By Gordon Hull
Over the course of a few posts (first, second, third), I’ve been exploring the question of what Foucault means when he refers disparagingly to “Chardino-Marxism” in a mid-1960s interview, comparing it unfavorably to what Althusser and his circle are doing. Although the “Chardino” part refers to Teilhard de Chardin, it’s fairly clear that the real target is humanist Marxism, of which Roger Garaudy is taken to be a leading example, probably due to his role in the PCF. Here I want to take an initial look at the chapter “Marxism and Religion” in his Marxism in the Twentieth Century and situate it with reference to Engels and Marx.
Garaudy’s chapter is long, and his general concern is to vindicate the idea that a non-institutional version of religion (or of faith, not religion) has its place in Marxist discourse. This is a carefully-defined position: he is at pains to distinguish the sense of faith he is talking about from most of what passes under the name. In the present context, a few features should be noted. First, Teilhard de Chardin is one of his principal reference points for a contemporary person who is going in the direction he wants (the other is Dietrich Bonhoeffer). Second, this is a recuperative project of humanism: it is “man” that is of concern the entire time. Third, Garaudy gets his Marx references almost entirely from the early writings. There are very few references to Capital in the chapter, and relatively few to Engels: most of the work is done in the 1845 and earlier writings. This is significant not least because of Althusser’s well-known denunciation of early Marx as ideological and pre-scientific. In other words, the version of Marx being used to support the humanist reading is the same one Althusser wants to get rid of in the name of anti-humanism (I will complicate this point below). Finally, Garaudy puts a lot of emphasis on the possibility of “love,” which he thinks can be rescued from a Platonic version that goes via God (I love the other insofar as I see God in them) to the direct love of alterity and other people.
Garaudy’s discussion of religion and Marxism is also more-or-less a stock photo, at least the historical part. For example, he writes that “from the very beginning, we must distinguish two currents in the elements that make up the extremely complex syncretism of Christianity, the Judaeo-Christian current and the Helleno-Christian” (111). Here’s what he says about the first:
“The former, which was dominant in the Church of Jerusalem, appeared as an offshoot of the Jewish religious movements of the first century BC. These were often revolutionary in inspiration: they were movements of popular national liberation directed against foreign rulers, Babylonian and Assyrian in earlier times and later Seleucid and Roman. They were for the most part expressed in a messianic prophetism” (111).
These were “socially revolutionary movements” that practiced a non-violence; some had common ownership. However, “side by side … with this waiting upon the realization of the Kingdom, there was also the violent activity of the Zealots;” the latter “appears to have to have contributed to making Christianity a factor that worked for the break-up of the power of Rome” (111). Garaudy says that this theme of the Just Man recurs periodically, right up through the 16th century figure of Thomas Münzer. It is “looming up in our own day at a new stage in history, when the working class is shattering the structures of the older world and so creating the conditions for a renascence, within Christianity, of the human values of action and combat” (112).
This is picking up a tradition in Marxist thought dating to the nineteenth century. Engels and Karl Kautsky, for example, both read early Christianity as communist, at least in consumption (but not production). Kautsky was a prominent figure in 19c German Marxism, and a focal point for Marxist debates through his editorship of die Neue Zeit. He also ultimately ended up opposing Leninist revolution, which earned him the permanent ire of Lenin as the “renegade Kautsky” (for a more sympathetic portrayal of his views and a critique of the viability of Leninism, see here).
Engels writes in the beginning of his 1894 “History of Early Christianity:”
"The history of early Christianity has notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement. Like the latter, Christianity was originally a movement of oppressed people: it first appeared as the religion of slaves and freedmen, of poor people deprived of all rights, of peoples subjugated or dispersed by Rome. Both Christianity and the workers' socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death, in heaven; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society. Both are persecuted and subjected to harassment, their adherents are ostracised and made the objects of exceptional laws, the ones as enemies of the human race, the others as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, the social order. And in spite of all persecution, nay, even spurred on by it, they forge victoriously, irresistibly ahead. Three hundred years after its appearance Christianity was the recognised state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain” (MECW 27, 447)
Engels similarly notes medieval peasant rebellions, where “behind the religious exaltation there were every time extremely tangible worldly interests” (448).
