The Singing Heart. On Resisting Evil with Force

«The Singing Heart» — one of the three key works in the creative legacy of Ivan Ilyin. In this book, the philosopher reflects on the spiritual and religious experience that permeates the entire life of a believing person, — including such purely secular concepts as love and friendship. The beauty of nature and the hustle of everyday life, the pain of loss and the inevitability of aging, suffering and negative emotions — these are just a few things he invites us to consider through the prism of sincere and profound faith that supports and purifies the mind and soul. "On Resisting Evil with Force" — a vivid, polemical, and harsh work of Ilyin, first published in Berlin in 1925, when the impressions of the Civil War and memories of the horrors of the «Red Terror» were still painfully fresh for the Russian emigration. In this work dedicated to the «white warriors, bearers of the Orthodox sword», the ruler of thoughts of the right-conservative wing of the Russian diaspora decisively condemns the «non-resistance» theory of Leo Tolstoy with its «sentimental moralism», delineating a distinction between actual violence as senseless and cruel oppression and «coercion» - i.e. a conscious and morally justified suppression of some harmful and dangerous activity. The first he condemns, while the second he sees as a simple necessity for the continuation of human society.