The twentieth century is the age of totalitarianism. Not only does a great portion of the human race live under pervasive totalitarian rule, but totalitarianism emerges as a crucial problem at every level of twentieth-century life, and is largely at the source of the great conflicts, economic, political, and spiritual, that are tearing apart the contemporary world.  

What has Christianity to say about this massive historical reality that gives our century its characteristic aspect? The utterances and interventions of influential Christian spokesmen in recent decades can hardly be regarded, most of them, as contributing to the clarity and responsibility so desperately needed in this time of crisis. The confusion in the churches is itself a major factor exacerbating the crisis and facilitating the advance of totalitarianism on many fronts. The effort to achieve a Christian understanding of totalitarianism, therefore, involves a drastic criticism of many things that have been said and done by the churches, and in the name of the churches, in their fateful confrontation with totalitarianism. 

Our Western political institutions, especially our Western political conceptions, derive, in large part, from the experience of the ancient Greek city-state, and from the political philosophy developed around it. For Aristotle, it will be remembered, the polis, the State, was “by nature.” Man, according to Aristotle, was “by nature a political animal,” that is, a being with a nature that demanded organized community for its proper life, and was always straining to establish it. Indeed, for Aristotle, as for Plato before him, and for the intelligent, educated Athenian of their time, the polis was, in fact, the human-making institution, in which man’s human potentialities could be actualized and perfected. The full perfection of humanness could be achieved only within and through the polis. When the Greek city-states began to lose their autonomy and vitality, political philosophers began to talk of a “universal polis,” a polis of the cosmos, a cosmopolis—sometimes identified with the Roman Empire, sometimes conceived as a “heavenly city” of the wise and the virtuous. But Greek political philosophy still remained essentially polis-thinking. 

Greek experience, and Greek philosophy founded on this experience, did not, and apparently could not, distinguish between society and State. Man’s sociality, which makes society “natural” to him, was made to cover the coercive organization of society as well. In Greek political thought, therefore, there was a strong totalistic element: the pervasiveness of society in bringing forth, educating, and molding the individual into a civilized human being was easily understood as the total jurisdiction of the State as a mind-and character-forming power. Even Aristotle, a careful, moderate, and realistic thinker, complained that

in most states, these matters [education, occupations, domestic affairs, etc.] have been neglected [by the authorities]; each man lives as he likes, ruling over wife and children in the fashion of the Cyclops. The conclusion to which we come is that the best course is to have a system of public and proper provision for these matters (Nic. Eth., 14; l 180al4).

In any well-conceived community, in other words, such matters as marriage, vocation, and domestic life, would properly fall under the jurisdiction and control of the State. The fact is that, in principle, though fortunately not always in practice, Greek political rationalism, as Hajo Holborn points out,

has no organ for the free individual. The idea of the right of the individual to possess a sphere of his own [Holborn goes on] was alien to the Greeks. The government was in total control of the community, and whatever freedom the individual might acquire, he could gain only through participation in government. The Greek soul [apparently] did not demand a field all to itself beyond the social order (Hajo Holborn, “Greek and Modern Concepts of History,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. X, No. 1, Jan. 1940). 

The distinction between society and the State was well understood by the Jews of the time as a result of their own experience and the traditions about the kingship coming from the Old Testament; the early church fully shared their way of thinking. Community, conceived in terms of ever-widening circles of covenant, was part of God’s creation, and therefore (using the Greek vocabulary) “natural” to man. But the State, as the coercive organization of society, most emphatically was not! The State, with its vast, complex machinery, was the outcome not of human nature, but of human sin. And yet, it was ordained of God, indirectly but no less truly. Here is how Paul, in that celebrated thirteenth chapter of Romans conceives it:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities [Paul admonishes], for there is no authority but from God, and the powers that be are ordained of God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resists what God had ordained, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good-doing, but to evil-doing. Would you have no fear of the magistrate who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will have his approval, for he is God’s minister for your good. But if you do evil, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain; he is the minister of God to execute his wrath on the evil-doer. Therefore, one must be subject [to the authorities] not only to avoid God’s wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are the ministers of God. . . . (Romans 13:1-6)

