Lanza del Vasto's Structural Ethics on War and Peace

Abstract

Motivated by the alarming recurrence of wars, Lanza delVasto became Gandhi’s disciple. From a social interpretation of biblicaltexts (Genesis 3 and 4, Apocalypse 8 and 13, Mt 5) he derived a characterization of non-violence as the conversion from not only personal negative drives, but also from the influences of negative social institutions and the entire civilization. His intellectual categories comprise an ethical conception of four essentially different models of development. This pluralism subsists inasmuch as the representatives of each model do not search the destruction or the suppression of the adversaries, but reconciliation through non-violent means.