Doukhabor

I never know what I will learn when I read Chesterton: today I started in the book he wrote with Perris and Garnett about Leo Tolstoy and the main discussion in Chesterton's introduction is about the so-called Doukhabors. This, apparently, was a sect of Russian Christian anarchists living in Canada who turned all their animals loose, 'on the ground that it is immoral to possess them or control them'. This group of people did not start with theology, 'but with the simple doctrine that we ought to love our neighbour and use no force against him, and they end in thinking it wicked to carry a leather handbag, or to ride in a cart.'
Tolstoy's character as a man, not as a writer, can be understood in similar terms of consistency, logic and fanaticism. One idea, in Tolstoy's case the 'utmost possible simplification of life', is logically carried to its extremes. Religion is not the cause, it could as well have been any other kind of theory that forms a consistent and logic basis and can be driven to mad extremes.