The Sacred and the Holy in Tolstoy’s Hadji Murád: Irreconcilable Tensions Between War and God

Twentieth-century French thinker Emmanuel Levinas’ distinction between the sacred and the Holy — the spiritual journey “du sacré au saint” — is key to understanding his philosophy. While the sacred emanates from religiously-justified violence, the Holy manifests in the ethical relationship with “the other.” This essay explores the fundamental distinction between the sacred and the Holy in relation to Leo Tolstoy’s novella Hadji Murád. Adopting a Levinasian view, the author unravels Tolstoy’s moral message: the sacred violence of war fuels the totalization of the other, which blinds its perpetrators to its un-Godliness and facilitates the continuation of violence. Even when narratives of war implicate God to glorify violence, war is the un-Holy. To signal the sacred, the author extracts examples from Tolstoy’s novella of the Holy emerging from humans’ selflessness. Through the story of Hadji Murád, Tolstoy begs his reader to revive God in all his Holiness, which entails an ethical surrender to the other. Today’s reader must re-interpret the Divine as Levinas does, for collective peace depends on it.