What one may call the theopolitical logic here is clear enough. Were it not for man’s sinfulness, were it not for man’s propensity to do evil, there would be no necessity for the coercive State, for the magistrate with his sword. But since man is sinful and prone to evil-doing, God, in his infinite mercy, has instituted the political order as an order of preservation, to save mankind from itself, to save it from destroying itself through its sinful self-aggrandizement. Hence, the State authority, from the Emperor down to the local magistrate, is carrying out a divine vocation: the ruler is, in Paul’s forceful language, a “minister of God,” though he may not himself know or acknowledge it—remember that the “public authorities” Paul is talking about are the pagan Emperor Nero and his pagan officials throughout the Empire! The magistrate with the sword is necessary, and must be obeyed by the Christian out of his Christian conscience; but he is made necessary by the dreadful consequences of human sinfulness, and he is to be obeyed not on his own claim, but out of obedience to God. 

Paul’s sweeping injunction, “Obey the governing authorities!” finds its own limitations elsewhere in the New Testament. There is, first, Peter’s declaration, “We must obey God rather than man” (Acts 5:29); this, however, was strictly limited in scope, meaning that a Christian could not obey the magistrate when the magistrate called to idolatry, or forbade the proclamation of the Gospel. Much more fundamental was the teaching that emerges out of Revelation 13. Romans 13 defines the legitimate government, ordained by God as a divine order of preservation. Here, in Revelation 13, we have the definition of the illegitimate government, which is an agency, not of God, but of the Devil. Here is the operative section of Revelation 13: 

Then, out of the sea, I saw a Beast rising. . . . The Dragon conferred upon it its power and rule. . . . The whole world went after the Beast in wondering admiration. Men worshiped the Dragon who had conferred his authority upon the Beast; they worshiped the Beast also, and chanted: “Who is like unto the Beast? Who can stand against him?” (Rev. 13:1-5)

This powerful passage has a reference that is directly political. The Dragon, of course, is Satan. The Beast is the Roman Empire, or the Emperor. Here, the “public authority,” which Paul had seen as the minister of God, is denounced as a servant of the Devil. And how is its diabolical character discerned? By its self-exaltation against God! Instead of confining itself to its God-ordained function of preserving society against sinful evil-doing, it now claims to be worshiped and exalted. (The chant, “Who is like unto the Beast? Who can stand against him?” is, of course, a devilish parody of the Song of Moses, Ex. 15:1-18: “Who is like unto Thee, O Lord. . . ?”) Because it claims for itself what is owing only to God, the State is no longer to be obeyed as an order of preservation, but it is to be opposed as an agency of Satan, in rebellion against God. This is the illegitimate State, in fact, the anti-State. 

The Pauline conception of the State as an institution not of the created, or “natural,” order but of the sinful world, to protect mankind against itself, came to govern the thinking of the Western Fathers, most thoroughly the thinking of the great Augustine. For Augustine, the political order, embodied in the coercive State, is emphatically not “by nature,” as an order of creation. On the contrary, it is “propter peccatum,” because of sin. In the order of creation, there is no rule of man over man; that emerges, as Paul had shown, out of the necessity for curbing man’s evil-doing, his sinful self-aggrandizement, which, uncurbed, would destroy the entire human race. The State is, therefore, not only propter peccatum; it is also remedia peccati, a remedy for, a protection against, sin. One must, therefore, obey the public authorities, except when they order something contra legem Dei, which, to Augustine as to the other Fathers, meant, as in the New Testament, a call to idolatry, a prohibition to preach the Gospel, or both. Under such circumstances, the Christian would have to obey God rather than man; but his disobedience to earthly authorities would always remain passive, leading to martyrdom. Of the distinction between the legitimate and the illegitimate State, there is only the most shadowy suggestion; it seemed so little relevant to the new age of the Christian emperors.  

