Julius Kovesi
My theme is not Marx. I intend to outline the conceptual framework of a large variety of attitudes towards Marx, which in spite of their variety share a common set of characteristics. These attitudes towards Marx have acquired over the last hundred years just as much historical reality as the life, activities, and writings of Marx himself, and thus deserve to be subject matter in the history of ideas just as much as the analysis of Marx’s writings themselves. My thesis is that if we want to understand the religious dimensions and aspects of Marx’s achievement we have to take into account the peculiar nature of these attitudes towards Marx as much as, and perhaps even more than, Marx’s writings themselves. The common characteristic of the attitudes I am considering is an ecclesiastical framework, and the varieties are varieties, reforms, or rejections of an ecclesiastical framework. I have to extend my observations to a kind of biblical criticism (perhaps the kind which used to be called ‘higher criticism’) as well, because once one is within an ecclesiastical framework then the study of Marx takes on the form of this criticism. Even the rejection of the ecclesia takes the form of an appeal to the bible.
I have to distinguish the attitude of mind of those who move within an ecclesiastical framework from others that offer superficial similarities. The study of great philosophers and thinkers is done not just by detached observers, but in order to find in them insights and ideas that we can accept as true, and to assimilate their ideas into our further thinking about the world and ourselves. Sometimes schools come into being where followers of a great master not only argue about the correct interpretations of his ideas but develop them further, perhaps even arguing for an orthodox or unorthodox interpretation and development of his thought. One could have such a relationship even towards Marx’s ideas and yet not move within an ecclesiastical framework. Nor would an emotional devotion to a master, a willingness to propagate his ideas, or a desire to spread his teaching suffice to qualify as a distinctive feature of moving within an ecclesiastical framework. Unfortunately, many alleged similarities between Christians and communists have been these subjective ones of dedication and devotion. These are symptoms but do not adequately distinguish the conceptual framework I wish to outline.
I shall indicate first that there is a special reason why those who move within an ecclesiastical framework are dedicated and committed to it, and secondly, I shall point to the paradoxical nature of their acceptance of the teaching that originally gave rise to the ecclesia. People move within an ecclesiastical framework it they understand its doctrine as applicable not only to themselves but also to all others. The only teachings that can give rise to ecclesiastical movements are those that can be interpreted as an all-inclusive universal drama within which people can understand themselves as engaged participants.[1] This is why their commitment should not be described merely as a devotion to an idea: rather, they act out the roles of ideas when they, as it were, personify (individually or collectively) roles in a world drama and regard others as personifications (individually or collectively) of other parts in the drama. Commitment, zeal, and action follow from these kinds of dramatized roles rather than as the result of an emotional attachment to an idea of person. Because of this lack of separation between people and their ideas, an ecclesiastic mind has a propensity to eliminate or neutralize or change the role of those who disagree rather than to argue against their ideas; if others express different views, raise objections, or show incomprehension, then this is what is expected of them as players of different roles in the drama. Ideas, views and arguments are not treated as ideas, views, and arguments for which there can be good or bad reasons independently of those who express them: the very fact of the existence of different ideas and views is explained from within the system; an explanation is given for the existence of differing ideas, how they arise, what causes them, what roles they play in the overall drama; and most of all, an explanation is given why others do not accept the only true ideas, why they have eyes but do not see, ears but do not hear.
A second feature of an ecclesiastical framework, mentioned earlier, is the paradoxical nature of the treatment of the original teaching that gave rise to the ecclesia. On a superficial look one might think that the person who lives within an ecclesiastical framework treats the writings that gave rise to his movement with greater respect than that shown by scholars towards the author they study and perhaps even follow. While there is a truth in this impression I want to point to a paradoxical aspect of this truth. After all, what makes a student of Plato a scholar is precisely his respect for the text, his thorough knowledge of it, his ability to understand and explain it, and the high standard of precision with which he treats his texts. The writings of Plato, Aristotle, or other great thinkers are studied by a large number of scholars, and have given rise to an extensive continuing literature, but in these cases the continuing studies and movements are an extension of the original literature’s life, while in an ecclesiastical framework the original writings themselves become part of the movement’s life. Surprisingly, the ecclesiastical mind, as against that of the scholar, can treat the literature that gave rise to the ecclesia more as an incident in the life of the movement. We shall consider later the interesting case of George Lukacs who supposed that all of Marx’s propositions could be disproved by modern science without damaging Marxist orthodoxy. The paradoxical nature of this problem is interesting: the ecclesiastical mind can treat its literature as incidental precisely because it regards the revelations of its literature as more important than any other piece of writing. Its literature points beyond itself: it reveals the truth about the universe and about history; it reveals the great drama in which we are supposed to be participants. So the appearance of the writings themselves becomes part of this universal drama and the drama they reveal is what gives them their importance. A scripture can be thought to be inspired only by reference to that larger universal view that the scripture reveals; or a body of literature can be thought to be the voice of, or at least the key to, the true consciousness, only by reference to that larger universal view that the literature itself reveals. In this context we meet again an ambivalent attitude towards reasoning. While for the scholar earlier and later literatures than those that he studies will be relevant in so far as they help him to understand the arguments of the works he studies, for the ecclesiastical mind earlier and later literatures will be relevant only by reference to the drama. Earlier literatures, for the ecclesiastical mind, are a preparation for the decisive event and later literatures are further developments in the drama. The relationship of the writings of Lenin and Stalin to Marx is not like the relationship of the continuing literature on Plato or Wittgenstein to Plato or Wittgenstein, nor like the continuing interpretations of Marx by Marxian scholars to Marx’s writings. They are further events in the drama which Marx’s work is supposed to be about and their ‘orthodoxy’ is determined by reference to the continuing events in that drama.
