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