From Essays in Socialism New & Old (1907), pp.25-34.
We are now in the midst of a great popular movement for the emancipation of human life from the oppression of its material conditions. The first century of the Christian era also saw a movement, mainly popular in character, for the emancipation of human life from the oppression of its material conditions. We have thus a parallel between the circumstances under which Early Christianity arose and those under which Modern Socialism has arisen. Both represent a protest against the dominant civilisation. Both are alike in this; they are also to some extent alike in their methods and in the nature of their agitation. But there is also a vast and a radical difference between Modern Socialism and Early Christianity, a difference which suffices to place them to some extent in opposition to each other. We will first of all consider Early Christianity, the struggling movement of the first century.
At the Christian era nearly the whole civilised world had become definitely united under the sway of Rome. The independence of the provincial cities with their old civic patriotism and their old civic religion was undermined or abolished. At the same time every great centre could show in addition to its slaves a vast vagabond, “free” population, dependent for its means of subsistence on the donations of wealthy patrons, and in Rome itself on the largesses of the Emperor. The polarisation of wealth at one end of the social scale and poverty at the other, with the gradual extinction of the intermediate stages, was in full progress, more especially in Rome and the larger cities. The development of ancient civilisation had issued in politics in a centralisation of the most pronounced character, and in economics in a crude form of capitalism based on slave production without the aid of machinery, and manipulated to a large extent by a tax gathering bureaucracy. As the century advanced all these symptoms increased in intensity. The provincial cities more and more lost their old municipal patriotism. The last remnants of independent peasant holdings anywhere near the great centres of civilisation became merged in the latifundia, or big farms worked by hordes of slaves, under a villicus or overseer. The old village community melted away in and around all the main arteries of the Roman power. The corruption and sensuality of the wealthy classes which under the republic reached its climax in the reigns of the first Caesars. It was then that the Roman military organisation, the Roman jurisprudence, and above all the Roman fiscal system made an end of the ancient world in the form in which it had hitherto existed. The old basis of ancient civilisation had been the group – the gens, the tribe and the city, originally a league of tribes; the largest group known to the ancient world. Up to the last, ancient civilisation bore within it traces of the primitive communal group-society out of which it arose. But with the advent of Roman imperial power the old local autonomy disappeared as it had not done under any of the older oriental empires, which were little more than loose confederations.
The Roman Empire was the first instance in the world’s history of a bureaucracy on an extended scale. The Roman or Romanised functionary slowly but surely destroyed all independent local life. Add to this that although production never of course reached the machine state under the crude capitalism of the Roman Empire, and even division of labour was very rudimentary, yet that the associated production of a number of slaves belonging to one owner was not only prevalent as above-mentioned in agriculture, but also in many branches of handicraft, so that the competitive power of aggregated capital undoubtedly made itself felt. The Roman who had enriched himself by tax-gathering the spoil of the provinces was not always above investing in an industrial or commercial enterprise, in spite of the traditional aristocratic prejudice against such methods of gaining wealth. Thus no less a man than Sallust made a large revenue out of his “Insulae” or blocks of buildings let out in small dwellings on the Esquiline hill.
The conditions described, political, economical and otherwise, which reached their full development under the early Caesars were the conditions under which Christianity was born and grew up. The practice of emancipating slaves , which the master could not always afford to keep in the old way as appendages of his family, had become common. The poor freemen who, driven by altered circumstances, flocked from the various provinces to the large centres, formed a motley crowd, having, as already said, a precarious economical footing in a society where labour was mainly carried on by slaves, and hence whence the poor freeman was largely dependent for his existence on the crumbs which fell from the rich men’s tables of the more favoured classes. The demand for money now made itself felt in districts where before exchange had exclusively been carried on under the forms of barter. Finally there was the vast army of actual slaves employed in agriculture or in other forms of productive labour. All these classes as Friedrich Engels has said (Neue Zeit, No.XIII 36), “had their paradise, their golden age behind them.” For them there was no more hope in this life. The old conditions of their existence were gone while for them, as for all other classes, the old enthusiasm for the life of their native city had disappeared before the Roman eagle, the symbol of the great centralising power, which had carried away their municipal gods, and had deprived them of an independent political life. What wonder that men abandoning their old ideals of civic patriotism, of the worship connected with their social group, should turn within and seek comfort in their own soul and in meditating on its relation to the supreme soul of the world! This life it is true could offer nothing to them, but this fact did not affect the possibility of an existence after death – an existence which had been vaguely admitted by all popular tradition and had been enlarged upon and decked out in imaginative colouring by the later poets.
