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Christianity and Marxism

Comrades, the topic of today's report is the parallel between Christianity and Marxism. For persons who are directly familiar with the sociological foundations of these two phenomena, such a comparison will not seem strange, because at present these two ideologies - Marxism, on the one hand, and Christianity, on the other, are two, though not the only forces, but in any case, by mighty forces that challenge each other's soul, humanity. Under the banner of Marxism, the Communist International comes forward and a significant part of the workers, who do not adjoin directly to it, but group themselves in other organizations, in other internationals, and under the banner of Christianity, both in the Catholic Church and in others, there are still many, strongly organized dozens of million people. Very often Marxism and Christianity clash directly, in some countries they are fighting each other. In order to penetrate into the depths of those classes in which the revolutionary ideology finds its adherents, Christianity takes on a variety of colors, and the struggle between these two worldviews, which often reject each other, proceeds both along the line of the direct front, the military one, and along the line of much more a complex, much more subtle division of the streams of these cultural forms where Christianity assumes the character of Christian socialism.

Therefore, even for those of my listeners who do not look into the social essence, into the social, historical background of these movements, such a contrast will not seem strange. We in Moscow constantly have occasions to attend discussions where representatives of Christianity and representatives of Marxism break their spears. But when I compared these two doctrines, I had in mind not only to understand where they differ, but also how they converge. I also had in mind the aforementioned historical and social background to them.

Christianity and Marxism are the two greatest ideologies put forward and created by the proletariat, they are two proletarian doctrines that have experienced quite different fates. The products of various epochs are essentially the ideology of the proletariat. Therefore, they can be compared not only by their tendencies, not only by where they call people, but also by their social essence.

All ideologies, all constructions, all thoughts, human emotions, all such guiding or aspiring human theories always bear the stamp of a class. Sometimes they are the expression of the will of this or that class to self-aggrandizement, they are ideologies that reject other classes, and sometimes they are ideological constructions that this class puts forward to capture hearts, to find a compromise, to gain the trust of other classes. There are attacking ideologies, luring ideologies, but in both cases they bear certain features of the class that is their author. Moreover, in the first case, when these ideologies are polemical, they have sharply defined features of the class, the author only, and in the second case, when they are designed to capture hearts and minds, they bear the stamp of the character of the author's class, at the same time reflect the features of the class that is the object that they want to lull, deceive, enslave ideologically, by educating the mass of a foreign class in the spirit of such ideas and feelings that would be beneficial to the class dominant. And ideologies of this order, polemical or enticing, we have a great many in the history of mankind.

But let's start with the ideology of the ruling class. We have a huge number of ideological conflicts, that is, such events, such phenomena of a cultural order, which are determined by the meeting, the clash of two cultural currents. But when we begin to take a closer look at what those internal social contradictions come down to that are revealed in the struggle of two religions, two philosophies, two cultures in the same society, we always see at the core, approximately, the same phenomenon. As in the feudal society of the East, as in the Greco-Roman world, and in the Renaissance, and in the new world, we constantly see in a certain period the same picture of the growth of the commercial and industrial class, which rises from the depths of democracy, relying on the growing movable private property, and shakes the economic foundations of a society based on noble land ownership,

We encounter this phenomenon all the time. As soon as we turn, say, into the depths of Egyptian history and stop there at some pharaoh Amenhoten, who begins a struggle in the name of the solar disk, as a single god, against the old gods. We can safely say that if he managed to win the fight and defeat, at least for a while, the priests, then only with the help of merchants and industrialists, who could not but support Amenhoten, who was their representative, support, leader, who tried to create by this new religion a system that would limit the privileges of the first two estates - the official priesthood and the official nobility. The next study of this phenomenon shows that this is exactly the case.

Let us pay attention to how in Greece in the 3rd-4th centuries BC the old religion begins to waver, philosophies of a different order are put forward. If we ask where this comes from, where these oppositions to the rationalistic secular philosophy of the old religion come from - oppositions that reach skepticism, to the saying that man is the measure of things - then we can say with certainty that the new class is the bearer of this process, that the cause - the growth of urban republics, the growth of people of capital who want to rationalize life and cast aside the sea of ​​prejudices that the old society has accumulated and which is the base, protection, trench for the old, obsolete and no longer needed classes and their institutions

This kind of struggle, the struggle of the dominant class and the struggle of the classes immediately following it, the landowners and representatives of movable capital, is repeated many times in history. Great shifts, great cultural phenomena, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, the new culture in Greece, the Renaissance, the Reformation, not to mention the English and French revolutions - all these phenomena of acute cultural struggle come down to the struggle of the ruling classes and immediately following them, the landowning classes. and owners of movable capital.

But do both make up a significant proportion of humanity? No. Both these aristocracies, the noble and the plutocratic, constitute a minority of the population. They are followed by a stratum of the middle bourgeoisie, then a stratum of the peasantry, and a stratum of the petty bourgeoisie, if we include in this number the one whom the Italians call the populo minuto—and this already passes into the semi-proletariat.

You know Marx's famous words that the proletariat existed for a long time as a class for others and only recently began to exist as a class for itself. What does it mean that the proletariat existed as a class for others? There are rams, cows, and these rams and cows have no idea that these kinds of animals exist. So same here is and belittled class. He doesn't know what class he is. He knows that he, Ivan or Marya, who are being beaten, are being exploited, but that there is such a class—the proletariat, that it is a well-known group, that the proletarians may have common interests—they do not know this, and therefore, as an outside observer, establishes varieties of animals or vegetable varieties, so the sociologist understands from the outside that this is a special class - the proletariat. The proletarian himself does not know this.

I will not dwell on the exceptions regarding the peasant ideology - this is not the topic of my essay, but regarding the proletarians, we can say that we do not have any proletarian ideologies, with the exception of two colossal arrays. One is Marxism with all the prerequisites for it, gradually growing out of the bourgeois system, a gigantic mountain range, a gigantic theoretical ridge, which is called scientific socialism. This is one proletarian ideology. At a very great distance from it, at a distance of two thousand years, stands Christianity.

Christianity is also the creation, par excellence, of the proletariat, and its true spirit was maintained insofar as the various strata, various new formations of the proletariat, successively from one another, adopted the spirit of true Christianity.

There is a huge difference between the ideology of the modern capitalist proletariat and the ideology of the old proletariat, the proletariat that mainly consumes, and it cannot be otherwise. What is the ancient proletarian, the proletarian who filled the eastern cities of Damascus, Antioch, Byzantium, Corinth or Rome? What are these proletarians? Where did it come from? What are its features? You know that the main factors in the economy of the ancient world were agriculture, which more and more, as we approached the era when Christianity arose, turned into large-scale land ownership, and a huge mass of free peasants, no matter what type they belonged to - indigenous peasants or to a new type of colonists, they went bankrupt and merged with the world as predatory latifundia. Work on these latifundia by large landowners was done by slave labor. But there was also industry: ships were built, manuscripts were copied, leather, textile, and ceramic factories existed. Meyer lists an extremely large number of productions. That these productions had a capitalist character?

Perhaps, in the sense of the mercantile, in the sense of commercial turnover, but not in the sense of the internal system, because they rested on 9/10 on slave labor. Even in trade, slave labor then played an extremely important role. The house of the old type, the economy of the old type, the landowning patriciate was based on a slave whom it exploited, and the bourgeoisie relied mainly on the slave. Wage labor was almost unknown. Since there was an element of freedmen, it was a parasitic environment, or wealthy people who had their own workshops. The number of freedmen who would work like proletarians, like mercenaries who had no property, was negligible. There was no proletariat in our sense of the word, a proletariat that would be the basis of production, by whose labor society would live, and that would have nothing but a pair of hands to sell.

