Demanding the Impossible

The influence of Augustine led some to withdraw entirely from politics into monasticism; for others, it fired their millenarian hopes. The Apocalypse and the Second Coming were no longer considered as spiritual metaphors but imminent events in history. For an increasing number, particularly amongst the downtrodden and impoverished, the millennium of God’s kingdom of earth was about to be realized.

An influential figure in this development was Joachim of Fiore (c.1145–1202), a Cistercian abbot and hermit from Calabria. After many years spent meditating on the scriptures, he developed a widely influential prophetic system. He was convinced that he had found a key to the understanding of the course of history. In a series of commentaries on the apocalyptic books of the Bible, he divided the history of humanity into three ages, corresponding to the three branches of the Holy Trinity. The first was the age of the Father, under the Jewish Laws of the Old Testament, laws based on fear and servitude; the second, of the Son, under the Gospel, the age of faith and filial obedience. In the coming third age of the Holy Spirit, he taught that all law would pass away since all people would act according to the will of God. All masters, both spiritual and temporal, would disappear and the Everlasting Gospel – a new understanding of the meaning of the Bible – would prevail. It would be the age of love and spiritual liberty for the Children of God, an age of joy and ecstasy. This state would prevail until the Last Judgement. This vision of the coming age of liberty was taken up by the Ranters during the English Revolution. The abolition of the monarchy was only the first act in a thorough-going change which would entirely transform society. At the time of the French Revolution, in Britain William Blake was preaching a similar message.

At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the attempt of Francis of Assisi to return to the life of the historical Jesus also had revolutionary implications. As is well known he preached a sermon to the birds, wrote a hymn to the sun, and called the donkey his brother. He has become a symbol of Christian pacifism. Although no vegetarian, his love for animals reflects a mystical awareness of the unity of being which is generally alien to the main Judaeo-Christian tradition. His contemporaries described him as taking ‘an inward and outward delight in almost every creature, and when he handled or looked at them his spirit seemed to be in heaven rather than on earth’.7 He felt the same delight in water, rocks, flowers and trees, and by all accounts lived a life of ecstatic joy. For Francis, God is immanent in the world, and the Trinity through Christ has become the comrade of man.

With a small band of companions (a brotherhood of eleven), Francis tried to live like Christ in voluntary poverty. He repudiated all notion of property, including those things retained for personal use. His original affinity group was united in perfect communion, but once his followers were accepted into the Catholic Church, the Franciscans developed into a hierarchical monastic order like the rest, founded on poverty, chastity and obedience. Nevertheless, Francis’ message of mystical poverty had a profoundly subversive influence: it showed up the Church and State to be lost in ostentation and opulence, and presented the poor as the only community capable of redemption. Those who wanted to follow Francis’ personal example were called Spirituals and were eventually dismissed as heretics. By the end of the thirteenth century, they were also propagating Joachim’s prophecies of the coming age of spiritual liberty.

The Spirituals were only one thread in a growing millenarian movement in the Middle Ages alongside the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Taborites and Hussites, and the Anabaptists of the Reformation. It emerged in the radical wing of the republican movement in the English Revolution, especially amongst the Diggers and Ranters. These groups found inspiration from texts like Augustine’s ‘Love, and do what you will’ and Paul’s ‘Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty’.(II Corinthians 2: 17) They rejected the Church and State and all temporal law because they felt they were in a state of God’s grace and could commit no sin. They denied all earthly government, believing that God-given reason was sufficient to guide their actions. They looked to the Second Coming of Christ and the immediate realization of heaven on earth in which people would live in perfect freedom and complete equality.

This underground libertarian tradition within Christianity surfaced again at the end of the eighteenth century in the writings of William Blake. He too expressed his social aspirations in Biblical language, wishing to replace the Babylon of existing Church and State with the Jerusalem of a free society in which all people would live according to the Everlasting Gospel of forgiveness and love. Like Lao Tzu, he saw reality as a dynamic interplay of opposites. ‘Without contraries is no progression.’ But he hoped to realize a higher synthesis, a Marriage of Heaven and Hell which would bring about a reconciliation between mind and body, imagination and reason, conscience and desire, rich and poor, humanity and nature.

