A Very Christian War and Peace

C.S. Lewis called War and Peace “the greatest war book ever written”. Tolstoy’s masterpiece is a monumental tome; a quasi-epic that has been called “Russia’s Iliad and Odyssey”, the book is a gift to the whole world (just as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are). It is no easy book to read. Several times the length of most novels, it moves between novel, history and philosophy as Tolstoy unfolds the destinies of his protagonists while intersplicing commentary on historical and philosophical fads and trends. But foreshadowing the simplicity of Tolstoyan wisdom of his later days, the ultimate message of War and Peace is the joy of love found in the midst of carnage and fleeting grandeur.

This essay appears in the latest Quadrant.
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Tolstoy’s work is eternal because love is the central theme that guides and moves the story. All the central characters, in their own unique, and sometimes myopic, ways, struggle to find love amid the bloodshed of war. As in the Iliad, the path to love is through the horror of war. The lives of Andrei, Pierre, Natasha and Nikolai—among others—intersect during the Napoleonic Wars and at the culling fields of Borodino in the greatest triumph of metamorphosis and redemption in world literature.

Prince Andrei is on a revenge mission to kill Anatole for having destroyed his prospective marriage with Natasha. Pierre, “by rights as a gentleman”, along with his nihilistic vanity of thinking himself destined by God to defeat the anti-Christ Napoleon, plants himself in the middle of the battle. Nikolai, now a decorated hussar (though he doesn’t think himself a hero), stands in reserve as the cannons cut down men and beasts on the field. Natasha, along with Marya, will be caught up in the retreat and abandonment of Moscow.

Up to this moment in the story, all the main characters have been searching for meaning in their lives. Their stories, though unique and particular to themselves, are equally universal stories—the very struggle that all of us go through, highs and lows, despair and joy, hope and fear. It is, fittingly, in the carnage of Borodino that their searches start to come to fruition and the long, sometimes painful, pilgrimage begins to reap its rewards.

Despite being set during the Napoleonic Wars, with the war always looming in the background, Tolstoy’s novel spends little time on the war itself. The great battles of Schöngrabern, Austerlitz and Borodino occupy less than fifty pages of material in most translations. It is not that the chaotic battles are an afterthought. Rather, the real war that the characters struggle through is the battle with themselves, the world, and the other flesh-and-blood humans who dot the landscape of Tolstoy’s magisterial portrait. We can say that the central war in War and Peace is the war for love—which is the ultimate meaning of life in a world torn apart by the slaughter of a physical war.

Andrei, the handsome aristocratic gentleman, has it all. He is aide-de-camp to General Kutuzov. He has a pregnant wife and the prospects of a family. Yet he abandons Lisa (who later dies) for his nihilistic lust for glory. He repeatedly dreams of his “Toulon Moment” (in ironic desire to imitate his hero, Napoleon, who is Russia’s mortal enemy). But at the cold and bloody battlefield of Austerlitz he is wounded and has a vision of beauty that moves him on the gruelling path towards love.

While Andrei becomes something of a recluse at Bald Hills, he is visited by his friend Pierre, who argues and philosophises with him about the importance of beauty and love. This leads Andrei to embrace a new life; he eventually courts Natasha and proposes marriage. Things are finally on the up and up until Anatole Kuragin, the son of the Kuragin family and brother of the villainess Helene, seduces Natasha and ruins their prospective marriage.

Swearing revenge, Andrei rejoins Kutuzov and the Russian army in 1812 as Napoleon invades. He does not, as he makes clear, join because of a feeling of patriotic duty. Instead, he seeks revenge against Anatole. Hatred moves him to join the Russian army, not love of country and his fellow countrymen.

Pierre, the bumbling idealistic intellectual, is a theoretical Jacobin and revolutionary at the beginning of the story. He speaks glowingly of the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity. If societies do not reform to these ideals internally, he says, then they should be forced to by the muscular thrust of revolution: “Napoleon is great because he rose superior to the Revolution, suppressed its abuses, preserved all that was good in it—equality of citizenship, freedom of speech and the press—and only for that reason did he obtain power.” When accosted by Anna Pavlovna, shocked at Pierre’s endorsement of regicide and terror, Pierre coldly answers, “I am not speaking of regicide, I am speaking about ideas.”

However, over the course of the story, Pierre abandons his abstract revolutionary Jacobinism in search of the interior life. He (re)affirms his belief in God and joins the Freemasons, excited by the prospect of finding meaning in esoteric knowledge and history. But we soon learn that he also joined because of the concrete element of Freemasonry: service to one’s neighbour. Pierre does have a heart of service after all, as we witnessed when he visited Andrei at Bald Hills and in his friendship and counselling of Natasha.