Even now, when we have ceased to say that there was no capitalism at that time, when German researchers have proved that capitalism existed and is very serious, that there were capitalists and labor force, it is clear that there was still no free proletarian, a proletarian producer of the present type. The slave was kept like cattle, he was more or less fed, more or less treated - it was property, and the relationship between the slave and the owner was different than between the proletarian class and the capitalist class.

Nevertheless, there was a huge amount of the proletariat. The proletariat consisted of a ruined peasant population, and the very word "proletarian" came from those times, and partly even represented the old struggle between the plebeians and the patricians, the struggle between the optimates and the proletarians. These proletarians were often free, not slaves, but simply homeless people; these were the ruined peasants and artisans, the peasantry killed by the latifundia, the artisans killed by the slave industry, the tottering bohemianism, the world's bossy. There was a lot of such a proletariat, it did not work at all.

He played absolutely no role in production, but played a political role, by the pressure of his masses. There are a lot of men and women living on the streets, in tugurias, eating what they got, flattering towards the authorities, the crowd is a beast that needs to be given bread and circuses so that its stomach does not growl, its thought does not get bored, and the crowd - ready, if not satisfied, to turn into a dangerous beast, a wild beast, capable of carrying out coups alongside the troops, with the Praetorians. This restless proletariat, which you can’t get anywhere, because it will rear up, in big cities it was a scourge, a disaster of the ancient world, from the point of view of the then landowner and bourgeoisie, and it was he who was the main bearer of Christianity.

It is quite natural that between the ideology of this kind of proletariat and between the ideology of the labor proletariat, working at machines in industry, which is the expedient realization of scientific thought, the proletariat, which labor itself collects and gigantic steel crystals, the proletariat, whose role is growing, which, in essence, everything produces, the proletariat, which is the basis of production and becomes the creator in the field of production—the distance is gigantic.

Let us now take a closer look at all the similarities and differences between these two proletarian ideologies and their historical fate. There are many analogies here, and many striking contrasts.

Let's deal with Christianity first. Christianity did not fall from the sky, and the proletariat, a class extremely scattered in the ancient world, ignorant, in itself so well-proportioned and, despite its internal oppositions, despite its crazy features, could not create such a captivating and fantastically rich ideology. He borrowed a lot. He borrowed mainly from peasants, from farmers.

The peasantry created in all countries of the cultural world known to us, both in Asian and European countries, and in American and African, one and the same basic background, their peasant religion. Such religions differ from each other in form, at the core of this - the religion of crop rotation - this is a set of myths depicting sowing and reaping, varying depending on which plant is the basis, which technique is dominant in this agronomy, what season is winter and summer , a change of cold and heat, or a change in a temperate climate, as favorable, and terrible droughts impose a seal on the economy. But the essence remains the same. From the main agronomic myths that we find in the Asian and Egyptian periods in the Confucian Chinese religion and in Slavic mythology, the struggle between the good and the evil begins to look at us.

The peasantry knows very well that some natural phenomena are useful for the harvest and give a harvest, and some are harmful, they know the period of the year when the vegetation dries up or disappears under the cover of snow. This change of some great forces, which in their struggle either turn things to the side of light, warmth, abundance of food, good luck for a person, then to the side of a deadly drought or a deadly cold, which adversely affects all the works of a person and the very fate of a person. , led a person to the idea that there are beings allied to him, peace-willing to him - divine, and next to them there are those who are against him.

So, from this idea of ​​two kinds of gods, of two worlds of gods, one should have drawn the following conclusion that none of these camps is stronger than the other. If such good gods as Adonis or Baldur were stronger, then eternal spring, eternal summer would reign and there would be no kingdom of Morana, death, night, cold. For example, Seth, the god of drought and destructive winds, dry sand, could not reign if Osiris was stronger than him. If they are replaced, then they are approximately equal in strength. Therefore, a good god, from time to time, suffers defeat, turns out to be weakened, wounded, taken prisoner, perhaps even killed, but never completely killed, because he (or his son) will certainly, in the end, again achieve throne, and the sun will rise again, and the god of great thunder and rain will reign again.

And since the peasantry is much more interested in the fate of the good God, their patron, than in the fate of dark forces, they create such a biography of this god, a mighty and great god, in which, due to treason or old age or the crime of the people themselves, who did not support his time, due to various circumstances, turns out to be broken by his enemy, but then, partly due to the merits of his son, partly thanks to his personal upsurge, energy, reigns again. The legend of the overthrown god returning to his former glory, or the legend of the overthrown, suffering god who is redeemed by his son—there are literally hundreds of such legends, and you are well aware of their examples. It suffices to cite the legend of Osiris, or the legend of Baldur, killed and resurrected, of Hercules, who died and resurrected in the form of a god. This brings the concept of suffering into the concept of God.

While he suffers, while night and cold again reign on earth, he must experience a feeling of deep oppression, indignation, but at the same time a firm hope for his coming victory. For the peasant, there is nothing particularly tragic in this myth. For him, this is a series of his holidays: the holiday of sowing, the ripening of the harvest, the holiday of parting with the sun, the holiday of a new turn of the sun to its growth, the holiday of the victory of summer over winter, and every peasant knows that along with the circle of crop rotation there are his holidays - Christian and Maslenitsa , Christmas, Easter or pagan, which were celebrated on the same days and which only changed their name.

It is as constant as the phases of the moon in the sky.

For the proletariat, this is not the case. The proletarian of the big cities felt tortured, felt infinitely oppressed, he starved, he was beaten, he had no light and no hope of happiness. It can be said that at the bottom of the big cities of each such Antioch or Rome there was a huge sediment, a bitter and dirty sediment of humanity. But the proletarian had to live with something. He grasped every superstition, believed in amulets, in divination, found the same consolation in gambling, as the Neapolitan lazzaroni now finds solace in lotto.

He was - il desperato.

And then he hears that there is a suffering god. There is a god in prison, a god spat on, a god in a grave, and this oppressed god is not a god-king, to whom he feels antipathy, but a god-slave, this god is, moreover, a real god, the hour will come when he will shine again and joy will come for all the oppressed of the world. Obviously, this is his god. The proletarian would also like to be joyful, beautiful, powerful, he feels that he has been offended, deprived. He sees unrest in society, he sees that there is no real truth, evil reigns everywhere. Now he knows it's temporary. “Our God” is in chains, suffering somewhere, but he will return to the throne someday, and we must believe in this. That is why the religion of the suffering god, i.e., the religion of the sun or the religion of the god of thunder, in those countries where rain plays a large role, has taken on a different character in the proletarian consciousness. I want to point out here which no history of religion emphasizes: it is not a matter of looking for the god of the sun in the Christian religion - it is boring to talk about it. Who can doubt that here we have a solar deity with his fading and his resurrection. And even a three-day period is the usual period.

The solar myth existed a thousand years before Christianity, and why was there such a religion of redemption as we see in Christianity? Because a new class has appeared, extremely numerous - the propertyless proletariat, which suffers endlessly. These homeless proletarians adopted the religion of the suffering god from the peasants and from a simple cycle brought out a social tragedy about the injustice reigning in the world and in a thousand years the kingdom of truth that has to come, which must be patiently waited for.

