The concept of socialism and communism is a great deal older than St. Thomas More’s Utopia, generally considered to be the first “Communist Manifesto.” Utopia is a half serious, half humorous, profound, yet satirical effort to visualize a state and a society based purely on the four natural virtues—prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. Faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues, naturally do not figure in this imaginary non-Christian part of the world. Platonic notions play a certain part in this highly rational polity which has far-reaching equality among its citizens (women must also serve in the army) for instance. There is no private property. The scholars, however, enjoy privileges, and there are monasteries.
Utopia also has an ironic aspect. It tries to show a perfect pagan society and indirectly reminds the reader that the Christian nations, in spite of being favored by God, often fall below pagan levels. Freedom, though not totally lacking, is rather limited in Utopia and state controls are ubiquitous and severe.
The basic ideas of the Communist order—lack of private property, equality, a nonhereditary government, common work, and common social life—can be found not only in Western civilization but also in the most diverse parts of the world. We find it concretely expressed in monasticism. This way of life, however, presupposes a vocation, the sacrifice of innate rights, and a voluntary act of surrender. Although it must be admitted that monastic life normally provides for certain non-spiritual advantages, such as regulated work, free medical care, and material security, it represents basically a sacrificial form of existence—even if outsiders, at the sight of the thick walls of some monastery, might sigh enviously: “It’s easy for them!” (But they don’t join.)
The purpose of the monastery is spiritual. Nobody is going to measure the success of a monastic order by its economic record (which, more often than not, is modest to say the least). Yet historically certain purely external features of the monastery are precursors of more or less modern institutions: the prison, the barracks and, above all, the factory, all practicing a more or less far-reaching separation of the sexes. Naturally this does not mean that these collective institutions have been consciously patterned after the monastery. But practical circumstances enforced the analogy.
The monastic spirit in the West seems to have made its first appearance in the Holy Land in the Essene communities. The earliest Christian monks were—as their name indicates—monachoi, men living singly, anchorites, hermits. Only somewhat later the monachoi began to live together in groups as coenobites. At a still later period St. Benedict established an order with formal vows of obedience, chastity, and poverty, the three “councils of perfection.” The Middle Ages were the great period of monasticism and we must not forget that for centuries the monasteries and convents were the fortresses of religious life, learning, the arts, and the higher crafts. Many of the intellectual treasures of antiquity were saved by the monks who copied and recopied ancient texts.
With the decline of the Middle Ages, in the fifteenth century, the monasteries too began to decline and the orders founded after the Reformation lack the monastic character. Jesuits, Redemptorists, and Salesians are not monks. They are not cloistered. The Oratorians (founded by St. Philip Neri) are not even an order but simply a congregation of priests. And with the twentieth century we get the “secular institutes” and finally “associations of the faithful” as, for instance, the Opus Dei.
On the other hand we have to bear in mind that the Reformation was started by a monk, an Augustinian hermit, and that it was, as we said before, essentially a reaction against the spirit of the Renaissance and of Humanism. In Rome Luther (understandably, one might say) received the impression that Christianity under the Popes had sold out to paganism. Luther was aghast when he saw that the medieval concept of the universe, the circle with God as its center, had been exchanged for an elliptical concept with two focal points, God and man. Luther decried worship (the saints elevated to the honor of the altars!) and protested against the enthusiasm for the cultural and intellectual treasures of antiquity. These were pagan in origin and everything pagan was damned for all eternity.1 The entire theological and philosophical intellectualism and “rationalism,” which started even before St. Thomas and had finally fused with the new learning, was odious to him. Reason did not lead to God2 and man could be saved by faith alone.
This fideism was one of the many aspects of Luther’s teachings alienating the leading humanists—Erasmus, Pirckheimer, Adelmann, and even the very anticlerical Reuchlin—and resulted in a real enmity of the universities toward the new teaching.3 Luther, of course, never taught the doctrine of “private interpretation”;4 he was not a precursor of liberalism.5 He was basically a rigorist and a disciplinarian6 and a conservative by inclination. The term “freedom” as used by him had no personal meaning.7 He was a predestinarian as much as Calvin, but thanks to Melanchthon’s intervention his notion of the enslaved will8 was not inserted in the Confessio Augustana. Melanchthon thought, quite rightly, that such teaching would prove an important obstacle to eventual reunion. Calvin’s reforms had a far stricter character than Luther’s9 and Geneva under Calvin and later under Besa and Farei actually became the first totalitarian state in Europe.10 Calvin’s Soli Deo Gloria! certainly did not make for any “polycentrism.”
It would be a great error to believe that the Reformation swept the European Continent as a torrential new surge of freedom.11 In certain areas the changes were dictated by the secular authorities (as in Scandinavia), but in others they were adopted with great popular enthusiasm. The Reformation was riding the wave of greater religious awareness, of an increased religious Innerlichkeit (inner-directedness) and popular piety. The feeling was quite general, however, that greater asceticism and greater strictness were needed: Luther’s monastic severity descended on Central Europe like a second coming of the Irish monks.12 Sebastian Franck, an ex-Dominican who could speak from experience, declared: “Now we think we have escaped the monastery, but actually we have to be monks all our life.”13 And while the Catholic world, continuing in the spirit of the Renaissance, the Baroque and the Rococo, remained individualistic and anarchical, revolutionary and torn between holy and unholy passions, the areas converted by the Reformation settled down to law and order and a strong community spirit.
