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I

Homer understood the logic of violence. In the Iliad, his epic retelling of the fall of Troy, every emotional, physical, and psychological dynamic of force is carefully and critically weighed. Every aspect of the human personality is submitted to the harsh rigors of close combat. Every ethical reserve is tested in the pitch of battle. Here, amid the crush of flesh and iron, ideals and abstractions are shattered in an ultimate realism. Lofty sentiments are unraveled by the elemental impulse for self-preservation. Moral pretensions and pieties are stripped bare by death feeding at the altar of war. The final vision of the poem, however, is not a celebration of this stark arena, or, as some have believed, of the soul of the warrior. It is, rather, an understanding that all who engage in violence are mutilated by it; that one cannot wield might without becoming its slave; that those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.

We discover that this greatest of all war epics is in fact an antiwar epic not through any systematic exposition or declaration, but through a striking accumulation of detail. First, there is the fact that the entire conflict is waged for the sake of a symbol, Helen, rather than any objective purpose or moral necessity. Capricious gods—acting through their ciphers, the ruling elites—stir the masses of ordinary people into a positive desire to kill and be killed. The gods must continually prime these men for battle through high-sounding rhetoric, through oracles and omens and promises of glory and success. Yet the impulse to wage war defies any logic or reason external to the war itself. When left to their own intuitions, the common soldiers declare that their only desire is to abandon the campaign and set sail for home. At the gates of Troy we thus find ourselves in an ethical void in which violence serves as its own justifier. “You must fight on,” the gods command, “for if you make peace you will offend the dead.” It is slaughter, in other words, that necessitates more slaughter. Against the desire of the gods to maximize destruction is the suffering of the innocent, as when the aging King Priam gives the following grim account of what war can only mean for the vast majority of human beings:

Pity me too!—

still in my senses, true, but a harrowed, broken man

marked out by doom—past the threshold of age . . .

and Father Zeus will waste me with a hideous fate,

and after I’ve lived to look on so much horror!

my sons laid low, my daughters dragged away

and the treasure-chambers looted, helpless babies

hurled to the earth in the red barbarity of war . . .

my sons’ wives hauled off by the Argives’ bloody hands!

And I, I last of all—the dogs before my doors

Will eat me raw . . . (22.68–78).1

The victims of war, Priam bears witness, are not the soldiers, whose deaths will be celebrated with songs and wreaths, but women, children, and the elderly. This, of course, comes as no new fact to anyone. But Priam’s words are particularly penetrating and revelatory, for Priam is a Trojan, a foe of Homer’s people. The foundational text in the Greek self-understanding subversively invites us to contemplate how violence bears on the weakest members of society and even on the enemy. It is as though the Hebrew Bible included descriptions of how YHWH’s holy wars might have felt for a Philistine child.

Most subversive of all, however, is the way in which the Iliad plays havoc with the underlying assumption of what would later be known as the “just war” tradition, namely, the assumption of reason. All just war theories rest upon the idea that violence can somehow be contained within established rules of prudence and proportionality. But if violence serves as its own justifier, and if the suffering of the innocent is not enough to deter an initial act of aggression, there is no possible limit that can be placed on any war waged for “a just cause.”

In Homer, this truth emerges through the unraveling of a treaty offering a modicum of ethical constraint within the conflict. Early in the poem the Greeks and Trojans make a pact allowing both sides to collect and burn their dead without hindrance or threat of attack. The agreement, while not affecting the actual prosecution of the war, seeks to place the struggle within the framework of social and religious convention. It aims to humanize and dignify the bloodshed through shared values of reason and restraint. Unfortunately, maintaining one’s reason while drenched in human blood is a tenuous affair. As the war intensifies, the combatants kill with increasing savagery until at last they are seen gleefully mutilating dead corpses. “Go tell them from me,/ you Trojans, tell the loving father and mother/ of lofty Ilioneus to start the dirges in the halls!” cries Peneleos to the Trojans while holding up the fallen soldier’s eyeball on the point of his spear (14.86–88).