The “mysteries,” i.e., secret religious ceremonies and doctrines whose original Pagan meaning had probably fallen into oblivion, had become schools where the aspirant was initiated into dogmas relating to God, the soul, and immortality. It was an age when the thoughts of all thinking men were turned on these theosophic and mystical questions, just as today the thoughts of all thinking men are turned on questions of economics and of social reconstruction. The theory that Christianity was a doctrine that burst upon the world with a new light is directly contradicted by history, which discloses it as simply the popular and democratic formulation of tendencies already present in the Paganism and Judaism of the time. The old social relations and ideals connected with the group-society, the tribe, or the city (as already said the largest political unit of the ancient world) had or had been undermined by the Roman ascendancy, and the whole trend of the age was towards finding compensation for the loss of the old life with its earthly immortality of the social group by a heavenly immortality of the individual soul in the presence of the supreme deity – no longer the mere god of the family, the tribe or the city, but the great spiritual, power of the universe. We must not forget that it was an age when throughout all the Roman provinces, in Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, there was a mad rage for new superstitions of all kinds, when magic and jugglery of every description flourished, and miracles abounded on all sides. Such was the social atmosphere of the time. Now the philosophic sects and the Pagan religious “mysteries,” whose theological doctrines were discussed or taught, were mainly the appanage of the learned or the wealthy, the education or initiation in some cases being only open to persons of family, and in well-nigh all cases involving expenditure of time and money, impossible save for those in a good social position. All society was more or less dissatisfied with current conditions, each section in its own way. For large numbers of the rich, as already stated, the public, life, and the religion of local and civic patriotism, with the worship of, their guardian divinities, which had occupied their forefathers, was dead. But the rich could at least plunge into pleasure and profligacy, or where they took the matter seriously they could devote themselves to the platonic or stoic philosophy, or they could get initiated into one of the numerous mystical Pagan cults then prevalent. But for the poor, the disinherited, and the ignorant there seemed no future. The pleasures of life were not for them, philosophy was only for the learned and the leisured, the Pagan “mysteries” were similarly for the honourable, the rich and the “virtuous,” and not for outcasts. And now appeared a sect which offered, to all alike “the promise of happiness “and the answer to those problems with which all serious men were then concerning themselves – secrets which had hitherto been revealed only under severe conditions to closed corporations of initiates; such was the state of affairs during the first century of the Christian era. Present mundane existence was deprived of its ideals and hopelessly bankrupt for large sections of the population, the thoughts of all turned towards something beyond the present life and outside mundane interests – in other words, turned in upon the individual soul and its fortunes. Under these circumstances the new sect offered a doctrine and ceremonies freely to all, the acceptance of which should at once ensure the eternal happiness of the individual and satisfy all his questionings. All were here invited to come and “know of the Mystery.”