In these parts the community, the congregation, the group dominated religious life to a large extent. The monarchical-patriarchal idea was badly shaken in the Calvinist world where republican ideas were soon on the march. It is no accident that strongly egalitarian and communistic notions made themselves felt in England during the time of the Commonwealth (Levelers, Diggers) and, later on, in the northern part of the American Colonies. Puritanism, after all, is a half-religious, half-secular kind of monasticism.
At the same time it remains true that the monastery served (very much against its own intentions) as a prefiguration of the big communities behind real or symbolic walls, not only of the seminary but also of the boarding school, the barracks, the hospital, the jail, or the factory—communities consisting usually (or predominantly) of one sex only. And what do we find in monasteries? The habit (uniform), mental and physical discipline, order, conformity, regulated work, community spirit, common meals, equality in hierarchy, cells (as in jails) or dormitories (as in barracks), self-control, subordination, mental concentration, an ascetic way of life, simplicity, and sobriety, altogether an autonomous but collective existence. There is no place in the monastery for sloth and individualism.
What would be the very opposite of the monastery? The bohemian family of a wild but prosperous artist in an isolated home where everybody dressed, acted, created, loafed, came and went according to his whims and inclinations. Now we do not insinuate that this is necessarily an ideal form of existence. The monastery has a positive value because, as we said, it rests on voluntary sacrifice which immediately would become odious if it assumed a coercive character, as is more or less the case with barracks, jails, boarding schools, hospitals, or factories. (This is equally true of their “hybrids”: the military hospital, the reformatory, etc.).
We have, however, oversimplified the issue because the monastery is not always pure sacrifice. Athough weakly developed, there is a monastic instinct in most of us. Don’t we sometimes envy the monks and nuns their settled, their “secure” life? The curious dilemma in this complexity of feelings is illustrated by the well-known question: “Who is sure of all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything?” The answer might be “the monks,” but the standard answer is: “the jailbirds.” And inevitably this makes us think of the citizens of the provider state, having material protection from “the womb to the tomb.” But here again, to sacrifice an eye for a dear friend is one thing; to be blinded by an executioner is quite another.
To marry a woman one pities is one thing; a shotgun wedding is quite another.
Yet the monastic yearning, as we have said, is also in us and therefore some of us will readily respond to the appeal of a false monasticism. The security element most certainly motivates this fascination. On the other hand, the person with the genuine monastic vocation will desire such security in his heroic struggle merely in order not to be detracted by material problems and to be able to lead a life of complete spiritual devotion. (All of which does not eliminate the fact that in bygone ages there have been men and women attracted to the monastic life by purely material considerations. In our oversexed, overeroticized and highly materialistic age such a “temptation” hardly exists.)
The situation is quite different in the “world,” where we find millions who crave security, who dread responsibility, who long for the gregarious life, who find happiness not in external but even in internal conformity. Oddly enough, the two historic epochs which in the secular domain were most inclined towards monasticism, were the Reformation and the French Revolution, two periods in which monasteries and convents were confiscated and dissolved by the thousands. (In Russia the same thing happened after 1917.) The smaller the number of monasteries, the stronger is perverted secular monasticism. The most extreme form of secular monasticism, however, is communism, and the communist movement’s strength in a given area often can be measured by the number of empty or ruined monasteries. This is also true of countries outside Western Europe and North America: It is true not only of Russia, but also of China, Southeast Asia, and Mexico.
The eccentric or ex-monk often is an ardent advocate of secular monasticism in one form or another. A typical representative of this type of mind and outlook was Tomaso Campanella, a rather odd Dominican who lived between 1568 and 1639. He is an even better example than Joachim de Floris (1145-1202), a radical Cistercian. Both were of noble birth and both came from Oalabria. The ideas of Joachim later profoundly affected the “spiritual” wing of the Franciscans and created grave theological and monastic disturbances. His vistas, considered quite orthodox during his lifetime, had an apocalyptic and eschatological character. Like Fourier and other visionary socialists he quite arbitrarily divided history into “ages” of the past and the future. In Joachim’s case they were: the Age of the Father, characterized by obedience; the Age of the Son (the “present time”), guided by reading; and the coming Age of the Spirit, devoted to prayer and song. The last and final age was supposed to be entirely monastic in character: Humanity will consist only of monks and nuns in preparation for the Day of Judgment. These quite “gnostic” Joachimite ideas were widely spread; they also influenced Wyclif and Roger Bacon and had a certain bearing on the Reformation.
Enjoying the protection of Frederick II, the stupor mundi, Joachim de Floris had as little trouble in his lifetime as Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres, who unknowingly stated the Jansenist heresy. Tomaso Campanella, on the other hand, had grave political difficulties and spent many years in jail because he opposed Spanish rule in Naples. He wrote several philosophical treatises but owed his fame to his Civitas Solis, the “Sun State” published in 1602. This interesting and intellectually contradictory man was also one of the first “one-worlders,” but F. Meinecke, the great German historian, has called his outlook “one of the greatest psychological riddles in the new history of ideas.” Civitas Solis may or may not represent a mere intellectual exercise such as Thomas More’s Utopia. It was published as a part of his Realis Philosophiae Partes Quattuor.
