From Christianity toward Communism and backwards
A traveller in the U.S.A. may ask for a ticket for Santa Fe, the capital of the state of New Mexico. Nothing extraordinary, if they do not translate "Santa Fe", as in the Spanish language it means "the Saint Faith". "A ticket return - eventually, half-price – toward the Saint Faith" sounds just amusing. But, as "In God we trust" is written on all American banknote, we must remain patient, because we have not found the God, as he will come to us, if necessary. Really??
It seems that, in philosophy, as in religion (which is nothing else but an applied philosophy under metaphor form), all ways are "round-trip", as the same ideas re– appear periodically under different forms. As for the price, no one estimates it before; we will see how much its cost was post factum.
The Bible teaches us that all people are equal in God’s eye. Well, this means they are equal with each other. From here until the idea of democracy is no more than a step, just a very small one. Greeks’ democracy, forgotten in the meantime, comes again, timid at the beginning, but stronger and stronger as time passes. It was natural for the leaders not to receive it with pleasure; but - aware that they could not hinder it – they concluded it would be wiser to use it, with some adjustments, instead of interfering with it. The solution was so good that it allowed the coalition church-politics to dominate for more than a thousand years. As any exaggeration leads to self-destruction, what inevitably occurred and culminated with the social explosion, best symbolized by French Revolution in 1789. From then on, democracy had a free way. But, such a transformation like this could not be accomplished quickly. As for the perfection, this remains an ideal. Occidental Europe did as much as it could. Of course, the complainers appeared soon, which is only natural. Un-naturally was the following exaggeration: "Your democracy is not good. We will do a perfect one" – said Marx and his flunkeys. This is how the communism appeared. What followed is known. The occidentals, with some experience, observed the mistake and remained in a compromise, where the idea of democracy circulates yet, but, in fact, the whole society is organized as an oligarchic model, with the estate warranted. The model is not so important as it. The capacity of the society to keep the equilibrium between opposite tendencies is what matters, which is possible as time as the exaggerations are tempered in time. In fact, nothing new happened, as Aristotle taught us a long time ago. He identified in the chapter V, book III, of his "Politics" three theoretical types of governing:
• royalty, when a single man rules the country;
• aristocracy, when a minority of people, supposed to be the best, governs;
• republic, when the majority of people governs.
We recognize democracy in the third type. Any type has its deviant forms:
• tyranny for royalty;
• oligarchy for aristocracy;
• demagoguery for republic.
All types have their qualities and flaws, so, inevitably, it turns into other types when the discontentment of people exceeds an acceptable threshold. Aristotle had in view all kind of countries, including those very small ones, sometimes limited at a single citadel, and the slave-owning system, where only the ‘citizens’ might go to the polls. In the first chapter of the same book, Aristotle specifies who has the right to be a citizen. In such small towns-state, like Sparta, or Athena, a government of the majority of citizens would be theoretically possible, even if Aristotle himself is doubtful (a state could not be governed by the majority, because the majority is formed by poor people, he says). In today’s world, with large states, a leadership made by the majority is impossible. What remains is demagoguery, not as a type of government, but as adjective for the two others.
Democracy needed a period of oppression for this nowadays-triumphant explosion to occur. This period was Middle Age, which put an end to antique democracies and started the blackest epoch, comparable with that of soviet communism, in which Christianity was replaced with the Marxism. It seems that the church was afraid of Christian-leveling principles and then took possession of its name, but only after turning its principles into some false ones, according with the interests of the monarchy.
After Renaissance, monarchy and church tottered together, due to the exaggerations they had done together. (The monarchy formally survived in several countries like England, as the dissociation produced there earlier, avoiding mistakes as serious as the Inquisition was.)
As the monarchy needed to be replaced with something, they wanted it to be democracy. But, as I have already shown, a real democracy, namely a governing by the majority, would not be possible in modern states, too large and with problems much too complex for being understandable by all the people. They maintain democracy only at the propagandistic level. We have democracy through our representatives (stupid mob elect its clever men). And, because a religion is necessary (religion, not church), democracy played this role of social ideal, particularly because the rabble liked it, and the main political chances in Europe were revolutionary, therefore the participation of the mob. That’s why, no matter what form of government, any country can call itself a democrat one. "Give to people bread and circus", the Romans used to say. The circus is to be found today in electioneering.
