ENRU
Chapter 2:
On Resistance to Evil by Force as Augustinian Doctrine of Just War
I now compare On Resistance to Evil by Force to the just war theology of Late Antique Catholic theologian Augustine of Hippo (354–430) in order to demonstrate that Ilyin’s text amounts to little more than a thinly-veiled presentation of Augustine’s doctrine of just war. The reason for my specific methodological gambit is that there is no scholarly consensus on a generic definition of just war, and any comparison is therefore necessarily particular. As mentioned above, doctrines of just war need not necessarily be theological, and, of those that are, not all are necessarily Augustinian in their argumentation. Yet Ilyin’s is. The significance of this finding lies partly in the fact that Ilyin’s champions and apologists tend to present his thought as innovative, uniquely Russian, and Orthodox. Obviously, to the extent that Ilyin’s argument is Augustinian, it is none of these. Yet it also lies partly in the fact that Augustine’s doctrine of just war provides for no real distinction between just war and holy war—an important distinction to which I return.

The individual bases of comparison in the analysis that follows are drawn from the work of the late John P. Langam, SJ, a Jesuit scholar and Georgetown University professor. Langan was a highly-regarded and widely-published expert on the Catholic Church’s teachings regarding just war and Christian ethics.1 As Langan explains, most of Augustine’s thoughts on just war are laid out in his Contra Faustum (c. 400). However, Langan also draws critical elements from two important letters that Augustine later wrote in response to concerns subsequently raised by Roman officials in Africa. The first is Letter 138, written in 412 CE to the tribune Marcellinus of Carthage. The second is Letter 189, to Boniface, the governor of Africa, which dates from 418 CE. Marcellinus wrote to Augustine with a problem. He described a pagan arguing that Christian “preaching and doctrine were not adaptable to the customs of the state,” and making references to Christian teachings about “not returning evil for evil and about turning the other cheek.”2 “Turning the other cheek,” of course, is a reference to the famous Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.3

Significantly, the pacifist problem of “turning the other cheek,” which Marcellinus brings to Augustine’s attention, is the same problem that Tolstoy focuses on in The Law of Love and the Law of Violence—the text to which Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force ostensibly responds. This commonality allows Ilyin to reference Tolstoy rather than Marcellinus and Augustine, thus further obscuring his debt to the Catholic theologian. Yet whereas Augustine addresses Jesus’ apparent call to pacifism only a decade after the former’s initial articulation of just war theology in Contra Faustum, Ilyin uses Tolstoy’s concern with this part of the Sermon on the Mount as a means of taking up the apparent contradiction between Christianity and coercive force from the very beginning of On Resistance to Evil by Force.

Much of what is unique about my intervention is my departure from the main current of scholarly analyses of On Resistance to Evil by Force as an actual good-faith response to Tolstoy’s The Law of Love and the Law of Violence. Many scholars—though certainly not all—have more or less taken Ilyin at face value in his claim to be in a dialog with Tolstoy. I contend that these scholars have failed to give sufficient consideration to the context and timing of Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force in their analyses. Not only had Tolstoy been more than ten years dead and the broader controversy about his pacifist teachings long since died down by the time Ilyin published On Resistance to Evil by Force,4 but the latter’s alleged response to Tolstoy came on the heels of the final White Army defeat by the Bolsheviks and within a year of Ilyin’s own involvement with the largest organization of the exiled White military as an ideologue. And while a few scholars have been suspicious of the context and timing of Ilyin’s ruminations on so-called anti-pacifism, to the best of my knowledge, none has yet proposed a reading of On Resistance to Evil by Force according to which Ilyin treats Tolstoy’s objections to coercive force as a proxy for those of Marcellinus’ anonymous fifth-century pagan in what is little more than a rehearsal of Augustine’s doctrine of just war. I proceed now to that comparison.
I. The first of Langan’s elements is “a conception of war as punitive rather than defensive.”5 He offers the following from Augustine’s Contra Faustum to illustrate: “He whose freedom to do wrong is taken away suffers a useful form of restraint, since nothing is more unfortunate than the good fortune of sinners, who grow bold by not being punished—a penalty in itself—and whose evil will is strengthened by the enemy within.”6 Here, Augustine’s “punitive conception of war” could scarcely be clearer, yet his reasoning is also didactic insofar as he describes removing the freedom to do wrong as “useful” to sinners.7 Indeed, the logic of this first element closely follows that of Proverbs 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates their children, but the one who loves their children is careful to discipline them.”

Ilyin’s justification of coercive force is likewise punitive-didactic. Not as pithy as Augustine, much less Proverbs, he nevertheless argues that the purpose of physical compulsion is:
not to loosen the will but to guide its initiative in the right direction; not to damage or suppress clarity, but to prevent the outward rampage of blindness, paving the way for the discovery of the inner eye and, perhaps for its epiphany. Physical compulsion of course cannot by itself bring about clarity, but, for example, the isolation of the unbridled person, forcing him to cease the external manifesting of his evil inclinations and passions, encourages him to concentrate on his internal state in which his soul can and should find favorable circumstances to burn out and be transformed: for many people, being deprived of freedom of external fantasies is the first condition for the acquisition of inner freedom, that is, for spiritual catharsis, vision and repentance.8
Thus, for both Augustine and Ilyin, the justification of coercive force— including war—is grounded not in the defense of self nor even in the defense of an existing social order, but in the imposition and maintenance of a natural (meaning divinely-ordained) moral order. Consequently, for both Augustine and Ilyin, challenges to that order define evil.

