AGAINST MARXIST MESSIANISM.

Important New (very largely) Statement from Tendance Coatesy.

NOTES ON RELIGION

“Tout commence par la mystique et tout finit en Politique.”

Everything starts in mysticism and ends in politics.

“la mystique ne soit point dévorée par la politique à laquelle elle a donné naissance.”

Mysticism must not be devoured by the politics to which it gave it birth.

Notre jeunesse. Charles Péguy. (1910)

“Did Péguy kill Jaurès? Did he incite

the assassin? Must men stand by what they write

as by their camp-beds or their weaponry

or shell-shocked comrades while they sag and cry?”

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Geoffrey Hill. (1)

Does Christianity in its “fabulous unreality” contains “love, hope and faith, beyond the realm of the state and of authority?” Was Jesus the bearer whose message may yet bring “Utopian light on the problem of universal alienation and its cure?” To Ernst Bloch the real Christ was less important than what he was, has been, and is seen to be. Standing at the gateway of Time. The revival of this Messianic thread in Marxism – the belief that communism is woven in the pattern of religious tapestry – needs materialist critique. Starting from the Herald of Good News. Yet, it is widely accepted, that we will never end the Quest for the Historical Jesus. That is, the search, carried out by sceptics such as David Strauss, and, later by Ernest Renan as thoroughly by Christians as dedicated as Albert Schweitzer, for the ‘real’ history of the Messiah, peeled away from all the idolatry, superstitions and myths of centuries. Or – without a purely theological (critical, that is) excursion into how to begin to conceptualise the Life, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection – to even approach the issue of what this means. Or grapple with what God presented, in believers’ minds – across the ages. One should, as a materialist, surely refuse to separate wholly the areas of what we can know about the Messiah and what his Crucifixion signified theologically. The documents we have, the witnesses collected in the New Testament, and the context, the culture and social structure of the time, are rich enough to sustain the voyage of many present and future quests. We shall only try to keep our journey on one path. That is we can start in one of its dimensions: the historical record of how Christianity became a Church, the moments when profane existence took up a picture of the Divine and built an institution around it. For an influential strand of thought, portraying Messianism and eschatology, within Christianity, above all in Saint Paul, that there is a relation (hidden through many dark glasses) between the “living hope” of the Resurrection-Event, followed by the Second Coming (Parousia) and “invariant communism.” And that by probing these mysteries (set down by Badiou, Amabgan, Žižek and others), that, we may discover Toni Negri’s “religion without God”? Or, as John Roberts asserts, “Marxists have to become messianists in order to live and struggle and organise in the here and now.”

That the Church was founded from, and (as it compromised) against, a vision and practice of Communism is normally made in far less abstract terms – ones that might even be grasped by the poor themselves. This has a long popular history. One that results partly from traditional feeling that religion preached equality not just of souls, but also of conditions. Another source was Biblical criticism which, amongst many topics, talked of the sharing of resources of the early Church faithful, described in Acts. Ernest Renan, the late 19^th century critic and conservative republican, was one of those. He claimed in La Vie de Jésus (1863) that Jesus’ doctrine was that “les pauvres (ébionim) seules seront sauvés, que le règene des pauvres va venir” (the poor (ebionim) alone will be saved, and the rule of the poor was coming). That even within Christianity this idea persisted, as “un levan” (yeast) never lost. This is widely accepted, often for its own mythic quality rather than its tested historical accuracy. Karl Kautsky in his pioneering Marxist study, The Foundations of Christianity (1904) stated that of the early Christians that “the community had been permeated by an energetic though vague communism, an aversion to all private property, a drive toward a new and better social order, in which all class differences should be smoothed out by division of possessions.” The English socialist Belford Bax, in his History of British Socialism (1919) described Christianity as “a religion of the lowly and humble it came into the world, endowed with the sentiment that communism was capable of raising economic life to a high moral level.” More recently the idea has crept in that religious fervour contains within it deeper, germs of communism, that the Kingdom of God, as proclaimed by the Son of Man was a mythologised projection of what was at root a materialist striving. That, put simply, the theory is that Christianity (and all religion?) contains, amongst other things, a communist impulse. This claim turns on its head the idea that Communism is a distorted religious urge: faith possesses revolutionary elements always beyond the grasp of the state and authority. To put it another way, using a Christian simile, it as if the passing of the seasons of the religious world bear witness to the operations of the Communist Spirit. (2)

The early 20^th century French writer Péguy marked well the outlines of this view. For him, against both the ‘bourgeois’ atheism and secularism of the French state and his anti-clerical opponents on the left, and clericalism itself, Christianity, with its centuries of charity, had once been rooted in the people’s egalitarian needs. Could this be revived? To the utmost degree: a real social revolution would be the “mystérieux assujttissment de l’éternal même au temporal.” (the mysterious subordination of the eternal itself to the temporal). Péguy, the emerging lyrical Christian revolutionary (and future ultra-nationalist) was but one influential and talented poet of politics and faith amongst a host of others. From his epoch, the Gospel has inspired layers of ethical Christian social democrats who pullulated in the Second International and the first Labour parties, above all in Britain, connecting to an older conservative tradition of Christian social-ism. From the former we have the ‘personalist’ current, present today on the Catholic left, influential through the French journal, Esprit. Its founding thinker, Emmanuel Mounier, defended human rights within the Church, and outside, announcing, not without gravitas and true meaning, that the task of such Christians (who centred upon the person, not eternity) was to make both socialism and the holy institutions democratic and equalitarian. By contrast, the latter tradition of religious socialism was based on the equality of all in spirit, but in the founding writings of John Maurice, Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, they supported the proper hierarchy of society, provided it was due to merit in an organic ‘social’ order. Neither strand is much discussed on the Anglophone Marxist left. However, in France and other Latin countries personalism has an important influence, extending to this left; here Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are Maurice and Kingsley’s direct ideological descendents.

Radical Christian movements are, by contrast, frequently flagged. The rise of Liberation Theology, which offers a more radical ‘Gospel of the poor’ for the temporal realm, is often cited as incontrovertible proof of how Christianity can be progressive. Social issues take greater precedence, but Christian love still permeates a life of dedication to Justice. And not far behind, to the message of the Cross. On this strand of the left, critical distance from the religious establishment, combines with belief in the popular aspirations of religion. That is, in the theory of the ‘two churches’, the one of the poor, objectively fighting for social justice, the other, of the state and the wealthy, holding them down. Engels wrote of Early Christianity and socialism that, “Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society.” Others, have developed Engels’ observation that early Christians were waiting not for a social transformation, by the millennium.” They have suggested that we can find, as with, say medieval millennialist movements, such as the German Peasant revolt led by Thomas Müntzer, religiously expressed protests against class oppression. And that in their distress the way out for the “enslaved, oppressed and impoverished” was not only in salvation in the afterlife, but an apocalyptic reign of Justice here and now.

Terry Eagleton claims that the Christian message shows that the Gospel’s vision is “not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new – of a regime so revolutionary as to surpass all image and utterance, a reign of justice and fellowship which for the Gospel writers is now striking into this bankrupt, dépassé, washed up world.” At the same time he has noted that the Gospel of Saint Mark is both a witness of a “revolutionary act” – the Crucifixion, in which “faith flows from the powerless” but that “The Kingdom of God to early Christians was a gift of God, not a work of history”. That Jesus’ disciples could not more bring about the kingdom of God by their own efforts than socialism for deterministic Marxists can be achieved by intensified agitation.” Nevertheless, according to many, the Faith that “the powerless can come to power” can become caught up in history, as belief in inevitable events requires at some point a last push to help it come into being. Even the most deterministic Marxist, of course, equally, considers that at some point socialism needs a final effort to spring into existence. This then is the Robert’s “politics of the chiliastic.” To be learnt from. This may be taken in a mild form: that in working for this moment Christianity can inspire worldly movements for social justice, inspired by the very wish for eternal life that Engels thought diverted them from improving this one. Yet one cannot exclude the prospect, common amongst these Apocalyptic movements, from Müntzer’s Anabaptists onwards, that seized by the fervent “metonia, or conversion” common in such groups, that a more lengthy ‘transition period’ to the Kingdom is fought for, in which the prophetic Messiahs, reign the world, driving out or exterminating unbelievers.