In reality, the majority of modern states are elitist, aristocratic or oligarchic, according to the way in which the elite are recruited and their education.
How the enlistment is made, we may emit all kind of theories, but it is clear that any parent will try to promote his child and any politician will try to surround himself with men loyal to himself. This is just the main mistake made by the communist leaders, a mistake that led to the collapse of the system. For doing the recruitment by promoting the real values, some other criterions must exist, other interests. Property is one of them. In this regard, the capitalist system proved to be better, because – in spite of some monstrous mistakes – it recovered itself every time. The communist one, instead, failed after its first generation. The explanation is that, while the capitalist system is a natural one, in which the feedback works – even if with some delay – the communist system was artificial and collapsed when the combustible (enthusiasm) was exhausted, the energy of the initiators finished.
Also, there are no real royalties in our days, so that we may speak only about aristocracies or oligarchies. All modern countries are governed by a group of people, sometimes better, sometimes worse. Demagoguery is their adjective and the first deceit.
As liberation of intellect under monarchic-religious doctrinal stress of the Middle Ages unbridled to democracy, it seems unusual the first book about communism as social ideal, "Utopia", was written by Thomas More in the other part of Europe, in England. The mother of Renaissance was Italy, and its father the Byzantine intellectuals banished by the Turkish from Constantinople, but nowadays neither Italians nor the Greeks have a particular appetite for great social problems. From democracy to tyranny, they knew glory and collapse not one time, but many times and, now, sole satisfaction attracts them more than political ambitions. They are tired nations. Why did democratic ideals revived as far away as the North? The question may be interesting, because it was not only Thomas More. The majority of later communist doctrinaires were from the North. Also, the first implementation was in Russia. Would the cerebral vessel-constriction provoked by cold be guilty? Leaving the joke aside, we can find an explanation in their inexperience of democratic practice that allowed them to give free scope to their imagination. The Greeks would not do such things, not only because they had the practice of democracy – either slave-owning or not – but they also knew the relation creator-man is not a reciprocal one. And also they have had several philosophers who taught them the rationalism much before Descartes, among the others that any idea must be verified experimentally before advancing another one, which results from the first. Communism is the product of imagination out of control. Thomas More had at least the common sense to entitle his book Utopia, promoting thus the idea that what he recommended exists nowhere (u-topos = without place). Only Marx believed that it would be possible, and Lenin found even a place for it.
Utopian literature appeared from a compensator necessity, followed after the disparagement of the religion. The hope in life after life must be replaced with something. And so, the Utopia appeared as another hope, this time as a social solution. At a more attentive look, Christianity itself is a social utopia as well, because it appeared as a religion for poor and or fallen people.
As for Marx, he was a shifter Jew wishing to be a prophet. Living during the period of industrial boom (and of democracy too), he thought that proletariat will be the most numerous and will form the most powerful political party. He prophesied what seems to be inevitable. Lenin, more impulsive and ambitious, wanted to be the one that realizes what anyway had to occur. Both of them were wrong, as the proletariat is not so numerous even today. On the contrary, the number of manual workers is smaller and smaller. Besides, they did not understand the essence of the democracy, its limits and possibilities. What they had in mind was a dictatorial society too: "dictatorship of the proletariat".