The proletariat also found another element of Christianity, the egalitarian one (the striving for equality), in the petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry, and, of course, it was not difficult for the proletariat itself to guess that it was necessary for people to be equal. But the historical fact is that Christians did not create the idea of ​​equality of people themselves, but took it out of another ideology. Here we can note the influence of India, but this is not yet fully established, but already that the Jewish and Israelite prophets played a decisive role - this is undoubtedly. Darmstetter was right when he added to what was written by the prophets some of the rabbis who lived in that era, from this purely Jewish thought he tried to restore all the provisions of the gospel. There is absolutely nothing in the gospel that cannot be found in the prophets or their followers. I often wrote and spoke about the prophets of Israel and the Jews - this is a very interesting phenomenon. Now I will not dwell on it - I only want to point out its inner meaning.

The prophets were the tribunes of the small peasantry, the small proprietors; they were singled out by this part of the Jewish people, when more and more developing agriculture and landownership, after the transition from the shepherd-nomad way of life, began to prevail and rich people appeared who began to oppress the poor, trying to take away “the houses of widows and orphans”, people who they take away, offend a neighbor in order to turn his modest vineyard into part of his growing estate. These people, these enemies, these Aohavas rounding up their estates, it doesn’t matter whether they are kings or landlords, and these Ievurai, poor neighbors, those who are not today, tomorrow will turn into a proletarian, but who do not want to turn into one, who protest in for decades, there were two camps. As we can see from the documents, there was a fierce struggle between them, struggle of the Jewish democracy against the Jewish aristocracy. Amazing monuments have been left in this area in the form of the book of Amos, Jeremiah, and others.

There were real tribunes here, who did not stop before the revolution, consistently advancing the point of view of the poor, but still the poor. What is the last dream of the egalitarians? This dream was that people should be equal - everyone under his own fig tree, everyone has his own vineyard and house, no one covets someone else's property, everyone lives by the labor of his own hands. If this is true, Mount Zion will be the holy mountain of the world. Let there be no greed, let there be no envy, which is now developing solely because some are rich, others are poor, because the rich, being stronger, swallowed up the poor neighbor and began to grow. This must be destroyed. More peaceful prophets turned to the rich so that they would repent, otherwise the people of Israel would suffer from a god who is a god of justice, while others dreamed of that Jehovah will give a sign to launch a bloody revolution. There are the most cruel terrorist pages in the younger prophets who lived before the life of Christ, calling for enormous destruction, for a huge bloody revolution.

These tendencies were akin to the proletariat. Only the proletarian is not accustomed to having his own vineyard and fig tree in order to cultivate, gather, and work hard. The Apostle Paul, who, I will say in passing, is a representative of the petty-bourgeois variant of Christians, the apostle most beloved later by the Lutherans and Calvinists (petty-bourgeois movements) - said: "He who does not work, let him not eat" - he himself was a small craftsman, weaver of tents. His favorite province was Macedonia, where the strong bourgeoisie lived, his favorite people to whom he writes are rather wealthy merchants, house owners, landowners, etc. Solomon did not dress like a lily, but God himself dressed her. This is purely proletarian preaching. The proletarian of that time did not really want to work. And in terms of the organization of work, his thought was rather weak. We will not find any attempts to create a labor utopia, and if we take a utopia that speaks of what the golden age will be, for example, Archbishop Irenaeus, he draws the following: “summer itself will grow fruits and there will be such an endless abundance of them that it will swallow everything will be impossible. Each vine will produce three bunches, each bunch will have 300 berries, and each berry will make three buckets of wine.”

So drink, eat and be merry soul. According to the gospel, Jewish rich people said: drink, eat and be glad soul, but this is a sin in itself. This is a sin because it is done at someone else's expense, because there is poor Lazarus, and in paradise everyone will be happy. The proletarian says: there will be no need to work, sow, or dress. We will be incorporeal spirits, we will drown in the contemplation of God, we will be blissful, but at the same time it will not even be possible to put our hands on the tummy, because there will be neither hands nor tummy. This is the spiritual version of Christianity. You know Valhalla of Germanic mythology. There the parasitism of the nobility, and here the parasitism of the proletariat. The desire for equality is expressed as follows: no property, the proud and the rich will be punished, and we, the poor, will be in the bosom of Abraham. There is nothing to think about tomorrow, you need to think only about the present day. God will think for everyone and arrange for everyone.

From everything I have told you, it is evident that the Christian religion of the suffering god has an element of hope for the future, and in the Christian religion this is of particular importance. The peasant has no reason to be hopeless. The more or less strong peasant, who does not go over to the proletariat, who is not oppressed by the landowner, has no reason to think so hopelessly. He knows that spring will come - red, harvest - father. Then we’ll make mash, bake pies, we’ll have a holiday. But he thinks with displeasure that not everything is Shrovetide for the cat and that after the summer an unpleasant devilry rolls - winter, which will force him to go into the hut, and perhaps not reach the new harvest. For the proletariat it is another matter. The proletarian has summer, winter, he is always hungry, his life is nervous, tense, painful. He says: in 10 years, and maybe tomorrow, and maybe in 100 years, but someday there will be a holiday on our street, and it will be a holiday for the holidays. Then we will laugh at the rich who sat on our necks! God, who sees the truth, may not speak soon, he will then tell the truth and tell it in its entirety. Then we will rejoice not only that it will be good for us, but also that it will be bad for you rich people, that we will be on the right hand, and you on the left hand of God the judge, and our hope lies not only in paradise, but also in hell, where will you go. The rich will go there for eternal torment because they didn’t come to us, the sick, didn’t feed us, the hungry, didn’t clothe us, undressed. This is a vengeful hope, full of class hatred, full of fantastic feverish pictures of such joy, such happiness, which will fall to the lot of the poor and for which one will not need to lift a finger on a finger.

It is difficult to wait a thousand years, and the proletarian finds another idea in the peasant - the idea of an afterlife. The idea of the afterlife is inherent mainly in the peasant religion. This does not mean that the idea of the soul did not exist earlier, in the nomadic period. But here for the peasant it acquires great significance. We know little about the mysteries of the Greeks, but we know something about the Eleusinian mysteries, etc., that these are joyful mysteries and are always and everywhere connected with the harvest. Just as a person dies and is buried in the ground, just as a grain is buried in the ground and seems to be dead, and just as a grain is resurrected and again comes to light in a multiplied form, so a supposedly dead person is freed from the grave for a new life. This is the essence of a purely peasant, pagan version, faith in the soul, faith that a new life begins behind the grave, which is transferred to the body itself. This faith takes on a different character with the proletarian than with the peasant. There, in the pagan peasant religion, it is an indefinite something, in the end it comes down mainly to the fact that the fate of the soul of the buried body can be very bad and can be very good, depending on whether the rites are performed. If everything is done properly, as grandfathers and great-grandfathers taught, if the burial is performed according to the rites, if certain food is given, old food, our kutya or honey (earlier in Egypt, sacrifices were made in the form of lotus grains), if the appropriate words of the spell are pronounced, then the soul will bloom just like a grain will grow if enough spells are cast over it.

I was recently on Sparrow Hills and saw a religious procession: people are walking with crosses and banners. I ask what it is. “That’s to keep it from raining. The rains have tormented."

So, then, you need to make sure that there is no rain and you need to go with crosses and sing songs and say different words, chow incense to God and then he will understand that the rains have tortured him, and he will make sure that there is no rain.

