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The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience TraditionBy Yoram HazonyCivil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law. Indeed, in his famous “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” King rallies the entire history of Judaism and Christianity to the support of the idea of resistance to injustice which had brought him into direct confrontation with the state of Alabama. Pointing to Amos and other Hebrew prophets, to the Jewish resistance to tyranny in the book of Daniel, to Jesus and Paul, to Augustine and Martin Luther, and without omitting the obligatory mention of Socrates, King repeats the ancient teaching for a generation which was far removed from appreciating the meaning of the ancient Jewish tradition:
And it was King, eighteen years after the end of World War II and the unimaginable horrors that had been committed in the name of obedience to the law, who brought home to every American that the lesson of the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal was not merely a theoretical teaching, not mere history, but a lesson that had to be absorbed and acted upon by every member of society:
In bringing the teaching of Nuremberg to bear on the immediate movement for civil rights, King transformed what for many had been a distant and abstract judicial event into a personal lesson of action, and of the responsibility to act against unjust law “here and now.” It was by then too late to save the millions of Jews from Hitler and his state. But in accepting for himself the old Jewish religion of disobedience before injustice, and insisting that one could not be a good Christian without embracing this teaching in one’s life, King explicitly denied men of all creeds the right to retain that pagan idea which had handed Hitler his unspeakable success.
Six million Jews had died at the hands of the ideology of the Roman emperors, and nothing could be done to change this fact. But all across America and the free world, millions of men and women were, from that time forward, to learn that to do good was not, as Paul had instructed his followers, to submit to evil. King taught them that to do good in the world was to act as a Jew.
VII
Mankind has seen no end of attempts to render human laws inviolable in principle, usually on the grounds that one process or another has produced them: There have been those who claimed that the laws of the state were legitimate and binding because the earthly ruler was a god; those who claimed that the laws of the state were legitimate and binding because the ruler was appointed by God; and those who claimed that the laws of the state were legitimate and binding because the ruler was a hereditary monarch. Today it is the fashion to claim that the laws of the state are legitimate and binding because its leaders were chosen in democratic elections. And while democratic governments may indeed be the best steward of right that men have yet devised, this fact no more makes them the final arbiter of right than did the similar popularity of now outmoded political regimes in ages past. Even in a democratic age, it remains the case that right action cannot be deduced solely from the decisions of the state. All governments are, after all, composed of men. And as such, they are bound to err, and sometimes terribly so.
It is the great virtue of our present democratic states that the culture and tradition upon which they have been built—and which, indeed, make their existence possible—are the result of thousands of years of efforts to comprehend and take to heart the political teachings of the Hebrew Bible. There is no alternative Greek source for the idea that man may rise up against his rulers and against their laws in the name of higher truth. This is not the philosophy of the Athenian merchant, who well knew that all he possessed existed by virtue of the state and its laws. It is the philosophy of the Hebrew shepherd, the outsider whose patience for the arrogant yet enslaved metropolis was tried anew with every encounter, and who ultimately set his course by an entirely different compass than that of other men. True, the ancient Jews did eventually conclude—much as had their pagan neighbors—that men could not live forever in tents, and that in the end, life and death among the nations meant learning the art of statecraft. But precisely due to the Jews’ past as a people of outsiders, the Jewish kingdoms of antiquity were from the first blessed with an internal opposition, consisting of men who at times lived within the city walls, but whose view of the state was always from the outside: From a vantage point which permitted them to judge it, and even to try and alter its course.
Today, we are left to operate the state without prophecy. But we do have the heritage of the prophets—a heritage in which individuals possess a “constitutional” standing as against that of the state, and which removes them a step or two beyond its reach. It is this distance from the dictates of men which affords us the freedom to judge and to abhor, to speak and to demand, and, when necessary, to disobey. Of course, for such a tradition to bear fruit ultimately depends on the strength of individual men. And there always exists the possibility that, when actually confronted with the injustice of the state, the many will simply turn their backs on the disobedience tradition of the West, submitting to the state and “just following orders,” as so many did in Germany not so long ago. Yet the political tradition of the democratic states of our time, as epitomized by their judgment at Nuremberg, continues to hold before us the alternate possibility: That even men who are not prophets can find strength in the disobedience tradition of the Hebrew prophets, and will prove worthy of its legacy when the terrible moment comes.
