I’ve been chipping away at Jacques Ellul’s Anarchy and Christianity (Anarchie et Christianisme, 1988) over the last few weeks. While it lacks the almost prescient bravado of his best work, it is nevertheless a thought-provoking read. Published as Ellul was approaching his 80th birthday, Anarchy and Christianity aims to “erase a great misunderstanding for which Christianity is to blame,” namely, that Christian faith is compatible with state power and its deployment of authorized violence. On the contrary, since Christianity insists that “love is the way, not violence,” then it is most consistent with anarchy or, at least, a certain version of anarchy. As Ellul explains:
There are different forms of anarchy and different currents in it. I must first say very simply what anarchy I have in view. By anarchy I mean first an absolute rejection of violence. Hence I cannot accept either nihilists or anarchists who choose violence as means of action.
Thus Ellul would not endorse a V for Vendetta (2005) style of anarchism, whereby counterviolence is used to subvert the state. Nor does he think the “falsified democracy of bourgeois states” is a viable solution, insofar as party politics requires the adoption of “a hierarchical structure and [a] wish to have a share in the exercise of power.” In fact, the assumption that politics is the means by which social problems can be repaired is a deception nurtured by institutional power itself. Of course, whether or not Ellul’s points are correct is another matter, but, as fighting in Ukraine rages on, they are well worth contemplating.
A related quote (perhaps?) from an 1848 journal entry by Søren Kierkegaard: “What I have so often said jokingly—that it does not make any difference what government I live under just so I get to know who it is, who is Imprimatur—it now occurs to me that this is
really Christianity.”
That's great. The only Christian anarchist whose work I am somewhat familiar with is Tolstoy. Does Ellul consider himself in any way a spiritual/ideological descendant of Tolstoy's? In my limited understanding of Tolstoy's anarchism, it seems to me that what LT believes is necessary is an egalitarian assumption of a life of shared labor. Labor and prayer, ora et labora. The violence that is already prehistorical in the natural world in this way is in a sense voluntarily taken on in the life of labor. That's my limited understanding. Quite its often whether in his own autobiographical voice or in those of its characters, in the spirit of "I realized that I was living a life of a parasite" and a waking and repentance to simplicity. "Into the Wild" is sort of the cinematic reference there, too.