Blake did not separate religion from politics: indeed, he asked, ‘Are not Religion & Politics the Same Thing?’; and insisted ‘Brotherhood is Religion’. He drew inspiration from the mythical social paradise, the Garden of Eden, where man and woman lived in a condition of innocence and wholeness, without private property, class distinctions, or human authority. After the Fall, humanity was condemned to toil and suffering, weighed down by Church and State, oppressed by Lord and King. They were obliged to inhabit a world riddled with contradiction: between Nature and Man, State and Society, Capital and Labour, Church and Christianity. Optimistically, Blake looked to a world revolution which would usher in a new millennium in which such contradictions would be no more.

Like later anarchists, Blake regarded authority as the principle source of injustice: ‘A Tyrant is the Worst disease & the Cause of all others.’ It is the oppressive structures of the State which impede the divine potential within humanity. Blake felt not only that ‘Every Body hates a King’, but wrote also: ‘Houses of Commons and Houses of Lords seem to me fools; they seem to me to be something Else besides Human Life.’ The State had no right to make laws, especially as no law could be sufficiently extensive so as adequately to cover every case: ‘One Law for the Lion & Ox is Oppression.’ Moreover, law encourages crime and transgression, just as the State creates disorder in society: ‘Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion.’ Indeed, since it is law which alone defines a crime, incites people to commit it, and promises dire punishment, Blake insisted: ‘All Penal Laws court Transgression & therefore are cruelty & Murder’. As a great libertarian, he concluded: ‘When the Reverence of Government is lost, it is better than when it is found.’8

When it comes to the Church, Blake is no less iconoclastic. The modern Church, he thought, ‘Crucifies Christ with the Head Downwards’. He rejected all political and religious authority since human beings are made in the Divine Image and can govern themselves. He identified with the rebel Jesus against the tyrannical Jehovah God of the Old Testament: ‘Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse, not from rules.’ Since man is innocent and natural desires are beneficial, it followed for Blake that any hindrance is harmful and unnecessary. Indeed, at the heart of his visionary anarchism is the belief that ‘The Gospel is Forgiveness of Sins & Has No Moral Precepts’. He looked forward to a time when every individual would be ‘King & Priest in his own House’ in a society of complete forbearance, for ‘What is Liberty without Universal Toleration?’.9

At the same time, Christianity influenced Blake’s contemporary William Godwin in an indirect way and helped him become the father of anarchism. Godwin was an extreme Calvinist in his youth and was trained to become a Dissenting minister. As a young man, he concluded that the God of the Old Testament acted like a ‘political legislator’ in a theocratic State and yet had ‘not a right to be a tyrant’.10 When he wrote his Enquiry concerning Political Justice (1793), he had under the influence of the French philosophes become an atheist, but his moral and economic beliefs had been largely shaped by his early Calvinism.11 He developed Aquinas’ notion of stewardship of the good things of the earth in a communist direction: the individual should distribute any surplus wealth he possessed to the most needy. Godwin’s anarchism moreover resulted from a strict application of the Dissenters’ right of private judgement from the religious to the political realm.

The great nineteenth-century anarchist thinkers Proudhon, Stirner and Bakunin were all imbued with the scientific spirit of the Enlightenment and identified Christianity with the existing authoritarian Church. Proudhon wanted to show that Catholicism was the counterpart of a hierarchical system of secular government. Since the Catholic God is considered the authority on which all other authorities rest, governments can be nothing less than ‘God’s scourges set up to discipline the world’. Even from a moral point of view, Proudhon was convinced that ‘God is tyranny and poverty; God is evil’. It is therefore the first duty of the thinking free man to banish the idea of God from his mind. Since we acquire knowledge and social life in spite of God, ‘Each step in our progress represents one more victory in which we annihilate the Deity’.12 But although Proudhon was militantly anti-Catholic, he still interpreted the Christian doctrine of original sin as a symbol of man’s ineradicable inclination towards evil and he sought to create a social order which would restrain his evil tendencies. Moreover, he talked of the idea of Justice inherent in nature as if it were a divine principle. In the form of natural law, it provided an ultimate reference point for his morality and operated as a kind of disguised Providence.