In this essay Campanella envisaged an idealist state which has no Christian characteristics nor a political-social aura reminiscent of Catholic concepts. (This dichotomy, however, is typical of all Campanella’s intellectual efforts: His philosophy does not tally with his theology, nor his theology with his political theory, nor his basic political views with his practical notions.) In his “Sun State,” with a monarchical head there is intellectual-elitarian leadership, no private property and no lasting marriage. Sterile women automatically become public harlots. Pregnant women can have sexual intercourse with everyone. Yet women who use makeup, wear high heels, or long skirts to conceal their feet will be condemned to death as “liars.” Incest, except between mothers and sons, is encouraged. Have we here a forerunner of de Sade?
Campanella was liberated from his Spanish jail in Naples by Pope Urban VIII through a ruse. He later fled to Rome and then settled in Paris. There he enjoyed the favors of Cardinal Richelieu who saw in him an esprit fort, an emancipated spirit. (This controversial friar, with the vivid sexual imagination, preceded Morelly by only a century.) He surely was a political agent, a theoretical libertine, a socialist thinker, a defender of absolute monarchy and papalism, and an enemy of Machiavelli’s teachings. Indeed there was nobody like him. He died, oddly enough, in the Dominican monastery of the Rue Jacob in Paris which spawned the smaller monastery in the Rue St. Honoré. The Dominicans in Paris were nicknamed Les Jacobins after the first monastery and the name also stuck to the radically leftist club established in the smaller house across the Seine. So even today, in a purely historic sense, Jacobin means Dominican.14
Nevertheless, it was obvious that religious monasticism had to shed its Christian roots in order to evolve perversely into secular socialism. True, this was not always the case, as witness the monastic bent in the younger William Morris, who later developed socialistic tendencies. A man quite divorced from the traditional values, however, was Morelly, of whom we know very little. Even his first name is a matter of conjecture, and it is not certain that he did hail from Vitry-le-Francois as some suppose. He is the author of several dull epics but also of a very important utopian socialistic treatise, the Code de la Nature, published 1755 in Amsterdam. It has been reprinted a few times, last by a Communist publishing house in Paris, and its influence on later socialist thinking cannot be underestimated. (Alexis de Tocqueville dealt with it very seriously in his L’Ancien Régime et La Révolution.) At first Diderot was thought to be its author, but this theory was exploded in the 1820s. In 1846 a German translation was published in Berlin. V. P. Volgin, a Soviet “politologist” who wrote the preface for the Paris edition in 1953, called Morelly “the purest interpreter of Socialism” (p. 8).
The most important part of this small book is the fourth giving a “Model of Legislation in Conformity with Nature.” Law No. 1.2 stipulates that “every citizen will be fed, housed, and employed at public expense.” No goods were to be exchanged, bartered, bought, or sold. Every transaction in this ideal order was to go through the hands of the state. “All non-perishable products shall be stored in public warehouses in order to be distributed” (II.6). There were to be jails for those with short sentences, but penitentiaries were to hold those serving long terms (IV.2). And in the midst of the cemeteries those dangerous maniacs and enemies of humanity who attempted to abolish the sacred laws and tried to introduce detestable property were to be jailed for life. They were to die a “civil death” and be separated from the rest of mankind in perpetuity by thick walls and iron grills (XII.2). The size of all cities was to be about the same and also the quality of the houses (IV.2-3). Everybody between the ages of 10 and 30 was to wear a uniform, one for work and one for holidays. Vanity was to be repressed by the “chiefs.” The laws, needless to say, could never be changed. There was to be uniform education for all children and the most severe censures taken against anybody teaching metaphysics or trying to define the Divinity in human terms (X.9). Freedom of teaching was allowed only as far as the natural sciences were concerned—not in the humanities. (XI.5). Private property was strictly outlawed; there were severe marriage laws relating to obligatory marriage; and equally strict sanctions against adultery (XII.3). Children were to be taken from their parents at the age of five, but occasional contacts through the schools were to be permitted (X.4). The political structure of this socialist utopia is in essence a hierarchic system of councils, of Soviets.15
Gracchus Babeuf knew the nightmarish works of Morelly, a precursor of Orwell, and so in all probability, did Comte Henri de Saint-Simon, the first nineteenth-century socialist in Europe and another French Leftist aristocrat.
Henri de Saint-Simon belonged to a junior branch of the Dues de Saint-Simon. Born in 1760, he owed a great deal of his education and intellectual inspiration to d’Alembert, while he himself profoundly influenced Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism.16 An enthusiastic young man, he and a host of aristocratic friends volunteered to fight for the young American Republic. Endowed with a great deal of imagination, he then offered the Viceroy of New Spain (Mexico) a plan for a canal between the two oceans. Back in France his great interest in economics prompted him a tidy little sum. He did not participate in the Revolution but was temporarily imprisoned during the Terror as a ci-devant. He then contracted an unfortunate marriage, got a divorce, was completely ruined, and took a menial position providing him with $200 a year. He later gave up this job when a former valet, who had become well-to-do in these turbulent times, gave him food and shelter.