Almost exactly the same as the peasant surrounds his crop with rituals, so he surrounds the soul with rituals, and the one who performed the rituals will save the soul.

For the ancient proletarian, things were different. He thought like this: the millennium is good, but if this is for my great-grandchildren, then what is it to me?

My soul is immortal. Maybe some kind of justice is possible in the next world, right after death? If evil reigns on the earth, then the soul, leaving the earth, does not end up where the bright god reigns? The soul, since it leaves the corporeal world, doesn’t it rise, like smoke from a fire, there to heaven and, having flown there to the supralunar world, does it not find its god, its homeland, its real father, who will take care of it? This is accepted by proletarian Christians, it consoles them, but it also makes them think: are all such immortals, even those who are filthy and dirty with their bodies, or is only the one who thought about the spiritual, about God, who did not collect earthly treasures and was immortal? really a real proletarian? A person should not be greedy, should not be proud, he should not have all those features that are characteristic of gentlemen. The then proletarian, the then apostle, the city dweller, the then prophet, who went from city to city, from church to church and preached the gospel, took colors from the peasant religion. This proletarian-apostle, who came with the gospel, who brought "good news", told people that the god who helps the princes and the rich here is the devil, the father of lies. The real, authentic god reigns far in the sky. In order to send people a message about himself, he has here God-inspired people, his messengers, they preach to you and only you, only the poor, only the ignorant, only the wretched are really close to the heavenly father. Do not lay up treasures on earth, only the poor will inherit the kingdom of heaven. If you are oppressed, it is good; if you are beaten, it is good. When you were hit on your right cheek - turn your left, you don’t need to grumble, this is Christian meekness and you are poor, you are meek, you, for enduring to the end, for doing what God requires of you, you will rewarded in death, or when he comes to earth, he will establish his truth here. The realistic moment, the really economic moment of the Christian trend, the basis of its organization lies in the so-called church, i.e., the organization of a huge social force, in some populous system of consumer communes, and there is no doubt that the original church cell was a community of proletarians, men and women who did not care about the “Morning”, and the alms that they collected, sometimes a meager income, were carried together in order to share what was brought and wait for the next day, for “the hour is unknown, at that time the bridegroom will come.” Stocking up for a few days is already a sin. This community, the cell of the poor, had a gigantic attraction for these poor people. They gathered in the dungeons, or where there was some kind of roof over their heads, and often where there was no roof, and experienced the greatest joy, which brought them to exaltation. They said: “What happiness - God loves us, we are his children and brothers among ourselves. And what does it mean to wait for God? Like a bad day, this life will pass. It is we who inherit the kingdom of heaven. It is we who are the princes of the blood, it is we who are the children of the king, and not those who rule here. And at their gatherings, love and every kindness and readiness to give up everything was manifested - "he who gives, he multiplies." This was an atmosphere of intense mutual love, endless tenderness for each other, a huge impulse for self-sacrifice, a complete absence of fear of death. On the face was a complete contrast between the life of Christians and their environment.

The aristocrats of that time, when people lay in wait for each other, when everyone was afraid of the emperor, and he was the first soldier, were looking for something that would lead them out of this hated life, out of this sleaze, they found joy, as Renan says, for example, Here's what: when the little Syrian went into the kitchen of the Roman lady, at her request: "Tell me about the new gods," he said that "and you don't know the real God, who will give happiness in having nothing, to help each other, to love each other,” these words caused a shock, and there were other motives for such shocks.

Enormous was the attractive force of the collective of people, the poor, who were interconnected and among whom the frantically convinced prophets made their tour, people who walked, who were absolutely devoted to their idea, were not afraid of any martyrdom, exalted proletarians who had no property roots , in their own way, magnificent flowers of the human spirit, which served as a link between Christian communities. As these congregations grew, multiplied, so did the passionate need to define more precisely what they believed.

Who is this god? When he will come? What will he bring with him? Why can't you feel it? Why is he not among the faithful? Why isn't there a revolution? Thousands of such questions arose, and some answered them this way, others that way, but always in the spirit of the religion of the suffering god. Just as the waves of the ocean cut a stone, so the basic gospel facts were polished over time in order to later become orthodox. The ideological trait inherent in this church organization was that Christianity was entirely based on hope. This was his strength. It did not call, as Spartak called for, to fight. Christ in the gospel once asked: “How many swords do you have? - Two. - Enough!" What means? You are poorly armed, you have no swords, there is nothing to rebel! He who takes the sword will die by the sword. Not in this case. You must endure, God himself will timely intervene in your business. As I said well in one report on Christianity - expect the earth to be occupied by the heavenly red army. She will bring a revolution, and you be patient! You are weaker than a child. Christianity puts forward only one requirement - the requirement of unlimited patience. Love, give yourself and endure, endure, endure! Soon the real day will come, the day of liberation. There will be many, many calamities, the apostle says - endless, terrible calamities, but you endure: he who endures to the end will be saved.

It is very difficult to undermine such an ideology of patience. If people call for a revolution, and the revolution fails, then it is difficult to save the idea of revolution, but the idea of patience is very easy to save: this week Christ did not appear, he will come next week. A hundred years did not appear, in 200 he will come. It would just be more patience. In addition, they say so: whoever endures in this world, he settles in advance in the next world, that bliss is released in advance immediately after death.

The Christian myth takes shape: injustice clearly reigns on earth, evil prevails, an evil god, demon, devil reigns. This is clear as daylight, and later the religion of the devil, say, in the middle of the century, during the era of Calvin's reform, came to the point that God seemed a distant, almost indifferent element, and the devil, who always sits near you, seemed more important. Religion began to come down not only to believing in God, but mainly to protecting oneself from the devil, to whisper from him, to disown him. Therefore, in the first place is the devil, and then God, a god without whom hopes were in vain: a god, a heavenly king, who can make the earth his kingdom, but who does not want to. Why doesn't he want to? His ways are inscrutable, he chooses his hour. But this god, who created the whole world, seems all the more great, the more thought reflects on him. He is great, omnipotent, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. From the old religions, the proletariat could not but gradually draw these definitions of God as the absolute. But here, of course, you will not understand anything! How God could create a nasty, sinful world, if he is omnipotent and all-good, is incomprehensible. If he needed the world, then why did he not create it for a long time, and why did he suddenly create it? It is impossible to capture this god in any way. It is very difficult for the proletariat to choose an image for it. He hates the king. He would like to have a god who would be like him, like a proletarian. He would like to have such a God that they would spit in his eyes, as they spit on him, the proletarian, that he would be both God and his brother. Here you give me what God! Such a god who would be in the proletarian way, and not in the royal way. I don’t need God in the root, and since philosophy rested on the idea that there is a colossal abyss between God and the world, it was necessary to connect God and the world with a chain of angels, first very large, then smaller, which reached a spirit similar to the human soul. Between absolute light and absolute darkness there is a rainbow changing into ever darker colors. At the very top, it was necessary to fix somehow this descending chain of spirits with absolute light, to create that being who would still be quite a god, but no longer a god, who would be a god who loves the world, interested in the concrete fate of the world. God the omnipotent, omniscient absolute is always equal to himself. He can neither worry, nor think, nor love. You need such a word of God, such a mind of God, which is already similar to a person, which is a facet of an infinite, many-sided deity, turned to you - this is the son of God, a friend of God, this is the radiation of God.