We cannot sufficiently admire the profundity and realism of this biblical-patristic view of the State. To the Christian, it should be self-evident that political power, to be in any sense legitimate, must ultimately come from God, the true Sovereign Lord. Where else is the legitimacy of an arrangement that gives some men power over others to come from? From the mere will and power of the ruler—whether monarch or people? That would be the sheerest idolatry. If I am to recognize the legitimate authority of the rulers, be they kings or parliaments, I must see these rulers, whether they themselves acknowledge it or not, as ministers of God, and their authority as authority coming from God, conferred upon them for preservative purposes. This view carries with it, let us never forget, implicit limitations on the scope of this authority of the State: those limits passed or violated, the State loses its legitimacy, and becomes a diabolical agency for the oppression and subversion of mankind. 

But our admiration of the profundity and truth embodied in the Pauline-Augustinian doctrine cannot blind us to one glaring defect. For, if the State is justified by the necessity of curbing the evil-doing that comes out of the sinful self-aggrandizement of men, how is it that the ruler—whether prince or parliament—is overlooked? Is not a ruler a man, a sinful man, driven on, as are other men, by sinful self-aggrandizement, by the libido dominandi, the “lust for dominating,” which Augustine sees as the paramount “law” of the Earthly City? Does not the ruler, therefore, need curbing on his part as well? This germinal idea of a constitutional order setting restraints on the power of rulers, however legitimate, seems to have been completely overlooked until the Middle Ages—or, perhaps, not entirely overlooked since there was some notion of the Church acting as a check on the inordinances of the State. In any case, the groundwork of the Christian understanding of the State, its nature and its limits, was firmly laid.  

This conception, however, did not fully satisfy Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. He was engaged in a massive enterprise of reconciling, by proper distinction and redefinition, the philosophical and the Christian traditions, Aristotle with Augustine, Augustine with Aristotle. And so he revived the Greek doctrine of the State “by nature,” while retaining the Pauline-patristic teaching of the State as an order of preservation made necessary by sin. Thomas effected this reconciliation by an acute distinction. There are two kinds of subjection of man to man, he said. The first is subjectio civilis, civil subjection, the kind made necessary by the very nature of civil society, in which the various positions and tasks would require some sort of public authority for their allocation, even if every citizen were a saint: this kind of subjection is “by nature,” and is presumably the kind Aristotle had in mind in his book on politics. On the other side, though, men are obviously and emphatically not all saints; they are sinners, and act out of sinful self-aggrandizement, and have to be curbed in their evil-doing. Here the subjection is subjectio servilis, servile subjection, the kind Augustine had in mind. Hence, therefore, the State is both by nature and by sin. 

The tenability of this appealing synthesis has been much argued. For our purposes, however, no conclusion on this question is necessary. What is necessary, most emphatically necessary, is to note that, for all his desire for reconciliation, Thomas brought out even more clearly the fundamental points of difference between the Greek and the biblical views. Although Aristotle did not, and could not, distinguish between society and State, Thomas could and did: He translated Aristotle’s characterization of man as “zoon phusei politikon” (“by nature a political animal”) with “animal naturaliter sociale et politicum” (“by nature an animal social and political”), thus making the vital and far-reaching distinction between society and State. But even more important, of really fundamental importance, as Jacques Maritain has pointed out, is Thomas’s emphasis on the transcendence of the human person beyond all social collectivities and institutions, beyond society itself. Consider these two texts from St. Thomas:  

Every individual person is related to the entire community as part to whole (S. Th. II-II, qu. 64., art. 2).

Man is not ordained to the body politic according to all that he is and has (S. Th. I-II, qu. 21, art. 4, ad. 3). 

Here we have the first clear and explicit challenge to totalitarianism. Although by nature part of civil society, the individual person is not to be swallowed up whole in society or State. On the contrary, by virtue of certain aspects of his being—what Kierkegaard was later to call his “God-relationship”—man as such is elevated above political society and the social order. It is man’s ordination to the divine that thus raises him above everything social and political that would totally engulf him. Who denies this, denies both God and man.  

