Alike for All Men
Yesterday I wrote about the ending of Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy and Konstantin Levin’s search for meaning and truth. After he came to the realization that the faith of his youth, Christianity, did indeed have the answers he was looking for, he wondered about other faiths. The novel relates that as he pondered the Milky Way, he said to himself, “‘Yes, the one unmistakable, incontestable manifestation of the Divinity is the law of right and wrong, which has come into the world by revelation, and which I feel in myself, and in the recognition of which—I don’t make myself, but whether I will or not—I am made one with other men in one body of believers, which is called the church. Well, but the Jews, the Mohammedans, the Confucians, the Buddhists—what of them?’ he put to himself the question he had feared to face. ‘Can these hundreds of millions of men be deprived of that highest blessing without which life has no meaning?’ He pondered a moment, but immediately corrected himself. ‘But w...