The Gospel in (Very) Brief

By the late part of the nineteenth century, Leo Tolstoy had secured his place as a titan of world literature. He had come out of a stunningly productive period of writing and his masterpieces War and Peace and Ann Karenina were behind him. Despite this success, Tolstoy found himself in an acute emotional and spiritual crisis.

In an effort to pull himself up from this downward spiral he set about the process of translating the gospels. He recognized that he lacked the scholarly background for such an ambitious task and joked about the absurdity of "an artillery lieutenant [deciding] to translate a Greek book for himself." He also confessed a decided disinterest in the supernatural dimensions of the gospels, including the miracles attributed to Jesus and even the resurrection. "The questions important to me," he declared, "are: What should I do? How should I live?"

One of the products of these efforts is a short book called The Gospel in Brief. In the Preface to the book, Tolstoy writes "The task must be to understand the essence of [the] teaching [of Jesus], this teaching that became so high and precious for people that they recognized the messenger of it as a God. I have tried to do this very thing; for myself at least, I have done it. And now I am offering it to my brothers."

One of the improbable brothers who many years later stumbled upon the book was the towering twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. He found the book in a shop in southern Poland while he was serving with the Austrian army at the end of World War I. Wittgenstein was a hard-edged skeptic and the story goes that he bought the book because it was the only one left in the shop. He carried it with him throughout the war, memorizing portions of it, and became known among his fellow soldiers as "the man with the gospels." In later years, Wittgenstein insisted that the book had on numerous occasions saved him from despair and suicide.

The book is not for everyone. Tolstoy takes liberties with his translation of certain passages. He makes some curious editorial decisions in his combining of the gospels. And the absence of the miracles and the resurrection will strike some believers as impossibly critical omissions. It is important to remember, however, that Tolstoy did not exclude those stories because he did not believe them. Rather, he left them out because he did not think they helped him answer basic questions about how he should live.

What remains, as Wittgenstein recognized, is a simple text of amazingly powerful moral authority. Much of that power comes from the simplicity of the message. There is perhaps no better example of this than a single sentence that Jesus utters in the chapter that Tolstoy calls "The Farewell Conversation."

Of course, Jesus says many things to his disciples on the night before his crucifixion. But the text comes to a dramatic pause when he makes a brief statement that summarizes all of the pages that have come before and all of those that will follow. Perhaps, in that lone sentence, we can all find the answer to our questions about how we should live:

"The entire teaching," Jesus says, "is nothing more than loving one another."

Amen. And Amen.