II. Langan’s second element pertains to the idea of evil, though it serves primarily to distance the violence (that is, coercive force) that challenges moral order from the violence that establishes and maintains it. He describes this element as “an assessment of the evil of war in terms of the moral evil of certain attitudes and desires rather than in terms of damage to premoral interests and values or in terms of actions wrong in themselves or by reason of their consequences.”9 Again, Langan illustrates with a quote from Contra Faustum:
What is the evil in War? Is it the death of some who will soon die in any case, that others may live in peaceful subjection? This is mere cowardly dislike, not any religious feeling. The real evils in war are love of violence (nocendi cupiditas), revengeful cruelty (ulciscendi crudelitas), fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power (libido dominandi) and such like.10
By locating the evil of war in inner motivations for violence rather than in the act itself, Augustine is able to permit the same coercive acts in the enforcement of moral order that he would punish in threats to it. The result is the double standard: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. (“What is permissible for Jove, is not permitted to cattle.”)

Ilyin continues to follow Augustine’s logic. In this element, however, he hides the similarity of his argument behind a distinction without a difference. Whereas Augustine acknowledges “violence” as a commonality of both just and unjust war, Ilyin argues that, when done out of love,11 physical coercion—however painful—is categorically different from “violence” as such. Thus, he insists:
Against “violence” we should protest, it must be fought; in any case a person who has been subjected to violence is offended, oppressed and deserving of sympathy and help. ... To prove the “permissibility” or “legitimacy” of violence means to prove the “permissibility of the impermissible” or the “legitimacy of the illegitimate.”12
So crucial is it to Ilyin’s argument that his reader accept and adopt his terms that he continues, “whether effectively, spiritually and logically proven or not, to make such claims [i.e., that “violence” may be justified] immediately turns out to be emotionally unacceptable and vitally contentious: the wrong term splits the soul and obscures its clarity.”13

In order to spare his reader the unpleasantness of a cleft soul, Ilyin proposes “to reserve the term ‘violence’ for referring to all cases of reprehensible inducement coming from an evil soul or a spiteful direction, and to establish other terms to denote a non-objectionable inducement originating from a benevolent soul or compelling towards good.”14 For Ilyin, only unjustified violence can be “violence,” properly speaking; the paradoxical notion of justified violence, on the other hand, is better described as “mental compulsion,” “physical compulsion,” or “suppression.”15 As Ilyin would have it, then, what is permissible for Jove and what is not permitted to cattle are—conveniently—two fundamentally different things. It should be noted that, in his effort to force this distinction, he was no more convincing then than now. In an open response to On Resistance to Evil by Force entitled “The Nightmare of an Evil Good” (1926), Nikolai Berdyaev remarked, “The subtle distinctions [Ilyin] makes between violence and coercion are casuistry and sophistry of the lawyer.”16
Ilyin’s insistence that justified violence be called something other than “violence” represents one of only a very few of his original contributions to the Augustinian formulation of just war doctrine in On Resistance to Evil by Force. It is philosophically inconsequential, but the strategic purpose of this alteration is at least twofold. First, it obscures Ilyin’s debt to Augustine. Second, by dissociating what he calls “non-objectionable inducement” from violence, he further separates it from any discussion of war and thereby disguises his project of proposing an extra-canonical doctrine of just war.

III. Langan describes the third element of Augustine’s doctrine of just war as “a search for appropriate authorization, either divine or human, for the use of violence.”17 He cites the following from Contra Faustum:
A great deal depends on the causes for which men undertake wars, and on the authority they have for doing so: for the natural order which seeks the peace of mankind ordains that the monarch should have the power of undertaking war if he thinks it advisable, and that the soldiers should perform their military duties on behalf of the peace and safety of the community.18
Thus, Augustine looks to “natural order” as the source of authority for imposing and maintaining moral order by means of coercive force.

Of course, for Augustine, only such order as reflects the will of God is “natural.” Moreover, as the above quote implies, this natural order includes social and political hierarchies—God has ordained that monarchs give orders and that soldiers obey them. Consequently, as Langan notes, Augustine’s soldier is authorized to take part in hostilities even when his orders come from “an ungodly king” or involve an “unrighteous command,” and he is left innocent “because his position makes obedience a duty.”19

Ilyin’s search for appropriate authorization for the use of violence, like his distinction between violence and “non-objectionable inducement,” is terminologically obscured. He explains that not only does resistance to evil by force not constitute “violence,” but also that it would be wrong to think of such forceful resistance as “just.” Rather, he insists, it is a matter of obligation.

