22 December1 In Moscow again.2 Suffered terrible mental agonies again. For more than a month. But they weren’t fruitless.
If you love God, and love the good (I think I’m beginning to love it) – i.e. live by it, see happiness and life in it – then you also see that the body is an impediment to the true good; not to the good itself, but to the possibility of seeing it and its fruits. Once you look to the fruits of the good you cease to do it, and moreover, by looking to the fruits, you ruin the good, you become vain, you grow despondent. What you do will only be true good when you are not here to ruin it. But you must lay up in advance as big a store of it as possible. Sow, sow in the knowledge that you, the man, will not reap. One man sows, another reaps. You, Lev Nikolayevich, the man, will not reap. If you start, not only to reap but to weed, you will ruin the wheat. Sow, sow. And if you sow God’s seed there can be no doubt that it will grow. It’s now clear that what previously seemed cruel to me – the fact that it won’t be granted to me to see the fruits – is not only not cruel, but good and sensible. How could I have recognised the true good – God’s – from the untrue, if I, a man of the flesh, had been able to enjoy its fruits?
But now it’s clear: what you do without seeing the reward for it, and do lovingly, is surely God’s doing. Sow and sow, God will make it grow; it is not you, the man, who will reap, but what it is within you which sows.
1 The only diary entry for 1882. It mainly refers to his treatise What I Believe.
2 In July Tolstoy bought a house in Dolgo-Khamovnichesky Lane (the present No. 21, Lev Tolstoy Street) and the family moved there in October. It was to remain their permanent town residence for the rest of his life.