Saint-Simon’s earlier works dealt with scientific, political, and social problems and brought him neither fame nor fortune. His ideas were not taken seriously. But, after the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, Saint-Simon became more aggressive. His writings now dealt intensively with the growing class of workers, a new social element and the product of the Industrial Revolution. The working class developed largely on the outskirts of the bigger cities and was neither intellectually nor spiritually taken care of. (For this reason, incidentally, it cannot be said that the Church “lost” the working class—it had never been properly inside.) It recruited itself partly from urban layers, but in its majority it consisted of uprooted sons and daughters of the peasantry, young people unwilling to work for years as apprentices and journeymen in order to acquire skills. They wanted to leave their dull villages and earn money immediately. Nor did they like the controls and the discipline of life in other families to which young craftsmen were subjected. Thus we see not only in France but everywhere in Western Europe (just as in England at an earlier period) the rise of a propertyless, ill-paid class, the industrial proletariat. Whether wages could have been substantially higher at that stage of technological development is not an easy question to answer. A good deal of historical, sociological, and economic research will have to be done first, but it is highly probable that the factory hands working on the new, rather primitive, yet quite expensive machines could not really have achieved substantially better living standards. At this stage of industrial development figures indicate that the manufacturers lived rather spartan lives and the reinvestments were enormous.17 But whatever the reason for their misery, the fact remains that an entire race of melancholic, desperate, destitute paupers was growing up, “wild animals” who became a potential menace to society.18
Saint-Simon’s compassion for these victims of an economic-social transformation may have been partly influenced by his own financial misery, the indifference of his relatives, his intellectual background conditioned by the Encyclopedists, and the kindness of his former butler, which strengthened his conviction that the lower classes were morally superior to the upper ones.19 Since, in a book published in 1820, he insisted that the death of 10,000 workers would be a much greater loss to France than that of 10,000 noblemen and members of the royal family, he was dragged into the courts but not condemned. (The judges, after all, were more independent then than in 1945-1946.) In 1821-1822 he published l’Industriel, a work dedicated to the industrialists, pro-claiming that he wrote for the managers and against the courtiers, for the bees and against the hornets.
In vain, and quite naively, he appealed to Louis XVIII for support. The public reaction to his work, however, was weak. A few idealistic young men admired him, but he despaired of the success of his ideas. The butler who had supported him died and he had to live practically from alms. In a fit of depression he tried to commit suicide (1823) but only managed to hurt one of his eyes. He lived two more years, just long enough to see the publication of his Nouveau Christianisme. In his last work he proposed the creation of a social-sentimental religion with a global hierarchic organization based on brotherly love.
It is this particular book which influenced the “Saint-Simonists” most strongly, above all a man called Barthélémy Prosper Enfantin who, on the basis of the ideas of Saint-Simon, founded together with Amand Bazard, an organization of modified Saint-Simonists which published Le Producteur and later controlled Le Globe. Now the rather odd ideas of Saint-Simon developed in the direction of real madness. The crazy radicalism which characterized the French Revolution, beginning with Roussellian nature worship and ending in a utopianism totally alien to nature, now demonstrated its full dynamism. Whoever wanted to establish utopia had to change, to reform, to rebuild, to smash existing forms.
Barthélémy Enfantin did not intend to prescribe total equality of wealth. His goal was the destruction of the family and therefore he wanted to do away with inheritance. Only the state should inherit. The Steering Committee of the Neo-Saint-Simonists which met in Paris and published l’ Organisateur did not divulge the entire program of the New Theocracy, which was to be administrated by a brand new type of priest. These priests were to run a control agency which would turn over the means of production to those most capable of handling them. Christianity was accused of having retarded humanity by its dualism of flesh and spirit. The new “theology” pushed by Enfantin preached the “Emancipation of the Flesh.”
The revolution of 1830 gave new impetus to these weird teachings and Enfantin’s Economie Politique created a minor sensation among the more literate representatives of the working class. Le Globe was now published under the title Journal de la doctrine de Saint-Simon, and since the organization was represented in most leading cities of France, Enfantin now had himself declared Le Pére, “The Father,” head of the Saint-Simonist Church of Tomorrow. He now openly preached total promiscuity (his version of the “Emancipation of the Flesh”), but Bazard disagreed with him and a schism was the result. In the summer of 1832 Enfantin established some sort of monastery at Menilmontant with forty-odd members who donned weird-looking habits and worked collectively in the fields of the estate. The police, however, intervened. Enfantin was brought to court and the “family” dissolved. The provincial centers were also liquidated. Thus the first phase of ideological-practical French socialism had come to an end.
We have mentioned Morelly and Babeuf as forerunners. One should add J. P. Brissott de Warville, later the leader of the Girondists, who already in the early 1780s expressed the idea that the owning of property can be theft. He thought that people should merely have an income sufficient to cover normal living expenses, and no more.20 Brissott is one of the many genuine links between democracy and socialism. The Abbé de Mably, whose real name was Gabriel de Bonnot and who was the brother of the philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, must also be considered a precursor of socialism and communism. The Abbé was invited in 1771 to visit Poland with Rousseau in order to draft a new constitution for the Polish Commonwealth. He was born in 1709 in Grenoble and died in 1785 after having written a number of works in which he enthusiastically advocated the cause of democracy and socialism.