Such a perspective can, naturally, with a degree of adaption, be applied to any religion. So we have, under the generous banner of progressive social protest, Shi’ite followers of the reign of the Twelfth Imam (to Alistair Crook who have “stepped beyond the shortcomings of Western material consciousness”), Unitarian Alter-globalisers, Buddhist human rights activists, and Jewish protestors for global righteousness, Hindi peace campaigners, and Pagan Green anarchists. They key, for Eagleton, is that here there is a “commitment and allegiance” “faith in something” – not the “inherently atheistic” advanced capitalist system. Even without such a parti pris many, following Ernest Bloch, have a belief that there is something precious to be gleaned from the religious corpus: an inherent utopian striving for a better world. That it is not just fractious conflict but the nature of how we picture an improved world that lies there, in however odd a form. Many on the left have drunk from this well, not to mention other, even doctrinal, aspects of religions and esoteric faiths. Such as the Russian early 20^th century God Seekers, who spoke of a Third Testament, and their rival God Builders, like Lunacharsky, who made the forces of production the Father, the proletariat the Son and scientific socialism, the Holy Ghost. Today’s Messianic Marxists are in crowded company in their search for Delivery from our Vale of Tears. (3)

The theory of the ‘two churches’ then is a common belief. Though that of the eschatological seeds of the Church of the oppressed is much less widely shared. Where does it begin? If religion ever succeeded in attracting followers through a picture of genuine leap into the beyond, and was thoroughly imbued with the Eschatological picture of the Coming End Days, here and now, one such picture emerged amongst the early Christians. Whether signalled by the Son of God, the Son of Man, the story of how this was adapted, domesticated, and became transferred to a more orderly picture of inner change; a life in God within this world, while storing up treasures in Heaven, is highly complex. We will see that Engels (and his countless followers) were too hasty to describe the journey of Christianity as one of support from the oppressed to (quasi-venal) incorporation into the state – this lacks both a mechanism to explain the change and an accurate class analysis of its support. For the former area, a radical Christian, deeply informed about the historical sources, this change managed “the maintenance of the tension (of that is the appropriate goal) between the vision of the new creation and the necessity of living life in the old aeon.” Ultimately Christianity emerged through a conflict between the “real world” and the “radical practice of Jesus”. That is an internal ideological evolution predicated on the existence of a Church facing up to its own need to sustain itself in a world without visible signs of God. We should not however, forget that Engels and the believers in the Church of the poor, betrayed by its surrender to Rome, that to some Christianity always stood up for the existing order. To G.E.M. Ste Croix, each side showed “complete indifference, as Christians, to the institutions of the world in which they lived.” A fact that “prevented Christianity from even having much effect for good upon the relations between man and man.” Marx himself indicated that Christianity “justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages…” Or that there remain other possibilities. Some might refuse to choose. That there are those, whose like Kierkegaard, who considered the journey to faith as something entirely different, beyond ethics (that is, human rules) an ‘absurd’ choice for the infinite, is clear. They remind us that the whole process begins with belief in something beyond normal rational explanation.

Not everyone agrees that Christianity was either initially radically opposed or subsequently indifferent to its own incorporation into the Roman system of rule, for human betterment or otherwise. Theologians and scholars have offered countless fascinating accounts of what is one of the most interesting eras, the founding of a new religion – when all these choices, social, class, constraints and reflections were intermingled. From these readings we can largely see that there was never a clear, final resolution of this tensions, either by surrendering to the Roman state, or faith-absorbed standing-aside, but rather a process of contradictory absorption in the political world. One in which issues of abstract philosophy (speculation about the ultimate nature of the world, and humanity) were worked out through the emergence of a religious current that became a form of counter-society, and then, an establishment, which through negotiations and Councils, became an official adjunct (in, again, deeply complex ways) of the State in late antiquity. In the process becoming a different obstacle to political and class liberation, far more profound, than suggested by most modern atheists. That, to follow, A.C. Grayling, “Religion is a man-made device, not least of oppression and control (the secret policeman who sees what you do even in the dark on your own), whose techniques and structures were adopted by Stalinism and Nazism, the monolithic salvation faiths of modernity, as the best teachers they could wish for.” The problem is that the emergence of Christianity, often accompanied by, despite what Grayling asserts, great acts of kindness, was to seal in a box the human capacity for relating politically, and to transpose the critical wish for a better world into ways that could never be resolved in the human City except by this force. It was its investment of these ideas into the life before death, not in its wishes for the eternity beyond, that hurt the most.

This is a vast area. But for us the important elements can be brought into some focus. What was one principal feature of the Jesus movement? If there was an illumination of the divine, it proceeded vertically, through contact with the Godhead, and if he had a prophetic content it would be realised, horizontally, through, initially the looming prospect of the Last Days. Thus the Gospel was, from inception, differently received. It was factionalism: the divisions that ran throughout the creation of orthodoxy, the definition of heresy, and the setting up of mechanisms, institutions and powers that defined the nature of Christianity. Far from overwhelming human beings with a sense of the Divine, the faith began with splits. This made its presence known at the start, during the process by which the Christians separated themselves from Judaism, in the Corinthian and Jerusalem churches, in the expansion of the movement across the Roman Empire, and the absorption, and confrontation with classical culture. We can align these processes to the real class and social contexts which led to the institutionalisation of the Church through suggesting plausible mechanisms.

Kautsky offered one. Without the Kingdom of God on Earth, “The Church could not therefore suppress the antagonism between rich and poor, but instead she made of it a new social antagonism. In its origin, her organisation was democratic and her functionaries were elected by the members of the community. But as the Church grew and her wealth increased, her functionaries – the clerics – became more independent. The constitution of this authority is the social condition inherent to all collective religion..” (My emphasis) These are bound to depend on general explanations about religion’s relation to social processes, and, from lack of detailed documentation, much depends on interpretation and contextualisation of the process, not the kind of solid data that, say Marx, used to develop a concrete account of how Capital operates. This development of Christianity through doctrinal conflict began before there were any real institutions; they were the founding of them. If there was a change between the early hope for a world transformed, Eschatology into the Pauline acceptance of the transformation in the present by inner illumination, these were not crude opposition between the ‘revolutionary impulse’ and the ecclesiastical Order. But for all that, one things is fairly well established in mainstream accounts, Paul was not concerned with the immanent arrival of the Apocalypse, his transcendent framework was firmly bound to the relation between the believer and God, now.

Not that order was irrelevant. A key moment was when the late Roman Emperor, Theodosius, in the 381 CE Constantinople Synod, imposed the orthodox creed through state power, the hoomusion (of the same substance) doctrine of the Trinity. That is that God, the Son and the Holy Spirit co-existed, different, but identical. This set the seal on the efforts to suppress all alternative versions of Christianity, and sounded the death-kneel of tolerance of Greco-Roman ‘Paganism’ and any non-Christian faith (Manicheism, the belief the world was ruled by Two Deities, was probably its first victim). Not did this spiral of many-sided changes end with this version of the Nicene Creed. It has continued. The density of this process has struck many modern accounts, as well as parallels between the Jesus movement and contemporary cults. Many modern writers think so, providing that we grasp that word (Cultus – worship) more accurately, embracing a range of introverted, revolutionary, magical, reforming groups. Or as we, more realistically, would call them, sects, factions, and tendencies and, in sum, splinters.

Is it there, in the early years, that we can find the origins of a conflict between materiality and religious belief, and a reflection on how division in one sphere (faith) can cross over into – interact with – another (politics)? Did the reign of Orthodoxy, as Ste Croix alleges, set up an ingrained diversion from social issues? That, “I doubt if a better means could have been devised of distracting the citizens of the class struggle from thinking about their own grievances and possible ways of remedying them than representing to them, as their ecclesiastical leaders did, that religious issues were infinitely more important than social, economic or political ones, and that it was heretics and schismatics (not to mention pagans, Manicheans, and Jews) upon whom their resentment could be most profitably be concentrated.” Or was Christianity divided within itself, and that those who took the road to the State were capitulating and abandoning their commitment to resolve matters of injustice, poverty and oppression? That despite this, the institutional carapace covered a perpetually unstable ‘second Church’ with more generous human ambitions, and a utopian zest for God’s justice on Earth? A third possibility that the religious dimension of human society contains both utopianism and craving for institutional recognition; they are not diversions but part of the architecture of (all previously known) social formations. These lend themselves to being drawn into irreconcilable differences about ultimate being, that spread intolerance and suppression when taken up in the political realm, may attempt to link the two claims, without satisfying supporters of either. Or, they may find themselves welded into a relatively stable social form, in the apparatus that ensures social cohesion – up to the point when it cracks open again. The history of subsequent religious dissension better illustrates its nature than the idea that at its core belief in God contains something good, a ‘rational kernel’ hidden behind its hieroglyphics.

To explore what this means needs some guiding thread. We might usefully invert and take over a strand within Karl Barth’s theological ‘actualism’. Instead of following Barth and seeing history as a series of God’s action that shape reality, as we have known it, we might see Church History through the angle of how God came to be considered existent. That is that the presence of religion in history is not only the outcome of its relations with the wider social (class and political) structures that lay down the ties that ultimately place it in different social forms. But that it has its own internal dynamic – as a set of ideological signifiers. Thus, to give one instance, there is dialectic between forms of orthodoxy and heresy which far from offering a space for liberation, is a rent in the fabric of social being without any rational and progressive goal. Or that the process of recognising the State was not just a matter of self-interest but had its own dynamic doctrinally and institutionally, with the relation between knowledge and power, accumulating ideological hegemony as much as political and financial capital. Or more generously, and perhaps obviously, pursuing what the Church indeed claimed to do (however falsely) to save human souls.

