Don’t you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable?The farmer sows the word.Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them.Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy.But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away.Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word;but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful.Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—some thirty, some sixty, some a hundred times what was sown.”
I got to attend the March for our Lives in DC yesterday. To say that it was a powerful time would be an understatement. There are many wise and insightful reflections on the march which have already been published. I would like to particularly highlight this piece by Megan Garber at the Atlantic and this photo reflection by my friend Benjamin. My thoughts this weekend have been circling around the ideas of poetry, prophecy, and silence.
Today is Palm Sunday and that seems, to me, relevant. On Palm Sunday we celebrate Jesus' triumphal entrance into Jerusalem. It is, in Christian tradition, one of the more mysterious of our celebrations. The celebration comes just days before Good Friday, when Jesus is killed by sinful humanity acting through a violent colonial empire. The celebration itself is understood to have been indelibly marked by plans to murder the very king it celebrated. The religious establishment and the secular government shook with fear and fury as children celebrated the Prince of Peace, the God-man who chose to ride to his final confrontation on the back of a mule rather than on a war horse. On Palm Sunday, Christians celebrate the one who defeated death by embracing his own pain and death.
I hope that the parallels are obvious.
Children, students, should never have had to lead the movement against gun violence. Children should never have had to lead the celebration of the one who delivers humanity from death. Children should never have had to, but children did have to. They had to because of the silence of those to whom the task was given. Two thousand years ago, in the face of adult silence, children sang. Yesterday, in the face of adult silence, children sang.
I don't know all of the reasons for our silence, and I don't know all of the reasons for their song. Some of us have been silent because we have given up hope—their hope is not exhausted and they share it with us. Some of us believe that the message of peace is too good to be true, we have chosen to accept the inevitability of violence—they still believe that peace is stronger. Some of us do not want peace, some of us have never wanted peace, our power comes from violence—they have chosen peace. Some of us want a King who will kill our enemies for us—they have embraced peace. Some of us were just too tired—they could not keep silent.
But neither were they afraid of our silence. Christians believe that, in dying, Jesus overcame death—that Jesus turned the agent of his destruction and of ours against itself. In the words of John Donne
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so...
Death, thou shalt die.
Yesterday I saw the students who, a month ago, looked at death, at a man whose ability to kill had been preserved by our silence, and turned silence against itself. Yes, they called out our silence about gun violence; they called out a nation's weary quiet—the deadly stillness that invariably returned weeks, months, or years after Columbine, Aurora, Newtown, and Pulse. But more than calling out our silence, they used silence against itself. I saw it in two ways yesterday.
Yesterday, teenagers were given the attention of a nation. They took that attention, they waited till we were all listening to them, and they told us to listen to someone else. Their own pain had driven them to hear the voices of communities of color, the voices that we have ignored, and they reminded us that those voices have been shouting the whole time. They stood back and silenced themselves so that we would be forced to hear from D.C. and Chicago ("see, the stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone"). One of the most powerful voices of the day was the voice of eleven year old Naomi Wadler who condemned us with:
I am here today to acknowledge and represent the African-American girls whose stories don’t make the front page of every national newspaper, whose stories don’t lead on the evening news, I represent the African-American women who are victims of gun violence, who are simply statistics instead of vibrant, beautiful girls full of potential.
And then there was Emma González. She has become, with good reason, a particular celebrity among the Parkland students who are speaking out on this subject. Her speech just days after the shooting was powerful and impassioned. One politician has already had to drop out of his race after he attacked her on twitter. When he went after her he was running unopposed, within days he had an opponent, and shortly thereafter he suspended his campaign. She owns her identity as a bisexual Cuban-American woman with pride and grace and has already learned the strength of what others might call her vulnerabilities. Yesterday, we all wanted to hear Emma González speak. We all wanted to hear the sort of impassioned power which has been so central to all that is happening. We showed marched yesterday because we care, we marched because this matters, we marched because we are learning to listen again, but I know that a part of me marched yesterday because I wanted a show. I wanted to see what would happen, I wanted all of these students and especially this student to perform for my encouragement and I know that I was not alone. The world was watching and asking her for a show. González rebuked us with a poem and with silence. The woman everyone wanted to hear, read a poem about others and then stood in silence—weeping, defiant, and powerful—and forced us to listen to the silence of 17 graves.
And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.
I have been reading and enjoying Dan Heck's According to Folly(here is my review)aSocratic exploration of contemporary American approaches to Christianity, recently (really enjoying it and I plan to review it as soon as I am done). In the book, the narrator witnesses a series of conversations between a Socratic interlocutor (the titular "fool") and three different "types" of contemporary Western folk. In the book, the Socratic fool identifies the different conversations he has with each of the types as a "game". Now I realize that this isn't original to Heck, but running into it the context of our current culture and the national moment has me reflecting on our methods of discourse in a particular way.