Stirner, on the other hand, thought God, along with the State and Morality, was just another spook to delude humanity. He argued forcibly that the State had come to be considered sacred like the Church, and laws were presented as if they were God’s commandments:

If the Church had deadly sins, the State has capital crimes; if the one had heretics, the other has traitors; the one ecclesiastical penalties, the other criminal penalties; the one inquisitorial processes, the other fiscal; in short, there sins, here crimes, there inquisition and here – inquisition. Will the sanctity of the State not fall like the Church’s?13

Bakunin for his part was haunted by the problem of God’s existence in his youth. But he eventually became a militant atheist, adopting the slogan ‘Neither God nor Master’. For him, the Christian God, who judged every action and threatened eternal punishment, was the ultimate symbol of authority. Like Stirner, he argued that God does not exist but is an abstraction which men project into heaven to worship.

Bakunin believed that Christianity taught:

God being everything, the real world and man are nothing. God being truth, justice, good, beauty, power, and life, man is falsehood, iniquity, evil, ugliness, impotence, and death. God being master, man is the slave …14

Christianity had understood this better than all other religions. As a result, it was the absolute religion, and the Roman Church the only consistent and logical one.

Like Nietzsche, Bakunin declared the death of God and argued that we must transcend Christian values and create our own. The destruction of religion is a prerequisite of a free society since ‘The idea of God implies the abdication of reason and of justice; it is the most decisive negation of human liberty, and necessarily ends in the enslavement of mankind, both in theory and practice.’ Bakunin was at his most passionate in his denunciation of Christianity, but he made his case for the death of God in the form of a syllogism: ‘If God exists, man is a slave; now, man can and must be free; then, God does not exist. I defy anyone whomsoever to avoid this circle.’ Loving human freedom and considering it to be the absolute condition for all he respected in humanity, Bakunin reverses the phrase of Voltaire to affirm: ‘if God really existed, it would be necessary to abolish him’.15 For this reason, he praised Satan for being the first rebel and the ‘emancipator of worlds’.

According to Bakunin, the Church represents the interests of the clergy, as the State represents those of the bourgeoisie. ‘Does She’, he asked rhetorically, ‘not turn what is living into a corpse, cast aside freedom, preach the eternal slavery of the masses for the benefit of tyrants and exploiters? Is it not this implacable Church that tends to perpetuate the reign of shadows, of ignorance, of poverty and of crime?’ He therefore affirmed that the abolition of the Church and the State must be ‘the first and indispensable condition of the true liberation of society’.16 These sentiments, particularly in Latin countries where the Catholic Church was so dominant, had a widespread influence. Bakunin was no doubt partly responsible for the militant atheism of the Spanish anarchists which led to many cases of church-burning during the opening period of the Spanish Revolution.

Not all nineteenth-century anarchists were atheists; others inferred their philosophy directly from their Christian beliefs. The American Adin Ballou reached anarchist conclusions in his Practical Christian Socialism (1854) from a more rational route. Since man has only an obligation to obey God and his divine government, he has no obligation to obey the law of the land or human government. Human government is the will of man exercising ‘absolute authority over man, by means of cunning and physical force’. God on the other hand divides his authority with no creature; he is the absolute sovereign. The will of man has therefore no intrinsic authority, ‘no rightful claim to the allegiance of man’. Ballou therefore asks rhetorically about government: ‘is it not a mere cypher?’

