Revealed unto babes

'Thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes.' Levin knows he is cleverer than his wife and Agatha Mikhaylovna and that he has thought about death with all the powers of his soul, and knows too that neither he nor the great minds he has read know a hundredth of what those two know — the proof being that they do not fear the dying and know without hesitating how to behave. He himself cannot decide where to look or whether to walk on tiptoe. Kitty has no time to think of herself: she talks of her wedding, smiles, mentions recoveries, and on the first day persuades Nicholas to receive Communion and Extreme Unction, which is the thing neither woman would count as merely physical care. That night she unpacks, makes the beds, sprinkles insect powder, and lays out combs and brushes until the rooms resemble home, in the state a man is in before a battle. Levin thanks her and calls her purity itself, and she says she and Nicholas would have been friends.

Tolstoy states the novel's epistemology outright: knowing how to behave is the only evidence of knowing anything, and by that test the nurse and the young wife have it and the philosophers do not. He forestalls the obvious objection — that this is animal instinct — by pointing to the sacrament neither woman would omit. Kitty's certainty that her husband is a Christian whatever he says is left uncorrected.