When the Greek hero Patroclus is slain at the end of Book Sixteen the unstoppable drift toward total war, in which no rules or conventions apply, is finally realized. The two sides engage in a battle of unprecedented fury and destruction for the entirely irrational purpose of seizing Patroclus’s dead body—the Trojans to further mutilate it and then feed it to wild dogs, the Greeks to prevent this humiliation at whatever cost. The idea that war might somehow be mediated by reasonable agreements and religious scruples, such as those governing the burial of the dead, has been reduced to a shambles by the internal dynamics of war and the logic of violence itself.

Once this fact of war is understood, all of our long-cherished rationalizations for violence are quickly exposed as mere enervating chimeras. As goes the venerable Patroclus, so goes the tradition of just warfare. The failure of the tradition is not that it is abstractly or theoretically false, but that it ignores what actually happens when humans engage in violence. Philosopher and Christian mystic Simone Weil had a clearer view of the human animal. In “The Iliad, Poem of Might,” her celebrated essay written at the onset of World War II, she saw that an excessive use of violence is almost never a political ideal, yet its temptation almost always proves irresistible—against all reason or moral restraint. “A moderate use of might, by which man may escape being caught in the machinery of its vicious cycle, would demand a more than human virtue, one no less rare than a constant dignity in weakness,” she wrote. As a consequence, “war wipes out every conception of a goal, even all thoughts concerning the goals of war.”2 Such a moral and spiritual void will, of course, be filled by politicians, militarists, and theologians with symbols and myths, but Weil understood that there is ultimately only one impulse strong enough to sustain wars among nations: the insatiable demand for power at any cost.

II

These insights are, I realize, difficult to grasp within the present national echo chamber of war enthusiasm, but they can be tested against the weight of history. Let us consider how prophetic Weil’s thoughts about force proved in a war that most people agree was fought for a just cause if ever there was one.3

On September 11, 1944, Allied forces conducted a bombing raid on the city of Darmstadt, Germany. The incendiary bombs used in the attack came together in a conflagration so intense it created a firestorm nearly one mile high. At its center, the temperature was approximately 2000° F, and it sucked the oxygen out of the air with the force of a hurricane. People hiding in underground shelters died primarily from suffocation. People fleeing through the streets found that the surfaces of the roads had melted, creating a trap of molten asphalt that stuck to their feet and then hands as they tried to break free. They died screaming on their hands and knees, the fire turning them into so many human candles. Almost twelve thousand noncombatants were killed that night in Darmstadt alone. Yet Darmstadt was only one city among many in a relentless Allied campaign. Anne-Lies Schmidt described the aftermath of a similar attack on Hamburg, code named “Operation Gomorrah,” more than one year before:

Women and children were so charred as to be unrecognizable; those that had died through lack of oxygen were half charred and recognizable. Their brains tumbled from their burst temples and their insides from the soft parts under their ribs. How terribly must these people have died. The smallest children lay like fried eels on the pavement. Even in death they showed signs of how they must have suffered—their hands and arms stretched out as if to protect themselves from the pitiless heat.4

That single raid on Hamburg killed approximately forty thousand civilians, including both of Schmidt’s parents. In total, it is estimated that more than half a million German civilians were killed as a direct result of British and American bombing. What must be absolutely clear about these deaths is the well-documented but largely ignored fact that they were absolutely intentional. These were not unfortunate casualties in a campaign against German military targets: from as early as July, 1943, on, they were the targets. The saturation bombing of German cities did not include the burning of children as an unavoidable “double effect” of “Just War”; burning noncombatant men, women, and children was the precise strategy of Allied planners.

It did not begin this way. At the start of the Battle of Britain in 1939, leaders on both sides declared that they would not target civilian populations. It was understood that bombing military factories and installations would result in unavoidable civilian casualties. But the policy of minimizing deaths among noncombatants was widely supported by both politicians and the public on religious and ethical grounds. This course continued until August 24, 1940, when Luftwaffe bombs, intended for an oil storage depot, fell on London’s East End. Winston Churchill, overruling the Royal Air Force, ordered a bombing raid on Berlin the next day. Germany responded by unleashing the blitz over London. Still, for some months the RAF insisted that the ban against killing civilians was still in effect. There was a lingering sense of moral compunction among the Allied forces that the dynamics of violence had not yet fully eroded. This would change.