Prominent among the various eastern religions which were obtaining adherents over the Roman world was the Jewish. The national divinity of the Jews had long been raised by the Hebrew race to the dignity of supreme ruler of the universe, while at the same time the doctrine of a future life was popular among a large section of them. Still Judaism, as such, remained a national, or rather, tribal religion, of which one of the leading tenets was at this time the belief in the approaching advent of a divine agent or Messiah who was going to raise the Jews to the chief place among the tribes and peoples of the earth. In this connection Judaism possessed the characteristics of all ancient tribal religions, its main concern was the future of its race, of which, its god was the protector and guardian. Christianity, it must be remembered, was at first no more than a Jewish sect which believed in a special Jewish teacher as the promised Messiah. This was the point which differentiated the earliest form of Christianity from its parent Judaism. But with this point was involved another, namely, its opposition to the current order of things both at home and abroad; and, as a consequence of this, that it was mainly recruited from the “common people,” i.e., from the impoverished peasantry and outcast population before spoken of. It was opposed in Palestine by the respectable adherents of the old religious parties and their official representatives, who also succeeded in making unpleasant elsewhere for, the adherents, of the new heresy by stirring up the Roman authorities against them. Thus it came about that while old respectable Judaism was tolerated by the Romans, Christianity was persecuted. Early in the movement a schism sprang up, caused by the accentuation of certain points in the programme, especially of the proselytising side and the individualist-introspective side, at the expense of the Judeo-ceremonial side. From the first, Christianity, like other forms of Judaism, as it then existed, recognised proselytising as one of its functions; it also from the first regarded ceremonial as subordinate to the inward devoutness of the individual, but even in the latter it was not new. Judaism had for long, begun to be introspective, and many perfectly orthodox Jews were tending in this direction, especially as their immediate hopes of national independence grew fainter. But nevertheless the points from which Christianity was to start in its career as the future world-religion were precisely these two: (1) the conception of the relation of the individual souls and of a future life, and (2) its definite transcendence in the religious sphere of those tribal and racial limits (I will not say national, because nations in our sense did not exist in the ancient world), which the Roman Empire had already transcended in the political sphere. There were then during the second half of the first century the following elements present or latent in Christianity: (1) its cardinal dogma, according to which Jesus was at once the predicted Messiah, and was also identified with the one voluntary sacrifice, that, according to the theory of Philo of Alexandria, should ultimately supersede the ceremonial system of sacrifice; (2) the traditional Jewish rites and ceremonies (3) the notion of proselytising, of making converts to the Jewish religion outside the Hebrew race; (4) a vague idea of the future life of the individual and his preparation for that life by faith, holiness and religious devotion (5) the traditional Jewish patriotic aspirations. Such and such only were the principles which we may, without hesitation, assert to have been common to the first churches or definitely organised Christian bodies. Respecting the earliest beginnings of Christianity we know nothing that is with certainty authentic. The attempt to disengage the historical elements in the comparatively late documents which have come down to us called gospels is obviously hopeless of success, often as it has been tried. The only possibility of ascertaining any fresh matter of fact concerning the first origin of Christianity would seem to lie in the discovery of some new document or inscription at Cesarea, the headquarters of the Roman government in Palestine.
The first undeniably authentic glimpse we get of Christianity is in the second half of the first century when it was already an established sect, and had undergone its first serious persecution by Nero. This is to be found in the so-called Apocalypse or Book of Revelation. This document has been proved by internal evidence to date from the year 68 or 69 AD, the five kings referred to as having fallen being the first five Roman Emperors, Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, Nero, the one spoken of as then existing being Galba, and the seventh that was yet to come being an allusion to the current belief known to have existed among certain sections of the population at the time that Nero was not really dead, but was in hiding among the Parthians, and would return to take vengeance on his enemies. Nero who was the anti-Christ, i.e., the persecutor of the followers of Christ, is also referred to according to a common practice of the age by the number 666, which in Hebrew letters spells Nero-Caesar. In the Johannine Apocalypse, then, we have our earliest known Christianity.