A few months back I put together a list of ten guidelines for arguing about theology on the internet. One of those guidelines has been haunting me so let me quote it at length here:
Remember that humans are complex
Everything I have been talking about has assumed the culture of debate and philosophy which was built by and for educated white men (and also some Greeks and North African men, and a lot of scholars who predate the whole concept of whiteness but whose work formed the foundation on which the men who came to think of themselves as white ultimately built their own power structures - some women also contributed but fewer than we should wish thanks to millennia of patriarchy). As such, while I (a white man) do think that theses guidelines really will be helpful in having productive and healthy arguments about theology, I would be utterly remiss if I neglected to recognize that the list is built on a presumption of the luxury of "doing" theology in relative security. Yes, white men have been martyred for their theology but the vast majority of western white, male theologians have been able to operate from a place of relative security. I don't think that I have heard this explained more powerfully than by Broderick Greer
I descend from enslaved people. From lynched people. From racialized people. From people who took the Jesus their white enslavers introduced them to - a white Jesus happy to watch them suffer in order to maintain the proper social and economic order - and understood him not as enslaver, but as emancipator. I descend from people who created liturgical music not in grand cathedrals or impressive basilicas but on labor camps from Texas to Virginia.
Folk who cried out, “Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen // Nobody knows but Jesus” and “Tell old Pharaoh // Let my people go”. Folk who sang, “ And before I’d be a slave // I’ll be buried in my grave”. Folk who did not dream of a pie-in-the-sky-when-they-die, who awaited a heavenly home free from the troubles of this life. No. They expected their God to act decisively, in history, to free them from the ravages of white domestic terror.
These were people for whom theology was more than an intellectual exercise. They did not have the comfort of ivory towers or lengthy sabbaticals. They just had each other: families and communities forged during the evil institution of African enslavement. And that’s what “powerless” people have to do: theology on the go, without books, seminary, theology on the streets, in the face of people wearing white sheets. Theology after we’ve been kicked to the corner for a perfectly holy and wholesome sexual orientation and gender expression, from the text of our very lives.Excerpt from Theology as Survival
It would be (and far too often is) catastrophic to mistake a person who is doing theology as survival—for their basic dignity, for their inclusion in sacred communities, for their ability to exercise the gifts and calling God has given them—for a person who is doing theology for simple (yet still valuable) edification. To demand that someone doing theology of survival operate in the mode of someone doing theology "from the ivory tower"—or keyboard, would be like asking someone on fire to not to speak too loudly; "too loudly" has a very different definition when you are on fire than it does when you are arguing around the kitchen table in the bloom of health.
It is, therefore, critical to remember (if you are a straight, white, male) that when you have a theological argument, you have the privilege of having it in a space designed to your optimal specifications. It is like the old joke:
Q: "Who would win in a fight, Kevin from Home Alone or Superman?"
A: "How much time does Kevin have to prepare?"When you are engaging on terrain that was built on the assumption that your culture, educational history, and gender are the definition of "normal" you should not expect people whose experience has been a different terrain with it's own "rules" and expectations to engage in the way you are accustomed to.
What I find myself wondering today is all to do with the power, risk, and essential value of discourse. I am a massive fan of Socratic dialectic as a way of discovering truth. The greatest educational experience of my life was my time at St. John's College where the teach the great books program and classes take place as discussions of texts around a table. The so called "great conversation" my abiding passion. In short, I am deeply committed to the proposition that rich, meaningful, robust, rigorous, and honest conversation is at the heart of human progress and understanding.
But here is the thing: In order to work, Socratic dialectic requires the conceit that all participants may engage freely without fear of existential threat or coercion. This is, technically, not a logical requirement but I am convinced that it is an almost entirely unyielding psychological requirement. I am not trying to say that the conceit is inaccessible to any particular class of persons, I am trying to point out instead that the conceit is a) often false, and b) easier for some people in some situations than for other people in other situations. When a straight Christian debates the meaning of the Bible on LGBTQ+ issues with a queer Christian, the consequences of the debate are significantly and unavoidably different for the two of them; this needs to be recognized by anyone who values dialectic as a tool for discovering the truth—it shapes the meaning, import, and weight of the arguments advanced by the two interlocutors.
It might be tempting to conclude from this that the less interested party, the party to who the conceit comes more easily, is more trustworthy in a spectators analysis of a given conversation. It might be tempting but it would also be wrong. The more interested party is often more invested in the outcome of the conversation precisely because she is better, and more holistically acquainted with the total truth of the matter. Yes, she does have a clear psychological investment in the outcome (provided she is arguing for the conclusion which would benefit her) but that does not preclude the possibility of her being correct. It was C.S. Lewis who identified the Bulverism, a combination of the ad hominem and genetic fallacies, demonstrating that a person's interest in the outcome of an argument does not ipso facto invalidate that argument.