Falvius Josephus’ (37 – C.100 CE.) History of the Jewish War places 1^st century inter-Hebrew conflicts within the wider clash with 1^st century Roman Rule. That is, not only were there religious differences, different groupings (from Pharisees and Sadducees, to cult-like groups like the Essenes, the presumed authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls). Writers on theology have often discussed the importance of the Jewish Eschatological tradition (visions of the last days) during this period. To Christopher Rowland the first century saw an “increase in the yearning for deliverance of the people of God, such as were told in the Scriptures.” That “the period when the early Christian movement emerged was one which favoured the utopian dreamer..” From Albert Schweitzer onwards those who based their Messiah in history considered fundamental his debt to the visions of the Book of Daniel as prophecies of the coming of God’s Kingdom that had been taken over by Jesus and his followers. There was therefore a cauldron of religious discontent, in which Christianity, post Christ, emerged. This area is not easy for a non-specialist to understand. However¸ this fractiousness, if obscurely located, and hard to grasp in our terms, sets a standard for vicious religious in-fighting. Before looking therefore at the deeper issues of the underlying theological – in fact ontological (beliefs about ultimate being) – views of Christianity-in-formation, might this capacity for division be of great significance? We have suggested that politics is based on stasis (a striving for upsetting order, feuds that run up against institutions that try to suppress/contain it – not the medical use of the term which means, confusingly, a constant state, a stoppage).). That the epic struggles of religion, above all that of Christianity, are often said to set down the blueprint for modern European political and social currents, tendencies, factions, sects and cults, and to have extended from that across the world into many other political cultures (formally in institutions, informally, through cultural globalisation) goes to its heart. Or that they have at least left a heavy imprint (however written over, and re-stamped), as the last two words indicate, one which is in effect changed – but how? What then are the differences and similarities at work here?

What exactly is there in these multiple histories that indicates such a path? One that starts in a visions and books, lives of preaching and conversions, building institutions, and warding off enemies and binding together disciples and appears to be undergoing a revival, whose effects are felt today. A world whose origins, it is often claimed, have been distorted for us by hundreds of years of institutionalised religion to the point where only a kind of leap into the beyond can even hope to grapple with the nature of the original messages of these believers. We may speculate that much of the dispute took place about a realm whose time Frank Kermode has described as truly alien to rationalist categories “Its predictions, though figurative, can be taken literally, as the future moves in on us we mat expect it to conform with the figures.” That signified that “the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life, have it also, as a beneficiation from the End, now immanent.” We have noted that this structure of feeling did not last, at least dominantly, as the most pressing concern of Christians – relegated to Gnostics, and eventually suppressed, eschatology was transformed into soteriology. The most registered fact remains that all these early doctrines, visions, and eschatological desires were eventually channelled into (or half contained by) institutions, whether post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism, or, as we will look at, the nascent Christian Church. This itself changed. The tangible, nunc movens of time and matter, from which Kermode suggest couriers from the Mind of God, Eternity, eventually appeared in the form of Angels rather than bolts that shook the foundations of the Roman state.

What did this imply about the growing Christian community’s ideological glue? The present Archbishop of Canterbury well describes the theological side of the process across a wide sweep of time, “Jesus is active in the corporate life of the Church what he gives to human beings, he gives in significant part through the mediation of the common life, which is itself his ‘body’ his material presence in the world, though it does not exhaust his identity or activity. To be incorporated into the community by its imitation rite is to become a ‘bearer’ of what Jesus has to give to other believers, to be entrusted with his renewing or creative agency by means of a ritual setting aside of ordinary; identity.” However, this still neglects the fully human aspect, how the religion came to be through its material practice. Most importantly Christianity became a State doctrine. During most of history Christianity has, in the process, nevertheless, been distinct from Theocracies (states ruled by Priests, or religious law-givers) by its relative separate place in the regime of power and truth of which it is, nevertheless, a pillar. Does this not indicate something about the complex character of the social nature of religion? That we have the foreground of how stasis plays out in the sphere of civil society, how faith, the belief in the transmundane, and the political sphere of the mundane, both bear the same fundamental fissiparous destabilising elements? That they are related through their mutual tendency to shape social arrangements? Or, by contrast, that this incorporation, negotiation or, simply, sell-out, to politics, can be fought? Indeed for some leftists there is common ground here, in the dissidence the political aspirations of the Kingdom of God that is valuable. That is, in Ernest Bloch’s words, a “utopian potentiality”. That “When atheism drove out the hypostatised reality of Lord and Master from the topos of the ‘divine’, it opened up this topos to revive the one and only final mystery, the pure mystery of man. In Christianity, and even post Christum, this mystery is called our Kingdom.”

The realm of the Church, however, is much more visible. And its history is one in which the mysteries of God are less odd, perhaps endorsing a rather cruder proof of Ludwig Feuerbach’s opinion that the faith owed a great deal to projections of human characteristics onto the infinite. Those dedicated to the anointed one, Christ, who unfolded the Word, or was the Word, shifted their gaze. Whether there was an ‘original violently loving God’ or not, or that this image is an appropriate one outside of a very particular theological take, we have plenty of evidence that he inspired many angry exchanges about his Nature. These definition may escape our comprehension s they wander into infinity, but what guided their doctrinal success is all too human. It may be said, anachronistically no doubt, that it is the ideological intensity and the organised caucuses, fervid meetings, writings and Councils about the phrases they used that provide an easy comparison with modern politics, from street agitation to lobbies and Parliaments. Not to mention the relative fluidity and a degree of equality (however formal and temporary) between disputants – something whose genesis is beyond the reach of Emperors and Sovereigns (until the Papacy became its own religious Sovereignty). Its unity was/is the Body of Christ (Romans 12:4,5); the Church was made as a gathering, defined by a ritual (sacramentum) that celebrated its participation in the corpse of the Lord through the Eucharist. Many of Christianity’s divisions as it took off as a religion in the first half of the first millennium occurred over the nature of that frame, its Human or Divine nature. Further back the split over the body was more direct; Saint Paul’s faction clashed with the more orthodox Jesus congregation, Jewish Christians over the flesh, in this instance about the need for circumcision. To Rowland, “The period of the Law had come to an end with the cross, for the crucifixion of the Messiah had effectively shown that he Law was never intended as a means of salvation, but as witness to the glory to come. The cross is to be understood as the gateway to eschatological glory for Christ and ultimately for believers. Its stands before humanity as a scandal, representing a moment of crisis.” A great deal of Paul’s letters are concerned with the dominance of faith and spirit over traditional Judaism, and extended it to an appeal to overcome the whole heritage of the orthodox Law, in the Torah and Talmudic exegesis. “ ..if it be true that that God is one…he will therefore justify both the circumcised in virtue of their faith, and the uncircumcised through their faith.” (Romans 3:30) As Karl Barth and others have commented, this is not a trivial matter, but one negotiated through a sense of how the Kingdom of God became not, an apocalyptic immediate possibility, but the way in which the Christian concept of the Lord entered the faithful, by grace. Israel and the synagogue are in a state of “unnatural disobedience” by their refusal to accept the Saviour.

It is hard, though an enormous amount of effort has been put into revealing these early years of Christian proselytism and growth, to reconstruct the primal division within the Jesus movement between those who continued to behave as Jews (in the sense of fully observing the Torah’s Law) and Paul’s burgeoning Christ-group. Christ may have been a Messianic figure amongst others, a Bringer of news about the coming Apocalypse, or a teacher of ethics, but in each case he is marked off not by what he was (peeled away as if we could ‘see’), but by how his Being became Embodied in the Church. The Gospel must have been open to the Gentiles, the issue was whether, how or if, a conversion should accommodate to Jewish customs. A frequent way – taken now by believers as well as those who claim neutrality – is to describe the organised form of the religious groundswell is in terms of ‘factional’ differences in the broadest sense (two groups within one not fully defined movement). Or, to consider Paul, for example, as an Organiser of a movement, come organised sect – with factions inside and decidedly bizarre cults just outside. As a mixture of charismatic enthusiast and pragmatic (up to a point) community leader. Evidence for them as truly rival organised forces lies in sparse recorded doctrinal distinctions. Outside the Canon we have obscure references in the writings of the Apostolic fathers, such as Ignatius’ letters ((early second Century), to uprooting heresies, whose full identity (whether remaining Law-bound Judaisers, or followers of Docetism – Christ was not really human, or other groups) remains a matter of dispute. Or to get more than a glimpse of all the other variant beliefs that soon sprung up in contact with the movement. Not much other than glimpses of how these messages were more widely received. Doctrinal disputation was a feature of ancient world Judaism which Christianity carried on, but the very process of breaking from that religion would have allowed it to assume a different character. (4)

But more significantly this might be said to herald a basic change in ancient politics. Religion began not to be treated as something fixed by birth and tradition that by unexamined right illuminated a community’s whole culture. It became an area both aside from and part of it. The emerging faith community of choice (or self-election), Christianity, upset social arrangements by claiming to decide anew all the rules. Here, instead of previous disagreements about policy, or fights between rival organised factions based on clan, ethnic and class interests, we have disputes about universal claims to link the mundane to the transmundane. Moral behaviour and worship were matters for discussion together. These received a test in the form of disputes about their truth. In principle these affect everybody, but only those who believe can take part in making decisions. So we find significant marking points: arrangements for organising social order that appear in Christian (and other religions’) history that shaped the foundations of modern politics. The Christians, whatever the exact character of their ideas, opened up a new mechanism for large areas of social order, one based on Revelation which simultaneously appeared as solid as a rock (Scripture), and as shaky as a Rocking Horse (Interpretation). Suppression of heretical beliefs was not unique to Christianity (as ancient Persia indicated) but what is highlighted here is that the drift back to absolute freedom of interpretation remained a permanent possibility. However theoretical. Having grasped the political mettle, as will be seen, to resolve differences which, even if only indirectly, after all, affected the state and public sphere, it is hardly surprising that this tool remained in use. History does not show many examples of those who make claims of absolute truth depriving themselves, when available, of the weapons of coercion. In contrast to both to the Jewish notion of the Chosen People the victorious religious Truth (initially merely theoretically, later administratively) was applicable to reshaping the fabric of everyday life of everyone. In a difference of lesser degree, the ethical turn of late antiquity’s philosophical schools (Epicureans and Stoics), to the ‘care of the self’, this became a matter of the duties of the self to God’s Revealed Word. When the legal apparatus of the State was in play we can see how factionalism developed, over what this revelation was, and from synods to strenuous efforts to end them by state repression, there are indications here of a gamut of responses that politics has yet to have done with.

