The Kingdom of God Is Within You

The Kingdom of God Is Within You is a treatise by Leo Tolstoy in which he sets out his reading of Christianity centred on nonviolence. Written as a work of argument rather than fiction, it was first published in Germany in 1894, after being banned in Russia, the author's home country. It is generally regarded as the culmination of some thirty years of Tolstoy's reflection on faith, power and society.

The title comes from Luke 17:21, where Jesus tells the Pharisees that the kingdom of God is within a person. Building on that passage, Tolstoy argues that the central teaching of Christ is the renunciation of violence, including defensive violence and revenge. His reading of the Sermon on the Mount, and especially of the call to turn the other cheek, leads him to regard war, capital punishment and coercion by the state as incompatible with the Gospel. He rejects the interpretations of Roman and many medieval scholars, which he believed narrowed the meaning of those words, and insists on a literal and radical reading.

Tolstoy also criticises the Russian Orthodox Church, which at the time was closely tied to the state and, in his view, subordinated to its policies. He holds that the decline began when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and that this drew the Church away from the original message. To support his case he gathers testimonies, excerpts from newspapers and magazines, and a history of non-resistance within Christianity, in which figures such as the American writers Adin Ballou and William Lloyd Garrison appear.

The book had considerable influence in the twentieth century. Mohandas Gandhi, who read it while living in South Africa, later named it among the works that most shaped him, and he corresponded with Tolstoy until the latter's death in 1910. Tolstoy's ideas on nonviolence helped shape Gandhi's concept of satyagraha, the nonviolent resistance with which he led the campaign for Indian independence. It also inspired later pacifist activists, including some figures in the American civil rights movement. In Spain, the first complete Spanish translation appeared in 2010, marking the centenary of the author's death.