He is fighting the devil. Philosophy developed such ideas; Christianity adopted them in a peculiar way. They heard how Zeus gave birth to Hercules and also performed feats and was destroyed by the enemy. They imagined Hercules as a solar deity who burns in fire, or who has his hair cut and loses his strength. This Hercules was finished off by the enemy, but God put him on his right hand. This is how the son of God should be in the opinion of a simple person. And the Jewish prophets talked a lot about the true righteous man, who will be the sufferer. But why should he endure like this - for nothing, for nothing, as a suffering righteous man, and for this, in the name of the merits of this righteous man, the world will be forgiven? When all this turns into legends, it is said that there will be such a youth who will appear not on a horse, not with a sword, not according to your master's model, but deeply offended, so righteous, so meek and so unfortunate that the most absolute god tears will flow from his eyes, and for his great merits, and for his innocent blood shed, God will forgive people, forgive for the son of man, whom he considers his son, God. Here are the paints that the proletarian could take, and he took them in all their abundance and declared that this son of God was indeed born, lived, endured, studied the very gospel that the prophets preached, was killed, died, as the god-moon dies , the sun god, the sowing god, and will rise again, as the Christian god rises. And the whole legend began to adapt so that the ideal image was obtained. Christians taught about such a god; he suffers, he dies, he is resurrected, he is in heaven, and we have come in his name. I did not see, but I was told by so-and-so who saw my brother in Jerusalem. We see gradually how the legend is changing, and finally, the image of the son of God is created in the likeness of the prophets themselves, however, the image is full of internal contradictions.

All three of the first gospels, more real, give one image of Christ, and the fourth gospel, which originated in a semi-intellectual environment, gave a different image. But simultaneously with these four gospels, ten others were written, which are called apocryphal, which the church dismissed, and which also speak of various other Christs. They are a portrait superimposed on each other, not matching, from which it is difficult to single out a genuine human physiognomy. And there is no it, this physiognomy. Some prophets interpreted the son of God by analogy with Hercules and the messiah, others gave a mystical phenomenon. I have a very negative attitude towards Rudolf Steiner, the founder of anthroposophy, but his book Christianity as a Mystical Fact has great merit simply because he, as a good mysticist, showed us how much the Christians could learn from minor mystical teachings. There were many such brotherhoods around the Mediterranean that had many myths that matched what we find in the gospels.

As a result, what happened? Something, although rather meaningless, but extremely touching and comforting.

If the proletarian were a thinker, he would immediately understand the whole strangeness of the fact that the omnipresent, omnipotent, all-good God creates the world and man, worthless, through and through sinful ...

Why did this perfect wise god create such a muck as a sinful person, and if he created it, then who is to blame? It would seem that he himself is to blame. No, they say that he is not to blame, but the man himself is to blame. If a person is tempted, and the person is to blame, and not God, then punish the person. But it turns out that he loved the world so much that he tortures his innocent son for it. It was extremely absurd, but at the same time extremely touching.

In fact, if we wanted to present this novel concretely, we would have to say - God made a terrible mistake, God is a great criminal, he looks at the world with terrible anguish, with terrible torment, which he mistakenly created, and feels his enormous responsibility for these two-legged creatures, to whom he gave consciousness, to whom he gave conscience and who torment each other, and God painfully thinks how to save them, he separates his soul, his beloved son and says - go, save if you can save - and the son goes and tries to save, comes to a real death and, continuing the romance, it must be said, he could not save, because 2 thousand years have passed, and the bipeds are just as bad, and they are still sent to hell.

The son of God came to earth in order to redeem himself with suffering, he turned out to be a preacher who went to the people, that heavenly nobleman, heavenly prince, who appeared on earth born in the family of a simple carpenter, who became a martyr and a revolutionary, but who was hanged for his propaganda and who , as a result of this, having again returned to his divine throne, from there he looks at us with great regret and love and tries to do his job of helping - all this is a very touching legend, on which a whole mass of all sorts of details can be screwed up.

Christianity, thus created and whose history I cannot follow in detail, gave birth to the struggle of the priests with the apostles and prophets. The prophets did everything and created new things. Today they came up with something, the priests admitted it, and tomorrow the inflamed imagination of the prophet invents a new fact from the life of Christ, and a conservative person who was chosen to be a deacon, stewards of property that began to accumulate, because the rich, mainly women, began to donate to the church, the presbyters, the elders, busy with the improvement, did not want heresies to appear; so that those who think differently do not cling to each other's hair, this conservative person says: we will establish once and for all what Christ was like, what he taught, and you don’t add anything more, otherwise we will never get out of disputes. This process of the struggle of the priests with the prophets, as a result, established the orthodox faith. The priests, through councils, finally established orthodoxy and declared whoever does not believe, as we have decided, is subject to condemnation! We have decreed things that cannot be understood, but that is none of your business. God is not one and not three, but one and three at the same time. Christ is neither man nor god, but man and god at the same time. The people yelled: we do not understand! “And you don’t need to understand, because man is stupid, and God is wise, and you cannot understand his truths, only a bishop can understand them.

There were heresies. Heresies were punished. When orthodoxy was established, when this slavery of thought was established, a strong ecclesiastical discipline was established, and almost the entire proletariat of the big cities was conquered by Christianity. He was joined by some sections of the petty bourgeoisie and a certain number of bar, who were looking for resurrection in Christianity, one might say, the best, most idealistic, although perhaps somewhat flabby part of the aristocracy. All this created a crowd of adherents around the proletariat, a crowd of people drawn into their orbit by this proletariat. It was a huge, extremely populous and superbly disciplined union. But he still had to live underground, fight against pagan priests, against the religion of the emperor, who to Christians seemed to be a servant of a demon, a beast from the abyss. In this underground, this discipline matured, faith in leaders matured, and the enormous power of the chief elder grew. And here is Constantine, this greatest debaucher, a cunning one, who himself converted to Christianity only a few hours before his death, when Constantine offered the clergy a deal and said: your flock obeys you, send them as soldiers to my army and say that if they fight for mine, Konstantinovo, cursed case against the cursed case of my cousins, then Christ will bless them and they will be real warriors of the church. Tell them this, make them believe it, and if you give them the opportunity to rely on the strength of your flock, I will give the support of the sword against heretics. My sword of the world against your enemy - the strength you have should be my support. I don't need the old priest, I need you, the new priest.

And the new priest made this deal. He sold his flock. He declared the imperial army to be Christ-loving, the emperor himself to be anointed with Christ, blessed his court, bureaucracy, etc., etc.

This created excellent ground for the further prosperity of all kinds of injustice. This was the greatest betrayal of the organized intelligentsia of the then proletariat. The proletariat protested, it created various heresies. They rolled far into modern times, through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Among them, some reached the revolutionary level. Here we can mention the commune of Münster. They took on the character of the Puritan movement in mid-17th century England. There were those who amazed with their patience, endured to the point of martyrdom, other, rarer sects that renounced Christian non-resistance, played a huge role in the history of mankind and were groups whose mood can be deduced from the peculiar situation of the social environment from which they were recruited. . But I won't talk about it in detail now.

Such is the essence of Christianity and, in brief outlines, its history.

Marxism, as I said in the introduction to today's lecture, is also a product of the creativity of the proletariat. It could not have arisen outside the proletariat, although the editorial staff, the great editorial staff of those ideas that the proletariat acquired in its practice, belonged to certain ideologists and heroes of this proletariat.