Dr. Yoram Hazony is the Director of The Shalem Center in Jerusalem. He is the author of The Dawn: Political Teachings of the Book of Esther (Genesis Jerusalem Press, 1995).
Notes
1. Indeed, the tribunal found that “the defendants planned and waged aggressive wars against twelve nations, and were therefore guilty of this series of crimes. This makes it unnecessary to discuss the subject in further detail, or even to consider at any length the extent to which these aggressive wars were also ‘wars in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances.’” Judgment of the International Military Tribunal of German Major War Criminals, p. 36.
2. This was the wording of the charter which established the Military Tribunal. Judgment, p. 3.
3. Judgment, pp. 65, 40, 40, 45, 118, 42. The extraordinary nature of the Tribunal’s findings is most evident in its finding in the case of JuliusStreicher, publisher and editor of the German weekly Der Strmer, who was sentenced and hanged despite having been accused of no crimes other than calling for the annihilation of the Jews of Europe. Streicher governed no territories or armies and gave no orders; he merely used his publication to repeat, time and time again, his demand for the murder of the Jews of Europe. But the court found that even the right of speech, protected by the democracies as perhaps the most fundamental of civil rights, must ultimately be limited by considerations of justice and humanity, like all other human actions. According to the Tribunal: “Streicher’s incitement to murder and extermination at the time when Jews in the East were being killed under the most horrible conditions clearly constitutes persecution on political and racial grounds in connection with war crimes ... and constitutes a crime against humanity.” Judgment, p. 102.
4. It is important to notice that this victory of the idea of the independence of right from the decrees of the state at Nuremberg was by no means a clear-cut victory for democracy.
Indeed, quite the opposite was the case: Germany had been a democracy not long before the war, and it was under this democratic regime that the Nazis had been catapulted to power. The rejection of the authority of the Nazi state at Nuremberg therefore entailed a none-too-subtle critique of the democratic processes which had breought the abominations of the German state into begin.
5. In recent years, as the campaign for an unquestioning obedience to “rule of law” has gained steam in Israel—itself a reaction to the contempt for law and government which had become ubiquitous under Israeli socialism—it has become painfully obvious how far the political and intellectual leadership of the Jewish state is from having understood, much less assimilated, this essential principle of contemporary democratic theory. For discussion of Israel’s adoption of the concept that state law, in particular that of the Supreme Court, should be considered unchallengeable, see Hillel Neuer, “Aharon Barak’s Revolution,” in Azure 3 (Winter 1998), pp. 13-49; and Evelyn Gordon, “Is It Legitimate to Criticize the Supreme Court?” in Azure 3 (Winter 1998), pp. 50-89.For the claim that disobedience is not appropriate to a democracy, see, for instance, Shlomo Avineri, “Not in the name of Gandhi and Martin Luther King,” Ha’aretz, August 18, 1995, p. B3. Numerous other pieces appearing in the aftermath of the rabbinic ruling in the summer of 1995 were far worse.
6. See, for example, George H. Sabine and Thomas L. Thorson, A History of Political Theory,fourth ed. (Hinsdale, Illinois: Dryden, 1973): p. 141f. This standard American textbook of the history of political ideas traces all the relevant moral-political teachings of Christianity to the Stoics. While noting that the Stoic school was less tied to Greece than were the other classical academies—and, indeed, that its founder, Zeno, was a “Phoenician”—Sabine and Thorson decline to speculate any further as to what these facts imply about the origins of Stoic thought.
