The Work
The Kingdom of God Is Within You (Царство Божие внутри вас) was written between 1888 and 1893 and first published in Germany in 1894 (it was banned in Russia and could not be published there). The English translation by Constance Garnett was published in 1894 by Heinemann. The book is approximately 360 pages and is organized as a sustained philosophical and theological argument for Christian pacifism and anarchism.
The book had an immediate and decisive impact on Mohandas Gandhi, then a twenty-four-year-old Indian lawyer in South Africa. Gandhi wrote: 'It overwhelmed me. It left an abiding impression on me. Before the independent thinking, profound morality, and the truthfulness of this book, all the books given me by [a] Christian friend seemed to pale into insignificance.' Gandhi subsequently corresponded with Tolstoy until Tolstoy's death in 1910, and the Tolstoy Farm in South Africa - Gandhi's first nonviolent resistance community - was named in his honor. Through Gandhi, Tolstoy's pacifist reading of the Sermon on the Mount reached Martin Luther King Jr. and the American civil rights movement.
Biblical Engagement
Luke 17:21 provides the title: 'the kingdom of God is within you' (or 'among you' - the Greek entos hymon is ambiguous). Tolstoy interprets it as affirming that the kingdom of God - the reign of divine love over human life - is not a future political or cosmic event but an interior reality available to every human being who chooses to live by Jesus's teaching. This interpretation, which challenges both ecclesiastical Christianity (which defers the kingdom to the afterlife or to eschatological judgment) and political Christianity (which identifies the kingdom with Christian civilization), drives the book's argument.
Matthew 5:39 - 'But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also' - is the book's central commandment. Tolstoy takes this text with absolute literalism: Jesus commands non-resistance to evil, and all subsequent Christian attempts to qualify, contextualize, or restrict this command are betrayals of the Gospel. The tradition of just war theory (Augustine, Aquinas, Grotius) is, for Tolstoy, a conspiracy of the powerful to exempt themselves from Jesus's clear teaching.
Matthew 5:44 - 'But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you' - is the positive counterpart to non-resistance. Tolstoy argues that love of enemies is the radical distinctive of Christian ethics - the element that makes Christianity genuinely different from all other moral philosophies - and that a Christianity that endorses warfare, judicial punishment, and coercive government has abandoned the one thing that made it distinctive.
Matthew 5-7 as a whole - the Sermon on the Mount - is the book's primary theological source. Tolstoy argues that the Sermon contains the whole of Christian ethics, that it is not a higher idealism beyond human achievement but a practical program for human life, and that the 'difficulty' of its commands is manufactured by a Christianity that has compromised with power. He notes that the Sermon's commands seem impossible only to those who have already decided that existing social arrangements (property, law, the state, the military) are non-negotiable.
Author and Context
Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy (1828-1910) was born into the Russian nobility at Yasnaya Polyana, his family estate in Tula. He served in the Crimean War and drew on that experience in his early fiction. His major novels - War and Peace (1869) and Anna Karenina (1877) - established him as the greatest living novelist in the world. In 1879-80 he underwent a spiritual crisis, described in A Confession (1882), in which he rejected the Orthodox Church, abandoned his novels, and adopted what he called 'Christian anarchism' - a program for living based on the literal application of Jesus's teaching.
In his later decades, Tolstoy dressed as a peasant, worked in his fields, gave away his literary royalties, and practiced vegetarianism and sexual abstinence (controversially, within his marriage). His conflict with the Orthodox Church, which he criticized as a corrupted institution that had betrayed Jesus's teaching, led to his formal excommunication in 1901.
The immediate occasion for The Kingdom of God Is Within You was Tolstoy's correspondence with American Quakers and other Christian pacifists, and his reading of Adin Ballou's Christian Non-Resistance (1846). He was trying to think through the implications of absolute pacifism and ended by writing the most comprehensive statement of Christian anarchism ever produced.
Structure and Argument
The book is divided into twelve chapters organized as a single extended argument:
Chapters 1-4 survey the reception of Christian non-resistance from the early church through the present, documenting the ways in which the church accommodated to Roman power, justified warfare, and suppressed the pacifist tradition.
Chapters 5-7 examine the Quakers, Mennonites, and other Christian communities that maintained non-resistance, and document how they were persecuted by both the state and the mainstream church.
Chapters 8-10 develop the philosophical argument: the state is organized violence, and participation in state violence (military service, judicial punishment) is incompatible with the commands of Jesus. The entire structure of modern civilization - courts, prisons, armies, police - rests on the willingness to use violence, and this willingness contradicts the Gospel.
Chapters 11-12 present the positive alternative: a community organized around non-coercive love, based on the literal application of the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy does not provide a detailed blueprint; he insists that the transformation of society begins with individuals who refuse to participate in organized violence.
Critical Reception
The book was banned in Russia immediately and remained banned until the end of the Tsarist period. In Western Europe and America it was widely read and debated. The response was divided: Christian pacifists and socialists were enthusiastic; mainstream Protestant and Catholic theologians found the argument too absolute. The just war tradition's defenders argued that Tolstoy's reading of the Sermon on the Mount was simplistic - that Jesus's commands were addressed to personal relationships, not to states, and that the use of force in defense of the innocent is not a contradiction of Christian love.
Gandhi's response was the most consequential: he took Tolstoy's argument seriously enough to develop a concrete program of nonviolent resistance - satyagraha ('truth-force') - that transformed it from a utopian proposal into a political technique. Through Gandhi and King, Tolstoy's pacifist reading of the Sermon on the Mount became one of the most practically influential theological positions of the twentieth century.
Theological Significance
The book's theological contribution is its insistence on the literal application of Jesus's teaching as the only honest reading of the Sermon on the Mount. Tolstoy was not the first to make this argument (the Quakers, Mennonites, and Anabaptists had been making it for centuries), but he made it with a literary force, a historical documentation of the church's compromises, and a philosophical consistency that gave it new power.
His argument raises a genuine theological problem: if Jesus commanded non-resistance and love of enemies, how can the church consistently participate in warfare, judicial violence, and the coercive apparatus of the state? The standard Christian response - that the commands apply to personal but not political morality, that the state has legitimate authority to use force, that just war theory qualifies but does not eliminate the command - is less self-evident than it appears when Tolstoy subjects it to sustained examination.
Legacy
The book's direct legacy is Gandhi and King. Its indirect legacy includes the Tolstoyan community movement, pacifist Christianity in the twentieth century (including the Catholic Worker movement and the Fellowship of Reconciliation), and the academic field of nonviolence studies. Its theological legacy includes the revival of interest in the Sermon on the Mount as a practical program rather than an impossible ideal - a revival represented by Willard's The Divine Conspiracy and Wright's engagement with Jesus's ethics.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Matthew 5-7 in its entirety (the Sermon on the Mount), Romans 12:14-21 (do not repay evil with evil; overcome evil with good), Romans 13:1-7 (the governing authority and its limits), Matthew 26:51-54 (Jesus's rebuke to the disciple who drew a sword), and Luke 6:27-36 (love your enemies).
Further Reading
- Mohandas K. Gandhi, An Autobiography: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927) - Gandhi's own account of the impact of The Kingdom of God Is Within You. - John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus (1972) - the most rigorous New Testament theological defense of Christian pacifism in Tolstoy's tradition. - Lisa Sowle Cahill, Love Your Enemies: Discipleship, Pacifism, and Just War Theory (1994) - the best scholarly analysis of the debate between pacifism and just war theory that Tolstoy's book provoked.