We can approach our problem also through the difference between what I call a ‘closed system’ and an ‘open system’. As Voegelin pointed out, when we reflect on social reality we find symbols and concepts in which the subject matter finds its articulation and self-understanding. Some, but not all of these symbols and concepts can be used by the observer to describe the social reality he tries to understand; at the same time, however, the people who are the subject matter might not always accept the observer’s description of themselves.
If a theorist, for instance, describes the Marxian idea of the realm of freedom, to be established by a communist revolution, as an immanentist hypostasis of a Christian eschatological symbol, the symbol ‘realm of freedom’ is part of reality (part of the self-understanding of the subject matter): it is part of a secular movement of which the Marxist movement is a subdivision, while such terms as ‘immanentist’, ‘hypostasis’, and ‘eschatology’ are concepts of political science. The terms used in the description do not occur in the reality of the Marxist movement, while the symbol ‘realm of freedom’ is useless in critical science.[2]
In the light of what we have said so far we can develop Voegelin’s point by saying that if I described myself as working for the realization of freedom which is to established by a communist revolution, I would not be a historian of ideas but rather a convert to communism. If, however, a communist described his beliefs as an immanentist hypostasis of a Christian eschatological symbol, he would cease to be a communist and would become a historian of ideas. Similarly, if St. Paul had reported in one of his letters that the story of the resurrection was a mythological way of expressing that Jesus is the Lord, that it was a symbol created by his contemporaries in reaction to a crisis situation, St. Paul would not have been a Christian, let alone an apostle, but some kind of anthropologist. If an anthropologist were to describe the resurrection in these terms he would have to describe St. Paul as someone who would reject such an interpretation; while if the anthropologist accepted what St. Paul believed to be the nature of the event he would become a Christian.
But are all observer-observed relationships of this nature? Is it always impossible for an observer to be also a participant in what he is observing? I think it is impossible only in cases where what we are observing is what I call a ‘closed system’. In these cases to become a participant is to be converted, and to become an observer is to break the magic circle of the ‘closed system’. On the other hand, as an example of an ‘open system’ one could imagine oneself trying to tell Plato what one thinks Plato is trying to do, and in this case it would hardly be possible to distinguish between the roles of the observer and the participant. Or, which comes to the same thing, we could remain an observer by fully participating in the activity and remain a participant by being an observer. If Plato did not accept the description given by a scholar of what Plato was trying to do, both would, in discussing the problem, be joint participants and observers of the activities of both of them. (There is of course also a Marx with whom we could be joint participants and observers, otherwise there could be no Marxian scholars but only Marxists.) This is what I would call an ‘open system’ of ideas which is nothing more mysterious or special than the continuing rational thinking of people who treat ideas and arguments at their face value, as ideas and arguments for which there can be good or bad reasons or evidence. In this activity ideas or arguments are proved, established, or eliminated, and not dramatis personae.
In order to explore now what type of literature could give rise to an ecclesia I begin first with an imperfect model which contains some but not all the ingredients of such a literature. Let us take Plato again as an example, put to a different use. Someone could understand himself as the Philosopher King and others as the spirited or appetitive elements of the society. In this case, if others objected to or questioned his views, he would not, and from his point of view should not, take their objections at their face value, as arguments, but as expressions of the society’s appetitive element–and since reason should rule in society, this element should be silenced. Rousseau’s work also could almost give rise to an ecclesia, and indeed some people during the French Revolution understood themselves as expressing not their own will but the General Will. If I understand my views only as my views, for which I need to give arguments, then I have to take the views opposing mine seriously and try to argue about them, and certainly I have no right to impose my views on others if they are only my views. But if I understand my views as the expression of the General Will and if others disagree with me, the disagreement is not between two persons’ views, but a case of some individual trying to assert his own particular will against the General Will. The very fact of his disagreeing with me is the proof of his not possessing the General Will, and I am not surprised at his because I know that most people, unlike me, tend to express only their particular will, and I can explain this by reference to the theory in terms of which I understand myself. But my megalomania here is just too obvious, and it would be similarly obvious if I understood myself as the Philosopher King.
