A CONFESSION [1]
he ceased to believe. On a hunting expedition, when he was already
twenty-six, he once, at the place where they put up for the night,
knelt down in the evening to pray -- a habit retained from
childhood. His elder brother, who was at the hunt with him, was
lying on some hay and watching him. When S. had finished and was
settling down for the night, his brother said to him: "So you
still do that?"
They said nothing more to one another. But from that day S.
ceased to say his prayers or go to church. And now he has not
prayed, received communion, or gone to church, for thirty years.
And this not because he knows his brother's convictions and has
joined him in them, nor because he has decided anything in his own
soul, but simply because the word spoken by his brother was like
the push of a finger on a wall that was ready to fall by its own
weight. The word only showed that where he thought there was
faith, in reality there had long been an empty space, and that
therefore the utterance of words and the making of signs of the
cross and genuflections while praying were quite senseless actions.
Becoming conscious of their senselessness he could not continue
them.
So it has been and is, I think, with the great majority of
people. I am speaking of people of our educational level who are
sincere with themselves, and not of those who make the profession
of faith a means of attaining worldly aims. (Such people are the
most fundamental infidels, for if faith is for them a means of
attaining any worldly aims, then certainly it is not faith.) these
people of our education are so placed that the light of knowledge
and life has caused an artificial erection to melt away, and they
have either already noticed this and swept its place clear, or they
have not yet noticed it.
The religious doctrine taught me from childhood disappeared in
me as in others, but with this difference, that as from the age of
fifteen I began to read philosophical works, my rejection of the
doctrine became a conscious one at a very early age. From the time
I was sixteen I ceased to say my prayers and ceased to go to church
or to fast of my own volition. I did not believe what had been
taught me in childhood but I believed in something. What it was I
believed in I could not at all have said. I believed in a God, or
rather I did not deny God -- but I could not have said what sort of
God. Neither did I deny Christ and his teaching, but what his
teaching consisted in I again could not have said.
Looking back on that time, I now see clearly that my faith --
my only real faith -- that which apart from my animal instincts
gave impulse to my life -- was a belief in perfecting myself. But
in what this perfecting consisted and what its object was, I could
not have said. I tried to perfect myself mentally -- I studied
everything I could, anything life threw in my way; I tried to
perfect my will, I drew up rules I tried to follow; I perfected
myself physically, cultivating my strength and agility by all sorts
of exercises, and accustoming myself to endurance and patience by
all kinds of privations. And all this I considered to be the
pursuit of perfection. the beginning of it all was of course moral
perfection, but that was soon replaced by perfection in general:
by the desire to be better not in my own eyes or those of God but
in the eyes of other people. And very soon this effort again
changed into a desire to be stronger than others: to be more
famous, more important and richer than others.
II
Some day I will narrate the touching and instructive history
of my life during those ten years of my youth. I think very many
people have had a like experience. With all my soul I wished to be
good, but I was young, passionate and alone, completely alone when
I sought goodness. Every time I tried to express my most sincere
desire, which was to be morally good, I met with contempt and