First, because it was too risky to bomb by day, the Allies decided that bombing should be done only at night. This, however, made precision bombing impossible and proved militarily unsuccessful since targets were often missed. Realizing that their efforts to strike only military targets by cover of darkness were not working, the RAF therefore shifted to a policy of “area bombing.” The destruction of whole neighborhoods was now permitted, providing there was a single military target within a given neighborhood. But by 1942, with the war dragging on and casualties mounting, the Allies decided that even this was not enough. Abandoning any pretense of ethical standards, they adopted a more “realistic” policy once and for all: indiscriminate “obliteration bombing” of entire cities. The explanation given for the new phase in the Allied campaign was twofold: first, it would ensure absolute success against military targets; more importantly and explicitly, it would “break enemy morale.” Chivalric distinctions between civilians and combatants were no longer practicable. The morality of “total war” was tautologically justified by the necessity of “victory at any cost.”

So began the routine bombardment of noncombatants. Yet soon Churchill was calling for still greater innovations in violence. “I should be prepared to do anything that might hit the Germans in a murderous place,” he wrote to his Chiefs of Staff in July, 1944:

I may certainly have to ask you to support me in using poison gas. We could drench the cities of the Ruhr and many other cities in Germany in such a way that most of the population would require constant medical attention . . . It is absurd to consider morality on this topic when everybody used it in the last war without a word of complaint from the moralists or the Church. On the other hand, in the last war the bombing of open cities was regarded as forbidden. Now everybody does it as a matter of course. It is simply a question of fashion changing, as she does between long and short skirts for women.5

In the end, the Allies were unable to devise a feasible plan for chemical war, but not for lack of will or trying. They were hampered, in Churchill’s words, by “that particular set of psalm-singing uniformed defeatists,” and by logistical considerations within the military. “I cannot make headway against the parsons and the warriors at the same time,” he lamented.6 The aerial campaign against civilian populations meanwhile proceeded without dissent. What feeble resistance there was to the policy of “total war” was kept to a minimum through pressure tactics and facile slogans. This will end the war sooner. This will save lives. We must take retribution. We must punish the aggressor. There were, it should be noted, a surprisingly high number of RAF pilots and crews who objected to the terroristic annihilation of defenseless noncombatants now required of them. But the military took severe disciplinary action against these individuals, court-martialing and imprisoning them to prevent their strange ideas from spreading through the ranks. The official reason given for their punishment was “LMF”—lack of moral fiber.

In the Pacific arena, however, moral fiber was in abundant supply. On the night of March 9, 1945, the United States set the entire city of Tokyo ablaze with napalm bombs. The heat was so intense it boiled the water in the canals. More than 100,000 civilians died in the attack. Bomber crews in the last waves could smell the burning flesh. The same was done to more than fifty other Japanese cities, leading to a befuddling dilemma for Allied strategists: by May and June there were few “untouched” cities left for the ultimate demonstration of Allied “resolve.” At last a list of cities, including the religious center of Kyoto, was compiled and submitted to the American High Command. None were proposed for primarily military reasons. What was critical in each case was that the target included a massive unspoiled population that could be annihilated without warning in a single moment. Civilian morale and psychological considerations—terrorism to be precise—dictated where the atomic bombs would fall.

The strategy was a spectacular “success.” More than 350,000 civilians were killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a litany of unspeakable horror, some instantly in the inferno that consumed the cities at the speed of two miles a second; some more slowly, their skin hanging from their bodies like rags; some vomiting and convulsing from radiation sickness days later; some bleeding out of the retina, the mouth, the rectum, and respiratory passages from decay of internal organs; others later still from cancer and unknown diseases. For years afterward thousands of children conceived in the two cities were born with chromosomal and genetic disorders—a multigenerational reminder of American power and so added insurance policy against recalcitrant Japanese nationalism.

In five short years between 1940 and 1945 the cycle of violence had come full circle. The Allies began the war vowing that they would not use the techniques of their enemies, but in the end the logic of violence proved irresistible. Their cause was just. Their motives were pure. But the initial cause of war proved immaterial to the way in which the war was finally waged. Once violence was accepted as a means to an end, violence became its own end. Traditional morality was discarded as so much intellectual and spiritual deadweight. “If [the Japanese] do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth,” said President Harry S. Truman in his radio broadcast to the nation.7 The nation applauded. A poll in Fortune magazine suggested that the only regret of nearly a quarter of the American public was that more atomic bombs had not been used. Truman, for his part, insisted that after ordering the bombings he went to bed and slept soundly.