He writes:
the man who fights villains must see for himself, perceive and evaluate all the conditions of the struggle, understanding them with his human mind and making decisions with his human will; he must understand that he is forced to resort to these means precisely because he himself is not God, but only a limited yet devoted servant of God, and therefore he must perform this necessity with extreme human understanding and discretion. And then he will see that these unjust means are for him not simply “allowed,” and are certainly not “sanctified,” but are mandatory in all their unrighteousness.20
Effectively, Ilyin replaces the criterion of justification with obligation. In this way, he once again strives to distance his call to arms from Augustine’s just war theology through a manipulation of his terms. He rhetorically negates both the terms “violence” (and by extension, war) and “just” by replacing them with “inducement” and “mandatory.” Yet the purpose of this rhetorical sleight of hand is to obfuscate any basis for comparison between his argument and Augustine’s formulation of just war, which, as explained in the introduction, is not acknowledged in canonical Orthodox theology. However, not only is there ultimately no appreciable difference between Augustine’s “violence” and Ilyin’s “coercion,” but also, as I will show, Ilyin’s “unjust” (or “unrighteous”) is not in fact the corollary opposite to Augustine’s “just.” Thus, Ilyin does not actually negate Augustine’s second term, but merely introduces an additional (yet meaningless) distinction.

For Augustine, the significance of just war (that is, justified violence) is bound up with the idea of moral culpability (that is, sin) and salvation. When violence is justified, its commission does not constitute sin. Crucially, the “unjust means” to which Ilyin refers do not amount to sin either. Augustine’s obedient soldier is innocent by virtue of the justness of his actions, yet Ilyin’s sword bearer is likewise innocent despite the unjustness of his. In the same way that Augustine argues that violence may be justified in the maintenance of divinely instituted moral order, Ilyin argues that although acts of non-objectionable inducement may be unjust and unrighteous, they are nevertheless sometimes mandatory in the voluntary service of God. Thus, Ilyin’s use of “unjust” is not the corollary opposite of Augustine’s “just,” and in fact appears to be semantically empty. The difference between their two arguments lies in Ilyin’s terms, not his ideas.

IV. The fourth element of Augustine’s just war is “a divided epistemological stance that includes certainty with regard to the superiority of spiritual goods and uncertainty about the ultimate desirability of other events and experiences and their connection with the higher spiritual goods.”21 Citing once again from Contra Faustum, Langan adduces the following:
The patriarchs and prophets, then, have a kingdom in this world, to show that these kingdoms, too, are given and taken away by God: the apostles and martyrs had no kingdom here, to show the superior desirableness of the kingdom of heaven.22
Augustine has a particular reason for approaching the subject in this way. Like Ilyin, he is confronted with the Gospel account of the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, which he cannot directly contradict.

Indeed, the verses in Matthew 5:38–42, part of the famous Sermon on the Mount, appear very much to be Jesus’ admonition to non-resistance to evil wherein “evil” is plainly understood as coercive force:
You have heard that it was said, “Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.” But I tell you, do not resist an evil person. If anyone slaps you on the right cheek, turn to them the other cheek also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, hand over your coat as well. If anyone forces you to go one mile, go with them two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you.23
Thus, again, as the Roman tribune Marcellinus points out to Augustine in Letter 138, the words of Jesus—understood literally—are at odds with the practical needs of the empire. Augustine’s solution to this conundrum is to reframe non-resistance as a means of overcoming evil—as a form of resistance. He explains:
Evil is overcome by good in the evil man, and the man is set free, not from an exterior foreign evil, but from an interior, personal one, by which he is more grievously and ruinously laid waste than he would be by the inhumanity of any enemy from without. Therefore, he overcomes evil by good who suffers the loss of temporal goods with patience, in order to show how far these goods are to be despised for the sake of faith and justice.24
The “divided epistemological stance” in Augustine’s thinking is a kind of non-attachment to material good in this world (such as one’s possessions, and indeed, one’s own body) for the sake of the spiritual good of the next. In other words, the preservation of one's material possessions and physical safety does not justify killing (e.g., outside of war), but neither does it offer a valid reason not to fight in a just war. Moreover, Augustine instrumentalizes this non-attachment when he writes, “he overcomes evil by good who suffers the loss of temporal goods with patience” (emphasis added). By defining good and evil in such terms, on the one hand, Augustine asserts the sanctity of life over possessions; on the other, he also effectively removes any tangible criteria for internal rebellion from below.

Ilyin’s reasoning likewise includes a divided epistemological stance that asserts the superiority of spiritual goods over the physical. Crucially, however, whereas for Augustine the spiritual and the physical seem to be entirely separate, Ilyin uses this reasoning to imbue certain physical goods and experiences with transcendent value. For example, he writes:
The beginning of the spirit is the beginning of a substantive choice and a religious devotion. And this spiritual force of religious devotion, which has chosen the Divine and clings to Him, inspires a spiritual love in one’s attitude to everything: to God, to the Church, to the homeland, to the Tsar, to his people, to his material and personal altars, to his family, and to his neighbor.25
Thus, Ilyin uses the same divided epistemology (that is, the respective values of spiritual and material goods) so as to prescriptively reorder aspects of material life according to their spiritual value. For Ilyin, some material things also have superior spiritual value.