Not only does St. Thomas make explicit the Christian rejection of totalitarianism, which is radical and uncompromising; he also makes quite plain the meaning of legitimate and illegitimate government. Government is instituted by God, but the divine ordination may operate through a variety of ways and institutions, all the way from dynastic succession to popular election. The ruler must remember that he is there to keep order, dispense justice, and maintain the law, which it is his to make only to a very limited degree. The ruler must be careful that, on the one side, he does not go contra legem Dei, against the law of God; and, on the other, he does not drive ultra vires, beyond his proper powers, as these are defined by natural and public law, by custom, tradition, charter, coronation oath, and the like. If he avoids violating the divine law, and if he keeps within what may now be properly called the constitutional limits of his power, as publically defined, he is a legitimate ruler, and is entitled to honor and obedience, without qualification. But, if he deliberately, systematically, and incorrigibly insists on violating the divine law and running beyond his constitutional powers, he becomes an illegitimate ruler, a tyrant. And, against tyrants, as is well known, St. Thomas, in the last resort, allows rebellion (on the part of the magnates of the community) and even tyrannicide. With St. Thomas, the Christian doctrine of legitimate government against tyranny is well established. The Reformers did not go beyond. Both Luther and Calvin called for unqualified obedience to constituted authority, so long as it remained legitimate in the biblical-Augustinian sense; both permitted resistance when the ruler went contra legem Dei; both required that this resistance be passive, leading to martyrdom, though both allowed a loophole, subsequently enlarged (by the Calvinists), to permit armed rebellion and tyrannicide, along Thomist lines. One more point, though: Calvin’s keen sense of the involutions of sin as libido dominandi led him to make an explicit argument in favor of republicanism as government by committee against government by the will of a single ruler. 

The vice or imperfection of man [Calvin argued], therefore renders it safer and more tolerable for the government to be in the hands of many, that they may afford each other mutual assistance and admonition, and that, if anyone arrogate to himself more than is right, the others may act as censors and masters to restrain his ambition. (Institutes, IV, 20: viii.)

Direct and conscious confrontation with totalitarianism did not arise for the mass of Christians in Western Europe and America, and for the Church as such, until the appearance of Nazism as a massive power on the continent of Europe. Both in Soviet Russia and in Fascist Italy, totalitarianism had emerged earlier, but it had emerged slowly, and concern over it was pushed to the background by excitement over other aspects of the new regimes (the atheism of Soviet communism, e.g., or the imperialist adventures in Africa on the part of the Mussolini regime). Indeed, in Germany itself, it was not until 1935 that even Karl Barth came to realize that the Nazi State was not an ordinary State in the sense of Romans 13, legitimate, to be prayed for, though unfortunately harassing the Church, and acting with painful injustice in many ways. In fairness, however, it must be noted that it was largely the writings of Karl Barth in the years that followed that revealed the inner nature of totalitarianism and its demonic character from the Christian standpoint—though Barth’s strange reversal at the end of the war, when it became a matter of communism rather than Nazism, has no doubt been a major factor making for confusion and demoralization in Christian ranks throughout the world.  

What is it that characterizes totalitarianism as a special kind of a State, a State radically different from the kind of State designated as legitimate in the tradition of Paul, Augustine, and Thomas? 

1. The totalitarian State of its very nature recognizes no majesty beyond itself; it exalts itself as its own highest majesty, its own god, and demands to be “worshiped” as such. In short, it demands for itself what is owing only to God: worship and absolute submission.  

2. The totalitarian State, in line with its own self-absolutization, claims jurisdiction over all of life, public and private, and over every aspect of life. “Everything in the State, and through the State; nothing outside the State.” In principle, the State swallows up society, State and society swallow up the individual person; and, in practice, every device of modern mass control is employed to implement the totalitarian claim. Nothing outside the State, nothing truly voluntary or private, can be tolerated. 

3. The totalitarian State refuses to recognize in man any dimension of his being or doing that carries him beyond the totalitarianized social order. For man to claim such a dimension of being is regarded, and quite logically in its own terms, as the most radical challenge not merely to the regime, but to the totalitarian idea and system as such.  