The difference between the position of the new proletariat and the ancient proletariat, in all its fullness, was reflected in a different approach to the world. The ancient proletariat was not only cut off from its culture, was ignorant, but culture itself was deeply anti-scientific. There was almost no science. First of all, it was accessible to very few and had no serious significance in life. On the contrary, modern capitalism is extremely interested in the development of applied knowledge. He undoubtedly contributed to the growth of scientific thought, that is, accurate observations and accurate conclusions from these observations, and the proletariat, although it received only crumbs from science, nevertheless, through the current production based on science, is incomparably more closely connected with the world of science than ancient the proletariat with the world of contemporary thought. This is what immediately ensures a different attitude of the proletariat towards the world. The current proletarian, insofar as he falls under the influence of science, is by no means inclined towards fantasy. In the formulation of questions of strict certainty, he seeks their practical solution. He rejects everything that is in the realm of nebulous divination. The socialist thought of the proletarian reached its full maturity only at the stage of scientific socialism. Socialism is a product of proletarian thought, for only the proletariat is interested in the actual implementation of socialism, but the scientific foundation under the building of socialism became possible only thanks to the flourishing of natural science and technology with the support and patronage of capitalism.

Then, not only do the present-day proletarian prophets, i.e., proletarian scientists, analyze the world as it is and where it aspires to, but moreover, the proletariat also feels that it is a force among forces. The ancient proletarian did not feel himself a force. He did not dare to think that he could break his opponents through a revolutionary uprising, if there were individual attempts, they were mercilessly suppressed. The ancient proletariat was not a particularly strong class either in numbers or in terms of solidarity. In contrast, the new proletariat in developed capitalist countries represents the majority of the population, or half of the population, or a very significant percentage not far behind the half. The organization of the proletariat is so great that even in a country like Russia, where at the beginning of the revolution the proletariat made up no more than 10% of the population, it turned out to be strong enough to group the working masses around itself and emerge as the strongest class in its country.

As a force, a revolutionary force that has risen up and overthrown the old regime, it is a destructive force. But it is not enough to destroy, one must also create, and the proletariat feels that it has the strength to create. He feels himself in a position to continue capitalist production with all its tendencies, towards greater technical power, towards ever greater organization. Having thrown the capitalists overboard, he himself leads the world along the path of further technical development. This is what makes him a creator. The current proletariat could form its worldview only in appropriate images and corresponding ideas on the basis of an accurate scientific analysis of what society is, what are the ways in which this society can be reworked in accordance with the interests of the proletariat, how to create conditions under which its victory could to ensure a truly happy existence of mankind.

Now, with this fundamental difference between the courageous, self-sufficient and self-determining spirit of the new proletariat and the lazy, parasitic and God-trusting proletariat of the old time, what similarity exists next to this contrast? Yet there is such a resemblance. Just as the old proletariat opposes itself to the world of masters, so the new proletariat opposes itself to the world of capitalists. Just as the old proletariat found that the world lies in evil, so the new proletariat finds that the world lies in evil. Just as the old proletariat is egalitarian, that is, it believes that it is necessary to strive for equality, so the new proletariat strives to create a society in which equality would be possible on earth. Just as the old proletariat had its golden age, its kingdom of God, so the present proletariat has its golden age, its own myth of the collapse of the world, its own apocalypse and its own happy outcome from this struggle. Only, for this, he does not wait for external strength, he relies on himself, he seeks the moment when the enemy will be weak enough, and his proletarian forces will be sufficiently organized to make a military attack on their enemies and independently carry out the aforementioned coup.

Of course, the future is also portrayed differently for the new proletariat and the old one, but there is also a similarity. The old proletariat recognized bliss without work. The new proletariat imagines organized, technically terribly powerful, and therefore short-lived, not painful for a person, not burdensome work. But nevertheless, there are similarities. And there a person strives to free himself from labor, and here too, but only here he strives to free himself from labor by organizing labor, by turning it into extremely concentrated, powerful labor, which would enable a person to free most of his time for other purposes not related to obtaining essentials. These are the similarities and differences in this respect.

On the other hand, we will say that the new proletariat, the Marxist proletariat, believes that this goal can be achieved only through a revolution, and through a revolution it can be very cruel, the more cruel, the greater the resistance of the enemy. But it cannot be said that the patience and peacefulness of Christianity are completely at odds with Marxism. In some forms, Christianity was rather revolutionary, and in its main body it also expected a very cruel revolution. In accordance with its feverish imagination, it pictured to itself this revolution in a more cruel form than any terror - in the form of a terrible judgment and hell. And the old proletariat did not consider itself the conductor of this punishment, this terrible judgment, but heavenly powers. From the fact that there is a certain parallel between Christianity and Marxism, it by no means follows that it is possible to create an amalgam, that it is possible to bring Christianity and Marxism closer together. No, on the contrary, any introduction of any shades of Christianity into Marxism, any striving to create Christian socialism, radically spoils the new movement. It's the same as if we say: the tractor is like a plow, it does the same job, and therefore the tractor needs to learn from the plow. It's impossible. Scientific socialism is a higher stage of development, and rudiments that have died out long ago cannot be the ingredients of this new one. We observe that wherever any Old Believer or reformed renovationist Christian ideas penetrate into the consciousness of the proletariat or the petty bourgeoisie, the peasant masses, for whose soul the proletariat is fighting, they are everywhere hostile to Marxism, and Marxism fights against these obsolete beliefs. This is a struggle for health improvement, for the creation of a powerful militant organization of the proletariat. Hence, of course, the constant conflicts along the line of our contact with all religious beliefs. Hence the struggle not only against distorted Christianity, against that ecclesiastical Christianity, against which even every genuine Christian should have to fight, for ecclesiastical Christianity is a surrender of position to the "devil", but also against genuine Christianity. When we see that genuine proletarian Christianity, and Christianity, due to the consideration that it will be easier for it to exist or due to sincere conviction, wakes up under the cover of the church, then we would have to fight this new or, rather, old and resurrecting Christianity. , and it is not known what is more harmful for us - the new Christianity, i.e. the reformed, renovationist Christianity or the old, ecclesiastical one. If one of them, by virtue of its hardened and conspicuous absurdities, is very hateful, very disgusting, then it is easier to fight against it, and Christianity is more subtle, more ethical, more revolutionary, repels us less from itself, but in in a more subtle form, the same poison seeps out, in which the last word is patience.

In this sense, Tolstoyism, as a fairly pure form of Christianity with its slogan "patience", is an eminently negative teaching. Indeed, it does not simply rest on patience, but recommends a passive struggle and directs it not only against the old world, but also against the new world. If it does not agree with us, then it disintegrates not only the White Army against us, but also the Red Army, and thus is an extremely definite enemy for us. And only his indifference and weak influence in such a fateful time as ours makes it possible to ignore him. It could raise an extremely dangerous enemy who would say: “we are communists, and we are for your ideals, but we are for this to be done peacefully, and since you took swords in your hands, we are forced to be your enemies” . They would strive for our destruction, our disintegration, and since their preaching is supposedly revolutionary, much more accessible to the lower strata than the white gendarmerie, they would corrupt our masses more than the opposite side, and could thus be direct traitors to the revolutionary movement. If this is not the case, it is because in our conflict Tolstoyism has, as it were, been obscured. Perhaps there is an even more dangerous ally who will say that he is with us. During our last conflict with England, the Renovationist Church issued a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and in addition, there was a statement from the Muslim clergy that if war broke out between Russia and England, they would bless our bayonets for abuse. We don’t need such a blessing from any side, we can do without it, but that’s not the point. There is indeed a great danger here. It turns out such a thing that it is as if this church trend is ready to go with us, as if we have no disagreements, but at the price of this what is being done? What is the difference, why these "renovationists" are not just communists? And the difference is that both God and the soul with the afterlife - all this remains a whole huge world of all sorts of prejudices, all sorts of junk that continues to occupy the human soul. This is precisely the advantage of the proletarian and his greatest realism, that he does not hope for all this, does not appeal to this, but after all, dreams of a world beyond are taught in the most active way by any, even the most updated church, they seep to us and can to paralyze our energy, to obscure that absolutely crystalline, scientific socialism, which we would like to see as the basis for the activity of the entire proletariat and the strata close to it.