Indeed, Ilyin’s instrumentalization of Augustine’s “divided epistemological stance” is so flagrant, so cynical, and so central to the purpose of On Resistance to Evil by Force, that I permit myself the following lengthy quotation in order to illustrate this:
Such love rebuilds in the soul an entire worldview and the relations which pertain to all the value in the world. Due to this, all dimensions are now considered in a new and different way, and everything is henceforth determined by Divinity and His sanctifying presence. Thus the typical, religiously blind opinion believes that the useful is above the sacred, that a man is above a thing, and that many people are above one person; it is “convinced” that all men are “equal,” that every person has the right to life and that the last word always belongs to “humanity” ... However, one who embodies spiritual love sees and regards all of these things completely differently. For him, the sacred is always above the useful: earthly harm is not certain to be terrible and human benefit is not always attractive. He knows “things” that are higher than a person ... Spiritual love knows that people are not equal ... It also knows that every man must earn and justify his right to life, that there are people who are better off not having been born, and that there are others who are better off being killed than allowed to do evil (Matthew 18.6; Mark 9.42; Luke 17.1–2). Spiritual love ... does not measure the improvement of human life by the contentment of individual people or the happiness of the human mass ... Its vision has long revealed to it why illness may be better than health, submission better than power, poverty may be better than wealth. And it is the power of this vision that has strengthened many in the noble conviction that noble death is always better than shameful life, and that each person defines himself in the face of God precisely at the moment in which he voluntarily chooses death.26
Thus, once again, Ilyin follows the logic of Augustine’s argument. In this case, however, he deploys it not to juxtapose the spiritual and the material with a preference for the spiritual, but rather to imbue certain material things with spiritual value and thus incite a religious war over an earthly kingdom.

V. The fifth element of Augustine’s just war theology is identified as “a willingness to interpret evangelical norms in terms of inner attitudes rather than overt actions.”27 Langan takes this element, in which Augustine clearly references the Sermon on the Mount, almost verbatim from Contra Faustum:
If it is supposed that God could not enjoin warfare, because in after times it was said by the Lord Jesus Christ, “I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but if any one strike thee on the right cheek, turn to him the left also,” the answer is, that what is here required is not a bodily action, but an inward disposition.28
Langan recognizes that Augustine has spiritualized the command not to resist aggression. Yet he also claims that “we would be mistaken if we took this spiritualization as a mere evacuation of the demanding content of the Gospel or as a veil behind which Christians would be free to assert themselves or to pursue their own selfish desires.”29

Regardless of whether Augustine intended to create such a veil, or whether, as Langan argues, it is part of his “effort to seek our happiness in another life and another kingdom,”30 Ilyin, for his part, deploys this element of just war theology selfishly and cynically in his presentation of Augustine’s argument. Almost from the first page of On Resistance to Evil by Force, Ilyin sets about discrediting any literal reading of the Gospel call to non- resistance to evil with the same “willingness to interpret evangelical norms in terms of inner attitudes rather than overt actions” that is so explicit in Augustine. In fact, Ilyin claims that Tolstoy himself makes the same internal/external distinction—that neither Tolstoy nor his followers actually advocated internal non-resistance to evil. This must be the case, he insists, since any literal interpretation of the gospel verses in question would require “accepting evil: letting it in and giving it freedom, scope and power,”31 and, returning to the point a few pages later, he doubles down, “the non-resistor to evil is absorbed by it and becomes possessed.”32

What Tolstoy actually advocates, Ilyin concludes, is the complete internalization of one’s resistance. The “ ‘non-resistance,’ about which Tolstoy and his followers write and speak does not mean internal surrender to evil; on the contrary, it is a special kind of resistance, i.e., repudiation, condemnation, rejection, and opposition. Their ‘non-resistance’ means resistance and struggle, however, only by certain favored means.”33 With that, Ilyin resolves that not even Tolstoy advocates literal non-resistance to evil and proceeds to reframe (that is, internalize) the question of nonresistance as one of a “favored means” of resistance rather than a question of literal pacifism.

Ilyin not only internalizes resistance to evil, but also evil itself. He explains, “So, first of all, ‘evil,’ about the resistance to which we are speaking here, is an evil not external, but internal.”34 Thus, he continues:
Evil begins where the person begins, and moreover it is not in the human body in all its states and manifestations as such, but the human psychospiritual world. No external state of the human body in itself, no external “act” of the person in itself (i.e., taken and discussed separately, detached from the psychospiritual state concealed behind it or giving rise to it) can be either good or evil.35
On this point, Ilyin directly contradicts Tolstoy’s literal reading of the Sermon on the Mount. It is a necessary part of Ilyin’s attempt to force a distinction between violence as “reprehensible inducement” and those forms of compulsion and suppression which he does not consider objectionable. This distinction allows him to achieve the same double standard that Augustine creates with his appeal to divinely-instituted “natural order” (that is, the abovementioned Quod licet Jovi ...). Just as for Augustine, violence in the maintenance of natural order is justified, for Ilyin, physical “compulsion and suppression” carried out in the interest of “spirituality” do not constitute “violence.” Thus, for both, coercive force in the interest of the author’s favored religious worldview is divinely sanctioned, while coercive force against that same order is not.