I found some time ago a talking-group the topic of which was "Why Marxism did not die?". As it was expected, a few messages were interesting, some amusing and some annoying. Of course, the hardest "arguments" come from those who do not know much what they are talking about. I will not say that I should know, but I can add one more opinion, namely the opinion of someone that knew the effects of one of the Marxism’s implementation. We, the Romanians, experienced a sort of Marxism imposed by Soviet Army, so that – except few traitors and stupid people – Marxism, communism, socialism, etc., are something coming from the East, with a smack of Urals-Altaic invasion. Things were different in the former USSR. While we were like a colony, the USSR was the colonist. Even inside of the USSSR, things were different in Russia in comparison with the other soviet republics, generally occupied countries. China and Cuba are other examples of Marxism installed by themselves, but I will not enter the details. Surprising for me is why the fans of the Marxism do not speak about Cambodia? This was the purist implementation of Marxism, because its leaders had been high educated in France and imposed their doctrine by force, which was exactly as Marx recommended. Everywhere, the results were disastrous. And still, Marxism did not die. Why? Because it is an idea, and ideas do not die. People – some people – made from it an ideal, a Utopia of course, and the politicians take advantages using it in their propaganda. It is nothing more than a propagandistic doctrine for manipulating stupid (but many) people, important thanks to their votes. Of course, its upholders will say that all the experiments of the Marxism were not perfect, and so the idea resists, as the perfection is not possible. The politicians always were sly enough for persuading credulous people, and they will try to gain their votes, no matter how stupid is their stubbornness in maintaining the same idea after so many failures.
Now, if you want to talk seriously about Marxism as a theoretical idea, you have to adopt a scientific method. First, one must define what Marxism is. In this order, we should read Marx’s writings, to learn what he said in addition to his predecessors. One of his predecessors was Hegel, as Marx himself referred to him. Consequently, we should read Hegel too, and so on. I do not want to dishearten you, but Aristotle did an analysis of political systems and how they turn from one form into another in a perpetual circular motion, A few modern writers added something really important. Marx was not among them.
I cannot consider Marx as a philosopher and a theologian he was not at all. He did not complicate his existence but entered directly into propaganda, giving it a philosophic make-up for naïve people. From three gases, nitrogen, hydrogen and chlorine, therefore apparently from nothing, one makes ammonia, which can be liquid, solid or gas, but particular malodorous. Lenin did something similar: from people’s dissatisfactions in face of injustice, his personal hatred of Christianity and the wish of Ural-Altaic people to kneel down Europe, he imagined a utopia that became an ideal for some, a nightmare for others that smells ugly, yet.
Those who know even a little abut Marxism realize that it is a theory of violence. From the beginning, it instigated one part of the society against the other. Violence, crime, terror are not accidental in the history of former or actual communist countries. They are part of its arsenal. "Class struggle" means for communist leaders extermination. And it was not only Marx. He provided only the ideologue base for political propagandists. To Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire wrote: "I received, sir, your new book directed against the human race….. Reading your work, I feel like walking on all fours". A Romanian thinker, Petre Tutea, said: "The one who until 28-30 years old is not of the left (in politics) has not heart. But if over 30 years old, after reaching the maturity, remain with the same conceptions, it means that he is cretin". And he again: "Democracy is like distemper of dogs; gets out of it only the strong ones". He was right; the strong ones know how to manipulate the weak ones, because democracy only bamboozles them. As a matter of fact, Aristotle said: "A state in which everything is in common cannot prosper".
Here is a simple scheme: parents say to the children all kinds of tale stories in order to teach them useful things. If the method proved to be efficient in children, why not try it with some credulous grown up? They tried and it works. And so, the religion appeared and together with it the politics, because the ones that succeeded became leaders. Religion and politics appeared together and develop themselves together. They are inseparable and immanent of the society. Who says he is not interested in politics or religion is either ignorant or demagogue. Max Weber says approximately the same, but with incomparable more words in "Sociology of Religion". For the same reason, the religions cannot be analyzed only through their doctrine, but together with people that adopted them and historic context in which they developed. It would be equally wrong to speak about religion in absolute terms, as something isolated, independent, as it would be to ignore religion in historical researches, because every religion is born in order to answer at some necessities. Of course, later, it will influence people’s mentality and the course of events, and so on.
Mircea Eliade, in "The Myth of the Eternal Return", relates the finding of a researcher while he was recording a popular ballad. The text was a very nice fairytale with goddesses and love. Soon, he learned the story was real and relative recent (40 years ago), found the heroine, she confirmed the facts, but the peasants refused to accept them, preferring the ballad. The myth had become more true than reality.
