13 h 58 minAudiobook6 minSummaryRead it, hear it, the 15-minute summary, and print and large print at costPaperback · 6 × 9 in · printing soonHardcover · 6 × 9 in · printing soonAbout this book
What if refusing violence means refusing the institutions that ask for your loyalty?
In The Kingdom of God Is Within You, Leo Tolstoy follows a moral argument to its hardest demands. Reading the Sermon on the Mount, he understands Jesus’s teaching as a command against all violence. He asks what happens when a person takes that command seriously, even when churches and governments ask them to set it aside.
Tolstoy turns from faith to the machinery of power: armies, courts, prisons, conscription, and oaths. He argues that governments depend on the cooperation of the people they rule, including those they oppress. Alongside accounts of groups who practise nonviolence, he presses a difficult question: how can anyone reject cruelty while helping to carry it out?
What you’ll discover
- A faith without force Follow Tolstoy’s reading of a religious command that challenges both church and state.
- The machinery of obedience Examine how conscription and oaths draw individual conscience into the service of violence.
- Power and its helpers Consider his unsettling claim that the oppressed also help sustain their own oppression.
- Lives shaped by refusal Meet small groups whose attempts to practise nonviolence give his argument concrete human stakes.
- Change that begins within Explore why Tolstoy turns away from violent revolution toward personal responsibility and refusal.
Who will love it
For readers who love moral arguments pushed to their limit, are curious about the roots of nonviolent resistance, or want to know what Tolstoy truly believed.
What’s inside
The key ideas, in the 15-minute summary
- Tolstoy finds a command he cannot ignore
- Churches and critics both bury the command
- Resist not evil is the heart of the law
- Governments rule by threat, and the army is the base
- Conscription and oaths trap the conscience
- People are both the victims and the agents
- Science, art and public opinion serve power
- Revolution fails, and change begins within
- Critics, followers and the book's reach
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Il regno di Dio è dentro di voi in 25 languages, side by side, paragraph by paragraph, once the book texts are online: the way to learn a language with a book you love.
Il regno di Dio è dentro di voi
by Lev Tolstoj · 1894
Tolstoy sets conscience against armies, courts and oaths, arguing that faith calls each person to refuse violence.
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In short
What if the Sermon on the Mount means exactly what it says? Leo Tolstoy, the famous Russian novelist, answers yes in this treatise, finished in 1893.
From the 15-minute summary · Key idea 1
Tolstoy finds a command he cannot ignore
Tolstoy opens by telling how his own mind changed. He presents the teaching of Jesus as a new understanding of life and an ideal to pursue, not comforting symbols. The rule that strikes him most is the Sermon on the Mount instruction not to resist evil.
He recalls once treating the teaching on nonresistance as a joke. Churchmen encourage that mockery rather than opposing it. Now he insists that Christ's words should be understood plainly and put into practice.
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What is The Kingdom of God Is Within You about?
It is Tolstoy's argument that Christianity forbids violence. He claims Jesus meant the command not to resist evil literally, and that wars, armies, oaths and punishments cannot be squared with it. He urges people to refuse to take part.
Why was The Kingdom of God Is Within You banned in Russia?
Russian censors blocked it. Tolstoy said the Church served the government, and that armies and courts rested on violence. The book spread through foreign editions and secret copies.
What does the kingdom of God is within you mean?
The phrase comes from the Gospel of Luke. Tolstoy takes it to mean that the kingdom is not a place or a future event, but a way of living that begins in each person's conscience.
The author
Leo Tolstoy
1828–1910 · Russian novelist and moral philosopher
Leo Tolstoy was a Russian author born in 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, where he lived for much of his life. He wrote novels, stories, and essays. War and Peace appeared in 1865–1869 and Anna Karenina in 1875–1877. He died in 1910 at Astapovo, Russia.
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