Throughout history "humanism" has been associated with "atheism", since it arose as a reaction against certain forms of theism that were seen as anti-human. Yet some kinds of humanism do not concentrate on a struggle against deity and indeed there are "religious humanists"; much of modern religion claims to be humanistic. In this essay, however, we shall use the two terms "humanism" and "atheism", in close association, in order to bring out the differences between the humanisms, especially Marxist humanism, and the ethics of Christianity.

"Atheism" in Western societies has had a wide range of meanings.¹ In its negative senses it has meant a belief or doctrine denying the existence of a deity, whether rejecting the use of the term altogether, employing a deviant or mistaken concept of deity, disavowing the supernatural order, or repudiating certain values held by theists. In its positive senses it has been an effort of persons to realize and reconstruct values, both outside and inside explicitly religious traditions. Thus atheism or humanism as a whole has sustained a dialectical relation of negation and affirmation toward theism. Where they confront one another, as they necessarily must, humanists and theists are opposed and antagonistic, aiming at the destruction of certain untruths and disvalues in the other side. But they are also united in a dynamic interdependence and interpenetration, for each defines its position and its advance by its effort to make contact with, negate, and transform the other.

If we examine theism and humanism in their historical evolution, it is clear that they did not originate as two isolated or discrete phenomena, but that they emerged together in mutual modification. Thus, they do not represent two absolutely separated entities, but are distinct poles which thus far in human history have required each other.

Accordingly, we shall deal with (1) the relations between the value claims of humanism and of religion, in particular, of Christianity; (2) the origins of the major contemporary humanistic antagonist of Christianity, namely, Marxism; and the historical relations of Marxist ethics to Christian ethics; (3) the philosophical relations of Marxist humanism to Christian ethics; and (4) the implications of these relations for the dialogue between humanists and Christians.

THE RELATIONS BETWEEN THE VALUE CLAIMS OF

RELIGION AND HUMANISM

What is the relevance of the value claims of religion to those of humanism, and, conversely, how can the claims of humanism be related to those of theism? Though on the face of it humanism vs. theism, and naturalism vs. supernaturalism, represent irreconcilable conflicts and mutually incompatible alternatives, historically they have developed in a dialectical relation. As they have opposed, penetrated, and influenced one another, it is important to understand them in this developing relation.

Humanism's Assumption of Christian Values

For the most part humanists in Western Christian cultures have assumed certain, though not all, values assumed in Christianity; they have defined their positions either by a redefinition and reapplication of certain Christian values or by an absolute repudiation of those values. Many humanists, for example, have taken "love" to be a basic value, though interpreting it in a variety of ways. For all its opposition to the established Church, the French Revolution, with its ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity, was an attempt to transform some of the great professed values of Christian history to a real, secular base.² Similarly, the Dutch, English, American, and Russian Revolutions were profoundly influenced in positive and negative ways by the history of Christianity in their respective countries.

Humanists have differed in the ways in which they have related themselves to the Christian tradition. Some have wished to acknowledge their ties to religion: "He alone is the true atheist," wrote Feuerbach, "to whom the predicates of the Divine Being, for example, love, wisdom, justice--are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing."³ Comte wanted to preserve the whole institution of the church stripped of superstition and transformed by the attitude of science. Hegel, the rationalist who was fully opposed to supernaturalism, declared that Reason governs the world; in the spirit of a believer, however, he added that "this Good, this Reason, in its most concrete form, is God."⁴ "Man is an object of existence in himself in virtue of the Divine that is in him, that which was designated at the outset as Reason . . . Freedom."⁵ Indeed, Hegel's whole philosophy was conceived as "translating the language of religion into that of Thought".⁶

A similar attitude may be seen in the young Marx, who at the age of seventeen wrote: "To man, too, the Deity gave a general goal, to improve mankind and himself, but left it up to him to seek the means by which he can attain his goal. . . ."⁷ This was an indication of what his mature faith would be. He would consider the improvement of humanity to be a natural goal or "categorical imperative" dependent upon man's courage and intelligence. Religion itself would be regarded as the alienated form of the quest for this goal.

Like Marx, Nietzsche had felt the impact of Christian values, good and bad, in his childhood. As a mature thinker conducting a running dialogue with Christianity, both with and without which he could not live, he exclaimed: "If there were gods, how could I endure not to be a god! Hence there are no gods."⁸ This implies that if the divine is to be meaningful it must be concrete and human. Furthermore, since humanity is not fully human, the divine must be in the making and humanity must surpass itself. For Nietzsche, the error and vice of Christianity was that it lazily asserted a transcendent achievement and then left humanity to suffer and decay. He voiced a longing for human fulfillment which gave rise to his indignation against Christianity precisely because it failed to achieve the aim it professed, namely, the divinizing of humanity. To surpass itself, humanity must surpass Christianity, though, as the French Marxist, Roger Garaudy, has pointed out, the very idea itself of self-surpassing is Christian.⁹

Even in men such as de Sade and Baudelaire, who took little time to refute theism but appeared to repudiate the humanistic values of Christianity and cultivate the demonic, there remained the divine ideal. This alone could give definition and point to their efforts to escape it, particularly inasmuch as it seemed to be sought in those same efforts. In his early work Sartre recognized this divine motif in our life; each strives to achieve that perfect and final union of the pour-soi and en-soi which defines God. However, since in fact we can never do so, life is "a useless passion".¹⁰ It is significant that Sartre's powerful and recurrent nostalgia for our union with others and the objective world led him to a philosophy which now represents the most formidable non-religious challenge to Christianity for the commitment of persons, namely, Marxism. In its comprehensiveness, its orientation of human thought and practice to the future of the world, its militancy, and its call for absolute commitment, Marxism is the most effective and influential form of humanism to appear in history. Its relation to Christianity will be considered in the next section.

Empirical and Rational Humanism

Despite this irrevocable inheritance of dependence on theism, Western humanism for the past 200 years has been not only anti-metaphysical, but anti-ecclesiastical, anti-clerical, anti-hierarchical, and anti-authoritarian; in a word, it has been anti-religious. Taking its principal impetus from the French and English Enlightenment, its spirit has been nominalistic, atomistic, materialistic, pluralistic, utilitarian, and libertarian. As conveyed through the popular literature of pamphlets and tracts, the term "humanism" still suggests a free-thinker wishing to efface every vestige of superstition that supports the idea of the God that is rejected categorically. This line of thought goes back brokenly to the pre-Christian, Democritean atomism of Greco-Roman civilization, which not only opposed the theology of established religion, but put forward an essentially egalitarian, democratic, and humanistic view of man.¹¹ The present-day perpetuators of this tradition in the West are the positivists and existentialists, who man, respectively, the objective and subjective flanks in the war on Authority.

This humanism is directed against all claims for objective universals, both political and religious. As a method of radical empiricism and a doctrine of radical individualism, it denies all gods as ruling principles and all authorities as principal rulers. It replaces patriarchy by brotherhood, kinship by merit, a priori premises and deduction by sense data, experiment, and induction, faith by critical reason, and duty by individual happiness. This spirit of the "modern" mind of the past 400 years has been greatly stimulated by science's "passionate interest in the detailed facts"¹² and by the rise of naturalism in art in the late middle ages.¹³ This particularist and empirical spirit frequently has been combined in various ways with a conviction in the ultimate Order or Creator of Nature, as in the early scientists Kepler and Newton, the philosophers St. Thomas and Occam, and especially the Protestant religious thinkers ranging from Luther to Anabaptists and Deists like Jefferson. However, the general drift of modern thought in the West has been anti-supernaturalistic, empirical, individualistic, and humanistic. This is illustrated by the dominant schools of contemporary secular philosophy in the West: realism, positivism, analysis, phenomenology, and existentialism.

Grounded in a strict empiricism, this kind of humanism appears to arise in those periods when the old centers of social power are shifting and the corresponding ruling ideologies are called into question. Not disposed to return to orthodoxy and not yet prepared to create a new ideology for a social order still to be born, intelligent and educated men are thrown back upon the immediate evidence of their senses and upon the impulses of their own bodies. Reality, value, and knowledge are to be found in or by the individual human being considered in contrast to the authoritative God of the past; the rebellion of the Titans against their rulers is repeated. The life of value and divine aspiration and fulfillment are attributed to the individual man who alone is God. Thus, the Greek atomists, in a way similar to the Charvakas in India, pictured a cosmos composed of an infinite number of individual atoms moving unhindered through empty space. In this view, the order of society and of the universe can only be a function of their individual inherent properties. The reasonable person becomes like a god once he or she understands this order. Modern empirical humanism does not always affirm the order; but it does affirm the actual or potential divinity of the individual man.

Western humanistic criticism, however, has been associated with another tradition of thought, namely, that which has stressed descriptive generalization, integrative reason, first principles, universals, ideals, communal and organic forces and values, and duty rather than individual happiness. This tradition, too, has associated with some principle of reason its acknowledgement of the existence and importance of the divine. From a traditional religious, that is, strictly supernaturalistic, point of view, it has been anti-religious and humanistic, for it leaves no place for faith and identifies the divine with the transcendent principle of reason to which man has access. Some Greek speculative philosophers such as Heraclitus, Socrates, Plato, and the Stoics, and some Renaissance and Enlightenment rationalists such as Bruno and Hegel fall into this group. The rich development of natural law philosophy is to be found here, branching out successively in Catholic theology through St. Thomas, in democratic theory through Jefferson, who combined it with Lockean libertarianism, and in Marxism where it was fused with materialism and dialectics. Pope John XXIIl's Pacem in Terris beautifully illustrates how natural law thought provides a matrix for the meeting, communing, and mutual ordering of diverse viewpoints and systems.