Such is totalitarianism in its essence. It is not merely an oppressive regime; indeed, in principle, it does not have to be particularly oppressive at all, at least not to large sections of the population. What is involved is something much more fundamental. The old-fashioned despot demanded obedience, taxes, and manpower for his armies. The totalitarian regime wants much more: “It’s your souls they want,” as someone once put it, referring to the Nazis. It’s total possession of the whole man they want; and they will brook no rivals in engaging man’s loyalties, hopes, and affections. The totalitarian rulers will sometimes tolerate less than they, in principle, demand; but this “moderation” is only temporary, pending more favorable conditions. A real abatement of their total claims is not to be expected. 

It needs no extended argument to show that the totalitarian State, thus described in its essence, is the contemporary embodiment of the illegitimate State pictured in Revelation 13, and further defined by Augustine and Thomas. It deifies and exalts itself; it demands a quasi-religious commitment on the part of its subjects; it runs constantly contra legem Dei, and it operates systematically ultra vires, beyond the inherent constitutional limits of States. And, finally, it refuses to recognize, and strives incessantly to destroy, man’s personal being and his God-relationship. 

But we cannot leave it at that. Every established order, every society, and every political system, has its inner totalistic strivings. Sören Kierkegaard, himself a thoroughgoing political conservative, was among the first to see this. Over a century and a quarter ago, he pronounced these impassioned words: 

The deification of the established order is the secularization of everything . . . In the end, one secularizes also the God-relationship . . . [This God-relationship] must be, for individual man, the absolute; and it is precisely this God-relationship of the individual that puts every established order into question. The established order refuses to entertain the notion that it might consist of . . . so loose an aggregation of individuals, each of whom severally has his own God-relationship. The established order desires to be totalitarian, recognizing nothing above it, but having every individual under it, and judging every individual who is integrated in it. . . . (Training in Christianity, Princeton, 1951, p. 92)

“Every established order desires to be totalitarian,” exalting itself, and demanding everything. But there is a difference: the legitimate state, especially the modern constitutional state, possesses built-in institutions and traditions of resistance to these totalitarian “desires” and strivings, while the totalitarian State is the very political embodiment of these totalistic potentials, and lives only to promote and implement them.  

On the basis of this analysis, what is indicated as the Christian attitude to totalitarianism, the totalitarian State, and the actual totalitarian regimes in operation today? Certain points, I think, deserve emphasis. 

1. Since the totalitarian State is so obviously the diabolical State of Revelation 13, the illegitimate State of Christian tradition, the Christian as Christian owes it no allegiance, no support or obedience whatever; on the contrary, the Christian as Christian stands in radical opposition to the totalitarian State and all its works, for the totalitarian State is, in fact, an instrument of the Devil against mankind. It is war without possibility of compromise. 

Many Christians find it hard to understand or go along with this notion. Some Christian leaders have even allowed themselves to become so bemused with the idea of “socialism” as a kind of wave of the future, and with the “liberal” delusion that the “enemy is always at the Right,” that they cannot see the flagrantly totalitarian character of the Soviet, East German, Chinese, and other Communist regimes, because these regimes are allegedly of the left, and tend to adopt attitudes running from friendly “neutralism” and “critical cooperation” to outright support. I will not elaborate further, but I venture to say that this betrayal of the Church will not, in the end, pass off entirely unrequited. 

But for large numbers of Christians, these are not the considerations that make them so embarrassed at the intransigent opposition to totalitarianism that I have suggested as the truly Christian attitude. The fact is that many Christians, especially on the Continent, have been so habituated to the Pauline doctrine of Romans 13 that opposition to government, let alone such intransigent opposition, is entirely out of their field of vision; they cannot conceive that something like it might become their Christian duty. They cannot see that the totalitarian State is a very different kind of thing, a diabolical thing, a device of the Devil. We are now paying for the superficial, unreal, even plainly misleading political education of the Church in recent decades and centuries.  

