I have known men, living by agricultural labor, who have ceased entirely to eat meat only because they had to kill their own cattle. And yet our lives are so organized that for one individual to obtain any advantage in life another must suffer, which is against human nature. The whole organization of our lives, the complicated mechanism of our institutions, whose sole object is violence, are but proofs of the degree to which violence is repugnant to human nature. No judge will ever undertake to strangle with his own hands the man whom he has condemned to death.
No magistrate will himself drag a peasant from his weeping family in order to shut him up in prison. Not a single general, not a single soldier, would kill hundreds of Turks or Germans, and devastate their villages – no, not one of them would consent to wound a single man, were it not in war, and in obedience to discipline and the oath of allegiance. Cruelty is only exercised (thanks to our complicated social machinery) when it can be so divided among a number that none shall bear the sole responsibility, or recognize how unnatural all cruelty is. Some make laws, others apply them; others, again, drill their fellow-creatures into habits of discipline – i.e., of senseless passive obedience; and these same disciplined men, in their turn, do violence to others – killing without knowing why or wherefore. But let a man even for a moment shake off in thought the net of worldly institutions that so ensnares him, and he will see what is really incompatible with his nature.
If once we cease to affirm that the evil we are so used to, and profit by, is an immutable divine truth, we may see clearly which is the more natural to man – violence, or the law of Christ. Which is better – to know that the comfort and safety of my family and myself, all my joys and pleasures, are obtained at the price of the misery, depravity, and suffering of millions, by yearly executions, by hundreds of thousands of suffering prisoners, and by millions of soldiers, policemen and sergeants (урядниковъ) torn from their homes and half stupefied by military discipline, who protect my idle pleasures by keeping starving men at a distance with their loaded pistols5; to know that every dainty morsel I put into my mouth, or give my children, is obtained at the price of all this suffering, which is inevitable, in order to obtain these dainties; or to know that my fare is my own, that nobody suffers for the want of it, and that nobody has suffered in procuring it for me?
It is sufficient to comprehend, once and for all, that, in our present organization of life, every joy and every moment of peace is bought at the cost of the privations and sufferings of thousands, who are only restrained by violence, in order to see clearly what is natural to man; i.e., not only to the animal nature of man, but to his rational nature as well.
5 All policemen and sergeants are armed with pistols in Russia.
It is sufficient to understand the doctrine of Christ in all its high significance and with all the consequences it entails, to see that it is not inconsistent with human nature, but that, on the contrary, His whole doctrine throws aside what is inconsistent with human nature – the delusive human teaching of resistance of evil, which is the chief cause of all human misery.
The doctrine of Christ, which teaches us not to resist evil is – a dream! But the sight of men in whose breasts love and pity are innate, spending their lives in burning their brethren at the stake, scourging them, breaking them on the wheel, lashing, slitting their nostrils, putting them to the rack, keeping them fettered, sending them to the galleys or the gallows, shooting them, condemning to solitary confinement, imprisoning women and children, organizing the slaughter of tens of thousands by war, bringing about periodical revolutions and rebellions, the sight of others passively fulfilling these atrocities, the sight of others again writhing under these tortures or avenging them – this is no dream!
When once we clearly understand the teaching of Christ, we see that it is not the world given by God to man for his happiness that is a dream, but the world such as men have made it for their own destruction that is a wild terrifying dream – the delirium of a madman – a dream from which it is enough to awake once, never to return to it.
God came down from heaven – the Son of God, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity – and became man to redeem us from the punishment entailed by the sin of Adam. We think that this God must speak in some mysterious, mystical way, difficult to be understood; indeed, that His Word can only be understood through faith and God’s grace; and yet God’s words are so simple and so clear. He says, ‘Do no evil to each other, and there will be no evil.’ Is it possible that the revelation of God is so simple? Can this be all? All this is so familiar to us.
The prophet Elijah, having fled from the haunts of men and concealed himself in a rock, had it revealed to him that he should see God at the entrance of the cavern. A tempest arose – the trees were rent asunder. Elijah thought God was there and looked, but God was not there. The earth quaked, fire issued out of it, the rock was split in two, and the mountains fell. Elijah looked, but God was not there. Then all grew still and calm, and a light breeze wafted the fragrance of the freshened fields toward him. Elijah looked, and God was there! It is thus with the simple words of God, ‘Do not resist evil.’
They are very simple, but they contain in themselves the sole and eternal law of God and man. This law is eternal, and if in history we find any progress made toward the annihilation of evil, it is due to those who truly understood the doctrine of Christ, who suffered evil without resisting by violence. The progression of mankind toward good is brought about by martyrdom, not by tyranny. Fire cannot extinguish fire, no more than evil can extirpate evil. Good, meeting with evil and remaining untainted by it, can alone conquer evil. There is a law in the heart of each man that is as immutable as the law of Galileo – still more immutable.
Men may turn aside from it or conceal it from others; nevertheless it is the only path that leads to true happiness. Each step that has brought us nearer to this great end was taken in the name of the doctrine of Christ: ‘Do not resist evil.’ It is with greater confidence even than Galileo that the follower of Christ can say, in defiance of all the temptations around him and the threats held out to him, ‘It is not by violence but by doing good that you will eradicate evil.’ And if the progress is made slowly, it is only because the clarity, simplicity, and rationality of the teaching of Christ and its inevitable absolute necessity are concealed from the eyes of men in the most crafty and dangerous manner; concealed under a spurious teaching, falsely called His.
Chapter 5
Everything tended to convince me that I had now found the true interpretation of Christ’s doctrine. But it was a long while before I could get used to the strange thought that after so many men had professed the doctrine of Christ during 1,800 years, and had devoted their lives to the study of His teachings, it was given to me to discover His doctrine as something altogether new.6 It seemed strange, nevertheless so it was. Christ’s doctrine of ‘non-resistance’ seemed to rise before me as something hitherto unknown and unfamiliar to me. And I asked myself how this could be. Had some false conception of Christ’s doctrine prevented my understanding it?
When I first began to read the gospel I was not in the position of one who heard the teaching of Christ for the first time. I already had a complete theory concerning the sense in which it was to be taken. Christ did not appear to me as a prophet, come to reveal the law of God to man, but rather as an expounder and amplifier of the indubitable divine law well known to me. I already possessed a complete, definite, and very complicated doctrine concerning God and the creation of the world and of man, as well as concerning the commandments of God, as transmitted to us through Moses.
In the gospel I found the words, ‘You have been told, “An eye for and eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” but I say to you, do not resist evil.’ The precept, ‘An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,’ was the commandment given by God to Moses. The precept, ‘I say to you, do not resist evil,’ was a new commandment that reversed the first.
Had I considered the doctrine of Christ simply, without the theological theory I had imbibed from my earliest childhood, I should have understood the true sense of these simple words. I should have seen that Christ sets aside the old