Before we ask what is missing from my oversimplified model of theories that could generate an ecclesia, let us observe an element which makes them potential candidates for such a role. Such a theory enables you to substitute for yourself something greater than yourself, and makes others less than they are. Again another paradox: it enables you to combine the greatest possible humility with the greatest possible arrogance. It enables you to say, in effect, something like this: ‘it is not I who am speaking; if this were merely my thought I would have no claim on you; but what you are expressing is something subjective, and partial, arising from your particularity and divergence from what is universal, objective and true. While my personality disappears and I am expressing the truth, your idiosyncratic personality is asserting merely itself.’
What is missing from my simple model is that element of drama emphasized earlier. The systems of both Plato and Rousseau are static, they do not reveal a movement in history which enables people to understand themselves as a participants in that drama without appearing to be too obviously megalomaniac. The mechanism of the drama will appoint you and identify you, as the spokesman of that which is greater than yourself. What Marx reveals is such a drama. I would like to give first an example of an intermediate stage between a system in which one could be only a self-appointed spokesman with all the appearance of megalomania, and the sort of drama which points to you as the spokesman.
The work of Teilhard de Chardin reveals a drama where the love of God and faith in the world will eventually converge. At the end of his Le Christique he claims that this is already ‘in the air’ though rarely, as yet, combined in one person. Then he goes on to say:
In me, by the chance of temperament, education and environment, the proportion of one and the other are favourable, and the fusion has spontaneously come about–too feebly as yet for an explosive propagation–but still in sufficient strength to show that the reaction is possible and that, some day or other, the two will join up. A fresh proof that the truth has only to appear once, in a single mind, and nothing can ever again prevent it from invading everything and setting it aflame.[3]
In this passage we find an excellent example of the simultaneous combination of the greatest possible ‘humility’ with the greatest possible megalomania. While scholars, scientists, and philosophers work hard and achieve something as a result of their own thinking, Teilhard does not claim any such achievement. His own humble self disappears and Truth appears in him. With great humility he does not claim anything more than that Truth appeared in him, in a single mind. It is not on the pathology of this case that I wish to dwell, but rather to draw attention to the structure of the ‘argument’: only if it is the case that the drama of history is the convergence of the love of God and faith in the world is it the case that if this convergence appears in someone then Truth has appeared in that person. This convergence is what is meant by the appearance of the Truth in Teilhard. We have here a self-justifying circle; only if his theory is true did Truth appear in him. But if we observe the passage again we find that the appearance of truth in the single mind of Teilhard is itself an event in this drama and this event is used as a proof for the Truth of his theory, namely, that this combination of love of God and faith in the world will spread from now on as the culmination of the drama of history.
We can now turn to Marx who was not a megalomaniac. Though he thought that he revealed the true drama of history, he pointed to others as the heroes of his drama. Working in the British Museum he wrote to Kugelmann in 1857: ‘I am working like mad all through the nights at putting my economic studies together so that I may at least have the outlines clear before the deluge comes’. But the deluge would come without him. Again a year later he wrote:
I have a presentiment that now, when after fifteen years of study I have got far enough to have the thing within my grasp, stormy movements from without will probably interfere. Never mind. If I get finished so late that I no longer find the world ready to pay attention to such things, the fault will obviously be my own.
I do not wish to add here to the expositions of and arguments about Marx’s system and about the role of the proletariat in Marx’s world-view. As stated earlier, my theme is not Marx. My concern is to show that Marx’s system is capable of being interpreted by others coming after him as referring to them, as allocating a role to them in a drama. Marxism is in a sense a theory trying to prove that it is not a theory. It reveals what is happening before our eyes, if we have eyes to see. ‘In the measure that history moves forward,’ says Marx, ‘and with it the struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek science in their minds; they have to take note of what is happening before their eyes and become its mouthpiece.’[4] Of course, Marx’s claim that we should leave theorizing behind and turn our attention to the real historical process, and the further claim that the real historical process itself will replace theorizing are themselves theories. The subtle arguments behind these claims are the subject matter of Marx scholars. Some Marx scholars see theological patterns in Marx’s arguments, but I am not basing my contention that Marx gave rise to an ecclesia on a theological interpretation of his writings. My argument is based on the fact that his theory is capable of being interpreted, and was in fact interpreted, by millions in such a way that they made themselves into an ecclesia by understanding themselves as the mouthpiece of the real historical process. ‘Heralding the dissolution of the existing order of things, the proletariat merely announces the secret of its own existence.’[5] To ask whether Marx intended a Party is just as futile as to ask whether Christ intended a Church. It is interesting to note here that theorists like Saint-Simon or Rousseau who explicitly projected the formation of a new religion did not give rise to a new religion. The explanation for this might be that they themselves felt the need to add to their theories the demand for a new religion because the inner logic of their own theories would not have started one. Marx did not feel the need for forming a new religion: not only because he lacked religious experience but because of the inner structure of his thought. Whatever paradoxes I have already stated, I have to bring out another one now: had his promise and expectation come true there would have been no need for a communist ecclesia. A Church is a response to a crisis: what happens if the predicted imminent end of the old dispensation and the ushering in of the new era does not materialize? One response could be to regard this as an empirical refutation of the promise. The alternative is to find an embodiment of the promise, a Body in which the promise is already fulfilled, which already belongs to the new era and yet has to live in ‘the world’ which has already been judged. One consequence of this solution is that the Church does not understand herself as being like any other association, just as the Party is not thought of by its members as being like any other party: the Party acquires an ontological status in a cosmic history and struggle.