Pierre’s ties with the Freemasons strain over time. He grows disillusioned by the general misanthropy of his Masonic brethren and grows delusional, journeying to Borodino with the vision that he has been selected by God to stop Napoleon. The man who had sung the praises of Napoleon’s bloodthirsty regime at the beginning of the book now comes to see him as the enemy of mankind and of the gentle life of love and peace that all humans seek.

Nikolai, Natasha’s older brother, an idealistic patriot who announces on the eve of Austerlitz that he would die for his emperor, is a tamer version of Andrei but equally nihilistic in his desire for death in service of the Fatherland. Despite his militaristic fervour, Nikolai’s first taste of battle scars him. Though he remains in uniform, he no longer has the naive desire to throw his life away in battle. He does all he can, while still in uniform, to avoid battle.

More problematically, Nikolai also has a massive gambling addiction which various men take advantage of. He quickly finds himself deep in debt and doesn’t want to shame his father and family name by admitting to his shortcomings. After the Battle of Austerlitz and the staggering debt he has amassed, Nikolai contemplates suicide until he hears the angelic and life-giving voice of his sister singing. Hearing this mystical voice above, as if from heaven, Nikolai forgets his suicidal stupor and loses himself in joy.

Still in uniform, after sobbingly admitting his gambling debt to his father, Nikolai rides with his regiment to Borodino to confront Napoleon. In early skirmishes, Nikolai is ironically hailed a hero and promoted after a frightful encounter with a French cavalryman whom he barely wounded in his fear of single combat. Both men, as Tolstoy tells us, were terrified of having to fight one another and after Nikolai barely brushed the Frenchman with his sabre he surrendered to Nikolai. Now on the eve of Borodino, Nikolai is a battalion officer but even emptier inside and wishing to escape the military career he had so eagerly embraced at the beginning of the book, despite being looked upon as a hero by his men and fellow officers.

Natasha, the great heroine of our epic, blossoms into a wholesome and life-giving woman over the course of the story. We are first introduced to her as a young girl who is not wholly beautiful, but whose face and eyes radiate with life:

This black-eyed, wide-mouthed girl, not pretty but full of life, with childish bare shoulders which after her run heaved and shook her bodice, with black curls tossed backward, thin bare arms, little legs in lace-frilled drawers, and feet in low slippers—was just at that charming age when a girl is no longer a child, though the child is not yet a young woman.

In this wondrous introduction to our heroine, Tolstoy foreshadows so much about Natasha and her growth to fullness of life and maturation.

Roger Scruton once wrote, “The face shines in the world of objects with a light that is not of this world—the light of subjectivity.” And in Natasha’s face, her mouth and eyes in particular, we witness the truly remarkable construction from Tolstoy’s pen. Her angelic voice saves Andrei and Nikolai from despair. Her eyes, so filled with life, capture the soul-to-soul encounter that is absent in the early incarnations of Andrei, Pierre and Nikolai in the first half of the story.

Natasha is our in-situ angel and life-giving spirit who bestows life to those who come across her in their darkest moments. Just as God’s voice recalls to life in the biblical and Christian tradition, so too does Natasha’s voice recall Nikolai to life. Just as God’s voice draws humans to it, so too does Natasha’s voice draw Andrei to her in love. Just as God’s voice is the sound of vitality, so too does Natasha’s voice triumphantly sound her resurrection before the presence of Pierre. Natasha, everywhere, calls the broken men of the book back to life. She resurrects them to new life with the call of her voice and the gentle love flaming in her eyes.

And so, our story moves towards its epic conclusion when all our characters and their respective wars for meaning intersect at Borodino.

At the bloody battle which claimed so many lives, Andrei is mortally wounded and brought to a field hospital and placed alongside the very man who ruined his possible life with Natasha. Anatole has been wounded too, and his leg amputated. Anatole weeps and whimpers from the pain. A lesser man than Andrei would have succumbed to the vow of revenge he had previously sworn, but instead of exacting his revenge, Andrei weeps for his fellow man. Beside the “miserable, sobbing, enfeebled” Anatole, Andrei takes pity and mercy on his wounded rival.

In that moment Andrei completes his metamorphosis from the vain glory seeker, like Achilles prior to the visit from Priam, into an image of Christ Himself. Tolstoy powerfully writes, “Prince Andrei could no longer restrain himself, and wept tender loving tears for his fellow men, for himself, and for his own and their errors.” As Andrei looks upon Anatole, and the other wounded souls around him, he is able to answer the question “What is love?” that had plagued him, “Compassion, love of our brothers, for those who love us and for those who hate us, love of our enemies; yes, that love which God preached on earth.” We see the dying Andrei exude the spirit of love which unites him with his fellow maimed and wounded souls.

