Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed—with no one to comfort them! On the side of their oppressors there was power—with no one to comfort them. And I thought of the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds done under the sun.
—Ecclesiastes 4.0-4:3
Make death die.
—Valentinus
About a year ago, my aunt sat me down rather dramatically and asked how I, a person with nice, conservative parents—good hardworking people, not too rich and not too strict and not too ideological, Episcopalians—had ended up straying so far from the flock. Sure, other cousins and relatives rebelled a little bit here and there, but not so much. She said that she had assumed that in those protesting years, I had been on the payroll of George Soros’s octopus of organizations—she couldn’t understand otherwise why I might have spent my time that way.
I tried to explain how things were, but as she looked at me slightly baffled, the words coming out of my mouth completely alien to her experience of life. I did not have a good answer except to say that I truly believed, that I thought that my friends had discovered the hidden answers to things; and that this belief was spurred on by a direct experience of life that felt good and true. In a word, epiphany—I suppose it was a religious-political epiphany.
I felt that we were extremely alive—“awake” is the term in the Bible—and that our tribe was nearly alone in seeing the world with open eyes and our hope was to get everyone else in the world to open their eyes. And that the people who surrounded us were sleepwalking half-alive or not alive at all. So we felt that we were alive in the land of the dead. Like the movie They Live, we possessed the magic sunglasses that cut through the artifice of the world. We were conveniently ignorant of the fact or ignoring the fact that there were different types of zealots and believers of every political and religious stripe all over the world engaged in a similar project of trying to “wake people up” to whatever their version of epiphany was.
To say that our tribe was cult would be far too strong of a word (like Raoul Vaneigem with his 1967 Revolution of Everyday Life, we believed it!)—there was no leader, no rules, no structure, just vibes.
But I would say the defibrillating experience of “feeling alive” in community was the key thing, and the politics came second, but that they were intertwined and mutually reinforcing.
My aunt’s question bothered me and led me to attempt to re-shape a slightly more cohesive response, mostly for myself—of how does this kind of thing work and why does it happen—that has been published as an essay in the February issue of Commonweal.
Here is a short excerpt:
Already I had a sense that a radical political sect could be substituted for a radical religious sect, that they served the same fundamental human need, in different ways—to resist the world, to deny oneself, and to feel connected to a small community. It didn’t matter how obscure the black-and-white copies of Crimethinc’s Inside Front punk magazine were; nor that the band behind that limited-release seven-inch that had changed so many people’s lives in Chattanooga broke up after a year; nor that the black-bloc march that smashed up a couple of banks on the streets of downtown Raleigh warranted only a single day’s notice in the local paper.
In hindsight, I see these forgotten and fragmentary radical sects as eerily parallel to the early heterodox Christian sects—the negation, the zeal for life, and the contempt for all authority, even the neglect of the minimal structure and record-keeping needed to perpetuate themselves. The Anchorites, the Essenes, the Basilidians, the Valentinians, the followers of Simon Magus, the mystery cults—who cares about them or remembers them today but a few marginal scholars?
There is something pure about letting a culture be forgotten, and something slightly sullying about insisting on longevity. Being dust in the wind was a good thing. Live frugally, money is evil, all things in common, all people one, the kingdom of God is within you—how many times, in how many different forms, have these impulses appeared and reappeared in history?
In his beautifully written 1973 book The Gnostics, Jacques Lacarrière discusses the heterodox Christians of the second and third century who believed that human beings were torn against their will from the divine by some cruel angel, god, or demiurge. Their view, as he put it, was that:
We on earth are rather like survivors condemned to eternal solitude, planetary detainees who are the victims of injustice on a truly cosmic scale. Stars, ether, aeons, planets, earth, life, flesh, inanimate matter, psyche—all are implicated, dragged into the universal disgrace…. our thinking being is tied to evil as ineluctably as our physical being is tied to the carbon in our body cells…. Each birth, each perpetuation of life, increases the domain of death.
You can read the rest here.
As is customary, my talented editor trimmed a lot of fat, shaping the piece to be much better.
He (wisely) cut out a kind of deep dive a did a few years ago into the specifics of socialism and communism’s engagements and interactions with communities of religious belief—things I really don’t care about much anymore, because honestly, trends and vibes almost always supercede “policy” and theoretical ideas, so what’s written doesn’t really matter.