I know that there are serious objections to this account of the origin of the Christian Church, but I do not think they invalidate my logical model which calls for a characteristic response as a solution to a crisis. There can be and indeed have been several important theological variations in the response to the crisis. It is neither within my competence nor within the scope of this essay to outline these various models in St. Paul, Tertullian, Origen, the Donatist and Montanist solutions, culminating in the classical solution of St. Augustine which lasted through the Middle Ages.[6] Marxists equally had to struggle with various solutions to the problem: ‘What holds it back?’ Christians were not the only ones to argue about the correct identification of the fourth Beast of Daniel which is to be the last dominion; Communists and Marxists argue until the present day how to identify the fourth mode of production which is to be the last before the ‘end of prehistory’. While for Marx this was capitalism, it had to be extended to imperialism as the last stage of capitalism and then to neocolonialism as the last stage of imperialism, while at the time of writing, cultural imperialism is the last stage of neocolonialism. The doctrine of ‘socialism in one country’ is another explanation both for the nonappearance of the universal revolution and for the state not withering away, a solution which had more drastic consequences than the Christian ecclesiological theories that incorporated the Roman Empire as part of their solution. One would think that one solution which was open to the Christians is barred for the communists: namely, the transferring of the Kingdom to a spiritual realm and the creation of the ‘two cities’. But a dualism is an essential part of communist ecclesiology, the dualism of the invisible and the visible Church. What good Catholic would give up his faith because of bad visible manifestations of the Church? Similarly there is no point in arguing with a communist or a fellow-traveller about the misdeeds and horrors perpetrated by communist states. Anyone who tries to argue by reference to such empirical facts stands condemned in the eyes of the believer for not being able to see beyond such things; moreover he is condemned for not even knowing what socialism is if he identifies it with such visible manifestations. In a certain type of ecclesiastical thinking, mainly among extreme reformers and puritans, we find also another dualism which is a variety on the distinction between the visible and the invisible Church. Whatever is wrong in the Church is due to the influence of the corrupt world in which the Church still lives, while on the other hand, the Holy Spirit works also outside the Church and whatever is good there is due to his influence. Similarly whatever is wrong in the Soviet Union or in Eastern Europe is due to the remnant of bourgeois attitudes or to the re-emergence of such pernicious influences, while whatever is good, say, in the United States, is due to ‘the people’. Thus, comparisons are made not between empirical realities: a cosmic struggle is going on between good and evil, and in this world good may be incarnated in an unattractive earthly vessel, while evil, as is its wont, appears in tempting garments.
Of course, bourgeois society looks good, so is ‘the world’ full of temptations that Christians have to resist. While in the nineteenth century such temptations were ‘trade-union consciousness’ and parliamentarianism, today other liberal institutions, including tolerance, are added to the list of temptations. According to the dualist ecclesiastic mentality, tolerance and liberal institutions not only hide the real nature of our civilization which is essentially wicked, but these temptations corrupt us, they make some unwary people love what is essentially evil, they dull us into acceptance of this world and make us forget our task of staying pure and fighting evil. The task of the saint–and to engage in the enterprise makes one a saint–is to unmask the true nature of our society. You do not need to believe in a transcendent God in order to think in terms of a dualist ecclesiastic framework, in terms of a visible and invisible Church.
