THEISM AND ATHEISM
BY: MAX HORKHEIMER
Source: Critique of Instrumental Reason. Max Horkheimer. Published by Continuum
1974;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;
Proofed: and corrected by Chris 2009
Crimes committed in the name of God are a recurrent theme in the history of Christian
Europe. The ancients practiced torture and murder in war, on slaves (who were
supplied by the wars) and as a form of entertainment: the circenses. But in spiritual
matters the emperors were relatively tolerant. If the Christians were singled out as
scapegoats, it was because they did not yet at that time place the state above all else
and still recognized something higher than the empire. But since Constantine in his
unscrupulous way singled out Christianity from among the existing religions to fill in
the cracks in his crumbling empire and elevated it to the state religion, Europe has
stood under the sign of that doctrine and betrayed it again and again. If the words of
the founder, his recorded will, his precepts had been put in practice instead of being
interpreted by the scholars, neither the unified Christians of the middle ages nor the
disunited Christians of the modern period would have had their splendid careers.
Whatever teachings could have been taken over from the Old Testament, glory in
battle was no part of it. Under the heathen emperors, the commandment to render unto
Caesar what was Caesar’s could bring Christians into conflict with the state and,
when they rightly refused to observe it, to the cross. But the Christian emperors would
have undertaken no wars of conquest, they would have named no tribunals to punish
those who had offended against them. The victorious course of Christianity since
Nicaea and especially since Augustine, which was not unlike the expansion of
Buddhism since the reign of Asoka, sealed its pact with that worldly wisdom which it
had originally professed to renounce. Its readiness for fanaticism, without which its
ascendancy would have been unstable, testified to a secret and indomitable hatred for
that attitude of mind for which its founder had earlier been put to death.
Initially, when the Christians themselves were the persecuted, the divinity appeared to
them as a guarantor of justice. There was to be no more suppression in the world
beyond, and the last would be the first; it was for the sake of heaven and not because
of hell, out of hope and not for fear that the martyrs and their disciples professed their
faith. Suppression, even death under torture, was but a transition into eternal
blessedness; apparently inescapable conditions were but a moment of false defeats or
triumph. All were the likeness of the divinity, even the lowest, and especially the
lowest. The man at the stake, on the gallows, on the cross was the symbol of
Christianity. It was not the ruling order of the time which determined who were to be
the first; the prison and the gas chamber were at least no further from the followers of
the divine delinquent than headquarters. If the barbarian masters, the men of quick
decision, the generals and their confidants were included in the divine love, it was
because of their poor souls. The pact concerned first of all those who were poor in
spirit, those whose lives were not primarily oriented toward riches, power, affairs of
state, or even towards prestige. In the first centuries of the Christian era, when the self-
confidence of the senate and the people was shaken by the aspirations of the tribes
outside and the resulting growth of barbarism inside, the gospel of a goal beyond this
world gave a new meaning to the lives of the masses, enslaved and unruly under their
masters. If it was possible for the primitive Christians to follow the gospel without
unconscious resistance, it was because they knew nothing except that heaven was open
to them. But the closer their doctrine came to gaining absolute power, the more it had
to conform to the requirements of self-preservation under existing conditions, to come
to terms with the law of this world — though its main idea had been the relativity of
this law — and to conclude the pact it has kept ever since. Darkness gained in
importance. As evil became increasingly necessary for it to carry out its plans for this
world, hell became increasingly important to it in its thinking of the world beyond.
Theology has always tried to reconcile the demands of the Gospels and of power. In
view of the clear utterances of the founder, enormous ingenuity was required.
Theology drew its strength from the fact that whatever is to be permanent on earth
must conform to the laws of nature: the right of the stronger. Its indispensable task was
to reconcile Christianity and power, to give a satisfactory self-awareness to both high
and low with which they could do their work in a corrupt world. Like the founder,
who paid the price for refusing to show any concern for his own life and was
murdered for it, and like all who really followed him and shared his fate or at least
were left to perish helplessly, his later followers would have perished like fools if
they had not concluded a pact or at least found a modus vivendi with the blood-thirsty
Merovingians and Carolingians, with the demagogues of the crusades and with the
holy inquisition. Civilization with its tall cathedrals, the madonnas of Raphael and
even the poetry of Baudelaire owes its existence to the terror once perpetrated by such
tyrants and their accomplices. There is blood sticking to all good things, as Nietzsche
remarked, whose sensitivity was unsurpassed even by a saint. If the great had taken the
conflict of Christianity and Christendom as seriously as Kierkegaard did in the end,
there would exist no monument of Christian culture. Without the artful patchwork of
scholastic theology, neither the works of pro-Christian nor of anti-Christian
philosophy would have come into being, nor the struggle for human rights, which
found in John XXIII a late high-minded spokesman, nor the remote village with its old
church, which was at first allowed to remain intact by the traffic, the sign of a more
advanced civilization, in its barbaric and at the same time benevolent manner.
Building on the foundation of enlightenment and renewal which had been laid by
church fathers, Pelagians, and gnostics against the superstitions of a decaying
antiquity, the Scholastics developed the view of the world on which the freemen of the
middle ages organized their government and established their cities. The combination
of acuteness and precision, knowledge and imagination to be found in the Summas
rivals the interpretations of the Torah which have been admired and disparaged as
products of the Talmudic spirit. Scholasticism signifies the great age of theology. But
while its comprehensive system lent ideological support to a relatively static society,
it could not in the end prevent the dissolution of Christian unity.
Scholasticism lived on its inheritance from classical philosophy. Eternal ideals,
which are supposed to reveal themselves to the mind like numbers, formed according
to it the intellectual structure of reality. Scholastic wisdom was accepted by all
believers as an interpretation of revelation, as knowledge of the world, of the
temporal and eternal, of past and future. The lord and the saints were enthroned on the
highest plane. Above the earth dwelt the angels and the blessed. Then came spiritual
and secular dignitaries, lords, freemen and serfs. The ladder of nature stretched into
the darkness of non-living things, and at the bottom was the place of the damned. Men
had a picture of the universe in which divine and natural knowledge, divine and
natural laws were one. In spite of predestination and grace, a man’s future in other
regions was largely determined by his conduct on earth which had implications
beyond the moment. Each man’s life had a meaning, not just the lives of the prominent.