The idea (itself a conceit) that disinterest strengthens the validity of an argument is quintessentially modernist in that it emerges from the attempt to reduce all knowledge to scientific and mathematical rubrics of knowing. While it would be a mere re appropriation of the bulverism to suggest that the conceit of disinterest as strength in an argument is wrong only because it serves the interests of those whose power is already well established (relatively wealthy cis, straight, white men) and that it was first forwarded by that same class of people; the genesis of the idea is certainly relevant to the discussion. So, again, I am not claiming that the conceit of disinterest as strength in an argument is wrong merely because it was developed and preserved by those people best situated to benefit from it. I am arguing instead that this may explain some of the idea's longevity—it is useful to those with power and that is generally a solid predictor of a things longevity in society. I think the idea is wrong because it fails to allow for the fact that knowledge can be acquired in ways that are not "scientific" and because it fails to allow for the simple fact that those most impacted by a proposition are often ipso facto those who are best acquainted with the strengths, weaknesses, and consequences of the idea.
That dude who thinks he can mansplain feminism because "he doesn't need it"
It was, again, Lewis in his essay Meditation in a Toolshedwho clarified the difference between looking at something (that is to privilege what can be described in a disinterested manner) , and looking along it (that is to know a thing from the "inside").
When you have got into the habit of making this distinction you will find examples of it all day long. The mathematician sits thinking, and to him it seems that he is contemplating timeless and spaceless truths about quantity. But the cerebral physiologist, if he could look inside the mathematician's head, would find nothing timeless and spaceless there—only tiny movements in the grey matter. ... The girl cries over her broken doll and feels that she has lost a real friend; the psychologist says that her nascent maternal instinct has been temporarily lavished on a bit of shaped and coloured wax.
As soon as you have grasped this simple distinction. it raises a question. You get one experience of a thing when you look along it and another when you look at it. which is the "true" or "valid" experience? Which tells you most about the thing? And you can hardly ask that question without noticing that for the last fifty years or so everyone has been taking the answer for granted. It has been assumed without discussion that if you want the true account of religion you must go, not to religious people but to anthropologists; that if you what the true account of sexual love you must go, not to lovers, but to psychologists; that if you want to understand some "ideology" (such as medieval chivalry or the nineteenth-century idea of a "gentleman"), you must listen not to those who lived inside it, but to sociologists.
The people who look at things have had it all their own way; the people who look along things have simply been brow-beaten. It has even come to be taken for granted that the external account of a thing somehow refutes or "debunks" the account given from inside.
I want to retain Socratic dialogue, healthy argumentation, and rigorous debate. But I think we need to learn to do it in a more fully formed way. We need to understand that the arguments of those who do theology, philosophy, politics, or ethics "for survival" may well be doing a better, or at least a differently informed and equally valid job of it than those engage in a more superficially disinterested way. Certainly we need to begin calling out the false claims of those who flippantly boast that they are "just interested in the truth" and "don't have a horse in this race". I still believe that the game is a useful—even a vital—one, but its rules are far more complex than we often want to admit.
This post is a response to C.S. Lewis' 1940 essay Why I am not a Pacifist reprinted in the collection The Weight of Glory.
I was recently involved in an online discussion over the subject of guns and gun restrictions. In the course of the discussion, someone recommended C.S. Lewis' essay Why I am not a Pacifist, as a strong argument against the pacifist position. Now C.S. Lewis would likely have been one of the first to tell you that he could not be absolutely certain of the reasons that he was not a pacifist, but in the essay he does lay out his moral and rational warrant for rejecting the pacifist position. The essay is an excellent example of many of my reasons for loving Lewis as a thinker and a writer: the elegance of his reason, the conviviality of his style, his nearly supernatural capacity to be direct and hard hitting without stooping to insult(1) or being dismissive.
I am, generally, a huge Lewis fan but this is one subject over which I part ways with him as I am a pacifist. Specifically, I am a pacifist of the non-lethality sort. That is to say that while I do not reject all forms of violent coercion (say for instance yanking a child out of the street, or locking a psychologically deranged person away from people whom he might hurt and implements with which he might do harm) I do reject as ultimately wrong all purposeful taking of human life—I think it is wrong to kill people.
Lewis begins the essay by neatly breaking the process of moral reasoning (he calls it an act of the conscience) down into four specific parts which, he argues, operate in both the general process of reasoning and in moral reasoning itself:
Now all three elements are found also in conscience. The facts, as before, come from experience and authority. I do not mean "moral facts" but those facts about actions without holding which we could not raise moral questions at all—for we should not even be discussing Pacifism if we did not know what war and killing meant, nor Chastity, if we had not yet learned what schoolmasters used to call "the facts of life." Secondly, there are the pure intuitions of utterly simple good an devil as such. third there is the process of argument by which you arrange the intuitions so as to convince a man that a particular act is wrong or right. And finally there is authority as a substitute for argument, telling a man of some wrong or right which he would not otherwise have discovered, and rightly accepted if the man has a good reason to believe the authority wiser and better than himself.