The clearest articulation of Ilyin’s position comes at the end of the sixth chapter, where he explains:
It is not compulsion or suppression which are anti- spiritual and contrary to love, but vicious abuse, and in this a person is always wrong; in some sense, is mad, in some sense, is the realization of rage, and in some sense is guilty of having despised another’s spirituality, transforming them into a means for his desire, and this injustice remains whether or not his deeds bring moral good or moral harm to his victim ... Compulsion directed against the villain, and malicious violence, to whomever it is directed, are not the same, and their confusion is baseless, unjust, biased, and blind.36
Ilyin thus distinguishes between the necessary compulsion or suppression of a villain and the anti-spiritual (that is, evil) “vicious abuse” or “malicious violence.” He avoids reference to Augustine’s paradigm of justification in describing the perpetrator of such “anti-spiritual” violence, suggesting instead that the perpetrator is instead morally wrong. Yet significantly, both Augustine and Ilyin find real evil in the motivations behind the perpetrator’s actions.

Both Augustine and Ilyin conclude their lines of thinking—Augustine, that not all violence is unjustified, and Ilyin, that not all compulsion is violence—with the same justificatory resolution that physical coercion can have spiritual-didactic value (element I). According to Augustine:
When war is undertaken in obedience to God, who would rebuke, or humble, or crush the pride of man, it must be allowed to be a righteous war; for even the wars which arise from human passion cannot harm the eternal well-being of God, nor even hurt His saints; for in the trial of their patience, and the chastening of their spirit, and in bearing fatherly correction, they are rather benefited than injured.37
And, according to Ilyin:
Yes, physical suppression deprives a person of pleasure and causes suffering; but the true educator knows that love for the educated person should not in any way be expressed by bringing him pleasure and in cautiously protecting him from suffering. On the contrary, it is in suffering, especially when given to a person in a wise way, that the soul deepens, grows stronger and begins to truly see: and it is in the pleasures, especially when not observed wisely, that the soul surrenders to evil passions and becomes blind.38
In explaining that coercion may, under certain circumstances, be for the ultimate good of the coerced, Augustine and Ilyin both attempt to demonstrate the validity of their respective distinctions by reason of disparate effect.

Ilyin, however, is careful to distinguish between the dutiful and dispassionate imposition of suffering that leads to spiritual growth on the one hand, and any sadistic enjoyment of another’s pain on the other, writing:
Of course, a person who is roughly moved, beaten, bound, perhaps even imprisoned for a long time, experiences unpleasant, maybe agonizing hours and days; but this does not mean that he has been accosted by another’s anger, that he has become a subject of hatred and that all of this leads him to reciprocal resentment and the demise of his love. Quite the contrary, the troubles and sufferings that he endures could be inflicted upon him by a will which wishes him and others good, and can become for him the source of the greatest good in life.39
Yet once again, Ilyin arrives precisely where Augustine does in the latter’s pronouncement that “the real evils in war are love of violence, revengeful cruelty, fierce and implacable enmity, wild resistance, and the lust of power and such like.”40 As Langan explains, “what Augustine finds repellent in the state of war [that is, coercive violence] is its expression of human selfishness and of the disordered desires of human beings.”41 In other words, it is internal evil that he finds objectionable. Neither Augustine nor Ilyin leaves any room for revolutionary resistance to their respective visions of moral order. Certainly, one can see how Augustine’s explicit purpose of justifying the exercise of coercive force “by the good, in order to curb licentious passions by destroying those vices which should have been rooted out and suppressed by the rightful government”42 might appeal to Ilyin as the ROVS ideologue.

VI. The sixth element Langan describes as “an assumption of general social passivity and quiescence in the decisions and moral judgments of authority.”43 Additionally, in the concluding remarks of his article, Langan specifies that the third and sixth elements should be considered together, “since they both involve a denial of the active role of the responsible citizen in shaping defense policy and in making decisions about the use of force.”44 Thus, according to Langan, Augustine assumes that people will—or at least should—accept and obey moral imperatives from a superior authority, whether human or divine. Both Augustine and Ilyin incentivize this passivity by connecting obedience to salvation.

As discussed above in element III, by transferring responsibility for violence to higher powers, Augustine is able to find the soldier who carries out an unrighteous command innocent of sin “because his position makes obedience a duty.” Similarly, Ilyin determines that “resistance to evil by force and the sword is not a sin wherever it is objectively necessary, or, what is the same, where it turns out to be the only possible, or least unrighteous outcome.”45

On the surface, the element of a status or position with an inherent duty to obedience appears to be missing in Ilyin’s formulation. In fact, it is not. Whereas for Augustine, it is the soldier’s subordinate status in a divinely ordained natural order that requires his obedience to superior human authority, for Ilyin, it is the sword bearer’s own choice between ultimate good and evil—between God and Satan—that obligates him. As he explains, “good and evil in their essential content are determined through the presence or absence of precisely these two combined attributes: love and spiritualisation.”46 Moreover, he adds, “a person is spiritual insofar as he voluntarily and of his own accord turns to objective perfection, needing Him, looking for Him and loving Him, measuring life and assessing life’s content by the measure of His true divinity (truth, beauty, righteousness, love, heroism).”47 In other words, it is his voluntary status as an Orthodox Christian that obligates him. Ilyin thus instrumentalizes obedience in such a way as to reinforce the pre-revolutionary autocratic Orthodox worldview—or, as I have previously described it, to attempt to “unring the bell” of popular sovereignty.