Humanism's Rejection of Christian Values

Both the empirical and the rational forms of humanism stand opposed to blind faith and other irrational and super-experiential claims. Both are anti-clerical, though the latter tender-minded humanism is not anti-authority, since it sees ultimate authority as residing in the reason of the universe, history, or man. However, whereas the rationalist humanist takes such social values of the Judaic-Christian tradition as love, compassion, fraternity, and mutual aid to be basic, the empirical humanist tends to subordinate these values in favor of individuality, liberty, and equality of rights and opportunities. Because rationalistic humanism is closer to the Christian tradition than is the empirical type, it can enter into dialogue more easily with theism. For example, as the heir of Hegel, Marxism offers, without God, the authority of social history as mediated through the interpretation of basic texts, a philosophical tradition, and a political party. Empirical humanism offers to the world simply the authority of the autonomous individual without God. This difference indicates not only why social, rational Christians and Marxists can talk as genuine rivals on a ground of common issues, but also why on social issues throughout the world Marxist humanism is strong and individualistic humanism is weak.

One may ask why Billy Graham--the epitome of the personalistic, revivalist spirit of North American Protestant Puritanism--has had such success in his visits to the Soviet Union and other parts of Eastern Europe. His theology is individualistic and non-rational in the extreme. I think one reason for the cordial relation that has grown up between him and Soviet authorities and believers is the overriding concern for peace and human life on both sides. By contrast, the personalistic apocalypticism of President Reagan, Jerry Falwell, and the others of the religious far right is so twisted by anti-communism and unconcern about Armageddon and nuclear holocaust that they refuse dealing with the Soviets in a sensible and cooperative way.

It was Greek rationalism which provided the early intellectual framework and defense of the Christian faith. Before Christ this rationalism had held that there is a principle of universal order in which "we live and move and have our being" and that "we are members one of another". Empirical humanism, dating from Democritus who held the state in high regard and apparently believed in mortal gods appearing in dreams and premonitions,¹⁴ was derived from both physical and human considerations and was directed against the official and popular cults. Epicureanism developed into a humanistic ideal and a way of life. However, being intellectual, sophisticated, and attractive to the individualistic aspirations of the middle-class, it could not compete with Christianity which provided mystical fellowship.¹⁵ Thus, the opposition of empirical humanism to theism has been rooted in its anti-authoritarian and anti-metaphysical attitudes, and in its individualistic independence and analytical science. Rationalistic humanism, on the other hand, has simply sought something other than the supernatural warrant for the extra-individual.

Modern Western empiricism in its definitive Humean form, following the course of the economic system which gave it birth, has declined into the niceties of scholastic linguistic analysis, irrelevant to the great social issues of the times. Cybernetics and a revised positivism have themselves revealed the key role of non-sensuous factors in our adjustment to the world. Since the crisis in empiricism has reflected the continuing crisis in capitalism, while the latter moves from one crisis to another, one may expect to see individualistic sensate philosophy in the final stages of its dissolution enacted in the meaninglessness of an increasing number of lives.

Just as the major rival to capitalism is socialism and the anti-dehumanizing national liberation movements, the major rivals to sense empiricism are Marxism, which is based in socialism, and, in the Western world, Christianity is situated ambiguously in both capitalist and socialist nations. Though both the empiricism of capitalism and the rationalism of Marxism are non-theistic and opposed to Christian theism, the former is much farther from Christianity in outlook and approach, for true Christianity is neither sensate in its knowledge nor profit-oriented in its values. Christianity has never been unequivocal in its response to capitalism, but the rise of Marxism as a major alternative, which is non-theistic but on the side of commitment and meaning in history, is forcing it now to take a stand. The emerging dialogue between Marxists and Christians is evidence of a sense of rivalry accompanied by a sense of unity. While Marxists oppose capitalism and theism and Christians oppose individualism and atheism, both oppose the collapse of meaning in a history threatened by economic and social disorder and by a nuclear exchange between capitalist and socialist nations which would bring omnicide to our planet. Hence, in the next section we shall look at the relations between Marxist humanism and Christian theism in the field of ethics.

ORIGINS OF THE MARXIST ETHICS AND

ITS HISTORICAL RELATIONS TO CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Humanism and Theism in Dialectical Relation

The dialectical relation between theists and humanists has taken many forms in history. They have been continuously united, opposed, interpenetrating, and mutually transforming. This dialectical relation has not been merely abstract and philosophical. It has reflected the real conflicts of history between the gods of civilization and the totemic spirits of pre-history, between city dwellers and country people ("pagans"--pagani--were peasants), between masters and slaves, between literate clergy and illiterate laity, between feudalists and merchants, between capitalists and proletarians, between Western colonialists and "heathen" Africans or Asians. The conflict between theism and humanism has also been associated with more permanent oppositions in persons and human societies: receptivity vs. active dominance, dependence vs. critical detachment, loyalty to the group vs. individual independence, and authority and tradition vs. questioning and innovation.¹⁶ Theism has been associated preponderantly with the first side of these oppositions, since religion has tended to take institutionalized forms and to become affiliated with the dominant structures of society, while atheisms have functioned as subordinate and critical movements in society. Many "theisms", however, which began as dissident minority movements and were initially denounced as "atheism", later modified or even supplanted the reigning "theism", which in turn, came to be considered "atheism". The genocidal God of Samuel¹⁷ and the miracle-working God of Elijah calling for human sacrifice,¹⁸ while ascendant in their own day over unbelievers, appear as false and atheistic in the perspectives of Amos and Jesus. The Yahweh whom Moses found in Midian and who made a covenant with the Israelites was not the same as the gods of nature whom his people had hitherto worshipped.

In modern times in the West, secularism and science stress an appeal to observable facts and are correlated with a non-religious attitude. Here, humanism has become associated with sensation or experience as the source and referent of knowledge, with the relativity of values, with the material world, and with the power and importance of human beings. Theism, in contrast, emphasizes reason, absolute values, the spiritual and ideal as against the actual world, and the power and importance of God. Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the leading critics of theism in modern times, accentuated human existence against the abstract "essence" of religion. This contrast, dating from the direct attack of 18th century mechanical materialism upon a feudalized theology, oversimplified the relation. Marx was deeply enough steeped in German religious idealism and Hegel's dialectical method to realize that religious behavior and thought, though alienated, spring from a profound need of man to fulfill himself. He reconceived the categories of rational, absolute, spiritual, ideal, possible, essential, which had been exalted one-sidedly by religion, upon a material base and in dialectical relation with the categories of empirical, relative, bodily, material, actual, and existent. Repudiating supernaturalism and idealism, the prevailing forms of religious thought, Marx pursued a humanized naturalism¹⁹ which sought to discover in those forms, as in all forms of human consciousness, what he had found in Hegel's Phenomenology, namely, "the self-genesis of man as a process".²⁰ A search of this type was required by his humanistic method and goal.

Many influences shaped the personality and thought of the young Karl Marx.²¹ Here we may mention his Jewish and later Christian parents; his father with his faith in the Enlightenment, the ideals of the French Revolution, and his "pure belief in God"; his Gymnasium teachers who taught him, among other things, Christian doctrine and who were in trouble with the police; his mentor, von Westphalen, a Saint-Simonian utopian socialist who called for a "new Christianity"; and his teacher at the University of Bonn, E. Gans, also a Saint-Simonian.

Philosophical Developments Before and Through Kant,

and Kant's Influence On Marx

As a student of philosophy the young Marx was centrally concerned with the problem of humanity's alienation and freedom, which he had inherited indirectly from the Judaic-Christian tradition by way of German idealism. The Jewish prophets, Jesus, the early Church Fathers, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and many others had provided formulations and answers for this problem. The synthesis of St. Thomas did not prevent the development of two divergent tendencies: Duns Scotus' emphasis on individuality and will and Meister Eckhart's mysticism which defined the human soul as potentially God and realizable as God. The first tendency helped to produce empirical science, bourgeois society, Protestant dualism, and humanism; the second tendency promoted rationalism and idealism in philosophy and their alliance with religion. Spinoza intellectualized the mysticism, which had been carried forward by Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno. However, Leibniz, who could not tolerate Spinoza's deterministic mechanism or the duality of both Spinoza and Descartes, recalled the principle of the identity of part and whole²² developed by Cusanuss and Bruno, and stressed the unity of creatures in continuity of vital and sensitive activity leading up to God.

More like Descartes, Kant (1724-1804) was shaped by the influence of mathematics and the empiricism of the industrially advanced countries. Himself a scientist and a Pietist, Kant was aware of the deficiencies of empiricism, rationalism, and moral-religious feeling when taken alone, as well as of the crisis in thought threatening traditional religious values and concepts. He believed that the disputes of metaphysicians on the soul, freedom, and God produced in the great masses "materialism, fatalism, atheism, free-thinking, unbelief, fanaticism, and superstition."²³

The young Kant, imbued with the philosophy of Wolff, a follower of Leibniz, took as axiomatic the primacy of the mind in knowledge and the formative and universal character of the mind. As he developed, however, particularly under the impact of empiricists like Hume, Kant became convinced that the establishment of both science and religion must avoid "dogmatism" and be "critical" in taking into account both rationalism and empiricism, and hence the origins, possibilities, limits, and rights of the human mind. Kant's conclusion was to found the structure of perception and understanding on the innate forms of the mind which, as in Leibniz, are universal and not merely subjective; to reject speculative metaphysics; to affirm a "categorical imperative" for the practical reason; and to argue that ideas like God are "postulates" of the moral will. Kant was thus more eclectic than synthetic. A Protestant in an age of reason and science, he did not move beyond the autonomy of man's will and reason but reinforced that autonomy. Whereas Leibniz, basing himself on the microcosm-macrocosm of medieval mysticism, had tried to hold all individuals in unity with one another and with God, Kant absorbed Leibniz' stress on active reason but remained essentially modern and scientific in outlook, considering religion to be adventitious and God unprovable. From the point of view of a comprehensive system like that of St. Thomas or Leibniz, Kant's philosophy appears cautious and divided. What prevented him from making the great leap forward, as Marx's criticism of Feuerbach indicates, was his incapacity to conquer empiricism--and individuality, subjectivity, alienation--in a creative way. Though the medieval mystics, Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, and Fichte had all in their own ways tried to transcend empiricism, their solutions either were static or denied the empirical component of human life.

