Ilyin’s “The Fundamental Moral Contradictions of War”(1914) and On Resisting Evil by Force(1925) complement each other. While some scholars point to the evolution of ideas over time, it is more accurate to say that neither work can be fully understood in isolation without the help of the other. While the respective meanings of war, evil, and power and their semantic correspondences are not easily ascertainable, a certain continuity of thought can be inferred from the fact that the problem of ethical dilemmas runs through both texts. The helpless conscience that cannot resolve the ethical contradictions of war, the ethical incompleteness that must be tolerated as long as evil is resisted by force, are themes that must be kept in mind in both texts in order to understand the precise meaning of Ilyin"s criticism of Tolstoy.
In "The Fundamental Moral Contradictions of War”, Ilyin seems to view life as a constant state of war. However, through an expanded concept of war that includes both before and after the physical event, Ilyin seeks to emphasize not only the hostile reality but also the process by which the most obvious ethical source, conscience, has been lost. For Ilyin, war is the epitome of the neglect of a mind bifurcated between positive and negative, and thus of an incapacity of conscience. Ilyin seems to assume that it is premature to debate the pros and cons of war in the face of a crisis of conscience as deeply rooted as the normalization of war, and so he is more interested in the conditions under which war can be judged ethically. The reason Ilyin harshly criticized those who justify war as a means to an end is because their rationale is inconsistent with the principles of conscience. This abstract judgment of the war itself is later connected to the way the Ilyin define any situation that fails to achieve good as evil.
In On Resisting Evil by Force, Ilyin counters Tolstoy"s "morality of flight" with his own ethic of community. However, in the idea that experience, which spans the dimensions of philosophy and religion, is the basis for discerning good and evil, and in the compulsion to reconcile faith and moral perfection, Ilyin shows considerable affinity with Tolstoy. While criticizing the limitations of Tolstoy"s morality, which rests on compassion and sentimentality, Ilyin acknowledges that realizing that human beings are intimately bound to each other in good or evil is a daunting experience available to only a few. Ilyin"s writings also show that the experience of ‘objective evidence’ and the art of describing it are very closely related. Behind his criticism of Tolstoy"s doctrine, then, may lie a regret for a writer who no longer confesses his own experience as a novelist.