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The Kingdom of God is within you by Leo Tolstoy

L >> Leo Tolstoy >> The Kingdom of God is within you




Musser's book is called "Non-resistance Asserted," or "Kingdom of
Christ and Kingdoms of this World Separated." This book is
devoted to the same question, and was written when the American
Government was exacting military service from its citizens at the
time of the Civil War. And it has, too, a value for all time,
dealing with the question how, in such circumstances, people
should and can refuse to eater military service. Here is the tenor
of the author's introductory remarks:

"It is well known that there are many persons in the United
States who refuse to fight on grounds of conscience. They are
called the 'defenseless,' or 'non-resistant' Christians. These
Christians refuse to defend their country, to bear arms, or at
the call of government to make war on its enemies. Till lately
this religious scruple seemed a valid excuse to the government,
and those who urged it were let off service. But at the
beginning of our Civil War public opinion was agitated on this
subject. It was natural that persons who considered it their
duty to bear all the hardships and dangers of war in defense of
their country should feel resentment against those persons who
had for long shared with them the advantages of the protection
of government, and who now in time of need and danger would not
share in bearing the labors and dangers of its defense. It was
even natural that they should declare the attitude of such men
monstrous, irrational, and suspicious."

A host of orators and writers, our author tells us, arose to
oppose this attitude, and tried to prove the sinfulness of non-
resistance, both from Scripture and on common-sense grounds. And
this was perfectly natural, and in many cases the authors were
right--right, that is, in regard to persons who did not renounce
the benefits they received from the government and tried to avoid
the hardships of military service, but not right in regard to the
principle of non-resistance itself. Above all, our author proves
the binding nature of the rule of non-resistance for a Christian,
pointing out that this command is perfectly clear, and is enjoined
upon every Christian by Christ without possibility of
misinterpretation. "Bethink yourselves whether it is righteous to
obey man more than God," said Peter and John. And this is
precisely what ought to be the attitude to every man who wishes to
be Christian to the claim on him for military service, when Christ
has said, "Resist not evil by force." As for the question of the
principle itself, the author regards that as decided. As to the
second question, whether people have the right to refuse to serve
in the army who have not refused the benefits conferred by a
government resting on force, the author considers it in detail,
and arrives at the conclusion that a Christian following the law
of Christ, since he does not go to war, ought not either to take
advantage of any institutions of government, courts of law, or
elections, and that in his private concerns he must not have
recourse to the authorities, the police, or the law. Further on
in the book he treats of the relation of the Old Testament to the
New, the value of government for those who are Christians, and
makes some observations on the doctrine of non-resistance and the
attacks made on it. The author concludes his book by saying:
"Christians do not need government, and therefore they cannot
either obey it in what is contrary to Christ's teaching nor, still
less, take part in it." Christ took his disciples out of the
world, he says. They do not expect worldly blessings and worldly
happiness, but they expect eternal life. The Spirit in whom they
live makes them contented and happy in every position. If the
world tolerates them, they are always happy. If the world will
not leave them in peace, they will go elsewhere, since they are
pilgrims on the earth and they have no fixed place of habitation.
They believe that "the dead may bury their dead." One thing only
is needful for them, "to follow their Master."

Even putting aside the question as to the principle laid down in
these two books as to the Christian's duty in his attitude to war,
one cannot help perceiving the practical importance and the urgent
need of deciding the question.

There are people, hundreds of thousands of Quakers, Mennonites,
all our Douhobortsi, Molokani, and others who do not belong to any
definite sect, who consider that the use of force--and,
consequently, military service--is inconsistent with Christianity.
Consequently there are every year among us in Russia some men
called upon for military service who refuse to serve on the ground
of their religious convictions. Does the government let them off
then? No. Does it compel them to go, and in case of disobedience
punish them? No. This was how the government treated them in
1818. Here is an extract from the diary of Nicholas Myravyov of
Kars, which was not passed by the censor, and is not known in
Russia:

"Tiflis, October 2, 1818.

"In the morning the commandant told me that five peasants
belonging to a landowner in the Tamboff government had lately
been sent to Georgia. These men had been sent for soldiers,
but they would not serve; they had been several times flogged
and made to run the gauntlet, but they would submit readily to
the cruelest tortures, and even to death, rather than serve.
'Let us go,' they said, 'and leave us alone; we will not hurt
anyone; all men are equal, and the Tzar is a man like us; why
should we pay him tribute; why should I expose my life to
danger to kill in battle some man who has done me no harm? You
can cut us to pieces and we will not be soldiers. He who has
compassion on us will give us charity, but as for the
government rations, we have not had them and we do not want to
have them' These were the words of those peasants, who declare
that there are numbers like them Russia. They brought them
four times before the Committee of Ministers, and at last
decided to lay the matter before the Tzar who gave orders that
they should be taken to Georgia for correction, and commanded
the commander-in-chief to send him a report every month of
their gradual success in bringing these peasants to a better
mind."