Kant influenced Marx both directly and, through German idealism, indirectly in the following ways. (1) Because of its autonomy, which Marx accepted, human reason may be alienated in the form of "false consciousness", and from its generic functioning. (2) Since our mind is active and creative, human beings can make their own history. (3) Theological and metaphysical speculation are futile and have no foundation in experience or reason; hence religious thought must be explained by non-rational forces behind the moral will itself. (4) The human being has a generic nature by which he or she is distinguished from a merely empirical being. From such a view Marx constructed his theory of alienation, dehumanization, and "socialized humanity". Rousseau had been a critical influence upon Kant's position in this regard,²⁴ and Rousseau in turn had translated the Christian view of the fall and redemption into secular terms: "God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil."²⁵ Also, "the general will is always right and tends always to the public advantage".²⁶ (5) In contrast to some empiricists, Kant believed in progress. Like similar ideas held by his contemporaries, this was a secular variant of the Judaic-Christian idea which stood in opposition to the Greek theories of fate (Moira), cycles, and degeneration. Marx adopted the idea, and developed his own interpretation.

The Influence of Fichte and Hegel on Marx

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), the most important and immediate heir of Kant, took up his teacher's theme of autonomy. Under the influence of the French Revolution with its "rights of man" and the Romantic Movement of Germany with its affinities to Christian mysticism, Fichte amplified the function of Kant's "practical reason." For Fichte, man's life and experience originate in his ego or will; out of the commitment of the will the person posits an opposite in the world and then fuses the self with that. Through a series of dialectical and self-transcending steps one thereby ascends to full knowledge of the absolute. Though in his later work Fichte called this process God, in his early work it is clear that the dialectical process is the creative praxis of persons who are rational, active, and social. In Fichte humanity and God, humanism and theism were indistinguishably fused.

The influence of Fichte on Marx is evident in Fichte's notions of the self-creative freedom of humanity, of the human being as a practical and social being, of the person's continuous self-transcendence, of the dialectical process of development, and of the revolt against theoretical and social dualisms.

The most powerful intellectual influence on the young Marx during his university years was the thought of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831). In his youth Hegel was a theological student at the Protestant seminary at Tübingen. The problem occupying him then and throughout his life was the rationality of Christianity, or the spiritual character of reason: What is the relation of faith to intellect, of humanity to God? The work of Kant and the Enlightenment converged with that of German Romanticism (especially Herder) and Rousseau to produce in Hegel a unique synthesis. Whereas Kant made a Copernican revolution by showing how a person's understanding revolves around its own forms, Hegel's revolution was bolder: it turned everything into history, the divine history of Spirit which culminates in the reason of humanity. Hegel combined the Romantic view that humankind is evolving through history and becoming like God with the view that the whole of history is the work of Reason. Here the unifying concept was Geist, which means both Mind and Spirit. The young Hegel's historical studies of Christianity led him, on a Kantian basis, to distinguish the interior moral power of reason from the external forms of religion. "Pure Reason completely free of any limit or restriction whatsoever is the deity himself."²⁷ In explaining the alienation of Christianity, he contrasted the rigid and "positive" religion of Jewish law with the free religion of the Greeks,²⁸ and the anti-naturalism and dualism of the Jews with the naturalism and mysticism of the Greeks.²⁹ Christianity has "fallen" from its ideal unity into the "depravity" of the privatized and fragmented Roman world. God has been objectified and alienated, and human life has been divided between religion and secularity, church and state, and piety and virtue. The overcoming of such estrangement is Jesus' "pantheism of love" and the Kingdom of God.

Hegel's mature philosophy was an elaborate reformulation of this early statement of the problem and its solution. One finds oneself, he argued, in the state of alienation (Selbst-Entfremdung) from oneself, others, one's own moral law, and society. Such self-alienation takes the form of "objectification" (Vergegenständlichung), in which one's world is precipitated into separate objects that stand over against one and appear as real things. In such a world of alienation and otherness (Entausserung) one becomes either master (subject) or slave (object); but in either case one has fallen from the realm of freedom or self-consciousness into the realm of blind necessity or ignorance. As one comes to recognize one's true self in the other, one begins the movement back toward an unalienated and unified self-consciousness (Aneigung). This movement of self-reconciliation in the person, via Reason, is nothing more than the activity of Geist or God in the world.³⁰ Though the reworking of the Christian theme of the drama of salvation is apparent in this theodicy, Hegel has substituted human Reason for a personal God, made illusion the Tempter, and replaced moral Sin with intellectual Gullibility.

Was Hegel an atheist? Some orthodox religious leaders suspected so, and some philosophers, especially the Young Hegelians, believed so. Feuerbach took up the attack on Hegel from a materialist viewpoint, arguing that the subjective being of God resolves into the predicates of the human being, that theology is reducible to anthropology. Feuerbach completed the humanizing, subjectivizing tendency in German thought which had begun with mystics like Eckhart and with Reformers like Münzer and Luther, and ran through Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.

Hegel's philosophy displayed the double irony of starting out as a critique of orthodox religion and society and ending as a justification of them, and of starting out as a philosophy of religion and ending as an implicit atheism. He sought to heal dualisms and to take the Incarnation of his faith seriously, but in so doing he assimilated God to the world-process, and eventually to the Prussian State.

The radical Young Hegelians, among whom were counted Marx and Engels, saw what was the most radical feature of Hegel's philosophy: its emphasis upon change, movement, interconnection, transformation, and development--in a word, upon dialectical process. The one constant and absolute reality is the creative process itself; its contents and the forms of what it creates are transient and relative. The creative process itself, however, is moving toward triumph over its obstructions in history. This was a new version of the dynamic and majestic sovereignty of God, recalling in a materialist and dialectical form the visions of the Old Testament prophets and sages, the Messianic expectations of the early Christians, the yearning of the mystics, and the nostalgic and fugitive fantasies of Christian millennialists. In its romantic exaltation of action, will, freedom, and the organic unity of humankind and history, it belonged with those other visions that inspired men at this time, such as the dream of Rousseau that impelled the plebeian revolutionaries of the Year II in France.³¹ In its assurance of a victory in progress which humanity might join, it evoked again the apocalyptic dream that had haunted the imaginations of Christians for almost 2000 years. It set itself against not only the ideology of feudalism but the modern ideology of the ascendent class of rationalists, mechanists, and Newtonian liberals of the bourgeois order. In the hands of the philosophies this liberal vision had helped to undermine French absolutism but, in turn, it became suspect in the eyes of many who saw it as an anti-populist viewpoint. This Romantic suspicion also had its conservative roots, for while the Romantic imagination was allied to the spirit of the Revolution, with its mood of "alienation", it sought to recover its lost harmony in primitive man, in the "folk", and even in the middle ages.³² For many Romantics the non-alienated unity of man could be recovered only in and through humankind with its history and its goals transcending the individual--what Hegel called the March of God on Earth.

The Influence of Feuerbach on Marx, and Marx's

Positive and Negative Assessment of Christianity

Insofar as Marx took over the grand dialectic of Hegel, he was a Romantic. Under the impact of his reading of Feuerbach (1804-1872), however, the young Marx saw that Hegel's dialectic must come down to earth and enter into practice, and that its speculative view of the state did not explain the contradictions in society.³³ Marx attacked Hegel from a Feuerbachian base: the state is derived from people and not vice versa; the "heavenly" political life is alienated from our "species-life"; and religious alienation rests in economic life.³⁴ He substituted "socialized man"³⁵ for Hegel's abstract and spiritual Idea and for Feuerbach's individualized corporeal man.

What leads to the alienation of our "species-life"? As Marx developed his answer to this question posed by Hegel and Feuerbach he developed his own philosophy. Religion is an expression of a widespread alienation of men in society, of "private interest . . . property . . . and . . . egoistic persons".³⁶ Thus the Christian State "is not the genuine realization of the human basis of religion".³⁷ The theological state has not succeeded in instituting in human, secular form "the human basis of which Christianity is the transcendental expression".³⁸ Marx's appreciation of "the human basis" of religion appeared later in his "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right" (1843), which states that "religion is the fantastic realization of the human essence because the human essence has no true reality."³⁹ Here religion is not described as a fantasy or as a phenomenon isolated from man; it is an expression of man, but of alienated man.