Engels spends quite a bit of time on German biblical Criticism – “so far the only scientific basis of our knowledge of the history of early Christianity” (452), which he divides into two schools. The Tübingen School rejects a lot of the accounts of miracles in the texts, admits the writing is post hoc, etc., but ultimately doesn’t go far enough in its de-mythologization. The second school consists of Bruno Bauer, who undermined the “legend that Christianity arose ready-made from Judaism and, starting from Palestine, conquered the world with its dogma already defined in the main and its morals” (453) by emphasizing the Greco-Roman elements of Christianity. Bauer however goes too far, and reduces everything to the Greeks and Romans. Engels proclaims the truth of the histroical origin to be between the two, and attempts to recover an early Christianity that differs from its later, more fixed form (and from the stories that later versions tell of the early version). Early Christianity, says Engels, exhibits a “feeling that one is struggling against the whole world and that the struggle will be a victorious one; an eagerness for struggle and a certainty of victory which are totally lacking in the Christians of today and which are to be found in our time only at the other pole of society, among the socialists” (457). As mass movements, early Christianity and early socialism share factionalism and sects as they are not yet aware of themselves as movements.
The parallels continue: early Christianity recruited from “lowest strata, as becomes a revolutionary element,” those for whom “there was absolutely no common road to emancipation,” despite their being otherwise diverse elements of society, sharing mainly being crushed by the Romans (460). They thus found a way out, “but not in this world. As things were, it could only be a religious way out” (461).
It's not quite Nietzsche’s slave revolt, but Engels does have this to say:
“As far as recompense was concerned, admittedly, the prospects were not so good: antiquity was too primitively materialistic not to attribute infinitely greater value to life on earth than to life in the shades; to live on after death was considered by the Greeks rather as a misfortune. Then came Christianity, which took seriously recompense and punishment in the world beyond and created heaven and hell, and a way out was found which would lead the labouring and burdened from this vale of woe to eternal paradise. And in fact only with the prospect of a reward in the world beyond could the stoico-philonic renunciation of the world and ascetics be exalted to the basic moral principle of a new world religion which would enthuse the oppressed masses” (461).
Engels then emphasizes that the Christians viewed the time of struggle that would earn them redemption was at hand, immanently, and cites the proliferation of apocalyptic texts of the time, particularly in the Book of Revelations (in which he notes that there is not so much about love, but instead revenge) as evidence. Engels says Revelations repeats and collates other texts such as Daniel; the sources are Jewish and “the only Christian point is the great stress laid on the imminent reign of Christ and the glory of the faithful, particularly the martyrs, who have risen from the dead.” (464)
Revelations, then, resolves the Tübingen vs. Bauer controversy:
“And the reason why this oldest writing of the time when Christianity was coming into being is especially valuable for us is that it shows without any dilution what Judaism, strongly influenced by Alexandria, contributed to Christianity. All that comes later is western, Greco-Roman appendage. It was only by the intermediary of the monotheistic Jewish religion that the cultured monotheism of later Greek vulgar philosophy could clothe itself in the religious form in which alone it could grip the masses. But once this intermediary was found, it could become a world religion only in the Greco-Roman world, and that by further development in and merger with the ideas of that world” (469)
Thus Engels. Garaudy doesn’t repeat most of this essay, but he does take the initial point – which is also made by Kautsky in a 1908 volume called Foundations of Christianity (which I’ve not read; I’m getting the reference from this paper, about which more next time).
Next time I want to mention another source behind Garaudy, the obscure Anatoly Lunacharsky – because that ties the narrative to Lenin and Althusser.
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