The Final Answer
Toward a Christian Anthropology of Violence
Introduction: Responsum Ultimum
Violence is not the only answer — but it is the final answer. In every legal system, institutional policy, and moral boundary, the specter of violence stands as the enforcement of last resort. Christianity does not erase violence — it transmogrifies it through the Crucifixion, where violence becomes the instrument not of domination, but of redemption. Christ does not avoid the violence of the world — He interiorizes it, absorbs it, transfigures, transfinalizes and triumphs through it, opening a path to divine peace through rather than around the Cross.
I. The Presence of Violence Beneath Every Peace
“One must beware of confounding peace with weakness, or tolerance with indifference.” — René Guénon
“The sword of light is sheathed in love — but the blade remains.” — Rosicrucian motto
To say that violence is final is not to glorify it, but to expose its ubiquity. Every pink slip you receive could be a bullet in your head. Behind every removal is the possibility of resistance. Behind resistance, the ever-latent presence of men with guns armed to take your life. Even in democratic or therapeutic settings, authority is ultimately enforced by the possibility of force.
Consider a psychologist fired from his practice (like me!) If he refuses to leave his office — citing a desire to simply serve his clients — polite HR protocols give way to security intervention, and security, if resisted, gives way to the police. What begins as a bureaucratic gesture ends with the possibility of bodily harm or imprisonment. In this way, every policy is backed by a body — and every body is vulnerable to violence — and all violence, in the end, can end in death. It is a simple extrapolation. (I promise — I never went that far in my own professional capacity!)
As Simone Weil observed, force turns a person into a thing. But in the world as it is, force also prevents certain evils. This is the paradox. Violence is not the preferred answer, but it is the final one when all else breaks down.
“The body is the guarantor of all law.”
II. Not the Only Answer, But the Final One
“The hand that heals can also unmake the world.” — Alchemical motto
“For those I love, I will do horrible things.” — Anon.
Philosophy delays violence. Psychology reframes it. Theology reinterprets it. But none of them removes it. If my wife or child is being hurt, and words, prayers, and diplomacy fail, as a man, I must act. And that action, if it rises to the defense of another, may take the form of violence. For me, it has, many times.
This is not an invitation to cruelty. It is a recognition of the edge of discourse. Beyond rhetoric, there is flesh. Beyond flesh, blood. The finality of violence is its binding upon the body — it does not ask permission to be real. It simply is. The man who defends his beloved is not abandoning reason; he is fulfilling it with action. Authentic manhood is violent by nature and a man should be violent — though he may never commit a violent act in his life: It is better to be a warrior in a garden than a gardener in war. Legitimate violence must be grounded.
“Its force is entire if it be converted into earth.” — The Emerald Tablets
But this personal necessity of violence reflects a deeper truth embedded in civilization itself. Girardian theory reveals that violence lies at the root of all social orders. Ritual sacrifice, scapegoating, and mimetic rivalry all form the bedrock of civilization. The mythologies of peace are built atop altars of collective violence. The structures we rely on — courts, laws, customs, economies — are held together not only by consent, but by the latent threat of force. Behind every bureaucratic process stands the silent silhouette of enforcement. The aforesaid HR department runs by violence — it is violence — internally and externalizing outward: HR wants you to “go postal.”
And yet Girard sees in Christ the unmasking of this structure: Christ is the innocent victim who exposes the violent machinery beneath inauthentic religion and law not rooted in God.
“The victim reveals the truth of the system.” — René Girard
“The angel has a sword, though he prefers the chalice.” — Anon.
III. The Christ-Event as the Transfiguration of Violence — The Hallowing Alchemy of Power & Force
“There are only a few true martyrs. In the religious sense. Throughout history, their number can be counted on the fingers of one hand.” — Mademoiselle (Martyrs, 2008)
“Love is the crucified God.” —St. Isaac the Syrian
Christ’s Passion is not passive resignation. It is a sacred confrontation. He does not run from the cross; He ascends it. In this ascent, violence does not disappear — it is transmuted. The nails do not vanish — they deepen. The spear does not melt — it furthers. The blood does not coagulate — it flames to a world-engulfing inundation. All of it, through the Logos, becomes a new ontology: Violence emptied of hatred, pain transformed into offering, death transfigured into Life. Old structures are destroyed, religion is reauthenticated and law is re-rooted into the Godhead.
“God allowed Himself to be conquered by death so that death would be conquered by God.” —St. Ephrem the Syrian
“He descended into Hell, not with sword, but with wounds.” This is the paradox: Christ fights not against violence, but through it, as the Universal Oblation. He breaks its spell by taking it upon Himself. In this way, He enacts what St. Maximus the Confessor calls a “cosmic recapitulation” — a folding of all reality into the salvific Logos, in all-purifying Light. The Cross is not merely an execution device — it is the Blood-filled “Tree of Life for those who grasp it with both hands” (Pseudo-Macarius.) It is a superheated alchemical furnace, in which violence is sublimated into charity, and hate into intercession. The Crucifixion does not erase violence. It fulfills it — overfills it — and then opens it into a higher register. The Sacred Heart is a fist.
