On Anarchy and Violence
Ellul identified himself as a Christian Anarchist. For him, this meant that nation-states should neither be praised nor feared, but merely ignored. To him, human government is irrelevant in that the law contained in Scripture is sufficient and exclusive. That is, being a Christian means pledging absolute allegiance to Christ, which makes other laws redundant at best or counter to the Law of God. Despite the initial attraction of some evangelicals to his thinking because of his high view of Biblical texts (i.e., generally eschewing the historical-critical method), this position alienated some conservative Protestants. Later, he would attract a following among adherents of more ethically-compatible traditions such as the Anabaptists and the house church movement. Similar political ideas to Ellul's appear in the writings of a corresponding friend of his, the American William Stringfellow, and long-time admirer Vernard Eller, author of Christian Anarchy. Ellul identified the State and political power as the Beast in the Book of Revelation.
Jacques Ellul discusses anarchy on a few pages in The Ethics of Freedom and in more detail within his later work, Anarchy & Christianity. Although he does admit that anarchy does not seem to be a direct expression of Christian freedom, he concludes that the absolute power he sees within the current (as of 1991) nation-state can only be responded to with an absolute negative position (i.e. anarchy). He states that his intention is not to establish an anarchist society or the total destruction of the state. His initial point in Anarchy & Christianity is that he is led toward anarchy by his commitment to an absolute rejection of violence. However, Ellul does not entertain the idea that all Christians in all places and all times will refrain from violence. Rather, he insisted that violence could not be reconciled with the God of Love, and thus, true freedom. A Christian that chooses the path of violence must admit that he or she is abandoning the path of freedom and committing to the way of necessity.
During the Spanish Civil War Spanish anarchist friends of Ellul's soon-to-be wife came to France in search of weapons. He tried to get some for them through an old school friend of his and claimed that this was probably the one time in his life when he was sufficiently motivated to commit an act of violence. He did not go with the anarchists primarily because he had only recently met the woman that would become his wife and did not wish to leave her.
Ellul states in The Subversion of Christianity that he thinks "that the biblical teaching is clear. It always contests political power. It incites to 'counterpower,' to 'positive' criticism, to an irreducible dialogue (like that between king and prophet in Israel), to antistatism, to a decentralizing of the relation, to an extreme relativizing of everything political, to an anti-ideology, to a questioning of all that claims either power or dominion (in other words, of all things political), and finally, if we may use a modern term, to a kind of "anarchism" (so long as we do not relate the term to the anarchist teaching of the nineteenth century)."
Ellul states in Violence that idealism serves to justify the use of violence, including:
1. revolutionary idealism (viewing violence as a means to an end and/or violence under the mask of legality)
2. generous idealism (leading to violence toward reconciliation and/or a blindness of the violence of one's enemy)
| “ | ...there is generous idealism of so many young men who risk imprisonment or death rather than participate in a war they condemn only because they idealize and whitewash their country's enemy. Those young men are heroes and fools both. They are repelled by the violence they see—the massive, enormous violence that cries to heaven. And they are right. But seeing this highly visible violence, they forthwith make lambs, saints, and martyrs of its victims. For they close their eyes to what the enemy is really like, to his cruelty, his violence, his lies. They overlook his real intentions; they overlook the fact that he would use terrible violence if he won power. Poor young men, totally unknowing, uncomprehending, blind, perceiving only what is happening now! So they side with the enemy and countenance the enemy's violence. In France, before the Second World War, a great many people sided with the Nazis. Hadn't the Nazis, out of their generosity, protested against the violence done the Sudeten Germans, the Croats, the Germans of Danzig? Hadn't they declared that they would defend the rights of the poor and the unemployed, the victims exploited by the capitalists? Their admiration of the Nazis cost those people dearly. Again, after the war, many French people sided with communism, 'the party of the poor, the proletariat.' A few years later they were stunned by the declarations of the Twentieth Communist Congress and by Moscow's suppression of the Hungarian revolt. This is the kind of idealism that must be combated and radically condemned." | ” |
3. pacifist idealism (beliefs and lifestyles which are only possible within a larger violence-based society)
4. Christian idealism (which is always concerned with the goodness of the world of man). This leads to concepts of progressiveness and unreserved participation with good conscience in political or scientific action. "In their idyllic world, harshness, torture, and war seem abnormal and almost incomprehensible. But it is only gross, highly visible, undeniable violence that evokes this scandalized reaction. They deny the existence of masked, secret, covert violence—insofar as this can be concealed...."
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Famous quotes containing the words anarchy and/or violence:
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