Religious distress is at the same time the expression of real distress and the protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people.⁴⁰

Marx's criterion for this criticism is his humanism. Inheriting the notion of self-alienation from German idealism, this humanism sees its roots not in illusion as such but in the material and social condition of human life. Consequently in his critique of religion Marx's main attack is directed against "a condition which needs illusions".⁴¹ In answer to Hegel, Marx insists that religious criticism must not remain in the domain of the Idea and "the other world", but must come down to earth and the suffering of real men, "the halo of which is religion".⁴² Criticism must likewise expose all other forms of self-alienation, later described by Marx as the legal, political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophic "superstructures"⁴³ of class society. All of them are abstractions and distortions of the real human being; all mistake the false human being for the true one. They do not make humanity; rather, humanity makes them as forms of its mythical, illusory, unhappy consciousness. At the same time Marx dialectically recognized in humanity's religion its revolt against its suffering, and humanity and its discontent with false consciousness, that is, with the human "spirit" in a "spiritless situation". Rather than seeing the person as fallen and alienated from the institution and thought of religion, Marx sees religion and the religious person as a fall or alienation from the real person, while humanism is a first but abstract step toward positive communism.⁴⁴ It should be noted that because Marx was opposed to theism ultimately because of its anti-humanism, any joining of the argument between Marxist humanism and theism must be joined on the issue of humanism.⁴⁵ Could it have been demonstrated, Marx presumably would have accepted a faith humanistic and naturalistic in all respects; however, religion appeared to be identified historically with alienated ideology and a class society. Marx had an appreciation for the humanism of the story of "the carpenter whom the rich men killed" and the religion "that taught us the worship of the child";⁴⁶ Engels expressed admiration for the revolutionary character of early Christianity;⁴⁷ while Lenin believed that cooperation between Marxists and believers was possible.⁴⁸

Marx's emphasis on the material and social world of practice as the source of our delineation culminated in the notion of the working class as the chief bearer of the new society. Marx probably first learned about the role of labor in human life from the Phenomenology of Hegel, who had been influenced by his reading of Adam Smith. The labor theory of value had its roots in the medieval communism of many Christian groups as well as in the Scholastics, and, beyond that, in the Bible.⁴⁹ It echoed Christian-Stoic organicism and the Cusanus-Bruno-Leibniz notion of the macrocosm in the microcosm, especially as the revolutionary labor movement mirrored the dialectical movement of the whole universe. But whereas mysticism from Eckhart to Hegel had spoken of the alienated individual as returning home by way of individual, contemplative knowledge, Marx insisted that it must be accomplish by collective political action. That is, it must be carried out by the members of that remnant class in society who are most dehumanized by "radical chains",⁵⁰ and hence most likely to pass over the stage of bourgeois society as self-delusive dehumanization and then become genuinely human. Analogously, Eckhart and the other mystics argued that the man who is most empty and ignorant is the most likely to become divine, as Jesus declared that the last shall be first. Thus Hegel's abstract form of alienation, Entaüsserung (externalization), becomes Marx's veraüssern (selling). Religious and philosophical accounts of this alienation (Christian "sin", and Hegel's "appearance") have been, for Marx, only alienated reinforcements of the alienation inherent in the exploitive labor situation of class society. Similarly, Christian and Hegelian notions of the unity of workers yet to be achieved point abstractly to a truth but away from "the real movement"⁵¹ of working people and of communism "to abolish the present state of things" and to create the unity longed for in religion and philosophy.

Marx's Transformation of the Values of Christianity

Marx's and Engels' Manifesto of the Communist Party, with its militant call for the workers of the world to break their chains and build a new world, was the climax of a rich period of German philosophy in its struggle to solve the problem of human alienation and freedom. As we have seen, this problem was inherited from Christianity. Most Christians have taken as an article of faith that human beings have an organic connection with Spirit (Logos). Hegel started here, finding this Logos to be supremely revealed in the self-consciousness of the human being. For Christianity's authoritarian autonomy, however, this was a fatal step; for the young followers of Hegel soon saw that the pre-existent Logos may go and leave only the human being. Spirit is already incarnate and secularized in humanity. On this view, the vehicle of the human spirit, which the young Marx called "species-being" and the mature Marx called "development", is not the Church or any other institution but is potentially everywhere. The working class, organized to bring to pass the de-alienated unity of persons with one another and with nature, becomes the major source of value in history. A social prometheanism has replaced a religion of sacrificial submission; human pride has superseded humility.

The promethean insistence on the power of human self-transcendence had been operative in Christianity itself, as had been the notion of creative practice, which was strong in German idealism and was carried to its conclusion in Marx's social praxis. Engels asserted that "the German working-class movement is the inheritor of German classical philosophy".⁵² Through that it is also the heir of the humanistic vision in Christianity which laid emphasis upon the mutuality and solidarity of people in actual living relations and upon the value of work as such. Paul enjoined the first Christians: "If any would not work, neither should he eat."⁵³ Engels approvingly recognized in Christianity "notable points of resemblance with the modern working-class movement": an oppressed people's movement, slaves and poor people expectant of liberation from bondage, and people against whom the persecution of the ruling groups is directed but who struggle victoriously against it.⁵⁴ The working people who responded to the humanist vision of Marx, Engels, and Lenin were responding to a vision which was similar to that of early Christianity, but which by and large medieval and modern Christianity, having become a movement of the ruling and privileged classes rather than of the suffering classes, had abandoned.

Though for Marx humanity and its ideas continuously change, he also believed, following Hegel and Feuerbach, that it has an essence (Wesen).⁵⁵ Some things in the human being remain constant: generic needs, general relations to one's fellow-man and nature, and the laws of development. Such development is intrinsically dialectical, social, and historical, for the human essence is not individual but communal, being "the ensemble of the social relations".⁵⁶ Not only human value but also human knowledge⁵⁷ are social tasks and achievements. Further, human development is not fixed at a certain limit; it is open-ended, bounded only by species-death. It is this-worldly and not other-worldly--which for Marx and Engels means life-affirming and not life-denying. This concept of the human essence had an affinity to the Christian concept that "we are members of one another"⁵⁸ and that we are creative:⁵⁹ together with others we can transcend the present forms of our thoughts, actions, and values toward a new and fulfilled future.

Such values of Christianity have been articulated principally within the Neo-Platonic framework of Greco-Roman civilization, the dualisms of the medieval period, the individualistic and predestinarian theologies of early bourgeois Protestantism, and the ambiguous liberal theologies of the 19th and 20th centuries. Conscious of the material origins of ideologies, Marx and Engels were able to point to the limits of these formulations. At the same time they undertook to express the values of our sociality and creativity, mutatis mutandis, in materialistic, economic, and political terms, though demanding drastic changes to realize them. In this way, Marxism absorbed, negated, preserved, and transformed those values of Christianity.

THE PHILOSOPHICAL RELATIONS OF MARXIST HUMANISM

TO CHRISTIAN ETHICS

Because Marx's humanism represents a fusion of empirical humanism (from the Enlightenment) and rationalistic humanism (from German idealism), Marxism has taken two different positions toward theism. Following the French materialists and Feuerbach and applying the "sensuous" test, Marx's early criticisms of humanism stress that theism does not meet this principle of verifiability, and hence is involved in a flight from sensuous, material reality. However, the Hegelian critique also appears: because "every historically developed social form [is] in fluid movement . . . and . . . transient",⁶⁰ from this "critical and revolutionary" point of view, the idea of God must be a symptom of alienation and the reification of an abstraction in order to secure comfort in "an unspiritual situation". Drawing support from science, Engels affirms that what is real is not a timeless, isolated, fixed, completed, metaphysical reality that is the Deity, but "a process" or world "in constant motion, change, transformation, development."⁶¹ Hence a "system of natural and historical knowledge" that is all-inclusive and final, not to mention supernatural knowledge that claims to pass beyond history, is "a contradiction to the fundamental law of dialectical reasoning".⁶² Ultimate reality and value are to be found neither in the depths of individual subjective experience nor in a supernatural God, but in the processes and relations of social history and physical and biological nature.

In its criticisms of theism, Marxism need not simply point to the supersensuous presumptions of theism. In the spirit both of empiricism and of the rationalism developed in Hegel and still further in modern science, it also can call attention to theism's unwarranted transcendence of relativities and to its violation of the best established principle in the modern mind, viz., the relativity of sensuous knowledge. In his Theses on Feuerbach, Marx saw that Feuerbach himself by his mechanical materialism had falsely absolutized the sensuous, static object of contemplation. When it is concrete, that activity, "developed by idealism . . . in contradistinction to materialism",⁶³ defines what is real. Accordingly, either God must be a concrete activity or some aspect of such activity, or He must be a non-entity.⁶⁴ Marxism finds no such activity.

Christian theism has also been affected by developments in the modern world and by the modes of understanding that make change and relativity essential to the comprehension of reality. Among Roman Catholics, Karl Rahner and Edward Schillebeeck have sought to find divinity by way of our existential and interpersonal situation, while a theology of hope and of the future has been developed by Johannes Metz and Leslie Dewart. This latter theology has its counterpart in the work of Protestants like Jürgen Moltmann and Herbert Richardson. These theological innovations in Catholicism have been evoked in large part by the Ecumenical Council, itself the result of the sensitivity of Pope John XXIII to the material and cultural changes throughout the globe. They have been more dramatic than the changes in Protestant theology, whose existentialist, Kierkegaard, had to wait for the disintegration of bourgeois civilization before his voice was heard. Most Protestant theologians of the present epoch--Bonhoeffer, Bultmann, Tillich, Robinson, Macquarrie--in various ways reflect this existentialist, secular trend. The Catholic Teilhard de Chardin and the Protestant Alfred North Whitehead have made heroic attempts to interpret religious concepts within the framework of an ontology required by a universe of process as portrayed in the sciences.

