The true teachings of Jesus, stripped of mysticism, hierarchies and rules; the philosophy of humanity's greatest teacher as "a very strict, pure, and complete metaphysical and ethical doctrine."
From Tolstoy's preface:
An examination of Christian teaching not according to interpretations [by "the so-called Fathers of the Church"] but solely according to what has come down to us of Christ's teaching, as ascribed to him in the Gospels.
If the reader belongs to the great majority of educated people brought up in the Church belief but who have abandoned its incompatibilities with common sense and conscience [and] considers all Christianity a harmful superstition—I ask him to remember that what repels him and seems to him a superstition is not the teaching of Christ; that Christ cannot be held responsible for the monstrous tradition that has been interwoven with his teaching and presented as Christianity: that to judge of Christianity, only the teaching of Christ as it has come down to us must be learned—that is, the words and actions attributed to Christ and that have an instructive meaning.
Studying the teaching of Christ in that way the reader will convince himself that Christianity, far from being a mixture of the lofty and the low, or a superstition, is a very strict, pure, and complete metaphysical and ethical doctrine, higher than which the reason of man has not yet reached, and in the orbit of which (without recognizing the fact) human activity—political, learned, poetic, and philosophic—is moving.
I ask [the reader] to remember that the teaching of Christ as set forth in this book is quite a different teaching [to that of the church]."