The political divisions led to the disappearance of the belief in eternal concepts, in
the harmony of natural and supernatural knowledge, and in the unity of theory and
practice which the Scholastics had in common with the Marxists, though the former
glorified the continuation of existing conditions and the latter their transformation. In
the end the medieval order was set in motion not only by wars, but as a result of the
widening of the world, through economic activity, the misery of the masses, inflation,
the beginnings of modern science and the backwardness of the religious professions.
The educated reacted with scepticism and humanism, and the threatened powers with
a religious renewal. The reformers, who had been preceded by the nominalists, the
followers of Cusa and by others, renounced the system as a way of rationalizing the
union of Christianity and worldliness. The opposition was all too apparent. They
acknowledged it and made it the central part of their teaching. The Protestant way of
reconciling the commandments of Christ with those human activities that appealed to
them was to declare any reconciliation to be impossible. Nothing could be said, either
about the will of God or about the right order of things, which would set up a general
connection between the two. Knowledge and science were concerned with transitory
things in a transitory world. Luther hated Scholasticism, theories of eternal relations,
systematic philosophy, “the whore Reason.” The view that men could justify their
private or collective lives in theological terms and determine whether they were in
harmony with the divine seemed to him sheer pride and superstition. Even though he
judged Christians to be high above other men, especially Jews and Turks, his final
judgment about right action remained suspended. In the end nobody knew what good
works were — the church as little as a secular board of censors. Luther’s verdict
against theological speculation, which anticipated Kant’s limitation of metaphysical
speculation, left reason free to roam this vale of tears — in empirical research, in
commerce, and especially in secular government. The interest of the individual and the
state became the criterion of action in this world. Whether the troops waded in the
blood of peasants who had risen from hunger, or whether a man sacrificed himself out
of political blindness to share his last bread with them, one action was as “Christian”
as the other, provided each agent sincerely believed that he was following the Word.
The Reformation introduced the era of civil liberty. Hate and treachery, the “scab of
time,” had its origin in the inscrutable counsels of God, and would remain till the end
of pre-history, till “all enemies of the Word have become like dung in the street.” The
idealist philosophers in Germany, who outdid the classics of liberalism in England in
their glorification of progress, came to regard the ruthless competition between
individuals and nations as the unfolding of the absolute spirit. God’s ways are
peculiar. His Word stands: We must love our enemies. But whether this means burning
the heretic and the witch, sending children to work before they can read, making
bombs and blessing them, or whether it means the opposite, each believer has to
decide for himself without even suspecting what the true will of God might be. A
guiding light, though a deceptive one, is provided by the interest of the fatherland, of
which there is little mention in the Gospels. In the last few centuries, an incomparably
greater number of believers have staked their lives for their country than for the
forbidden love of its enemies. The idealists from Fichte to Hegel have also taken an
active part in this development. In Europe, faith in God has now become faith in one’s
own people. The motto, “Right or wrong, my country,” together with the tolerance of
other religions with similar views, takes us back into that ancient world from which
the primitive Christians had turned away. Specific faith in God is growing dim.
Theology was able to adapt itself to the triumphs of the new science and technology in
the last few centuries. In those European countries which had resisted the
Reformation, especially in France and Italy, the intellectual and political struggles
produced a form of life in which the consciousness of civil liberty was allowed to
flourish while Christianity in its traditional form was able to retain a place in
connection with it. There the social forces which had found expression in the
Enlightenment were able to assert themselves in political reality, whereas in the
German states they were confined to the subjective realm, to the benefit of romantic
poetry, great music and idealist philosophy. Here the way to bliss led again through
faith, through the idea. Similarly religion, whether Catholic or Protestant, survived the
nineteenth century as an element of bourgeois life, even though it changed its role.
Much of the credit for its survival belonged to the militant atheists. Even when the
great atheists did not themselves suffer martyrdom for their beliefs like Bruno and
Vanini, it was so obvious that the antithesis — their radical or not so radical
departure — was inspired by the thesis — the spirit of the Gospels — that they were
far more capable of deepening the interest in religion than of extinguishing it. Voltaire,
the foremost among them, was still generous as to let theism pass, and his work
remained as foreign to the general consciousness as Goethe’s, which resembled his.
The popular figure of atheism, metaphysical materialism, was too barren to become a
serious threat to Christianity as long as it lacked a dialectical and idealistic — or in
reality, a utopian and messianic — theory of history. As long as government was not
yet in control of everything, from the co-operation of political and economic forces in
commerce and industry to the conduct of one’s private life — the struggle with
solitude which is called “spare time” — preaching the love of God and trust in His
guidance continued to be the better way. The Absolute of the theologians was
incomparably more effective in providing consolation, incentive and admonition than
any concept which the philosophical materialists had to offer. True, their critique of
theism sounded plausible enough. “It has always been in the womb of ignorance, fear
and misery that men have formed their first conceptions of the divinity,” writes
Holbach in his System of Nature, the bible of eighteenth-century materialism. This
shows that those teachings “were either doubtful or false and in any case deplorable.