7. In considering the reasons for Abraham’s departure from Mesopotamia, one frequently meets with the response that he left “because God commanded it.” Yet this only raises the parallel question of what it was that moved God to concern himself with Abraham’s place of domicile. And unless one is to claim that God’s commands as recorded in the Bible are arbitrary and without reason, there is no choice but to return to the circumstances surrounding them in order to discern their motive: What are the reasons for Abraham’s escape from Mesopotamia; what are the reasons for God’s instruction to Moses to smear the blood of a sheep on the doorposts on the night of the Jews’ departure from Egypt; and so forth.
8. Genesis 11:31-12:3.
9. See Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New Haven: Yale, 1957).
10. Henri Frankfort, et al., The Intellectual Adventure of Ancient Man (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1946), pp. 80-81.
11. Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure,pp. 76-77.
12. J.E. Manchip White, Ancient Egypt: Its Culture and History (New York: Dover, 1970), p. 16.
13. White, Ancient Egypt, p. 13.
14. White, Ancient Egypt, pp. 39-40.
15. Cf. Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure,pp. 85-86; White, Ancient Egypt, p. 18. These gods are a ram, a cat and a lioness, respectively.
16. Frankfort, Intellectual Adventure, p. 203.
17. Georges Roux, Ancient Iraq (New York: Penguin, 1980), p. 150.
18. G.R. Driver and John C. Miles, trans., The Code of Hammurabi (Oxford: Clarendon, 1955). Hammurabi was the sixth of eleven kings in the Old Babylonian (Amorite) Dynasty. He ruled from 1728 to 1686 B.C.E., and the code was apparently enacted at the beginning of his reign. James B. Pritchard, ed., Ancient Near Eastern Texts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), p. 163.
19. Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 239, 264, 320.
20. Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 264, 320.
21.Albert K. Grayson, Assyrian Royal Inscriptions (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1972), vol. 1, p. 13. Erishum appears on the king lists two entries before Sargon I, which places him roughly in the twentieth century B.C.E. Cf. Ashurnasirpal I (1049-1031 B.C.E.), describing his treatment of a city which had disobeyed his rule: “I built a pillar over against his city gate and I flayed all the chiefs who had revolted, and I covered the pillar with their skin. Some I walled up within the pillar, some I impaled upon the pillar on stakes, and some I bound to stakes round about the pillar.... And I cut off the limbs of the officers, of the royal officers who had rebelled.... Many captives from among them I burned with fire, and many I took as living captives. From some I cut off their noses, their ears and their fingers, of many I put out the eyes. I made one pillar of the living, and another of heads, and I bound their heads to tree trunks round about the city. Their young men and maidens I burned in the fire. Twenty men I captured alive and I immured them in the wall of his palace....” Roux, Ancient Iraq, pp. 269-270.
22. A.T. Olmstead, History of the Persian Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1948), pp. 119-128.
23. G. Bhler, trans., The Laws of Manu (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1962), book VII, section 14f, p. 218f.
24. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,p. 102.
25. Bhler, The Laws of Manu,pp. 218-219.
26. Harold Nicolson, Monarchy (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962), p. 43.
27. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,pp. 95, 102.
28. Confucius,Analects, book VIII, ch. IX,in James Legge, The Chinese Classics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1893-1895), vol. 1, p. 211.
29. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,pp. 90-91.
30. Homer, Odyssey, book XIX.
31. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,pp. 145-146.
32. Nicolson, Monarchy, p. 54.
33. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism,p. 94.
34. Nicolson, Monarchy,p. 27.
35. Nicolson, Monarchy, p. 33.
36. Quoted in Nicolson, Monarchy, p. 72.
37. Nicolson, Monarchy, p. 80; Sheldon S. Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought (Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1960), p. 92.
38. Wolin, Politics and Vision,p. 92.
39. Seneca, De Clementia, quoted in Wolin, Politics and Vision,p. 93.
40. Justinian, Institutes I, 2, 6. Justinian’s statements come despite the fact that he was a Christian, who did not claim divinity for himself.
