NONRESISTANCE
But Jesus had not yet arrived at the most stupefying of His revolutionary teachings. “Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth: But I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: But whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloke also. And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.”
There could be no more definite repudiation of the old law of retaliation. The greater part of those who call themselves Christians not only have never observed this new Commandment, but have never been willing to pretend to approve of it. For an infinite number of believers this principle of not resisting evil has been the unendurable and inacceptable scandal of Christianity.
There are three answers which men can make to violence: revenge, flight, turning the other cheek. The first is the barbarous principle of retaliation, now smoothed over and emasculated in the legal codes, but nevertheless prevailing in usage: evil is returned for evil, either in one’s own person or by the means of intermediaries, representatives of our tribal lack of civilization, called judges or executioners. To the evil committed by the first offender are added the evils committed by the officers of justice. Often the punishment turns on the punisher and the terrible chain of violence from one revenge to another stretches out interminably. Wrong is two-edged; it fails even if inflicted with the desire of doing good, in nations, or families or individuals. A first crime brings after it a train of expiations and punishments which are distributed with sinister impartiality between offenders and offended. The law of retaliation can give a bestial relief to him who is first struck, but instead of lessening evil it multiplies it.
Flight is no better than retaliation. He who hides himself redoubles his enemies’ courage. Fear of retaliation can on rare occasions hold back the violent hand, but the man who takes flight invites pursuit. He who hides invites his adversary to make an end of him. His weakness becomes the accomplice of the ferocity of others. Here also evil begets evil.
In spite of its apparent absurdity the only way is that commanded by Jesus. If a man gives you a blow and you return another blow, he will answer with his fists, you in turn with kicks, weapons will be drawn and one of you may lose your life, often for a trivial reason. If you fly, your adversary will follow you and emboldened by his first experience will knock you down. Turning the other cheek means not receiving the second blow. It means cutting the chain of the inevitable wrongs at the first link. Your adversary who expected resistance or flight is humiliated before you and before himself. He was ready for anything but this. He is thrown into confusion, a confusion which is almost shame. He has the time to come to himself; your immobility cools his anger, gives him time to reflect. He cannot accuse you of fear because you are ready to receive the second blow, and you yourself show him the place to strike. Every man has an obscure respect for courage in others, especially if it is moral courage, the rarest and most difficult sort of bravery. An injured man who feels no resentment and who does not run away shows more strength of soul, more mastery of himself, more true heroism than he who in the blindness of rage rushes upon the offender to render back to him twice the evil received. Quietness, when it is not stupidity, gentleness, when it is not cowardice, astound common souls as do all marvelous things. They make the very brute understand that this man is more than a man. The brute himself when not incited to follow by a hot answer or by cowardly flight, remains paralyzed, feels almost afraid of this new, unknown puzzling force, the more so because among the greatest exciting factors for the man who strikes, is his anticipated pleasure in the angry blow, in the resistance, in the ensuing struggle. Man is a fighting animal; but with no resistance offered, the pleasure disappears; there is no zest left. There is no longer an adversary, but a superior who says quietly, “Is that not enough? Here is the other cheek; strike as long as you wish. It is better that my face should suffer than my soul. You can hurt me as much as you wish, but you cannot force me to follow you into a mad, brutal rage. The fact that some one has wronged me cannot force me to act wrongly.”
Literally to follow this command of Jesus demands a mastery possessed by few, of the blood, of the nerves, and of all the instincts of the baser part of our being. It is a bitter and repellent command; but Jesus never said it would be easy to follow Him. He never said it would be possible to obey Him without harsh renunciations, without stern and continuous inner battles; without the denial of the old Adam and the birth of the new man. And yet the results of non-resistance, even if they are not always perfect, are certainly superior to those of resistance or flight. The example of so extraordinary a spiritual mastery, so impossible and unthinkable for common men, the almost superhuman fascination of conduct so contrary to usual customs, traditions and passions; this example, this spectacle of power, this puzzling miracle, unexpected like all miracles, difficult to understand like all prodigies, this example of a strong, sane man who looks like other men, and yet who acts almost like a God, like a being above other beings, above the motives which move other men—this example if repeated more than once, if it cannot be laid to supine stupidity, if it is accompanied by proofs of physical courage when physical courage is necessary to enjoy and not to harm—this example has an effectiveness which we can imagine, soaked though we are in the ideas of revenge and reprisals. We imagine it with difficulty; we cannot prove it because we have had too few of such examples to be able to cite even partial experiments as proofs of our intuition.
But if this command of Jesus has never been obeyed or too rarely obeyed, there is no proof that it cannot be followed, still less that it ought to be rejected. It is repugnant to human nature, but all real moral conquests are repugnant to our nature. They are salutary amputations of a part of our soul—for some of us the most living part of the soul—and it is natural that the threat of mutilation should make us shudder. But whether it pleases us or not, only by accepting this command of Christ can we solve the problem of violence. It is the only course which does not add evil to evil, which does not multiply evil a hundredfold, which prevents the infection of the wound, which cuts out the malignant growth when it is only a tiny pustule. To answer blows with blows, evil deeds with evil deeds, is to meet the attacker on his own ground, to proclaim oneself as low as he. To answer with flight is to humiliate oneself before him, and incite him to continue. To answer a furiously angry man with reasonable words is useless effort. But to answer with a simple gesture of acceptance, to endure for three days the bore who inflicts himself on you for an hour, to offer your breast to the man who has struck you on the shoulder, to give a thousand to the man who has stolen a hundred from you, these are acts of heroic excellence, supine though they may appear, so extraordinary that they overcome the brutal bully with the irresistible majesty of the divine. Only he who has conquered himself can conquer his enemies. Only the saints can charm wolves to mildness. Only he who has transformed his own soul can transform the souls of his brothers, and transform the world into a less grievous place for all.