By MICHAEL LÖWY*
Critical note on several publications about the relationship between Marxism and Christianity
The first socialists of the 1844th century in Europe, whether Saint-Simon and his followers, Cabet and the French communists, or Wilhelm Weitling, the founder of the German League of the Just, were religious and claimed a Christian heritage. It was only with Marx and Engels that a non-religious, or even atheistic, socialism emerged. The founding text of this inflection is an article by Marx published in XNUMX in the Deutsch-franzözische Jahrbücher.
The full French translation of the Franco-German Annals has just been published for the first time; it includes not only the writings of Marx and Engels, but also the entire journal, which allows the texts to be placed in their historical and intellectual context. As is well known, this publication, which appeared in Paris in February 1844 under the direction of Arnold Ruge and Karl Marx, was originally a project aimed at a Franco-German alliance, philosophical and political. The Young Hegelians, who initiated the project, chose Paris both to escape censorship in Germany and to establish a collaboration with French democrats and socialists. But the latter – Lamennais, Etienne Cabet, Pierre Leroux, Louis Blanc – politely declined the invitation, reticent with the atheistic position of the Germans.
In addition to Marx and Engels, the authors are Arnold Ruge, Johann Jacoby, Moses Hess, Lazarus Bernays, Heinrich Heine, Georg Herwegh. It is striking that the vast majority of these authors are of Jewish origin: this is the case of Marx, Hess, Jacoby, Bernays, Heine. Five out of eight participants! It is clear that Marx and Bernays come from converted families, and have no connection with Jewish tradition. They would be “Jews not Jews”, according to Isaac Deutscher's famous concept. The editors did not emphasize this aspect. To some extent, the Proceedings they are an episode in the long history of left-wing radicalism among Jewish intellectuals, which began in the XNUMXth century and reached its peak in the XNUMXth century.
It is in one of the two articles published by Marx in this magazine, the “Contribution to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of law. Introduction”, which appears a small sentence that will sanction the divorce between Marxism and religious faith: “religion is the opium of the people”. Considered by supporters or opponents alike to be a kind of summary of the Marxian conception of religion, this ironic formula is by no means specific to Marx: it can be found before him, with some nuances, in Moses Hess, Heinrich Heine, Bruno Bauer and several others. authors of this period. Moreover, Marx's conception of religion at the beginning of 1844 was neo-Hegelian (Feuerbach) and ahistorical: religion as alienation from the human essence. It is only later, from the German Ideology (1846), that the properly “Marxist” analysis of religion appears as one of the forms of ideology, to be related to social classes and historical conditions.
In fact, Marx paid little attention to religious phenomena. It was his friend Friedrich Engels who would take a close interest in the historical development of Christianity, especially in his book on the social and religious wars in Germany at the time of the Reformation. The little book by Nicos Foufas is the first analysis, in French, of this “classic” text by Friedrich Engels, The Peasant Wars in Germany (1850). It is, in fact, a series of articles published by Engels in Nova Gazeta Renana (economic-political magazine) edited by the two friends in London, where they had taken refuge after the defeat of the 1848-49 revolution in Germany.
Nicos Foufas rightly clarifies the radical novelty of this text, which is in fact the first – and one of the most successful! – attempt to apply historical materialism to a past event, the Peasants' Revolt (1524-25) in the Holy Roman Empire. Engels' study, observes Nicos Foufas, is quite original in its attempt to explain religious conflicts through class conflicts, but also because it does not reduce religion to a factor of obscurantism and conservation: it is also, under certain historical conditions, capable of to express subversive aspirations.
This was the case with several heretical movements of the Middle Ages and, in particular, with the peasant revolt of the sixteenth century, in which religious faith, in the form of the revolutionary theology of the Anabaptist preacher Thomas Münzer, played a decisive role. If Engels found it necessary to write about this event in the context of the years 1848-50, it is because it was the most important revolutionary uprising in German history.
