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A Contribution to Christian Materialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2024

Extract

The debate between Christians and Marxists has been under way now for more than a decade. Christians are admitting that they have in the past been too wrapped up in the institutional forms of religion, and that they have perhaps been seduced from the Gospel by the success of the institutional Church. Marxists, in similar vein, admit that they have in turn been too ready to castigate the outward forms of religious organization, and too little prepared to give consideration to the central message of the Gospels and the prophets. Here too the exigencies of party organization have brought about the same displacement of goals found in the Church. Each declares that the other has far more to offer than they had previously either suspected or been prepared to admit. The unhappy feature of the Christian/Marxist dialogue is that in ten years or so it does not seem to have progressed very far beyond ‘programme statements’, or declarations of intent, of this kind. The concrete and substantive advances made in debate appear to have been quite disproportionate to the expectations held of it. In particular, the development of a really coherent ‘Christian materialism’, hoped for by many participants in the debate, has not been realized.

One is compelled to ask why such an initially promising line of philosophical enquiry should have provided such meagre results. Is it that we were mistaken after all in thinking that progress could be made here? Is it that Christianity and Marxism in fact have nothing to say to each other beyond that which has already been said? Are they, in the last analysis, incompatible systems of thought?

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © 1970 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

page 560 note 1 Examples of this kind of interchange are readily available in a number of sources. See, for example, J. Klugmann and P. Oestreicher (eds.), What Kind of Revolution? A Christimr-Communist Dialogue, Panther Books, 1968.

page 561 note 1 K. Marx and F. Engels, The German ideology, International Publishers, New York, 1963, pp. 6-7.

page 562 note 1 This emphasis, on the active nature of man, is neither exclusive to Marxism, nor does it originate there. Kant, for example, had already stressed that human understanding cannot be understood as a passive mirror which merely reflects the pattern of things, but that the ‘mind’ is an active agency, which itself composes the data of sense experience into some kind of order. The premise of activity is also one of the cardinal assumptions of pragmatism.

page 562 note 2 K. Marx, in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, quoted in T. B. Bottomore and M. Rubel (eds Karl Marx: Sclected Writings in Sociologv and Social Philosophy, Penguin Books, 1963, p. 67.

page 562 note 3 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, op. cit., p. 7.

page 563 note 1 In the ‘Theses on Feurbach’ (Bottomore and Rubel, op. cit., pp. 82-4) Marx refers to this distinction in tern of the ‘old’, or ‘contemplative’, materialism and the ‘new’ materialism. An extended and detailed documentation of Marx’s early struggle to define his own position in this respect is contained in S. Hook, From Hegel to Marx, Ann Arbor 1962 (first pub. 1950). The development of this position by Engels, Lenin and subsequent Soviet writers is dealt with in G. A. Wetter, Dialectical Materialism: A Historical and Systematic Survey of Philosophy in the Soviet Union, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958.

page 563 note 2 The view to which Marx opposed himself is summed up epigrammatically, but extremely, in Feurbach’s, ‘Man is what he eats’. Such simple reductionism has been lampooned by Gramsci as leading to the belief that, ‘if one knew what a man had eaten before he made a speech one could better interpret the speech itself’. (See A. Gramsci, ‘What is Man?’, in The Modern Prince, and Other Essay, Lawrence and Wishart, 1957, p. 79).

page 563 note 3 Marx, ‘Theses on Feurbach’, op. cit., p. 83.

page 563 note 4 A. Gramsci, op. cit., p. 80. See also H. Lefebvre, Dialectical Materialism, Jonathan Cape. 1968. ‘Historical Materialism’. pp. 60ff.

page 563 note 5 See A. Cunningham, Adam, Sheed and Ward, 1968; T. Eagleton, The Body as Language, Sheed and Ward, 1970.

page 564 note 1 This argument is given weight, I feel, by the fact that the Marxist theoretician Ernst Fischer founds his theory of artistic creation on the theory of labour. See his The Necessity of Art, Penguin Books, 1963, Chap. 2. In the work already referred to (note 4 p. 563) Lefebvre goes so far as to say that, ‘Man is creative activity …’. (Op. cit., p. 148.)