Engels remarks that the writer invariably addresses his readers as “Jews” never as “Christians,” which would seem to indicate that the latter epithet was still regarded only as a nickname bestowed on them by their opponents, and that they still deemed themselves merely aspect of the Jewish religion. The writer is, moreover, presumably himself a Jew, as the Greek is that of a foreigner and ungrammatica1 to boot. Of the five elements spoken of as immanent in the Christianity of the time, and all of which are traceable in the “Revelation,” those belonging to Judaism proper are, with exception of the first cardinal point, by far the most prominent, and it is not difficult to see that some, at least, of the strictures directed against the churches which in the view of the writer had “gone astray” refer to the new “Hellenistic” or anti-Judaistic movement which was destined to develop into the Christianity of history, and which is associated with the name of the Apostle Paul. Some critics, in fact, have regarded the whole attack as directed against the rapidly-growing Pauline influence. [1] The gist of the whole book turns on the current belief, among the first votaries of the faith, in the approaching triumph of the new Christo-Judaism and the end of this age, when the world shall be ruled by the elect of the twelve tribes of Israel, and of the new heaven and new earth, which is to arise on the ruins of the old one after the lapse of a thousand years, and after the final destruction of “the world, the flesh, and the devil,” which are to be judged by the supreme divinity himself (not, as was afterwards imagined, by Christ). The whole document belongs to a class of writing not uncommon in that time of religious exaltation. The series of visions which repeat themselves very much in substance are not very original. The imagery is borrowed largely from older Jewish writings of the same class, e.g., from Ezekiel, etc., though there are some touches of local colouring, e.g., death on the pale horse, a piece of folk-lore still obtaining among the peasants in some of the Greek islands, also the allusion to certain natural phenomena still prevailing in the Aegean sea, as, for example, the water having the appearance of blood. The whole book breathes a ferocity against the powers that be, and all who are “not of the fold,” contrasting strangely with the later Paulinised Christianity which strove to be reconciled as far as possible with secular authority, and with the world in general. But the most interesting point about the Apocalypse is not so much what we find there as what we do not find. As before said, we find most of the notions proper to the Judaism of the time coupled with the apotheosis of the person of Jesus as the redeemer and atonement, who, however, is placed second to Moses. We read of the “song of Moses and the Lamb.” The strict Jewish monotheism of the book is very pronounced. Of the dogma of the Trinity there is no trace. The “lamb” is the servant of the one Jewish god, whose death had been accepted by the latter as the perpetual sacrifice for mankind in accordance with the popular Jewish theory of the time expounded by Philo. The conceptions which later on, under Alexandrian influence, developed into the “Holy Ghost” appear here in the Judaeo-Mazdaic form of the attendant “seven spirits of God.” The doctrine of personal “future life” in the ordinary man, moreover, here takes a very subordinate place, the chief point of interest being the approaching advent of Christ, and his reign with the saints to whom should come “a great multitude whom no man could number,” who had accepted him at once as the Messiah and the redeemer, and had presumably become, by adoption and submission to the law, “of the house of Israel.” It was not until the second generation, and later, that the idea of the second advent and of the last judgment began to be relegated to the position of a pious opinion. The first generation of Christians seem to have been mainly influenced by a notion which was a kind of cross between the old idea of the eternal life of the race and the new one of the eternal life of the individual – to wit, that of the speedy advent of the Kingdom of God in which the elect should be preserved in an apotheosised bodily form, in a regenerated earth with its New Jerusalem, conceived on a scale of oriental magnificent as built up of gold and precious stones, with God like a gigantic diamond (as Renan has observed) to illumine the whole. Such, interspersed with obscure references to contemporary events of which history has left us no other trace is the main purport of the Johannine Apocalypse.
In the second generation of the Church, the Pauline or anti-Jewish party, began to acquire strength and ascendancy; new dogmas came in: justification by faith, the logical consequence of the doctrine of the atonement, before long the Alexandrian theory of the logos appears, and soon afterwards the Trinity, not as yet in the fully fledged form of the Nicene Council, but still sufficiently recognisable. But most important of all was the definitive enthronement of the individual conscience, the individual soul and .individual immortality after death, as the central pivot on which all turned; and as the logical consequence and complement of this was the definite abandonment of all notions derived from the old racial, tribal, or civic clannishness, whether Jewish or otherwise, or from distinction of outward circumstance, and the proclamation of the doctrine of the equality of all men, “barbarian, Scythian, bond, or free,” before God. These were the two points which constituted Christianity a revolutionary creed.
