Monasticism "its attention was directed to the achievement of a Christian Life, apart from civilization, in obedience to the laws of Christ, and in pursuit of a perfection wholly distinct from the aims that men seek in politics and economics, in sciences and arts
Mennonites
The Society of Friends
many groups copelled by loyalty to Christ to withdraw from culture and to give up all responsibility for the world
TolstoyDevotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a oposition to the institutions of culture
-found himself threatened in his own life by the meaninglessness of existence and the tawdriness of all the values that his society esteemed.
could not arise from this despair into tranquility, and from the full stoppage of life into new activity, until he recognized the fallibility of all other authorities, and acknowledged the teachings of Jesus as inescapable truth, founded on reality
-release from struggle when he at last discovered that Jesus' words were to be literally interpreted
-summarize the law in 5 injuctions
1. live at peace with all men and never consider your anger against any man justified (me??)
2. Do not make the desire for sexual relations an amusement
3. Never take an oath to anyone, anywhere about anything
4. The fourth commandment destroys "the stupid and bad" social order in which men live, for simply, clearly, and practically it says: "Never resist the evildoer by force, do not meet violence with violence
5. not to make distinctions between on'e own and other nations and not to do all the things that flow from making such distinctions
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-Devotion to the commands of Jesus Christ is a oposition to the institutions of culture
-To Tolstoy these seem founded on a complex foundation of errors, including the acceptance of the inevitability of evil in man’s present life, the belief that life is governed by external laws so that men cannot attain blessedness by their own efforts, the fear of death, the identification of true life with personal existence, and above all the practice of and belief in violence
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-The evil with which men contend is in their culture only (not individual self…)
-Becomes crusader against culture under the banner of the law of Christ
Every phase of culture falls under this…Though state, church, and property systems are the citadels of evil, philosophy and sciences and arts also come under condemnation….there is no such thing as good government for Tolstoy
-The state and Christian faith are simply incompatable for the state is based on love of power and the exiercise of violence,, whereas the love, humility, forgiveness, and nonresistance of Christian life draw it completely away from political measures and institutions.
-The arguments of such Christians as Paul who contend that the state performs an interim function in restraining evil does not appeal to Tolstoy for he sees the state as the chilef offender against life.
-Against its evil there is no defense except complete nonparticipation and nonviolent striving for the conversion of all men to peaceful, anarchic Christianity
-Though churches call themselves Christian, they are equally far removed from the Christianity of Jesus. Tolstoy regards them as self-centered organizations that assert their own infallibility, servants of the state, defenders of the reign of violence and privilege, of inequality and property, obscures and falsifiers of the gospel.
-The churches as Churches are anti-christian utterly hostile in their pride violence and self-assertion, immobility and death to the humilitiy penitence, meekness, progress and life of Christianity
-The church is an invention of the devil, no honest man believing in the gospel can remain priest or preacher, all the churches are alike in their betrayal of Christ’s law; churches and states together rpresent the instiutionalization of violence and fraud.
-Christ did not found them and comprehension of his doctrine will not reform but will “destroy the churches and their significance”
Church an invention of the devil
-Attack on economic instiutions believed property cliams were based on robbery and maintained by violence
-Turned against subdivision of labor in economic societies …means by which privileged people such as artists, intellectuals, and their kind, absorbed the labor of others, justifying themselves by the belief that they were beings of a higher order than workingment
-Turned against philosophy, and the sciences and arts
-Philosophy leads us no farther than the knowledge that all is vanity
-At least distinction of good and bad art
-Like John 1 in praise of love and rejection of flesh
-Like Tertullian in attack on social institutions
-Like monks in withdrawl into a life of poverty
-Legalist?
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