But if you’re interested in that kind of thing or what gets left on the cutting room floor, there’s a section or two below.
Hello to new subscribers, and thanks again for reading.
IX.
Lacarrière suggests that, if he tries to imagine, “people like Basilides, Valentinus, or Carpocrates… I see them as either totally detached from all political considerations, or, on the contrary, totally involved in the revolutionary struggle of our times (these two postures being, for these men, two identical forms of the same asceticism).”
The social and political conditions of empire in the time of the New Testament has been a persistent source of fascination for scholars, writers and thinkers. Many—most recently Reza Aslan—have offered a revisionist interpretation of Jesus as a revolutionary political figure, a Jewish zealot on the fringes of empire, remembered for his particularly vicious martyrdom. Others, like Michael Walzer in his Exodus and Revolution, have tried to paint Exodus as a blueprint for millennia of revolutionary struggle—an attempt for which he was smashed by the unswervingly secular Edward Said in his review, “Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading.”
It is not hard to imagine those persecuted cabals of early Christians hiding out, perhaps engaging in direct action against the pagan empire, after Jesus’s death—and I see more and more parallels between the yo-yoing momentary advances and repression of radical social movements and the early heterodox sects, their erasure, their momentariness, their rejection, their sense that the world is an evil trick—while zealous movements are often completely right about everything, they come together and fall apart, in some ways they too much love oblivion and are not preoccupied by reproducing themselves.
At the end of his life, Friedrich Engels obsessed over the various resonances between the worker’s movement he helped build and early Christianity, in short essays like “The Book of Revelation” and “On the Origins of Early Christianity” writing:
Just as all those who have nothing to look forward to from the official world or have come to the end of their tether with it—opponents of inoculation, supporters of abstemiousness, vegetarians, anti-vivisectionists, nature-healers, free-community preachers whose communities have fallen to pieces, authors of new theories on the origins of the universe, unsuccessful or unfortunate inventors, victims of real or imaginary injustice who are termed ‘good-for-nothing pettiforgers’ by the bureaucracy, honest fools and dishonest swindlers—all throng to the working-class parties in all countries—so it was with the first Christians. All the elements which had been set free, ie. at a loose end, by the dissolution of the old world came one after the other into the orbit of Christianity as the only element that resisted that process of dissolution.
Ah, the vegans, anti-vivisectionists, nature-healers, straight-edgers—the continuum Engels draws from early Christianity through the wing-nuts in the 19th century workers movement, can be continued straight into the anti-globalization movement, and up into Occupy.
Engels died before he could make further studies, but passed the intellectual project onto his surrogates, who also died before they could compose an opus.
A foundational scholarly study on religion and socialism remains elusive, even as its threads penetrate into every aspect of religion, socialism, and art. The metaphysical impulses toward truth and justice bend and refract in all directions, across all disciplines—was Marx, for instance, touched by the divine as he labored through his economic opus? Many of the great religious texts are implicitly communist—a communism reserved for the elect of believers, of course—while the drives beneath drives towards social democracy are in some sense originating from the New Testament. Everything is leavened by the same yeast.
Marx mentioned the word “God” only 25 times in Capital Vol. 1, mostly as a sarcastic epithet. Though his quip about religion as the “opium of the people” is well known, its less known that his earliest piece of preserved writing, composed at the tender age of 17, was an essay on “The Union of the Faithful with Christ, according to John 15:1-14.” His father was forced to convert Christianity from Judaism due to the widespread career prejudice in 19th century Prussia. Both Engels and Marx engaged substantially with Christianity, but Marx fought bitterly in hand-to-hand combat with the spiritual and the mystical, seeking to crush peers like Bauer and Feuerbach. Marx’s writings on religion read as sarcastic and dismissive, while Engels was more nuanced and empathetic, seeing the potential in the Venn diagram:
Both Christianity and 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 baited, their adherents are despised and made the objects of exclusive laws, the former as enemies of the human race, the latter as enemies of the state, enemies of religion, the family, 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 recognized state religion in the Roman World Empire, and in barely sixty years socialism has won itself a position which makes its victory absolutely certain.
Eventually, a more ruthless tactician and organizer shows up and brings together the dissolute strands, cutting some of them out, into a structure—a Pauline push for power and organization; Irenaeus pens Against Heresies, Marx or Lenin smash down on their ideological competitors, and eventually, with much pitilessness, a hard-won Orthodoxy emerges, a Council of Nicaea is held.
