Christian Socialism

  

“Not he who rejects the gods of the crowd is impious, but he who embraces the crowd’s opinion of the gods.” (From Epicurcus’s letter (341–270 BC) to Menokeus on the tenth book of Diogenses Laertitus)

“…the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”—Marx (Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1844)

Dr. Vervaeke presented a great summary of Hegelian Absolute Idealism within one hour (Ep. 24 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Hegel). A course on this topic in the United States would cost a fortune, but is given freely by the good professor Dr. Vervaeke. What first attracted me to his lectures was the constant focus on consciousness and an insightful review of its evolution in the history of philosophy. This theme seemed very familiar, but it was only when studying the word “Telos” that I consciously realized the similarity with Hegel’s famous work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, that essentially has the same angle of approach: review theories of cognition through history while searching for “patterns of intelligibility,” another fantastically useful term.

In a second video, A Metaphysical Dialogue with John Vervaeke Jun 23, 2019, he goes into even greater detail by introducing two new important terms of which I must have been asleep in class when it was taught in college: emergence ontology, and emanationist ontology. Clearly, Marx viewed Hegelian Absolute Idealism as emanationist since it has a strong Neo-Platonic notion of the transcendent ideal forms that objectively exists and all of being is derived. And Marx would view a certain kind of materialist philosophy as emergent since material being interacts with itself to build complex emergent properties. A single cell cannot read, but billions of organized specialized cells can read, write, and speak. I would argue, however, that both Hegelian idealism and Marxian historical materialism (Marx never used the term “dialectical materialism”) synthesizes emergence and emanationism cosmologies.

“In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth [Hegel], here we ascend from earth to heaven.”—Karl Marx in The German Ideology (1845)

Absolute Idealism developed just as Hegel predicted; his idealist system presented a thesis, materialism is the antithesis, and Marx provided a synthesis. Hegel begins with mind in his ontology, and Marx begins with mind in existence so that initially Hegel descends, and Marx ascends. What is often overlooked and misrepresented by Cold War propaganda is both Marxian and Hegelian ontologies are dynamic feedback loops. The Hegelian road to experience is one in which consciousness evolves to self-consciousness and then to Reason. This process involves learning from experience, changing existence, and advancing from mere Perception (Empiricism), to Understanding (Kantian Transcendental Idealism). In Marx’s case, his starting-point is consciousness in existence, but material existence is dynamic, alive, and evolving—this is not the dead matter of crude materialism that is automatically used as a straw man argument against Marx (Not Copyrighted Material):

“In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men, developing their material production and their material intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. In the first method of approach the starting-point is consciousness taken as the living individual; in the second method, which conforms to real life, it is the real living individuals themselves, and consciousness is considered solely as their consciousness” (Karl Marx. The German Ideology ,1845, Part I: Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlook).

Remember that Hegelianism was the dominant philosophy of the time so Marx emphasized material existence.  Whenever Marx or Engels are asked if existence is the determining factor of life, they would argue on the side of consciousness; on the other hand, asked if consciousness in the determining factor of life, they would argue on the side of material existence. This historical context is never mentioned whenever Marxist historical materialism is discussed by persons that never studied Marx.

Friedrich Schelling took over the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Berlin after Hegel's death in 1831. Schelling was a school roommate of Hegel and was deeply personally offended by his critical comment that “in the absolute all cows are black.” Schelling believed that Hegel’s system did not give actual existence it proper ontological place. Within one year of taking the Chair, Schelling began his lectures on “positive philosophy.” Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Engels along with anarchist Bakunin attended Schelling’s lecture! Interestingly, both Schelling and Hegel were friends with Goethe. Excepting Bukunin, all of the philosophers mentioned borrowed from Schelling’s philosophy including Fichte whom he accused of plagiarism. Also, Heidegger’s Dasein analytic in Being and Time was inspired by Schelling. Dasein is a Romantic!

During times of political upheaval in history the sophists appear to share their “knowledge,” but they really want only to distract, mislead, and coerce. It was during a time of great political upheaval that Christianity arose as a world religion. During religious upheaval the Book of Revelations is used to frighten the population, “All the apocalypses attribute to themselves the right to deceive their readers”(On the History of Early Christianity, 1894 (HEC). Engels wrote,

“We shall find that the type of ideologists at the time [Early Christian sectarianism] corresponded to this state of affairs. The philosophers were either mere money-earning schoolmasters or buffoons in the pay of wealthy revellers.”--Friedrich Engels in Bruno Bauer And Early Christianity, 1882.

I will let you figure out who is who.

Also, Engels noted, “It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of “free love” comes into the foreground. With one set of people as a revolutionary progress, as a shaking off of old traditional fetters, no longer necessary; with others as a welcome doctrine, comfortably covering all sorts of free and easy practices between man and woman” (Engels in “The Book of Revelations,” 1883, referred as BOR).

“Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.”-- Communist Manifesto (1848)

The same can be said of Christian Socialism that is often discussed out of its historical context. Engels helped draft the Communist Manifesto that was going to be entitled, “The Socialist Manifesto,” but another group already took the name “Socialist”—no Hegelian metaphysical debate decided the manifesto’s title. The Marxists did not care for the socialists anyway since all they wanted was a better dogcatcher and not really challenge the power of capital. Marx viewed religion as a fetish, but Engels had a deeper understanding of organized religion than the Manifesto would imply. Engels was raised in a very religious home and had surprisingly in-depth knowledge of biblical criticism of his era. Toward the end of his life, Engels viewed Christianity as a proletarian movement against the Rome Empire.

“And this is correct. Christianity got hold of the masses, exactly as modern socialism does, under the shape of a variety of sects, and still more of conflicting individual views clearer, some more confused, these latter the great majority — but all opposed to the ruling system, to “the powers that be.”—Engels in BOR.