But even here Christianity did not stand alone. Stoics like Epictetus, Platonists like Plutarch and others, preached the worth of the individual as such and the fatherhood of God, and in some cases the tone of their writings is very difficult to distinguish from that of the Church fathers. Yet although Christianity in a sense only formulated the ideas which belonged to the common mental atmosphere of the time, it nevertheless won over them all, because it succeeded in finding the suitable formula and the suitable policy in and by which these ideas were to become the official expression of the conscience and belief of mankind for ages to come. With the philosopher or pagan mystic these doctrines hung together in a manner at once vague and obscure. Again, while the philosophical sects, it is true, proposed in theory the doctrine of equality, they very often in practice retained the old exclusiveness, or, at the least, took no trouble to propagandise. It was only the Christian sects that took the new doctrine of equality seriously, and accordingly made it their lifework to go forth into the highways and hedges and preach to all, and agitate and organise among all. Thus Christianity created the social organisation which was to be for ages the rival of the secular power. Before the end of the second century the last echoes of the old and bitter quarrel between Petrine or Jewish and Pauline or Gentile Christianity died out, and the reconciliation begun earlier in the century was completed – the canon of our New Testament, which represents the amalgamation of the two hitherto hostile tendencies into the “one Catholic and Apostolic Church,” becoming fixed. The main battle of the Church for the next century was between Christianity and the various Gnostic heresies, but this does not specially concern us here.
Now the general analogy between early Christianity as a popular movement and modern Social-democracy as a popular movement is obvious. Early Christianity was essentially a creed offering salvation from existing ills for the disinherited. So does Socialism. Christianity, like modern Socialism, found itself in antagonism to the whole established order of things. Christianity called upon all, irrespective of race, language, or condition, to embrace its teaching and its practice. So does modern Socialism. Christianity proclaimed a higher life for mankind. So does Socialism. Christianity preached brotherly love. So does Socialism. These five points are the chief resemblance in principle between the early Church and the Socialist party. There are plenty of resemblances in the development of the two movements, in the tactics employed, the nature of internal dissensions, etc., which we shall consider presently. First of all let us discuss the question of principle. Most of the points of resemblance, it will be remarked, are somewhat negative in charaxter. Christianity professed to be a gospel of salvation for the oppressed of the world, it is true. But how? Not in this life and not as a class, but in a super-sensible sphere, and as individuals, who by “grace” and a change of heart have become “born again.” The reward is to be reaped by the individual in a future life, and not by the class or by humanity in this life. It is to be effected by an operation between the man’s soul and his God. Every man shall work out his own salvation, in spite of the complementary proposition “of His grace ye are saved, not of yourselves.” Christianity is therefore a doctrine of Individualism and of direct personal self-seeking. It is true it may lead the individual to sacrifice even life itself, and naturally, since in as far as he sincerely believes his creed, he feels convinced he is passing into a better life. Socialism, on the contrary, teaches that there is no salvation for the individual save in and through society. The future life of himself as a particular individual is of comparative indifference to Socialism. It is the future of society, of the working-class, and of humanity through the working-class, with which Socialism is peculiarly concerned.
