else could be done? If not retaliation in kind, what then? If not retributive justice, how peace? Before attempting to give a positive answer, we must return to the world of Iliad. We must see why the question suggests the same fatalism that permeated ancient Greek thought.
For the Greeks, over and against the will of the gods was the inexorable reality of Fate or Moira. Fate, armed with necessity (ananke), joins with the Furies (Erinyes) to defy human craft and intelligence. Even Zeus is unable to overrule what Fate commands. In Plato’s Timaeus, for example, it is the task of the Creator or Demiurge to mold blind, inert matter to the divine will. But matter, ananke, is resistant to any meaning or purpose, so the creation is never wholly good or complete; there always remains in the universe a residual amount of “brute fact” or necessity that even the gods cannot rationalize or control. Ultimately, then, the highest provenance is not the divine will but the law of Fate. It is impossible to predict what Fate will command. It is impossible to argue with what Fate decrees. “Fate is immutable, impersonal, unseeing, and strikes like a thunderbolt. Future is like past: determined.”9 In the Iliad, the war is not spurred on primarily by human choices, but by the edicts of Fate meted out by Zeus. Achilles, Zeus declares to the goddess Hera, will not fight until after Hector kills Patroclus “in the narrow place of necessity . . . This is the way it is fated to be.” In the meantime, the Furies must ensure that the war does not come to a premature end; so “Terror drove them, and Fear, and Hate whose wrath is relentless . . . the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together/ of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran blood” (4.440–451).10 Homer sees how abhorrent war is, but he is unable to posit any escape from it; the cycle of violence is senseless but unavoidable.
Several centuries later, this idea of the simultaneous futility and inescapability of bloodshed would form the heart of Greek tragedy. Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy is archetypal: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia to propitiate the goddess Artemis. His wife Clytaemestra must then murder him to avenge the death of her daughter. But Orestes, prompted by Apollo, must now kill Clytaemestra to avenge Agamemnon. The cycle is only ended by the arbitrary intervention of the goddess Athene, who appeases the Furies by giving them a permanent home beneath the city of Athens.
The contemporary question of whether there is any alternative to violence (and the assumption that the answer is negative) is best seen in this mythological context. For when we examine the statements made by politicians and military planners in World War II, what is most striking is not the fact that they made dubious ethical choices, but that often in the deepest sense they did not make choices at all. “Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made,” recalled George Elsey, one of his military advisors involved with the Manhattan Project. “He could no more have stopped it then a train moving down a track . . . It’s well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.”11 So, we discover, from the Iliad to Dresden and Nagasaki nothing has changed. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Malta. Fate, necessity, and the Furies decided the war.
This is why violence, at its most basic root, is the ultimate form of passivity. It is based upon the assumption and the fear that when Fate decrees slaughter, humans have no choice but to obey. The “realist” is a conscientious objector to nonviolent action because ultimately he does not believe we are truly free. To think “pragmatically” about when it is acceptable for innocent humans to be destroyed is to think mechanistically about what it means to be human. “War always encourages a patriotism that means not love of country but unquestioning obedience to power,” writes Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry. “In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.”12 Christian complicity in the atrocities of our century thus reveals how deeply the church has absorbed the pagan malaise of determinism. By rejecting nonviolence as a binding principle, Christians have cauterized their consciences and absolved themselves of the freedom to make authentic moral choices. Can the passivity of the German population in World War II be separated from Martin Luther’s claim that Christians are duty bound to wield the sword for the sake of political and social order? Can the compliance of the Catholic chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic crew that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki (destroying three orders of nuns in the process) be separated from Augustine’s Just War teaching? “[S]hould you see that there is a lack of hangmen,” Luther wrote in 1523, “and find that you are qualified, you should offer your services.”13 The Protestant Church has been offering its services ever since. The Catholic Church had a head start beginning with Constantine in the fourth century.
IV
So again, the question: is there any alternative to violence and the fatalism it implies? The New Testament witness says there is. This witness, however, does not take pragmatic reason as its highest value and starting point. Rather, it declares that reason itself is defined by the life and teaching of a single person. One may, of course, reject this person’s teaching of peaceableness toward enemies. What one cannot legitimately do is deny what this teaching is. The evidence is absolute and unequivocal; all special pleading for violence must studiously refrain from sustained exegetical analysis:14
You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also . . . You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. (Matt 5:38–39, 43–45a)15
The Sermon on the Mount, from which these words are taken, is presented in Matthew’s Gospel in a programmatic fashion as the new Torah, a new charter for the community of believers. Just as Moses delivered the tablets of stone from Sinai, Jesus gathers his disciples on the mountain to disclose a new covenant with Israel. The new covenant begins with the Beatitudes, a counterintuitive and politically charged overturning of the world’s values and moral reasoning. God’s blessings, Jesus declares, are upon the downtrodden, the oppressed, the meek, the peacemakers. All of the accouterments of power and prestige on display in Greco-Roman society mean nothing. Education, wealth, and noble pedigree are illusory anchors. Lord Caesar and Lord Mammon are out. Reality, in God’s eyes, is ordered with a paradoxical premium upon weakness and undeserved suffering.
To embody God’s truth in a blinded world, Jesus calls for the formation of a countercultural community, “a polis on a hill” (Matt 5:14). In the polis of Jesus, reconciliation will overcome hostility, marriage vows will be kept with lifelong fidelity, language will be honest and direct, all hatred and violence will be renounced. The emphasis throughout is not upon individual piety as a means to salvation, but upon personal and social ethics leading to restored community in the present reality. Jesus sees his teaching as the deepest fulfillment and revelation of the Law and the prophets. He does not seek to negate the Torah but actually intensifies the Torah’s demands. The Law prohibits murder; Jesus prohibits even anger. The law prohibits adultery; Jesus prohibits even lust. When it comes to the matter of violence, however, Jesus does not simply radicalize the Torah: he decisively alters and in fact overturns it.
The lex talionis—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—is spelled out in several passages in the Hebrew Bible, but particularly in Deut 19:15–21. If in a criminal trial a witness gives a false testimony, the Law declares, that person must be severely punished in order to preserve the social order. “Thus you shall not show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (19:21). Political stability is the goal and fear is the mechanism by which it will be achieved. Jesus shatters this strict geometry with a simple injunction: “Do not resist an evil person.” This does not imply passive capitulation