From its genesis, Christianity, Paul had clearly not settled its doctrine around the Resurrection or the Spirit. It did not present a fixed internally consistent truth In its disentanglements from Post-Temple Judaism we learn of disagreement already emerging over the justification of faith by works, or by grace alone, present in the New Testament’s texts themselves, and of the different conceptualisation of Jesus’ Godhead (listed below). One area stands out against the entire modern Marxist (?) Messianistic interpretation of Saint Paul In the absence of the Second Coming, and an only partially stabilised textual Canon, dissension would be rife if ultimate issues of religion were examined in any detail. There was no way, short of the actual creation of the Kingdom of God on Earth, to settle any matter of debate other than by purely human means; the different sides had no intrinsic proof of their rightness outside of their hearts. As a result Christianity hatches, from its beginnings, differences. Tertullian in the Second Century emphasised the role of tradition and the apostolic succession in defining ‘true’ – orthodox – belief (against the existence of apocryphal texts). Describing the process of reaching certainty Origen writing in the 3^rd Century, when the practice must have been relatively codified, listed three main ways of reading Scripture, through its ‘body’ (immediate meaning) its ‘soul’ (analogously) and through its ‘spirit’ (images of heavenly things). These remain signposts to the fact that there could be no fixed reading, or creed, other than of human creation. All the apparently seamless system of signs that bound our world to the ‘other’ existence of the Divine, cracked when people began to weigh the merits of different accounts of that revealed Being. That far from being a negative side to the process of factionalising – or simply differences of opinion – was a part of the general upsetting, or what we can call the specific stasis of religious order, which has ensured that one can never achieve beyond the Self the welding of the world at hand with the beyond. Despite the wishes of some philosophers and theologians that is. Or rather, that only force and strongly governed ideology and culture can construct a consensus at the base of any society around a Faith. In La Fontaine’s meaning, the logic of the strongest wins out. Which, historically, has been as great a part of the legacy of Christianity to politics as all its other aspects, from its opening of the gap to a secular existence, since the Church is ultimately based on a beyond that always escapes exact definition – Barth’s famous absence of a secure bridge to either the full meaning of the Gospel or to the living God, to its detailed culture and morality. To Slavoj Žižek its universalism cut against was a miraculous Event that disturbs the balance of pagan ontologies that assimilate the human into the “One-All” by positing difference. This can be put a lot more simply. That Christianity set up a difficulty (how to connect the to the universal) and then has spent two thousand year trying to resolve it. So that what we will look at is not a foundation stone on which politics has been built, but a process by which religion became only partly domesticated, part of politics, material in a far broader base and in the process something contestable, inherently so. A perpetually recurring doubt in the building of Chains of Being that tie us to the Divine. One that leads, just as inevitably, to efforts to enforce Closure. That is an urge to nail down the shifting chain of the signifiers from the human world of the Symbolic to the (imaginary) Real of God, to pass over the crossing to the Beyond.

Epic, and well-recorded (by the victors) intellectual battles commenced when Christianity had seized the imagination of large swathes of the population of the late Roman Empire. That is, when it has a material presence, and practice, culminating in a negotiated absorption into the State. Whether this was a capitulation or largely willed-for expansion into institutionalised social recognition and power (which seems more likely) the spores of earlier types of stasis remained. Here we have the most lucid examples of how the translation from abstract discussion into social form took shape. Indeed they could be said to be its early years – in the way that all we have are records shot through with these debates, and their echoes, rather than a real chronology. According to Ernest Bloch the absence of the Second Coming meant that the early indifference to the world developed into “Inward-looking spirituality and concentration on the other-world began to take the place of the Kingdom coming down from heaven. The rich were pardoned and almost assured of their place in heaven if they gave arms…” Yet there remained, despite the victory of the “Church and state authorities” a savoury remnant. That “something of the social threat” in that a “desire for Exodus and for a break-through into the Kingdom” long lingered. Another narrative would be that the failure of the Apocalypse to arrive was, to say the least, inevitable, and it is curious for anyone other than the believers to regret this. What became at stake was the nature of other vehicles for the faithful to realise themselves through and with their Deity. That this was not so hard for the majority of Christians suggests that their aspirations for God’s kingdom on Earth had not involved much earthly effort. We have little evidence of much effort made to realise this world other than in building a counter-community, none at all of any revolutionary; action – for all Terry Eagleton’s second-hand Liberation Theology about Christ ‘associating’ with ‘anti-imperialist’ (theocratic) Zealots. Despite well-documented analysis of its all-importance, the turn from early Christian eschatology, to the private celebration of faith (a ‘horizontal’ view that the resurrection and the Kingdom would come on Earth) to ‘vertical’ practice (towards God as something to be approached, at however a distance, here and now) appears to have left much less trace than completely different disputes. The question is therefore what happened not only to channel ‘utopian’ hope to existence after death, but why, in recorded debates, more pressing topics emerged.

Any transition from contemptuous rejection to integration, of Church and State, (an anachronistic idea since this scarcely appeared even on the distant horizon to the primitive Church) the new course opened up a different set of disputed issues for the believers to quarrel about. That is, over the nature of Christ, as a hinge between our world and the Other world, or as such a part of Godhead that he was divine semblance, a sign of the Lord. In other words, the key issue for Christianity was not whether an effort to plunge into a world to be realised in the future, or even whether to devote themselves to realising the Kingdom within themselves. It was, infinitely more realistically, whether there was any ‘bridge’ between themselves and God at all, through Christ and through Scriptural teaching. Many of them (the most abstract) are comprehensible today largely because of their borrowings from ancient philosophy (Plato and the neo-Platonists), not the other way around. This should not obscure the fact the hook they offered was far from abstractly appealing: it joins together the here-and-now with the heavens. Without it we have no sense of how Christianity’s apparently ‘illogical’ creed of the Trinity could be immensely attractive, it is a far more ‘rational’ link between the mundane and extramundane than the vehicles offered by religions which leave the believer stark and alone on the planet faced with something infinitely beyond them. Or bound to the chains of a cold Book. (5)

Edward Gibbon, in celebrated lines, traced a great deal of Christian speculation to this source, present in the Gospel of Saint John. “The respectable name of Plato was used by the orthodox and abused by the heretics, as the common support for truth and error..” “The same subtle and profound questions concerning the nature, the generation, the distinction and the equality of the three divine persons of the mysterious Triad or Trinity, were agitated in the philosophical and in the Christian schools of Alexandria.” Justin, considered one of the Fathers of the Church, (100 – 175), preached a transcendent God present in the world, with clear reference to the Greek’s ideas of the divine Logos-made-flesh. Others, only briefly cited by Gibbon, but considered today of importance, diverged radically from this. Marcion (85 – 160) offered his view of the two Gods, (one the incompetent designer of the existing world, the other Christ, the redeemer from this) The Gnostic Valentinus (100 – 175) took a different Platonic angle on the Divine human light that was above all material being. More usually disagreements were expressed over the precise ‘balance’ of the Trinity. Variations on these, and other issues, came to have graver consequences as the Church expanded. As a historian Gibbon’s central judgement was that such disputes mattered very little until the Church was an authority, and the masses of people became devoted to these differing views. One will see in the latter an entrenched hostility to popular sectarianism in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as if such disputes were not the concern of ordinary people. Others could say that this illustrated a democratisation or at least an extension to a wider public, of thinking about the basic make-up of the world. This latter observation is of as much significance in illuminating the nature of this quasi-social religious stasis as all the previous allegedly important transition from the hope and fears of the approaching Apocalypse. It is to be considered, that, within an ideologically constructed salvation factory’ (Jesus), the character of the machines and instruments that produced salvation (Christ’s clockwork), the tools of soteriological trade as were a more serious matter of dispute than the timing of an Event Beyond Time whose coming had been infinitely postponed for a long period of time-as-at-hand