He goes on to claim that the significant difference between reasoning generally and moral reasoning is that our immediate sense of goodness and evil is somewhat more corrupted and corruptible than our our immediate perception of truth and falsehood (on which the operation of general reason relies). I am not totally convinced of this but as it plays no further role in the argument than to encourage the reader to a more rigorous self reflection—a very wise and proper suggestion—I am not inclined to quibble with it here.
All of this is classic Lewis, identifying the process by which the question is to be addressed and then breaking that process into discreet operations, each of which is then addressed in turn. So far I am very much on board.
After pointing out that there is no more utility in arguing about basic moral intuitions than there is about basic perceptions since the person who claims to "just know" that pacifism or non-pacifism is good has provided no grounds for disagreement, Lewis launches into his moral analysis of pacifism as an examination of the facts, intuition, reasoning, and authority which he sees behind pacifism.
Moral Facts
Lewis begins with the fact that war is "very disagreeable" and suggests that Pacifists add to this a fact-claim that "wars always do more harm than good". I cannot speak for all pacifists, but this is not a claim I would make. I am willing to grant that there are wars which may well have led to less harm than likely would have occurred had the aggressor nation succeeded in its stated goals—WW2 being a somewhat obvious example (if one that Lewis was in no place to use in 1940). Lewis points out that the claim, if made, would be necessarily speculative and can therefor be treated as something of a null claim. This strikes me as something of a straw man representation of the Pacifist analysis of war, but is, finally, a strong approach as it does box out my suggested rejoinder, that there are possibilities other than either a) war or b) concession to the aggressive power; the claim that a third option might have had an even better outcome than either war or Nazi domination of Europe is, I think, possible but also admittedly speculative so I will not list it as a fact. I do need to notice, though, that "war was the best possible outcome" is just as speculative as the rest.
And I think that note is important because Lewis goes on to claim (using WW1 as his example) that "If a Germanized Europe in 1914 would have been an evil, then the war which prevented that evil was, so far, justified". Lewis is saved here by his inclusion of "so far". The little phrase allows room for Lewis to grant (though I wish he would have done so explicitly) that an action is not justified by the mere fact of its being less bad than an alternative. If a murderous cannibal chooses to let a particular victims corpse alone, it is certainly better than his having eaten it but the original murder is not thereby justified. By including the "so far" Lewis seems to be claiming only that a war which is not as bad in its effects as total capitulation to an oppressor would have been is not thereby condemned by simple utilitarian calculation. I agree with him that it is not, and it will do as an explanation for why Lewis does not find speculation about outcomes particularly convincing. It does not explain why he should find the non-pacifist claim that "war is less bad than capitulation to an oppressor" to be a particular vindication of war as such. To do so would be to commit the false dilemma fallacy.
This turns out to be just about all Lewis wants to do with the facts, but before I follow his essay over to discussing moral intuition I want to suggest a further moral fact, that the loss of a life is always in itself to be viewed as an evil. I am confident that this claim could be argued on religious grounds (Romans 5:12 springs to mind) but I think it is just as well established as shared human opinion. Though we disagree about pacifism, we all generally do agree that life is to be preferred over death. Thus death does not enter the discussion with the presumption of innocence but with the presumption of guilt. If death is to be allowed as a moral good, the burden of proof is on the non-pacifists to demonstrate that there are circumstances under which it can be justified. I think that, so long as we are dealing strictly with the category of moral facts, we cannot conclude that death is always an evil as there may well be situations in which it could be turned for the good—that possibility must not be ruled out without examination which would involve a move from stating moral facts to moral reasoning.
Moral Reasoning
Lewis begins his analysis of the relevant moral reasoning by observing that any general principle of beneficence has to be particularized to be meaningful. In his words
You cannot do simply good to simply Man; you must to this or that good to this or that man.
This fact, which I do not dispute, taken together with the fact of human limitations (no person can act in all ways at all times), and the general principle that some people have a greater claim on our beneficence than others (I have some provisos on this one but am basically willing to grant it), leads Lewis to the following move:
And this in fact most often means helping A at the expense of B, who drowns while you pull A on board, And sooner or later, it involves helping A by actually doing some degree of violence to B. but when B is up to mischief against A, you must either do nothing (which disobeys the intuition) or you must help one against the other. And certainly no one's conscience tells him to help B, the guilty. It remains, therefore, to help A. So far, I suppose, we all agree. If the argument is not to end in an anti-Pacifist conclusion, one or other of two stopping places must be selected. You must either say that violence to B is lawful only if it stops short of killing, or else that killing of individuals is indeed lawful but the mas killing of war is not.