Such new theologies, while secular and relative in many ways, have also sought to take account of the sacred and the absolute. On the other side, Marxism, with Engels' and Lenin's insistence on naturalistic or materialistic categories, has never given up the categories of the objective and the absolute. The secularizing of Christian theists learned in part from the worldly successes of Marxism, and the emphasis of the Marxists on a natural or secular absolute, bring Christian theism and Marxist humanism together at the level of theory. There they can begin to understand one another, dialogue may become fruitful, and cooperation practicable.

The Standard of Ultimate Value: Its Identity, Status and Evidence

The standard of absolute, ultimate value for the Christian is a transcendent God as revealed in the Jesus Christ of history. Among persons this takes the form of a forgiving and redemptive love exemplified in the fellowship of the faithful. In itself, however, this value is said to be a pattern of personal being independent of such a fellowship and beyond history as its source and end. The status of Jesus Christ is thus both immanent and transcendent, both historical and super-historical. It is known by all those who, through faith from within and grace from without, receive revelation mediated through Scripture and Church tradition. This way of knowing is self-authenticating.⁶⁵

For the Marxist, the standard of ultimate value is a pattern of events immanent in man and in history. Though it neither has a supernatural status nor lies beyond history, it transcends man's present state of development as an order of human fulfillment that is actualized in history past and future, and in history as a whole. This pattern is exemplified by the individual person in relation to other persons and to the non-human world of nature, and by humanity as a species in relation to the world of nature. The concrete possibilities of the pattern of value can never be exhausted, since it is of the nature of historical events to be incomplete. This standard is known by the critical-practical method of dialectic, that is, interaction with other persons and with the world in order to transform them in accordance with the demands of human need.

It is a mistake to say either that Christian theology is wholly transcendental, or that Marxism's theory of value is wholly arbitrary or narrowly humanistic. Some Christian theologies, both Roman Catholic and Protestant, have stressed the absolute otherness of God; but such theologies could never consistently take account of the incarnation by which God not only is in history but takes its evils unto himself, suffers, dies, and triumphs over the world's evils. Other Christian theologies, chiefly liberal-Protestant, have stressed the historicity of God, at times reducing Christ to the man, Jesus; but such theologies have made Christianity simply one relative factor alongside many others. Christian orthodoxy, as established in the early Councils, maintained both positions in balance, i.e., the divine transcendence and historicity.

Similarly, there have been both extremely humanistic and extremely materialistic and necessitarian Marxists; the classical writings may be partially quoted in support of both. If not read carefully and comprehensively, the work of Marx could easily give the impression that values are relative only to class or to a given historical stage of development. His over-all position, however, is that, like facts, values are not only relative and subjective, but also non-relative and objective.⁶⁶ Nevertheless, Marx is not always clear on the exact status of these values: are some values unconscious, either in individual person or in society; in history, are there impersonal processes, such as machines and processes of industrial production, which participate in human value processes; in what sense are human values subtended by such historical processes or by processes in nature; and what is the relation to pre-human processes of the first distinctively human values arising out of social production?

Because of his concern with historical studies and political practice, the emphasis of Marx's writings is humanistic and historical. At the same time, he is quite aware of the wider background of nature within which history moves. It is this awareness, developed explicitly in Engels, which has led some to transform Marxism into a transcendentalism of nature, according to which nature or physical laws transcend history and completely determine it. This is an historical deviation from Marx, just as mechanical predestinarianism is an a-spiritual deviation from Christian orthodoxy. In both cases humanism is sacrificed to mechanism, the human to the non-human, the free to the necessary, individual project to totalitarian control, and the unformed to the formed.

Within Christianity the impulse toward such transcendentalism has been associated with a variety of motives, such as the longing for unity in Augustine, a sense of vocation in history in Calvinism, and disapproval of liberal views in Jansenism. Marx believed that only a proper grasp of the objective existence of matter, independent of us and in dialectical motion in both nature and history, can correct the tyrannies of a "false consciousness", false idealism, and false materialism. This objective world with its "laws" is required by Marx for human reality and value.⁶⁷ Similarly, Christianity has taught that, except for establishing a correct relation to things other than ourselves and transcending our own purposes, if it is left to its own devices, cannot be saved from its own self-destructive tendencies. In both cases, the irony is that in enforcing the transcendental law, people have sometimes generated bloodier tyrannies than the evils they intended to forestall or rectify.

In opposition to the individualistic and mechanistic cosmologies, Christianity and Marxism hold social or organicist views, in that both are philosophies of community or social order. Because of classes and class struggle, in Christian history social order has been interpreted ambiguously both as elitist and as democratic in character. On the other hand, Marxism, as a product of late-feudal and modern revolutions, has been in theory unambiguously democratic, though certain deviations have yielded to the temptation of elitism. In fact, the main reason for Marxism's vehement rejection of religion was precisely its alliance with ruling elites and oppressive social orders, and its suppression of a democratic social order. Although the feudal Roman Catholic Italian Church had to reject both capitalism and Protestantism because together they opposed its economic and ecclesiastical power, like Marxism it was compelled in principle to reject all individualism and sectarianism because, from an organicist viewpoint, freedom and dissent carried to the point of fragmentation are great evils. On this point Christianity and Marxism are agreed. At the same time, should the Church or a socialist society become an instrument of oppression, its prophets must arise to criticize it by its own best standards, and call it back to its historic mission of binding people together in mutual care and labor.

Because Christianity and Marxism also converge in belief in the non-mechanistic, creationist, spiritual attribute of the world and of history, they give priority in their world-views to the domain of values over that of facts. This means that they look ultimately to practice, and not to theory alone, for the resolution of their problems,⁶⁸ though for Christianity, unlike Marxism, this priority ultimately originates outside of history and nature. Both Christianity and Marxism see the universe as a value-universe that is orderly and hence intelligible, in its workings and responsiveness to human creative activity. Human, spiritual history represents the end and significance of natural history. This is finally understandable only by means of spiritual history, though not reducible to its categories. The history of nature displays a tendency toward the history of the human being, who, as the highest expression of value in nature and as "crowned with honor and glory", is endowed, in turn, with "dominion . . . over all the earth"⁶⁹ and with a responsibility for what happens upon it.

We are able to understand, control, appreciate, and thus unite with and elevate nature because we are formed of the same dust and ordered according to the same laws, though possessed of the higher law of spiritual freedom. For Marxism the value-standard is the immanent and ultimately intelligible dialectical law of development; for Christianity it is the transcendent will of God, which, though its natural laws can be understood, is ultimately unintelligible and must be accepted on faith. For the Marxist our transcendence is a function of our immanence since spirit comes from and depends upon dialectical matter; whereas for the Christian, spirit has a chronological and logical priority over matter which is purely contingent. Here Marxism has struggled to give our transcendent spirit its proper place, whereas all metaphysical transcendentalism attenuates matter and human history. For both, we must be guided both by a provisional, relative ethics and by a categorical, absolute ethics. However, whereas for Marxism the latter is always progressively revealing itself through the former as we approximate to full knowledge of the absolute,⁷⁰ Christian thought has emphasized the discontinuity between natural theology with its ethics, on the one hand, and revealed theology, on the other.

Marxism and Christianity share the view that transcending and determining the individual's present act are one's own past, one's own imagined future as presently operative, other persons and things of one's particular community and human society, and the established world of nature. In the broad sense of the term, these are all social orders, each of which supports the other. Where for Marxism, however, this sociality in its ultimate dialectical character is a final metaphysical fact, for some traditional Christian theologies, at least, the sociality is contingent. The only necessary fact is God who, even as love, is not always thought to need a world outside himself to love.⁷¹ For the Marxist humanist to whom love is mutual care and creation ever being transformed, love is a historical if not a metaphysical necessity. We cannot conceive history without it; more accurately, our own natural history, as the only history we know and that matters, is in its essence the history of loving beings in their struggle to be and to develop their being and to help others to do so.

The Relation of the Ultimate Value to the Actual World

In Christian orthodoxy the ultimate value, or God, remains essentially unchangeable and impassible in relation to the world. In the Incarnation, the Divine became man, not in order to change or improve the divine nature--for that would be impossible--but either to provide a ransom for the Devil who had humanity in his power, or to pay for the infinite satisfaction for humanity's infinite sin against the divine, or to persuade, by sacrificial example, sinful persons to repent of their sins. In short, the divine entered into history to reveal there its perfection to imperfect people and to rescue them from the Fall which defines history. The Fall requires an Incarnation and Redemption, just as history requires a super-historical Creation. The Incarnation occurred because, according to the respective theories, God's supreme power, honor, and goodness had been violated by humanity and demanded vindication. Because God cannot suffer and people have fallen beyond self-help, the significance and fulfillment of history lie not in history among people, but outside of history in God alone.

These pre-feudal and feudal views of the Atonement reflect the sharp distinction and separation between the lord and his subjects. The more humanistic view, suppressed but never destroyed by hierarchial power and thought, found God in the very depths of men's hearts, the Living Christ and Emmanuel in the midst of history, recurrently suffering, dying, and rising again to transform persons. The mystical, communal, reformative, apocalyptic, and revolutionary movements within Christianity were alive to the Presence of Christ in history, and derived their energy and inspiration from a sense of that Presence. Such movements fed the modern streams of socialist thought and German idealism, which having converged with such other streams as materialism and science issued, in turn, in the dialectical and historical materialism of Marx.