The history of Christianity’s factions and sects, schematics and dissenters the coalescence of ideas broad currents and what tends to be accepted, begins in the writings of these Church’s polemicists, the early hagiographers and herisologists, the heretics’ works being largely and successfully suppressed (though many of the Gnostics writings have since been re-discovered). They ceased to be viewpoints expressed by shifting groups and became attached to, or against, existing church structures. Take some of the most marked epochs, at Christianity’s institutional foundations, recorded (imperfectly) by the Fathers of the Church. Eusebius (260 – 339), one of the first historians of the struggle to establish Orthodox (Catholic) Doctrine. These are far richer than the records of the Apostolic Fathers. His account is full of dangerous heresies, caught by the “evil demon”. To take a few: Ebonite’s, who held “poor and mean opinions” about Christ (i.e. questioned his absolute Divinity), the sect of Cerinthus, one of the first millennialists who heralded Christ’s Kingdom would be on earth, and indulged in “unlimited indulgence in gluttony and lechery at Banquets.” Plenty of other enemies of God get cited amongst an account of genuine suffering at the hands of the Roman state’s persecution of Christians and their eventual victory in the Empire. The travails of the martyrs, and the works of the first Christian intellectuals, were, he concludes, bound to so finish. At the conclusion of this factional battle, Eusebius celebrated the Emperor Constantine’s Christian rule in extravagant language (whose modern echoes do not need underlining), “Men had now lost all fear of their former oppressors; day after day they kept dazzling festival; light was everywhere, and men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes. They danced and sang in city and country alike, giving honour first to of all to God our Sovereign lord, as they had been instructed, and then to the pious emperor with his sons, so dear to God. Old troubles were forgotten, and all irreligion passed into oblivion…” In reality the institutional triumph came later in 381 when Theodosius, partly promoted by another Church father, Ambrose of Milan succeeded imposing the Constantinople Synod slightly amended Nicene Creed, and set up the legal framework to ensure it was obeyed. Nevertheless, Eusebius might be said to one of the first narratives of a victorious factional ideological battle. (6)

Well, not quite. The battle lines were not fixed. Eusebius himself is sometimes considered unorthodox, a sympathiser with Arius (C256 – 356) whose views tore the Church apart. Disagreements about the nature of Christ, the Divine Logos (with a Platonic shade of meaning as Absolute Being) as manifested in the Trinity, became for centuries the “badges of factions” (as Gibbon put it). The struggle over Arianism (the Father is greater than the Son), the mysteries of the Homoousion (the Consubstantiality, equality of nature of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost of the Trinity – the Nicene creed), and the vast, colourful array of different opinions on the topic, burning in their day, became, as Christianity was established, an issue of state policy, and a sign separating the Arian Germans from the Latin and Greek Orthodox. Another rift was caused by the Donatists – which contained a political challenge in effect, since it stood for the purity of those giving Communion and opposed the very existence of imperfect sinners inside the Church hierarchy. Saint Augustine, a former Manichean heretic himself, spent his years as Bishop of Hippo fighting them – even writing a sectarian chant against the influential group (no doubt the forerunner of many student union songs about rival leftist groups). These and other splits had been incipient at Christianity’s origins. Gibbon noted that in the century following the death of Christ, the dogmatic wars had already begun. A transposition of ancient philosophy (the speculations on being of Plotinus and other neo-Platonists) into religion (often regarded as present in St John’s Gospel) provided the mainspring. Budding theological divisions were soon “exposed to the public debate”. They were no longer philosophical speculations, debated at legislature in the Athenian Academy, but were expounded by those “least qualified to judge” who were “least exercised in the habits of abstract reasoning.” He lists 18 variant creeds (excluding the outsiders such as Gnosticism and Manicheans). We can see how differences became concentrated in their most developed form in bishops’ synods, such as the ecumenical Council of Nicaea, (325 CE). Which while not democratic in a modern sense (the ecclesiastical hierarchy to begin with was largely self-selecting) it certainly saw a strong degree of easily recognisable factionalism – over Arianism. Driven out of Orthodoxy it survived, as one would expect, only through the use of power, by the Germanic tribes who were faithful to the belief, and withered when that might receded. As Councils followed, the authority of the Church, as it became established, gave an ever-severer cast to their arguments, a matter of life and death as persecution of Pagans and Heretics on grounds of sedition were replaced by the ferocious battles for religious power, and organised heresy hunts took over from the condemnation of conciliar assemblies. Intra-Christian fights were well in presence at the other celebrated Council of Nicaea (787 CE) over Iconoclasm – banning the veneration of images (and thus religious icons themselves). They have never ended, through Protestantism to the break-away Churches who refused to accept Vatican 11.

These disputes were not confined the ecclesiastics and the devoted, as they tend to be today. Famously Gibbon quoted Jortin, writing of the time following Eusebius (334 to 389). In the seat of Macedonius, “‘This city,” says he, ‘ is full of mechanics and slaves, who are of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father, if you ask at the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you enquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.” Nobody can miss the disdain of the vulgar herd here. Gibbon believed with Plato that the humble mechanic should best stick to toiling in his allotted role. In opposition, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the point already made, that here there is a vigorously democratic aspect of a dispute in which all can join in with their own opinions. It is no doubt wearisome to have the villager crowd expressing an opinion on subjects of the delicacy only the refined can grasp – an attitude repeated today by the religious who dislike sceptics and atheists trampling on their cherished myths and poetic yearnings. The fact remains that they had become wrapped up in social forces that were inherently conflictual. But what was not in doubt in the ancient disputes is that democracy only existed to a degree. Power was at stake, a battle between those in charge, and did not depend initially on winning a row amongst the people, except for the immediate auxiliaries of the notables fighting it out. It was surely the role of the Church as prize, wielder of such power, arbiter, and caster into the flames, that is the objectionable legacy of the early religious faction-fights, and one with significant echoes in later systems of censorship and the more violent repression of ideas. Micheal Onfray does not exaggerate much when he states that Constantine alone, established this rule by “use of constraint, torture, acts of vandalism, destruction of libraries and symbolic sites, unpunished murder, ubiquitous propaganda, the leader’s absolute power, the remoulding of the whole of society on the government’s ideological lines, extermination of opponents, monopoly of legal violence and the means of communication, abolition of the divide between private life and the public sphere, overall of politicisation of society, destruction of pluralism, bureaucratic organisation, expansionism – attributes of all totalitarianisms, including that of the Christian Empire.”(7)

Preceding the rise to power, and during their entire history, the established or dominant Churches has been confronted with their own type of stasis. Not just internally but externally. There are obvious similarities between the historical record of intense faith groups and what we would today call religious cultish behaviour. But as factionalising was initially a political phenomenon of the pre-Christian world, so religious cults appear to have very ancient roots. Bearing in mind, of course, that the most available descriptions are made from a hostile perspective. The first surviving satirical (and hostile) treatment of a recognisable religious cult is said to be the Epicurean Lucian (Lucianus) of Samosata’s satire, Alexander the False Prophet. Writing in the 2^nd Century Lucian’s description of this – real – person, with his acts of wonder and his ability to dazzle followers, amass money and devotion, is said to provide a recognisable prototype of a modern cultish leader. Perhaps one should go back further to Simon the Magician. He had (Acts 7.9 to 24) swept the Samaritans “off their feet with his magic arts, claiming to be someone great”. The New Testament is not known for its developed sense of humour as Saint Peter, accusing him of dishonesty with God, castigated him and that he was “doomed to taste the bitter fruit and wear the fetters of sin.” Here, perhaps is another type of dislocation in the pre-existing fit between religion and society that preceded and accompanied the Christianisation of the Common Era.

But was not the spread of Christian inspired stasis that overturned the order of the Roman Empire’s mixture of gods and civic worship, itself the action of a cult? More mundane, but equally important, information can be seen in the post-Gospel writings generally. A po-faced attitude towards building the cause of the ‘Citizens of heaven’ is the, less poetically theological tone of much the letters of Paul and the other records of the earliest church. Their frequent disagreements, display a remorseless need to sustain discipline in the face of disagreements, sexual misconduct, monetary dodgy dealing, how to deal with the authorities, rivals (Jewish Christians who held to the ‘law), disreputable individuals, and the details of organisation. Its more than possible to read the lot, callously, as a series of tracts and internal documents on Building the Christian Party – though there is far more depth and beauty in it all than in the average left group’s publications. No doubt their had, their, unrecorded, mockers, beyond the ranks of the more heavy handed Roman Pagan critics. Not to mention the tales of orgies, which had a long life, extending – in a displaced way – to stories about the later heresies and millennialists (and not strictly speaking always inaccurate). Here, like many contemporary religious commentators, we may feel that later writings offer an illumination into what happened. Aspects of sectarian fighting, and nit-picking, not to mention rank religious hypocrisy were the stock of trade of medieval parody and satirical barbs, in Chaucer (such as the Summoner’s tale of the greedy friar) and Langland’s Piers Ploughman, in which Mendicant Friars that “”preached the peple, for profit of hem-seleum’), or Rabelais’ Gargantua and his Abby of Theleme, and their motto, Do What Thou Wilt, to cite but a few well-known poetic source of anti-clerical (as distinguished from anti-religious) this phenomenon was well known by the middle ages. Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium, 1511) a magnificent work of great humour largely at the expense of theological sectarianism, Scholastic quibbling that is. A “phalanx of professional definitions, validations, deductions and propositions, both simple and complex”. Or theologians, who “enjoy themselves too, describing every aspect of hell with such accuracy as to suggest they’d been resident citizens for years.” Erasmus’ attack on the Pope’s Party, in Pope Julius Barred from Heaven is in another, vein, directly attacking real figures of authority. The full range of types of social upsetting, organisational consolidation and recruitment, propaganda, are at work in the New Testament, though the barbs, counter-jibes, which we have in abundance from later periods, have survived less well- from the time when Paganism and Judaism were suppressed or sidelined. (8)

