Rensselaer Journal, Volume 10, Number 41, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 March 1901 — Colstoi Excommunicated. [ARTICLE]

Colstoi Excommunicated.

The Greek church has carried out its threat to excommunicate Count Leo Tolstoi. The organ of the Holy Synod has published the official notice placing on record the novelist’s apostasy and casting him into outer darkness so far as the orthodox church is concerned. The sentence of spiritual death thus pronounced upon him is not likely to trouble Count Tolstoi to any great extent. As the circular of excommunication says, he has “by speech and writing unceasingly striven to separate himself from all communication with the orthodox church.” His whole intellectual life has been lived outside the forms and creed of that church, so he will not feel the excommunication as others might. Happily the physical and material sufferings that once accompanied the displeasure of a church can no longer

3,® inflated in Russia or elsewhere. The social ostracism that once followed the victim of such a decree hardly exists, and it is not likely that Count Tolstoi will be severely shunned by the peasants to whom he has devoted so much of his life and his money. For the favors of the society world he cares nothing. So long as an excommunication does not carry with it any torture or Imprisonment, a man like Tolstoi can afford to smile at it. In the eyes of the world he is a larger figure than all the members of the Greek hierarchy combined.