It is true that Gabriel Bonnot de Mably was a priest merely for the sake of convenience (as was his more famous younger brother), but Spengler is more right than wrong with his remark about the frequency of priests in leftist movements. It is not monasticism only which “suggests” socialism but also, to a more naive mind, Christianity itself. Let us agree that socialism and Communism (the fulfillment of socialism) take their initial inspiration from basic Christian tenets. Universal brotherhood, altruism, mutual aid, social justice, all-pervading charity, humility-in-equality—all these notions have Christian roots, a Christian background. But, remember, Corruptio optimi pessima! Due to this common source and to the ensuing confusions, we also have a “left Catholicism” and a “left Protestantism,” fanatical isms whose errors, deviations, and transgressions must be understood in the light of this Christian root.
The temptation to inject Christian precepts into the practical order in such a naive way that they become self-defeating is especially great in a society where Christian trends have a sentimental and historic basis. Socialism and communism, though able to invade areas without a Christian tradition, could have been born only of civilizations with a strong Christian background. And not only the ethical content of Christianity fosters and promotes the temptation toward socialism, but also much of Christian imagery and doctrine. Along the path of the socialist utopia lies a day of judgment when the humble will be exalted and the rich and mighty brutally dispossessed.21 And from the Socialist-Communist utopia itself can be gleaned the picture of paradise lost—and regained: a new age of innocence, of peace and brotherly love, with envy, crime, and hatred banished forever.22
Of course this “Edenism” is already present in democracy which is a conscious-subconscious effort—no more and no less so than nudism—to recreate Paradise. Democracy uses the magic formula, “We are not ruled, we rule ourselves” to relativize the State, the painful result of original sin,23 just as nudism tries to solve the sexual problem by shedding clothes. (As if nude people had no sexual problems!) Neither in our political nor in our sexual life does it make sense to pretend that we are like Adam and Eve.
In the Socialist-Communist vision, with its accent on the salvation of the world through the proletariat, not only is Christian imagery important but also the gross misinterpretation of Christ and early Christianity. Unfortunately the Christian churches are not entirely innocent in this respect. In Christian folklore the Savior appears as the Son of the humble carpenter, the poor Boy from a lowly family, born in the stable and venerated by the Magi as He lies among domestic animals. He is the simple Man who talked to uneducated fishermen and associated primarily with the indigent. Early Christianity, furthermore, is presented as a movement of the outcasts of the Roman Empire, of slaves, paupers and illiterates, a proletarian movement which—according to Communist doctrine—has been taken over eventually by the high and mighty. These exploited and lulled the masses into subservience by offering them salvation in the hereafter. Hence the formula of Marx that “Religion is the opium of the people.”
It is amazing how often the romantic notions about Christ and early Christianity are repeated by well-meaning Christians of all denominations. This, unfortunately, only proves that the New Testament is rarely read intelligently, that knowledge of Jewish history and sociology is nil even among the better educated Christians, that our schools teach almost nothing about the Church in antiquity.
The most obvious mistake concerns the beloved picture of the Magi in front of the manger. Scripture tells us clearly (Math. 2:11) that they entered a house, probably the house of Joseph and Mary. As for the “Son of the carpenter,” we should know that tektôn in Greek means carpenter as well as house-builder, architect, contractor. Joseph, moreover, is not an “ordinary Jew” but as a descendant of David he is of royal blood and therefore, in the eyes of his compatriots, a potential heir to the Throne of Judea. The angel characteristically addresses him as “son of David,” but Christ too was addressed as “Son of David” (for instance, in Matt. 20:31; Mark 10:48; Luke 18:38) and had to flee in order not to be proclaimed king (John 6:15). “My kingdom is not of this world,” however, makes his position clear. Yet when Pilate asked him whether he was a king, Christ answered in the affirmative. And since the Virgin Mary is the niece or grandniece of Zacharias and Elizabeth, both Aaronites and therefore of the priestly caste, she also belongs to the highest Jewish social layer. Although Joseph and Mary were probably not rich, they still rated very high socially. Joseph must also have been a landowner in Bethlehem, the Davidic village, which explains why he had to be there for the census.24
Our Lord certainly did not concentrate on the proletariat or on the illiterate in His teaching years. Peter seems to have been the boss of a group of fishermen. John, the most beloved disciple, obviously was an intellectual of the first order (and so, later, was Paul). The other Evangelists certainly belonged to the educated classes. Nor did Our Lord shun the company of rich people.25
The notion that Christianity was a religion of outcasts in the Roman Empire is totally erroneous. One need only peruse the Roman Missal and observe the social background of the early Martyrs to see that Christians could be found in all layers of society—among the patricians, the families of senators, the emperor’s family, among actors and intellectuals. Nobody can maintain that the early Fathers of the Church were mostly simpleminded illiterates. Ignatius of Antioch, Tatian, Justin, Origen, Tertullian, Cyprian, Clement of Rome, Lactantius, Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria, Polycarp of Smyrna, Irenaeus, and Novatian were first rate intellectuals, spiritual men—and certainly not “social reformers.” A religion of slaves undermining an aristocratic-heroic commonwealth: This picture is totally unhistorical.26 But there always will be a certain breed of “conservatives” with a pagan-heroic outlook who are prone to see in Christianity a weak, unmanly faith of crybabies—as did Winston S. Churchill. Maurras, too, was not far from this position. The antics of certain Christian leftists confirm them in this view.