page 564 note 2 The ‘rediscovery’ of alienation in this country was triggered off by Bottomore’s translation of Marx’s early writings. (Published as Marx’s Concept of Man, edited and with an introduction by Erich From, Frederick Ungar Publishing Go., 1961. Also, T. B. Bottomore, Karl Marx: Earl Writings, C. A. Watts & Go., 1963.) These were brought into prominence by the general reshaping of the Marxist movement which has been under way since the late 1950s. Today many prominent Marxist thinkers set out on their exposition of Marx’s thought from ‘alienation’, emphasizing the more liberal elements in the Manrian perspective, in preference to the concern with patterns of historical chauge-the ‘iron determination of history’—which had been the focus of earlier expositions of Marxism. Possibly the most popular writer in this respect has been Herbert Marcuse. See, in particular, his Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed., Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954.

page 565 note 1 K. Marx, quoted in Bottomore and Rubel, op. cit., p. 178.

page 565 note 2 See K. Marx, Captial, Progres Publishers, 1965, Vol. I, pp. 71-83. It is easy to see how the nature of idolatry has become so significant in the theology of the Catholic left, in the light of this connexion. See, for example, Cunningham, op. cit., pp. 129-39.

page 566 note 1 Erich From, op. cit., p. 44. Irving Zeitlin suggests that a similar point is made by Paul Tillich in his, Der Mensch im Christentum und im Marxisums. See, I. M. Zeitlin, Marxism: A Re-Examination, D. van Nostrand Co. Inc., 1967, p. 13.

page 566 note 2 From the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, quoted in Bottomore and Rubel, op. cit., pp. 845.

page 566 note 3 Ibid., p. 250. (Emphasis in original.)

page 566 note 4 This point is also the basis for the Marxist critique of contemporary sociology. See my article, ‘Sociologische Modelle des Menschen’, in Internationale Dialog Zietschrift, 3. Jahrgang, 1970, 2, pp. 138-48.

page 567 note 1 A similar point is made by Ernst Cassirer, in his Essay on Man (Yale University RWB, paperback ed. 1962, p. 107). Here he argues that the distinct advance made by the prophetic boob of the Old Testament over the earlier tribal notions of ‘taboo’ lied in the insistence that ‘even human actions, as such, are no longer regarded as pure or impure. The only purity that has a religious significance and dignity is purity of the heart’: in other words, purity of the total being.

page 567 note 2 See Cunningham, op. cit., p. 123.

page 567 note 3 It should be noted that we are concerned here with the nature of sin, and not of evil. I do not wish to digress at this juncture into a discussion of the complex problem of theodicy. This important distinction is not always clearly maintained. Cunningham, for example (op. cit., pp. 135-8), plainly confuses the two notions.

page 567 note 4 Romans 7: 15, 19 (New English Bible).

page 568 note 1 Ibid., vv. 22-4.

page 569 note 1 This aspect of language is under-estimated by both Eagleton and Cunningham, because they both concentrate on language as a capacity to communicate. (See Cunningham, op. cit., pp. 87-96; Eagleton, op. cit., Chaps. 1 and 2.) From this point of view language tends to become almost a ‘thing’ which one possesses, rather than an activiry in which one engages. Eagleton in particular reveals this in his tendency to write about ‘linguistic consciousness‘, rather than linguistic behaviour, or activity. (I prefer the latter.)

page 569 note 2 This point is rooted in the work of George Herbert Mead, and in his theory of the significance of the ‘generalized other’ for our understanding of rule-governed behaviour. First formulated in the 1930s, Mead’s approach is today fairly generally accepted in social science. See his Mind, Self and Society, Chicago University Press, 1934. For a more accessible discussion of his ideas see H. S. Thayer, Meaning and Action: A Critical History of Pragmatism, Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1968, Part Two, Chap. 5.

page 569 note 3 In this respect I believe that the connection between language and alienation noted by Eagleton—that it provides man with the means of exploitation—is almost incidental to the present point, and certainly consequent upon it.

page 570 note 1 Luke 17: 20-1.

page 570 note 2 See Catholics and the Left, Sheed and Ward Ltd, 1966, edited by A. Cunningham and T. Eagleton; especially, ‘The Church, sacrament of a socialist society’, by Martin Redfern.

page 570 note 3 See Cunningham, Adam, op. cit., p. 153.

page 571 note 1 Cunningham, op. cit., p. 188.

page 571 note 2 Eagleton, op. cit., pp. 545.

page 571 note 3 Ibid., p. 55.

page 571 note 4 See, for example, Giles Hibbert, ‘Christian Materialism’, New Blackfriars, May 1969.