The Gospels: My Preface

"Book lists" have always been prepared for people who don't read much - so this leads to a paradox: when someone asks you for a book list, he or she probably won't read anything you recommend to him or her.

The reason I say this is that just like the more you read papers, the more you learn, the more you read books. Have you ever seen a book without "《》" in the main text? Probably not. Even Da Bing quotes classics in his books.

Like most people, I first learned about Tolstoy's "The Summa of the Gospels" from Ray Monk's "Wittgenstein: Genius as Responsibility". According to the biography, when Wittgenstein was about to collapse mentally during the First World War, he relied on "The Summa of the Gospels" to survive the most difficult time. The original text is as follows:

What saved him from suicide, however, was not the encouragement from Joles and Frege but the personal transformation and religious conversion he had sought on the battlefield. It was the Bible, so to speak, that saved him. In his first month in Galicia he went into a bookshop, where he found only one book: Tolstoy's Summa. The book fascinated him. It became like a talisman: he carried it with him wherever he went, read it over and over again, and memorized whole paragraphs. He became known among his companions as "the man with the gospel." At one point he - whom Russell had felt before the war was "even more unfriendly to Christians" than he was - became not only a believer but an evangelist, recommending Tolstoy's Summa to every suffering person. "If you are not familiar with it," he later told Ficker, "then you cannot imagine what effect it can have on people."

About a hundred years later, the global damage caused by the COVID-19 pandemic is comparable to that of the First World War. When I got the "Summary of the Gospels", it was the peak of the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan. Perhaps Japan's epidemic prevention measures are far from strict, but when I picked up the "Summary of the Gospels" in compliance with the "self-restraint" rules, I still vaguely resonated with Wittgenstein in spirit - when I wrote this sentence, even I was embarrassed, but please allow me to express it this way!

In 2022, my first goal is to translate "The Summary of the Gospels" into Chinese. Although the Taiwanese translator had already completed this work in 2008, and although I have neither a theology degree nor a half-baked English level, I really felt the call in the past month, and I realized that I must complete this work. Starting from January 1, 2022, this column will continue to be updated uninterruptedly until I complete the translation of the entire "The Summary of the Gospels".

Finally, I would like to conclude this “Preface” with Wittgenstein’s original words:

You seem to be living in darkness, deaf to the promise of salvation. And if I - who is fundamentally different from you - were to try to give you some advice, it would make me look like an ass. But I will venture to try it anyway. Are you familiar with Tolstoy's "Summa of the Gospels"? This book literally saved my life at the time. Will you buy this book and read it? ! If you are not familiar with it, you cannot imagine what effect it can have on people.