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Moscow, Rome, and Other Places
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13562 |
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BOOK WORLD
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4 / 1988 |
1,622 Words |
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Thomas Molnar
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MARXISM AND RELIGION
David McLellan
Harper & Row, 1987
209 pp., $18.95
The flaw of books like David McLellan's is that while the title implies an impartial treatment of Marxism and religion, the irresistible tendency of the times carries the discussion toward favoring, or at least emphasizing, the first of these. McLellan--this should be acknowledged--plays with his cards on the table and gives as a subtitle of his work "A Description and Assessment of the Marxist Critique of Christianity." And he tells the reader in a preface that he is a convert to Christianity, spent some time in the Jesuit novitiate, and that a sojourn in the Soviet Union revealed to him the true face of Marxism.
With all this, however, the tone he adopts, while it is by no means Marxist-oriented, cannot help but wear the stamp of the general leftward spirit characteristic of the age in which we live. McLellan knows how to argue critically about Marxism and its prominent thinkers, but, precisely, too much time is taken up by this zeal for any comparable time to remain for arguments drawn from religion. Imagine a book with the title reversed: Religion and Marxism, which would allot to the second term very much less space than to the first; the book would be dismissed as prejudiced, whereas we automatically declare that McLellan's book is objective.
In its essence--pace, Feuerbach--Christianity is an otherworldly salvation system; it is neither political science nor sociology. Yet the author calls to testify mostly people belonging to these professions, such as Max Weber and Emile Durkheim, not theologians and Christian philosophers, unless they are active in Marxist/Christian dialogue groups. Thus the book becomes somewhat one-sided, in spite of McLellan's best intentions, which are obvious.
This one-sidedness is perhaps the reason for his remark that Marx himself wrote of religion only "en passant," so that, our author notes further, Marxism does not have a fully developed theory of religion! I beg to differ. Marx may not have been a more sophisticated anti-Christian than, let us say, Diderot or d'Holbach, but he was a very convinced atheist, practicing this art at the feet of true masters, Hegel and Feuerbach. It is false to say that the essence of his anti-religion is summed up in his theses on Feuerbach. His materialism is different from, but as thorough as, that of Democritus and Lucretius. Marx's originality consists of the elaboration of a new substructure of atheism within the largely biased framework of an analysis of mankind's economic history.
Marx's atheistic-materialistic thesis is suggested by McLellan in two passages. One considers Marx's argument that religion prospers in an inverse ratio to (material) human misery. This argument can only be called a bluff, and is at once refuted by the historical existence of prosperous societies paying sincere tribute to their divinities, Christian societies included. Marx would answer that people do not even know that their consciousness is permeated by "misery" (for example by slave-owner or capitalist postulates), but this kind of psychoanalysis is a game that can be played by the Christian side also. The debate ends in a draw.
The other Marxist
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