The main weakness of Engels' analysis – in our opinion – was to analyze certain religious beliefs as a mere “reflection” or even a “mask” of class interests. However, in some passages, which Nicos Foufas does not cite, Engels goes beyond this type of socioeconomic reductionism. Referring to Münzer's communism, Engels writes: “Its political doctrine corresponded exactly to this revolutionary religious conception and surpassed existing social and political relations just as its theology surpassed the religious conceptions of the time. (…) This program was less the synthesis of the demands of the plebeians of the time than a brilliant anticipation of the conditions of emancipation of the proletarian elements in germ among these plebeians (…)”.
What is suggested in this startling paragraph is not just the protest or even revolutionary function of a religious movement, but also its anticipatory dimension, its utopian function. Here we are at the antipodes of the “reflection” theory: far from being the simple “expression” of existing conditions, Münzer's politico-religious doctrine appears as a “genius anticipation” of the communist aspirations of the future. We find in this text a new clue, which is not explored by Engels, but which will later be richly worked on by Ernst Bloch, from his youth essay on Thomas Münzer to his great work the hope principle.
Ernst Bloch represents an important shift in the history of Marxist reflection on religion: he is the first to aim less at the “critique of religious alienation” – even if this dimension is not absent from his writings – than at rescuing the utopian surplus of religious traditions and particularly Christianity. His religious atheism places him in a unique philosophical position, opposed to both institutional theologies and vulgar materialism.
No one was better qualified to address this issue than the Franco-German philosopher Arno Münster, disciple and biographer of Ernst Bloch and author of several notable essays on his thought. One of his last books is a little disorganized: the chapters do not follow a chronological order, nor a thematic organization, which results in a certain number of repetitions. The first part is a brief history of the relationship between socialism and religion, from Auguste Blanqui to the USSR, passing through Jean Jaurès (but without Marx!), inevitably a little schematic. But Münster's analysis of Ernst Bloch's philosophy of religion is a very important contribution to the debate on Marxism and religion.
As Münster recalls, Bloch became a Marxist in 1921, under the influence of his friend Georg Lukacs; fellow travelers in the communist movement, he went into exile in 1933 after the Nazis seized power, first in France and then in the United States. Back in Europe after the war, he settled in the German Democratic Republic, where he served as a semi-official philosopher from 1949 to 1956. His opposition to the Soviet intervention in Hungary led him to be condemned as a “revisionist” and banned from teaching. At the time of the construction of the wall in 1961, he decided to move to Tübingen in Federal Germany, where he would become a Marxist opponent, much listened to by the rebellious youth of 1968.
The philosophy of religion is present in four moments of the work of the Jewish-German philosopher: (a) in his youth work The Spirit of Utopia (1918), especially in the final chapter with the startling title of “Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse”; but also on an excursion “Symbol: the Jews”; (b) in the book Thomas Münzer, theologian of the revolution (1921), his first communist work, which profoundly renews the Marxist approach to religion; (c) in chapter 53 of volume III of his masterpiece the hope principle, dedicated to the three great monotheistic religions, from the point of view of their contribution to the “Not-Yet-Being” utopia; in the book Atheism in Christianity (1968), a materialist exegesis of the Bible, which provoked much polemic and controversy – especially from Christian theologians.
Hostile to what he calls “vulgar and indigent atheism”, but also to conservative theologies of all confessions, Bloch is fascinated by messianism, apocalypse, eschatology, Kabbalah, mysticism, heresies; he enthusiastically celebrates the prophet Amos, Jesus of Nazareth, Joachim of Flora, Meister Eckhart, Jan Huss, Thomas Münzer, Wilhelm Weitling, and… Dostoyevsky. But it is Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels who provide the guiding thread: class struggle, revolutionary praxis, communist utopia.