In fact, whatever part of the globe we look at, whether the icy regions of the North, the
torrid ones of the South, or the most moderate zones, we find that people everywhere
have trembled and, as a result of their fears and their misery, either created their own
national gods or adored those brought to them from elsewhere. It is ignorance and fear
which have created the gods; conceit, passion and deceit which have adorned and
disfigured them; it is weakness which adores them, credulity which nourishes them,
and tyranny which supports them in order to profit from the delusions of men.” So
much for the materialist’s account of the origin of religion. In place of the rejected
divinity they offer Nature. “Nature,” continues Holbach at a later place, “tells the
pervert to blush at his vices, at his shameful inclinations, his misdeeds; she shows him
that his most secret disorders will necessarily affect his happiness.... Nature tells the
civilized man to love the country in which he was born, to serve it faithfully, to enter
with it into a community of interests against all those who might try to harm it.” In the
name of Nature the enlightened Holbach calls for the defense of one’s country not only
against external enemies but against internal tyrants. But what does he mean by
“Nature"? There is nothing outside her; she is one and all at once. Man shall discover
her laws, admire her inexhaustible energy, use his discoveries for his own happiness,
and resign himself to his ignorance of her last, her ultimate causes which are
impenetrable. With his whole being man belongs to her. The abstract entity which,
according to such materialists, forms the basis of right conduct is as indeterminate as
the Deus absconditus of the Protestants, and the promise of happiness in this world is
as problematical as bliss in the next, which is extremely uncertain. The naturalistic
doctrine agrees with the theological doctrine it opposes in identifying what is most
permanent and powerful with what is most exalted and worthy of love — as if this
were a matter of course. In their fear of death men turn to the One, eternal and
immortal — which is their own wishful thinking hypostatized — as if in obedience to
a superior power. ,The ancient materialists were still inclined to stop with a plurality
of atoms; the worshippers of Nature, like the pantheists, ontologists and theologians,
will hear of nothing less than the One. But Nature does not say anything, as little as
Being, which has been tried recently and which is supposed to deliver its oracles
through the mouths of professors. The place of God is taken in each case by an
impersonal concept. The Scholastics had already depersonalized the humanity and
individuality of the murdered Jesus by multiplying them as it were into the Oneness of
God. The ipsum esse, the true identity of the divinity, his humanity could hardly be
distinguished any longer from the radiant Being of the neo-Platonists, because of the
ceaseless interpretation of being and being-in-the-world — the unity of essence and
existence — in which all differences disappeared. When they build a system, theists
and atheists alike posit an entity at the top. The dogma of a Nature which can speak
and command — or at least serve as a principle for deducing moral truths — was an
inadequate attempt to go along with science without giving up the age-old longing for
an eternal guideline. But nature could only teach self-preservation and the right of the
stronger, not for example liberty and justice. The liberal bourgeois order was always
forced to pursue non-rational interests. Traditional institutionalized religion was still
in a far better position to arouse these interests than atheism of whatever kind. The
French materialists of the eighteenth century and especially the so-called “free-
thinkers” and the pale monists of the nineteenth century were only a passing threat to
Christianity.
The upheavals which began with the present century — the era of world wars, of
nations awakening all over the globe, of stupendous population growth — can only be
compared with the decline of antiquity or the middle ages. Christianity and theism in
general are far more seriously called in question than in the Siècle des Lumières. In
the nineteenth century, individual advancement depended in relatively wide areas on
general education, initiative, responsibility and foresight. In a changing economy, the
decisive qualities are now versatility, ability to react precisely to stimuli, specialized
skill, reliability. We are witnessing a rapid decline in the importance of highly
differentiated and independently acquired attitudes, along with a decline in the role of
those qualities and of the family which produced them. But qualities which lose their
social utility become obstacles, the marks of the provincial, of backwardness. These
changes in the psychological structure are part of a comprehensive process in which
political and religious institutions are also involved. Democracy is being undermined,
at least as Locke and Rousseau conceived it and as it was still functioning under the
French Third Republic and even in imperial Germany: as a conflict between the
different commercial, industrial and agrarian interests of independent groups. (The
relationship between workers and employers formed as it were a surd which could
not be expressed in parliament.) There has been a radical change in the character of
the deputies, in their relationship to their party, in their ability to form their own
independent judgments on the questions under debate. When faced with important
matters of state, especially in foreign policy and even more so in case of conflict, the
clumsy democratic apparatus calls for its own transformation into a fast and efficient
instrument operated by strong men. Theology had to adapt not only to structural
changes in the social mechanism and to the related transformation of the family and the
individual; a powerful enemy, called “communism” by friend and foe alike, sprang up
at the same time. This threat, which concerns not only religion but civilization as such,
comes not so much from the theory of Marx and Engels which is itself among the
greatest achievements of civilization. Dialectical materialism was, moreover, quickly
transformed into a mere ideology, like the bourgeois Enlightenment after its victory in
the French Revolution and like theistic religions wherever they come to power. Much
more important is a social mechanism which is also operative in other countries
where it is about to integrate religion completely with the state, and which ensures that
the only serious interest transcending the horizon of individual self-preservation is
collective power, the rule of one’s own nation or supra-national block. National
socialism was a case in point. It had no longer any need of Christianity and felt it as a
threat in spite of mutual concessions. Anybody, whether theist or atheist, who did not
belong without reservations was an enemy of the national atheism. Even today the
Third Reich — the savage collective will to power — tends everywhere to suppress
the thought of another Reich and to achieve thereby what the civitas terrena — in spite
of the gruesome deeds it committed in the name of the civitas Dei throughout history
— was unable to accomplish earlier because of its backward technology: a world
without shelter.