How the correction ended is not known, as the whole episode indeed
was unknown, having been kept in profound secrecy.

This was how the government behaved seventy-five years ago--this
is how it has behaved in a great cumber of cases, studiously
concealed from the people. And this is how the government behaves
now, except in the case of the German Mennonites, living in the
province of Kherson, whose plea against military service is
considered well grounded. They are made to work off their term of
service in labor in the forests.

But in the recent cases of refusal on the part of Mennonites to
serve in the army on religious grounds, the government authorities
have acted in the following manner:

To begin with, they have recourse to every means of coercion used
in our times to "correct" the culprit and bring him to "a better
mind," and these measures are carried out with the greatest
secrecy. I know that in the case of one man who declined to serve
in 1884 in Moscow, the official correspondence on the subject had
two months after his refusal accumulated into a big folio, and was
kept absolutely secret among the Ministry.

They usually begin by sending the culprit to the priests, and the
latter, to their shame be it said, always exhort him to obedience.
But since the exhortation in Christ's name to forswear Christ is
for the most part unsuccessful, after he has received the
admonitions of the spiritual authorities, they send him to the
gendarmes, and the latter, finding, as a rule, no political cause
for offense in him, dispatch him back again, and then he is sent
to the learned men, to the doctors, and to the madhouse. During
all these vicissitudes he is deprived of liberty and has to endure
every kind of humiliation and suffering as a convicted criminal.
(All this has been repeated in four cases.) The doctors let him
out of the madhouse, and then every kind of secret shift is
employed to prevent him from going free--whereby others would be
encouraged to refuse to serve as he has done--and at the same time
to avoid leaving him among the soldiers, for fear they too should
learn from him that military service is not at all their duty by
the law of God, as they are assured, but quite contrary to it.

The most convenient thing for the government would be to kill the
non-resistant by flogging him to death or some other means, as was
done in former days. But to put a man openly to death because he
believes in the creed we all confess is impossible. To let a man
alone who has refused obedience is also impossible. And so the
government tries either to compel the man by ill-treatment to
renounce Christ, or in some way or other to get rid of him
unobserved, without openly putting him to death, and to hide
somehow both the action and the man himself from other people.
And so all kinds of shifts and wiles and cruelties are set on foot
against him. They either send him to the frontier or provoke him
to insubordination, and then try him for breach of discipline and
shut him up in the prison of the disciplinary battalion, where
they can ill treat him freely unseen by anyone, or they declare
him mad, and lock him up in a lunatic asylum. They sent one man
in this way to Tashkend--that is, they pretended to transfer to
the Tashkend army; another to Omsk; a third him they convicted of
insubordination and shut up in prison; a fourth they sent to a
lunatic asylum.

Everywhere the same story is repeated. Not only the government,
but the great majority of liberal, advanced people, as they are
called, studiously turn away from everything that has been said,
written, or done, or is being done by men to prove the
incompatibility of force in its most awful, gross, and glaring
form--in the form, that is, of an army of soldiers prepared to
murder anyone, whoever it may be--with the teachings of
Christianity, or even of the humanity which society professes as
its creed.

So that the information I have gained of the attitude of the
higher ruling classes, not only in Russia but in Europe and
America, toward the elucidation of this question has convinced me
that there exists in these ruling classes a consciously hostile
attitude to true Christianity, which is shown pre-eminently in
their reticence in regard to all manifestations of it.




CHAPTER II.

CRITICISMS OF THE DOCTRINE OF NON-RESISTANCE TO EVIL BY FORCE ON
THE PART OF BELIEVERS AND OF UNBELIEVERS.

Fate of the Book "What I Believe"--Evasive Character of Religious
Criticisms of Principles of my Book--1st Reply: Use of Force
not Opposed to Christianity--2d Reply: Use of Force Necessary
to Restrain Evil Doers--3d Reply: Duty of Using Force in
Defense of One's Neighbor--4th Reply: The Breach of the Command
of Nonresistance to be Regarded Simply as a Weakness--5th
Reply: Reply Evaded by Making Believe that the Question has
long been Decided--To Devise such Subterfuges and to take
Refuge Behind the Authority of the Church, of Antiquity, and of
Religion is all that Ecclesiastical Critics can do to get out
of the Contradiction between Use of Force and Christianity in
Theory and in Practice--General Attitude of the Ecclesiastical
World and of the Authorities to Profession of True
Christianity--General Character of Russian Freethinking
Critics--Foreign Freethinking Critics--Mistaken Arguments of
these Critics the Result of Misunderstanding the True Meaning
of Christ's Teaching.


