not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 10:34–9)
I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished! Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division; for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. (Luke 12:49–53)
If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)
Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house: there’ll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone. (Thomas 16, non-canonical)
How not to recognize “divine violence” here, where it is openly proclaimed, in Jesus’ “I bring not peace, but a sword”? How are we to read these statements? Christian ideology resorts to five strategies to deal with them, rather than heroically accepting the message imposed by a literal reading and claiming that Christ himself advocates violence to crush his enemies. The first two readings are outright denials of the problem: one gets rid of it by disputing the standard translation, suggesting either a modest correction (changing “those who do not hate their father, etc.” into “those who do not prefer me to their father,” so that we get just a graduation of love enjoined by a jealous god—love your father, but love me more . . .), or a more radical correction, as in the Book of Kells, the Celtic illuminated manuscript copy of the Gospels, which erroneously uses the word “gaudium” (“joy”) rather than “gladium” (“sword”), rendering the verse in translation: “I came not [only] to bring peace, but joy.” (One is tempted to read this mistranslation together with the correct translation and thus compose the full message as: “I come not to bring peace, but the joy of the sword, of struggle.”) What then follows are three more sophisticated strategies, the first (arguably the most disgusting and politically dangerous) claiming that Christ’s message “I bring a sword” has to be read together with its apparent opposite, the “pacifist” warning, “all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52): the sword Christ is talking about when he announces that he “brings a sword” is the second sword in “those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”—in other words, it is others who first use the sword, or attack Christians, and Christians have the full right to defend themselves, by the sword, if necessary. This is also how the passage from Luke 22:38 (“if you don’t have a sword, better sell your clothes and buy one”) should be read: buy a sword to finish off those who first used one. The problem with this reading, of course, is that it courts the danger of sanctioning the most brutal violence as a defense against those who attack us, even giving it the force of fulfilling the divine prophecy-injunction (“those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”). Hitler all the time claimed exactly the same—he was only using the sword to destroy those who had already taken up the sword against Germany . . .
The next strategy is to read Christ’s words not as an injunction or threat, but as a simple prediction and warning to his followers: “I bring a sword” means “When you spread my message, you should be ready for the hatred of those who will ferociously oppose it and use a sword against you”—a prediction fully confirmed by the many massacres of Christians in the Roman empire. It is in this sense that Christ is turning husband against wife, and so on: when a wife accepts Christianity before her husband, this can of course engender his animosity towards her. The problem with this reading is that it fails to account for the much stronger injunction to (actively) hate your father, and so forth, not merely to be prepared to (passively) endure their hatred: when Christ enjoins his followers to hate their parents, there is no qualification that they should do so only if their parents oppose their faith in Christ—the injunction clearly calls for a hatred which, as it were, makes the first move, and is not just a reaction to the hatred of others.
As might be expected, the final strategy involves a metaphoric reading: the “sword” in question is not the literal weapon used to hurt others but the word of God itself which divides truth from error, so that the violence it enacts is that of spiritual cleansing. Nice as this sounds, ambiguities and dangers lurk here.
In The Divided Heaven, Christa Wolf’s classic GDR novel from 1963, about the subjective impact of the divided Germany, Manfred (who has chosen the West) says to Rita, his love, when they meet for the last time: “But even if our land is divided, we still share the same heaven.” Rita (who has chosen to remain in the East) replies bitterly: “No, they first divided Heaven.” Apologetic for the East as the novel is, it offers a correct insight into how our “earthly” divisions and struggles are ultimately always grounded in a “divided heaven,” in a much more radical and exclusive division of the very (symbolic) universe in which we dwell. The bearer and instrument of this “division of heaven” is language as the “house of being,” as the medium which sustains our entire worldview, the way we experience reality: language, not primitive egotistic interest, is the first and greatest divider, and it is because of language that we and our neighbors (can) “live in different worlds” even when we live on the same street. What this means is that verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every form of specifically human violence.
So, back to Christ: even if his divisive sword is spiritual, its “division of heaven” is ontologically more violent than any “ontic” violence, which it can easily ground and justify. In order to account for Christ’s “problematic” endorsement of violence, we must confront it with traditional pagan wisdom. Although the rise of democracy and philosophy in Ancient Greece announced a different world, the traditional wisdom is still fully asserted there, exemplarily in the ethico-political poem on eunomia—the beautiful order—by Solon, the founder of Athenian democracy:
These things my spirit bids me
teach the men of Athens:
that Dysnomia
brings countless evils for the city,
but Eunomia brings order
and makes everything proper,
by enfolding the unjust in fetters,
smoothing those things that are rough,
stopping greed,
sentencing hubris to obscurity,
making the flowers of mischief to wither,
and straightening crooked judgments.
It calms the deeds of arrogance
and stops the bilious anger of harsh strife.
Under its control, all things are proper
and prudence reigns over human affairs.15
No wonder that the same principle is asserted in the famous chorus on the uncanny/demonic dimension of man from Sophocles’ Antigone:
If he honors the laws of the land, and reveres the Gods of the State, proudly his city shall stand; but a cityless outcast I rate who so bold in his pride from the path of right does depart; never may I sit by his side, or share the thoughts of his heart.16
(Some,
