The Old and New Testament in the Religious Consciousness of Leo Tolstoy

This article presents the French translation, long unpublished, of a study by Nicolas Berdyaev published in Moscow in 1912, devoted to the religious consciousness of Leo Tolstoy. Proceeding through rigorous critical analysis, Berdyaev shows that Tolstoy's religious thought, despite its Christian appearances, remains entirely Old Testamental: a religion of law, self-salvation and moral commandment, it ignores grace, rejects redemption and fails to recognize the person of Christ. Tolstoy, a thinker of the Father without the Son, a naturalist rationalist close to pantheism and Buddhism, perceives neither the mystery of evil nor that of freedom. The theological contribution of the study is twofold: it precisely identifies the irreducible specificity of Christianity in the face of all reductive moralism, and it paradoxically situates Tolstoy as a providential critic of a hypocritical historical Christianity, an involuntary precursor of an authentic religious renaissance.