The changes with which Catholics and Protestants alike are trying to meet the threat in
the developed countries are no less far-reaching than the most fundamental changes in
the history of theology. Rome these days (May 1963) is both progressive and
conservative. The new spirit seeks to improve the lot of the workers, to give them a
share of the wealth in free countries and to liberate them from brutal suppression
under backward dictatorships. Social movements are judged without hatred even
when they derive from an anti-religious doctrine. Who could deny, we are asked in
Pacem in terris, the papal encyclical, “that something good and worthy of recognition
is to be found in such movements, as long as they conform to the law and order of
reason and take into account the just demands of the human person?” The inevitability
of social change is being acknowledged and affirmed. But tolerance of social progress
is combined, by internal necessity, with the endeavor to salvage as many middle-class
virtues as possible and to build them into the new order even at the risk of making
quick adaptation to existing conditions impossible. It is by remaining within the
tradition while giving it a new sense that the Church is trying to take an active part in
shaping society. Its efforts to keep up with the times appear modest when compared
with the conclusions that Protestant theologians have already drawn. The latter have
eliminated the possibility of any conflict not only with science — which science in its
positivistic form has been avoiding in any case — but even with all moral principles,
no matter what their content may be. Further, the assertion that God really exists as a
person or even as a trinity — not to mention the other world — is true only in a
mythical sense. According to a popular work, Honest to God, by John Robinson, an
Anglican bishop, which is now being debated in several countries, the whole
conception of a God who “visited” the earth in the person of His Son is as mythical as
the prince in the fairy tale. The “supernatural scheme” which includes for example the
Christmas story and corresponding legends can, we are told, survive and take its place
as a myth “quite legitimately.” The only reason why it ought to survive is that it points
to the spiritual meaning of our lives. Robinson is only putting into simpler words the
thoughts of Paul Tillich and other philosophical theologians: the stories of the Bible
are symbolic. When the New Testament tells us that God was in Christ and that the
Word was God, this only means according to Robinson that God is the ultimate
“depth” of our being, the unconditioned within the conditioned. The so-called
“transcendent” — God, love, or whatever name we might give it — is not “outside”
but is to be found in, with and below the Thou of all finite relationships as their
ultimate depth, their ground, their meaning. But if we must talk of ultimate, then
Schopenhauer was closer to the truth when he denounced it in each creature as the
instinct for self-preservation, the will to be and to be well. However well-intentioned,
the bishop’s words turn out to be mere verbiage, unctuous words which to German
ears are nothing but well-worn cliches. And even though theism is to be sacrificed for
an anti-dogmatic attitude, the rejected view is being presupposed in a perfectly naive
way. Truth — eternal truth outlasting human error — cannot as such be separated from
theism. The only alternative is positivism, with which the latest theology is in accord
irrespective of contradictions. On the positivist view, truth consists in calculations
that work, thoughts are instruments, and consciousness becomes superfluous to the
extent that purposive behavior, which was mediated by it, merges into the collective
whole. Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning. No matter how
independent a given form of expression may be within its own sphere as in art or
religion, and no matter how distinct and how necessary in itself, with the belief in God
it will have to surrender all claim to being objectively something higher than a
practical convenience. Without reference to something divine, a good deed like the
rescue of a man who is being persecuted unjustly loses all its glory, unless it happens
to be in the interest of some collective whole inside the national boundaries or beyond
them. While the latest Protestant theologians still permit the desperate to call
themselves Christians, they subvert the dogma whose truth alone would give their
words a meaning. The death of God is also the death of eternal truth.
Having retreated to their last position, Protestant theologians, unconscious of this
philosophical dilemma, try to rescue the idea that the life of each individual has its
own meaning. It is essential for life in this world to mean something more than this
world. What more? Their answer is: Love. The reason why love remains to determine
what cannot be determined is obviously the memory of the Christian heritage. But love
as an abstraction — as it appears in recent writings — remains as obscure as the
hidden God whom it is supposed to replace. If its consequences for thought and action
are not to be left entirely to chance, it is essential that the various implications
contained in this principle be made explicit. The meaning of the concept would
become apparent if it were explicated in the form of a theory of reality — of those
real situations in which it should be tested. One would then deduce from the concept
of Christian love how the world appeared today within its horizons, in which
direction it could work within society, and especially, to what extent it would have to
be negated to be able to express itself — not to speak of finding the strength to assert
itself. As the theory was being developed, it would in turn affect the principle behind
it by defining it more fully and by modifying it. Even the will to eradicate all hunger
and injustice is still an abstraction, though it is already more concrete than empty talk
about values, eternal meaning and genuine being. The idea of a better world has not
only been given shape in theological treatises, but often just as well in the so-called
“nihilistic” works — the critique of political economy, the theory of Marx and Engels,
psychoanalysis — works which have been blacklisted, whether in the East or in the
West, and provoked the wrath of the mighty as the inflammatory speeches of Christ did
among his contemporaries. The opposition between theism and atheism has ceased to
be actual. Atheism was once a sign of inner independence and incredible courage, and
it continues to be one in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries where it is
regarded as a symptom of the hated liberal spirit. But under totalitarian rule of
whatever denomination, which is nowadays the universal threat, its place tends to be
taken by honest theism. Atheism includes infinitely many different things. The term
“theism” on the other hand is definite enough to allow one to brand as a hypocrite
whoever hates in its name. When theism adopts eternal justice as a pretext for
temporal injustice, it is as bad as atheism insofar as it leaves no room for thoughts of
anything else. Both of them have been responsible for good and evil throughout the
history of Europe, and both of them have had their tyrants and their martyrs. There
remains the hope that, in the period of world history which is now beginning, the
period of docile masses governed by clocks, some men can still be found to offer
resistance, like the victims of the past and, among them, the founder of Christianity.
Even though Catholics and Protestants are nowadays ‘both on the defensive, theism is
again becoming an actual force in the period of its decline. This follows from the very
meaning of “atheism.” Only those who used “atheism” as a term of abuse meant by it
the exact opposite of religion. Those who professed themselves to be atheists at a time
when religion was still in power tended to identify themselves more deeply with the
theistic commandment to love one’s neighbor and indeed all created things than most
adherents and fellow-travelers of the various denominations. Such selflessness, such a
sublimation of self-love into love of others had its origin in Europe in the Judaeo-
Christian idea that truth, love and justice were one, an idea which found expression in
the teachings of the Messiah. The necessary connection between the theistic tradition
and the overcoming of self-seeking becomes very much clearer to a reflective thinker
of our time than it was to the critics of religion in bygone days. Besides, what is
called “theism” here has very little in common with the philosophical movement of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which went by that name. That movement was
mostly an attempt to reconcile the concept of God with the new science of nature in a
plausible manner. The longing for something other than this world, the standing-apart
from existing conditions played only a subordinate part in it and mostly no part at all.
The meanings of the two concepts do not remain unaffected by history, and their
changes are infinitely varied. At a time when both the national socialists and the
nationalistic communists despised the Christian faith, a man like Robespierre, the
disciple of Rousseau, but not a man like Voltaire, would also have become an atheist
and declared nationalism as a religion. Nowadays atheism is in fact the attitude of
those who follow whatever power happens to be dominant, no matter whether they
pay lip-service to a religion or whether they can afford to disavow it openly. On the
other hand, those who resist the prevailing wind are trying to hold on to what was
once the spiritual basis of the civilization to which they still belong. This is hardly
what the philosophical “theists” had in mind: the conception of a divine guarantor of
the laws of nature. It is on the contrary the thought of something other than the world,
something over which the fixed rules of nature, the perennial source of doom, have no
dominion.