Engels drew his own, rather lesser, though often entertaining, sometimes misleading, stories from amongst the early Christian disputants and sects. He made some telling comparisons between their disputes about the nature of the divine throve and the controversies at the beginnings of the socialist movement. But over-extend, as we shall see, the comparison. This effort has never ceased to be reproduced, to the point where some points of order need to be raised. He offered a sketch of a parallel causal explanation of Christian and early socialist ideology which may show something about the specific nature of Christianity’s entry into the political world, and the nature of its factionalising. That both emerged as an expression of a social push, for reform, which, in the religion’s case was then turned around to serve the greater needs of social stability. Sympathetic to the early Christians’ travails, at many points, Engels subscribed at times to the comforting opinion that there was something in common between the early years of Christianity, and belief that the “word of God is alive and active” (Hebrews 4,12), and socialist pioneers. They were displaced manifestations of protest, the one a transference of class conflict into imaginary other-worldly salvation, that other (also in the realm of the imaginary) a condensation of popular unrest in this-worldly (but still unreal) dreams of an equal society. Engels tended to avoid going far into the nature of this claim, thereby becoming one of the first historical materialists to downplay the materiality and depth of people’s world-views, which formed the chief bonds that drew them together.

The issue here is that the process of transfer and condensation in each example produced a format of material practice that generated its own causal determinations. Thus, the Church, thus the Trade Unions and Socialist Sects. These bodies would not exist without these ideological ties, which are not just human beings’ ways of living their relation to the world, but the structure which guides their actions in making social links. Whatever else formed them and caused their appearance they have causal weight. A unified movement is only possible in certain conditions, and certainly all the evidence for disagreement uncovered – from variants about doctrine to the different social groups involved in each movement, to the concrete aims of each body (as the religious strove to conquer not just Souls but the State, or the Socialists tried to change Laws as well as Men) are the most compelling sources. Nevertheless one can say of Engels that he revealed an important part of sectarianism, small group dynamics, and the appearance of providential oracles, more or less fraudulent (or self-deceiving). These appear to stud the social field and puncture ideologies as such, and are far from unique of religion or early socialism. . So, the display of charismatic leadership, and cult behaviour (transferring the original meaning of cult, worship of any kind, to blind obedience to a Chief), was and is a feature in common to just about any kind of movement, that is, anything emerging out of the people. The examples in the studies of Early Christianity and their socialist counterparts are striking. But was Engels original in comparing them? Or in telling the tale of often fraudulent cults? He knew he was not. These phenomena are sufficiently historically frequent and noteworthy to have been mentioned and to have inspired the parodies already mentioned. From the ancient world Engels cited the case of the preacher, Proteus, “a prophet, an elder, a master of the synagogue”, a “new Socrates”, and became entirely supported by the Christian community. Until thrown out for violation of their law. In short a charlatan. Engels remarked that he had known of the ‘prophet Albert’ who had lived off the Weitling communist communities in Switzerland in the 1840s, and acted in much the same way – as well as a number of other characters.

Engels suggested another comparison between Christianity and Socialism, “Neither of these two great movements was made by leaders or prophets – though there are prophets enough among both of them – they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to be considered at the beginning, confused at the beginning, confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradiction, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy.” A note of caution should be added: Christianity became an established institution, not just a movement, the masses were brought together by faith in an ancient world, socialism’s masses were formed by industrialisation, brought together by conditions, not belief, and it has been institutionalised in a very different manner. It was through the decisive transformation of the apocalyptic vision, which helped the process, which shows something about the nature of this faith, that it could, by its nature, never have seen a Kingdom of God on Earth. It resolved its differences, which arose in the wake of this failed hope, through administrative means, initially through internal procedures, then, with a handle on the state, through power and repression. If Socialism has taken over anything from this heritage it is dire: the effort to settle truth by bureaucratic and repressive means. But in fact the very nature of its political ambitions gives the labour movement a very different dimension: its crises can be negotiated through negotiation in the mundane world, not through the decisions of guardians of Doctrine. Its sources are social, not the visions and the Revelations of the Gospel or religious pundits. There is a democratic chasm between the love of this world that lies at the root of socialism and the yearning for the Beyond that anchors Christianity and all religion. Were socialists to take the path back to the gaps into the world rent by Faith and seek an Eschatological return they would soon find themselves erecting new tyrannical means to enforce the validity of the Good News they discovered: by appealing to the unsettled Infinity they abdicate human negotiation. The rest is secondary. If one wants to cite the importance of magnetic personalities, that can be accounted for in all political trends, from the popular to the elitist, and the fraud a certain type of cultish leader thrives on (not least their own self-deceptions) is so commonplace a human fault that it extends far into the area of business practice, academia. So obviously that the word itself, fraud, has been around from the classical Latin fraus-fraudis to describe it. As yet nobody has produced a thorough non-psychological explanation of how this happens, and, as will be argued, this remains a difficulty for politics not to say those caught up in these cults. Yet the dead-end that religious and political charisma in small inward looking and manipulative groups offers is far less significant than that created by widespread delusions fostered by mass support for non-negotiable Eschatology and the refusal of political negotiation.

One point remains crucial and can be looked into: there may have been great convention-breaking bonds of belief that swept through each social trend, but one is anchored literally in the Not of This World, with an ambiguous relationship to the political, the Polis, the City of Men, the other has never had anything other than the Human City as its object. This should clarify and make us wary of too simply taking over Alain Badiou’s judgement (which is puts in a new form an old opinion) that what Saint Paul and (by implication) Pauline Christianity offered was based on new working out of the concept of Truth. Badiou premised this on a concept of ‘truth events’ that mark out history. They are “innovation in act”, singular but universal, “irreducible singularities, the ‘beyond the law’ of situations.” That “Every truth process is an entirely invented immanent break with the situation.” Thus Saint Paul (no doubt prefiguring Badiou’s Event, the Cultural Revolution) depended “entirely on a pure event, which is itself beyond all the prediction and calculation that our understanding is capable of” That from the seizure of the Crucifixion, its immanent scandal of suffering, and redemption, and resurrection, spread the form of Christian universalism “the Pauline conception of the church is not at all the realization of a closed separation. Instead, it proposes something that is open to everybody, a collective determination, and the realization of a separation in a universal field. So, naturally, there is, for Paul, in the process of universalism, something like division but this is a division internal to the subject itself. It is not an external division between the subject and others, but a division within the subject.” On the contrary, if the doctrine is universal, it is in the shifting political application we have sketched already, and behind this the ‘truth’ of the religion is strictly dependent on a much less path-breaking submission to Revelation. Or rather, to its vehicle in the community of Christ – the Church. Far from relishing its position as what Slavoj Žižek claims, as “’uncoupled’ outcasts from the social order” the universalistic impulse, thwarted by the perpetual absence of a divine mechanism to draw the individual into its presence, turned to coupling itself with the established social set up.

It should remain fixed in our minds that the Christians did not read their texts to sift out what was the truth that Paul proclaimed and the rest of the New Testament. There one can read, mixing references, that by Christ, “God choose to reconcile the whole universe to himself, making peace through the shedding of blood upon the Cross – to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven – through him alone” (Colossians, 1, 20) and that “the solid reality is Christ’s” (Colossians 2, 19), and that Christians are “God’s chosen people” (Colossians, 2, 12). Lest we forget the followers of Jesus saw themselves as those who “stand before Mount Zion, and the city of the living God, heavenly Jerusalem, before myriads of angels, the full concourse and assembly of the first-born citizens of heaven, and God the judge of all.” (Hebrews 12,22) “aliens in a foreign land” (Peter 1,11), They highlight a Hope that Bloch underlined, which overturns our world, and creates a stasis in society, to be sure. But the drive is always from the horizontal dimension to the vertical one: the source of the other-worldliness of Christians. Karl Barth emphasised that Paul required, in Letter to the Romans, that believers should adjust to the authority of the state. But that the “which the Gospel calls eternity has fulfilled the time. That which the Gospel call the Spirit dwells in moral bodies”. Consequently in the “vast space of the gentile world” the believers are sanctified – thus apart. That this attitude has endured over the centuries (and it is so obvious to anyone who knows fervent believers of all religions that it hardly should need pointing out) is endorsed by Erasmus himself, a rather good witness one would think, affectionately jibbing that for the godly, “the visible world in all its manifestation is either utterly beneath their concern of at any rate of far less value than the things that cannot be seen.” Or that “in absolutely every aspect of life that the godly person recoils from the bodily domain and its transported to the realm of the eternal, the invisible and the spiritual.” So, the “eternal” guides the transient, or rather the knowledge of infinity, which only the believers have. This perhaps marks the area where any alignment of religion with the mundane becomes problematic, and where, optimists about Christian or other religious forms of democracy meet a crucial test. (9)