Lewis here manages again, to his great credit, to avoid the false dilemma of painting Pacifists as advocates of passivity in the face of injustice. He recognizes the possibility that we might well say that something can and should be done to restrain, or frustrate the intentions of, "B" but that killing B is an option which should be taken off the table. Notably, however, Lewis does not actually discredit the active, non-lethal option. Instead he states, without arguing, that there are situations wherein killing B is the "only efficient method" for restraining B from running rampant and then argues briefly that capital punishment is a subject "on which good men may legitimately differ". Lewis seems, here, to be glossing over what is, for me, the whole issue. I am willing to grant that killing an aggressor is the most efficient way of preventing future aggression on his part. I can even move beyond "efficient" to "effective", and grant that there are plausible situations in which the only apparently effective way to deter an aggressor is to kill the aggressor, particularly since Lewis grants that there may not be any situations in which the death of "B" is necessary saying in the next paragraph "It is arguable that a criminal can always be satisfactorily dealt with without the death penalty". But the practical thing is not always the correct thing to do. Lewis would, I think, be one of the first to agree that there are some actions which, even when they are very likely to work to achieve a good end are nevertheless "out of court" on the grounds that they are intrinsically evil—I am reminded of Lewis' treatment of Jadis in The Magician's Nephew and her use of the deplorable word. This is not a minor point; Lewis was never a moral pragmatist and neither am I. The only conclusion I can see is that, so long as we want to read Lewis as consistent in his overall ethics, we have to say that his response to the suggestion that aggressors should be stopped but that only non-lethal methods are on the table for stopping them is that the truth of the claim ultimately rests on the question of whether or not there are situations under which killing an aggressor is ever justified. If killing people is going to be ruled moral in some situations then it will remain possible that killing people might be moral when it is the only efficient or effective method of stopping an aggressor. In the meantime the question of pacifism remains open.
Lewis next move is to claim that "It is certain that a whole nation cannot be prevented from taking what it wants except by war. It is almost equally certain that the absorption of certain societies by certain other societies is a great evil". While I cheerfully grant the latter claim, I am not entirely convinced of the former. It is, I think, relevant that Lewis wrote this essay before India was able to secure its independence from Britain through non-violent means, a decolonization which turned out to be the prelude to a wave of decolonization and independence movements which were often (though certainly not always) accomplished through strategic non-violence. Additionally Lewis did not have access to the recent work of Erica Chenoweth demonstrating that non-violent resistance has proved more effective than violent resistance in the modern era. I do not mean to suggest that any of this proves that aggressor nations can always (or ever) be stopped by non-violent means—this evidence is no where near sufficient to support such a claim, the time scale and types of conflict involved are far too limited—but I do think that it provides sufficient evidence to challenge Lewis' claim that "It is certain..." and suggest that today Lewis would have had to restrict himself to "It is likely..." or "It is probable...".
Ultimately, however, my response to this argument is roughly the same as my response to the previous. The validity of his argument here rests on two presuppositions: first that there are circumstances which make killing a person moral, and second that preventing the success of aggressor nations is one of those circumstances. Both of these presuppositions are clearly dubitable; It may well be that the immorality of, at least purposefully, killing a person is an absolute—and even if it is not, Lewis has no warrant to presume that it there are circumstances which justify at is such an assumption would constitute question begging—or even if there are circumstances where killing a person can be morally warranted he has not demonstrated that preventing the very evil eventuality of a despotic, tyrannical, and/or evil nations taking over another constitutes those circumstances—it may, but Lewis does not demonstrate it here. And so, again, I find that Lewis fails to make his point with this argument.
Lewis' next line of argumentation addresses a sort of pragmatic Pacifist position which, Lewis says, suggests that we should work to remove war as best we can and that the most pragmatic method is to advocate pacifism in the hope that there will eventually be enough pacifists in all nations that war will become untenable. I have not, myself, encountered any pacifists who take this view but I have no reason to doubt Lewis that they exist. Insofar as they do, I am with him in discounting their reasoning. I do not think that pacifism should be advocated unless it is, in fact, correct. In this section Lewis is at his very best when he opines
I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.
I am in full agreement.
Authority - Human
Having established, to his own satisfaction (if not to mine) his case that the case for Pacifism cannot
be made on the basis of moral facts and reasoning alone, Lewis goes on to consider the question of moral authority. Here Lewis breaks the question of moral authority into the familiar categories of special and general authority, either human or divine.
He first looks at special human (moral) authority and recognizes that, in his case, all of it—or at least the vast majority—goes against pacifism. He points out
If I am a Pacifist, I have Arthur and Aelfred, Elizabeth and Cromwell, Walpole and Burke, against me. I have my university, my school,and my parents against me. I have the literature of my country against me, and cannot even open my Beowulf, my Shakespeare, my Johnson, or my Wordsworth without being reproved.
and I think that he is, so far as this goes, correct in his assessment. My only addendum is that, as a US citizen living at the beginning of the 21st century I am in a slightly different place insofar as I also have William Penn, Jane Addams, Dorothy Day, and Dr. King to recon with if I want to dismiss the Pacifist position. The special human authority in this country and at this time is somewhat more varied than it was for C.S. Lewis in the U.K. in 1940. In any case, Lewis does not insist that the non-Pacifist witness of England should be deterministic, he wants only to note it and allow it a voice in the conversation. Let us now say that it is noted and allowed, and move on with him.