41. E.g., Ernest van den Haag, “Civil Disobedience” in Ernest van den Haag, Political Violence and Civil Disobedience (New York: Harper & Row, 1972).A serious elaboration of the idea of the Bible as a book of obedience can be found in Hobbes’ Leviathan,in which God is sovereign of the world and so deserves obedience, and through contract this sovereignty is passed to Abraham in his family, and likewise to Jewish and Christian monarchs. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan,C.B. Macpherson, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1968), pp. 443-451, 499-512.
42. Exodus 3:8.
43. Genesis 18:25.
44. See, for example, Numbers 14:11-25.
45. Genesis 32:29 and Rashi ad loc.
46. Genesis 10:8-9.
47. Genesis 11:4.
48. Genesis 12:12.
49. Genesis 26:6-7, 26:18.
50. Genesis 34:1f.
51. Exodus 1:17-19.
52. Megilla 13a.
53. Exodus 2:1-10.
54. Exodus 2:11-12.
55. Exodus 5:21.
56. Exodus 12:3-11, 21-23. Amon, the god of the Egyptian capital of Thebes, was represented as a ram. By the time of the enslavement of the Jews, Amon had become the most powerful and prominent god in the pantheon, under whose standard the Egyptian armies waged war.
57. Numbers 22:18.
58. Numbers 22:41-24:13.
59. Numbers 22:28-31.
60. Judges 8:23.
61. I Samuel 8:10-20.
62. Deuteronomy 17:16-20.
63. I Samuel 14:43-45.
64. I Samuel 19:11f for Michal.
65. I Kings 1:39-40. “The people” are also described as placing later kings on the throne of Judah: Azariah, II Kings 14:21; and Josiah, II Kings 21:24.
66. I Kings 11:1-3, 5:6, 10:14-26, 5:27-28, 9:21-22.
67. I Kings 11:4-8.
68. I Kings 12:11.
69. Isaiah 7:14-25; Hosea 12:10; Jeremiah 35:1-19.
70. II Samuel 12:1f; I Kings 17:1f.
71. I Samuel 15:26-16:1.
72. II Kings 9:1-10:29.
73. Jeremiah 38:2. That such defection was illegal is clear from Jeremiah 37:13.
74. Daniel 3:16-18.
75. Daniel 6:7-11.
76. Esther 3:1-2; 5:9.
77. Esther 4:1-2.
78. Esther 4:8.
79. Esther 4:16, 5:1-2, 8:3-4.
80. Esther 8:8-9:5.
81. Compare, for example, the classic rabbinic statement on the subject of disobedience by Maimonides in the twelfth century: “If a heathen orders a Jew to transgress one of the commandments found in the Tora or he will kill him, he should transgress it and not die.... This principle refers to all of the commandments except for idolatry, sexual crimes and crimes of bloodshed. But if he should be ordered to transgress one of these three or be killed, he should die rather than transgress them.... And all this refers to situations in which there is no decree [of the state involved]. But under a decree, when there arises an evil king such as Nebuchadnezzar and his like, and decrees against Israel, prohibiting their beliefs or one of the commandments, he should die rather than transgress even one of the lesser commandments....” Moses Maimonides, Mishneh Tora, Laws of the Fundamentals of the Tora 5:1-3. A dramatic insight into the deeper meaning of these ideas is offered by the midrashic parable of R. Simlai, which suggests that the ability of the individual Jew to act in spite of worldly law derives from the fact that it was nothing less than sovereignty that was granted every individual at Mt. Sinai, where “six hundred thousand ministering angels descended and set two crowns on the head of every individual of Israel, one for ‘we will do’ and one for ‘we will hear’”—the two responses of the Jewish people at Sinai in Exodus 24:7. Shabat 88a.
82. It is essential to take note, however, that the biblical theory of the independence of right from the dictates of the state did not mean that the spheres of moral truth and worldly power were independent from one another. On the contrary, the message of the Bible was that worldly power is ultimately dependent on doing right.
83. Sabine and Thorson, A History, p. 141f.
84. Leo Strauss, Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1953), p. 81.
85. See Edward Corwin, “The ‘Higher Law’ Background of American Constitutional Law,” in Harvard Law Review 42:2 (1928), p. 386.