BY: MAX HORKHEIMER
Source: Critique of Instrumental Reason. Max Horkheimer. Published by Continuum
1974;
Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;
Proofed: and corrected by Chris 2009
Crimes committed in the name of God are a recurrent theme in the history of Christian
Europe. The ancients practiced torture and murder in war, on slaves (who were
supplied by the wars) and as a form of entertainment: the circenses. But in spiritual
matters the emperors were relatively tolerant. If the Christians were singled out as
scapegoats, it was because they did not yet at that time place the state above all else
and still recognized something higher than the empire. But since Constantine in his
unscrupulous way singled out Christianity from among the existing religions to fill in
the cracks in his crumbling empire and elevated it to the state religion, Europe has
stood under the sign of that doctrine and betrayed it again and again. If the words of
the founder, his recorded will, his precepts had been put in practice instead of being
interpreted by the scholars, neither the unified Christians of the middle ages nor the
disunited Christians of the modern period would have had their splendid careers.
Whatever teachings could have been taken over from the Old Testament, glory in
battle was no part of it. Under the heathen emperors, the commandment to render unto
Caesar what was Caesar’s could bring Christians into conflict with the state and,
when they rightly refused to observe it, to the cross. But the Christian emperors would
have undertaken no wars of conquest, they would have named no tribunals to punish
those who had offended against them. The victorious course of Christianity since
Nicaea and especially since Augustine, which was not unlike the expansion of
Buddhism since the reign of Asoka, sealed its pact with that worldly wisdom which it
had originally professed to renounce. Its readiness for fanaticism, without which its
ascendancy would have been unstable, testified to a secret and indomitable hatred for
that attitude of mind for which its founder had earlier been put to death.
Initially, when the Christians themselves were the persecuted, the divinity appeared to
them as a guarantor of justice. There was to be no more suppression in the world
beyond, and the last would be the first; it was for the sake of heaven and not because
of hell, out of hope and not for fear that the martyrs and their disciples professed their
faith. Suppression, even death under torture, was but a transition into eternal
blessedness; apparently inescapable conditions were but a moment of false defeats or
triumph. All were the likeness of the divinity, even the lowest, and especially the
lowest. The man at the stake, on the gallows, on the cross was the symbol of
Christianity. It was not the ruling order of the time which determined who were to be
the first; the prison and the gas chamber were at least no further from the followers of
the divine delinquent than headquarters. If the barbarian masters, the men of quick
decision, the generals and their confidants were included in the divine love, it was
because of their poor souls. The pact concerned first of all those who were poor in
spirit, those whose lives were not primarily oriented toward riches, power, affairs of
state, or even towards prestige. In the first centuries of the Christian era, when the self-
confidence of the senate and the people was shaken by the aspirations of the tribes
outside and the resulting growth of barbarism inside, the gospel of a goal beyond this
world gave a new meaning to the lives of the masses, enslaved and unruly under their
masters. If it was possible for the primitive Christians to follow the gospel without
unconscious resistance, it was because they knew nothing except that heaven was open
to them. But the closer their doctrine came to gaining absolute power, the more it had
to conform to the requirements of self-preservation under existing conditions, to come
to terms with the law of this world — though its main idea had been the relativity of
this law — and to conclude the pact it has kept ever since. Darkness gained in
importance. As evil became increasingly necessary for it to carry out its plans for this
world, hell became increasingly important to it in its thinking of the world beyond.
Theology has always tried to reconcile the demands of the Gospels and of power. In
view of the clear utterances of the founder, enormous ingenuity was required.
Theology drew its strength from the fact that whatever is to be permanent on earth
must conform to the laws of nature: the right of the stronger. Its indispensable task was
to reconcile Christianity and power, to give a satisfactory self-awareness to both high
and low with which they could do their work in a corrupt world. Like the founder,
who paid the price for refusing to show any concern for his own life and was
murdered for it, and like all who really followed him and shared his fate or at least
were left to perish helplessly, his later followers would have perished like fools if
they had not concluded a pact or at least found a modus vivendi with the blood-thirsty
Merovingians and Carolingians, with the demagogues of the crusades and with the
holy inquisition. Civilization with its tall cathedrals, the madonnas of Raphael and
even the poetry of Baudelaire owes its existence to the terror once perpetrated by such
tyrants and their accomplices. There is blood sticking to all good things, as Nietzsche
remarked, whose sensitivity was unsurpassed even by a saint. If the great had taken the
conflict of Christianity and Christendom as seriously as Kierkegaard did in the end,
there would exist no monument of Christian culture. Without the artful patchwork of
scholastic theology, neither the works of pro-Christian nor of anti-Christian
philosophy would have come into being, nor the struggle for human rights, which
found in John XXIII a late high-minded spokesman, nor the remote village with its old
church, which was at first allowed to remain intact by the traffic, the sign of a more
advanced civilization, in its barbaric and at the same time benevolent manner.
Building on the foundation of enlightenment and renewal which had been laid by
church fathers, Pelagians, and gnostics against the superstitions of a decaying
antiquity, the Scholastics developed the view of the world on which the freemen of the
middle ages organized their government and established their cities. The combination
of acuteness and precision, knowledge and imagination to be found in the Summas
rivals the interpretations of the Torah which have been admired and disparaged as
products of the Talmudic spirit. Scholasticism signifies the great age of theology. But
while its comprehensive system lent ideological support to a relatively static society,
it could not in the end prevent the dissolution of Christian unity.
Scholasticism lived on its inheritance from classical philosophy. Eternal ideals,
which are supposed to reveal themselves to the mind like numbers, formed according
to it the intellectual structure of reality. Scholastic wisdom was accepted by all
believers as an interpretation of revelation, as knowledge of the world, of the
temporal and eternal, of past and future. The lord and the saints were enthroned on the
highest plane. Above the earth dwelt the angels and the blessed. Then came spiritual
and secular dignitaries, lords, freemen and serfs. The ladder of nature stretched into
the darkness of non-living things, and at the bottom was the place of the damned. Men
had a picture of the universe in which divine and natural knowledge, divine and
natural laws were one. In spite of predestination and grace, a man’s future in other
regions was largely determined by his conduct on earth which had implications
beyond the moment. Each man’s life had a meaning, not just the lives of the prominent.