Lewis next move is to general human authority looking at the witness of human history as a whole. Here I believe he overstates his case somewhat. He accurately points out
To be a Pacifist, I must part company with Homer and Virgil, with Plato and Aristotle, with Zarathustra and the Bhagavad-Gita, with Cicero and Montaigne, with Icealnd and with Egypt. From this point of view, I am almost tempted to reply to the Pacifist as Johnson replied to Goldsmith, "Nay Sir, if you will not take the universal opinion of mankind, I have no more to say."
Lewis goes on to some important comments about the weight that the "universal opinion of mankind" ought to have and the methods whereby people might elect to stray from it, but before I follow him there it is important to point out that, while Lewis would be correct in claiming that the majority opinion of mankind is against pacifism, he overplays his hand in claiming that the cry against Pacifism is universal. He has the Jains, a variety of Buddhists, possibly St. Francis, Laozi, Tolstoy, and the Anabaptist and Quaker traditions to recon with. All of these together constitute, at best, a minority report on the "opinion of mankind" but they are certainly sufficient to falsify Lewis' claim to the universality of non-Pacifism.
Having noted that Lewis overplays the univocality of the "opinion of mankind" in his assessment, it is worth taking a look at the weight he believes that opinion, univocal or not, ought to have. He identifies two potential ways a person might reasonably shrug off the non-Pacifist opinion of mankind. The first, essentially boils down to what he liked to call "chronological snobbery" (though he does not use that term in this essay) and a vague justification for it—essentially the idea that humanity is always improving such that opinions of the past have no real weight in the present. I don't think that this view is as common as Lewis makes it out to be (though it may well have been just that common in Lewis' own circles—I know Lewis himself claims to have been taken in by it until he was cured of the delusion by some talks with Owen Barfield). At any rate, I am not personally familiar with any pacifists who take this approach and I certainly do not(2). The second way Lewis sees that a person might shrug off the weight of historical tendency of mankind away from Pacifism is the directly religious, and particularly Christian, observation that mankind is morally imperfect and that as a result the opinion of mankind is no clue as to the good. Here again I think Lewis is overstating the case. The moral corruption of humanity would only totally undo the testimony of the great thinkers and leaders of human history if one were to hold to the strictest of Calvinist "total depravity" doctrines. Lewis did not hold to such a doctrine and neither do I. Yes, humanity is morally corrupt, but we are not utterly incapable of truth, goodness, and beauty—whether because of remnant goodness, universal redemption, or prevenient grace does not matter here—there is real wisdom to be found in the witness of mankind, though that witness remains imperfect.
Authority - Divine
The shift towards the religious leads Lewis into considering Divine Authority in, he notes, exclusively Christian terms(3). As I am, myself, a Christian Pacifist (in that I am a Pacifist for Christian reasons) this bit is, for me, the real meat of the essay. Lewis points out (quite accurately) that the Christian Pacifist conclusion is built, in large measure, on the teachings of Jesus Christ (as well as, I would add, His example) and that without these teachings it would be nearly impossible to get a pacifist reading of the Bible. He does, again, overstate the case against pacifism from the tradition of Christian interpretation on the subject. Citing Anglican, Roman Catholic, and Presbyterian traditions (while ignoring the radical reformation and the Quakers) Lewis quotes Aquinas on just war theory and then cites Augustine as representative of the Patristics. Here, for the fist time and though it pains me, I am really tempted to accuse Lewis of arguing in bad faith. While it is certainly true that Augustine will work as an early church father and an advocate of the non-pacifist interpretation, he is practically alone in that regard. Nearly every other church father, from Origen, to Justin Martyr, to Tertullian, who weighed in on the subject, did so on the side of non-violence. Lewis has to have known this so his cherry picking the (almost only) Patristic voice strikes me as less than fully honest to the argument. Again, Lewis has something of a point here since the majority of the Church's witness would support his non-Pacifist position, but he overplays his hand and undermines his total argument. The Christian Pacifist who looks to the tradition of the Church, and especially to the tradition of the early church fathers, to support Pacifism will not have difficulty finding it.