The impression I gained of a desire to conceal, to hush up, what I
had tried to express in my book, led me to judge the book itself
afresh.

On its appearance it had, as I had anticipated, been forbidden,
and ought therefore by law to have been burnt. But, at the same
time, it was discussed among officials, and circulated in a great
number of manuscript and lithograph copies, and in translations
printed abroad.

And very quickly after the book, criticisms, both religious and
secular in character, made their appearance, and these the
government tolerated, and even encouraged. So that the refutation
of a book which no one was supposed to know anything about was
even chosen as the subject for theological dissertations in the
academies.

The criticisms of my book, Russian and foreign alike, fall under
two general divisions--the religious criticisms of men who regard
themselves as believers, and secular criticisms, that is, those of
freethinkers.

I will begin with the first class. In my book I made it an
accusation against the teachers of the Church that their teaching
is opposed to Christ's commands clearly and definitely expressed
in the Sermon on the Mount, and opposed in especial to his command
in regard to resistance to evil, and that in this way they deprive
Christ's teaching of all value. The Church authorities accept the
teaching of the Sermon on the Mount on non-resistance to evil by
force as divine revelation; and therefore one would have thought
that if they felt called upon to write about my book at all, they
would have found it inevitable before everything else to reply to
the principal point of my charge against them, and to say plainly,
do they or do they not admit the teaching of the Sermon on the
Mount and the commandment of non-resistance to evil as binding on
a Christian. And they were bound to answer this question, not
after the usual fashion (i. e., "that although on the one side one
cannot absolutely deny, yet on the other side one cannot main
fully assent, all the more seeing that," etc., etc.). No; they
should have answered the question as plainly as it was put
in my book--Did Christ really demand from his disciples
that they should carry out what he taught them in the Sermon on
the Mount? And can a Christian, then, or can he not, always
remaining a Christian, go to law or make any use of the law, or
seek his own protection in the law? And can the Christian, or can
he not, remaining a Christian, take part in the administration of
government, using compulsion against his neighbors? And--the most
important question hanging over the heads of all of us in these
days of universal military service--can the Christian, or can he
not, remaining a Christian, against Christ's direct prohibition,
promise obedience in future actions directly opposed to his
teaching? And can he, by taking his share of service in the army,
prepare himself to murder men, and even actually murder them?

These questions were put plainly and directly, and seemed to
require a plain and direct answer; but in all the criticisms of my
book there was no such plain and direct answer. No; my book
received precisely the same treatment as all the attacks upon the
teachers of the Church for their defection from the Law of Christ
of which history from the days of Constantine is full.

A very great deal was said in connection with my book of my having
incorrectly interpreted this and other passages of the Gospel, of
my being in error in not recognizing the Trinity, the redemption,
and the immortality of the soul. A very great deal was said, but
not a word about the one thing which for every Christian is the
most essential question in life--how to reconcile the duty of
forgiveness, meekness, patience, and love for all, neighbors and
enemies alike, which is so clearly expressed in the words of our
teacher, and in the heart of each of us--how to reconcile this
duty with the obligation of using force in war upon men of our own
or a foreign people.

All that are worth calling answers to this question can be brought
under the following five heads. I have tried to bring together in
this connection all I could, not only from the criticisms on my
book, but from what has been written in past times on this theme.

The first and crudest form of reply consists in the bold assertion
that the use of force is not opposed by the teaching of Christ;
that it is permitted, and even enjoined, on the Christian by the
Old and New Testaments.

Assertions of this kind proceed, for the most part, from men who
have attained the highest ranks in the governing or ecclesiastical
hierarchy, and who are consequently perfectly assured that no one
will dare to contradict their assertion, and that if anyone does
contradict it they will hear nothing of the contradiction. These
men have, for the most part, through the intoxication of power, so
lost the right idea of what that Christianity is in the name of
which they hold their position that what is Christian in
Christianity presents itself to them as heresy, while everything
in the Old and New Testaments which can be distorted into an
antichristian and heathen meaning they regard as the foundation of
Christianity. In support of their assertion that Christianity is
not opposed to the use of force, these men usually, with the
greatest audacity, bring together all the most obscure passages
from the Old and New Testaments, interpreting them in the most
unchristian way--the punishment of Ananias and Sapphira, of Simon
the Sorcerer, etc. They quote all those sayings of Christ's which
can possibly be interpreted as justification of cruelty: the
expulsion from the Temple; "It shall be more tolerable for the
land of Sodom than for this city," etc., etc. According to these
people's notions, a Christian government is not in the least bound
to be guided by the spirit of peace, forgiveness of injuries, and
love for enemies.