The point is not that Allied soldiers lacked moral principles, goodwill, or noble intentions. It is that war has its own will and its own intentions: it refuses to be contained or controlled by mere humanity. Whatever vestiges of decency and restraint America and England possessed at the start of the war gave way to more pragmatic calculations as the war progressed. Sentimental images of American GIs dispensing chocolate bars to German and Japanese children prevents us from seeing the staggering slaughter inflicted by the Allies, with absolute calculation, on hundreds of thousands of civilians.

All of the arguments dredged up from medieval scholastic theology to vindicate violence for “a just cause”—and particularly World War II—therefore miss the mark. The ethical principles set forth for defending stone castles, if ever valid, were rendered obsolete by the advent of modern war. As Thomas Merton wrote in his essay “Target Equals City”:

There is one winner, only one winner in war. The winner is war itself. Not truth, not justice, not liberty, not morality. These are the vanquished. War wins, reducing them to complete submission. He makes truth serve violence and falsehood. He causes justice to declare not what is just but what is expedient as well as cruel. He reduces the liberty of the victorious side to a servitude equal to that of the tyranny which they attacked, in defense of liberty. Though moralists may intend and endeavor to lay down rules for war, in the end war lays down rules for them . . . War has the power to transmute evil into good and good into evil. Do not fear that he will not exercise this power. Now more than ever he is omnipotent. He is the great force, the evil mystery, the demonic mover of our century, with his globe of sun-fire, and his pillars of cloud. Worship him.8

III

But is there any alternative? Do we have any choice other than violence? When Hitler and Hirohito unleashed their war machines on the world, what else could be done? If not retaliation in kind, what then? If not retributive justice, how peace? Before attempting to give a positive answer, we must return to the world of Iliad. We must see why the question suggests the same fatalism that permeated ancient Greek thought.

For the Greeks, over and against the will of the gods was the inexorable reality of Fate or Moira. Fate, armed with necessity (ananke), joins with the Furies (Erinyes) to defy human craft and intelligence. Even Zeus is unable to overrule what Fate commands. In Plato’s Timaeus, for example, it is the task of the Creator or Demiurge to mold blind, inert matter to the divine will. But matter, ananke, is resistant to any meaning or purpose, so the creation is never wholly good or complete; there always remains in the universe a residual amount of “brute fact” or necessity that even the gods cannot rationalize or control. Ultimately, then, the highest provenance is not the divine will but the law of Fate. It is impossible to predict what Fate will command. It is impossible to argue with what Fate decrees. “Fate is immutable, impersonal, unseeing, and strikes like a thunderbolt. Future is like past: determined.”9 In the Iliad, the war is not spurred on primarily by human choices, but by the edicts of Fate meted out by Zeus. Achilles, Zeus declares to the goddess Hera, will not fight until after Hector kills Patroclus “in the narrow place of necessity . . . This is the way it is fated to be.” In the meantime, the Furies must ensure that the war does not come to a premature end; so “Terror drove them, and Fear, and Hate whose wrath is relentless . . . the screaming and the shouts of triumph rose up together/ of men killing and men killed, and the ground ran blood” (4.440–451).10 Homer sees how abhorrent war is, but he is unable to posit any escape from it; the cycle of violence is senseless but unavoidable.

Several centuries later, this idea of the simultaneous futility and inescapability of bloodshed would form the heart of Greek tragedy. Aeschylus’s Oresteia trilogy is archetypal: Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Iphigeneia to propitiate the goddess Artemis. His wife Clytaemestra must then murder him to avenge the death of her daughter. But Orestes, prompted by Apollo, must now kill Clytaemestra to avenge Agamemnon. The cycle is only ended by the arbitrary intervention of the goddess Athene, who appeases the Furies by giving them a permanent home beneath the city of Athens.

