title with the vague dismissive defensive mental impulse provoked by something which I know is supposed to sound good but really isn't. Then I said to myself, don't be lazy, think about what each word means and what the whole means so you can analyze and think critically about it. That's when I decided how much I really disliked it. This despite that this book was written by the man who wrote one of my favorite novels ever.
The sense I get of the title is that it means "Away with your religious mumbo-jumbo and arcane rituals and unnecessary baggage; I will show you a system of principles by which you can order your life to produce good results." This sort of thing is very appealing to a large segment of our post-Enlightenment culture, in different ways - the cultured secular despiser of religious cult and the adherent of the health-and-wealth gospel self-help guru preacher who scorns priestcraft and the like. Reading it, do you also feel that "mystic" is supposed to be something of a disparaging term?
But think about what the goals are of a "mystic religion" and of a philosophy. For some people, "mystic" is practically a synonym for esoteric, bizarre, and unnecessarily confusing. But who are the mystics of the Church? The mystics are those saints who spent their lives building real intimacy with God - not cheap pretend intimacy manufactured through presumptuousness, but something akin to what the blessed in heaven enjoy, at the cost (basically) of getting all their purgatory out of the way while yet on earth and making of themselves a total offering to God. Something unprofitable servants like me will never manage this side of eternity. Yet the point of being a Christian, shocking though it may be if you think about it, is for everyone to attain this mystical union with God, if we will have it, even if we can't quite finish purifying ourselves of attachment to the world during our time on earth.
But none of this for Tolstoy! He will liberate us by making sure that Christianity is something theoretical and abstract, a set of rules or guidelines to follow, like Aristotelianism or Platonism or any other -ism. Having Christianity as just an intellectual system that orders your life is so unlike authentic Christianity that it is unlikely that the ancient Romans would have even bothered to persecute you as a Christian had you lived back then. In all honesty, I'm probably not going to devote the time to reading the book unless I need to study it for some reason, but I hope it's not as bad as I have surmised.
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