86. Plato, Phaedo, in Plato, Five Dialogues (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1981), pp. 154-155.
87. Plato, Crito, in Plato, Five Dialogues, p. 53.
88. Much has been made of the fact that during his trial, Socrates tells the jury that if he were offered a deal whereby he would be spared if he gave up philosophy, he would choose to continue philosophizing. Apology, in Plato, Five Dialogues, p. 34. Yet there is no declaration here that he would violate the law; he is merely rejecting the deal, saying that he would never make such an agreement. Indeed, his emphasis in the Crito on the fact that he had signified his acceptance of Athenian law by living all his life in Athens suggests that had there been such an Athenian law during his life, he would have chosen to live in a more hospitable city. One actual example of Socrates’ disobedience to the Athenian state is his refusal to carry out the order of the dictatorship to bring Leon of Salamis to be executed. In this case, Socrates judges the rulers to be in violation of the laws of the city, and actually disobeys. The case is analogous to that of Antigone.
89. “It is not impossible that someone might propose the dissolution of the laws or the regime as something in the common good.... It is evident, then, that some laws must be changed at some times; yet ... this would seem to require much caution. For when the improvement is small, and since it is a bad thing to habituate people to the reckless dissolution of laws, it is evident that some errors both of the legislators and of the rulers should be let go; for [the city] will not be benefited as much from changing them as it will be harmed through being habituated to disobey the rulers.... Law has no strength with respect to obedience apart from habit. Hence the easy alteration of existing laws in favor of new and different ones weakens the power of law itself. Further, if they are indeed to be changeable, are all to be, and in every regime? And by anyone, or by whom?” Aristotle, Politics, book II, ch. VIII (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1984), pp. 72-73.
90. Aristotle uses Antigone as his sole exemplar for such a tactic. Corwin, “Higher Law,” p. 154.
91. Corwin, “Higher Law,” pp. 159-160.
92. Quoted in Wolin, Politics and Vision,p. 93.
93. Matthew 5:38-41.
94. John 18:36; I Corinthians 7:31; Hebrews 13:14.
95. Romans 13:1-4. See also Ephesians 6:5; Colossians 3:22.
96. I Peter 2:13, 18-23. Also 3:13-14: “Who is going to do you wrong if you are devoted to what is good? And yet if you should suffer for your virtues, you may count yourselves happy.”
97. Matthew 22:21. Cf. Matthew 17:24-27.
98. Quoted in Wolin, Politics and Vision,p. 113.
99. Quoted in Wolin, Politics and Vision,p. 113.
100. Sabine and Thorson, A History, p. 187. Yet much as the ideals of the primitive Church seemed to have capitulated before the leering god-emperors of Rome, the Jewish theme of resistance was not far beneath the surface. Almost immediately, the apostles found themselves under orders from the Jewish authorities to desist from their preaching, and this at least was something in which they found themselves unable to acquiesce. Thus the same Peter who wrote with such passion on the subject of submitting to earthly authority was nevertheless moved to declare that the teaching would not cease: “We must obey God rather than men. The God of our fathers raised up Jesus ... [and] we are witnesses....” Acts 5:29-32. The insistence on openly professing Christianity rapidly became the needed loophole through which, as the Church gained in strength and confidence, an increasing range of types of resistance became once again acceptable. Thus Christians were instructed that Peter had not meant that “perverse” directives from those wielding power should actually be obeyed, that Jesus had not meant that evil should never be resisted. Instead, the established Church reclaimed the authority to order the general abrogation of state laws which were in direct contravention of Christian teachings—calling for what became known as “passive obedience.” Under this doctrine Christians were to observe and promote Christianity even in the face of state prohibition, fulfilling the exhortation not to resist evil by submitting to whatever punishment the Roman persecutor chose to exact.
101. Ambrose, Enarrationes in Psalmos 37, 43. Quoted in S.L. Greenslade, ed., Early Latin Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1956), p. 180.