Finally (and, for most American Evangelicals, most substantially) Lewis moves on to a direct examination of the Bible. Having already pointed out most readings of the Old Testament (and, Lewis suggests, the Bible in its totality) do not recommend a Pacifist conclusion, Lewis zeroes in on something quite near to the actual exegetical argument I would make. He says
The whole Christian case for Pacifism rests, therefore, on certain Dominical utterances, such as "Resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also." I am now to deal with the Christian who says this is to be taken without qualification. I need not point out—for it has doubtless be pointed out to you before—that such a Christian is obliged to take all the other hard saying of Our Lord in the same way. For the man who has done so, who has on every occasion given to all who ask him and has finally given all he has to the poor, no one will fail to feel respect. With such a man I must suppose myself to be arguing; for who would deem worth answering that inconsistent person who takes Our Lord's words a la rigueur when they dispense him from a possible obligation and takes them with latitude when they demand that he should become a pauper?
I have three objections so far. First, Lewis doesn't happen to have chosen the command on which I base my pacifism (though I don't particularly fault him for the one he did choose—it is certainly a relevant passage) and as a result, throughout the rest of the essay he ends up playing more around the edges of my position than addressing it directly. Second I disagree with his assertion that taking this command "without qualification" requires that all commands of Jesus be read in that way. As Lewis himself points out a littler further on in the essay "Any saying is to be taken in the sense it would naturally have borne in the time and place of utterance" context has an effect on the meaning of a statement and that is no less true of the commands of Christ than it is of any other bit of human language. Jesus does have quite a few "hard sayings" and each ought to be examined in the light of its own context and evaluated in that way. So while I don't find any fault in Lewis' method of interpretation, it seems to me that this particular point flies in the face of just that method. Third, if a rigorous application of Lewis' method does, in fact, lead to an application which is more convenient to the position of a Pacifist who does not take the path of total poverty, well, I should hardly have to remind Lewis of the dangers of a Bulverism.
Lewis' own interpretation of Jesus command to turn the other cheek is reasonable and straight-forward though I maintain it is based on a somewhat inaccurate reading of history and of the text.
I think the text means exactly what it says, but with an understood reservation in favour of those obviously exceptional cases which every hearer would naturally assume to be exceptions without being told. Or to put the same thing in more logical language, I think the duty of non-resistance is here stated as regards injuries simpliciter, but without prejudice to anything we may have to allow later about injuries secundum quid. That is, insofar as the only relevant factors in the case are and injury to me by my neighbour and a desire on my part to retaliate, then I hold that Christianity commands the absolute mortification of that desire. ... Does anyone suppose that Our Lord's hearers understood Him to mean that if a homicidal maniac, attempting to murder a third party, tried to knock me out of the way, I must stand aside and let him get his victim? I at any rate think it impossible they could have so understood Him.
I would contend that Jesus did not leave room for the "obviously exceptional cases" Lewis mentions. Directly after the section of Matthew 5 which Lewis quotes is the passage which I find most compelling in my own pacifism. "You have heard it said, 'love your neighbor and hate your enemy', but I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven" (Matthew 5:43-45a - NIV). Jesus follows the command to "turn the other cheek" with the active command to "love your enemies", (the order of the commands are reversed but still paired when we read them again in Luke 6:27-29) which when taken together with the additional command that we are to love our neighbor and Jesus response to the question "who is my neighbor" would seem to cover all people. My basic contention is, then, is that the command to non-lethality is universal precisely because killing a person is finally incommensurate with loving that same person. Inasmuch as it may have been true that Jesus' original audience would have heard obvious exceptions to the command to "turn the other cheek", Jesus follow on command to love their enemies would have closed those "loopholes".
It is particularly worth noting that the command to love in Matthew 5:44 takes a form of the Greek word "agape", a term Lewis himself wrote extensively about in The Four Loves. Agape is, Lewis well understood, the love that healthy people have for themselves, or better, it is the love that God has for us. As Lewis said in Studies in Words.
Charity [agape] means 'Love in the Christian sense'. But love, in the Christian sense does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will that we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
The command to "agape" our enemies inevitably means that we must treat our enemies (regardless of how we feel about them) in a way which is finally oriented to their real good. I maintain that killing them must always be viewed by humans (who have no access to the internal states or eternal situations of one another) as antithetical to the good of others.
Lewis finally justifies his flawed exegesis of Matthew 5 with the fairly standard argument on the part of non-Pacifist Christians that a non-Pacifist interpretation of these commands of Jesus is easier to square with the rest of the Bible.
But I also think that, so taken, it harmonises better with St. John Baptist's words to the soldiers and with the fact that one of the few persons who Our Lord praised without reservation was a Roman Centurion. It also allows me to suppose that the New Testament is consistent with itself. St. Paul approves of the magistrate's use of the sword (Romans 13:4) and so does St. Peter (I Peter 2:14). If Our Lord's words are taken in the unqualified sense which the Pacifist demands, we shall then be forced to the conclusion that Christ's true meaning, concealed from those who lived in the same time and spoke the same language, and whom He Himself chose to be His messengers to the world, as well as from all their successors, has at last been discovered in our own time."