Amongst those Marxists who wrote of religion, steeped in Engels’ immediate intellectual contribution, Kautsky’s great work The Foundation of Christianity (1908) developed new ideas from what began as largely as series of popularising footnotes (based on a great deal of learning) to Marx’s intellectual partner’s judgement. The premise, that Christianity was originally an anti-establishment movement, of the ancient ‘proletariat’ and slaves, remains a consolation for those who want to say something in its favour. Nietzsche of course found in this a direct parallel with socialism’s ressentiment, pity, and hatred of the Noble. The herd that followed Jesus was a prototype of every revolutionary mob. “Christianity is the revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that is elevated.” This much seems the case. Christ was poor (if his life corresponded to the account given to us), and if the followers that made Christianity Christian were not always deprived of wealth, they were by definition at variance with the Roman or Jewish hierarchy. It equally seems to have been the practice of early Christians to hold strongly to the belief that they should care for others, share their wealth, and adopt modest and ascetic life-styles (at least if Acts are to be given credence). More recent research has cast doubt over the extent of this Charity, and there is no evidence for sharing the, means of production (though later in Monastic orders would practice this within their communities). ) The common life is became located in the meetings of Christian friendship – initially awaiting the Apocalypse, gradually adjusting to the need for the community to adjust to the Roman state, gradually becoming a factor within that state, and finally establishing its ‘universalism’, and distinction from Pagan concept of the particular allotted place of people in the Universe and the Polis with its own rules bent in favour of the Elect. In this way the transformation that turned on the inability of a vertical desire to find comfort in the Divine spread outwards into the social sphere with the principle objective of moulding society in its image. Thus we can see not that the Christianity ‘sold out’ to Power, but that it became part of it in the process of becoming more truly itself, a religion whose practice recognised that only the Earth existed, whole its theory was inclined upwards towards the heavens. As far as any radical economic doctrine went this was itself altered. Georges Sorel, for example, considered that the Fathers of the Church participated in the ancient economy, in a directly opposite manner, as a regulating force. That is with a conception of “possession contrôlée par l’Église “ Or limited by the needs their notion of Charity and equilibrium dictated, and behind this the real interests the Church administration had. From this, rather than the moment of the Eschatological longing of the early Church, we have a more solid source of Christian anti-commercial, anti-capitalist, energy: that idea that whatever the economic arrangements of markets and production everything should eventually be moulded in line with the doctrines of the Church. Everything was and is inclined to make mainstream Christian experience a part of the world in which everyone lived, and dwelt on the potential of redemption beyond time only through the inner light of the Spirit.

We still have to tease out what is unique, and what is not, the force that drives what Terry Eagleton repeatedly labels Holy Terror. But, instead of this underlying gap into the beyond, something more approachable is detectable. That this is prefigured in the Gospels is less surprising than the claims of people who take the words of the Gospels more lurid revelations as messages of outstanding eschatological depth. Enthusiasm for this, we have seen, passed soon enough (and when we come to examine revivals of the Spirit in this vein they too have not endured). Perhaps the greatness (and appeal) of the New Testament lies in the fact that it recorded the ordinariness of its characters. Something that won it the scorn of no less a figure as Nietzsche. For whom it was “nothing but petty sectarian groupings, nothing but Rocco of the soul”, it was from the people “regurgitating their most personal affairs, stupidities, sorrows and petty worries” that something of the taste of the time survives. No doubt the Christian Church (real or ideal) displayed many features common to the splitting, disagreements, ‘party-building’ and ideological apparatus of any social and political movement. It is human. But we stop at this point. We have discarded Nietzsche’s sneers at these efforts, but there remains something. There is a lot more at stake here than the work of people to find some home in the world: the Eschatological Vision of the Cross-as the point where the World meets the Divine. This is the essential point where we part company forever. For believers it is the other-existence that really counts. But in practice, one, which seems not to affected the behaviour of the majority too deeply.

The problem for the left arises in making conclusions too hastily about what will find amongst the domains where there is are resemblances. The theory of the ‘two churches’, that the radicalism of the ‘movement’ (considered ultimately a class protest) was ‘betrayed’ by the priestly apparatus, as it became part of the establishment, is politically entrenched today, at least amongst the popular ideology of the left, even if its historical basis looks shakier and shakier. We have said that the early Church was forced to negotiate its way out of this imposing origin by virtue of the simplest of event – the non-event of the Second Coming. The idea that on the one hand there was a proto-politically and socially radical Church – the Commons – and on the other, an Establishment that thwarted them is a drastic simplification. It neglects the fact that the whole history of the Church is that it has sought to create an establishment. Stirring the masses, the followers of Christ eventually did, entering into the bones of Europe’s culture. But, on the facts, Engels was wrong to claim that early Christianity was a movement of the oppressed, or specifically slaves and proletarians (in the sense of the propertyless). It is now generally accepted that its original influence in the ancient world did not initially reach far beyond urban centres (hence pagans, from the Latin for country dweller). Within these districts it gained converts from all classes, but particularly the (free) artisans. There were equally many well-off converts, and others, while not rich, held some property. It is presently well-established that its chief difference with ‘mystery’ religions, the cults of the Pagan world, which apparently gained an audience amongst a not dissimilar layer of spiritual questers, was that the followers of Jesus were well-organised, had a generally stable doctrine (though this, we have seen, was open to disputes), and was exclusive. Christianity built its unity around the process of establishing a Book, literally made the Book, deciding what went in and what was not Canon. This implied literary, at least for the organisers – not so widespread. In its first centuries Christianity developed around the activities of intellectuals to establish this, and an emerging hierarchy, not from a social protest. It added features of self-protection, a welfare state for the members, and a refuge from the violence of the time, a state that could descend at any moment and deprive people of their living. Or a shield against wars, a sense of familiarity and human contact faced with the sheer complexity of the Empire. And as Gibbons aid, its simple ideological appeal could not be gainsaid when its religious competitors offered no such certainty about the future (though here the explanation wobbles – Judaism still proselytising may have offered a not dissimilar vision).

Thus Christianity was not in any real sense proto-revolutionary. It did not preach the abolition of slavery or participate in the ancient society’s most prominent form of class conflict, demands for debt relief. Revelations’ vision of the end of the World may have been a call to religious partisanship and separation from the world, not a revolutionary desire to overthrow it. The experience of living in the ‘last times’ was a hope for an end to the existing order, not a means to bring this about. When the time came for them to accommodate themselves to the persistence of the secular order, and, as cited, Bloch’s words that it was “granted implicit recognition” appeared to a degree true. Its however is to neglect the fact that the challenge of Christian universalism remained. Strangely the supporters of the ‘two Churches’ theory fail to give much attention to those who laid down their lives against this state, not for any social issue, but to Witness the Truth they wished to shine through. That those seized by this faith were more inclined to individual Martyrdom than to act to overthrow the existing order apparently does not register highly on the eschatological left. But as the saying went, ‘the Blood of the Martyrs is the seed of the Church’. Witnesses, and actors in a Theatre where only a minority could be admitted. Dying for the Cross may be a drama played out in the face of eternity; it was not the revolt of the oppressed for a new world, but for another universe entirely. As Saint Augustine indicated: its real interest was situated in a completely different time to the mundane. Combining in this way a challenge to what ‘is’ with the hallucinatory prospect of an ascent to heaven.

This great curtain, which falls down whenever the issue of early Christianity is discussed, is the basis of the Persecution that created many of these Martyrs equally failed to live up completely to Žižek’s grandiloquent claims about a clash between a Pagan hierarchical social ontology and the Christian assertion of universality, but nevertheless bears all the marks of one aspect of this: the political practice of absorbing religious cultures in a common obedience to Caesar. That is, not through their absence of tacit consent to the state, but their lack of minimal signs of active compliance. As an aspect of the cruelty of the Roman state, it should not be minimised, and if there were those who sought martyrdom for the reasons just sketched at least they (unlike certain modern religious zealots) did not try to kill anyone in their efforts. The point here is that the suppression of inconvenient religious cults was part and parcel of a ‘morality’ of penal servitude. One of the first Roman references to Christianity is in Tacitus’s Annals. After the Great Fire of Rome (63 CE) under the reign of Nero, the Emperor tried to “transfer the guilt” for the conflagration to Christians, a “race of men detested for their evil practices” These were convicted not on real evidence, “bur rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race.” Their deaths were by “exquisite cruelty”. “At length the cruelty of these proceedings filled every breast with compassion. Humanity relented in favour of the Christians. The manner of that people were, no doubt, of a pernicious tendency, and their crimes called for the hand of justice, bit it was evident, that they fell a sacrifice, not for the public good but to glut the rage of cruelty of one man only”. Tacitus condemned the followers of Christ not, however, for political subversion, nor for religious heresy, but for withdrawing from common religious observance (educated Romans such as Cicero had long expressed scepticism about the details of Pagan religion). It was their disputative, withdrawing, practices, against the public nature of these rituals that attracted state repression. That is Christianity was attacked for its ‘superstition’ not just faith in exotic outlandish things but that it was a secretive cult-like worship of what was considered a patent fraud. One could say, with some exaggeration, that while Nero was being exceptionally vicious, the underlying attitude towards the Christians was an explainable dislike of people who clearly did hate if not all, at least a large proportion of the non-Christian human race. A few glances at the New Testament confirms this (and one imagines the Sermons of the early Church were often wild – if Revelations is any indication). Let’s begin with the after-life and the fate of the wicked, sinful, and the unbelievers. Few today would accept the justice of condemning the rich man who ignored Lazarus during life to suffer in the fires of Hades and have to hear Abraham tell him that no-one can help him, or even pass over the “chasm” between that realm and heaven (Luke 16: 19-31). Though of course the Tortures Christians imagined for their enemies were, during this period, confined to the pits of Hell. And that the martyrdom that many sought was, as Onfray observes, at least partly motivated by the fact that its version of “monotheism is fatally fixated on death. It loves death, cherishes death; it exults in death, is fascinated by death.”

