Ethics
A Confession
by Leo Tolstoy(1882)
Tolstoy's raw autobiographical essay on his midlife spiritual crisis, documenting his search for meaning after worldly success left him in despair.
Some links are affiliate links. Purchases help support the channel at no extra cost to you.
Episodes featuring this book
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
Leo Tolstoy was born on a vast Russian estate in 1828, a place of quiet and privilege that would shape everything he became and everything he later sought to destroy. He wrote two of the greatest novels in any language: War and Peace, which dismantled the myth of great men by showing that history is made by the countless small decisions of ordinary people, and Anna Karenina, which asked whether passion alone could ever carry a life. But his novels were only the beginning. In his fifties, the foundations of meaning collapsed beneath him entirely, and he turned to the Gospels with genuine seriousness for the first time. What he found there was not a theology but a practice: nonresistance to evil, love without exception, simplicity, and labor. These teachings cost him his marriage, his comfort, and his standing in the Orthodox Church, which excommunicated him in 1901. They also inspired Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., who built movements on the same tradition Tolstoy began.
What Did Dostoevsky Actually Believe About God?
Hell is not punishment from God. It is the inability to love. This three-hour episode traces the Orthodox Christian tradition that shaped everything Dostoevsky ever wrote, from Isaac the Syrian and Maximus the Confessor to Gregory of Nyssa and the hesychast monks. What does it mean that sin is not a crime requiring penalty but a sickness requiring healing? That salvation is not a transaction but a transformation of the whole person? These are the questions buried inside The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Crime and Punishment. This episode is a companion to our earlier Dostoevsky exploration. Where that episode examined his ideas through a philosophical and psychological lens, this one traces them to their source: kenosis, theosis, apophatic theology, prelest, and sobornost.
Beauty Will Save The World
Fyodor Dostoevsky spent four years in a Siberian labor camp and emerged convinced that human beings are not rational creatures who occasionally act irrationally, but irrational creatures who occasionally manage reason. This three-hour episode traces his life and philosophy through Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Idiot, Demons, and The Brothers Karamazov. We examine the underground man's revolt against the crystal palace of rationalism, Raskolnikov's theory of the extraordinary individual and its collapse, the problem of suffering in a world that might have no God, Ivan Karamazov's rebellion and the Grand Inquisitor, and Dostoevsky's insistence that freedom, even the freedom to suffer, is what makes us human. His novels do not argue positions. They stage collisions between ideas and watch what survives.
Life Is Not A Problem To Be Solved
This episode is a long, gentle walk through the thought of Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher who believed existence is not a puzzle to be solved but something lived inwardly, one anxious choice at a time. Writing under a constellation of pseudonyms, each embodying a different mode of life, Kierkegaard staged philosophical dramas rather than building systems. We explore his three stages of existence, the concept of anxiety as the dizziness of freedom, despair as the sickness unto death, and the radical leap of faith. From his broken engagement to Regine Olsen to his fierce attack on institutional Christianity, and from the indirect communication of Either/Or to the raw devotion of Works of Love, Kierkegaard's ideas resonate with striking force for anyone lying awake wondering what it all means.