Chapter 6
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18971897

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Author : Leo Tolstoy

Translator : Aylmer Maude

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But how could it happen that that very art, which in
ancient times was merely tolerated (if tolerated at all),
should have come, in our times, to be invariably considered
a good thing if only it affords pleasure?

It has resulted from the following causes. The estimation
of the value of art (i.e. of the feelings it transmits) depends
on men’s perception of the meaning of life; depends on
what they consider to be the good and the evil of life.
And what is good and what is evil is defined by what are
termed religions.

Humanity unceasingly moves forward from a lower, more
partial, and obscure understanding of life, to one more
general and more lucid. And in this, as in every movement,
there are leaders,—those who have understood the meaning
of life more clearly than others,—and of these advanced men
there is always one who has, in his words and by his life,
expressed this meaning more clearly, accessibly, and strongly
than others. This man’s expression of the meaning of life,
together with those superstitions, traditions, and ceremonies
which usually form themselves round the memory of such a
man, is what is called a religion. Religions are the exponents
of the highest comprehension of life accessible to
the best and foremost men at a given time in a given society;
a comprehension towards which, inevitably and irresistibly,
all the rest of that society must advance. And therefore
only religions have always served, and still serve, as bases
for the valuation of human sentiments. If feelings bring
54men nearer the ideal their religion indicates, if they are
in harmony with it and do not contradict it, they are good;
if they estrange men from it and oppose it, they are bad.

If the religion places the meaning of life in worshiping
one God and fulfilling what is regarded as His will, as was
the case among the Jews, then the feelings flowing from
love to that God, and to His law, successfully transmitted
through the art of poetry by the prophets, by the psalms, or
by the epic of the book of Genesis, is good, high art. All
opposing that, as for instance the transmission of feelings
of devotion to strange gods, or of feelings incompatible with
the law of God, would be considered bad art. Or if, as
was the case among the Greeks, the religion places the
meaning of life in earthly happiness, in beauty and in
strength, then art successfully transmitting the joy and
energy of life would be considered good art, but art which
transmitted feelings of effeminacy or despondency would be
bad art. If the meaning of life is seen in the well-being
of one’s nation, or in honoring one’s ancestors and continuing
the mode of life led by them, as was the case among
the Romans and the Chinese respectively, then art transmitting
feelings of joy at sacrificing one’s personal well-being
for the common weal, or at exalting one’s ancestors and
maintaining their traditions, would be considered good art;
but art expressing feelings contrary to this would be regarded
as bad. If the meaning of life is seen in freeing oneself from
the yoke of animalism, as is the case among the Buddhists,
then art successfully transmitting feelings that elevate the
soul and humble the flesh will be good art, and all that
transmits feelings strengthening the bodily passions will be
bad art.

In every age, and in every human society, there exists a
religious sense, common to that whole society, of what is
good and what is bad, and it is this religious conception
that decides the value of the feelings transmitted by art.
55And therefore, among all nations, art which transmitted
feelings considered to be good by this general religious
sense was recognized as being good and was encouraged;
but art which transmitted feelings considered to be bad by
this general religious conception, was recognized as being
bad, and was rejected. All the rest of the immense field
of art by means of which people communicate one with
another, was not esteemed at all, and was only noticed when
it ran counter to the religious conception of its age, and
then merely to be repudiated. Thus it was among all
nations,—Greeks, Jews, Indians, Egyptians, and Chinese,—and
so it was when Christianity appeared.

The Christianity of the first centuries recognized as
productions of good art, only legends, lives of saints,
sermons, prayers and hymn-singing, evoking love of Christ,
emotion at his life, desire to follow his example, renunciation
of worldly life, humility, and the love of others; all
productions transmitting feelings of personal enjoyment
they considered to be bad, and therefore rejected: for
instance, tolerating plastic representations only when they
were symbolical, they rejected all the pagan sculptures.

This was so among the Christians of the first centuries,
who accepted Christ’s teaching, if not quite in its true form,
at least not in the perverted, paganized form in which it
was accepted subsequently.

But besides this Christianity, from the time of the wholesale
conversion of nations by order of the authorities, as in
the days of Constantine, Charlemagne, and Vladimir, there
appeared another, a Church Christianity, which was nearer
to paganism than to Christ’s teaching. And this Church
Christianity, in accordance with its own teaching, estimated
quite otherwise the feelings of people and the productions
of art which transmitted those feelings.

This Church Christianity not only did not acknowledge the
fundamental and essential positions of true Christianity,—the
56immediate relationship of each man to the Father, the
consequent brotherhood and equality of all men, and the
substitution of humility and love in place of every kind of
violence—but, on the contrary, having set up a heavenly
hierarchy similar to the pagan mythology, and having introduced
the worship of Christ, of the Virgin, of angels, of
apostles, of saints, and of martyrs, and not only of these
divinities themselves, but also of their images, it made blind
faith in the Church and its ordinances the essential point of
its teaching.

However foreign this teaching may have been to true
Christianity, however degraded, not only in comparison
with true Christianity, but even with the life-conception of
Romans such as Julian and others; it was, for all that,
to the barbarians who accepted it, a higher doctrine
than their former adoration of gods, heroes, and good
and bad spirits. And therefore this teaching was a
religion to them, and on the basis of that religion the
art of the time was assessed. And art transmitting pious
adoration of the Virgin, Jesus, the saints and the angels,
a blind faith in and submission to the Church, fear of
torments and hope of blessedness in a life beyond the
grave, was considered good; all art opposed to this was
considered bad.

The teaching on the basis of which this art arose was a
perversion of Christ’s teaching, but the art which sprang up
on this perverted teaching was nevertheless a true art,
because it corresponded to the religious view of life held by
the people among whom it arose.