We are dealing now with patterns of thinking which do not belong to what historians consider as the mainstream of orthodox Christianity. This is not the place to distinguish all the patterns as they appear within Christianity and as they appear in secularized forms, though the task is not impossible because the spectrum of alternatives is limited. What complicates such a comparative study is that we do not have a single spectrum, with a belief in a transcendent God at one end and a complete secularized revisionism at the other: we meet almost the same spectrum twice over, both within Christianity and within a secular ecclesia like the Communist Party. Thus, after some terminological clarifications, we could describe some aspects of the liberalization process in confessional states such as the Communist states as a process of secularization confronting a ‘secularized’ ecclesia. I wish to indicate now only two interesting conclusions that such a study would reach: (a) What would be described as orthodox versions of Christianity and of Communism exhibit similarities to each other, and reformers and revisionists in each resemble each other. Consequently, the orthodox and the reformer/revisionist face the same problems in confronting each other within both Christianity and Communism. (b) While the orthodox on each side know their differences, the extreme reformers and revisionists of each camp merge into each other. While the orthodox express something totally different by the help of the same conceptual framework, the extreme reformers and the revisionists often say the same things in different languages.
The merging of the extreme reformers and revisionists also throws light on the phenomenon which baffles some people, namely, the existence of Christian atheists, on the one hand, and atheist believers, on the other. On each side there is some unwillingness to admit even the possibility of such phenomena within one’s own side, while they are obvious to those on the other side, and of course to outside observers. Most Christians seem to be constitutionally incapable of comprehending that Christian atheists are atheists, and it is anathema for Communists to recognize the theological structure of their thought. But the recognition of such states of mind in the other camp should logically enable the recognition of them in one’s own. We noted earlier that one does not need to believe in the existence of God in order to think in terms of a dualist ecclesiastical framework. Now if Communists and their revisionists are capable of doing this, a fortiori a Christian can think in terms of his accustomed ecclesiastical framework. They of course would use a different vocabulary for the same enterprise. One way of showing, therefore, that ecclesiastical thinking can exist outside the Christian Churches is to show that ecclesiastical thinking can exist within the Christian Churches without a belief in God. The most striking and clear-cut example of this in recent years is in an article by Father Giles Hibbert, O.P. in the Dominican periodical, New Blackfriars.[7] Father Hibbert offers there an analysis of the Christian claim which, he says, is ‘at once materialistic and dialectical’. Though there is no dialectic in the analysis, it is certainly materialistic. His claim is that the Church has ‘a richness, a “further dimensionality”, which is in fact precisely what we should have been using the word God for all along. This “further dimensionality,”… this spiritual element embodies what is meant by God, and by heaven etc. (sic).’ To illustrate what he means by a spiritual element he makes an analogy with a ‘profound work of art’ and its effect on a ‘sensitive observer’ and adds: ‘but no one but a fool would suggest that this “spiritual quality” is something in a different sphere of reality to the work itself’. Since works of art, unlike their creators and observers, do not possess consciousness, he adds, as if in an afterthought, that the relationship between this ‘spiritual quality’ and its materiality is the other way around in the Christian Church. (As it is indeed, one should add, in any human society: as a first step in studying human society, one should surely make this elementary distinction between beautiful objects and social beings.) But, says Father Hibbert, ‘these differences do not bring with them, however, any danger of a return to dualism and religion as long as the principles for the interpretation of Christianity, which we have outlined, are faithfully observed.’ (italics mine). ‘For Christians it is essential to nurture, cultivate and explore this “more”, … this cannot easily be done, nor can the claim effectively be pressed however, until the Christian Church has put its house into better order and made it look less like what Christ himself referred to as “a den of thieves”.’ Thus, we are offered an explanation why most of us have eyes but do not see, and have ears but do not hear; why most people within the Church do not ‘faithfully observe’ this Christianity, while others outside the Church, presumably ‘nurture, cultivate and explore this “more”.’ Now this is a very crude and simplistic view, but all the more does it illustrate the possibility of an ecclesiastic thinking without a belief in God.
On the orthodox end of the scale, let me illustrate briefly how an observer like Leszek Kolakowski, dealing with the problem of historical determinism, can recognize even the problems of predestination and grace as they reappear in Communist ecclesiology.
Marxist literature on the subject presents various motifs, usually revolving around solutions close to those of the Council of Trent: Actions that correspond to the desires of the historical absolute move within the framework of determination derived from that absolute. Nevertheless, there is not irresistible grace, and the individual bears responsibility for accepting or rejecting the offer of co-operation that the absolute extends to everyone. Redemption is available to everyone, yet on the other hand not all will take advantage of it, and therefore the human race is inevitably divided into the chosen and the rejected. This division is irrevocably planned by the absolute and all its consequences are pre-ordained; nonetheless, individuals freely enter one or the other category.[8]
It is far from me to say that this is the Marxist view, nor do I want to commit Kolakowski to any views he held at the time of writing this essay. But it shows that Marxists can understand themselves in these terms even if they cannot always articulate it with such historical knowledge and such precision as Kolakowski does in this paragraph. That Kolakowski was able to perceive so clearly a common feature between Marxism and Catholic theology is not merely a matter of intellectual ability. It also illustrates what I described earlier as a mind moving in an open system.