As Arno Münster shows with great intelligence and sensitivity, Bloch's religious atheism manifests itself above all in a critical, heterodox and materialist reading of the Bible, in search of its utopian, subversive and emancipatory moments. A reading “with the eyes of the The Manifest Communist”, which will lead him into a critical dialogue with the most advanced Protestant theology: Rudolf Bultmann, Albert Schweitzer, Jürgen Moltmann and above all his friend Paul Tillich, a Christian socialist and German anti-fascist, also exiled in the United States. Of course, Christian theologians cannot accept Bloch's central proposition, paradoxical and somewhat provocative: “only an atheist can be a good Christian and only a Christian a good atheist”.
With Moltmann, also a Christian socialist, the bone of contention will be Bloch's categorical rejection of the “theology of the cross” of Paul and Luther, which led, in his eyes, to the acceptance of suffering as a human destiny. One of the Protestant theologians, Carl-Heinz Ratschow, professor at the University of Marburg, even dedicated an entire book in 1972 to the discussion of the heretical theses of Ernst Bloch. Despite his sympathy for the latter, he rejected his Marxist engagement and opposed Bloch's hope, based on combat, to Christian hope, based on certainty. Ratschow also unsurprisingly rejected Bloch's polemical interpretation of the Book of Job as a revolt against God, guilty of condoning the world's injustice.
Finally, Bloch's most favorable reception came from Latin American liberation theologians (especially Gustavo Gutierrez); without accepting its atheism, they fully shared the wager found at the conclusion of the 1968 book: "The union of revolution and Christianity in the peasants' war will not be the last."
If Marxist thinkers were interested in Christianity, wouldn't there also be Christians attracted to Marxism? Of course, we can find many examples of this in modern history. A recent book published in the United States tells of a rather surprising case: a young Catholic woman, Grace Carlson (1906-1992), who “converted” to Marxism, becoming one of the main leaders of the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyist organization associated with the Fourth International!
Donna T. Haverty-Stacke's book is a well-documented biography of this unusual spiritual and political journey. Born into a working-class Catholic family of Irish origin and raised by the Sisters of Saint Joseph, the young Grace Holmes became interested in the working-class condition, but from the perspective of rerum Novarum and the social doctrine of the Church. A student at the University of Minesotta, she mobilized, along with her husband Gilbert Carlson and her sister Dorothy, in support of a large workers' strike in Minneapolis in 1934, which was led – quite exceptionally at the time – by Trotskyist militants.
The three began to participate in political meetings, which they did not consider incompatible with their religious faith: they could go to mass and a socialist meeting on the same Sunday... In the following years, the two sisters became increasingly close to the Trotskyists and in 1936 adhered to this dissident communist current, which, in 1937, founded the Socialist Workers Party (Socialist Workers Party), which was based on Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. Around 1938, Grace ceased to be a practicing Catholic, which led to her separation (but not divorce) from her husband Gilbert Carlson.
What are the reasons for what the author calls “a conversion”? She suggests an interesting hypothesis: the “elective affinity” – in the Weberian sense of the word – between Grace's Catholic workers' conscience and the SWP's workers' socialism. But this intuition is not developed in the book…
In the years that followed, Grace became the only woman on the National Committee, the SWP's governing body (1942). After spending a year in prison (1945), accused of “trying to overthrow the government of the United States by force”, in 1948, she would be a candidate for vice president of the United States by the SWP – the presidential candidate was one of the leaders of the strike of 1934, Farrell Dobbs.
However, in 1952, a second conversion would take place: Grace Carlson decided to leave the Party and return to the Catholic Church... This led to reconciliation with her husband, who remained Catholic, Gilbert Carlson, but to a break with her sister Dorothy, who continued in Party, with her lover Ray Dunne, and with her numerous socialist friends, with whom she had formed a “sisterhood” network. James P. Cannon, founder and main leader of the SWP, who had become a personal friend of hers, tried to explain to Grace that the Catholic Church was “the most reactionary and obscurantist force in the whole world”, but without much success…
Perplexed, her Marxist friends have tried to explain this about-turn out of fatigue in the face of repression and the witch-hunt of McCarthyism, but for Grace it's about something else: a spiritual turn, a need for God. “I changed my religious attitude but not my politics”, she said: “I remained a Marxist in my own way”. She would be taken in by the Sisters of Saint Joseph and would teach in a School of Nursing at Saint Mary's Hospital - not without cooperating with Slant (Point of View), a Christian Marxist group from England, and to denounce the Vietnam War.