The solution of the ills of the world for Christianity was, from our point of view, negative, since it lay in the renunciation of all hope or joy here and in the fixing of the attention on a future life. Respecting the political or social conditions of this life, Christianity had nothing to offer. Neither at that time did the serious part of the world want to know anything about them. Earnest men for the most part, and above all the poor and the outcasts, had ceased to take any interest in public life. What they were interested in was their own souls. So much was this the case, as already remarked, that every Pagan rite and ceremony, and every Pagan legend, which originally referred to some social function, to something concerning the life of the tribe or the city was beginning to be explained as symbolical of the life of the soul. Now, of course, we see exactly the opposite. Men have begun to get tired of fidgeting with their own souls. They are looking for salvation, not in a shadowy, individual life beyond the tomb, but in a social life on earth. As a consequence, we see churches and religious bodies, like the Salvation Army, interpreting “Christianity” as meaning the solution of the problem of “darkest England,” and Anglican clergymen explaining away the doctrines and precepts of the Church in a non-natural and also non-theological, quasi-socialistic sense. Yet in spite of all this Paganism remained Paganism and not Christianity, just as Christianity to-day in spite of every effort remains Christianity and not Socialism. There is an unbridgeable gulf in both cases between the two theories of life, the decaying theory and the growing theory.
Then, as to the brotherly love of Christianity, this meant as its practical expression the assistance by one individual of another individual in distress, such as the voluntary surrender by A of a portion of his property to B, in other words Charity – Christian Charity. Socialism sees that this individual Charity in a society based on private property is a remedy which “doth but skin and film the ulcerous place, while rank corruption mining all within infects unseen.” The brotherly love specially enjoined by Socialism is the renunciation of the desire for the supremacy of the privileged class to which one belongs or to which one may hope to belong some day – in other words, the desire for, and the endeavour to bring about, true social liberty, equality, and fraternity – to bring about a society in which class have ceased to exist. Finally, as to the internationalism of Christianity. This again was rather negative than positive. Christianity proclaimed the equality of all men before God – i.e., that all might become initiated into the doctrines and the rites of the new faith, and enjoy the spiritual salvation it offered; but how little this spiritual equality availed to prevent rivalry and jealousy between the churches even of different localities, and how little it sufficed to prevent distinctions based on rank and wealth growing up, the history of the Church very soon proved. Socialism, on the contrary, proclaims International solidarity as positive principle, inasmuch as it shows the existing national jealousies to redound simply to the advantage of the common enemy – the capitalist class – by whom they are fomented, and hence it shows that modern Patriotism is an outwork of Capitalism. The international character of Socialism is no merely spiritual “equality before God,” it is based on the increasing economic interdependence of peoples, and on its necessity for the final accomplishment of economic equality. The overthrow of nationalism as it exists to-day is, in other words, a fundamental condition of the triumph of Social Democracy.
The resemblance in external circumstances and internal squabbles between the early Christian and the modern Socialist movement is very striking. We find the same tendency to go off on side-issues, the same muddleheadedness as to the ultimate aims of the movement, the same squabbles and internal intrigue, and finally the same tardiness and laxity in paying subscriptions, among the early Christians as we have to contend with to-day in the Socialist movement. The great Petrine-Pauline struggle which shook the Christian movement during the first century of its existence finds a certain parallel in the antithesis between Anarchism and Social Democracy, and this in more ways than one. In its earliest form Christianity, for example, tried to directly carry through its principle of the renunciation of this world and the concentration of the attention on the kingdom of God, which was immediately at hand, or on the future life. On this account it reckoned worldly goods of no consequence, and cursed the then existing political and social order almost in the manner of a modern Anarchist. As against this you had the followers of St. Paul, who maintained the necessity and obligation of living in the world and performing the duties of the world. In the same way we find all sorts of divergent tendencies of various kinds making themselves felt. Just as Socialism is sometimes described nowadays by superficial bourgeois writers as a body of opinion having only a tendency in common, so Christianity might have been described by a superficial Pagan writer of the time of Trajan. In either case, of course, the view taken is wrong, but it is natural for one who only looks at the outside of things and sees a number of persons claiming to call themselves by the same name, but who nevertheless seem to differ even in essentials, and in some cases bitterly oppose each other. In both instances, however, in spite of all the eddies and side currents, there were certain cardinal doctrines which undeniably represented Christianity, just as there are to-day principles which undeniably represent Socialism. These principles are the touchstones by which to gauge the respective positions. They are the doctrines by which to “test the spirits,” as saith the Scripture. Behind the doctrines themselves there was a main movement throughout the Roman world, embodying these doctrines and the instinctive tendencies which clustered round them, just as there is to-day in every country a distinctive movement embodying the principles of socialism and the instinctive tendencies which gather round these principles.