The political divisions led to the disappearance of the belief in eternal concepts, in
the harmony of natural and supernatural knowledge, and in the unity of theory and
practice which the Scholastics had in common with the Marxists, though the former
glorified the continuation of existing conditions and the latter their transformation. In
the end the medieval order was set in motion not only by wars, but as a result of the
widening of the world, through economic activity, the misery of the masses, inflation,
the beginnings of modern science and the backwardness of the religious professions.
The educated reacted with scepticism and humanism, and the threatened powers with
a religious renewal. The reformers, who had been preceded by the nominalists, the
followers of Cusa and by others, renounced the system as a way of rationalizing the
union of Christianity and worldliness. The opposition was all too apparent. They
acknowledged it and made it the central part of their teaching. The Protestant way of
reconciling the commandments of Christ with those human activities that appealed to
them was to declare any reconciliation to be impossible. Nothing could be said, either
about the will of God or about the right order of things, which would set up a general
connection between the two. Knowledge and science were concerned with transitory
things in a transitory world. Luther hated Scholasticism, theories of eternal relations,
systematic philosophy, “the whore Reason.” The view that men could justify their
private or collective lives in theological terms and determine whether they were in
harmony with the divine seemed to him sheer pride and superstition. Even though he
judged Christians to be high above other men, especially Jews and Turks, his final
judgment about right action remained suspended. In the end nobody knew what good
works were — the church as little as a secular board of censors. Luther’s verdict
against theological speculation, which anticipated Kant’s limitation of metaphysical
speculation, left reason free to roam this vale of tears — in empirical research, in
commerce, and especially in secular government. The interest of the individual and the
state became the criterion of action in this world. Whether the troops waded in the
blood of peasants who had risen from hunger, or whether a man sacrificed himself out
of political blindness to share his last bread with them, one action was as “Christian”
as the other, provided each agent sincerely believed that he was following the Word.
The Reformation introduced the era of civil liberty. Hate and treachery, the “scab of
time,” had its origin in the inscrutable counsels of God, and would remain till the end
of pre-history, till “all enemies of the Word have become like dung in the street.” The
idealist philosophers in Germany, who outdid the classics of liberalism in England in
their glorification of progress, came to regard the ruthless competition between
individuals and nations as the unfolding of the absolute spirit. God’s ways are
peculiar. His Word stands: We must love our enemies. But whether this means burning
the heretic and the witch, sending children to work before they can read, making
bombs and blessing them, or whether it means the opposite, each believer has to
decide for himself without even suspecting what the true will of God might be. A
guiding light, though a deceptive one, is provided by the interest of the fatherland, of
which there is little mention in the Gospels. In the last few centuries, an incomparably
greater number of believers have staked their lives for their country than for the
forbidden love of its enemies. The idealists from Fichte to Hegel have also taken an
active part in this development. In Europe, faith in God has now become faith in one’s
own people. The motto, “Right or wrong, my country,” together with the tolerance of
other religions with similar views, takes us back into that ancient world from which
the primitive Christians had turned away. Specific faith in God is growing dim.
Theology was able to adapt itself to the triumphs of the new science and technology in
the last few centuries. In those European countries which had resisted the
Reformation, especially in France and Italy, the intellectual and political struggles
produced a form of life in which the consciousness of civil liberty was allowed to
flourish while Christianity in its traditional form was able to retain a place in
connection with it. There the social forces which had found expression in the
Enlightenment were able to assert themselves in political reality, whereas in the
German states they were confined to the subjective realm, to the benefit of romantic
poetry, great music and idealist philosophy. Here the way to bliss led again through
faith, through the idea. Similarly religion, whether Catholic or Protestant, survived the
nineteenth century as an element of bourgeois life, even though it changed its role.
Much of the credit for its survival belonged to the militant atheists. Even when the
great atheists did not themselves suffer martyrdom for their beliefs like Bruno and
Vanini, it was so obvious that the antithesis — their radical or not so radical
departure — was inspired by the thesis — the spirit of the Gospels — that they were
far more capable of deepening the interest in religion than of extinguishing it. Voltaire,
the foremost among them, was still generous as to let theism pass, and his work
remained as foreign to the general consciousness as Goethe’s, which resembled his.
The popular figure of atheism, metaphysical materialism, was too barren to become a
serious threat to Christianity as long as it lacked a dialectical and idealistic — or in
reality, a utopian and messianic — theory of history. As long as government was not
yet in control of everything, from the co-operation of political and economic forces in
commerce and industry to the conduct of one’s private life — the struggle with
solitude which is called “spare time” — preaching the love of God and trust in His
guidance continued to be the better way. The Absolute of the theologians was
incomparably more effective in providing consolation, incentive and admonition than
any concept which the philosophical materialists had to offer. True, their critique of
theism sounded plausible enough. “It has always been in the womb of ignorance, fear
and misery that men have formed their first conceptions of the divinity,” writes
Holbach in his System of Nature, the bible of eighteenth-century materialism. This
shows that those teachings “were either doubtful or false and in any case deplorable.