Yet it has a powerful effect as a myth. There are good Christians who believe that the rich man is bound to be bad, whereas his real problem is not to become enslaved by his wealth, to be “poor in spirit,” ptochos to pneumati. Rarely pondered is the possibility that a wealthy man might not serve Mammon while a man less endowed with material goods may struggle and toil desperately to achieve them, thereby neglecting his spiritual life. Nobody will deny that the rich man who gives away his possessions liberally in a spirit of charity is acting virtuously. But is poverty in itself sanctifying? Is laziness with resulting poverty more admirable than the industriousness and thrift that produce material wellbeing? This is hardly the case. However, in the Christian world of today, replete with romanticism among Catholics as well as among Evangelical Christians, there is not only a perfectly wholesome readiness to live a life of poverty, but also a tendency to worship the poor: the agrarian pauper and above all the “proletarian.” Curiously enough the pro-Socialist and Socialist sentiment in Christendom is nourished by this weird romantic enthusiasm—an oddity, because socialism and communism hate poverty. Socialism is opposed to it. It copies from monasticism the idea of collective work, of a regulated life, of obedience and sobriety, of “mutualism” and equality. It hopes, however, to eliminate poverty, to achieve general material wellbeing. (It will probably never achieve this goal, at least not as speedily and effectively as the free world whose economics is based on a far more realistic evaluation of the average man’s character; but here this is not the point.)
The grim fact remains that there always will be Christians casting longing glances at the Socialist camp, sincerely regretting that Marxism is by its very nature atheistic.27 They dream of a “Christian communism,” of the possibility of transforming dialectic materialism by “baptizing” the concept of a collective society. Communism operates on the notion of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (i.e., of the party), and what is called “democratic socialism”28 wants to achieve the same end by peaceful, by democratic means. If 51 (or 99) percent vote for socialism, the rest (49 or only 1 percent) will have to knuckle under. The genuine democrat will have no difficulty in underwriting this; we are here faced with Locke’s thesis that “Right is what the majority wills—what the majority wills is right.”29
In our ecumenical age the tendency prevails to build bridges not only between the Christian faiths but in every direction, to open up dialogues with every imaginable body of thought, to show a readiness to learn from everybody and to compromise wherever and whenever compromise is possible—or impossible. (So far nobody has offered to start a fruitful dialogue with the Nazis and other advocates of genocide—yet let us be patient!)
If there is a strong trend in our age to use Christian tenets, knowingly or unknowingly, to justify a reconciliation with leftism, why should we be surprised to encounter the same tendency in bygone centuries? We mentioned Saint-Simon and his Nouveau Christianisme. Auguste Comte, the founder of Positivism, who dreamed of a completely secular Catholic Church was, after all, Saint-Simon’s secretary for many years.
A distinctly non-Christian competitor of Saint-Simon in the ancestral gallery of early Socialist thought was another Frenchman, Francois Charles Marie Fourier. Born in 1772, son of a small manufacturer, he survived Saint-Simon by twelve years. Fourier surprised the public with his first work in 1808, his Théorie des quatres mouvements. His vision was rather different from Saint-Simon’s. The blueprint he proposes for a Socialist society is based on his monomaniacal notion of harmony, in which he sees a crucial human drive. Numbers and geometric notions play a decisive part in his utopia where the arbitrary is curiously mingled with the prophetic, and odd rationalizations alternate with dreams of utter unreality—tendencies and propensities which increased in him as he got older.
Fourier wanted to divide humanity into groups of 1,600 people, the phalanges which were to live in monasterylike buildings called phalanstères (reminiscent of Morelly’s jointly housed “tribes”). Economically each of these units was to be self-sufficient. Each was to have its fields and workshops. As in the case of Saint-Simon’s utopian reveries, the visionary elements combined with pure rationalism to form weird blueprints. Since madness is very often a combination of cold reason with a fantasy severed from all reality, we are faced here with madness in a pure form. Surprisingly, or perhaps not so surprisingly, the response to Fourier’s ideas was considerable.30 Even if all efforts failed to make his dreams work—there have been repeated attempts on both sides of the Atlantic—followers of Fourier appeared in all countries, in Russia no less than in the United States.
The study of Fourier’s writings is interesting because we encounter here a truly sick mind, much further from sanity than Saint-Simon’s. Fourier’s utopianism worked both ways: “constructively” in planning for the future, retrospectively in explaining and expounding a totally unreal past. His descriptions of the earth’s past are entirely imaginary. For instance, he assumes that the earth had another satellite named Phoebe which in the dim past fell on our globe. The ensuing general destruction and confusion helped to bring 150 new species of snakes and forty-three new races of bedbugs into existence. His views of life on the planets were equally interesting. He insisted that the inhabitants of the planets and the solariens who existed on or around the sun had a physical organ which the terriens, the inhabitants of the earth, did not have. This member had the following properties: protection in falling, powerful defense, splendid ornament, gigantic strength, remarkable dexterity, and cooperation and support in all bodily movements. From his description this sounded like a sort of trunk or tail, and his enemies used his own words to lampoon the solariens in delightful cartoons.