In the case of Grace Carlson, it was a unique and personal journey. What we would find, a generation later, in Latin America, would be of another dimension: an entire social movement, especially among Catholic youth, would appropriate certain Marxist concepts and formulate a new Christian – socialist vision. This movement, born in Brazil in the early 1960s – after the Cuban Revolution, but before the Second Vatican Council – took different forms, including the formation, in 1962, by militants of the Catholic University Youth, of a socialist/humanist political party , Popular Action (AP). It was only much later, after 1971, that “liberation theology” would develop from this sociopolitical experience, not only in Brazil, but throughout Latin America.
One of the most striking episodes of this convergence between Catholicism and Marxism was the involvement, around 1968-70, of a group of Dominican friars from the Convent of Perdizes, in São Paulo, in armed resistance against the military dictatorship established in 1964 in Brazil. Leneide Duarte-Plon's book is the biography of one of these Brazilian Dominicans, Friar Tito de Alencar, who paid with his life for this social and political engagement.
A member of the Catholic Student Youth, who entered the Dominican Order in 1966, Tito shared with his brothers in the Convent of São Paulo, his admiration for Che Guevara and Camilo Torres, and the desire to associate Christ and Marx in the fight for the liberation of the Brazilian people. Tito was close to Ação Popular, which was hegemonic in the student movement, and contributed to the clandestine organization, in 1968, of the Congress of the National Union of Students in the city of Ibiúna. Like all delegates, he was arrested by the police on this occasion, but was soon released.
After the hardening of the military dictatorship in 1968 and the impossibility of any legal protest, the most radical wing of the opposition to the dictatorship will take up arms from this moment on. The main organization of armed struggle against the regime was the Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN), founded by a dissident communist leader, Carlos Marighella. A group of young Dominicans – Frei Betto, Yvo Lesbaupin, Fernando Brito and others – joined the ALN, not taking up arms but providing logistical support. Not belonging to those who collaborated directly with Marighella and her comrades, Tito de Alencar is supportive of their involvement. Like them, he believed that the Gospel contained a radical critique of capitalist society; and like them, he believed in the need for a revolution. As he would later write, “the revolution is the struggle for a new world, a form of earthly messianism, in which there is the possibility of an encounter between Christians and Marxists”.
On November 4, 1969, during the night, police chief Fleury invaded the Convent of Perdizes and arrested several Dominicans, including Friar Tito. Most of them were tortured and their confessions allowed the police to set a trap for Carlos Marighella and murder him. Tito had no contact with the ALN and responded negatively to all questions. He was twice subjected to torture (electric shocks) in late 1969 and early 1970, first by Fleury and later at the Army intelligence facility – called by the military “the branch from hell”.
To escape his tormentors, he tries to commit suicide with a razor blade. Interned in the Military Hospital, he receives a visit from the Cardinal of São Paulo, D. Agnelo Rossi, a conservative figure, who sympathized with the military and refused to denounce the torture of the Dominicans. Finally sent to an “ordinary” prison, Tito wrote an account of his sufferings that was published by the American magazine look and distributed in Brazil by resistance militants, with considerable repercussions. Pope Paul VI finally condemned “a great country that applies inhuman interrogation methods” and replaced D. Rossi with Paulo Evaristo Arns, the new Cardinal of São Paulo, known for his commitment to the defense of human rights and against torture.
