ellul, jacques - violence.pdf - Violence - sinderella

Contents

I . Traditional Views

Compromise, i

Nonviolence, 9

Violence, 1-7

Today's Christians for Violence

Congress Card Catalog Number: 69-13540 Design by Paula Weiner

644-469-C-5 Printed in the United States of America

any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher,

except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and

reviews.

The Singling Out of the Poor, 30

The Basic Presuppositions, 35

The Three Possible Orientations, 43

The Character of Christian Participation in Violence 60

The Theological Consequences, 71

:3. Christian Realism in the Face of Violence

Violence as Necessity, 84

The Law of Violence, 93

Are There Two Kinds of Violence? 108

Rejection of Idealisms, 115

.1. The Fight of Faith

Necessity and Legitimacy, 127

Christian Radicalism, 145

The Violence of Love. 160

INDEX

Traditional Views

Violence

TIHE CHURCHES and the theologians, it is helpful to recall at I lie

outset, have never been in unanimous agreement in their views on

violence in human society. Today most people believe that general

opinion in the past accepted and, in one way or other, blessed the state's

use of violence and condemned any revolt against the ruling authorities.

But it is a mistake to assume that it is only in our day that Christians

have adopted a nonviolent stance or, on the other band, have ranged

themselves on the side of revolutionary violence. These two attitudes

have had their representatives, their theologians, their sects from the

beginning. Let us then put the problem in perspective by reviewing,

briefly, the main facts concerning these several positions.

of the state-or, at the very least, of the official political authorities-and

ascribed to it a divine origin. We shall not here take up the innumerable

exegeses of Romans 13 and parallel texts. The important thing is to

understand that such passages and exegeses predisposed the Christians

to accept the political power as more or less valid. On the practical level,

however, they saw that the state always threatened to become a

persecuting state, and they saw also that it used violence against its

enemies, internal or external. For war certainly seemed violence pure

and simple, and the police operated by violence-the crucifixion of

thousands of slaves, for instance. How then accept that, when it used

such methods, this power was ordained by God? To be sure, the

Christians understood that the state legitimately wields the sword. But

was this valid in all circumstances?

COMPROMISE

As early as the end of the first century, the Christians found themselves

under a political power-the Roman empire-which persecuted them but at

the same time insured a kind of order and a kind of justice. They also

found themseIves confronting biblical passages which affirmed the value

Questions like these led to the development of various theological

positions-that , for instance, which was to be dominant in the West

during the Middle Ages (so-called political Augustinianism), or that

which triumphed at Byzantium. What is remarkable in these theological

constructions is that they do not retain the biblical perspective which

sees the state as ordained by God, in harmony with the divine order, and

at the same time as the Beast of the Abyss, the Great Babylon; as wielder

of the sword to chastise the wicked and protect the good, but also as the

source of persecution and injustice. Instead of maintaining the balance of

both these truths, these theologians chose rather to validate the political

power a priori on a global scale. They worked out their position on the

basis of a kind of monism. The question they put was: Under what

conditions is the state just, and when does it cease to be just? This led to

casuistic reasoning on the acts of the state, and presently to the

elaboration of a compromise which allowed the Christian and the church

to live in the situation where they found themselves.

Traditional Views

Violence

Very quickly the state became the auxiliary of the church, and vice

versa. The emperor was declared "outside bishop," and the state became

the secular arm carrying out the decisions of the church. For its part, the

church became an earthly magnitude with a political calling. The world

was divided between two powers, the spiritual and the temporal.

Nevertheless the church continued to claim for itself the right of judging

the state. It was she who declared whether or not the state was just. She

could pronounce condemnations, awl actually went so far as to order the

deposition of the prince. She could do no more than speak the truth

about the slate. It must be admitted that under this "Christian" regime

she often used her power of truth-speaking for her own advantage, to

defend her goods and her personages. But just ice requires us to

recognize that she also used it to protect the weak and to establish peace

among the powerful. Contrary to general opinion, the church's struggle

for these ends was very successful in the Middle Ages. Nevertheless the

political power, though recognized, limited, and in some measure

controlled, continued to use violence.

ings; even in its demonization (as Karl Barth was also to say) it still,

negatively, does God's will. It is the institution which demonstrates the

difference between violence and force. The theologian Suarez's

statement of the matter is well known: a man cannot lawfully kill his

neighbor, nor can two men together, nor a hundred men, nor ten

thousand; but a judge can lawfully pronounce a sentence of death. There

is the difference. This indisputably legitimate power derives from the

nature of the state; that nature does not reside in man. There is all the

difference between violence and force.

