“That which he had been tormented by before, which he had constantly sought, the purpose of life––now did not exist for him. It was not that this sought-for purpose of life happened not to exist for him only at the present moment, but he felt that it did not and could not exist. And this very absence of purpose gave him that full, joyful awareness of freedom which at that time constituted his happiness.

He could have no purpose, because he now had faith––not faith in some rules, or words, or thoughts, but faith in a living, ever-sensed God. Before he had sought for Him in the purposes he set for himself. This seeking for a purpose had only been a seeking for God; and suddenly he had learned in his captivity, not through words, not through arguments, but through immediate sensation, what his nanny had told him long ago: that God is here, right here, everywhere. In captivity he had learned that God in Karataev was much greater, more infinite and unfathomable, than in the Arkhitekton of the universe recognized by the Masons. He experienced the feeling of a man who has found what he was seeking under his own feet, while he had been straining his eyes looking far away from himself. All his life he had looked off somewhere, over the heads of the people around him, yet there was no need to strain his eyes, but only look right in front of him.

Formerly he had been unable to see the great, unfathomable and infinite, in anything. He had only sensed that it must be somewhere and had sought for it. In all that was close and comprehensible, he had seen only the limited, the petty, the humdrum, the meaningless. He had armed himself with a mental spyglass and gazed into the distance, where the petty and humdrum, disappearing in the distant mist, had seemed to him great and infinite, only because it was not clearly visible. Thus he had looked at European life, politics, Masonry, philosophy, philanthropy. But even then, in moments he regarded as his own weakness, his mind had penetrated this distance, and there, too, he had seen the petty, the humdrum, the meaningless. Now he had learned to see the great, the eternal, and the infinite in everything, and therefore, in order to see it, to enjoy contemplating it, he had naturally abandoned the spyglass he had been looking through until then over peoples heads, and joyfully contemplated the ever-changing, ever-great, unfathomable, and infinite life around him. And the closer he looked, the calmer and happier he became. The terrible question, “Why?” which formerly had destroyed all his mental constructions, did not exist for him now. Now, to this question ‘Why?’ a simply answer was always ready in his soul: because there is God, that God without whose will not a single hair falls from a man’s head.”

–– Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. (New York: Alfred A. Knope, 2007), 1103-4.