A few months later, revolutionaries kidnapped the Swiss ambassador and exchanged him for the release of 70 political prisoners, including Tito de Alencar. The young Dominican was hesitant to accept, as the idea of leaving his country was foreign to him. The 70 were expelled from the country and forbidden to return. After a brief stay in Chile, Friar Tito settled with the Dominicans at the Convent of Saint-Jacques in Paris. Exile was a great suffering for him: “It is very difficult to live far from your country and the revolutionary struggle. We have to endure exile as we endure torture.” He participated in campaigns to denounce the crimes of the dictatorship, and began to study theology and the classics of Marxism: “I accept the Marxist analysis of the class struggle. For anyone who wants to change the structures of society, Marx is indispensable. But the worldview I have as a Christian is different from the Marxist worldview.” The French Dominican Paul Blanquart, known for his options “to the left of Christ”, describes him as “the most committed and the most revolutionary of the Dominicans”.
However, as time goes by, Tito shows more and more worrying signs of psychic imbalance. He believed he was being persecuted by his torturer, Chief Fleury. In 1973, he was offered a more peaceful place: the Dominican Convent of l'Arbresle. He became friends with the Dominican friar Xavier Plassat, who tried to help him, and underwent psychiatric treatment with Doctor Jean-Claude Rolland. It was in vain. After the coup d'état in Chile in September 1973, he became increasingly anguished, convinced that Fleury was still hounding him, and that the Dominicans, or the nurses at the psychiatric hospital, were his acolytes. Finally, at the end of his strength, in despair, on August 8, 1974, he opted for suicide by hanging.
Finally, his Dominican friend, Friar Xavier Plassat, settled in Brazil, where he became the organizer of the Pastoral Land Commission campaign against slave labor: according to his testimony, “my work here is a legacy left by Tito” .
As is well known, the Vatican, under John Paul II and Ratzinger, rejected liberation theology as an “error”, mainly due to its “indiscriminate” use of Marxist concepts. With the election of Bergoglio, Pope Francis, of Argentine origin, a new period seems to open. Not only was Gustavo Gutierrez received at the Vatican, but the Pope decided, in a meeting in 2014 with Alexis Tsipras and Walter Baier, two leaders of the European Left, to open a dialogue between Marxists and Christians. Dialogues of this type took place in the post-war period in some European countries (France, Italy, Germany), but an initiative under the aegis of the Vatican is unprecedented.
The Pope delegated Archbishop Angelo Vincenzo Zani, secretary of the Vatican Congregation for Catholic Education, and the movement hearths, a secular network founded by Chiara Lubich in post-war Italy. The book Europe as a Common it is the first publication of this attempt to explore a “transversal social ethics”. Two of the book's editors, Franz Kronreif and Luisa Sello, belong to the Focolare network, and the other two, Walter Baier (former general secretary of the Austrian Communist Party) and Cornelia Hildebrandt, from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, represent the Transform!, a network of Marxist research foundations linked to the European Left.
Initially, the dialogue took place at the Sophia University Institute, of the Focolare Movement, in the village of Loppiano, near Florence, where the participants were received by the Belgian sociologist Bernard Callebaut. Other symposia were held at Castelgandolfo – the Pope's summer residence! – and in Vienna. In September 2018, however, a joint Summer School was held at the University of the Aegean, located on the island of Siro, home to a traditional Catholic community. Most of the documents collected in the book Europe as a Common (first volume) are presentations made during this initiative. During their courses, the students, coming from both currents, jointly wrote a document entitled “The Manifesto of Hermópolis”, which was also included in the book.
In the introduction, the four editors of the book recall that the objective of the dialogue is not mutual conversion, nor the production of syncretism, but rather the search for what is common without ignoring fundamental differences. Three initial interventions serve as a starting point:
Franz Kronreif, of the Focolare Movement, speaks of “consensus in difference” and proposes that the initial parameters of the dialogue be the encyclical Laudato Si of Pope Francis and the Theses About the concept of history by Walter Benjamin. Walter Baier, network Transform!, recalled the need for a self-critical reflection by Marxists on the crimes committed in the name of socialism in the USSR; he found in the writings of Karl Polanyi elements for a convergence between socialism and Christianity. Finally, Archbishop Zani, in a greeting to the 2018 Summer School, paid homage to the ideals of justice, fraternity and solidarity of the young participants in this meeting.
