There is a dangerous romance at the heart of certain revolutionary ideologies: a conviction that violence is not only inevitable, but redemptive. Across both sacred and secular registers, the willingness to destroy has often been cast as the ultimate proof of moral seriousness. From Robespierre’s guillotine to the slogans of contemporary street uprisings, violence, baptized in the name of justice, is often framed as the harbinger of a new world. However, this is a theological mistake and a political dead end. As William Cavanaugh, Hannah Arendt, and Isaiah Berlin each argue in their idioms, violence is not a vision. It is rather what emerges when vision collapses, when the political imagination grows impatient, or intoxicated, and mistakes sacrifice for transformation.

In his seminal work, Theopolitical Imagination, William Cavanaugh traces how modern states, although formally secular, are animated by deeply theological myths of redemptive sacrifice. The state’s power to compel death in war, he argues, is sustained by a quasi-liturgical structure: rituals of memory, symbolic martyrdom, and sacred borders. The citizen-soldier does not merely die for policy, but for the imagined community––the sovereign abstraction of nationhood. Cavanaugh warns that when revolutionary politics internalize this logic of sacrifice, violence becomes its justification. Bloodshed ceases to be regrettable and instead becomes a sacred act. The revolutionary subject is then bound to a mimetic logic: to prove commitment, one must suffer; to purify the future, one must destroy the present. Nevertheless, Cavanaugh is not merely condemning the state; he is contrasting its logic with a different theological inheritance, one rooted in the anti-sacrificial tradition of the early church. For the first Christian martyrs, the refusal to kill was the very sign of mortal and divine witness (martyria). True transformation comes not through ritualized bloodshed, but through the radical break of mercy, forgiveness, and endurance. To kill for the good is to betray it.

Hannah Arendt, writing from a different tradition, reaches a parallel conclusion. In “On Violence,” she distinguishes violence from power. Power for Arendt arises from collective action and mutual recognition; it is plural and discursive. Violence, by contrast, is instrumental: it destroys rather than persuades. It is the means of those who have lost the capacity to act with others. Crucially, Arendt notes that revolutions that begin in the name of freedom often end in tyranny when violence becomes the organizing principle. The glorification of force—the cult of breaking and burning—eviscerates the political space itself. “Where violence rules absolutely,” she writes, “power is absent.” The Left’s temptation to romanticize violence as spontaneous, pure, or morally unambiguous can lead to the annihilation of the very world it hoped to redeem.

Isaiah Berlin deepens this critique by turning to the metaphysics of politics. His famous defense of value pluralism challenges the utopian assumption that all goods are compatible, or that history can be bent into perfect harmony. For Berlin, political maturity means accepting the tragic: the recognition that liberty may conflict with equality, that justice may come at the expense of mercy. When utopian ideologies deny this truth, they have the tendency to become totalizing in nature. The desire for unity metastasizes into coercion. It is a short step from imagining a purified world to the elimination of all who would obstruct such a vision. In this sense, the absolutist spirit, whether on the Left or Right, makes violence necessary, not incidental.

The result is a political theology of apocalypse. Within segments of the contemporary Left, one finds a troubling aestheticization of collapse: a delight in the imagery of burning cities, guillotines, and overturned institutions. This is not to deny that the rage is absolute or that the injustices are grievous. Regardless, the nihilistic fervor for destruction, often cloaked in the language of justice, betrays a failure to imagine durable alternatives. There is little interest in the slow, painful work of institutional reform, persuasion, or compromise. Instead, the symbolic immediacy of violence replaces institution-building with spectacle. In such moments, the revolutionary becomes indistinguishable from the sacrificial priest, demanding blood to sanctify a future he cannot describe.

Against this backdrop, we must recover a politics of limits, mercy, and imagination. It is not a politics of passivity, but one of building. It begins with the refusal to treat human beings as expendable in the name of abstract ends. It insists that means matter, that the dignity of political life lies not in purity but in patience. Here, Arendt’s vision of natality—the capacity to begin anew—offers a corrective: politics must be grounded in the possibility of dialogue, not the certainty of domination. Berlin, too, offers counsel: to choose in conditions of plurality is not to betray justice, but to honor the irreducibility of the human condition. Moreover, Cavanaugh reminds us that a truly redemptive politics must break the cycle of sacrifice, not perpetuate it. Violence may clear the ground, but it cannot plant. It may shatter illusions, but it cannot sustain meaning. The world we inherit is fragile and fractured, yet it remains ours to shape and mold.

Violence is not vision. If we seek the good, we must construct it—brick by brick, not corpse by corpse.