Nothing is more adequate to lead the mob than superstition. Without superstitions, it is violent, cruel, changeable. Once seduced by the vanities of a religion, the mob listens better to the wizard as the leaders. Man must keep the tradition, namely the religion.
From history textbooks we learn about the most important personalities and events, and particularly when they occurred. Two thoughts are to be observed here:
• A historical event marks the end of a period and, of course, the beginning of the next one. A person can represent a historical period in our minds, but not being representative for it, because he did not generate it, is not characteristic for it, maybe he only finished it.
• The works of many personalities were misinterpreted in the following centuries, and used for different purposes, usually propagandistic.
The relativism of our appreciations might be illustrated with numerous names and events.
The emperor Constantine the Great, for example, is named also Saint Constantine, because through the Edict of Milan (313) he mandated toleration of Christians in the Roman Empire, putting an end to their persecutions. All right, but he was not Christian. His initiative was a political act, a military decision. The empire was divided, every part was fighting with the others and he, as leader of one of the parts, was interested to have quiet inside his territory and attract as many people as possible. Only his mother, Helena, was Christian. One says that Constantine adhered to Christianity just before his death, but there is no proof demonstrating this. Instead, there are many evidences that in the whole of his life, he was a solar henotheist, believing in the Sun god. Among them, there are lots of coin effigies figuring him together with Sun god. The question is: "How may they declare someone a saint who never was Christian? Besides, from the historical point of view, documents did not attest any edict from Milan with Constantine’s signature. There is only an ordinance toward the governor of Bithynia, which mandated toleration of Christians in the Roman Empire, but it is signed by Licinius, a Constantine’s ally in their common dispute against Maxentius. Still, we suppose that he was not outside of the subject. On the other hand, "Constantine intervened in ecclesiastical affairs to achieve unity; he presided over the first ecumenical council of the Church at Nicaea in 325. He also began the building of Constantinople in 326 on the site of ancient Greek Byzantium. The city was completed in 330 (later expanded), given Roman institutions, and beautified by ancient Greek works of art. In addition, Constantine built churches in the Holy Land, where his mother (also a Christian) supposedly found the True Cross on which Jesus was crucified. The emperor was baptized shortly before his death, on May 22, 337." (Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia)
Another example is King Henry VIII of England, the founder of Church of England. The problem is that he did not do it from religious convictions, but from excessively proud and paltry personal interests: he wanted to marry against the will of the pope Clement VII. Still, Henry VIII was never declared a saint. Instead Thomas More was, because he was decapitated, but not from religious convictions, but because he confronted the king and Henry was not the man to accept it. Thomas More is more known to the world as the author of "Utopia", the first book about communism. What is surprising is that his canonization was in 1935, 400 years after his death, when the effects of the communism were already known in the U.S.S.R. The gesture of the Pope Pius XI was not at least a political one. It was used for nothing, being only a proof of political ignorance. To canonize the one who wrote the first book about communism in full development of the horribleness of communism is something inconceivable.
One may continue with Charlemagne’s example. Together with Pope Leo III, he assembled the base for the most monstrous coalition, which lasted over centuries, the effects of which were the moral degradation both of the church and of monarchy.
In religion, the relativism is at its home. Here, it is not the divinity what matters, but the rapport between man and divinity. Divinity itself is conceived on the base of this rapport.
No matter how faithful or unfaithful we would be, no matter our religion, the divinity remain un-cognoscible. It is not conceived according with our philosophy of life, and reciprocally.