To refute such an assertion is useless, because the very
people who make this assertion refute themselves, or, rather,
renounce Christ, inventing a Christianity and a Christ of their
own in the place of him in whose name the Church itself exists, as
well as their office in it. If all men were to learn that the
Church professes to believe in a Christ of punishment and warfare,
not of forgiveness, no one would believe in the Church and it
could not prove to anyone what it is trying to prove.

The second, somewhat less gross, form of argument consists in
declaring that, though Christ did indeed preach that we should
turn the left cheek, and give the cloak also, and this is the
highest moral duty, yet that there are wicked men in the world,
and if these wicked men mere not restrained by force, the whole
world and all good men would come to ruin through them. This
argument I found for the first time in John Chrysostom, and I slow
how he is mistaken in my book "What I believe."

This argument is ill grounded, because if we allow ourselves to
regard any men as intrinsically wicked men, then in the first
place we annul, by so doing, the whole idea of the Christian
teaching, according to which we are all equals and brothers, as
sons of one father in heaven. Secondly, it is ill founded,
because even if to use force against wicked men had been permitted
by God, since it is impossible to find a perfect and unfailing
distinction by which one could positively know the wicked from the
good, so it would come to all individual men and societies of men
mutually regarding each other as wicked men, as is the case now.
Thirdly, even if it were possible to distinguish the wicked from
the good unfailingly, even then it would be impossible to kill or
injure or shut up in prison these wicked men, because there would
be no one in a Christian society to carry out such punishment,
since every Christian, as a Christian, has been commanded to use
no force against the wicked.

The third kind of answer, still more subtle than the preceding,
consists in asserting that though the command of non-resistance to
evil by force is binding on the Christian when the evil is
directed against himself personally, it ceases to be binding when
the evil is directed against his neighbors, and that then the
Christian is not only not bound to fulfill the commandment, but is
even bound to act in opposition to it in defense of his neighbors,
and to use force against transgressors by force. This assertion
is an absolute assumption, and one cannot find in all Christ's
teaching any confirmation of such an argument. Such an argument
is not only a limitation, but a direct contradiction and negation
of the commandment. If every man has the right to have recourse
to force in face of a danger threatening an other, the question of
the use of force is reduced to a question of the definition of
danger for another. If my private judgment is to decide the
question of what is danger for another, there is no occasion for
the use of force which could not be justified on the ground of
danger threatening some other man. They killed and burnt witches,
they killed aristocrats and girondists, they killed their enemies
because those who were in authority regarded them as dangerous for
the people.

If this important limitation, which fundamentally undermines the
whole value of the commandment, had entered into Christ's meaning,
there must have been mention of it somewhere. This restriction is
made nowhere in our Saviour's life or preaching. On the contrary,
warning is given precisely against this treacherous and scandalous
restriction which nullifies the commandment. The error and
impossibility of such a limitation is shown in the Gospel with
special clearness in the account of the judgment of Caiaphas, who
makes precisely this distinction. He acknowledged that it was
wrong to punish the innocent Jesus, but he saw in him a source of
danger not for himself, but for the whole people, and therefore he
said: It is better for one man to die, that the whole people
perish not. And the erroneousness of such a limitation is still
more clearly expressed in the words spoken to Peter when he tried
to resist by force evil directed against Jesus (Matt. xxvi. 52).
Peter was not defending himself, but his beloved and heavenly
Master. And Christ at once reproved him for this, saying, that he
who takes up the sword shall perish by the sword.

Besides, apologies for violence used against one's neighbor in
defense of another neighbor from greater violence are always
untrustworthy, because when force is used against one who has not
yet carried out his evil intent, I can never know which would be
greater--the evil of my act of violence or of the act I want to
prevent. We kill the criminal that society may be rid of him, and
we never know whether the criminal of to-day would not have been a
changed man tomorrow, and whether our punishment of him is not
useless cruelty. We shut up the dangerous--as we think--member of
society, but the next day this man might cease to be dangerous and
his imprisonment might be for nothing. I see that a man I know to
be a ruffian is pursuing a young girl. I have a gun in my hand--I
kill the ruffian and save the girl. But the death or the wounding
of the ruffian has positively taken place, while what would have
happened if this had not been I cannot know. And what an immense
mass of evil must result, and indeed does result, from allowing
men to assume the right of anticipating what may happen. Ninety-
nine per cent of the evil of the world is founded on this
reasoning--from the Inquisition to dynamite bombs, and the
executions or punishments of tens of thousands of political
criminals.