102. Sabine and Thorson, A History, p. 183.
103. Ambrose, Letter 51. Quoted in Greenslade, Early Latin Theology, pp. 255-256.
104. The New Encyclopaedia Britannica (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1993), vol. 11, p. 690.
105. R.W. Carlyle and A.J. Carlyle, A History of Medieval Political Theory in the West (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1950), vol. 4 ,pp. 286-289.
106. John of Salisbury, Policraticus: The Statesman’s Book (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1979), pp. 50-51.
107. Corwin,“Higher Law,” p. 165.
108. Aquinas, De Regimine Principum, 1:6. Quoted in John Neville Figgis, The Divine Right of Kings (New York: Harper & Row, 1965), p. 52. Aquinas did not, however, accept John’s view that the illegitimacy of a ruler justified tyrannicide.
109. Of course, it can be reasonably objected that the increasingly aggressive position of the Church with regard to its right to oppose secular government in no way empowered the individual, instead building steadily towards the replacement of the lay king with a pope-emperor whose rule would have been every bit as authoritarian and more. And, indeed, what we know of the sufferance of internal dissent against the medieval popes suggests precisely this. After all, the Jewish prophets never wielded earthly power beyond that which the allegiance of the populace to their words and ideas could command, while the Church was a vast landholder in command of a literal empire of offices and authorities that embraced much of Europe; the Church when it came of age threatened not merely to topple kings but to topple kingship, arrogating the power of empire to itself. Thus the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries found popes such as Innocent III, Innocent IV and Boniface VIII exercising not merely a right to organize resistance to injustice—although this was of course the claim—but the actual annexation of government itself, including the right to establish the fitness of candidates for office, to confirm or deny the validity of elections and treaties between nations, a right to force the arbitration of disputes and discipline heretics, and a right to punish rulers who resisted these projected powers. Sabine and Thorson, A History, pp. 271-273. Indeed, Pope John XXII even declared that the authority of the Emperor, being nothing more than a delegation, reverted directly to him in the case of an interregnum. Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, p. 52. In short, the ideology of the papacy, once set free from the confines of New Testament teaching, tended rapidly towards the establishment of an absolutist church-state—with the Pope replacing the Emperor in absolute rule, to which there could be no legitimate resistance whatsoever. Indeed, such theories of the rights of the papacy, once loosed, continued to haunt Europe for four hundred years. Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, pp. 50-51. Yet reasonable as this fear may have been in the fourteenth century, the fact remains that the proclivities of the Church towards a papal imperium were never able to command the loyalty of the peoples of Europe (whose increasingly keen national consciousness stymied such pretensions at every turn), and that this strain of papist thinking proved neither popular nor durable. The real importance in papism lay in the confidence—and even arrogance—with which it posed an independent critique of monarchicalism, relying on the Jewish prophets as proof that the sphere of right is to be set over the secular and have the authority even to overthrow it if need be, quoting, for example, Jeremiah 1:10: “I have set you over the nations and over the kingdoms to uproot and tear down, to crush and destroy, to build and to plant.” See Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, p. 48. It was the tension which was created by the willingness to behave in the tradition of the prophets that within a short time emboldened both churchmen and laymen to seek theoretical and practical tools to break the jaws of the despotisms that ruled them.
110. Figgis, Divine Right of Kings, p. 94.
111. At the outset Protestant reformers seemed to offer scant promise of any disobedience theory whatsoever; as Martin Luther’s primary concern was the inward salvation of the individual, he had no qualms about calling upon German Protestants to side with secular authorities with whom he shared the mutual interest of destroying the influence of Catholicism. Luther’s calls in the 1520s for submission to the state therefore could have been written by Peter or Paul: “It is in no wise proper for anyone who would be a Christian to set himself up against his government, whether it act justly or unjustly. There are no better works than to obey and serve all those who are set over us as superiors. For this reason also disobedience is a greater sin than murder, unchastity, theft and dishonesty, and that these may include.” Sabine and Thorson, A History, p. 338. Yet within a handful of decades, as Protestantism gained strength across the continent, the quietistic element in Luther’s thought evaporated—just as the doctrine of submission to the Roman authorities had dissipated with the ascension of the Latin Church after Constantine.