On the other hand, whatever were the intellectual abilities of Lukacs, he is a classic example of a mind caught up in a closed system of ecclesiastical thinking. One could not find a theologian in the entire history of the Church who has stated the infallibility of the Church in such unqualified terms as Lukacs did in his essay on ‘What is Orthodox Marxism?’ where he shifts infallibility from Marx to the proletarian Ecclesia.
Let us assume for the sake of argument that recent research had disproved once and for all every one of Marx’s individual theses. Even if this were to be proved, every serious ‘orthodox’ Marxist would still be able to accept all such modern findings without reservations and hence dismiss all of Marx’s theses in toto–without having to renounce his orthodoxy for a single moment.[9]
In order to understand what Lukacs is going on to say we must distinguish it from another Marxist view with which it is often confused, namely, the view that what characterizes a true Marxist is the practice of Marx’s method, not the acceptance of the content of his works. We would miss Lukacs whole argument if we understood by ‘method’ a theoretical method, one which enables us to understand, analyze, and predict social movement and change. Method, or praxis as understood by Lukacs, leaves theory behind; it is the real movement of history and not a theoretical method of understanding that real movement.
The argument of Lukacs’ essay is that Marxism is not about Marx but about the real historical movement that Marx revealed. This movement is the dialectical development of the relationship between subject and object in the historical process. The resolution of the dualism between subject and object, between the knower and the known, is not a theoretical problem; it is being resolved in practice by the culmination in history of the unity of the knower and the known. This cannot be comprehended if we assume that the object of knowledge is some ‘objective’ reality existing independently of human beings. The object of our knowledge is the metabolism of nature and man as producer, and this ‘object,’ the subject matter of our knowledge, is itself developing until if finds its highest development in the proletariat; but this social reality, this subject matter is at the same time conscious of itself, so in the proletariat the knower and the known will be one and the dualism is overcome in reality.
‘To posit oneself, to produce and reproduce oneself–that is reality,’ says Lukacs. There is an affinity between historical materialism and Hegel’s philosophy because both conceive theory as the self-knowledge of reality. But, Lukacs goes on to say,
Marx reproached Hegel with his failure to overcome the duality of thought and being, of theory and practice, of subject and object … in the crucial point he failed to go beyond Kant. His knowledge is not more than knowledge about an essentially alien material. It was not the case that this material, human society, came to know itself… [At the beginning of our social history] man finds himself confronted by purely natural relations or social forms mystified into natural reality. They appear fixed…In feudal society man could not yet see himself as a social being because his social relations were still mainly natural… Bourgeois society carried out the process of socialising society … the economic relations that directly determined the metabolic exchange between man and nature progressively disappear. Man becomes, in the true sense of the word, a social being. Society becomes the reality for man. Thus the recognition that society is reality becomes possible only under capitalism, in bourgeois society. But the class which carried out this revolution did so without consciousness of its function… It was necessary for the proletariat to be born for social reality to become fully conscious … the proletariat is at the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge.[10]
Compared to this great drama, it is indeed unimportant whether Marx’s statements are true or false; to be an orthodox Marxist is to be a participant in this great drama. Indeed, by reference to this drama it is not surprising if Marx’s statements are not correct; after all, he lived at an earlier stage of historical development and his consciousness could not be at such a high level as the consciousness of those in the Kremlin who even condemned Lukacs. Lukacs himself said in this essay: ‘Hegel was unable to penetrate to the real driving forces of history. Partly because these forces were not yet fully visible when he created his system.’ Hegel, with all his ideas, was but an earlier event in the drama: ‘the corpse of the written system remained for the scavenging philologists and system-makers to feast upon’. It is interesting to note how Lukacs looked upon his own work in the Preface of its 1967 edition. Claiming that it is no contradiction to assert the importance of his book in spite of its ‘negative aspects’, he says:
The very fact that all the errors listed here have their source not so much in the idiosyncrasies of the author as in the prevalent, if often mistaken, tendencies of the age gives the book a certain claim to be regarded as representative. A momentous, world-historical change was struggling to find theoretical expression. Even if the theory was unable to do justice to the objective nature of the great crisis, it might yet formulate a typical view and thus achieve a certain historical validity.[11]
We find certain similarities here with Teilhard’s claim that it is not he who is speaking. A momentous, world-historical change was struggling to find expression in Lukacs’ work. The fact that Lukacs does not appear here so obviously megalomaniac as Teilhard is not due to their comparative psychology, but to the nature of the system in terms of which they understood themselves. (For one thing, and in this Lukacs is a Marxist, he refers more to the objective conditions of history than to his own personality.) I hope I have been able to indicate this feature of the Marxist drama: it enables people to be appointed rather than to appoint themselves to world-historical roles.
