Toward the end of
War and Peace, Tolstoy gives his protagonist, Pierre, who has been through terrible hardships as a prisoner of the French during the War of 1812, the following thoughts on God:
He could not see an aim, for he now had faith -- not faith in any kind of rule, or words, or ideas, but faith in an ever-loving, ever-manifest God. Formerly he had sought Him in aims he set himself. That search for an aim had been simply a search for God, and suddenly in his captivity he had learnt, not by words or reasoning but by direct feelings what his nurse had told him long ago: that God is here and everywhere. In his captivity he had learn that in Karataev [an uneducated but naturally pure man] God was greater, more infinite and unfathomable than in the Architect of the Universe the Freemasons acknowledged. He felt like man who, after straining his eyes to see into the far distance, finds what he sought at his very feet. All his life he had looked over the heads of the men around him, when he should have merely looked in front of him without straining his eyes.
... That dreadful question, What for? which had formerly destroyed all his mental edifices, no longer existed for him. To that question, What for? a simple answer was now always ready in his soul: 'Because there is a God, that God without who will not one hair falls from a man's head.'
Book 4, Part IV, Chapter 12
