Book Review: Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy

Father Sergius is a wonderful story of human dilemmas in front of divine expectations. It is the story of an ordinary man on which greatness and sainthood was thrust upon. He continuously faced dilemmas of life, also because he had a genuine and pure heart which always did introspection. At the end, he found the true peace in most unexpected place and way, which he never got in the Church. During the course of the story, the book details what is wrong with the Church, and also with the organised religion in general.
 

When I finished reading the book for the second time, I wondered if Leo Tolstoy was inspired by Hindu philosophy. The crux of this story can be summed up in what Father Sergius realises in the end. He realises that one small act done without selfish intent is far better than prayers. “One good deed — a cup of water given without thought of reward — is worth more than any benefit I imagined I was bestowing on people (by praying for them)” This is exactly what Bhagawat Gita teaches us. Also, there is a comment which tells God is within us. “The less importance he attached to the opinion of men the more did he feel the presence of God within him.” Now this is Hindu philosophy which tells us not to seek God outside but within us. That we need not worship or believe in those who claim to be God’s only son, or real prophets, but each one of us have God inside us, waiting to be realised by our own efforts. 
 

Some excerpts:
 

“But as soon as he left the church the crowd of people rushed to him soliciting his blessing, his advice and his help. There were pilgrims who constantly tramped from one holy place to another and from one ‘starets’ to another, and were always entranced by every shrine and every ‘starets’. Father Sergius knew this common, cold, conventional, and most irreligious type. There were pilgrims, for the most part discharged soldiers, unaccustomed to a settled life, poverty-stricken, and many of them drunken old men, who tramped from monastery to monastery merely to be fed. And there were rough peasants and peasant-women who had come with their selfish requirements, seeking cures or to have doubts about quite practical affairs solved for them: about marrying off a daughter, or hiring a shop, or buying a bit of land, or how to atone for having overlaid a child or having an illegitimate one.” 

“So that is what my dream meant! Pashenka is what I ought to have been but failed to be. I lived for men on the pretext of living for God, while she lives for God imagining that she lives for men. Yes, one good deed — a cup of water given without thought of reward — is worth more than any benefit I imagined I was bestowing on people. But after all was there not some share of sincere desire to serve God?” he asked himself, and the answer was: Yes, there was, but it was all soiled and overgrown by desire for human praise. Yes, there is no God for the man who lives, as I did, for human praise. I will now seek Him!”