In fact, whatever part of the globe we look at, whether the icy regions of the North, the
torrid ones of the South, or the most moderate zones, we find that people everywhere
have trembled and, as a result of their fears and their misery, either created their own
national gods or adored those brought to them from elsewhere. It is ignorance and fear
which have created the gods; conceit, passion and deceit which have adorned and
disfigured them; it is weakness which adores them, credulity which nourishes them,
and tyranny which supports them in order to profit from the delusions of men.” So
much for the materialist’s account of the origin of religion. In place of the rejected
divinity they offer Nature. “Nature,” continues Holbach at a later place, “tells the
pervert to blush at his vices, at his shameful inclinations, his misdeeds; she shows him
that his most secret disorders will necessarily affect his happiness.... Nature tells the
civilized man to love the country in which he was born, to serve it faithfully, to enter
with it into a community of interests against all those who might try to harm it.” In the
name of Nature the enlightened Holbach calls for the defense of one’s country not only
against external enemies but against internal tyrants. But what does he mean by
“Nature"? There is nothing outside her; she is one and all at once. Man shall discover
her laws, admire her inexhaustible energy, use his discoveries for his own happiness,
and resign himself to his ignorance of her last, her ultimate causes which are
impenetrable. With his whole being man belongs to her. The abstract entity which,
according to such materialists, forms the basis of right conduct is as indeterminate as
the Deus absconditus of the Protestants, and the promise of happiness in this world is
as problematical as bliss in the next, which is extremely uncertain. The naturalistic
doctrine agrees with the theological doctrine it opposes in identifying what is most
permanent and powerful with what is most exalted and worthy of love — as if this
were a matter of course. In their fear of death men turn to the One, eternal and
immortal — which is their own wishful thinking hypostatized — as if in obedience to
a superior power. ,The ancient materialists were still inclined to stop with a plurality
of atoms; the worshippers of Nature, like the pantheists, ontologists and theologians,
will hear of nothing less than the One. But Nature does not say anything, as little as
Being, which has been tried recently and which is supposed to deliver its oracles
through the mouths of professors. The place of God is taken in each case by an
impersonal concept. The Scholastics had already depersonalized the humanity and
individuality of the murdered Jesus by multiplying them as it were into the Oneness of
God. The ipsum esse, the true identity of the divinity, his humanity could hardly be
distinguished any longer from the radiant Being of the neo-Platonists, because of the
ceaseless interpretation of being and being-in-the-world — the unity of essence and
existence — in which all differences disappeared. When they build a system, theists
and atheists alike posit an entity at the top. The dogma of a Nature which can speak
and command — or at least serve as a principle for deducing moral truths — was an
inadequate attempt to go along with science without giving up the age-old longing for
an eternal guideline. But nature could only teach self-preservation and the right of the
stronger, not for example liberty and justice. The liberal bourgeois order was always
forced to pursue non-rational interests. Traditional institutionalized religion was still
in a far better position to arouse these interests than atheism of whatever kind. The
French materialists of the eighteenth century and especially the so-called “free-
thinkers” and the pale monists of the nineteenth century were only a passing threat to
Christianity.
The upheavals which began with the present century — the era of world wars, of
nations awakening all over the globe, of stupendous population growth — can only be
compared with the decline of antiquity or the middle ages. Christianity and theism in
general are far more seriously called in question than in the Siècle des Lumières. In
the nineteenth century, individual advancement depended in relatively wide areas on
general education, initiative, responsibility and foresight. In a changing economy, the
decisive qualities are now versatility, ability to react precisely to stimuli, specialized
skill, reliability. We are witnessing a rapid decline in the importance of highly
differentiated and independently acquired attitudes, along with a decline in the role of
those qualities and of the family which produced them. But qualities which lose their
social utility become obstacles, the marks of the provincial, of backwardness. These
changes in the psychological structure are part of a comprehensive process in which
political and religious institutions are also involved. Democracy is being undermined,
at least as Locke and Rousseau conceived it and as it was still functioning under the
French Third Republic and even in imperial Germany: as a conflict between the
different commercial, industrial and agrarian interests of independent groups. (The
relationship between workers and employers formed as it were a surd which could
not be expressed in parliament.) There has been a radical change in the character of
the deputies, in their relationship to their party, in their ability to form their own
independent judgments on the questions under debate. When faced with important
matters of state, especially in foreign policy and even more so in case of conflict, the
clumsy democratic apparatus calls for its own transformation into a fast and efficient
instrument operated by strong men. Theology had to adapt not only to structural
changes in the social mechanism and to the related transformation of the family and the
individual; a powerful enemy, called “communism” by friend and foe alike, sprang up
at the same time. This threat, which concerns not only religion but civilization as such,
comes not so much from the theory of Marx and Engels which is itself among the
greatest achievements of civilization. Dialectical materialism was, moreover, quickly
transformed into a mere ideology, like the bourgeois Enlightenment after its victory in
the French Revolution and like theistic religions wherever they come to power. Much
more important is a social mechanism which is also operative in other countries
where it is about to integrate religion completely with the state, and which ensures that
the only serious interest transcending the horizon of individual self-preservation is
collective power, the rule of one’s own nation or supra-national block. National
socialism was a case in point. It had no longer any need of Christianity and felt it as a
threat in spite of mutual concessions. Anybody, whether theist or atheist, who did not
belong without reservations was an enemy of the national atheism. Even today the
Third Reich — the savage collective will to power — tends everywhere to suppress
the thought of another Reich and to achieve thereby what the civitas terrena — in spite
of the gruesome deeds it committed in the name of the civitas Dei throughout history
— was unable to accomplish earlier because of its backward technology: a world
without shelter.