For Christian theology the divine or ultimate value became human in order to display the divine more fully and to draw human beings to it. For Marxism, on the contrary, persons approached the divine, understood as an ultimate value already immanent within them as their human potential, in order to become more fully human and draw the divine unto persons. For the first, one is raised by God into eternity; for the other, humanity evolves by its collective struggle from pre-history into genuine human history. For both, there is a qualitative transformation into a new being and a fulfilled, non-alienated life. Once more, though the difference between Christian transcendence and Marxist immanence is evident, historically the difference is not a simple one. Alongside its emphasis on the impassibility of God, Christian theology has given an important place to the sufferings of Jesus, the historical fellowship of the visible and invisible Church as the body of Christ, and the historical continuity of the Church through its apostolic succession, its army of martyrs, and the communion of the faithful. Practically speaking, the belief in God's impassibility as the eternity of the realm of value did not always arrest activity in history; at times it spurred efforts to improve people and their conditions in history. Though this activity might not add to God's super-abundant goodness, which for the orthodox Christian is finished and perfected, it might win for persons eternal bliss or participation in that goodness.

Similarly, while for the Marxist value is process and hence ever changing, it manifests at the same time a universal, absolute, objective structure embedded in its various manifestations. This structure does not lie beyond history, but is inherent in history to which it provides the directive norm.⁷² The process of the material dialectic raises up ideals which both reflect and selectively guide humanity into interactive relations with the world in order to transform these ideals into actualities. Such interactions are themselves dialectical; they modify both man and the world so that values are embodied and new values conceived and actualized. Thus, whereas for the Marxist history is a material process of the realization of value, for the Christian value has already been realized outside of history. For the Marxist, the creating of values by which humanity transcends itself is a function of natural history and is contained in it; for the Christian, this transcendent creating lies beyond the limits of history and nature. Whereas the human ideal for the Marxist is to struggle to contribute to the creative historical process, for the Christian the ideal is to seek and find God in eternity. The Christian stresses our dependence upon and determination by God, while the Marxist calls on us to be independent and self-determinative.

Does this difference irreconcilably divide a religious perspective from a scientific one, and separate theism from humanism; or does it stem from an ancient Platonic-Aristotelian way of conceiving things, as contrasted with the dialectical materialist approach to the world; or is it both? In short, can a religious person hold to dialectical materialism, and can a dialectical materialist be religious? If the answer is no to both, then the remaining question is where the two can converge in belief and cooperate in practice.

The Nature and Destiny of Evil in the World

In Christian thought evil has been understood as (1) a power or powers resistant to or destructive of God, (2) a power destructive of the order of God's creation, and (3) the absence of good (the view of St. Augustine and others) or of perfection (St. Thomas). Evil finds its expression in the world at large (symbolized by the figure of the Devil) and in the sin and fall of human beings (Genesis 2:4-3:24). In sin the self arrogantly exalts itself above its Creator and His creation, refusing faith in God. But evil is not independent of the world and God. Embedded in the context of God's created order and creativity, it draws its existence and meaning from its relations within this wider domain of good. Evil obstruction and destruction in humankind represent forms of alienation from God, from self, from others, and from non-human nature. Yet such sin and its alienation are not absolute and final. Human idolatry can be transformed if the sinner, in confession and repentance, will give himself or herself to God, who will grant forgiveness and restoration to a right order. God is the redemptive power in the world, at work in Christ and "reconciling the world unto Himself^".73 He is overcoming evil with good.

Marxism's view of evil is kindred to this position, namely, that there is no absolute opposition between the progressive force in history and the reactionary force; in particular societies this is the opposition of the ruled to the ruling class. Some Marxists, like some Christians, have tended to say that evil people and groups in history will be judged, defeated, and cast into the outer darkness of damnation. In general, however, Marxism is neither Manichaean nor dualistic; it maintains that in the dialectical movements of history opposites are always united, interpenetrate, and transform one another. In this view, evil is transformed (aufgehoben) in the Hegelian sense, that is, in the moving order of history brought from a state of alienation to a state of creative contribution so far as possible.

So far as is possible, Marx and Engels argued, socialism should be achieved by peaceful means; each person should become a "midwife" assisting in the birth of the new society. Struggle with resistant forces, though sometimes violent, cannot always be avoided, for violence will sometimes issue from the ruling groups intent on fighting to the death against change. Marx's attitude toward evil is not radically different from Christian teaching according to which temptations will come, "but woe to the man by whom the temptation comes".⁷⁴ The sinner ought to cut off violently the offending member; the money changers ought by force to be driven from the temple.⁷⁵ In the face of evil Christianity is not passive nor is Marxism terroristic, but both desire to maintain and to humanize the underlying order of society and history.

Our views of the universe and of history, which stretch beyond our limited capacity to perceive and to comprehend, are reflections and extensions of our own experiences. Our inner life, the images that we gather and store, the concatenations and developments of those images in the consciousness and unconsciousness, the construction, destruction, and reconstruction of connections between them, all represent the source of those world-views we present to ourselves and others. As the inner life or formation of personal identity is an introjection of the world, the construction of a picture of the world's identity is a projection of the inner life of man.

The earliest, most formative, and essential relation of ourselves to the world is our relation to another human being. The ideologies of many religions are ways of dealing with this relation in the most primordial terms of the relation of infant to mother and father. Whether the Other be conceived as bountiful mother, lawgiving father, etc., this relation is conceived in the religions as that of our dependence on the Other. In such a relation each person is seen to be what he or she is, namely a helpless child in need of a face-to-face relation of mutual recognition, confirmation, and creation. In the Judaic-Christian religious tradition, the Fall is the individual's separation from this state of innocent bliss through the intervention of our own autonomous activity. When pride and stubborn self-presumption disrupt the relation of mutuality, the bonds between Self and Other are voluntarily sundered. The consequence is separation, isolation, suffering, and spiritual death--in a word, the lovelessness of hell. The only way for us to be restored to the paradise of love is to acknowledge our dependence on the Other, to confess and repent of our prideful sin, and to commit ourselves once more to that relation "in whom we live and move and have our being."

For the Jews, Jesus, and the early Christians, that relation of Self and Other was always personal: the Divine was defined as a relation whose terms were the Self and Other. The author of the letters of John put this matter succinctly:

Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God, and he who loves is born of God and knows God. He who does not love does not know God; for God is love.⁷⁶

In the course of Christian history this ideal was sometimes distorted or displaced by a rigid, punitive morality that cowed people through superstition, cruelty, and fear of eternal punishment in hell. Though with the dissolution of civic life under the Empire, people were thrown back to their fundamental relations in families, villages and, in time, feudal estates, these relations remained brief and transient, forever threatened by famine, disease and war. Self became estranged from Other. Accordingly, God was transformed into that Supremely Distant and Totally Other, who was simultaneously inscrutable and all-powerful and sent both good and evil alike on the world. With the periodic upsurge of mysticism among the solitary monks, he was defined as existing in the depths of the Self. In both cases the divine was always defined as an unknown being apart from persons because persons, being parted from their counterparts, could not know who he was. God remained the unconscious representation of the self's mystery to the self; the divine was the alienated expression of human self-alienation.

With the revival of commerce and urban and civic life in Europe in the 10th and 11th centuries, people's relations to one another commenced to change. Sustained by new food supplies and other necessities for physical existence, the whole institutional structure of secular life began to spread and elaborate itself. The Self rediscovered the Other, and hence itself, in the manifold dimensions of their mutuality: commercial, industrial, political, linguistic, religious, aesthetic, sensuous, and scientific. The "revolutions" of this secular transformation worked themselves out in every sphere of human life. Often they took two forms, though in much historical writing one form has obscured the other. The most successful form, whose development has been responsible for the writing of such history, was the revolution of the Self against the Other. This expressed the new mercantile movement seeking to break free from traditional feudal restrictions. In theology it appears in both human and divine manifestations as a conflict between the insurgent individual or autonomous Self and the Church or totalitarian Other. Hence emerged the preoccupation of philosophers at this time with the problems of the particular and the universal, mysticism and authority, pantheism and classical theism, Manichaeism and God's omnipotence, and the like. After capitalism, and its religion of semi-autonomous Protestantism, had secured a certain autonomy for the Self, these problems were superseded by a more detailed examination of the relation of sin and grace, and of the degree of human freedom alongside that of God's determination of humanity.

The subordinated form of revolution against the totalitarian Other is to be found in the mystical, communal, and apocalyptic sects, commencing with the heretical Cathari and continuing through the recurrent clerical and lay thinkers and movements who demanded and sometimes achieved reform. These groups, gripped by a vision of the early Christian community, wished to return to the pristine fellowship of Self and Other which had infused the life of that archetypical community. They longed to feel Christ as incarnate in people's relations one to another. Although they looked backward for inspiration and remained utopian in their idealism, they were the predecessors of modern secular socialism and the bridge between first-century Christianity and the contemporary world.

Like its antithesis, capitalism, Marxism defiantly asserts Self before the authoritarian Other and proclaims the modern hatred of arbitrary human limitation. At this point the similarity ends, for the capitalistic man still lives under the shadow of his feudal past and feels the vague urgings of conscience to store up merit in self-regarding works. The capitalist ethic is only this harsh and Oedipal conscience made secular and respectable in the name of some human aims; it is a persistent will that makes the Other pure means to Self as end. For the last four centuries the principal problem of Western man has not been the inquisitions and crusades of the Christian Church, but the deprivations and wars inflicted by the capitalistic enterprise on mankind. This enterprise is driven by the need to negate the Other in all forms; it reincorporates in its own behavior the harsh external conscience it negates; it remains arrested at the level of autonomy and initiative, unable either to go back to the basic trust of childhood relations or forward to the matured trust of Self toward Other. The destiny of the capitalistic spirit, consistently pursued, is the despondency and destructiveness of the fascist state. Forever directed against the Enemy, its "collective" spirit is only a facade for the underlying emptiness of its component individuals. For them God the Other, the Enemy, is transformed into God the Self. Like the feudal Other, such a God is doomed to become a Void, for its inability to relate to what lies beyond it reduces it to meaninglessness.

