While mobilised during the First World War Ludwig Wittgenstein walked into a bookshop in Poland. Its shelves were emptly apart from one book, Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief.

With no choice, Wittgenstein picked up the book to read in the trenches. He later wrote to a friend, “this book virtually kept me alive… you cannot imagine what an effect it can have upon a person.”

The Gospel in Brief is a consolidation of the canonical Gospels, meticulously studied by Tolstoy in the original Koine Greek.

Tolstoy stripped out the tales of miracles, divinity, and genealogy of Jesus, leaving only his teachings, the goal being “the solution to the problem of life”.

The book is laid out in 12 sections, each corresponding to—and an elaboration of—a line of the Lord’s Prayer, which Tolstoy believed was Jesus’s whole teaching in its most concise form.

Wittgenstein’s austere 1921 Tactatus Logico-Philosophicus borrows the same structure, with seven core lines (“propositions”) unpacked in elaborations at a lower level.

The Gospel in Brief’s implicit attack on priestcraft and theological distortions resonate with the words of the Gospel itself. Because of this and other Christian writings, Tolstoy was excommunicated by the Russian Orthodox Church in 1901 and his spiritual works were restricted in both Tsarist and communist Russia.

Regardless of your beliefs, The Gospel in Brief will move you with its simplicity and directness. “I, God, do not rejoice in your offerings, but rejoice at your love to each other… I desire love, and not sacrifice.”