During the dialogues and debates at the Summer School, there were confrontations between very opposing points of view, such as, for example, between Leonce Bekemans, Jean Monnet professor at the University of Padua, a staunch supporter of the “really existing” European Union, and Luciana Castellina, former communist European deputy, who dreams of “another Europe”, not submissive to capitalist markets. Sometimes, however, interlocutors on both sides managed to draw up a common document, as was the case with Cornelia Hildebrandt and Pal Toth, professor at the Sophia University Institute, on “A non-violent strategy in a plural world”. The same applies to the contribution of Petra Steinmair-Pösel, a theologian linked to the Focolare, in collaboration with Michael Brie, from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Berlin, on “The Commons: our common ground?”.
Europe as a Common also contains contributions from Piero Coda, rector of the Sophia University Institute, Bernard Callebaut, sociologist at the same institution, Spyros Syropoulos, professor at the University of the Aegean, Alberto Lo Presti, from the Lumsa Catholic University of Rome, José Manuel Pureza, professor at the University of Coimbra and member of the Left Bloc in the Portuguese Parliament, Muslim theologian Adnane Mokrani – defender of “a secular State as a religious necessity” –, social psychologist Thomas Stucke, Colombian political scientist Javier Andres Baquero (who reports on his experience in “green” management ” from the city of Bogotá), and the author of this note. The set, which testifies to the plurality of perspectives involved in this “transversal” initiative, is completed by a conference by Pope Francis on “The preferential option for the poor, the key criterion of Christian authenticity”.
What can we conclude from this rather bumpy bibliographic itinerary, which takes us from the young Marx to the Pontifex Maximum Bergoglio? The only conclusion is that the relationship between Marxists and Christians remains an open book, whose next chapters will be written not so much from each other's Holy Scriptures, but in response to the ecological, social and ethical challenges of the XNUMXst century.
*Michael Lowy is director of research in sociology at Center nationale de la recherche scientifique (CNRS). Author, among other books, of The War of the Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (Voices).
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
Originally published in Archives of Sciences Sociales des Religions, no. 196, December 2021.
References
Friedrich ENGELS et Karl MARX. Annales Franco-Allemandes, Complete Edition. Préparée par Alix Bouffard et Pauline Clochec. Translation by JC Angaut, V.Beguin, A.Bouffard, JM Buée, P.Clochec, C.Fradin, M. L'Homme et J.Quétier. Présentation et annotation par P.Clochec, Paris, Editions Sociales, Geme (Grande Edition Marx et Engels), 2020, 328 pages;
Nicos FOUFAS. Friedrich Engels et la Guerre des Paysans Allemands. Paris, L'Harmattan, «Ouverture Philosophique», 2020, 117 pages.
Arno MÜNSTER. Socialisme et religion au XXe Siècle. Judaisme, Christianisme et athéisme dans la philosophie de la religion d'Ernst Bloch. Paris, L'Harmattan, coll. «Ouverture Philosophique», 2018, 175 pages.
Donna T. HAVERTY-STACKE. The Fierce Life of Grace Holmes Carlson. New York, New York University Press, 2021, 289 pages.
Leneide DUARTE-PLON and Clarisse MEIRELLES. Tito de Alencar (1945-1974). A dominicain brésilien martyr of the dictature. Paris, Karthala, Collection «Signes des Temps», 2020, 308 pages. Translated from Portuguese by authors. Preface by Vladimir Safatle, Avant-Propos by Xavier Plassat.
Walter BAIER, Cornelia HILDEBRANDT, Franz KRONREIF, Luisa SELLO (Eds.). Europe as a Common. Exploring Transversal Social Ethics. Zurich, LIT Verlag, 2021, Vol. I, 267 pages.