The contemporary question of whether there is any alternative to violence (and the assumption that the answer is negative) is best seen in this mythological context. For when we examine the statements made by politicians and military planners in World War II, what is most striking is not the fact that they made dubious ethical choices, but that often in the deepest sense they did not make choices at all. “Truman made no decision because there was no decision to be made,” recalled George Elsey, one of his military advisors involved with the Manhattan Project. “He could no more have stopped it then a train moving down a track . . . It’s well and good to come along later and say the bomb was a horrible thing. The whole goddamn war was a horrible thing.”11 So, we discover, from the Iliad to Dresden and Nagasaki nothing has changed. Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met at Malta. Fate, necessity, and the Furies decided the war.

This is why violence, at its most basic root, is the ultimate form of passivity. It is based upon the assumption and the fear that when Fate decrees slaughter, humans have no choice but to obey. The “realist” is a conscientious objector to nonviolent action because ultimately he does not believe we are truly free. To think “pragmatically” about when it is acceptable for innocent humans to be destroyed is to think mechanistically about what it means to be human. “War always encourages a patriotism that means not love of country but unquestioning obedience to power,” writes Kentucky farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry. “In the face of conflict, the peaceable person may find several solutions, the violent person only one.”12 Christian complicity in the atrocities of our century thus reveals how deeply the church has absorbed the pagan malaise of determinism. By rejecting nonviolence as a binding principle, Christians have cauterized their consciences and absolved themselves of the freedom to make authentic moral choices. Can the passivity of the German population in World War II be separated from Martin Luther’s claim that Christians are duty bound to wield the sword for the sake of political and social order? Can the compliance of the Catholic chaplain who administered mass to the Catholic crew that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki (destroying three orders of nuns in the process) be separated from Augustine’s Just War teaching? “[S]hould you see that there is a lack of hangmen,” Luther wrote in 1523, “and find that you are qualified, you should offer your services.”13 The Protestant Church has been offering its services ever since. The Catholic Church had a head start beginning with Constantine in the fourth century.

IV

So again, the question: is there any alternative to violence and the fatalism it implies? The New Testament witness says there is. This witness, however, does not take pragmatic reason as its highest value and starting point. Rather, it declares that reason itself is defined by the life and teaching of a single person. One may, of course, reject this person’s teaching of peaceableness toward enemies. What one cannot legitimately do is deny what this teaching is. The evidence is absolute and unequivocal; all special pleading for violence must studiously refrain from sustained exegetical analysis:14

You have heard that it was said, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also . . . You have heard that it was said, “You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.” But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. (Matt 5:38–39, 43–45a)15

The Sermon on the Mount, from which these words are taken, is presented in Matthew’s Gospel in a programmatic fashion as the new Torah, a new charter for the community of believers. Just as Moses delivered the tablets of stone from Sinai, Jesus gathers his disciples on the mountain to disclose a new covenant with Israel. The new covenant begins with the Beatitudes, a counterintuitive and politically charged overturning of the world’s values and moral reasoning. God’s blessings, Jesus declares, are upon the downtrodden, the oppressed, the meek, the peacemakers. All of the accouterments of power and prestige on display in Greco-Roman society mean nothing. Education, wealth, and noble pedigree are illusory anchors. Lord Caesar and Lord Mammon are out. Reality, in God’s eyes, is ordered with a paradoxical premium upon weakness and undeserved suffering.

To embody God’s truth in a blinded world, Jesus calls for the formation of a countercultural community, “a polis on a hill” (Matt 5:14). In the polis of Jesus, reconciliation will overcome hostility, marriage vows will be kept with lifelong fidelity, language will be honest and direct, all hatred and violence will be renounced. The emphasis throughout is not upon individual piety as a means to salvation, but upon personal and social ethics leading to restored community in the present reality. Jesus sees his teaching as the deepest fulfillment and revelation of the Law and the prophets. He does not seek to negate the Torah but actually intensifies the Torah’s demands. The Law prohibits murder; Jesus prohibits even anger. The law prohibits adultery; Jesus prohibits even lust. When it comes to the matter of violence, however, Jesus does not simply radicalize the Torah: he decisively alters and in fact overturns it.

