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In the early 1970s, Malcolm Muggeridge was surprised to hear that members of the intellectual elite in the Soviet Union were experiencing a spiritual revival. Anatoli Kuznetsov, living in exile in England, told him there was scarcely a single writer or artist or musician in the USSR who was not exploring spiritual issues. Against all government policy, the most favored children of the regime were abandoning hope in a kingdom on earth and turning instead toward belief in transcendence.

Muggeridge writes, "I asked [Kuznetsov] how this could have happened, given the enormous anti-religious brainwashing job done on the citizenry, and the absence of all Christian literature, including the Gospels. His reply was memorable; the authorities, he said, forgot to suppress the works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the most perfect expositions of the Christian faith of modern times."

At a crucial time in my Christian pilgrimage, these two Russian novelists became for me, too, spiritual directors. They helped me come to terms with a problem that vexes every thoughtful Christian, namely, the huge gap between life as it should be and life as it is. New Testament passages, most notably the Sermon on the Mount, spell out lofty ethical ideals: Give to everyone who asks you, Love your enemies, Welcome persecution. But these ideals inevitably shatter against the grim reality of actual human behavior.

In my profession, I experience a constant, unresolvable tension over this issue. As a journalist, I observe up close the spectacular and petty failures of Christian leaders. And when I turn to more personal concerns, I find that I write about the spiritual disciplines far better than I practice them. What Christian has not felt a similar twang of dissonance? We are called to strive for ideals that we know will never be attained.

I felt this dilemma most keenly during adolescence, when I was haunted by the Sermon on the Mount. I would read a book like Charles Sheldon's "In His Steps," solemnly vow to act "as Jesus would act," and turn to Matthew 5-7 for guidance. What to make of such advice! Should I mutilate myself after a wet dream? Offer my body to be pummeled by the motorcycle-riding "hoods" in school? Tear out my tongue after speaking a harsh word to my brother?

Now that I am an adult, the crisis of the Sermon on the Mount still has not gone away. Though I have tried at times to dismiss it as rhetorical excess, the more I study Jesus, the more I realize that the statements contained here lie at the heart of his message. The absolutist quality of Jesus' teaching leaves me gasping. "Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect," he said, his statement tucked almost casually between commands to love enemies and give away money. Be perfect like God? Whatever did he mean?

Other religions teach variations of the "Golden Rule," but stated in a more limited, negative form: "Don't do to others what you wouldn't want them to do to you." Jesus expanded the rule into the unbounded command, "In everything, do to others what you would have them do to you." How can we even respond to such impossible ideals?

This cognitive dissonance kept me in a state of spiritual restlessness for many years. If the Sermon on the Mount sets forth God's standard of holiness, I concluded, then I may as well resign from the start.

Ultimately, I found a way to address this conflict, not in the works of great theologians, but rather in the writings of the nineteenth-century Russian novelists I have called my spiritual directors. My understanding of the Sermon on the Mount, and its mosaic of law and grace, now consists of one-half Tolstoy and one-half Dostoevsky.

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July 17 1995, Vol. 39, No. 8