112. Quoted in Sabine and Thorson, A History, pp. 358-359.
113. When the Congregationalist movement began among English Puritans, its goal was that every congregation should do without the control of a central ecclesiastical authority, not because every church should be free to set its own doctrine, but because the one true doctrine could be determined well enough without orders from above. In fact, Puritan churches were hardly known for acceptance of the freedom of conscience of the individual, being characterized in England, as in Scotland and Geneva, by widespread censorship and espionage to ensure a dedication to the doctrine of the Church. Yet the structural independence of every church worked at cross-purposes with the strict discipline imposed within each congregation, and the movement tended towards increasing congregational independence in doctrinal matters as well.
114. See, for example, Akiva Zakai, Theocracy in Massachusetts (Lewiston: Mellen University Press, 1994), pp. 16-24.
115. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, The Rights of Man, and Other Essential Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Meridian, 1969) pp. 29-33.
116. Paine, Common Sense,pp. 75, 80.
117. Paine, Common Sense,p. xix.
118. Thoreau’s innovation is in his advocacy of withholding taxes, a form of disobedience which does not involve violation of an unjust law, but rather seeks to bring an end to government policy through nonviolent means. But the common interpretations to the effect that Thoreau’s essay was based on a greater theory of nonviolence, or else on a theory of disobedience in cases in which the state is fundamentally just but wrong on a particular issue, are incorrect. Like Paine, Thoreau was advocating revolution, and he was perfectly willing to support violent means as well as nonviolent: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great or unendurable. But almost all say that such is not the case now. But such was the case, they think, in the Revolution of ’75. If one were to tell me that [Britain] was a bad government because it taxed certain foreign commodities brought to its ports, it is most probable that I should not make an ado about it, for I can do without them. All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is [also] a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.... If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of government, let it go, let it go: Perchance it will wear smooth.... But if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.... I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side.... Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs [the machine] by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose.... This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution.... But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man’s real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.” Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience,” in Carl Bode, ed., The Portable Thoreau (New York: Viking, 1947), pp. 113, 119-123.
119. See Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1962), pp. 252-267.
120. Henry David Thoreau, “The Last Days of John Brown” in Meltzer and Harding, A Thoreau Profile, pp. 262-263.
121. Cf. Jeremiah: “So says the Eternal, God of Israel: I made a covenant with your fathers on the day I brought them out of Egypt, the house of slavery, saying: At the end of seven years, every man should set free his brother Jew who has been sold to him.... [Yet] you have not listened to me, to proclaim freedom, every one to his brother and every one to his neighbor. Behold then, I proclaim freedom to you, says the Eternal—to the sword, to pestilence, and to famine.” Jeremiah 34:13-17.
122. Thoreau, “Last Days,” p. 264.
123. It is instructive to contrast Thoreau’s position on resistance to unjust law with that of his fellow abolitionist Abraham Lincoln, whose lot it would be to try to hold together the self-same state which Thoreau had declared himself prepared to overthrow. Years before assuming the presidency, Lincoln had said, in terms harkening back to the religious imperative of submission to the state: “Let every American, every lover of liberty, every well wisher to his posterity, swear by the blood of the Revolution, never to violate in the least particular, the laws of the country; and never to tolerate their violation in others.... Let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in the legislative halls, and enforced in the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation.... Although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still while they continue in force, for the sake of example, they should be religiously observed.... There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law” [emphasis in original]. Van den Haag, “Civil Disobedience,” p. 12.
124. Martin Luther King , Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? (Boston: Beacon, 1968), pp. 169-170.
125. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” in Hugo Adam Bedau, Civil Disobedience: Theory and Practice (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1969), pp. 77-78.
126. King, “Letter,” p. 79. |
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