Another similarity with Teilhard’s logic remains. Lukacs claims that Truth appears in historical reality and not in theory, not even in that of Marx. But this itself is a theory and only if this version of Marxist theory is true is it true that Truth appears as a historical reality in the most conscious elements of the proletariat, in the Leninist Ecclesia. At the same time the pronouncements of the Leninist Ecclesia are accepted as the yardstick to determine whether the world-historical movement did or did not find a correct theoretical expression in Lukacs. But I leave this problem to those, who, no doubt, discuss it in sessions of Christian-Marxist dialogue.
The doctrine of the infallibility of the Church necessarily undergoes a drastic change when it is applied to a secular ecclesia. It is not just that Communists have never in fact worked out a limit to the infallibility of the Party decisions, as the Catholic Church has circumscribed the area of her competence. The difference is more systematic. It is not accidental that one of the areas excluded from the Church’s infallible teaching is the area of empirical knowledge where human judgment has both its competence and its failures; on the other hand, a secular ecclesia, ex hypothesi, does not make judgements on questions concerning matters of divinely revealed doctrine. The infallibility of the Party is about thisworld, and since competence in matters in this world strictly belongs to economists, historians, philosophers, artists, and critics, and not to an ecclesia, a secular ecclesia becomes a totalitarian system. Indeed even the Church’s behaviour within her own area of competence is justifiable only if there is a God who has revealed certain things.
When Lukacs’ History and Class Consciousness was condemned, he submitted to the Ecclesia, though he could have gone from Vienna not to Moscow, but to California. After having outlined his ecclesiology, I would like now to argue briefly that his biblical criticism is that of the Left Hegelians. It was David Strauss who formulated the distinction between the left and the right Hegelians by reference to their attitude to the historicity of the Gospel narratives.[12] He gave the name ‘Left Hegelians’ to those who thought that the whole Gospel history was ‘contained as history in the idea of the unity of divine and human nature’, while the ‘Right Hegelians’ denied that the Gospel history could be ‘deduced as history from the idea’. What this amounts to is that if someone believes that our history, in terms of religious consciousness, is the realization of the unity of divine and human nature, then he can claim that from this idea it can be deduced, without much need for historical records, that sometime or other during the history of our religious consciousness someone had to appear, Jesus, the first to claim this unity in his person. Jesus’ appearance was an incident in the history of our consciousness and from the vantage point of our higher stage of consciousness we can understand the significance of that event even better than the early Christians who distorted and mystified it. According to this left Hegelian view we even know its significance better than Jesus did, simply by living at a higher stage of the history of our consciousness, after having overcome our alienated religious consciousness. However, the right Hegelians based their belief on the historicity of certain events that cannot be deduced from the young-Hegelian drama about the development of our consciousness. It is in this sense that I regard Lukacs’ view on the place of Marx in the history of the development of our consciousness as exemplifying the left Hegelian biblical ‘higher’ criticism. That someone like Marx with his ideas had to appear at some stage of our history can be deduced from the idea of the unity of the knower and the known and from our vantage point of a higher consciousness we can understand the significance of Marx or if one uses the terminology of liberal theologians, ‘the Marx-event’) better than his contemporaries or than Marx himself.
Lukacs, when he was confronted by those who condemned him in the Kremlin, looked beyond the visible manifestations of the True Consciousness. We noted earlier that the distinction between the visible and the invisible Church enables people to disregard harsh empirical facts, but there can be a point where the facts can no longer be ignored. The emergence of the New Left is a response to a new ecclesiastical crisis, when the pretence cannot be sustained and the distinction between the visible and the invisible Church cannot cope with the facts any more. One response to the crisis is again to regard the disappointment as an empirical refutation of the promise, and many tough-minded communists took this agonizing step. Another response is to preserve your faith by claiming that you are right and the institution went wrong. The emergence of the New Left is comparable to the Reformation. Ecclesiology is again connected with the bible. By rejecting the Party, the New Left rejected not only an institution but an intermediary between the original revelation and themselves. The unprecedented interest in the writings of Marx is, of course, partly due to scholarly interest following the publication of some of the most fascinating and intriguing writings of Marx; but perhaps to a greater extent it is due to a ‘back to the Bible’ movement and a desire for a private interpretation of the Bible where one finds a Christ according to one’s own image and a humanist Marx concerned with the problems of present-day bourgeois youth.
One interesting way of grading the variety of movements that are grouped together under the term ‘New Left’ is to compare them with the varieties of Reformation opinion from the point of view of the answer it gave to the question ‘Where did things go wrong?’[13] Was it only the selling of indulgences or should we also reject scholastic philosophy and go back to St. Augustine? Was it with Constantine that Christianity took a fatal turn? Should we reject the Church Fathers and the influence of Greek philosophy and go back to St. Paul? Though not many at the time of the Reformation went any further, present day Christian reformers try so hard to go beyond everything conceivable that one cannot help feeling that some of them would rejoice if in one of the Palestinian caves someone discovered Jesus’ Early Manuscripts. On the Left some think that only the Cult of Personality ruined the true tradition and they would remain Marxist-Leninists, while others would go back to Rosa Luxemburg or stay with Trotsky, or regard the association of a world-revolutionary idea with a particular state-power in Russia a tragedy comparable to what happened to Christianity through Constantine. There are of course scholars working on important and interesting questions like the difference between Engels and Marx and the difference between Marx’s more mature works and his early many-sided speculations. But the New Left’s interest in searching for the ‘authentic Marx’ is more like the interest in the Bible at the time of the Reformation.