Marxism has in itself such properties in the field of tactics and its ultimate ideal that Christianity cannot have. In Christianity, in some cases, in the Jesuit order, considerable flexibility, gentleness, tactical skill developed, but this amounted to opportunism.

In essence, there were well-known cunning tricks with the help of which it was possible, taking into account influential persons and the environment, being unscrupulous, flexible, crawling where it was impossible to go ahead. Marxist tactics is one of the greatest phenomena of human thought that we have ever observed on earth, for it is a wonderful creation of the will of the proletariat, which in Marxism tries to justify itself as a part of humanity, opposed to all other classes, some as an enemy, others as as an ideal leader, as a class that knows exactly what it needs and is able to lead other, less conscious groups. Here there is a tremendous tense will, and at the same time it is not for a single moment something deceiving, arising only from this will - I want it that way, I will fight, I will walk in a straight line. Marxists are often called fatalists. Marxists often say that the will plays no role, that events are created by themselves, that economic phenomena, independent of the will of individual people, are the basis that determines everything, right down to the revolutionary party and its tactics.

If Marxists go beyond determinism, aren't they the real opportunists, don't they go with the flow, don't they teach that all that remains is to obey reality? The fact of the matter is that there are not, and are constantly possible, two heresies, a direction towards leftism, when the class will is taken as the only determinant, and a deviation into Menshevism, when the natural course of events is taken as the decisive force that one has to obey. Marxism is equally far from both. He says: society, the processes that take place in it, must be studied by us objectively. True, in the future, when people will be absolutely conscious, when one person will not fight with another, one group with another, one nation with another nation, we will master our destiny and then society will make its life, fighting nature, as it will resist, but that will be when we turn into an organized whole. Now, when everyone is fighting against everyone, when groups and classes are fighting, when we have before us a chaotic process of the impact of fragmented wills, the results do not depend on consciousness, but must be calculated on the basis of objective laws, like any chaotic phenomenon. But among these wills we still have a gradually organized human will. The class itself, the proletarian class, striving for ever greater organization, discipline and consciousness, is advancing towards the leap "from the realm of necessity to the realm of freedom," of which Engels spoke. The more we organize the proletariat, which is the more influential, the more conscious its vanguard, the more confidence the Party enjoys, the more powerful its leadership, the more we hasten victory. Marx does not say that the human will means nothing. He does not say that some demons decide for us.

He says that the will of each person is determined by his position, his social environment, his interests, and therefore it is possible to say from the analysis of society who will go where, who is our enemy and who is our friend or semi-friend. This can be said easily, almost unmistakably. The will of the proletariat is determined by its position in society, and once defined as the will directed towards socialism, it acts like a force, and will act all the more, the more organized it is.

The tactics of the proletariat are as follows: to create the most organized and intense revolutionary will possible, and on the other hand, never direct it, not knowing in which shores it will flow. This is the greatest tactic imaginable, and it coincides with military tactics. Can a general say: I have created an army, I have equipped an army, I have organized an army, I have nothing to know about the position of the enemy, how many troops he has, etc.? No, he studies it in the most exact way and will not take a single step that is not determined by the maneuvers of the enemy. This is the fighting force of Marxism. That is why Marxism is so scientifically cold, so infinitely honest when it draws its conclusions, and why it is so infinitely active when it comes to organizing its army and putting it into action.

In this area, I will note: just as proletarian Christianity overgrown with the bark of its organized intelligentsia, its deacons, presbyters and bishops, who betrayed this proletariat to the prince of this world, so it exactly happened with the new proletariat. The new proletariat was also overgrown with orthodox churchness, and this orthodox churchness was by no means what is called orthodoxism. Most of all it was reformism, because it presented itself as genuine Marxism, but was the beginning of a surrender. He considered himself to be the most orthodox and claimed to be recognized by all. Leading circles appeared, taking deputy seats, sitting next to the ministers. A kind of proletarian aristocracy appeared, made up for the most part of defectors from other classes, and this upper layer began to regard Marxism as phraseology. In the imperialist war, social patriotism showed itself fully. The current proletariat, with all the maturity of its thought, with all its organization, nevertheless turned out to be on the way to go with the orthodox priests, with the Second International, to go with the whole herd to serve Constantine - Wilhelm - Nicholas. He served them, he fought for them. With the help of a whole series of sophisms, the most honest people betrayed the flesh and blood of the proletariat as cannon fodder. This danger continues. Now this orthodox clergy in the Second International, which keeps the majority of the proletariat in its orbit, continues to be a colossal danger, because with the help of Marxist phraseology it puts the proletariat under the yoke of capital. The former clergy did this, declaring: be patient! Christ endured and commanded us! Patience, that was the slogan preached by the old clergy, and the Menshevik slogan—the same patience, only under a new sauce of interpretation of Marxism as evolutionism. The time will come for a revolution, so it will come, and if it has not yet come, then there is no need to hurry. The point is not to actively organize the prerequisites for revolution, to call for revolution, to train fighting forces, but to win seats in parliament, lose them, win them again, and lose them again. The point is not to change the course of events, because that would be Blanquism. This is the second coming in the legends of Christianity. No one knows the hour and day when the bridegroom is coming, and they are also waiting, as Christians are waiting for their second coming. Just as heresies arose among Christians that restored the true Christian spirit, i.e., an irreconcilable attitude towards other classes: in no case recognize the state, in no case recognize the war - so exactly here arose the same purely proletarian, purely socialist doctrine is communism. The only difference is that at that time centuries of the triumph of the masters were revealed before the world, in the sense of their gradual metamorphosis into the feudal system, the early capitalist system and the capitalist era, and now the capitalist era has come to an end, is fizzling out, and the desire to conclude an alliance with it cannot give it nothing to the clergy of the 2nd International. They can no longer support each other. Our objective scientific analysis says that, although we also cannot accurately determine the dates, but these dates are close, and they will be all the closer, the more actively we prepare our terrible judgment, we will not wait until end to end heaven, alien economic forces or, as Christians thought, otherworldly forces, will ignite the fire of the revolution. We must ignite it ourselves, waiting for an opportune moment and, by gathering the forces of the proletariat around the banner of the Comintern and the Profintern, give the revolution a maximum of consciousness and organization.

This is a huge difference in positions. Christianity turned out to be hopeless, because it hoped for the other world, and in view of its metaphysical and mystical nature, in view of the absence of real forces in the proletariat, it had to end with the betrayal of the priesthood, which merged with the enemy.