Why did the founders of communism want to wipe out religion? Time proved that it was one of the greatest errors. Not only they did not succeed, but they estranged people instead of attracting them. It would be understandable to eliminate the priests, as they pushed away the intellectuals, because they showed the propagandists’ lies and the errors of the communist doctrine. But why the religion? The explanation consists in the fact that they wanted to replace religion with Marxist doctrine. They saw in Marxism a new religion. Maybe Lenin even thought it. But why mix a social- politic doctrine with religion? It is true, there were some antecedents and they did some associations of ideas, some correct, but others erroneous. Religion, hand in hand with politics, used both to manipulate people easier. The most eloquent period was that of the Middle Ages, during which the Catholic Church was something like the unique political party in totalitarian systems and religion like the political doctrine. The Inquisition is the best proof. The communists wished to replace Christianity with Marxism. The idea was tempting. Unfortunately, in the meantime, the Occident abandoned the church as far back as the French Revolution, in 1789, so that the model became obsolete. Maybe this is why they thought not to set up the communism in occident, but in Russia, a country less developed, frozen in a past time, with people still religious, almost bigots. Here they make another mistake, one more grave: the occidental Christianity is a radically different face to the east European one, so different that I do not know if they deserve to bear the same name! But, for this we need to do some history. Of course, not now!
Firstly, the attempt of removing the religion! I think that only hate for Christianity dazzled Lenin, making him to think that a thing like this is possible. A faith is necessary. Some people need it. Besides, through religion they set up habits, traditions, creating a unwritten but respected ethic. As a social being, any person keeps local customs, and any European is, by definition, Christian, even when he declares himself to be atheist. (Sometime, it is amusing to observe these people as they invoke God when they are in a deadlock.) Besides, the religion was so deeply implicated in history, in our becoming, that ignoring it is inconceivable. To do it would mean to deny ourselves. Of course, we could modify it, but not remove it. As for the Bible, it is the first reference book. We could not understand the evolution of European civilisation without it.
A cardinal mistake of the founders of the communism regarding Christianity was that they did not keep account of the difference between Catholic and Orthodox churches. If, at its beginning, Christianity gradually developed, step by step, as a poor people’s faith, later on, the situation changed itself. The turning point was the fall of the Western Roman Empire, in the year 476. At that time, a part of the East European population was already Christian, while the quasi- totality of the Occidental one was pagan. Later, people from Eastern Europe had to fight with barbarians, all of them pagans. In this way, defending their goods, they defended their faith as well. The faith was an additional reason to fight the invaders. For them, the barbarian, invader, etc. meant unfaith people, non-Christian. For Christian Orthodox people of that time, faith meant civilisation. The removing of faith was equivalent with falling in barbarism. Occidental Europe had no such problems. For them, Christianity was imposed from top to bottom and changing it would not be so difficult. This difference still exists, but Marx and Lenin did not apprehend it.
The similarity between Inquisition, Russian NKVD and Romanian Secret Policy is almost perfect. It gives us an idea why Lenin wanted to remove religion: to replace it with Marxism. He wanted a society like that of Occidental Middle Age with Marx’s "Capital" instead of the Bible.
And something more: the communists addressed the masses. But masses are composed of individuals. For attracting them, one must keep account by the particularities of their personality. Not every person thinks about religion in the same way. On the contrary, it is the field in which our opinions are, maybe, the most different, even when we utter the same words.
Communist propagandists made a mistake even in their methodology of teaching Marxist doctrine: there were no references to the past. Any philosopher builds his discourse starting from a predecessor, face to whom he adds something, or corrects him. Evidently, in this approach, one supposes the reader knows the predecessor’s theses, who has, at his turn, another predecessor and so on. Consequently, philosophy must begin with the beginning. There is a history of philosophy more than a science of philosophy like chemistry, physics, etc. From modern philosophers, only Kant, "with his talent to deceive himself", as Schopenhauer characterized him, had the naivety of thinking that he could build a complete philosophic system starting from zero. Against the eulogies that made from Kant a monument of Philosophy, his system has more holes than Swiss cheese and almost lacking of content. Only the propaganda of a Germany in full expansion, which needed to make famous his glory, could make him a top of philosophy. Coming back to communist propagandists, they used to mention only Hegel, saying about him that he was wrong – no one knows why – but we are lucky with Marx, the man who discovered everything. The effect was inversely: the lack of reference points to the past provoked us to read secretly just these philosophers. Otherwise, it would be dangerous for our security. As a matter of fact, the propagandist themselves did not read any philosopher, not even Marx. They were only reciting ready-prepared texts. From this reason, they were not admitting any deviation from these texts, afraid not to change its meaning, a meaning that used to remain obscure for themselves, anyway.