Autor: Murray, John

Buch: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Titel: The Problem of God: Yesterday and Today

Stichwort: Kennzeichen: Atheismus - Marx; Problem des Bösen; moalischer Absolutismus

Kurzinhalt: This is the purest and most passionate form of atheism, when man rejects God in the name of his own more God-like morality;

Textausschnitt: 108a In the first place, the Marxist will to oppose God is not founded on some personal will to libertinage as in the case of the biblical fool, nor again on some prideful will to worship only reason as in the case of the modern philosophes. Marxist atheism has it roots not in the world of ideas but in the world of fact-in the social fact of human misery. It is an atheism of exasperation directed against the historical condition of man in the industrial age. At the bottom of an atheism whose matrix is the problem of evil, there lies a moral absolute. It asserts not only that evil has no right to exist but that its existence is intolerable. This is a principle of such absoluteness that the God of the Bible does not admit it as an imperative on his governance of the world. He judges evil to be evil, but he does not regard it as intolerable. He shows toward it the "forbearance" of which Paul speaks (Romans 3:25). This now becomes the charge against him. He who is God-so runs the indictment-ought not to tolerate evil. Since the God of the Bible does tolerate it, he is not God. God is rejected in the name of God himself. This is the purest and most passionate form of atheism, when man rejects God in the name of his own more God-like morality. It towers high above the petty biblical atheisms and above the shallow monisms of philosophy. Marxist atheism rises toward, if it does not reach, this height of purity and passion. (Fs) (notabene)

This astonishing reply measures all the distance that lies between the modern and the Marxist concepts of freedom. For the Marxist, true freedom is the empowerment to alter nature, to transform man and society, to build a new world, to inaugurate a new history. This empowerment descends upon man through his recognition of the necessities inherent in the materialist dialectic of history. By this recognition man becomes the master of history. Precisely in this mastery, exercised in each concrete moment of history, man's concrete freedom consists. It is the freedom of the Pantokrator, an actuality of power over the historical process. By this freedom the man of the Revolution will make sense out of history, that is, give to it a new substance of meaning and impart to it a new direction toward the goal of a world without misery.

109a In the third place, the ultimate enemy of freedom in the Marxist sense is God, the Pantokrator. The knowledge of God in the biblical sense is the primary source of man's alienation. This Marxist concept is complex. For our purposes here it may be sufficient to say that the state of alienation is the contrary of the state of freedom. More exactly, because in more dynamic terms, alienation divests man of his freedom. The man who believes that God is the Pantokrator falls captive to an illusion. By fiat of the Marxist will, if not by deliverance from modern philosophy, God is an illusion. God is no more than man's own creation, the "sigh of the oppressed creature," in Marx' phrase (in the famous passage in which he calls religion the "opium of the people"). For the sake of his own comfort man projects into an illusory heaven the fantasy of a power who is master of history, powerful enough to rescue man from misery and to guide history to a paradise beyond history. But this is the projection of what man himself is. Therefore the projection, the fantasy projected, and the belief in the fantasy are utterly pernicious. They are man's alienation from himself. (Fs) (notabene)

110b Therefore the knowledge of God is to be eradicated from the midst of the new people of the Revolution. Moreover, the suppression of God is to be total, from private as well as from public life. Marx and his heirs were not deceived by the vacuous slogan of the modern godless man, that religion is a purely private affair. They had the genius to see that religion, even in the form of private faith, is the most public of all public affairs. Therefore, in the ideal Marxist society, no one is to be permitted to say, even in the privacy of his own heart, "God is here; the Pantokrator is living, active, in this moment." Such a man would be the fool, an apostate from the Revolution, whose whole success depends on the suppression of God, on the destruction of the belief that God is the Master of history. Lenin, the heir of Marx, is more explicit than his master on this crucial point. It may be, he said in 1905, that the state can choose to regard religion as a purely private affair; this is no more than a matter of tactics, a concession to the bourgeois spirit of the modern age. But for the party of the socialist revolutionary proletariat, religion is by no means a purely private affair. It is an affair of ideology; therefore it is an affair of the party; therefore it is a public affair. The struggle against religion is central in the ideological struggle. The propaganda of atheism is essential to the propaganda of the party. There is no room in the party for the Christian, for the man who believes that God is the Pantokrator, here, with us, in this moment of history, and there will be no room for him anywhere when the party comes to victory in the victory of the revolution. (Fs) (notabene)

111a In the fourth place, the myth of the death of God is integral to the ideology of the Revolution. Only it is not a myth. More exactly, under the literary form of myth, there lies a scientific fact. The fact is that the man of the Revolution has come to a scientific understanding of history. He has discovered the meaning of history. He has discovered that it is history, not God, that makes the nature of man. This discovery was the death of God. When man came to know himself through history, when he came to understand that he is the creature of history and not of God, God was dead. He died out of history, leaving man as its master. (Fs)

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112b In the sixth and final place, the man of the Revolution displays a newly sure confidence, proper to the sovereign dignity that he has assumed. He is not, of course, a Condorcet, full of the bright and brittle confidence of the earlier rationalism that trusted to the shining of les lumieres to dissolve les prejudices. Marx said: "Ideen konnen überhaupt nichts ausführen." And his heirs have taken him at his word. They have furnished Marx' new lights with an armature of power, in the form of a great state whose full resources are enlisted in the furtherance of the Revolution. They fully understand the uses of force in support of ideas. Again, the new man is no Comte, satisfied to believe that history itself will usher in the new age of science, terminating and replacing the ages of philosophy and theology. The new man knows that history, which needs a master, also needs a servant who will do its work. This is his supreme dedication-to be the servant of history. In this service he finds the deepest root of his confidence. He is the contrefagon of the Servant of Yahweh of whom Deutero-Isaiah sang. He is selfless. He is incorruptible by money or pleasure. He is committed to the asceticism of constant work, the essential work of the working class, which is to hasten the consummation of the Revolution. Presently he wills to seize dictatorship over all the world, but only in order that he may thereby save the world. He even wills his own death, which is the withering away of the state, the instrument of his power, in order that this death may be the ransom of the Many, who will thus rise, by its virtue, to the new life of the classless society. This event is invisible now, but he confidently sees it coming. The invisible is always visible to faith. (Fs)