Our Marxist inner struggle against generations parallel to Christianity is not our task. If we are fighting Christianity with one hand, then with the other hand, on a purely ideological front, we must fight our own priests, pseudo-orthodox, social democrats, who look at us as heretics, as a minority, as troublemakers, and only in the struggle the consciousness of the proletariat and peasants will be cleansed of all the prejudices of the old religion and of all the prejudices of the new superstition, the Menshevik superstition, the Menshevik betrayal, only in the struggle can we forge a genuine Marxist world outlook and genuine Marxist behavior.

The last thing I want to say in my lecture is about the ultimate ideal of Marxism. They say that in essence our goal is to get well on earth. This cannot be ignored, because this is one of the main trump cards in the hands of renewed Christians against us. These arguments can be heard from the lips of Vvedensky. He stresses that all we need is for everyone to be fed and satisfied, and this is something animal. Is that the case with us?! And the immortal soul, and the ascent to God, who is the absolute! All this sounds extremely lofty and beautiful - we are for the spiritual, as opposed to the corporeal. We look at a person as a spirit, and you will not bribe us with comfort. All these objections are nonsense. It is ridiculous that the proletarian should not attach importance to the demands of the stomach. When a person is hungry, he wants to be full, and a hungry organism can give birth to sick and strange ideas. We know that the brain must be well nourished, and then what we call a healthy spirit, clear and light, manifests itself.

Material improvement is a simple premise to develop in life; it is necessary that, first of all, a person should not suffer from lack of space, from lack of food, from illness, etc. - and how absurd it is to say to the patient: “what an eccentric you are, instead of thinking about the greatest goals, you think about your disease," so here it is absurd to say that we only care about being fed. It is necessary to cure human poverty, depravity and ignorance, it is necessary to correct, cure, free from all this a person so that he can set himself real goals in order to achieve those riches that a person needs for further development. Marx, in an article on "Ricardo and Malthus," tells us that their cause is the ultimate criterion for socialists - it is the growth of wealth for mankind. You will say, says Marx: this is something dry, but here is human wealth. Human wealth is not understood formally. The wealth of a socialist society means the possibility of the maximum development of all the forces inherent in man. This is what we set as a certain ideal. To create such an environment on earth in which a person can develop into the most diverse, powerful and perfect being - this is our ultimate ideal. The thoughts and feelings of man must develop immeasurably, many-sidedly, surpass the present thought, as it surpasses the thought of the animal. This is our desire for the superman, but not according to Nietzsche, but the desire of man himself, freed from the yoke of struggle and internal exploitation, to be what he should be, what everyone wants to be. Have strong muscles and strong nerves. After all, when the body functions correctly and powerfully, this means that a person is enlightened, logical, that horizons that we cannot imagine have opened before him. We are looking for free powerful rationality, we are looking for complete perfection, complete happiness, and this is possible only when hostility disappears from us, when man becomes a brother to man, and only a common economy can provide each of the brothers with all the possibilities of full development. One determines the other. In order to achieve this, we need to overcome, we need to trample down those obstacles that are built in front of us by the egoistic will, egoistic groups and classes, whose interests impel them to fight against the achievement of these ideals of ours. Hence the direct task of waging that struggle illuminated by Marxist tactics, which I have described above to you. Marxism, in the sense of the ultimate object, in the sense of the height of the ideal, is not afraid of competition with Christianity. He is practical, he is sober, he is fighting, and this is his enormous difference from priestly Christianity. The only thing he does not promise you, and what Christianity promises, is the afterlife and the immortality of your soul. Here, I would say, is the weak point of socialism. When we address this sermon not to the proletarian, but to the intellectual, the intellectual rushes about with his personality, he has little in common with “we”, the consciousness of the collective, he easily throws out such a phrase as the great Herzen used: “What do I care about my grandchildren."

My own experiences, my own self, my own happiness are important to me, and of course, if you think like that, then you can say that the greatest process by which we will come to the desired life, it leaves me indifferent. It is important for me that I have a soul that, after a terrible death, will have some other fate.

This can only be answered in this way: a person is often powerless against his own vices, his own ugliness. Egoism, the desire to evaluate everything from the point of view of one's personality, is a vice, a deformity of the petty-bourgeois consciousness. But a healthy proletarian goes to the Red Army to fight in the forefront, does not spare himself in this struggle, and if you ask him, what does it give you? - he will say: “this gives me the greatest joy, the joy of consciousness that I participate in the general construction. Why think that I will not taste the fruits of this construction? For me, the consciousness that I am participating in this construction is already salvation. As for a Christian there is hope for the afterlife, so for me salvation lies in the fact that I contribute to the growth of the future.

He who does not know how to feel like this, who is in solitary confinement of his own jacket, cannot think like that, and you cannot fool him on this chaff. He will say: what is the next generation? Are you inviting me to be a dung beetle for the coming generation? I don't want it. I seek the immortality of the soul.

As for us, we have an unshakable conviction, based on science, that we will receive a reward in this life. Even those who have to drag out a difficult existence receive this award because they really feel like builders.

But people who rely on the immortality of the soul not only actually rely on illusion, they hang in the air with their old prejudices, the origin and development of which science has completely clarified, but they actually constantly doubt this, and I am deeply convinced that that, except for those who stand at the level of savages, all others, i.e., those of whom we are talking, those whose consciousness we want to win, do not really believe in this, but only try to believe, and an example of this is Tolstoy, who constantly writes in his diary “today I don’t believe” and who trains himself to believe. And such is the fate of every intelligent person. I have an immortal spirit. He is important to me. How can I arrange my spirit so that when they take me to the cemetery, it can live and develop? From time to time the believing intelligentsia says to itself: what if this is not so, if this is not true? What if I'm really deluding myself? And then she stands in front of the hole and clings all the more to her soul because, moving away from her soul, she sees nothing but a pessimistic picture of a bleak life, and she vacillates between the deceptive light of her false faith and emptiness, when life seems like a crypt. And we say to such people: maybe you will try to understand us, maybe you will try, by joining the appropriate organizations, by working on yourself, to comprehend what that bright confidence in a tremendous sense is, which life receives in conscious work, which can illuminate everyone. an hour of our life, and you will understand that you are not rich, but we are rich, for we conquer this death, this coffin, we conquer because our treasure is not connected with our mortal body, but is connected with what is higher than the body and what is imperishable can be passed down from generation to generation. And if one's own scripture were understood as it should be, then you would understand that the proletarian who dies for his friends really gives his life for them. When he says: I don’t believe in my soul, I don’t need an immortal soul, but I want to give the one that I have, so that a human thought ignites with a more magnificent light - whoever says this helps his own “I” he survived, and whoever does not want to give his soul, who clings to his soul, destroys his soul, he closes himself and finds himself in the desert, where he falls asleep with the sand of superstition and disappears without a trace.

To summarize, comrades, I will say that Christianity at the present time must be recognized as dead, unnecessary for the proletariat. It is the product of the creativity of the ancient proletariat, the parasitic proletariat. We meet this product of the proletariat in a rotten, distorted form in today's church. Restoring the old spirit of Christianity is a waste of time. We now have another proletariat, a militant proletariat, which is the true, collective messiah, called to save the world. Christianity has outlived its time, the proletariat is now at a different stage than it was 2,000 years ago. This time, the proletariat sees itself in true science, its goal is to bring true truth to the world, and it goes itself and leads others to the realization of this truth, not to the kingdom of God, but to the kingdom of man, reason and justice.

Moscow 1923.

Publishing house "Krasnaya nov".

Glavpolitprosvet, Milyutinsky per., 22.