The artists of the Middle Ages, vitalized by the same
source of feeling—religion—as the mass of the people, and
transmitting, in architecture, sculpture, painting, music,
poetry or drama, the feelings and states of mind they
experienced, were true artists; and their activity, founded
on the highest conceptions accessible to their age and
57common to the entire people, though, for our times a
mean art, was, nevertheless a true one, shared by the
whole community.

And this was the state of things until, in the upper, rich,
more educated classes of European society, doubt arose as to
the truth of that understanding of life which was expressed
by Church Christianity. When, after the Crusades and the
maximum development of papal power and its abuses,
people of the rich classes became acquainted with the wisdom
of the classics, and saw, on the one hand, the reasonable
lucidity of the teaching of the ancient sages, and, on the
other hand, the incompatibility of the Church doctrine with
the teaching of Christ, they lost all possibility of continuing
to believe the Church teaching.

If, in externals, they still kept to the forms of Church
teaching, they could no longer believe in it, and held to it
only by inertia and for the sake of influencing the masses,
who continued to believe blindly in Church doctrine, and
whom the upper classes, for their own advantage, considered
it necessary to support in those beliefs.

So that a time came when Church Christianity ceased to
be the general religious doctrine of all Christian people;
some—the masses—continued blindly to believe in it, but
the upper classes—those in whose hands lay the power and
wealth, and therefore the leisure to produce art and the
means to stimulate it—ceased to believe in that teaching.

In respect to religion, the upper circles of the Middle Ages
found themselves in the same position in which the educated
Romans were before Christianity arose, i.e. they no longer
believed in the religion of the masses, but had no beliefs to
put in place of the worn-out Church doctrine which for them
had lost its meaning.

There was only this difference, that whereas for the
Romans who lost faith in their emperor-gods and household-gods
it was impossible to extract anything further from all
58the complex mythology they had borrowed from all the
conquered nations, and it was consequently necessary to find
a completely new conception of life, the people of the Middle
Ages, when they doubted the truth of the Church teaching,
had no need to seek a fresh one. That Christian teaching
which they professed in a perverted form as Church doctrine,
had mapped out the path of human progress so far ahead,
that they had but to rid themselves of those perversions
which hid the teaching announced by Christ, and to adopt
its real meaning—if not completely, then at least in some
greater degree than that in which the Church had held it.

And this was partially done, not only in the reformations of
Wyclif, Huss, Luther, and Calvin, but by all that current
of non-Church Christianity, represented in earlier times
by the Paulicians, the Bogomili,[61] and, afterwards, by the
Waldenses and the other non-Church Christians who were
called heretics. But this could be, and was, done chiefly
by poor people—who did not rule. A few of the rich and
strong, like Francis of Assisi and others, accepted the
Christian teaching in its full significance, even though it
undermined their privileged positions. But most people of
the upper classes (though in the depth of their souls they
had lost faith in the Church teaching) could not or would
not act thus, because the essence of that Christian view
of life, which stood ready to be adopted when once they
rejected the Church faith, was a teaching of the brotherhood
(and therefore the equality) of man, and this negatived
those privileges on which they lived, in which they had
grown up and been educated, and to which they were
accustomed. Not, in the depth of their hearts, believing in
the Church teaching,—which had outlived its age and had
no longer any true meaning for them,—and not being strong
59enough to accept true Christianity, men of these rich,
governing classes—popes, kings, dukes, and all the great ones
of the earth—were left without any religion, with but the
external forms of one, which they supported as being
profitable and even necessary for themselves, since these
forms screened a teaching which justified those privileges
which they made use of. In reality, these people believed
in nothing, just as the Romans of the first centuries of our
era believed in nothing. But at the same time these were
the people who had the power and the wealth, and these
were the people who rewarded art and directed it.

And, let it be noticed, it was just among these people that
there grew up an art esteemed not according to its success in
expressing men’s religious feelings, but in proportion to its
beauty,—in other words, according to the enjoyment it
gave.

No longer able to believe in the Church religion whose
falsehood they had detected, and incapable of accepting true
Christian teaching, which denounced their whole manner of
life, these rich and powerful people, stranded without any
religious conception of life, involuntarily returned to that
pagan view of things which places life’s meaning in personal
enjoyment. And then took place among the upper classes
what is called the “Renaissance of science and art,” and
which was really not only a denial of every religion but
also an assertion that religion is unnecessary.

The Church doctrine is so coherent a system that it cannot
be altered or corrected without destroying it altogether. As
soon as doubt arose with regard to the infallibility of the
pope (and this doubt was then in the minds of all educated
people), doubt inevitably followed as to the truth of tradition.
But doubt as to the truth of tradition is fatal not only to
popery and Catholicism, but also to the whole Church creed
with all its dogmas: the divinity of Christ, the resurrection,
and the Trinity; and it destroys the authority of the
60Scriptures, since they were considered to be inspired only
because the tradition of the Church decided it so.

So that the majority of the highest classes of that age,
even the popes and the ecclesiastics, really believed in
nothing at all. In the Church doctrine these people did
not believe, for they saw its insolvency; but neither could
they follow Francis of Assisi, Keltchitsky,[62] and most of the
heretics, in acknowledging the moral, social teaching of
Christ, for that teaching undermined their social position.
And so these people remained without any religious view
of life. And, having none, they could have no standard
wherewith to estimate what was good and what was bad art
but that of personal enjoyment. And, having acknowledged
their criterion of what was good to be pleasure, i.e., beauty,
these people of the upper classes of European society went
back in their comprehension of art to the gross conception
of the primitive Greeks which Plato had already condemned.
And conformably to this understanding of life a theory of
art was formulated.


     From : Gutenberg.org

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     Chapter 6 -- Publication : November 30, 1896

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