The Jewish Origins of the Western Disobedience Tradition

By Yoram Hazony

Civil disobedience did not, as we are taught, begin with Socrates and Antigone, but with a Hebrew Bible that rejected the supremacy of human law.

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Thus while Christianity remained thoroughly committed to the idea of a separation between power and right, it was forced to abandon the personal activism which had made Jews and their ideas a thorn in the flesh of every despot who had come across them for over a thousand years. Instead, the New Testament struck a fateful compromise between the independent realm of right inherited from Judaism and the submissive power-worship prevalent in Greece and Rome: While insisting that the Emperor had no authority to determine right and wrong for his subjects, the New Testament fully acquiesced in the theory that so long as they were to live in this world, the relationship of men to worldly power should be one of submission. Jesus therefore urges the faithful not to resist evil, whether of the government, or of anyone else:

You have heard that it was told: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you: Do not resist evil. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also; and if anyone would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.⁹³

The doctrine that made this stunning reversal of the Jewish ideology of resistance possible was a new metaphysic, which posited that while absolute justice did exist, it could not be achieved in the present world. Christians could therefore believe in the Jewish distinction between power and right, but should expect to see no right until the future world: “My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus tells his followers. “Let those who mix in the world live as if they were not engrossed in it, for this stage is passing to an end.” Similarly: “For here we have no permanent home, but we are seekers after the city which is to come.”⁹⁴

The abandonment of the Jewish belief in the cause of justice within the present earthly city was developed by Jesus’ apostles into an unequivocal doctrine of passivity in the face of the state, one tailored explicitly to the needs of the Roman masses for whom no philosophy other than subservience, and the quiet hope for a different age, would have made any sense. In his letter to the Romans, Paul makes the case explicitly:

Every person must submit to the supreme authorities. There is no authority but by act of God, and the existing authorities are instituted by him; consequently, anyone who rebels against authority is resisting a divine institution, and those who so resist have themselves to thank for the punishment they will receive. For government, [being] a terror to crime, has no terrors for good behavior. You wish to have no fear of the authorities? Then continue to do right and you will have their approval, for they are God’s agents, working for your good. But if you are doing wrong, then you will have cause to fear them; it is not for nothing that they hold the power of the sword, for they are God’s agents of punishment, for [taking] retribution on the offender. That is why you are obliged to submit.⁹⁵

And lest this message be misunderstood, it was expressed even more clearly by Peter:

Submit yourselves to every human institution for the sake of the Lord.... Servants, accept the authority of your masters with all due submission, not only when they are kind and considerate, but even when they are perverse. For it is a fine thing if a man endure the pain of undeserved suffering because God is in his thoughtsֹ. When you have behaved well and suffer for it, your fortitude is a fine thing in the sight of God. To that you were called, because Christ suffered on your behalf, and thereby left you an example; it is for you to follow in his steps. He committed no sin ... [yet] when he suffered he uttered no threats, but committed his cause to the One who judges justly.⁹⁶

To Peter, obedience is of especial importance when the ruler is in the wrong, for if Jesus silently gave up his life to Roman injustice, such must be the way of God, to be emulated by all men. On earth, submission in the face of evil is the duty of men, but not because of any right of the ruler to do evil. On the contrary, the “One who judges justly” will bring about true justice eventually—in the next world.

Thus while the Jewish belief in universal justice remained in principle within the Christian teachings, the definition of this justice underwent a dramatic downshift in the process of becoming palatable to the non-Jewish audiences of the Empire. The Jewish life of active resistance had been based on the essential premise of the Hebrew prophets that justice was a feature of this world—that is, that by means of a human decision to mend ways and pursue justice, the good world could be brought into existence at the initiative of men. Such a view naturally places a premium on the deeds that men do, and the Jewish conception of heroism therefore consisted not merely in recognizing the injustices of the existing order, but in actively setting them right. In the New Testament, the struggles of Jeremiah and Job and the Psalms to understand why bad things happen to good people come to an eerie end. Peter accepts that bad things happen for no reason at all, that suffering is not the reward for wrongdoing but the reward for rightdoing as well, much as the Greek tragedians had always maintained. The present world is stripped of the promise of justice, and the “One who judges justly” becomes more coy, judging this world, but not meting out justice until another time and place. With the promise of success thus spirited away, the incentive of the individual to take action against overwhelming odds all but disappears, shrinking into a passive, inner sense of what is right that never bothers to break through to the world in terms of action, for the world is—irrelevant.