The changes with which Catholics and Protestants alike are trying to meet the threat in
the developed countries are no less far-reaching than the most fundamental changes in
the history of theology. Rome these days (May 1963) is both progressive and
conservative. The new spirit seeks to improve the lot of the workers, to give them a
share of the wealth in free countries and to liberate them from brutal suppression
under backward dictatorships. Social movements are judged without hatred even
when they derive from an anti-religious doctrine. Who could deny, we are asked in
Pacem in terris, the papal encyclical, “that something good and worthy of recognition
is to be found in such movements, as long as they conform to the law and order of
reason and take into account the just demands of the human person?” The inevitability
of social change is being acknowledged and affirmed. But tolerance of social progress
is combined, by internal necessity, with the endeavor to salvage as many middle-class
virtues as possible and to build them into the new order even at the risk of making
quick adaptation to existing conditions impossible. It is by remaining within the
tradition while giving it a new sense that the Church is trying to take an active part in
shaping society. Its efforts to keep up with the times appear modest when compared
with the conclusions that Protestant theologians have already drawn. The latter have
eliminated the possibility of any conflict not only with science — which science in its
positivistic form has been avoiding in any case — but even with all moral principles,
no matter what their content may be. Further, the assertion that God really exists as a
person or even as a trinity — not to mention the other world — is true only in a
mythical sense. According to a popular work, Honest to God, by John Robinson, an
Anglican bishop, which is now being debated in several countries, the whole
conception of a God who “visited” the earth in the person of His Son is as mythical as
the prince in the fairy tale. The “supernatural scheme” which includes for example the
Christmas story and corresponding legends can, we are told, survive and take its place
as a myth “quite legitimately.” The only reason why it ought to survive is that it points
to the spiritual meaning of our lives. Robinson is only putting into simpler words the
thoughts of Paul Tillich and other philosophical theologians: the stories of the Bible
are symbolic. When the New Testament tells us that God was in Christ and that the
Word was God, this only means according to Robinson that God is the ultimate
“depth” of our being, the unconditioned within the conditioned. The so-called
“transcendent” — God, love, or whatever name we might give it — is not “outside”
but is to be found in, with and below the Thou of all finite relationships as their
ultimate depth, their ground, their meaning. But if we must talk of ultimate, then
Schopenhauer was closer to the truth when he denounced it in each creature as the
instinct for self-preservation, the will to be and to be well. However well-intentioned,
the bishop’s words turn out to be mere verbiage, unctuous words which to German
ears are nothing but well-worn cliches. And even though theism is to be sacrificed for
an anti-dogmatic attitude, the rejected view is being presupposed in a perfectly naive
way. Truth — eternal truth outlasting human error — cannot as such be separated from
theism. The only alternative is positivism, with which the latest theology is in accord
irrespective of contradictions. On the positivist view, truth consists in calculations
that work, thoughts are instruments, and consciousness becomes superfluous to the
extent that purposive behavior, which was mediated by it, merges into the collective
whole. Without God one will try in vain to preserve absolute meaning. No matter how
independent a given form of expression may be within its own sphere as in art or
religion, and no matter how distinct and how necessary in itself, with the belief in God
it will have to surrender all claim to being objectively something higher than a
practical convenience. Without reference to something divine, a good deed like the
rescue of a man who is being persecuted unjustly loses all its glory, unless it happens
to be in the interest of some collective whole inside the national boundaries or beyond
them. While the latest Protestant theologians still permit the desperate to call
themselves Christians, they subvert the dogma whose truth alone would give their
words a meaning. The death of God is also the death of eternal truth.
Having retreated to their last position, Protestant theologians, unconscious of this
philosophical dilemma, try to rescue the idea that the life of each individual has its
own meaning. It is essential for life in this world to mean something more than this
world. What more? Their answer is: Love. The reason why love remains to determine
what cannot be determined is obviously the memory of the Christian heritage. But love
as an abstraction — as it appears in recent writings — remains as obscure as the
hidden God whom it is supposed to replace. If its consequences for thought and action
are not to be left entirely to chance, it is essential that the various implications
contained in this principle be made explicit. The meaning of the concept would
become apparent if it were explicated in the form of a theory of reality — of those
real situations in which it should be tested. One would then deduce from the concept
of Christian love how the world appeared today within its horizons, in which
direction it could work within society, and especially, to what extent it would have to
be negated to be able to express itself — not to speak of finding the strength to assert
itself. As the theory was being developed, it would in turn affect the principle behind
it by defining it more fully and by modifying it. Even the will to eradicate all hunger
and injustice is still an abstraction, though it is already more concrete than empty talk
about values, eternal meaning and genuine being. The idea of a better world has not
only been given shape in theological treatises, but often just as well in the so-called
“nihilistic” works — the critique of political economy, the theory of Marx and Engels,
psychoanalysis — works which have been blacklisted, whether in the East or in the
West, and provoked the wrath of the mighty as the inflammatory speeches of Christ did
among his contemporaries. The opposition between theism and atheism has ceased to
be actual. Atheism was once a sign of inner independence and incredible courage, and
it continues to be one in authoritarian or semi-authoritarian countries where it is
regarded as a symptom of the hated liberal spirit. But under totalitarian rule of
whatever denomination, which is nowadays the universal threat, its place tends to be
taken by honest theism. Atheism includes infinitely many different things. The term
“theism” on the other hand is definite enough to allow one to brand as a hypocrite
whoever hates in its name. When theism adopts eternal justice as a pretext for
temporal injustice, it is as bad as atheism insofar as it leaves no room for thoughts of
anything else. Both of them have been responsible for good and evil throughout the
history of Europe, and both of them have had their tyrants and their martyrs. There
remains the hope that, in the period of world history which is now beginning, the
period of docile masses governed by clocks, some men can still be found to offer
resistance, like the victims of the past and, among them, the founder of Christianity.
Even though Catholics and Protestants are nowadays ‘both on the defensive, theism is
again becoming an actual force in the period of its decline. This follows from the very
meaning of “atheism.” Only those who used “atheism” as a term of abuse meant by it
the exact opposite of religion. Those who professed themselves to be atheists at a time
when religion was still in power tended to identify themselves more deeply with the
theistic commandment to love one’s neighbor and indeed all created things than most
adherents and fellow-travelers of the various denominations. Such selflessness, such a
sublimation of self-love into love of others had its origin in Europe in the Judaeo-
Christian idea that truth, love and justice were one, an idea which found expression in
the teachings of the Messiah. The necessary connection between the theistic tradition
and the overcoming of self-seeking becomes very much clearer to a reflective thinker
of our time than it was to the critics of religion in bygone days. Besides, what is
called “theism” here has very little in common with the philosophical movement of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which went by that name. That movement was
mostly an attempt to reconcile the concept of God with the new science of nature in a
plausible manner. The longing for something other than this world, the standing-apart
from existing conditions played only a subordinate part in it and mostly no part at all.
The meanings of the two concepts do not remain unaffected by history, and their
changes are infinitely varied. At a time when both the national socialists and the
nationalistic communists despised the Christian faith, a man like Robespierre, the
disciple of Rousseau, but not a man like Voltaire, would also have become an atheist
and declared nationalism as a religion. Nowadays atheism is in fact the attitude of
those who follow whatever power happens to be dominant, no matter whether they
pay lip-service to a religion or whether they can afford to disavow it openly. On the
other hand, those who resist the prevailing wind are trying to hold on to what was
once the spiritual basis of the civilization to which they still belong. This is hardly
what the philosophical “theists” had in mind: the conception of a divine guarantor of
the laws of nature. It is on the contrary the thought of something other than the world,
something over which the fixed rules of nature, the perennial source of doom, have no
dominion.