There were in the early Christian world all sorts of heresies in opposite directions; there were Judaising heresies, paganising heresies, Montanist heresies and Gnostic heresies, but there was one movement which held fast to the main dogmas of the Christian creed against them all, which became the Catholic Church, and which succeeded in establishing Christianity as a world-religion for ages to come. So in our Socialist movement to-day we have in this country Fabian Socialists, Labour-party Socialists, Sentimental Socialists, various groups of Anarchists, in short, all sorts and conditions of persons calling themselves Socialists, and making use of one or other plank in the Social Democratic programme as a shibboleth but who are either unclear on the whole question, or who are at variance with the fundamental articles of Socialist doctrine on other points.
If it be asked what one may signalise as the fundamental theses of Socialism corresponding to the cardinal articles of the Christian faith in its earliest developed form (as dating from the second century – for the form in which we find it in the Apocalypse corresponds to Socialism in its Utopian phase), I should put forward the following: the accomplishment of the communisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange in and through the modern class-struggle, this being the final issue of an historical development beginning with the dissolution of the primitive communism of the clan, the tribe and the village; the recognition, in economics, of labour, as the ultimate basis of value; and of modern Individualist society, as founded on the class-monopoly of the means of production whereby surplus-value is extracted by the capitalist class from the labouring class; the acknowledgment that our socialistic duty consists in joining with the class-conscious working-class in its struggle with capital, and generally in furthering the realisation of a communist society in which classes shall have ceased to exist (together with the other antagonisms of civilised society); in short of a society in which the government of persons shall have given place to the administration of things. These points, I take it, are “of faith.” They are vital, and in every country there is a movement and a party, large or small, embodying them. This is the true Socialist party. To set up an opposition direct or indirect to such a party is to injure the cause of Socialism. In Germany this is recognised. The “Independents” of fifteen years ago have gone under. The “Revisionists” of five years ago are fast going under. There exists but one powerful Social-democratic party. In France, where unhappily, there have been many dissensions, the movement is concentrating itself on the lines of the so-called Marxist party, i.e., on the basis of modern scientific Socialism, as above stated. The same may be said of Italy. In England, as we all know, we have many Socialisms promulgated by persons who are anxious to show themselves original, and who for this and other reasons are shy of joining the one English Socialist body which is in line with the great Socialist movement of Proletarian emancipation throughout the civilised world.
Although now the predominance of scientific Socialism, or, as it is sometimes called, Marxism, is assured the workmen of the Continent; although old feuds, theoretical and personal, have lulled down before the supremacy of the central Socialist stream – the one and indivisible Social-democratic party – in other European countries, yet that this was not always so the following extract from Friedrich Engels will show. Speaking of the great classical sceptic of the second century, Lucian of Samosata, who has left us an account of an adventurer named Peregrinus, who became a teacher in the early Christian Communities, and was subsequently turned out for eating forbidden meat, Engels says:
“All who have known from experience the European workman’s movement in its early beginning, will call to mind dozens of such occurrences. Nowadays such extreme cases have become impossible in the great centres, but in remote places, where the movement is occupying new ground, a Peregrinus may even still have a certain limited success.”
Engels goes on to observe that as with the revolutionary movement of classical antiquity, Christianity, so with the modern revolutionary movement, Socialism, all elements are attracted to it “that have nothing to expect from the official world, or that have played themselves out therein.” He gives among other instances “free church parsons whose congregations have fallen away from them, unfortunate inventors, sufferers from real or imaginary wrongs, characterised by the official bureaucratic world as ‘insufferable nuisances,’ honest fools, and dishonest impostors.” All elements set free by the disintegration of the old world tend to gather round a movement which is consciously or unconsciously felt to contain within itself the germs of a new world.