“Thinkest thou that I cannot now pray to my Father, and he shall presently give me more than twelve legions of angels?” — Matthew 26:53
There is an interesting statement misattributed to Jean Rostand and misanthropic existentialist of various stripes: “Kill one man, you are a murderer; kill a million, you are a conqueror; kill everyone (or everything) and you are a god.” We might imagine a final post-necrocene phrase: “Kill God … and You are God.” Only Christ as the supreme Deity can let Himself become undignified and un-deified through the violence of the Cross: From the Incarnation of Deity; to the Dis-Incarnation of the Cross; to the Super-Kenosis and Self-de-Theosis of the Harrowing of Hell; to the resurrective re-Theosis; and to the final ascensional Henosis back into the Godhead … Christ moves in power, authority, respect — and violence.
“The day of vindication and the year of favor converge in the Paschal Mystery, in the dead and Risen Christ. This is the vengeance of God: He Himself suffers for us, in the Person of His Son.” — Pope Benedict XVI
IV. The Martyr as a Minister of Violence — Messianic Mimesis
“Martyrs are exceptional beings. They survive pain, total deprivation. They bear all the sins of the Earth. They transcend themselves … they give up everything. They become nothing. They are transfigured.” — Mademoiselle (Martyrs, 2008)
“Christians do not escape suffering. They pass through it to get to the resurrection.” —St. John Chrysostom
To “turn the other cheek” is not submission — it is an assertion, a demand, of spiritual dignity. Christ does not say, “Let them strike you” out of some misplaced masochism as Christ’s detractors endlessly rail — but to impossibly confound the expectations of power. In doing so, He exposes the impotence of violence before the Divine Image. The martyr is not one who is simply killed. The martyr is one who goes through death without becoming its instrument. He is a mimetic Christ.
In the words of St. Ignatius of Antioch, “Let me be ground by the teeth of beasts, that I may become the pure bread of Christ.” Martyrdom is not surrender. It is sacrificial militancy. It is the absolute refusal to mirror evil. It is the triumph of the Lamb over the sword — the Lamb becoming a sword — a triumph by a force more than force — by the impossibility of endurance. In the language of the alchemical poets: “I have become the gold of God through the torture of the metals.”
“The saints are those who pass through fire without becoming ash.”
V. Hell as Violence Unredeemed — The Base-Metal Un-Alchemized
“The souls in Hell do not wish to be freed from their pain, for their very will is in hatred of God.” — St. Catherine of Genoa
Hell is not where violence ends. It is where it condenses — like a collapsed star. Rudolf Steiner did not believe in a perpetual Hell, but did believe in hell-like states akin to a kind of “crystallized violence in soul-form” (a negative “kamaloka”), where karmic debts remain unless the will is sacerdotally ingrafted into the Christ-Impulse.
The souls in Hell do not suffer because God is violent, but because they have refused the violent grace of the Cross. Moreover, Christ’s descent into Hell is the ultimate invasion of violence — not merely to conquer, but to liberate. But liberation must be freely received. To reject the Crucified is to embrace one’s own sin, and thus to become violence incarnate. Purgatory — what the medievalists call the “Good Hell — is a redemptive violence — an exploding star. We must let our wills be broken — we must embrace the Broken Christ entirely — and let His Most Precious Blood douse and fill our hells and clog and break and burst their engines of torture and machineries of second death.
In the mystic language of Julian of Norwich: “Sin is behovely, but all shall be well.” That is, gross, meaningless violence has its moment. But only the violence that is gathered into God shall be glorified and engulfed in luminescence — inundated with Grace, with God Himself. To pass beyond violence, one must enter it, violently, with the Crucified.
“Hell is the soul without the Light of the Cross.”
Conclusion: Violent Lives Ending Violently — The Revelation of the Theophanocene
“Light from Light, True God from True God … ”
“Whether left-wing or right-wing, I am pro-violence.” — Yukio Mishima (attributed)
Christianity does not deny violence — it passes through it. The final answer is still violence — but violence baptized into an eternal radiance. The old world’s answer is control and coercion — the inevitable bullet in the head; Christ’s is discipline and transfiguration — the sinless sacrality in the heart. To live as a Christian is not to be above violence. It is to live in it. To commit violence to the passions. To carry and buckle and carry again the crimson-saturated cross (Christ’s Shoulder-Wound is said to be His worst Agony.) To undergo physical mortification and spiritual ego death. To kill the self in the realest way imaginable. To suffer the final violence of death —(the unnatural rending of soul and body as inheritor of original sin) — with the dignity of the Creator of Life (Who gave His Life) and enter into Everlasting Life … into the all-annihilatory (yet personally theotic) Light of His Face. To the perpetual violence of the Deific Fire that divinely burns but does not consume.
“He is the Creator of worlds … the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world … the Lion of Judah Who shall lay waste to all worlds ... in Him is our peace.”