The lex talionis—an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—is spelled out in several passages in the Hebrew Bible, but particularly in Deut 19:15–21. If in a criminal trial a witness gives a false testimony, the Law declares, that person must be severely punished in order to preserve the social order. “Thus you shall not show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot” (19:21). Political stability is the goal and fear is the mechanism by which it will be achieved. Jesus shatters this strict geometry with a simple injunction: “Do not resist an evil person.” This does not imply passive capitulation to force, but physical nonretaliation as a dynamic spiritual weapon, particularly in the political realm. The command only makes sense in the context of the prophetic community or polis Jesus has announced he is building. By exemplifying the peaceableness and conciliatory spirit of the Beatitudes, the believer confounds and shames the aggressor, creating an opportunity for the violent person to be reconciled with God. By absorbing undeserved suffering and not retaliating in kind, the disciple also destroys the evil inherent in the logic of force. Instead of an endless cycle of violence and recrimination, there is shalom, there is peace.

The assumption among believers that violence is an acceptable tactic and tool, and the willingness of the Christian community to play chaplain to our nation’s military complex, therefore discloses a crisis of mistaken identity. When Christians declare that “we” must wage war for the sake of this or that political goal, when they point to what “they” did to “us” and argue about what “our” response should be, they mistakenly identify the calling of believers with the objectives of the nation-state. But the polis of Jesus is not merely one kind of allegiance contained within others, wheels within wheels. It is a radically different allegiance based upon goals and principles that the state may at times not tolerate or comprehend. In the final analysis, because nonviolence may result in martyrdom as it did for Jesus, it only makes sense to those who see all war in “cosmic perspective,” who know that there is genuine freedom because there is also Advent hope.

The freedom of the prophetic community is not freedom from “this-worldliness.” It is not liberty for the sake of personal security or individual purity. It is not motivated by narrow perfectionism or pious idealism. Rather, those who are truly free are conscious that they must live as faithful witnesses amid all of the ambiguities and anxieties of society, speaking truth to power in a fallen world and acting in ways that might actually make a difference. This means challenging the unquestioning raptures of a war-worshiping culture. This means proclaiming the principles of the Sabbath Jubilee as God’s judgment upon social and economic systems that oppress and exploit. This means fighting for peace using the weapons of peace rather than the weapons of death and fear.

The hope of nonviolent resistance to evil is not unrealistic, as history has proved. The accomplishments of Gandhi and Martin Luther King are well known, but there have been many others. During World War II, the French Huguenot village of Le Chambon Sur Lignon saved thousands of Jewish children through nonviolent noncooperation with Gestapo and Vichy authorities. The entire nation of Denmark likewise engaged in nonviolent resistance to the Nazis. When told that Jewish refugees must wear stars, the Danes declared that they would all wear stars; they mounted strikes and protests; they refused to repair German ships in their shipyards; they ferried Jews to Sweden out of harm’s way; they hid Jews in their homes. Again, thousands of lives were saved. Nazi officials were thoroughly unnerved, bewildered, and deflated by these actions. Many were converted. Eichmann was repeatedly forced to send specialists to Denmark to try to sort out the problem since his men on the ground could “no longer be trusted.”16 These movements, however, were rooted in communities that took their Christianity seriously and were prepared to count the cost. Let us cease praying for the success of our technology and weaponry long enough to ponder: are Christians still ready to count the cost?

—2002

1. Fagles, trans., The Iliad.

2. Weil, “The Iliad, Poem of Might,” 168, 170.

3. The facts in this section have been adapted from Glover, Humanity, 69–116; McCullough, Truman, 391–96, 436–44, 453–60; and Merton, “Target Equals City,” in Passion For Peace: The Social Essays, 28–36.

4. Glover, Humanity, 78.

5. Gilbert, Churchill, 782–83.

6. Ibid., 783.

7. McCullough, Truman, 455.

8. Merton, Passion for Peace, 28.

9. Heschel, The Prophets: Volume II, 19.

10. Lattimore, trans., The Iliad of Homer.

11. McCullough, Truman, 442.

12. Berry, “Peaceableness Toward Enemies,” in Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community, 77, 87.

13. Luther, Martin Luther, 374.

14. See Hayes, Moral Vision of the New Testament, 317–43; and Yoder, Politics of Jesus.

15. All biblical citations are from the New American Standard Bible unless otherwise noted.

16. See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 171–75; and Merton, “Danish Non-Violent Resistance to Hitler,” in Passion for Peace, 150–53.