Under all of this it was still possible to see the Jewish teaching of the independent sphere of right. After all, it was Jesus himself who had exhorted to “render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”⁹⁷ It was only that what belonged to Caesar had for the time being been defined to be the entire world, so that the role of the prophet and the disobedient hero had been virtually eliminated. As Origen, the third-century Neo-Platonist Church father summed it up, Jesus had come to the world to “restore to men the discipline of obedience, to the ruling powers the discipline of ruling.”⁹⁸ Tertullian, best known of the early Church fathers besides Augustine, had been even more blunt a few years earlier: “There is nothing more alien to us than politics.... What is Athens to Jerusalem, the Academy to the Church?”⁹⁹ The adoption of this position by the Church reached its peak in the sixth century with Pope Gregory, upon whose passionate insistence the Church held that the acts of rulers were not even to be criticized, even if they were wrong.¹⁰⁰

In 333, the Emperor Constantine converted to Christianity, bringing to an end three centuries of bloody suppression of the Church. In elevating Christianity to the position of a privileged faith for the first time, Constantine inadvertently recreated something of the conditions that had permitted the independence of the Hebrew prophets a thousand years earlier. To be sure, there was at first nothing independent about the Church, which was only adopted by Rome as a replacement for the paganism which had enjoyed the sponsorship of the state up until then. But with the elevation of the Christian bishops to a position of official authority over the religious life of the entire empire, only the most absurd reading of Christianity would have insisted that they should continue to maintain silence in cases where the emperor, now supposedly a Christian, could be brought into line with the demands of justice. All that was needed was for there to arise a Christian leader with the determination to rekindle the direct confrontation with the state that had lain dormant in the prophetic heritage of Christianity for so long.

Such a leader Christendom found in Ambrose, Bishop of Milan in the late fourth century, and mentor to Augustine. Marking out the battle lines between the political powers and the Church for the centuries to come, Ambrose daringly resurrected the constitutional function of the Jewish prophets, claiming for the Church the right and the obligation to stand watch over the Christian kings to ensure that their rule was just. As Ambrose wrote in his commentary on the Hebrew Bible: “Prophets and bishops must not rashly insult kings, if there are no grave sins for which they deserve reproach; but where there are grave sins, the bishop must not spare to correct them by his just remonstrances.”¹⁰¹ And spare them he did not. While continuing to support the theory of complete obedience to the state, Ambrose nevertheless engaged the Roman Emperors in a series of public confrontations aimed at subjecting their unlimited authority to the criticism and influence of Christian moral teaching, on one occasion informing the Emperor that the ruler was “within the Church, not above it.”¹⁰² In 390, he refused to conduct a mass in the presence of Emperor Theodosius in protest over a massacre committed by his troops in Thessalonica. In a letter explaining his action, Ambrose dismissed the formal ritual of the communion as being insufficient, drawing on the example of the prophet Nathan’s rebuke to David as a precedent to justify his claim that Theodosius should accept Ambrose’s criticism and do public penance:

Are you ashamed, Sir, to do as David did...? He was told [by Nathan] of the rich man who had exceedingly many flocks and yet, when a guest arrived, took the poor man’s ewe lamb and killed it; and when he [i.e., David] recognized that he was condemned by the story, he said: “I have sinned against the Lord.” Therefore, do not take it ill, Sir, if what was said to King David is said to you: “Thou art the man.”

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