2. This radical opposition to totalitarianism as the work of the Devil does not itself entail public disobedience or outright rebellion at every point. It does entail a total inner withdrawal of allegiance and obedience. But, let us not forget, that along with this inner posture of radical opposition, there are considerations of prudence and worldly responsibility that cannot be ignored. Revolution against the totalitarian State is, in principle, always justified in the Christian conscience; but the actual translation from principle to action must depend on a careful and realistic assessment of the situation. I do not want to lay down rules: sometimes a demonstrative action without much hope of success may be in place; but sometimes, too, prudence may have to be carried to a far point indeed. All this must necessarily be left to the conscience and good sense of those who live and suffer under totalitarianism.  

3. There is still another consideration of far-ranging importance. The primary function of the State, it will be recalled, is to curb evildoers, and to assure the community its security and justice. The totalitarian State is prone to pervert even this elementary function, politicalizing its justice, and converting the security it affords into a weapon of State control. But in totalitarian countries, as in all others, the elementary preservative services must be carried out or else the society itself would go under. Fires must be put out, traffic must be regulated, theft and burglary and non-political crimes of violence must be suppressed, and so on. Now it seems obvious to me that responsible inhabitants of a totalitarian country, no matter how uncompromising their opposition to the State, would have to give some support to the activities of the State in these elementary preservative areas. Augustine somewhere speaks of a man held captive for ransom by a robber band, and therefore obliged to live in the robber community for months, perhaps even for years. Obviously, he will feel it necessary and proper to support the efforts of the bandit leaders to maintain order in the bandit community, preventing violence, fighting fires, dispensing its very limited and partial kind of justice (“Even a robber band has its justice,” as Plato pointed out). The captive will do this without in the least recognizing the legitimacy of the bandit government, or abdicating his right to escape if possible, or helping destroy the entire bandit enterprise, if circumstances prove favorable. This kind of “cooperation,” if “cooperation” it can be called, is very different from the cooperation offered by many radical Christians to the totalitarian regime. The cooperation they offer in East Germany, e.g., is to help build “socialism,” the name given to the State-controlled economies of such countries. In the one case, the totalitarian program is being supported and promoted; in the other case, it is only those activities of the State without which it would be impossible to live that come into consideration.  

These conclusions are not, I admit, particularly sensational; and I do not want them to be. They are simply some of the more obvious conclusions one may draw from the fundamental Christian understanding of the State, the legitimate State of Romans 13, and the illegitimate, self-deifying State of Revelation 13. We might put it this way:  

The legitimate State of Romans 13 (whether democratic or not) the Christian acknowledges as a divine order, and is bound in conscience to obey, unless it commands what is contra legem Dei, against the law of God. On the other hand, the illegitimate State depicted in Revelation 13—in our time, the totalitarian State—must be denied the allegiance and support of the Christian, and there is no obligation in conscience to obey it, though where it serves an elementary preservative function, the Christian can support these activities without commitment. This, I think, is basic.  

I am sure it has been obvious from my discussion that we must not fall into the egregious error of identifying the legitimate State with the democratic State. The legitimate State is not identifiable with any particular system, and can find expression in any one of a variety of regimes, provided it meets the requirements I have described. The absolute monarchy of the eighteenth century was certainly not democratic; but it was quite legitimate in the proper sense: (1) it recognized a higher majesty beyond itself; (2) it did not claim total jurisdiction over all of life, many areas being left, in theory and practice, to institutions and agencies outside the State, or to the individual himself; (3) it never questioned the reality of the God-relationship that raised the individual human being at some point beyond every social order, including the absolute monarch’s own political order; and (4) it acknowledged the preservative function of the State, and fulfilled it with not inconsiderable success. There are self-styled democracies that have not met, and do not meet, these requirements as well. So let us keep clearly in mind what we really mean when we speak of legitimate and illegitimate States. 

In the last analysis, the struggle against totalitarianism and the totalitarian State is, for the Christian, a religious struggle, a struggle for men’s souls. For the totalitarian State is not simply a political institution; it is, as Karl Barth saw so clearly when it was a matter of Nazism, an “anti-Christian counter-church,” making an “inward claim,” and “demanding the adoption of a particular philosophy of life,” utterly opposed to Christianity. With this kind of State no Christian who is serious about his Christian faith can make his peace. 

Will Herberg was a sociologist who wrote on philosophy, culture, and religion.