And again, Lewis dips into misrepresenting the non-violent stance of the first few hundred years of the church. The only salient objection I found here is the common and reasonable objection that interpreting Jesus commands to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek in Matthew 5 and Luke 6 without exception(4) (obvious or otherwise) leads to apparent contradictions within the whole of the Biblical text. Quickly noting that Lewis has already marshaled almost all of the New Testament texts which might be problematized by a Pacifist interpretation of Jesus' sermons on the mount and plain (the other two are John 2 and Luke 22 and their parallels), I am willing to agree that there is indeed an apparent contradiction in the surface reading of the Bible. But this is hardly news. in fact, Lewis has already noticed the apparent contradiction in claiming that we ought to adopt a contextually modified interpretation of the sermon on the mount. Nobody is denying the apparent contradiction (and I am a little disappointed that Lewis doesn't grant this), the difference is in which surface readings we think required a deeper examination if we are to hold onto a harmony on this subject in Scripture. I contend that, as Jesus is the fullest image we have of God in the Bible, the proper approach (following the hermeneutic principle that the less clear should be interpreted in light of the more clear) is interpret those passages which would seem to support the non-Pacifist position in light of the clear and direct commands (as well as the self-sacrificing example) of Jesus. Where Lewis seems to want the Gospels interpreted in light of the rest of the Bible (but mostly the Old Testament), I want to interpret the rest of the Bible (and particularly the Old Testament) in light of the Gospels.
Psychological Pressure
After working through his thoughts on authority, Lewis takes a moment to reflect on the psychological pressures which might be influencing a continued preference for the Pacifist tradition. I am nearly always in favor of carefully examining one's own passions so I cheerfully accept his invitation here. I will even extend it right back to the non-Pacifists. His analysis of the reasons one might be tempted to accept Pacifism is gracious, honest, and so far as I can tell an accurate representation of the factors which would have been in play for his contemporaries at the outset of the second world war.
All that we fear from all the kinds of adversity, severally, is collected together in the life of a soldier on active service. Like sickness, it threatens pain and death. Like poverty, it threatens ill lodging, cold, heat, thirst, and hunger. Like slavery, it threatens toil, humiliation, injustice, and arbitrary rule. Like exile, it separates you from all you love. Like the gallies, it imprisons you at close quarters with uncongenial companions. It threatens every temporal evil—every evil except dishonour and final perdition, and those who bear it like it no better than you would like it. On the other side, though it may not be your fault, it is certainly a fact that Pacifism threatens you with almost nothing.
My only response in this case is that several of those factors are not in play for me as I have never realistically faced the threat of the draft or of having to serve as a soldier in wartime but that there are additional factors (the "wisdom of my age" the pressure of both major political streams) against me. Further I think it does need to be added that humans have a almost immediate propensity towards seeing violence as a solution. We are one of the most violent species on the planet as measured by our propensity towards killing members of our own species, and it is generally recognized violence is a typically human reaction to insecurity and threat; so there are significant and legitimate pressures beyond those Lewis identified in a person's desires to hold either the Pacifist or non-Pacifist positions. I do, however, think all Pacifists ought to read this section in particular and to sit diligently with it before declaring for Pacifism.
Conclusion
Lewis concludes the essay with a brief summary of his total argument
This, then, is why I am not a Pacifist. If I tried to become one, I should find a very doubtful factual basis, an obscure train of reasoning, a weight of authority both human and Divine against me, and strong grounds for suspecting that my wishes had directed my decision. As I have said, moral decisions do not admit of mathematical certainty. It may be, after all, that Pacifism is right. But it seems to me very long odds, longer odds than I would care to take with the voice of almost all humanity against me.
My response is that this, then, is why I am a Pacifist. If I tried to abandon the Pacifist position, I should find a doubtful factual basis, a convoluted train of reasoning, a slight but significant weight of human authority and an even more significant weight of Divine authority against me, and strong grounds for suspecting that my insecurities are influencing my decision to abandon Pacifism. I agree with Lewis that moral decisions do not admit of mathematical certainty. It may be, after all, that Pacifism is wrong. But is seems to be me very long odds, longer odds than I would care to take with the clear teaching of Jesus against me.
(1) Lewis does use the term "idiot" throughout the essay but that term had a different connotation and somewhat different denotation at that moment in history.
(2) I am, however, inclined to agree with Dr. King that "the moral arc of the universe is long but bends towards justice". However I do not imagine that the trajectory towards justice is at all linear.
(3) Lewis does briefly mention that there is a pacifist tradition in Buddhism here which would indicate that he must have known he was overstating his "universal opinion of mankind" claim at least a little.
(4) I hope that it is clear at this point that I do actually think that non-lethal intervention is a textually legitimate exception to the command not to resist and evil doer as this command should be read in the context of the broader commands to love both enemy and neighbor.
Some helpful Resources
A "Doodle" video of the essay (Part 1)
A "Doodle" video of the essay (Part 2)
Erica Chenoweth describing her research into non-violent resistance movements
