Conscience opposes violence

Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-04-01
Features: In the classic work Conscience Against Violence, the master of biography Stefan Zweig, with his powerful pen, vividly and authentically recreates a historical fragment of the sixteenth-century Reformation movement. The renowned reformer Calvin, with unwavering faith and indomitable spirit, eradicated the influence of Catholic authoritarian rule in Geneva but established the autocracy of Protestant theocracy. Calvin and his followers, in order to impose the only order—the order of Calvin—and to uphold the only belief—the Calvinism—to suppress all beliefs and exclude all dissenters, led to the execution of theologians and scientists like Servetus. In such a severe and cruel situation, the scholar Castellio, who fought for the freedom and justice of humanity, bravely stood up and engaged in a struggle akin to a "swallow fighting an elephant": On one side was Castellio, an insignificant, negligible figure, a refugee without the right to reside or hold citizenship in a foreign land, a double exile, with no support except his own shadow, and nothing but the inalienable wealth of an unyielding conscience. On the other side was Calvin, a renowned and law-defining figure, the spiritual leader whose doctrines had been enshrined as law in Geneva, a theocratic dictator, supported not only by all administrative organs and their powers but also by the rulers of the city-states of the Swiss Confederation, backed by the church and clergy, and surrounded by a webbed group of followers. This was a life-and-death struggle between tolerance and cruelty, freedom and oppression, humanity and religious fanaticism, individuality and rigid dogma, and conscience and violence, with forces as imbalanced as a mosquito against an elephant. In this brutal struggle, Castellio, worn down by suffering and exhaustion, died with his aspirations unfulfilled, while violence achieved a temporary victory. However, history mercilessly proves that the ideas for which Castellio lived and died, like all truly humane ideas, transcend all worldly and temporary violence. His ideas and character will endure in the annals of human spirit, and Zweig's classic Conscience Against Violence will transcend time and space, winning the hearts of sincere readers across generations and inspiring the conscience of future generations.