As to our history, he divided it in the following way:
A. Periods anterior to history
1. Bastards, no human beings
2. Primitive, called Paradise
3. Savagery or inertia
B. Divided Industry: repulsive
1. Patriarchalism with small industry
2. Barbarism with middle-sized industry
3. Civilization with big industry
C. United industry: attractive
1. Guaranteeism: half-association
2. Sociantism: simple association
3. Harmonism: full association
The final goal is “harmony,” the earth being divided into a number of completely peaceful empires with monarchical rather than republican constitutions,31 without total equality and with a slight difference in income (according to a key granting percentages for capital investment, work, and “talent”). These sixty-odd empires have small “armies” working together in large economic and technological projects. Sexual life is at last freed from all shackles; free unions are formed and abandoned every day.
The true social unit is the phalanster, in which the most intensive social life takes place. People sleep from ten P.M. to three A.M. From three to four in the morning they wash and dress to make the assembly at four. There the chronicle of the night is read so that everybody can satisfy his or her curiosity as to who shared the bed with whom. Half an hour later the “délite,” the first meal is eaten, followed by the “industrial parade.” A shooting and hunting party is organized for five A.M. At seven fishing begins. From eight to nine is breakfast, at nine the newspapers are distributed and read and at ten there is divine service. Then comes a break when people watch the pheasants until eleven, which is library time. Dinner is at one P.M., after which people repair to the hothouses, then to the exotic plants, then to the fish ponds and at six P.M. they enjoy a champagne party, followed by a visit to the merino sheep. At eight the phalansterians march to the stock exchange, supper is at nine. Music and dancing follows till bedtime at ten P.M.
This sort of daily timetable tells a story in itself. We see the unrealism of a man who believes that five hours of sleep is a good average and that work—as fun!—could be done in between. Two hours a day, wedged in here and there, seemed to him sufficient. Religion is not eliminated: Fourier believed in God who had endowed man with passions but not with reason, which is a purely human and ungodly inclination. In spite of his socialism, he was not an egalitarian. He would not even have objected to titles in his phalanstères as long as they were not a handicap to brotherliness and human harmony resting on free interplay of the passions which should not be resisted, merely “harnessed.”(The influence of Saint-Simon is not certain but that of Rousseau is obvious.)
Unlike the later “scientific” Socialists, Fourier was a real Epicurean. He not only envisioned sexual libertinism (as we find it in Campanella and Saint-Simon) but had a marked penchant for the joys of the palate and stomach—joys which somehow would not impair the health of the Harmoniens scheduled to live at least 150 years. Fourier planned for semiculinary, semimedical specialists, the gastrosophes, whose task it would be to watch over alimentation. “The gastrosophers thus become inofficial doctors for each individual, protectors of his health by means of pleasure. It should be their ambition to see to it that each phalanster become well known for its appetite and the enormity of its food consumption.”32 Altogether a rather French vision.
Of course there was to be a uniform type of school with an identical basic education for everybody, avoiding at the same time any overeducation of those children who preferred to develop their bodies. (And, obviously, instincts and passions are better guides than idle ratiocinations.) On the other hand, children also like to band together and this penchant should be fostered assiduously. Fourier proposed the establishment of delightful organizations such as the petites bandes (consisting of two-thirds little girls and one-third boys) and the petites hordes with an inverse ratio of the sexes. The predominantly masculine petites hordes were to be dressed in Tartar costumes, all of different colors so that from a distance they would look like a “well-mixed field of tulips.”
For the petites bandes our great visionary reserved the task of controlling the language. People with bad accents and bad grammar were to be persecuted by this largely female horde. If anybody fell below the standard set for the universal language, he was to receive from the chancellery of the petites bandes a list of the errors he committed and was to be exhorted not to repeat them.
Smaller children would be trained as scavengers (because of their natural inclination to play with dirt), and this would keep the phalanstère in perfect order. Adolescents, according to their sexual activity, were to be divided into vestels and vestales, leading a continent life, and damoiseaux and damoiselles opting for a more tantalizing way of sexual behavior.
For all this, life in the phalanstères was only a part of Fourier’s grandiose view of the future. The enormous work-armies of the age of Harmony would engage in huge enterprises. They would pierce the Isthmus of Suez and the one of Panama, they would transform the Sahara into fertile land, they would see to it that the Arctic Ocean was perfumed. (All in a two-hour workday?) Most interesting would have been the creation (through careful cross-breeding) of such animals as the “antilion,” a superb, docile, “elastic” quadruped which could transport its rider in almost no time from one corner of France to the other. Starting in the morning from Calais, one might have lunch in Paris and dine in Marseilles. The animal would be about three times the size of our own miserable lions and with every step he would cover eight yards. “It would be a pleasure to live in this world if one could enjoy such wonderful service,”33 observed Fourier wistfully.