Although he did not call himself an anarchist, Ballou preached against voting, office-holding, legislating, or punishing since ‘Majorities often decree folly and inequity. Power oftener corrupts its possessor, than benefits the powerless.’ Instead, he argued that the true Christian should resist war and develop his moral power. And if ‘non-resistants’ should ever become the great majority of any community, he thought they could manage public affairs through voluntary assemblies in which the ‘law of love and the counsels of wisdom will prevail without strife’.17

Tolstoy of course is the most well-known Christian anarchist, and it was a radical interpretation of the Gospels which led him to anarchist conclusions. He believed that they taught that one should live at peace with all men and not promise an oath nor resist evil. It followed for Tolstoy that all governments, laws, armies, and all protection of life or property are immoral: ‘I cannot take part in any Government activity that has for its aim the defence of people and their property by violence; I cannot be a judge or take part in trials; nor can I help others to take part in law-courts and Government offices,’ he declared.18 Since The Kingdom of God Is Within You and you can be guided by the divine light of reason, governments are both unnecessary and harmful.

If people could but understand that they are ‘sons of God’, Tolstoy wrote, ‘and can therefore be neither slaves nor enemies to one another – those insane, unnecessary, worn-out, pernicious organizations called Governments, and all the sufferings, violations, humiliations, and crimes they occasion, would cease.’19 Tolstoy inspired a long tradition of anarchist pacifists, while his greatest disciple Gandhi developed his doctrine of civil disobedience into a highly effective form of non-violent direct action.

While Tolstoy rejected both Church and State, and was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church for his views, Ammon Hennacy and Dorothy Day in this century have found it possible to be Catholic anarchists. Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker in 1933, became one of the staunchest advocates of Christian pacifism and anarchism. She felt that the authority of God only made her a better rebel. It gave her courage to oppose those who sought wrongly to carry over the concept of authority from the supernatural field to the social one where it did not belong. She did not think that it was contradictory or unethical to choose to obey the authority of God and reject the authority of the State since ‘we were born into a state and could not help it, but accepted God of our own free will’.20

Influenced by Tolstoy and Proudhon, she sought with the anarchist Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker Group to decentralize society and establish a community of families, with a combination of private and communal property. While most people associated the Catholic Worker with voluntary poverty and community, she stressed above all the need for love: ‘We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.’21

Hennacy, for his part, was inspired by the ‘true rebel Jesus’ and his idea of God ‘was not an authority whom I obeyed like a monarch but a principle of good as laid down by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount’.22 If the forces of the State conflicted with his ideals, he would follow his ideals and disobey the State. Hennacy preached ‘the one-man revolution within the heart’ based on voluntary poverty and pacifism. Drawing out his legacy, he wrote: ‘The way of Jesus, of St Francis, of Tolstoy, and of Gandhi teaches us to love our enemy, to establish justice, to abolish exploitation, and to rely upon God rather than on politicians and governments.’23

In the preface to his autobiography, Hennacy gave the clearest and most eloquent statement of his principles and their source in Christianity:

Christian-anarchism is based upon the answer of Jesus to the Pharisees when He said that he without sin was to cast the first stone; and upon the Sermon on the Mount which advises the return of good for evil and the turning of the other cheek. Therefore, when we take any part in government by voting for legislative, judicial and executive officials, we make these men our arm by which we cast a stone and deny the Sermon on the Mount.

The dictionary definition of Christian is: one who follows Christ, kind, kindly, Christ-like. Anarchism is voluntary co-operation for good, with the right of secession. A Christian-anarchist is, therefore, one who turns the other cheek, overturns the tables of the moneylenders, and who does not need a cop to tell him how to behave. A Christian-anarchist does not depend on bullets or ballots to achieve his ideal; he achieves that ideal daily by the One Man Revolution with which he faces a decadent, confused and dying world.24

Where Day and Hennacy were primarily activists, the Russian philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev developed like Tolstoy a form of revolutionary Christianity which was non-institutional and liberating. Both saw the Kingdom of God as an existential condition rather than a social regime but for Berdyaev it took the form of creative autonomy rather than non-resisting love.