Marx found the answer to this problem neither in that pathological affirmation of Self which fears the absorption of the Self in the Other, nor in that pathological fear of Self which seeks refuge and submission in the Other. Marx's answer was similar to that of the early Christians: Self and Other define and create one another in a developing relation of mutual care and responsibility. The directive of human living is to be found neither in the autonomous Self nor in some Other, whether earthly ruler or heavenly lord, whose nature and purpose are closed to us. It is to be found in the mass of exploited and dispossessed men, who in the particular and universal connections of Self and Other can form a world-wide community of interdependence: "an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all".⁷⁷ In its continuous unfolding such a community would combine the freedom of the Self with the conditioning care of the Other, the Immanence of individual or social achievement with the Transcendence of history, Independence with Interdependence, Individuality with Universality, and Activity with Receptivity.

In this light, Marxism and Christianity converge at the point of affirming the interdependence and mutual creation of Self and Other. When Christianity asserts that God is Love in such a relation, it means both (1) that God is the relation in virtue of which persons achieve a fulfillment that they alone cannot consciously achieve, and (2) that God is the personal being who is the source and end of the relation, and who accordingly must be the Supreme Other toward which our love is directed. For one to love another means implicitly to love that creative, transforming and saving relation which both enables one to love and makes the other lovable. Our personal love for the other person, however good and well-intentioned, is always confined by immature development, self-concern and defensive operations which must be broken and restructured by a process coming from beyond the powers of thought and will of the most virtuous person.

One of the stumbling blocks in this Christian thought is the association of the word "God" with a substance philosophy, and hence the tendency to conceive deity as fixed in itself and removed from interpersonal relations. Teilhard's process cosmology has begun to overcome this by using the term "divine" as an adjective that qualifies process. Marxism's naturalistic position is that the only personal Others whom we encounter are other persons like ourselves, and that it is a confusion and reification to identify our interpersonal relations with a supernatural or superhuman being. Nevertheless, Marxism implies that as individual persons we can relate to those concrete interpersonal relations of men whose "ensemble" compose the very essence of humanity as a species-being⁷⁸ and which are the very creators of history. That is, as individuals, we can either understand and facilitate those creative interpersonal relations or remain blind to them and obstruct them.

In Marxist as in Christian thought, these relations are not entirely of our own doing and thinking; they stand over against us and make and break us. Marxism agrees with Christianity that the true and rightful object of our human devotion is not merely finite, individual persons but the creative, loving relations we are enabled to sustain with them; persons come and go, but this creative relation abides. It is this capacity to enter into such relations that we really cherish in others. Dating from Jesus' own teachings, like that on the Good Samaritan in Luke 10 and the parable of the Last Judgment in Matthew 25, there has been a humanistic, pragmatic tradition in Christianity. According to this what counts is, not a person's concepts, but one's responses to human need, that is, one's capacity to relate oneself affirmatively to others. This is the last judgment under which all stand, humanist and theist, Marxist and Christian.

IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DIALOGUE

BETWEEN HUMANISTS AND CHRISTIANS

Because Marxist and Christian agree on the essential nature of the Self-Other relation, they are already involved in dialogue. But a dialogue presupposes differences within unity, for it would be meaningless between two who are in accord in every respect. The differences between Marxist and Christian are ample enough to furnish vivifying contrast in the context of a basic agreement.

Christians understand the incompleteness, dependence, and receptivity of human nature; accordingly, on the one hand, they value human humility, gratitude, reverence, submission, obedience, and confession, and, on the other hand, forgiveness, nurturance, succor, solace, and compassion. Marxists understand the phases of human fulfillment, independence, and activity; accordingly they value self-reliance, resourcefulness, criticism, struggle, and "revolutionizing practice." Where Christians believe that a person is and remains a child or a finite creature who derives one's being and fulfillment from beyond oneself and history, Marxists hold that the person, while not totally self-sufficient, is in essence the maturing creator of history, and that this in turn is both the place and the goal of his fulfillment. Where Christians understand the threat to the self in its own isolation and solitude, and value both man's need of the other and the gift of the other which fulfills that need, Marxists understand the threat to the self in the absorption or oppression of the other, and value the integrity of the self. Where Christians discern in our fulfillment a grace or power at work beyond our own to generate good in one's individual and collective life, Marxists emphasize the power of the person's own body and intellect to maximize good and minimize evil. Where Christians see our limitations and alienations and tend to stress the tension between the actual and the ideal, Marxists see our possibilities and stress the conquest of his conditions and limitations.

A creative dialogue would have each participant express candidly, freely, and fully his perspectives, listen sensitively to the perspectives of the other, and differentiate and integrate so far as possible the perspectives thus expressed. The differentiation and integration must occur not only in individual persons, but in their relations one to another. In dialogue people change their perspectives in relation to each other; the very integration of qualities, forms, intentions, etc., which defines their personality is defined by its relation to the perspectives comprising the other. Furthermore, these contents of personality are not inert images entertained by an idle mind, but the very forms of our response to others and to the world; they pertain to the world upon which the personality intends to act. As one is known by one's fruits, the point of dialogue is not only to interpret the world but to change it. Hence, the final situation and test for dialogue between Christians and Marxists must be human society itself, with its problems of war, poverty, political tyranny, racism, and cultural deprivation. The forms and extent of the exploitation of people on our planet are urgent enough to destroy us if we do not co-operate in discussion and action to solve them. They are deep and widespread enough to keep us all, theists and humanists alike, busy and human in our dealings with one another for centuries to come.

Though it has taken different forms, the principle of dialogue is basic to both Christianity and Marxism: the Christian "speaking the truth in love" to friend and foe alike, and the Marxist engaged in the dialectic of critical practice. In the past, these two forms have sometimes seemed diametrically and irreconcilably opposed. The first did not vaunt itself, but was patient and kind, and in suffering took the evils of the world upon itself; the second strove strenuously to change and control the material conditions of the world. However, the present crisis of technology, of nuclear and other genocidal weaponry, and of massive poverty and indebtedness, has brought them closer together. Many Christians living in a secularized world can see the impact of material conditions, while many Marxists recognize the limits and dangers of force in human affairs. Not only has the threat of mutual destruction driven them together; they also share a common faith in the saving value of dialogue between people working in a common cause.

Both Christians and Marxists have also recognized the transforming and revolutionary nature of dialogue and dialectic between persons when it touches them not only in conversation but in action as the final outcome and test of conversation. To interact expressively, sensitively, and creatively with other persons and the world is an act of great faith, for it means that one considers one's own system of ideas and values to be subject to the transformation that might emerge in such interaction, generating new insights and new ways of doing things. It means that the reality of the creative, transforming power working between persons and their world takes priority over what they as individual persons and institutions desire and conceive. It means that, although one cannot foresee how he or she and others will be changed, the relation of mutual trust in their communication and common labor provides them with a bond of security which will enable them to tolerate frustration, conflict, and suffering and to rejoice in new problems and truth. The demand and opportunity of our age is dialogue and common labor at all levels, between as many persons and groups as possible. We must learn either to live in this way or to die; we must learn either to love with all our heart and soul and mind and strength, or to face a physical and spiritual hell.

CONCLUSION

The readiness and willingness to enter into dialogue and cooperation are growing on both sides. Recalling the influence of "that extraordinary figure" of Jesus Christ on his political faith and his concentration since youth on "the revolutionary aspects of Christian doctrine and of Christ's thought", Fidel Castro has said:

In my opinion, religion from the political point of view is not in itself an opiate or a miraculous remedy. It can be an opiate or a wonderful cure to the degree that it is used or applied to defend the oppressors and exploiters or the oppressed and exploited--depending on the way in which one approaches the political, social, or material problems of the human being who, apart from theology or religious beliefs, is born into this world and must live in it.

From a strictly political point of view--and I believe that I know something about politics--I even think that one can be Marxist without giving up one's being Christian and can work united with the Marxist Communist to transform the world. The important thing is that, in both cases, they be sincere revolutionaries willing to overcome the exploitation of persons by others and to struggle for the just distribution of social wealth, equality, fraternity, and the dignity of all human beings--that is, to be the bearers of the most advanced political, economic and social consciousness, even though, in the case of the Christians, starting from a religious conception.⁷⁹

The National Conference of Catholic Bishops (USA) has called on the educated Christian to engage in "seriously studying" Marxism. The Bishops criticize Marxism's atheism, anti-transcendence, the economic interpretation of alienation, an exclusively human eschatology and hope, and the reduction of moral norms to social, revolutionary practice. For all this, they assert:

Still the ideological outlook of the communist movement is not the only factor that determines cooperation on the part of Christians. In some areas of universally human concern collaboration with communist governments or communist parties has become a practical necessity. Due to the socialization which Pope John XXIII recognized as one of the distinctive characteristics of our time, modern life requires the cooperation of all men and women of good will. Citizens of a world united by unrestricted technology and instant communication, yet devoid of an effective international authority, have no choice but to seek common approaches and concerted action in attacking global problems.⁸⁰

As we, the very wide and long procession of people in history, do solve our problems and turn to new creative tasks, we shall know more fully the answers to our present questions about humanity and the divine. The very forms in which we pose the questions are limited by our own perspectives. Love moving into the creative dialectic of practice is the only path by which new positions can be attained and our eyes lifted to new horizons. Mysteries that mislead theory find their ultimate solution, if such can be found at all, in reflective practice:⁸¹ Faith without practice is dead. Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart conceived, what is prepared for those who truly practice love,⁸² for now we see ourselves and our fulfillment only through a glass darkly, but in the triumphant future we shall see them face to face.