Indeed it would, since even the hardest work would be sheer delight. Take, for instance, farming. “We would see all these active groups well distributed over a beautiful valley, well-housed in colored tents, working in separate groups, moving about with flags and instruments, and singing hymns in chorus. Then we would behold the whole canton spotted with castles and rural palaces with columns and turrets instead of huts covered with straw. Would we not believe that this is an enchanted landscape, a country of fairies, an Olympic dwelling place?”34
The pleasure of these visions overpowered Fourier. “He who has seen the interior galleries of a phalanstère will consider the most beautiful palace to be merely a place of exile, a manor for idiots who after three thousand years of experimenting with architecture have still not learned to house themselves in a healthy and comfortable way.”35
These visions—most of them quite detailed—fill hundreds of pages. The reader might ask whether the musings of a certainly not well-balanced man are of any interest except to the psychologist or the psychiatrist. The fact is that they are of considerable importance. Fourierism is a crucial stage not only in the gradually unfolding history of socialism and communism, but also in the development of leftist thought in the United States. The chasm between the Utopian Socialists and the scientific Socialists of a later period is not so great as the latter would like us to believe. The psychological foundations are practically the same; only the intellectual “superstructure” is different.
Friedrich Engels in his Anti-Dühring praised Fourier very highly, especially for his attitude toward women but also for the skill with which he “manages” dialectics. In this, Engels likens him to Hegel, Fourier’s contemporary. In the revolutionary movements of 1848-1849 Victor Considérant Fourier’s leading disciple, played a key part as an aide to the great demagogue Ledru-Rollin. Considérant was a former student of the Ecole Polytechnique and became editor of La Phalange after Fourier’s death. He finally persuaded a rich Englishman to finance a phalanstère in Condé-sur-Vègre in central France. It collapsed and with it La Phalange. The paper, however, was replaced with another one, La démocratic pacifique. During these years Considérant published a number of books, the majority of them almost as fantastic and as remote from reality as those of his mentor. He was elected to the Assemblée Nationale in 1848 and again in 1849. Since he sided with what was then called La Montagne, he had to flee to Belgium.36 From there he went to Texas where he founded another phalanstêre, called La Réunion, near San Antonio.37 This project also failed, but Considérant was permitted to return to France in 1869 where he died at the age of 85 in 1893.
It is not from Texas, though, that Fourierism affected American intellectuals but rather via George Ripley and Brook Farm, originally started as an experiment of the New England Transcendentalists. The purpose of the enterprise in the beginning was to combine manual labor and intellectual life into an ideal example of collective living. The Transcendentalists, moreover, had a certain antirational bent and leaned toward “intuitivism.” All in all the influence of monastic ideals (in spite of the Unitarian background) was very obvious, the secular-sentimental imitation of the monastery quite apparent. It was probably not accidental that the founder of the Paulists, Father Isaac Hecker, was connected with Brook Farm in his pre-Catholic days: a rare example of an evolution back to the original (and healthy) sources of a concept. (The evolution in the opposite direction is far more frequent.)38
In 1845, under the influence of Fourierism, George Ripley transformed Brook Farm into a phalanster, but a year later the not-yet-finished main building burned down and by the end of 1847 the whole experiment had come to an end. Still, Brook Farm had many friends and supporters, inmates, and sympathizers: Ralph Waldo Emerson (who favored it from a distance), Francis J. Barlow, Nathaniel Hawthorne (who was there for a short while), Arthur Brisbane, Charles A. Dana, James Russell Lowell, William H. Channing, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Margaret Fuller, and Horace Greeley. George Ripley wrote a column (mainly about Fourierism) in Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, a most respectable daily and the forerunner of the New York Herald Tribune. After Greeley and Ripley, Arthur Brisbane39 was most active on behalf of Fourierist ideas. He organized the North American Phalanx in New Jersey which failed. (A Wisconsin Phalanx met the same fate.)
While Fourierism entered the American Olympus (even if on the sly and with a number of modifications), it had—as one can see from The Possessed by Dostoyevski—a marked influence on the Russian left, the precursors of Bolshevism. Even Alexander I in his earlier, leftist period (prior to 1812) was a reader of Fourier. Byelinski was profoundly impressed by Fourier40 and so was, as one might expect, Alexander Herzen who, however, saw in him and in Saint-Simon merely a forerunner of the real Socialist ideology of tomorrow.41
Fourier also made a deep impression on Nikolay Gavrilovitch Chernyshevski, son of a priest whose novel What to do?42 stands at the very beginning of the intellectual and emotional trends that led almost directly to Bolshevism in Russia. There is only one cleverly masked reference to Victor Considérant’s La destinée sociale in this highly programmatic novel, but Fourierism makes itself felt all through. (The attitude toward female emancipation, the theory of the delight in work rendered disagreeable only by “circumstances” are typical takeoffs from Fourier.) Another avid reader of Fourier was Peter Lavrov, a nobleman and revolutionary living mostly in exile, who made France his home. Thus, as we can see, raving madness stands at the cradle of a revolutionary movement which led to the Red October and to the crisis in which we all are; its weird, dark specter has never left us since.43