quisition gave Christians a full measure of the sense of union with God, probably the fullest measure they were collectively to have.
For then, in course of time, came the movement historians call nationalism, a movement which subordinated church to state, the faithful to the patriotic, a movement which made of God at most a national hero. To illustrate this subservience of the godhead I can not do better than cite the colloquy between Shatov and Stavrogin in Dostoevsky's novel, "The Dispossessed," and let me cite it at length, for not only does it illustrate the role of the gods in nationality, it expresses extremely well that more fundamental mysticism of nationality which, we hold, is the source of international war. Shatov is speaking:
"Nations are built up and moved by another force [a force other than science and reason] which sways and dominates them, the origin of which is unknown and inexplicable: that force is the force of an insatiable desire to go on to the end, though at the same time it denies that end. It is the force of the persistent assertion of one's own experience,[1] and a denial of death . . . the seeking of God, as I call it. . . . The object of every national movement in every people and at every period of its existence is only the seeking for its god, who must be its own god, and the faith in Him as the only true god. God is the synthetic personality of the whole people, taken from its beginning to its end." . . . "You reduce God to a simple attribute of nationality," exclaims Stavrogin. "I reduce God to the attribute of nationality?" cries Shatov. "On the contrary, I raise the people to God. And has it ever been otherwise? The people is the body of God. Every people is only a people so long as it has its own god and excludes all other gods on earth irreconcilably. . . . If a great people does not believe that the truth is only to be found in itself alone (in itself alone and exclusively); if it does not believe that it alone is fit and destined to raise up and save all the rest by its truth, it would at once sink into being—not a great people.
A striking portrait, is it not, of the patriotic Christian, the Christian national?
But why is it, I may be asked, that despite Christianity's subjection to nationalism, despite its own peculiarly bloody history, there has persisted in Christendom a belief in the sanctity of human life, a conviction potent enough at times to make for large bodies of heretics like the Lollards, the Anabaptists, or the Quakers, a conviction that is even to-day a thorn in the flesh of the unmitigated militarist nationalist?
This outcropping conviction, this stubborn feeling, the Christian pacifist likes to date back to the early years of Christianity; but it is, I suspect, pre-Christian, nay prehistoric. It is akin, I suggest, to the horror of blood pollution felt by primitive peoples. It expresses the same aversion to killing another human being that taboos on the savage homicide betray. After a Pima killed an Apache he had to fast for sixteen days, touching neither meat nor salt, nor looking at a fire blaze, nor speaking to a human being. Were he to touch his head or his face with his fingers, his hair would turn white and his face wrinkle. Unless the Natchez who had taken his first scalp abstained from eating flesh and from sleeping with his wife for six months, the soul of the
- ↑ The italics are mine.