While untouched by combat, Nikolai and his regiment guard the retreat of the Russians from Borodino and, in what is either a chance encounter or the movement of providence, helps to rescue Princess Marya from the French advance. It is their face-to-face encounter that truly rescues them from the hell of the war consuming the land around them:

Nikolai immediately recognised Princess Marya not so much by the profile he saw under her bonnet as by the feeling of solicitude, timidity and pity that immediately overcame him. Princess Marya, evidently absorbed in her thoughts, was crossing herself for the last time before leaving the church. Nikolai looked at her face with surprise. It was the same face he had seen before … There was a pathetic expression of sorrow, prayer and hope in it.

That hope, of course, would later be more fully manifested through their love and marriage and chase away the sorrows that had grieved both of them for so long.

Pierre and Natasha briefly meet as Pierre stumbles around Moscow after the battle and Natasha, Marya and others flee for safety from Napoleon’s forces. After Pierre’s dramatic rescue, he reunites with Natasha and the two realise the love which had thus far eluded both of them. Pierre’s first marriage, with Helene, was purely utilitarian. Helene married Pierre because of his newfound wealth and legitimisation after his father’s death. But as she cruelly told him after they took their nuptial vows, she would never love him or bear him children. Pierre, admittedly, had fallen for the seductive body—rather than the face—of Helene, which she flaunted “quite unclothed” for her own purposes.

With Natasha, however, Pierre falls in love with the soul that permeated Natasha’s face and gave life to so many throughout the story. In their marriage we witness the consummation of the simple pleasures and joy of life that all souls desire: intimate love with a partner.

Pierre had wanted to help others in the deracinated and abstract method of politics at Anna Pavlovna’s party. He then wanted to help people through the Masonic Order. At last he has come to realise how he can help someone most: through faithful marriage producing children and in the company of friends.

In her marriage to Pierre, Natasha fully blossoms into a life-giving woman which marks her out from the other prominent woman in the story—Helene. Helene, whose concentration is purely on the body, cannot bear—and therefore, give—life. She brings death wherever she goes. Natasha, often young and immature, is nevertheless described by Tolstoy as being “full of life”. Tolstoy had prefigured, from the beginning, Natasha’s journey into a life-giving woman. She is abused and seduced at times, especially by Anatole, but ultimately overcomes the weight of sin and defilement to radiate like the sun in her blessed marriage with Pierre.

Fittingly, Natasha’s face is the concluding image we have of her, full of life and love in the presence of Pierre: “Natasha came up to him with wide-open happy eyes and quickly seizing his head pressed it to her bosom saying: ‘Now you are all mine!’” She tells Pierre with a blushing and radiant smile, “I love you awfully … Awfully, awfully!”

Part of the genius of Tolstoy is in how he dialectically advances his story from start to finish. War and Peace is set against the most terrible and ferocious war to that time in human history. Tolstoy, however, deconstructs the emptiness of great battles and great men (most visibly as it relates to his construction of the petty tyrant Napoleon) and the maelstrom the carnage and slaughter wrought by revolutionary politics. The real war is not against Napoleon per se—it is with us and our struggle to find meaning in a broken and seemingly meaningless world.

Throughout the story, men and women try to find that meaning in the pursuit of military glory, revolutionary politics and social advancement. These pursuits all end in death and destruction. The end of Tolstoy’s epic reveals the simplicity of his wisdom. Meaningful life is found through an incarnate and intimate relationship with another. It’s right before our eyes—if only we had the eyes to see or the ears to hear the face and voice of a Natasha instead of fantasising revolution and glory like Napoleon.

The end of the story of War and Peace is the serenity found in a family, a garden, and a dinner banquet. The war our protagonists struggle through is a gruelling pilgrimage through the muck and mud of the post-lapsarian world and its spirit of domination. We cannot undertake this journey alone, as Tolstoy makes clear—we need others. And only after this “war” is waged and the battle is won—in the embrace of love with another—do we find the “peace” and joy we were always seeking, in an image reminiscent of the heavenly banquet reserved for those who have transformed themselves, and their little slice of the world, through love incarnate.

Paul Krause is the editor-in-chief of VoegelinView and the author of The Odyssey of Love: A Christian Guide to the Great Books (Wipf and Stock, 2021).