Moja wiara with delivery to Ireland

Leo Tolstoy (1828–1910), a Russian aristocrat best known for his great novels (Wojna i pokój, Anna Karenina), turned to religious searching at a certain point in his carefree life, at around the age of fifty. It was not, however, a simple passage from the nihilism he admitted to into the bosom of the Orthodox Church. Tolstoy saw much evil in it: a betrayal of Christ's ethical teaching, smothered by ceremonialism, metaphysics and theology. His anticlericalism led to his excommunication in 1901, and the anarchism and pacifism that grew out of his faith set him against both the Church and the tsarist state. Moja wiara (1884) belongs to a series of religious, theological and moral writings he produced in the 1880s and later (including Spowiedź, 1882). In this treatise, a spiritual autobiography, he based his faith on the Sermon on the Mount, which he regarded as the very essence of the Gospel. From it he derived his opposition to war, violence, oaths and courts, but opposition without struggle: evil is to be resisted only by refusing to take part in it. In twelve chapters the author describes his path to this stance. Its fervour and sincerity did not stop the authorities from banning publication, although the confiscated print run ‘sold out’ through non-commercial channels among the very people who had banned it. Tolstoy's faith is rather a prescription for earthly life: moral and joyful, illuminated by faith in Christ, but ‘stripped’ of Christian dogmas such as eternal life and the resurrection.