A fourth, still more refined, reply to the question, What ought to
be the Christian's attitude to Christ's command of non-resistance
to evil by force? consists in declaring that they do not deny the
command of non-resisting evil, but recognize it; but they only do
not ascribe to this command the special exclusive value attached
to it by sectarians. To regard this command as the indispensable
condition of Christian life, as Garrison, Ballou, Dymond, the
Quakers, the Mennonites and the Shakers do now, and as the
Moravian brothers, the Waldenses, the Albigenses, the Bogomilites,
and the Paulicians did in the past, is a one-sided heresy. This
command has neither more nor less value than all the other
commands, and the man who through weakness transgresses any
command whatever, the command of non-resistance included, does not
cease to be a Christian if he hold the true faith. This is a very
skillful device, and many people who wish to be deceived are
easily deceived by it. The device consists in reducing a direct
conscious denial of a command to a casual breach of it. But one
need only compare the attitude of the teachers of the Church to
this and to other commands which they really do recognize, to be
convinced that their attitude to this is completely different from
their attitude to other duties.

The command against fornication they do really recognize, and
consequently they do not admit that in any case fornication can
cease to be wrong. The Church preachers never point out cases in
which the command against fornication can be broken, and always
teach that we must avoid seductions which lead to temptation to
fornication. But not so with the command of non-resistance. All
church preachers recognize cases in which that command can be
broken, and teach the people accordingly. And they not only do
not teach teat we should avoid temptations to break it, chief of
which is the military oath, but they themselves administer it.
The preachers of the Church never in any other case advocate the
breaking of any other commandment. But in connection with the
commandment of non-resistance they openly teach that we must not
understand it too literally, but that there are conditions and
circumstances in which we must do the direct opposite, that is, go
to law, fight, punish. So that occasions for fulfilling the
commandment of nonresistance to evil by force are taught for the
most part as occasions for not fulfilling it. The fulfillment of
this command, they say, is very difficult and pertains only to
perfection. And how can it not be difficult, when the breach of
it is not only not forbidden, but law courts, prisons, cannons,
guns, armies, and wars are under the immediate sanction of the
Church? It cannot be true, then, that this command is recognized
by the preachers of the Church as on a level with other commands.

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Turkey is restoring the citizenship of its most famous 20th century poet Nazim Hikmet over 50 years after it branded him a traitor.

Hikmet, a communist who died in exile in Moscow in 1963, was imprisoned in Turkey for more than a decade. He was stripped of his Turkish nationality in 1951 because of his communist views, but despite a ban on his poetry which remained in place until 1965, has remained one of Turkey's best-loved poets. His work, much of which was written in prison, including his masterpiece Human Landscapes, has been translated into more than 50 languages.

"This is very good news," said Richard McKane, Hikmet's English translator. "The restoration of his Turkish citizenship is long overdue: the people of Turkey and his readers are owed that."

Immortalised by Pablo Neruda, with whom he shared the Soviet Union's International Peace Prize in 1950, with the lines "Thanks for what you were and for the fire / which your song left forever burning", Hikmet was also supported by Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk, when given the editorship for a day of Turkish newspaper Radikal two years ago, used the example of Hikmet in his cover story to criticise the lack of freedom of expression in Turkey. In 2000, 500,000 Turks petitioned the government to restore Hikmet's citizenship rights and repatriate his remains.

Deputy prime minister Cemil Cicek told the Associated Press that it was time for the government to change its mind about Hikmet. "The crimes which forced the government to strip him of his citizenship at that time are no longer considered a crime," the BBC quoted him as saying.

Hikmet, whose remains are currently in Russia, had said that he wished to be buried in Turkey in his 1953 poem Testament, translated by Ruth Christie. "Friends if it's not my lot to see the day / of independence... / if I die before that day / - and it seems I will - / bury me in a village graveyard in Anatolia / and if it's fitting / and a plane tree grows at my head, / then there's no need for a gravestone or anything else."

Cicek said that Hikmet's family would now decide whether to ship his remains back to his homeland.

Hikmet introduced free verse to Turkey in the 1930s, with his themes ranging from war to love. Despite his imprisonment he retained a deep passion for Turkey. "I love my country", he wrote in one of his poems. "I swung in its lofty trees, I lay in its prisons. Nothing relieves my depression like the songs and tobacco of my country."

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