It should come as no surprise that Ilyin does not explicitly subordinate his sword bearer to the monarch since, at the time of the publication of On Resistance to Evil by Force, there was none. Yet in laying out the only “loving and spiritualized” (or, in Augustinian terms, “naturally ordered”) course of action over the course of On Resistance to Evil by Force, Ilyin has effectively placed himself, rather than the tsar, between his “sword bearer” and God in this particular call to arms. Augustine’s soldier must obey his commander; Ilyin’s sword bearer must obey Ilyin.
The sword bearer’s choice of Good over Evil is thus no different from that of Augustine’s soldier to obey divinely-ordained natural order or to rebel against it. Ilyin’s sword bearer is not obligated by the nature of his position as a soldier, but rather obligated to soldiering by the nature of his commitment to love and spiritualization: that is, to the good. Moreover, just as Augustine’s soldier is sinless in his violence so long as he is obedient to his superiors, Ilyin’s sword bearer is sinless in his violence so long as he is spiritual, the measure of which, it seems, is a version of the familiar “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality.” Finally, albeit in somewhat subtler terms, Ilyin openly declares his attempt to unring the bell of popular sovereignty, writing, “such [spiritual] love rebuilds in the soul an entire worldview and the relations which pertain to all the value in the world.”48

VII. The seventh element in Langan’s analysis is an appeal to “specific New Testament texts to legitimate military service and participation in war.”49 It is thus closely related to the third element. However, whereas the third deals with the authorization of coercive force (that is, violence and war), the seventh is intended to relieve Christians from the apparent call to pacifism (that is, to “turn the other cheek,” as described in the Gospels of Matthew). To this end, Augustine refers to the words of John the Baptist to the soldiers in Luke 3:14,50 and cites Jesus’ favorable reference to the centurion in Matthew 8:5–13.51 Moreover, Augustine returns to this aspect of just war in his Letter 189 to Boniface (418 CE), declaring, “Do not imagine that no one can please God while he is engaged in military service.”52

Ilyin likewise appeals to “specific New Testament texts to legitimate military service and participation in war,”53 and although his choice of scriptural authority varies from Augustine’s, the difference does not demonstrate a departure from the Augustinian paradigm. Rather, it is merely a necessity of Ilyin’s rhetorical strategy. As explained above, whereas Augustine argues that violence is sometimes justified, Ilyin argues that “non-objectionable inducement” is sometimes an obligation of true Christian conviction. Thus, in Augustine’s choice of gospel verses, he seeks to reveal a John the Baptist and a Jesus positively disposed toward soldiers (and thus, presumably, not categorically opposed to military service), whereas Ilyin adduces verses meant to establish a category of people deserving of punishment. Ilyin thus explains:
Calling on us to love our enemies, Christ meant the personal enemies of a man himself (“your,” “you”), his own haters and persecutors, whom the offended, naturally, can choose to forgive or not to forgive. Christ never called on us to love the enemies of God, to bless those who hate and trample upon all that is Divine, to assist blasphemous seducers, to kindly sympathize with the obsessive molesters of souls, to be in awe of them and to possess a strong sentiment that nobody standing in opposition should interfere with their villainy
(Matthew 5.43–47; Luke 6.27–28).

The contrary is in fact true, both for such people and even for those incomparably less guilty. Christ also had fiery words of reproof (Matthew 11.21–24, 23; Mark 12.38–40; Luke 11.39–52, 13.32–35, 20.46–47, etc.) and the threat of severe retribution (Matthew 10.15, 12.9. 18.9. 34–35, 21.41, 22.7, 13, 24.51, 25.12, 30; Mark 8.38; Luke 19.27, 21.20–26; John 3.36), and the driving out of a scourge (Matthew 21.12; Mark 11.15; Luke 19.45; John 2.13–16) and impending eternal torments (Matthew 25.41, 46; John 5.29).

Therefore, a Christian who strives to be faithful to the word and spirit of his Teacher is not at all called to unnaturally force his soul to feel tenderness and affection towards the impenitent villain as such, and he cannot find in Christ’s commandments either a reason or a pretext for evading the resistance to villainy. He needs only to understand that the immediate, religiously faithful resistance to evildoers is in waging a battle against them, not as personal enemies, but as enemies of the cause of God on earth.54
Although they differ in the specific verses to which they appeal for authority, both Augustine and Ilyin are responding to the question of the individual soldier’s (rather than the ruler’s) culpability for military service and participation in war, and Ilyin appeals to scriptural authority with a barrage of citations handily exceeding Augustine’s few references (see n. 72, above).

VIII. The final element of Langan’s analysis of Augustine’s just war theology is “an analogical conception of peace.”55 For Augustine, the analogy consists of the relationship between peace in this world and peace in the next; for Ilyin, it is between peace with one’s personal enemies and peace with the enemies of God. For each of them, it is a question of a kind of peace, which is limited and must be distinguished from any totalizing, literal (as opposed to analogical) understanding (and expectation) of peace. Both Augustine and Ilyin use this analogical reasoning to arrive at a paradoxical reading of non-resistance to evil which rejects the pacifism described in the Sermon on the Mount and involves—whether justifying or necessitating—violent coercive force out of a duty to God and the state. Although Ilyin’s analogy is not precisely identical to Augustine’s, it is nevertheless very much an “analogical conception of peace,” which he, like Augustine, uses to undermine the gospel imperative to “turn the other cheek” in such a way as to exculpate the individual soldier who must exercise violence in the interests of the state.

