Searching for a Higher Power Later in Life
The truest measures of wealth have little to do with money
If you had asked me to read Tolstoy as a younger man, I would have told you I didn’t have time. But later in life, I developed an insatiable curiosity about Tolstoy, Emerson, Jung, Dostoevsky, and many of the great thinkers who wrestled with the deeper questions of human existence.
My hope has always been that they could help me wrestle with the deepest questions, and they have. After recently finishing Tolstoy’s The Kingdom of God Is Within You, I realized that Leo Tolstoy had everything the world tells us should make a person happy.
By the time he reached fifty, he was one of the most celebrated writers alive. He had produced War and Peace and Anna Karenina. He possessed wealth, land, status, a wife, children, and the admiration of readers around the world.
Yet Tolstoy found himself standing at the edge of despair.
“I did not myself know what I wanted,” he wrote. “I feared life, desired to escape from it, yet still hoped something of it.”
His Crisis Was Not Caused by Failure
It was caused by the discovery that success could not answer his deepest question:
“Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?”
Tolstoy could no longer distract himself with work, pleasure, property, or praise. Death made every achievement appear temporary. If everything he loved would eventually disappear, what lasting meaning could life possibly have?
He described this spiritual breakdown in A Confession, written shortly after turning fifty. It was more than depression. It was a crisis of consciousness, the collapse of the worldview that had guided his adult life.
When crisis calls us, how will we answer?
Why the Question Comes Later
Many people begin asking spiritual questions as they grow older because the identities that once supported them begin to weaken. That’s been my experience, and for many I know or have studied.
Curiosity about a higher power seems universal for certain souls. Life happens, our consciousness evolves.
Careers end. Children leave. Parents and friends die. The body changes. Recognition fades. Time, which once seemed unlimited, becomes precious.
The questions become harder to avoid: What was my life really about? What remains when my accomplishments are forgotten? What part of me, if any, survives death?
These questions can create fear, but they can also become gateways to higher consciousness and fulfill our human purpose. The loss of certainty may open us to humility. The awareness of death can teach us to value life. The fading of ambition can make room for gratitude.
Tolstoy began looking beyond the educated and wealthy people around him. He observed ordinary laborers, farmers, and religious believers who endured poverty and hardship without surrendering to despair.
They believed life had meaning because they participated in something greater than the individual self. This compelled Tolstoy to shift his view. A reason to live for a higher purpose, such as self-determination, much like Viktor Frankl taught us.
“Faith is the sense of life, that sense by virtue of which man does not destroy himself, but continues to live on. It is the force whereby we live.” - Leo Tolstoy
From Achievement to Transformation
Tolstoy returned to the teachings of Jesus, especially the commands to love, forgive, serve, live simply, and resist violence. His beliefs remained controversial and often differed from official Russian Orthodox doctrine. Yet the direction of his life changed.
The question was no longer, “What can I acquire?”
It became, “What kind of person must I become?”
This resembles the ancient Christian concept of theosis, the gradual transformation of the human person through participation in divine love. It’s the Eastern Christian way of revealing the enlightenment of humanity.
It does not mean becoming God. It means becoming more fully what we were created to be, more compassionate, truthful, humble, forgiving, and awake. Grace, in this sense, is not merely something we receive. It is something we learn to embody.
Tolstoy increasingly believed that social progress depended upon this inner change. “A better life can only come when the consciousness of men is altered for the better,” he wrote.
The Gift Hidden in Aging
Published in 1894, the book emerged from the radical spiritual transformation that followed Tolstoy’s midlife crisis. He had become disillusioned with wealth, fame, organized religion, government, and the violence societies accepted as normal.
Returning to the teachings of Jesus, especially the Sermon on the Mount, he concluded that the kingdom of God was not a political system, religious institution, or distant heaven. It was a moral and spiritual reality discovered within the individual.
Tolstoy argued that society could be transformed only when individuals practiced love, patience, forgiveness, and nonviolence in daily life.
The book revealed how completely his worldview had changed. The celebrated novelist who once pursued achievement and social status had become convinced that the meaning of life was found through conscience, simplicity, service, and obedience to the highest truth within us.
Tolstoy’s Later Life Was Not Peaceful or Perfect
He struggled with his family, his wealth, his beliefs, and the contradiction between his ideals and his behavior. That may be the most honest part of his story.
Spiritual awakening does not remove human weakness. It makes us more aware of it. Gratitude does not mean pretending that life is painless. It means recognizing that life remains sacred despite its pain.
Tolstoy discovered that the fear of death could become an invitation to live differently. Aging stripped away some of his illusions, but it also revealed a profound possibility.
We may spend the first half of life building an identity. The second half asks us to release it.
What remains may be simpler than we expected: love, service, forgiveness, gratitude, and the grace to become more fully human before our time is gone.
Thanks for leaving a comment and restacking this article if it helped you. Learn more about my work at CliffordJones.com.