By Fr. Emmanuel Charles McCarthy
November 24, 2025
Leo Tolstoy, one of humanity's authentic literary geniuses, wrote the masterpiece on Gospel Nonviolence, The Kingdom of God is Within you, which upon reading it was the critical and final step in Gandhi's conversion to nonviolence, as well as in the conversions of untold numbers of other human beings to explicitly Gospel Nonviolence. Tolstoy was also a seasoned beekeeper. Throughout his writings he employs bees and their ways to illuminate a deeper understanding of or solution to seemingly intractable human spiritual and practical problems. For example, below he addresses one of the most insoluble and destructive of the conundrums facing humanity
"Men in their present condition are like a swarm of bees hanging in a cluster to a branch. The position of the bees on the branch is temporary, and must inevitably be changed. They must start off and find themselves a habitation. Each of the bees knows this, and desires to change her own and the others' position, but no one of them can do it till the rest of them do it. They cannot all start off at once, because one hangs on to another and hinders her from separating from the swarm, and therefore they all continue to hang there. It would seem that the bees could never escape from their position, just as it seems that worldly men, caught in the state's conception of life, can never escape it. And there would be no escape for the bees, if each of them were not a living, separate creature, endowed with wings of its own. Similarly there would be no escape for men, if each were not a living being endowed with the faculty of entering into the Gospel's conception of life.
If every bee who could fly, did not try to fly, the others, too, would never be stirred, and the swarm would never change its position. And if the man who has mastered Jesus' conception of life would not, without waiting for other people, begin to live in accordance with this conception, mankind would never change its position. But only let one bee spread her wings, start off, and fly away, and after her another, and another would follow, and the clinging, inert cluster would become a freely flying swarm of bees. Just in the same way, only let one man look at life as the Gospel teaches him to look at it, and after him let another and another do the same, and the destructive enchanted circle of existence in the state conception of life, from which there seemed no escape, will be broken through.
But men think that to set all men free by this means is too slow a process, that they must find some other means by which they could set all men free at once. It is just as though the bees who want to start and fly away should consider it too long a process to wait for all the swarm to start one by one; and should think they ought to find some means by which it would not be necessary for every separate bee to spread her wings and fly off, but by which the whole swarm could fly at once where it wanted to. But that is not possible; till a first, then a second, then a third then a hundredth bee spreads her wings and flies off of her own accord, the swarm will not fly off and will not begin its new life. Till every individual man makes Jesus' conception of life his own, and begins to live in accord with it, there can be no solution of the problem of violence and war, enmity and deception in human life, and no establishment of a new form of life."
Question:
Have you personally taken one or many steps away from the state's conception of existence with its use and justification of violence and war, enmity and deception? Have you taken one step or many steps away your violent religion's spiritual and moral endorsement of, support of and fostering of the state's conception of existence?
Has the step or have the steps you have taken away from the state's conception of existence only been mental and intellectual or did they have physical and incarnational components to them?
Does anyone outside yourself-even if your steps have been only mental or intellectual- know of your steps away from the swarm of ceaseless violence that is the condition of the state, which follows automatically from the state's conception of existence