“There was no folly, no chimera, no imposture,” says Engels, “that did not force itself upon the young Christian Communities, and that did not, at least in some places, find open ears and willing believers. As with our early communist workmens clubs so with the early Christians.”
He continues, “they possessed an astounding credulity for things which it pleased them to believe – so much so that we can be by no means sure that some fragment or other of the numerous writings compiled by Peregrinus for the edification of the Christians, has not found its way into our New Testament.” Ernest Renan once observed that the best modern analogy of an early Christian Church was a local section of the (at that time still-existing) “International.” This is so true, Engels observes, that it is impossible for any old member of the International to read the Second Epistle to the Corinthians, with its complaints direct and indirect of the laxity and delay with which overdue subscriptions came in, without feeling old wounds break out in him afresh. I have no doubt that many branch secretaries of the Social Democratic Federation will be prepared to echo Engels’ words as regards the latter body, and may find some consolation from a perusal of the Second Epistle to the Corinthians.
Such a parallel as I have sought to elaborate will not be without its uses if we bear in mind the Latin proverb crimine ex uno discant omnes (from the fault of one, let all learn), and also if we remember what led the Christian movement to success. It was not the heresies of brilliant geniuses. It was not the bright original idea of some local preacher who thought to start a brand-new Christianity of his own. It was the steady development of the main stream of Christian thought and organisation on lines well-fixed, at least, from the second century onwards, which led Christianity to victory over the Roman world. It will assuredly be only by a similarly strong and definite adhesion to principle and organisation that modern Socialism will accomplish its far, far more difficult task of conquering the world of modern capitalistic civilisation. Christianity, which was essentially a religion of the other world, left the economical and political side of things with little immediate alteration. It definitely established the great anti-thesis between sacred and profane, church and world, spiritual and temporal, priest and layman, an antithesis which was undeveloped throughout antiquity, when religion being essentially social there was no marked distinction between it and politics, every religious act being also social or political, and every political or social act also religious. Thus Christianity, owing to its solution of the problem of human life involving the transference of the sphere of religion (1) from society to the individual, and (2) from this world to the next, was able to come to an agreement with the powers that then were, by which it reserved to itself the spiritual and left the temporal pretty much as it had been. The fact of its involving these distinctions also subsequently enabled Christianity, especially in its most extreme individualist form of Protestantism, to become the appropriate religious expression of an economically individualist society.
Socialism, on the contrary, knows no such convenient separations. Its aim is primarily the effecting of an economical change, the greatest which history has known, in the conviction that a complete revolution in human relations and conceptions must follow upon this change. Christianity proposed to solve matters by revolutionising one side only of human affairs, and that the easiest to move. Socialism, on the contrary, formulates the principles underlying the coming revolution in the whole of human life, in and through the side involving the deepest and most tenacious of all interests, in and through its very heart and marrow, its economic constitution. The immense task of realising this change will assuredly demand a full measure of the energies, intellectual, moral, and physical, of the “Proletarians of all countries” who unite themselves, and of those who join with them in this noblest of all unions.
1. The doctrine of the personal immortality of the soul as distinct from bodily resurrection was unquestionably introduced or at least brought into prominence by the ex-Pharisee Paul and his party. The oldest Christianity which the “Revelation” in the main represents was completely dominated by the conviction of the approaching advent of the Jesus Messiah and the “end of the age.” Those “believers” who died were expected to rise again in bodily form in a few months, or, at most, years, to join in the reign of the saints on earth in the New Jerusalem. It was only as time wore on, and that the first generations of Christians did pass away without any of these things being fulfilled, that the Pauline doctrine of personal immortality came universally to the fore, replacing the older belief in the approaching advent of a millennium. The latter, henceforward, became relegated to the subordinate position of a “pious opinion” as to what would happen in an uncertain and possibly remote future of the world’s history.
Last updated on 15.1.2006