University of Bridgeport

Bridgeport, Connecticut

1. These meanings have been explicated in my article, "Atheism and Human Values," in Religion in Contemporary Thought, ed., George F. McLean (New York: Alba House, Inc., 1970).

2. On the dependence of the Enlightenment on Christianity, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), ch. VI, 1.

3. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity translated by George Eliot (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), p. 21.

4. G.W.F. Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History, translated by J. Sibree, in Selections, ed. J. Loewnberg (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 385.

5. Ibid., p. 381.

6. Ibid., p. 363.

7. "Reflections of a Youth on Choosing an Occupation," in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, trans. Loyd D. Easton and Kurt H. Guddat (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Co., 1967), p. 35.

8. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufman (New York: The Viking Press, 1954), p. 198.

9. "Culture et Religion," Comprendre, 26-27, (1964), pp. 85-92.

10. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 615.

11. Gay, op. cit. About the same time, though not concerned with nature and cosmology, Gautama Buddha attacked the reigning tyranny of gods and caste with a similar analysis and preached a doctrine of equality.

12. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: The I. Macmillan Co., 1926, p. 4.

13. Ibid., p. 23. Capitalism and Protestantism, with all their advances and flaws, were the economic and religious forms in which this particularist ethos worked itself out and its self-contradictions moved toward dissolution. See R.H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1926).

14. Charles M. Bakewell, Source Book in Ancient Philosophy, (New York: Scribner's, 1939) p. 65. B.A.G. Fuller, A History of Philosophy, revised edition (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1945), p. 91.

15. Archibald Robertson, The Origins of Christianity (New York: International Publishers, 1954), pp. 132-137.

16. For psychological evidence of basic attitudes and values, see Elsa A. Whalley, Individual Life-Philosophies in Relation to Personality and to Systematic Philosophy: An Experimental Study (Chicago: Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Chicago, 1955).

17. I Samuel 15: 1.9.

18. I Kings 18: 20-29.

19. Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), p. 102.

20. Ibid., p. 151.

21. For a discussion of these influences, see Howard L. Parsons, "The Young Marx and the Young Generation," Horizons, No. 26 (Summer, 1968), pp. 17-74.

22. Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), Vol. II, p. 422. I have passed over most of the thinkers (such as Paracelsus, Boehme, Weigel) who figured in the development of German mysticism and shaped German idealism.

23. Immanuel Kant, Preface to the second edition, Critique of Pure Reason, (London: Macmillan and Company, 1933).

24. Ernst Cassirer, Rousseau-Kant-Goethe: Two Essays, translated from the German by James Gutmann, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and John Herman Randall, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1945), pp. 18-25.

25. J. J. Rousseau, Emile trans. Barbara Foxley. (London: J.M. Deat and Sons, 1911), Book I, page 5.

26. J. J. Rousseau, The Social Contract, Book II, Chapter 3 (New York: Hafner, 1949). The translation is anonymous.

27. Hegel, Life of Jesus, as quoted by Richard Kroner in the Introduction of Friedrich Hegel, On Christianity. Early Theological Writings, Richard Kroner, trans. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), p. 5.

28. Hegel, The Positivity of the Christian Religion, in Hegel, On Christianity, p. 5.

29. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, in Hegel, On Christianity, pp. 182-205 and passim.

30. See especially Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. J. G. Baillie (New York: Humanities Press, 1966).

31. E.J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (New York: The New American Library, 1962), p. 346.

32. Ibid., p. 312.

33. "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State: (1843), in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, pp. 151-202.

34. "On the Jewish Question," in Karl Marx. Early Writings, translated and edited by T. B. Bottomore (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1964), pp. 1-31.

35. "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of the State," p. 174.

36. "On the Jewish Question," p. 26.

37. Ibid., p. 17.

38. Ibid., p. 16. Easton and Guddat render überschwänglicher, translated here as "transcendental," as "sublime," in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, p. 228.

39. In K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n. d.), pp. 41-42.

40. Ibid., p. 42.

41. Ibid.

42. Ibid.

43. Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated from the Second German Edition by N.I. Stone (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr and Co., 1906-1909), pp. 11-12.

44. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 102-103, 114.

45. Pope Paul VI has recognized this in his call for a humanism "open to the values of the spirit and to God who is their source". Populorum Progressio, p. 42.

46. E. Marx-Aveling, "Karl Marx (A Few Stray Notes)," in Reminiscences of Marx and Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n.d.), p. 253.

47. Friedrich Engels, "On the History of Early Christianity," in K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion, pp. 316-318.

48. "The Attitude of the Workers' Party Towards Religion," in V.I. Lenin, Religion (New York: International Publishers, 1933), p. 17.

49. R. Pascal, "Communism in the Middle Ages and Reformation," in Christianity and the Social Revolution, edited by John Lewis, Karl Polanyi, and Donald K. Kitchin (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1935), Chapter V. Gregory Vlastos, "The Ethical Foundations," in Towards the Christian Revolution, edited by R.B.Y. Scott and Gregory Vlastos (London: Victor Gollancz, Ltd., 1937), Chapter III.

50. "Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right," in On Religion, p. 56.

51. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Parts I and III, edited with an Introduction by R. Pascal (New York: International Publishers, 1947), p. 26.

52. Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1950), p. 91.

53. II Thessalonians 3:10. This verse is quoted in the 1936 Soviet constitution (Article 12) but does not appear in the 1977 constitution.

54. "On the History of Early Christianity," in On Religion, p. 316.

55. See especially his early works, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The German Ideology. This view is maintained in his mature work. See, for example, Capital, translated from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling and edited by Frederick Engels (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, n. d.), Vol. I, pp. 329, 609. I have concentrated here on the ideas set down by Marx in his early works. The principal foundations and outlines of his humanism remained throughout his life, developed, extended, and systemized in his views on labor, labor-power, use-values, exchange-value, surplus-value, class struggle, and revolution. Marx's humanism is foundational to his political economy and permeates it. For a full exposition of Marx's value theory, see my Humanism and Marx's Thought (Springfield: Charles C. Thomas, 1971).

56. Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, an Appendix in Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy.

57. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, second edition (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959), pp. 120-22.

58. Ephesians IV: 25.

59. "When anyone is united to Christ he is a new creature: his old life is over; a new life has already begun." II Corinthians 5:17 (The New English Bible, alternative translation).

60. Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Afterword to the second German edition, p. 20.

61. Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (New York: International Publishers, 1935), p. 49. See also Lenin's comments on Hegel in his Philosophical Notebooks. Collected Works, Vol. XXXVIII (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961).

62. Ibid., p. 50.

63. Theses on Feuerbach, I.

64. Some modern thinkers in meeting this demand of modern thought have sought to define God as concrete activity--e.g., A.N. Whitehead, Charles Hartshorne, Henry N. Wieman, and Teilhard de Chardin.

65. I have tried to state the most general pattern of belief that characterizes the vast majority of the branches and denominations within Christendom today. Not all Christians, of course, would accept this formulation. A principal problem for the contemporary mind which is acquainted with science and takes time seriously is whether the categories of traditional metaphysics commonly employed in Christian thought--supernaturalism, the dualism of matter and spirit--are adequate to serve the demands of integrity in thought and effectiveness in practice. For example, some "naturalistic" theologians, rejecting supernaturalism, conceive of deity as a natural, impersonal, creative process whose transcendence is "functional". See, for example, Henry N. Wieman, The Source of Human Good (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1946) and Bernard Eugene Meland, Faith and Culture (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1972).

66. Howard L. Parsons, "Value and Mental Health in the Thought of Marx", Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, XXIV (1964), 355-65.

67. In spite of their humanism, Marx and especially Engels tended to take the 19th century view of laws as non-probabilistic.

68. "Human Nature and the Causes and Cures of War: Can Christians and Marxists Agree and Cooperate?" Akten des XIV. Internationalen Kongresses fur Philosophie (Wien: Herder, 1968), Band II, pp. 649-55.

69. Psalms 8: 5-6; Genesis 1:26.

70. V.I. Lenin, Materialism and Empirico-Criticism (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1952), p. 134. Frederick Engels, Anti-Dühring, p. 122.

71. St. Thomas Aquinas, On the Truth of the Catholic Faith. Summa Contra Gentiles, Book I: God, translated by Anton G. Pegis (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1955), Chs. XXVIII, XXXVIII, LX, and LXXXI.

72. If the structure is in history, is it not affected by history? In that case wherein does it retain its absolute character? If it is not affected, then how is it different from the Christian supernatural God? In short, does materialism or naturalism require an ultimate order which in some sense is independent of the particular material entities, though it may in another sense be dependent on them?

73. II Corinthians 6:19.

74. Matthew 8:7.

75. Matthew 18:8, 21:12.

76. I John 4:7-8.

77. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, edited by Friedrich Engels, (New York: International Publishers, 1948), p. 31.

78. Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, VI.

79. Fidel y la Religion. Conversaciones con Frei Betto. (La Habana, Cuba: Officina de Publicaciónes del Consejo de Estado, 1985), pp. 322, 333. My translation.

80. National Conference of Catholic Bishops, Pastoral Letter on Marxist Communism (Washington, D.C.: United States Catholic Conference, November 18, 1980), passim, p. 14.

81. Ibid., VIII.

82. James 2:20; I Corinthians 2:9.