Non-Resistance to Evil by Force

Tolstoy identifies non-resistance to evil as one of the five core commandments of the Sermon on the Mount — the commandment that the institutional Church has most systematically suppressed. In its place, the Church has blessed armies, endorsed capital punishment, and provided theological cover for every form of state violence. Tolstoy reads this suppression not as an innocent mistake but as a deliberate accommodation: the Church needed state power to survive, and state power needs violence, so the teaching had to go. But the teaching, he insists, is not optional or metaphorical — it is the heart of the matter.

The ordinary objection to non-resistance is practical: if you do not resist evildoers by force, they will win. Tolstoy's response is that this objection assumes violence is an effective means of eliminating evil — which it is not. Violence produces counter-violence; coercion produces resentment; punishment produces fear but not the change of heart that alone can make evil cease. The history of all states and armies confirms that violence at best shifts the configuration of power without reducing the total quantum of suffering. The only thing that has ever actually changed human beings is love — the recognition of another's humanity.

The political consequences of Tolstoy's argument, developed most fully in his correspondence with Gandhi, were revolutionary. If individuals refuse en masse to participate in state violence — refuse military service, refuse to serve as police or prison guards, refuse to pay taxes for wars — the machinery of state coercion collapses. This is not a fantasy but a description of the one form of power that concentrated violence cannot overcome: the non-violent resistance of people who no longer fear punishment more than they fear moral compromise. Gandhi read this argument in 1894 and spent the rest of his life testing it. The test, on a large scale, confirmed it.

The phrase "non-resistance to evil by force" (неделание злом — not doing evil with evil) appears throughout The Kingdom of God and was derived by Tolstoy from his close study of Matthew 5:39. His correspondence with Gandhi (1909–10), shortly before his death, forms a short but significant document in the history of non-violent thought.