It is hard to say for sure, but I might be the only person in my neighborhood who owns a Tolstoy t-shirt. While putting it on a couple of days ago, it got me thinking about Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox.”
In the essay, Berlin discusses the broad philosophical and didactic strengths of the worldview of a variety of writers. Using the premise of the Greek poet Archilochus, he sets out to name whether a writer is a fox, who knows many things, or a hedgehog who knows one big thing. Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin, and Aristotle are foxes. Dostoevsky, Plato, Nietzsche, and Pascal are hedgehogs.
The bulk of the essay is a discussion determining where Tolstoy fits in. Primarily, the goal is to dissect his view of history. Tolstoy’s individualized view stands in direct contrast with many of his contemporaries. He rejects the historical approach that major world events are carved out by larger than life figures. Rather, it is the ordinary, everyday person who creates meaning and trajectory out of the minutiae. Berlin subsequently decides the great Russian writer is naturally a fox, but is frustrated by his determination to be a hedgehog.
I am not going to take the time here to flesh out Tolstoy’s changing view of art, his rejection of the Orthodox faith, his attitude toward the Russian peasants, that is, his version of the “noble savage,” or as the Russians express it, the “holy fool.” We might talk about his iconoclast lifestyle and the antagonism and abandonment his family endured because of the way he chose to live out his life. He was an anomaly and deeply troubled. This author of such monoliths of world literature as War and Peace and Anna Karenina seemed to have an uncanny understanding of human nature. His characters were sympathetic and full of pathos, but he himself, seemed to lack the empathy for those closest to him.
But if we believe in inspiration in any sense, we know that any author’s work is always wiser and deeper that the actual flesh and blood human. Tolstoy’s artistic and pedagogical ideas were constantly in conflict with his relational or incarnational ways of being. He was never able to live up to what he taught through his novels, his short stories, or his essays. He was a disappointed man. A man who lived with high ideals, but without grace for others or for himself. That may sound harsh, but it is hard to feel generous toward a man who is so exacting, who lived in close proximity to his family, and yet so emotionally removed from them.
It forces me to draw in my breath when I wonder how I am living out my days. How big of a disparity is there between the needs I see right in front of me and my otherworldly ideals? What is that place of grace and understanding within the so-called “thin places” of the physical and spiritual worlds, the now and the not yet?
When I look at Berlin’s list of the foxes and the hedgehogs, I can’t help notice I am immediately drawn more to the hedgehogs, even to the ones I don’t necessarily agree with. I feel Tolstoy’s dilemma. After so much striving, wouldn’t it be satisfying that you at least knew one big thing? This puts me in mind of the apostle Paul, who was well educated and extremely focused. Yet he claimed,
Paul acknowledged his own baseness. He placed his confidence in the grace and wisdom of the Holy Spirit. With all Tolstoy had going for him, it hurts me to think he never knew that joy. Even at his death in a remote train station, running away from home at the age of 82, he was still trying to do it all himself, and knew he was failing.
What about you, are you drawn to reading foxes or hedgehogs?
Are you a fox or a hedgehog?
What do you think of Tolstoy’s attempts to live by his ideals?