For this element, Langan once again cites Augustine’s 418 CE Letter 189, in which the latter assures Boniface that one may indeed please God while engaged in military service. Nevertheless, according to Langan:
Augustine’s pastoral concern is not to urge Christians to join in fashioning a more just order here with a correspondingly better peace, except insofar as the republic to which they belong rightly worships the true God and so possesses true virtues. Rather, he wants to keep Christians moving on to the peace of the heavenly city and to prevent them from placing their felicity in this life.56
Yet as Langan also explains, for Augustine, “the peace of the heavenly city is attained not by a series of social experiments and approximations, but by the eschatological events of death, resurrection, and judgment.”57

For his part, Ilyin is not primarily concerned with a distinction between worldly happiness and the “peace of the heavenly city,” but rather between peaceful relations with one’s personal enemies and peace with “the enemies of God.” Thus, Ilyin’s ultimate aim diverges significantly from Augustine’s (as interpreted by Langan). Unlike Augustine, Ilyin is very much urging “Christians to join in fashioning a more just order here with a correspondingly better peace”58 through coercive force. In other words, whereas Augustine’s formulation of just war could be interpreted as holy war, Ilyin is unambiguously advocating holy war. It should be observed, moreover, that this very aspect of just war is what inspires Ilyin’s choice of title for On Resistance to Evil by Force. Recognizing—as did Augustine and many others before and since—that a Christian call to war must be reconciled with the words of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, Ilyin confronts the problem head-on in his argument:
It is in this connection that we should also understand the Gospel’s words “do not resist evil” (Matthew 5.39). The rule contained within them is clearly explained in the following way: in the sense of an affectionate deferring of personal grievances, as well as the generous giving up of personal property, and individual services. To interpret this call to gentleness and generosity in personal matters as a call to the inactive contemplation of violations and injustices, or the subjugation to evildoers in matters of righteousness and spirit, would be unthinkable and unnatural ... The teaching of the Apostles and Fathers of the Church, of course, advanced a completely different understanding. “God’s servants” need a sword and “do not wear it in vain” (Romans 13.4); they are a threat to the villains. And it was in the spirit of this understanding that St. Feodosy Pechorsky said: “live in peace not only with your friends, but also with your enemies; but only with your personal enemies, and not the enemies of God.”59
Thus, the analogical conception of peace in Ilyin’s thinking primarily serves to identify objects of legitimate violence, despite his protestations that thinking in such terms splits the soul.

In Augustine’s thinking, on the other hand, the analogical conception of peace primarily serves to explain why violence must exist, generally—it is a theodicy that attempts to explain why one sometimes finds oneself on the receiving end of acts of violence—and how it is that internal non-resistance in fact works as a kind of resistance. For this, Langan cites Book IV of Augustine’s City of God. He notes how, after praising the rule of good and godly men, Augustine explains that:
the dominion of bad men is hurtful chiefly to themselves who rule, for they destroy their own souls by greater license in wickedness, while those who are put under them in service are not hurt except by their own iniquity. For to the just all the evils imposed on them by unjust rulers are not the punishment of crime, but the test of virtue.60
Remarking on Augustine’s theodicy, Langan concedes that “it would be hard to imagine a line of thought which, while affirming the existence and the extent of injustices in society, does more to cut the nerve of revolutionary change.”61

In large part, then, the difference between Ilyin and Augustine over the question of “resistance to evil” comes down to Ilyin’s flair for the dramatic. Both agree that turning the other cheek and surrendering—willingly—the shirt off one’s back builds a sort of Christian character. Furthermore, they both agree that the legitimate exception to such non-resistance pertains to the enforcement of a moral order in which “the republic to which they belong rightly worships the true God and so possesses true virtues.”62 The only substantive difference between them is soteriological (that is, regarding salvation): whereas Augustine stresses the redemptive value of suffering in this life, Ilyin stresses the Christian “obligation” to fight the “enemies of God.” Once again, Ilyin blatantly intends the more cynical and self-serving of the possible readings of Augustine, which Langan is at pains to distinguish from what he believes to be Augustine’s true intention.
Non-Combatant Immunity and Conscientious Objection

After the eighth and final element, Langan adds that Augustine’s theology of just war “does not include non-combatant immunity and conscientious objection.”63 His concluding observation has particular bearing on the comparison of Augustine’s and Ilyin’s arguments: it further demonstrates the extent to which they are, in fact, the same. Beginning with conscientious objection, both Augustine and Ilyin remove its possibility by forcing the would-be combatant to choose between good and evil rather than combat and non-combat. Augustine’s soldier has the choice to act in accordance with the divinely-instituted natural order (that is, to obey his superiors) or not. If he chooses rebellion, however, he is morally culpable—he is guilty of sin. Likewise, Ilyin’s sword bearer may fail to (voluntarily) choose “spirituality and love” (that is, the good). Yet in so doing, he is no less guilty of choosing evil—if only tacitly. As I have previously remarked, I believe this feature of their shared argument to be crucial to understanding both the historical purpose and modern appeal of Ilyin’s On Resistance to Evil by Force.