All this crisis, however, has not eliminated the Marxist ecclesia: it has eliminated the visible Church and created an invisible association of Saints who refuse to be committed to or preserve anything in this corrupt world. This is not really a return to Marx but a return to the atmosphere of the Young Hegelians who realized that Reason was not incarnate in the Prussian State and were looking forward to the ‘realization of Philosophy’. Their disappointment in the Prussian bureaucracy did not shake their belief that as a result of historical processes Reason became perfect; nor did they give up the belief that the world was yearning to receive this pre-existent Logos. Hegel’s mistake was only that he pre-dated the Incarnation. It is as if this one wise man mistook the Prussian state for the promised Child. One of the Young Hegelians, Moses Hess, began his European Triarchy with these words:
German philosophy has fulfilled its mission, it has led us to full truth. What we have to do now is to build bridges which will again lead us from heaven to earth. What remains in separation, be it truth itself when it remains in its high distinctness, is untrue. Just as reality which is not penetrated by truth, so truth which is not realised, is imperfect.[14]
As the Young Hegelians, and liberal theologians, thought that Christianity was born of the consciousness and eschatological expectations of the early Christians, so we, in order to understand the origins of Marxism, have to understand the Young Hegelian ‘Sitz im Leben‘. Marx also shared this atmosphere; he had no doubt about the fact that Reason only needed a material force in which it would take flesh. ‘Revolutions require a passive element, a materialbasis… As philosophy finds its material weapons in the proletariat, the proletariat finds its intellectual weapons in philosophy.’ He found the Suffering Redeemer in the proletariat which is, he says, ‘the complete loss of humanity and can redeem itself through the total redemption of humanity.’[15]
But now the New Left are as disappointed in the proletariat as the Young Hegelians were in the Prussian state. No statement can express this eschatological predicament better than a quotation from Sartre: ‘It is not the idea that overthrew us; nor moreover was it the condition of the workers … no, it was the one linked to the other, it was … the proletariat as the incarnation and vehicle of the idea.’[16]
But the Saints are still looking for the incarnation and momentarily attach themselves to a hero or to a movement and anxiously ask: ‘Art thou he that is to come, or look we for another?’ And they say: ‘Perhaps he is in the desert, perhaps he is in the jungle…’
[1] The drama which is in principle universal can have a rather provincial universality in reality, and large sections of the world can be ignored in the drama. Thus the universal gentile world comprised the Greco-Roman world and if St. Paul had reached Spain, he could have considered that the Gospel had indeed been preached ‘universally’. Again, the world-spirit’s development was expected to culminate in the limited area of early nineteenth-century Germany, France, and England. When the world outside the drama cannot be ignored, or forces its importance to be recognized, it creates a crisis in the self-understanding of the actors in the drama and can create an ecclesiological crisis. In this respect the place of Hinduism or Buddhism in the history of Providence presents problems for Christianity comparable to the role of the ‘Third World’ in the Marxist drama.
[2] Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1952), 29.
[3] Teilhard de Chardin, Le Christique as quoted in Robert Speaight, Teilhard de Chardin (London: Collins, 1967), 330.
[4] Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Moscow, n.d.), 120.
[5] Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction, in L.D. Easton and K.H. Guddat, Writings of the Young Marx (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 263.
[6] Jaroslav Pelikan, The Finality of Jesus Christ in an Age of Universal History. A Dilemma of the Third Century (London, 1965; Richmond, Va., 1966).
[7] New Blackfriars (May 1969). The article was printed in the same month in Marxism Today as part of an ongoing Christian-Marxist dialogue.
[8] Marxism and Beyond (London: Paladin, 1968), 38.
[9] History and Class Consciousness (London: Merlin Press, 1968), 1.
[10] Ibid., 15-20.
[11] Ibid., XXV.
[12] D. Strauss, Streitschriften (Tübingen, 1841), III, 95.
[13] I owe this point to a conversation with Professor Patrick Henry of Swarthmore College.
[14] Die Europaische Triarchie, in Moses Hess, Philosophische und Sozialistische Schriften, ed. Auguste Cornu and Wolfgang Mönke (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1961), 77.
[15] Toward the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction.
[16] Sartre, Critique de la Raison Dialectique (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), 23.