Tolstoy asserts and reasserts a message from the Gospels: It is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than it is for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle. For Tolstoy, it became necessary to “[renounce] the life of our class and [recognize] that this is not life but only the semblance of life, that the conditions of luxury under which we live make it impossible for us to understand life” (76). He portrays the affluent as parasites while he praises the laboring poor for their simple life and simple faith.

The author builds his case against his class gradually throughout his A Confession. In Chapter 2, Tolstoy explains that as a youth he was ridiculed for his attempts to be morally righteous and praised for indulging “vile passions” (17), suggesting the moral decay of his peers. As a young writer, Tolstoy lived selfishly and sought fame and fortune like his writer friends. He lost his discipline and ceased his efforts at self-improvement after years of pressure from his audience and his friends to hide “under the mask of indifference and even pleasantry those yearnings for something good which gave meaning to my life” (18).