Where Love Is There God Is Also
Where Love Is There God Is Also
Translated by Nathan Haskell Dole
A grieving shoemaker in Tsarist Russia receives an unexpected visitor who changes everything. Martuin Avdyeitch has lost his son and his will to live, spending his days in a cold basement workshop, barely surviving. Then an old man mentions the Gospels, and Martuin begins to read. He expects Christ to walk through his door. Instead, Christ arrives in the form of a soldier's widow, a hungry child, a thief seeking redemption. Each act of compassion opens Martuin's eyes wider: that God doesn't appear in churches or holy texts alone, but in the suffering faces of his neighbors. Tolstoy wrote this as a meditation on what it means to truly live for something beyond yourself. It's a small book with an enormous heart, challenging readers to consider that every kindness toward the forgotten is a prayer.
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“You are in despair, because you wish to live for your own happiness.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“In the morning he would sit down to work, finish his allotted task, then take the little lamp from the hook, put it on the table, get his book from the shelf, open it, and sit down to read. And the more he read, the more he understood, and the brighter and happier it grew in his heart.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“Said He, whoever exalts himself, shall be humbled, and he who is humbled shall become exalted.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“blessed are the poor, the humble, the kind, the generous.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“It seems that Pharisee must have been such a man as I am. I, too, apparently have thought only of myself,”
— Leo Tolstoy
“Thus ran his thoughts; he wanted to go to bed, but he felt loath to tear himself away from the book.””
— Leo Tolstoy
“At times he would become so absorbed in reading, that all the kerosene in the lamp would burn out, and still he could not tear himself away. And so Avdyeitch used to read every evening.””
— Leo Tolstoy
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— Leo Tolstoy
“You ruin them that way, the good-for-nothings,” said the old woman. “He ought to be treated so that he would remember it for a whole week.”“Eh, babushka, babushka,” said Avdyeitch, “that is right according to our judgment, but not according to God's. If he is to be whipped for an apple, then what ought to be done to us for our sins?””
— Leo Tolstoy