Christian theologians Martin Luther, Georg Hegel, and Soren Kierkegaard were much harsher critics of Christianity than Marx, or Engels. Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Spirit “ inspired Ludwig Feuerbach to write The Essence of Christianity, 1841, in which Feuerbach agreed with Hegel that all theology is anthropology, “Thus God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of man's inward nature.^[1] “ Engels viewed Christianity as emerging out of a “Darwinistic struggle for ideological existence.”(Engels in “Bruno Bauer and Early Christianity,” 1882, referred to as BEC). During this time a plethora of new religions sprang up within the Roman Empire causing a wave of religious debate and buffoonery just mentioned. Engels agreed with Biblical scholar Bruno Bauer (1809-1882) that Christianity was influenced by Ancient Greek thought more than Judaism arguing that the philosopher Philo actually formulated Christianity with aspects of Stoicism (Seneca) injected into its theology. Engels further wrote,

“Christianity, like every great revolutionary movement, was made by the masses. It arose in Palestine, in a manner utterly unknown to us, at a time when new sects, new religions, new prophets arose by the hundred. It is, in fact, a mere average, formed spontaneously out of the mutual friction of the more progressive of such sects, and afterwards formed into a doctrine by the addition of theorems of the Alexiandrian Jew, Philo, and later on of strong stoic infiltrations. In fact, if we may call Philo the doctrinal father of Christianity, Seneca was her uncle”(BOR).

Engels understood Christianity as essentially a subversive force against Roman tyranny:

“It is now, almost to the year, sixteen centuries since a dangerous party of overthrow was likewise active in the Roman empire. It undermined religion and all the foundations of the state; it flatly denied that Caesar’s will was the supreme law; it was without a fatherland, was international; it spread over the whole empire, from Gaul to Asia, and beyond the frontiers of the empire. It had long carried on seditious activities underground in secret; for a considerable time, however, it had felt strong enough to come out into the open. This party of overthrow … was known by the name of Christians [10] (see “Engels, ‘Introduction to Karl Marx’s The Class Struggles in France’).(Not Copyrighted Material)

Christianity was in opposition to the Roman Empire, but the Empire’s eventual response was to absorb Christianity as the official state religion and make Christians subject by law to Roman military inscription. This synthesis of religion and state is known as Constantinism and is when first century Christianity became the bureaucratic Christendom Kierkegaard protested against (Not Copyrighted Material):

“A religion that brought the Roman world empire into subjection, and dominated by far the larger part of civilized humanity for 1,800 years, cannot be disposed of merely by declaring it to be nonsense gleaned together by frauds. One cannot dispose of it before one succeeds in explaining its origin and its development from the historical conditions under which it arose and reached its dominating position. This applies to Christianity. The question to be solved, then, is how it came about that the popular masses in the Roman Empire so far preferred this nonsense — which was preached, into the bargain, by slaves and oppressed — to all other religions, that the ambitious Constantine finally saw in the adoption of this religion of nonsense the best means of exalting himself to the position of autocrat of the Roman world”(BEC).

Engels argues with Bauer that Christianity arose among the slaves, which included nearly everyone, “It was in the midst of this general economic, political, intellectual, and moral decadence that Christianity appeared. It entered into a resolute antithesis to all previous religions”(BEC). “Such was the material and moral situation. The present was unbearable, the future still more menacing, if possible. There was no way out. Only despair or refuge in the commonest sensuous pleasure, for those who could afford it at least, and they were a tiny minority. Otherwise, nothing but surrender to the inevitable”(BEC). In search of material and spiritual salvation Stoicism was an inadequate substitute for religion and parasitic Stoic disciple conduct “discredited its doctrines.” 

Christianity became a universal religion from the doctrines of fallen humankind and individual persons feeling responsibility for the corruption they witnessed and lived. The Christian doctrine of atonement offered salvation which many other religions understood and welcomed. The slave Christians pointed the accusing finger at themselves for the corruption and sought spiritual redemption (Not Copyrighted Material): 

“Christianity struck a chord that was bound to echo in countless hearts. To all complaints about the wickedness of the times and the general material and moral distress, Christian consciousness of sin answered: It is so and it cannot be otherwise; thou art in blame, ye are all to blame for the corruption of the world, thine and your own internal corruption! … The admission of each one's share in the responsibility for the general unhappiness was irrefutable and was made the precondition for the spiritual salvation which Christianity at the same time announced. And this spiritual salvation was so instituted that it could be easily understood by members of every old religious community. … Christianity, therefore, clearly expressed the universal feeling that men themselves are guilty of the general corruption as the consciousness of sin of each one; at the same time, it provided, in the death-sacrifice of his judge, a form of the universally longed-for internal salvation from the corrupt world, the consolation of consciousness; it thus again proved its capacity to become a world religion and, indeed, a religion which suited the world as it then was” (BEC, emphasis added).

Berlin Blues

It Ruffled up my feathers and it barked right up my tree

When Suddenly it seemed all the fingers were pointing on up at me

And the footsteps in the sand

And we are were all getting

Washed up by the sea

To leave me in stitches

Bursting at the seams

Bursting at the seams

When the sun came out to greet me

I only saw the wolves from my dreams

This is my Berlin blues song

Sometimes life can get a little wrong

But it won't be long

Cuz it just makes me strong

And there is a place where we one day

Would delve where there no more walking on eggshells

Where ideas are for free

OH! It's the place to be

A great mind's no longer the minority

I'll see you there with your hands in the air

Where the canvas is bare

And there's no more despair

And your third eye would stare

Nothing can compare

not want care

and I'll see you there

I'll see you there

I'll see you there

This is my Berlin blues song

Sometimes life can get a little wrong

But it won't be long

Cuz it just makes me strong