Blessed Are the Meek:
The Roots of Christian Nonviolence

Thomas Merton, May 1967

The Trappist monk Thomas Merton brought a special gift to American social struggles: contemplation. Faced with the burnout of so many young people, veterans of the civil rights and then the anti-Vietnam war efforts, Merton, while not himself an activist, brought an uncanny appreciation of the spiritual hemorrhaging that endless interventions caused. From the invidious split between people who pray and people who act, was born a new, integral person, who prays and acts with a harmonious balance between them. This ground-breaking article was first published as an FOR pamphlet. Merton died a year later in 1968.

Nonviolence is perhaps the most exacting of all forms of struggle, not only because it demands first of all that one be ready to suffer evil and even face the threat of death without violent retaliation, but because it excludes mere transient self-interest from its considerations. Those who practice nonviolent resistance must commit themselves not to the defense of their own interests or even those of a particular group: they must commit themselves to the defense of objective truth and right and above all of human beings. Their aim is then not simply to prevail or to prove that they are right and the adversary wrong, or to make the adversary give in and yield what is demanded.

July-August 1979 cover drawing by Naomi Camilleri.

Nor should nonviolent resisters be content to prove to themselves that they are virtuous and right, that their hands and heart are pure even though the adversary's may be evil and defiled. Still less should they seek for themselves the psychological gratification of upsetting the adversary's conscience and perhaps driving that person to an act of bad faith and refusal of the truth. We know that our unconscious motives may, at times, make our nonviolence a form of moral aggression and even a subtle provocation designed (without our awareness) to bring out the evil we hope to find in the adversary, and thus to justify ourselves in our own eyes and in the eyes of "decent people."

Christian nonviolence is not built on a presupposed division, but on the basic unity of humankind. It is not out for the conversion of the wicked to the ideas of the good, but for healing and reconciliation. Let us, however, seriously consider at least the conditions for relative honesty in the practice of Christian nonviolence.

• Nonviolence must be aimed above all at the transformation of the present state of the world, and it must therefore be free from all occult, unconscious connivance with an unjust use of power. This poses enormous problems, for if nonviolence is too political it becomes drawn into the power struggle and identified with one side or another in that struggle, while if it is totally apolitical it runs the risk of being ineffective or at best merely symbolic.
  
  
• The nonviolent resistance of the Christians who belong to one of the powerful nations and who are themselves in some sense privileged members of world society will have to be clearly not for themselves but for others, that is for the poor and underprivileged. (Obviously in the case of Negroes in the United States, though they may be citizens of a privileged nation, their case is different. They are clearly entitled to wage a nonviolent struggle for their rights, but even for them this struggle should be primarily for truth itself - this being the source of their power.)
  
  
• In the case of nonviolent struggle for peace - the threat of nuclear war abolishes all privileges. Under the bomb there is not much distinction between rich and poor. In fact, the richest nations are usually the most threatened. Nonviolence must simply avoid the ambiguity of an unclear and confusing protest that hardens the war-makers in their self-righteous blindness. This means that in this case above all nonviolence must avoid a facile and fanatical self-righteousness, and refrain from being satisfied with dramatic self-justifying gestures.
  
  
• Perhaps the most insidious temptation to be avoided is one which is characteristic of the power structure itself: this fetishism of immediate visible results. Modern society understands "possibilities" and "results" in terms of a superficial and quantitative idea of efficacy. One of the missions of Christian nonviolence is to restore a different standard of practical judgment in social conflicts. This means that the Christian humility of nonviolent action must establish itself in the minds and memories of modern people not only as conceivable and possible, but as a desirable alternative to what they now consider the only realistic possibility; namely, political technique backed by force. Here the human dignity of nonviolence must manifest itself clearly in terms of a freedom and a nobility which are able to resist political manipulation and brute force and show them up as arbitrary, barbarous, and irrational. This will not be easy. The temptation to get publicity and quick results by spectacular tricks or by forms of protest that are merely odd and provocative but whose human meaning is not clear, may defeat this purpose.