But this was not the end of the matter, for, obviously, the state is not

necessarily just, not necessarily right. So the next question arose:

whether the state itself is just or not; for the power that condemns to

death (and has the right to do so!) evidently may be tyrannical or

oppressive, or may condemn by mistake. The question then becomes one

of whether the state makes just laws or not. And it is the spiritual power

which can say whether those laws are just. (Calvin himself adopted this

casuistry.) A further question is whether the prince acquired his power

by just procedures or simply seized it by violence; if the latter, he is a

tyrant and unjust. Nevertheless the power he holds renders his sentences

valid, without violence. Moreover, if the prince uses justly the power he

seized by violent means, it is legitimized in the end. Then the final

question: whether the state's use of force conforms to the laws. Here

again we find that confidence in the institution which marked ancient

Rome: a death sentence pronounced according to previously established

procedures, for a crime previously defined as such, and in application of

existing laws-that sentence is just. All the state can do is make decisions

in conformity with its laws. (Except that sometimes the laws themselves

may be unjust; whether they are is up to the church to decide.) In any

case, force is just when its use conforms to the laws; when it does not

con

The theologians and the canonists, leaning on the Roman tradition, then

established positions which are still influential today. As regards

violence, three main points were advanced. First, as to internal violence,

the reasoning soon took shape as follows: The state is not of the same

nature as man; therefore, since it has received the sword from the hand

of God, it never acts by violence when it constrains, condemns and kills.

Next, a distinction was made between violence and force: The state is

invested with force; it is an organism instituted and ordained by God,

and remains such even when it is unjust; even its harshest acts are not

the same thing as the angry or brutal deed of the individual. The

individual surrenders to his passions, he commits violence. The

state-even the corrupt state-obeys quite different prompt-

Traditional Views

Violence

form to the laws, it is still force-not violence-but unjust force.

of peace, that violence is good or bad depending on the use or purpose it

is put to.

In all these matters, too, Calvin generally, though with some nuances,

took the positions that were widely held in his time. We today hold many

of these ideas, even if we have abandoned the conceptions of the church

as judge of the state and of the supremacy of the spiritual over the

temporal power. Yet modern Christians are always prone to judge the

state and to tell it what it ought to do-thus tacitly admitting that the state

is valid, legitimate, and a priori capable of using force justly.

Clearly the theologians' prescriptions for a just war have theoretical

solidity. According to them seven conditions must coincide to make a

war just: the cause fought for must itself be just; the purpose of the

warring power must remain just while hostilities go on; war must be

truly the last resort, all peaceful means having been exhausted; the

methods employed during the war to vanquish the foe must themselves

be just; the benefits the war can reasonably be expected to bring for

humanity must be greater than the evils provoked by the war itself;

victory must be assured; the peace concluded at the end of the war must

be just and of such nature as to prevent a new war.

By such a course of reasoning, the theologians and canonists attempted,

first, to clear the state of the charge of violence by explaining that it was

not violence; and second, to establish a viable compromise between the

state and Christians.

Obviously we need not, in this brief historical review, proceed to analyze

or criticize this elaboration of the just-war idea. Let us point out only

that the whole argument rests on the concept of "justice"-a concept that

was perhaps clear to the Middle Ages but certainly is not so today;

moreover in those times notions of "justice" were much more juridical

and Aristotelian than Christian. Let us point out also that these seven

conditions were formulated in a day when it was possible to see a war

situation with relative clarity; but the phenomena of modern war-total

war as well as wars of subversion-and the extent of the battlefields rule

out utterly the application of these seven criteria and render them

altogether inoperative.

The same method was applied to the second form of violence; namely,

war. Obviously the political authority was always fighting with its

external enemies. It waged war. Should it have done so? Very soon-as

early as 314, at the Council of Arles-the church realized that to deny the

state the right to go to war was to condemn it to extinction. But the state

is ordained by God; therefore it must have the right to wage war. Yet is

not war intolerable violence?

So began the casuistry of the just war. To analyze the successive phases

of that argumentation and to describe the tests set up would be

superfluous. Let us simply recall the climactic point of the just-war

debate in the analysis made by Gratian and Thomas Aquinas, which

became the traditional doctrine of the Catholic Church.* It is based on

the conviction that man can retain control of violence, that violence can

be kept in the service of order and justice and even

Nevertheless these just-war ideas have been taken up again and again. At

present we find three orientations. Catholic thought generally poses the

problem in terms of the lesser evil: war is legitimate as an extreme

means of preventing greater evil for humanity. But note that this greater

evil is variously identified-by some, as the spread of communism; by

others, as the exploitation of the Third World by the cap

11 B. de Solages, La theorie de la juste guerre (Paris, 1956).

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