Berdyaev defined freedom as ‘the duty of man to be a personality, to display the strength of the character of personality’. The free man is a self-governing being who transcends both State and society since “The self-government of society, and of a people is still the government of slaves.’ But for Berdyaev the concept of the free personality can only be understood in a religious context: Christ was the freest man bound only by love and ‘God is the guarantee of the freedom of personality from the enslaving power of nature and society, of the Kingdom of Caesar and of the object world.’25

The anarchism of Berdyaev is based on the incompatibility of the Gospel and the State, between what he calls The Realm of the Spirit and the Realm of Caesar (1946). The ethics of the Gospel, he insists, are invariably opposed to the ethics imposed by the State. The prosperity of the State does not represent the community and always involves the death of innocents. ‘The law of the State is that in order to save the State even the innocent must be sacrificed’, Berdyaev writes, and yet ‘the death of a single man is an event more important and more tragic than the death of a State or an Empire.’ Moreover, the Church has become such an intimate partner of the State that it has turned the State into another Church. By recognizing the State, the Church has accepted the incumbent power, whatever it may be, so that ‘Sovereignty and the divine character of power exist in equality!’26 The remedy for this state of affairs is to deny the sovereignty of the State and anyone who claims political authority.

Like the non-resistant anarchists Tolstoy and Ballou, Berdyaev develops the Christian concepts of the Second Coming and the Divinity of Christ in a revolutionary direction. He does not look to any particular class as the agents of change: master and slave, ruler and ruled are victims of the same spiritual affliction. It is the unique individual who concerns him. He introduces into his philosophical framework the spiritual concept of the human ‘personality’ as our essential feature: man is a person, whose conduct is to be explained in terms of intentions and beliefs, not by his external behaviour or forces. For Berdyaev therefore it is creative autonomy, rather than non-resisting love, which constitutes the existential centre, the true inner kingdom: ‘Personality in man is the triumph over the determination of the social group … emancipation from dependence upon nature, from dependence upon society and the state.’27

Slavery in man is his sin, his Fall. Man seeks slavery as well as freedom. But the free man goes beyond the correlatives of master and slave ‘to exist in himself’, to become like Christ, the freest of the sons of men who was only bound by love. The truly free man is freed from psychological and physical violence, from the State and social pressures, to be entirely self-governing. As a complete person, he is creative in the ‘ecstasy of the moment’ which is outside time. It is only ‘the gathering together of freedom, truth and love which realizes personality, free and creative personality’.28 Berdyaev finally envisages the end of history, which for him is marked by the victory of ‘existential time’ over historical time, as the complete liberation of humanity.

It should be clear that despite the opposition of many of the classic anarchist thinkers to Christianity in the nineteenth century, and the close historical link between the Church and the State, anarchism is by no means intrinsically and-religious or anti-Christian. Indeed, its forerunners were inspired by the minor libertarian and communal trend within Christianity, especially in the Middle Ages and during the Reformation. Tolstoy was the outstanding Christian anarchist thinker in the past, but this century has witnessed a remarkable flourishing of Christian anarchism from different traditions.

In fact it could be argued that Christian anarchism is not an attempt to synthesize two systems of thought but rather an attempt to realize the message of the Gospels. Like the mystical anarchists of the Middle Ages, Ciaron O’Reilly has recently claimed that the free society already exists in embryo: ‘To the Christian the revolution has already come in the form of the resurrection. It is merely a matter of living out that promise, not living by the standards of the fallen world. The Kingdom of God exists within the social organism, it is our role to make it universally manifest.’29

To deny the authority of the State and Church does not necessarily mean a denial of the authority of God. The law of God, like natural law, can offer a standard by which to live and to oppose man-made law. We are coerced into accepting the latter, while we can accept or reject the former according to voluntary choice. Jesus undoubtedly provides an enduring libertarian example by refusing to collaborate with the Roman rulers, by rejecting the financial benefits of the Sadduccees, and by encouraging people to liberate themselves and to form communities based on voluntary association and common property. Jesus dealt with wrongdoers by confronting them and then forgiving them. By suggesting that we should do unto to others as we have done unto ourselves, he offered a universal moral principle which does not require the sanction of law. By not resisting evil, by turning the other cheek, he taught that we should not participate in violence to others. Since government is organized violence par excellence, a genuine reading of the Sermon on the Mount must logically lead to the rejection of all earthly government. As with the other major world religions, Christianity has left a mixed legacy, but it has been a source of great inspiration to anarchism as well as to socialism, and no doubt will continue to be so in the future.