The proto-movements, the Social Revolutionaries, the apostates, the nameless primitive rebels are all forgotten.
X.
The church and the party. The party and the church. In the end, they are one and the same—Norman Cantor said you could go through the early Christian books and substitute the word “church” for “party.”
Take this paragraph: “Augustine’s church was the instrument of the Holy Spirit, and its mission was to act in this world. In Platonic terms (which Augustine often used), the church was the earthly embodiment of the Holy Spirit. Its function was to absorb, to educate, and to reform the world, and it could not do so if it was against the world or retired from the world. Augustine believed that churchmen had to work in the world and slowly, painfully transform it.”
The late Benedict Anderson opened his fantastic Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, with the observation that nationalism (which was typically referred to within the Marxist discourse as “the national question”) has “proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory and precisely for that reason, has been largely elided rather than confronted.”
This statement, while true of nationalism, is even truer in terms of religion, particularly Christianity. “God...God takes a backseat with us,” Lenin wrote in his 1894 polemic against the anarchists, Narodniks, and Tchaikovsky circle.
He more concretely laid out his views on religion in a short 1905 essay on socialism and religion. Following Marx’s lead and tone, his outlook was dismissive, disgusted with the church and the police, yet he reaffirmed a kind of tolerance for religious expression: “discriminations among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable.”
The religious were welcome into the Party as long as they did not confuse their private beliefs with their political loyalties. It was a kind of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Anticipating the people who say “socialism is my religion” Lenin wrote, “If a religious person (says socialism is my religion) he was saying in effect that he was abandoning religion for socialism. But if someone who considered himself a Marxist claimed socialism as his religion, he was abandoning socialism for religion.”
Alain Badiou has compared Lenin to Paul—the organizer, the missionary, the tactician, the nerve center for Marx’s prophecy, without whom there never would have been a living Marxist orthodoxy.
On religion, he was nowhere near as well-versed as the god-builder faction of the Bolshevik Party, who took on a rather insane project of trying to hybridize the “warm stream” of spirituality with the icy logic of scientific socialism, but his outlook is still more muddled and compromising than is commonly believed. As Roland Boer notes, in the long lead-up to the revolution, Lenin published an article in a radical theology journal called God’s World, and would occasionally attend socialist church services while in turn-of-the-century exile in London, even taking along Trotsky, where the adherents would sing gospel songs like, Lead us, O Lord from the Kingdom of Capitalism to the Kingdom of Socialism.
In her excellent memoir Impressions of Lenin, Angelica Balabanoff—who remained the moral conscience of the Bolshevik party and confidant and advisor of Lenin until she could no longer stomach it and like so many other Russians, fled to Italy—wrote “In contrast to anarchists, utopian socialists, and other factions, the Marxists did not consider church membership to be an obstacle to joining the Socialist movement,” but ultimately, “The Bolshevik government’s great error was to persecute the believer, knowing full well that by doing so not the system but its victims were hurt. Worse still: the government began using different weights and measures.”
Her record of the Bolshevik policy towards religious believers after 1917 is revealing, and more moderate than commonly assumed. When Balabanoff sets out to write a pamphlet about the Revolution’s impact on religion, she is instructed to be careful not to “hurt the feelings of the high dignitaries of the church.”
She found the clergy surprisingly malleable to the country’s new order. “It was surprising how quickly they had picked up Bolshevik terminology and newly coined phrases and how well they understood the various articles of the new legislation… the ex-priests showed more zeal than the others and paid their respects to the new authorities without mention of God or saints.”
Even though they disagreed about everything, Balabanoff’s political eccentricities were tolerated because she was so deeply respected by Lenin. It sounds like this respect originated in the stoic privation with which she endured the Revolution and Civil War’s most bitter days.
Her notes of Lenin’s self-imposed privations are especially endearing.
For instance, the head of the Soviet state still wrote the Moscow library asking for permission to borrow a dictionary overnight.
Like two emaciated old ascetics, united in their deprivation, when Lenin and Balabanoff would meet they would fret and worry after one another.
Balabanoff would try to get Lenin to take a square of chocolate. Lenin would ask her to eat a bit of white bread and get some prescription glasses. It’s sweet.
But she ultimately concludes that “the government which called itself the defender of the poor was particularly hard on those who were deprived of material as well as spiritual goods.”