Langan’s other observation is about noncombatant immunity, which concerns the ethics of conduct once battle has begun and is thus an aspect of right or justice in war (ius in bello). Significantly, he notes, “Augustine presented no clear-cut argument for the protection of the innocent, especially for the civilian innocent or noncombatant, in time of war.”64 Langan offers four rather generous readings (that is, possible theological explanations) for this absence in Augustine’s theology.65 However, I propose that this lack of an articulated position on noncombatant immunity is inextricably linked to the impossibility of conscientious objection in Augustine’s and Ilyin’s shared framework. In their arguments, Augustine and Ilyin both stage an inescapable choice between ontic good and evil. Within this strict dichotomy, there may be noncombatants in the strictest sense, but there can be no innocent bystanders. Even noncombatants must choose sides. The failure to choose the good (whether in fighting or praying), amounts to siding with evil. Thus, for the same reason that there can be no conscientious objection to the struggle between good and evil, there can also be no true noncombatant in what amounts to spiritual warfare.
Langan does not discuss spiritual warfare, specifically, but he does note that Augustine draws a parallel between prayer and warfare in the preservation of order: “Thus some fight for you against invisible enemies by prayer, while you strive for them against visible barbarians by fighting.”66 According to this logic, I suggest, there can be no absolute noncombatants. Augustine expects the spiritual (moral) support of noncombatants in his analogical conception of peace (see element VIII). As Langan further notes, “Augustine reminds Boniface that war is waged for the sake of peace and that he is to wage war as a peacemaker. Violence is appropriate in dealing with rebels who reject peace. War is ‘the result of necessity,’ and therefore ‘let it be necessity, not choice, that kills your warring enemy.’”67 Thus, not only does Augustine effectively frame evil as the rejection of peace—the rejection of the imposition of divinely-instituted natural order—but he also shares Ilyin’s framework of “necessity.”

Unsurprisingly, Ilyin handles the problem of noncombatants in much the same way. From the following, it is obvious that noncombatants are acceptable collateral damage especially when they are in any way spiritually opposed to compulsion. That is, outward defiance serves as evidence of inward evil in combatants and noncombatants alike. He writes:
The lower the general spiritual quality of the compelled (e.g., the mental underdevelopment or moral stupidity of a person, his obscurity, ignorance, the frenzy of crowds, one’s upbringing in the religion of cruelty and hatred, his weak legal awareness or patriotic faith in the country), the stronger the passions of a person (e.g., cases of insanity, mass psychosis) or his evil will (e.g., the ferocity of a villain), the greater the likelihood that sooner or later a critical moment may come in which all psychospiritual means are exhausted. Finally, for the more mentally helpless (e.g., the deaf and mute, the foreigner who does not speak the language, one who is deprived of gifts of speech), or the spiritually unarmed (e.g., cases of pedagogical inexperience, the unprincipled leader, a government’s powerlessness in the absence of public support, integrity, or an honest press), it is more difficult to wage a struggle with purely spiritual means.68
Thus, finally, despite Ilyin’s sustained efforts to distinguish what he presents as the false idea of just war from unjust but mandatory compulsion and suppression, he cannot help but elaborate the various circumstances in which the use of coercive force—against both combatants and noncombatants—is justified.

Summary of the Comparison

The careful comparison of Ilyin’s argument in On Resistance to Evil by Force to Augustine’s doctrine of just war reveals that although Ilyin seems to begin On Resistance to Evil by Force as a polemic against Leo Tolstoy’s pacifist teaching, he ends up justifying acts of coercive force. Tolstoy is Ilyin's foil, not his interlocutor. Ilyin has worked backwards when compared to Augustine, but he ultimately mounts the same argument. By the end of the text, there can be no mistake that Ilyin is very much concerned with “just war,” as he no longer limits his discussion to “resistance to evil by force,” but refers time and again to “resistance to evil by force and the sword.”

Both Augustine and Ilyin are concerned with the justification of coercive force (that is, violence) in war. However, their respective positions require them to approach the problem of just war from different perspectives. Augustine was an eminent bishop theologian of the Roman Empire, which had recently adopted Christianity as its official religion. Ilyin was a right– Hegelian philosopher and publicist who became an ideologue for ROVS and its supporters. To be sure, there is no reason not to think of Ilyin and Augustine both as ideologues—certainly with regard to just war. However, Augustine’s purpose was to authorize the Roman state and exculpate individual soldiers in the practice of war, whereas Ilyin’s purpose was to deauthorize the Soviet state and obligate (rather than authorize) individual soldiers (since he could not directly authorize the White cause as such without the absolute authority of an autocratic tsar).

Any difference between their arguments amounts to a sophistical distinction without a difference between violence and coercion (as Berdyaev noted in “The Nightmare of an Evil Good”) and between justification and obligation, which, as I have shown, is no different than Augustine’s own reasoning when it is at all consequential. It is the location of this justification/obligation of coercive force in any combatant or noncombatant resistance to the imposition of divine order in both Augustine and Ilyin that brings us to the discussion of holy war.
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