Levin’s Confession

 

“To live not for one’s needs but for God!”

“How does he remember God?  How does he live for the soul?”  Levin almost cried out.

“You know how: rightly, in a godly way.  You know, people differ!  Take you, for instance, you won’t injure anyone either…”

Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy

While the novel is named for Anna, Constantine Levin is as central to the story as she and the novel ends with Levin’s confession of faith – a re-discovery (as he abandoned the Orthodox faith of his childhood) that was prompted by a discussion with a peasant.

The words the peasant had spoken had produced in his soul the effect of an electric spark…

This spark brought together many disjointed ideas he had carried through his life. 

“Can I possibly have found the solution of everything?  Have my sufferings really come to an end? … I have discovered nothing.  I have only perceived what it is that I know.”

This realization showed him one thing: he had lived well (that is to say, rightly, in a godly way), but he thought badly. 

“Whence comes the joyful knowledge I have in common with the peasant, and which alone gives me peace of mind?  Where did I get it?”

He spent much time examining many worldly philosophies and ideas in search of the truth that was offered to him from the time of being an infant, as if drinking the truth in with his mother’s milk.

“Can this really be faith? … My God, I thank thee!”

Sobbing, tears filling his eyes.

Yet this joy, this realization would run right up against his old habits.  Yes, he regularly treated others kindly; he could also be quite short with them – including his wife.  Was this joy just a momentary thing, something that would pass soon enough?

He reconciled with his shortcomings, while holding on to this newly embraced faith.  The entire book closes with his confession:

“I shall still get angry with Ivan the coachman in the same way, shall dispute in the same way, shall inopportunely express my thoughts; there will still be a wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people; even my wife I shall still blame for my own fears and shall repent of it.  My reason will still not understand why I pray, but I shall still pray, and my life, my whole life, independently of anything that may happen to me, is every moment of it no longer meaningless as it was before, but has an unquestionable meaning of goodness with which I have the power to invest it.”