Why Christianity became the dominant European religion, was institutionalised and poured into the whole culture, is too complex to be discussed at length here: it is part, a back-commentary, on nearly everything we do. Nevertheless, if we have given a theological ‘causal’ outline (based on the transition from Eschatology to vertical worship) of how this might have appeared as a practice (even if not explicitly theorised) some social and political account has to be given, in order to weaken the two Churches theory. They, as our description accumulates, clearly involved the growth of a wealthy counter-establishment, half-integrated, and then, largely integrated, into the Roman administrative system. This can be summarised. Gibbon declared that Christian success was due to five main factors (none of which involve the idea of a revolutionary aspiration). These were, its “exclusive zeal”, in opposition (and loathing) to existing religious “harmony”, while nevertheless opening their doors to all; their belief in the afterlife, a “promise of eternal happiness”; belief in miracle, “The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events”; their virtues, bolstered by repentance for past sins and a wish to behave well to spread the Christian message; and their internal organisation, which developed from early popular selection of leaders to the eventual growth of “Episcopal Office” built on early forms of tithing and donations, which sustained their hierarchy and distribution of alms to the poor. Finally the Christians were kept together by the threat of excommunication for sinners, and heretics. In this, “the well-tempered mixture of liberality and rigour, the judicious dispensation for reward and punishments, according to the maxims of policy as well as justice, constituted the human strength of the Church”. For all its contestable nature these explanatory elements form a persuasive structure: combining ideological displacement (from the existence of the afterlife in ancient paganism to a guaranteed good place in it for Christianity), and a range of ideological-organisational means (their virtues – read their ability to offer material benefits to supporters) that favoured the growth of the Church. One could supplement these with structural position of religion-as-an-institution. That is a means of finding a degree of personal security in an Empire where the lives of people were often subject to exploitation (for slaves, the rural poor and most of the urban plebe) and oppression (whatever their social class) and where people looked for closer bonds in an impersonal and cruel administered world. This one would call as ideological ‘apparatus’ whose beliefs were the cement of the identity, which the Christian Church used to draw together its followers.

As such the Church was to remain the Empire’s last embodiment, after it had long disappeared in the West. Christianity gained influence when Emperor Constantine supported it. The Conversion of Constantine, Gibbon remarked in a succeeding chapter, was perhaps not unrelated to the fact that, “The passive and unresisting obedience which bows under the yoke of authority, or even of oppression, must have appeared in the eyes of an absolute monarch the most conspicuous and useful of evangelical virtues.” Yet this was paralleled by the establishment of a Christian republic, in which, initially elected, prelates began to assemble the rule of Bishops who ruled their flock. And spent a considerable amount of time, as we have seen, in what Gibbon described in a multitude of inventive levels of depreciation, “an idle mixture of metaphysical subtleties “puerile rites”, and “fictitious miracles”, and “on the religious merit of hating the adversaries and obeying the ministers of the church.” If winning the freedom to engage in this was a ‘betrayal’ then perhaps we misunderstand what treachery is all about. For no-one could doubt that these disputes were enjoyed by the very mechanics and city dwellers that Gibbon mocked.

What of Rome’s Imperial responsibilities? Saint Augustine pointed to the fact that his faith did not assume responsibility for the temporal power (even comparing the state’s origins to the rule of robber bands). But they had accepted it. It seems more probable on the above evidence that Official Establishment was not in itself an impediment to anything: it was merely a stage in a process of integration, which had begun with the religion’s consolidation amongst the upper classes, and, by the nature of authority in those centuries, within the Empire’s administration. Their own liberties secured what more could they want? A little cynical anti-clericalism, albeit it grating to the fine feelings of the religious, along the lines of vulgar Marxist explanations of religious ideology is in order here. It is all very well to talk of the Sermon on the Mount, and the dignity of the every-present poor. But if your goal is winning souls then the rich and mighty matter too: the more power and influence they have the better they are to carry the Word. And did not classical writers talk – quite openly, or in the case of Cicero, lightly hidden under a concern for religion’s role in sustaining social virtue – of the place faith has a pillar of Order. So, even if Gibbon was wrong about the appeal to Constantine of Christian humility, in the long term it proved an accomplice to political power – even if a separate domain – and not necessarily a bad thing for that. If it had tried to rule directly the decaying Roman Empire according to the Gospels then nobody can be sure that religious tyranny (already tightening around its parishioners) would not have been worsened. It would follow that the Church ultimately became a movement toward harmony when it spread its influence. As a sympathetic serious-minded historian observes, in its rise to power, “The rule of the Church depended upon the identification, suppression, and excommunication of heretics. The scope of Christian power therefore, was based not only on including people through conversion, baptism, participation in the Eucharist, and subscription to an orthodox confession of the faith. Christian power was also reinforced through the rituals of exclusion.” The fact that it persecuted its own, when believers challenged this impulse, illustrates the strength of the initial impulse toward unity and control.

This process reached across Europe, and most people who have an interest in the subject are aware that this was not accomplished bloodlessly. As an illustration of how religious zeal can act when it becomes a direct guide to policy, and to war, what followed does not indicate much that we would admire today. Celebrated are the conversions of the northern heathens. Some were made peacefully, as Bede in 8^th century England testified. But other, were made in ways far from this. Led by Charlemagne (768 – 814 CE). His efforts to create an Imperium chistianum began with the forcible conversion of the Old Saxons – involving large-scale massacres for ther recalcitrant. The culmination, in Europe, were the crusades of the Teutonic Knights who only finally subdued the pagan Balts in the 13^th century. Christianity’s spread outside the Roman limes and (after the Empire’s break up) to re-paganised lands was not only through force. A large literature demonstrates that in non-Roman ‘barbarian’ circles – notably in the Germanic world – Christianity in the period of conversion had an extremely aristocratic ‘heroic’ appeal, and conversion there went from the military governing elite downwards. No doubt the conquests of Charlemagne reinforced this drive. So much for Nietzsche’s unhistorical speculations about its roots in ‘slave morality’. Beowulf, one of the earliest literate remains of the epochs of the encounter, has a Christian patina over a strong culture of the warrior band and the centrality of loyalty to its Lord of it – a factional loyalty that became the foundation of state power in much of the feudal world. A study of the conceptual translation of Christian language in the older Germanic tongues sheds light on just how this operated: adopting the roots of the vocabulary of the ancient barbarian comitatus for worship. That is by direct borrowings, loan translation (calques). Thus we have a word for Lord, truth, in Old High German, transferred from a military meaning (chief of a band) to an almost completely Christian usage, as the Lord. If the language was so deeply impregnated with this imagery then this indicates how thoroughly the ideological weight of the faith entered into the social resources of the West.

In the Romance lands a similar mechanism is evident in the first vernacular writings, La Chanson de Roland and the cycle of stories around Charlemagne, not to mention their real historical referent (to cite but the most obvious) show a Christian warrior aristocracy. It was by such means that the cult of the Nazarene undoubtedly became ‘popular’, melding state sponsorship after the Empire’s Conversion, during the centuries of expansion in the ‘Barbarian’ North and East, with earlier customs, and transcendental enthusiasm. The process operating here has more in common with how the ruling class spreads its ideological hegemony over the masses – the early feudal social structure in which there was in any case little in the way of organised oppositional class struggle – than a self-defined popular culture of belief. Eventually devotion did spread to all classes. The desire for distributive justice or at least equity (in the way of sharing, social, charitable), is not incompatible with an appeal to ruling elites or urban intermediate classes – good works, and cultish sacrifice are recurring features of a wide variety of religions and ideologies. Its factionalising theologically speaking, on what we would recognise as ideology (systems of ideas) – was a feature which has strikingly modern echoes. The dialectic between stasis and order has never finished. Nonetheless, this should not mislead us: the ultimate eccelsisiatical whole was a powerful absorbing machine. (10)

There remains the utopian element? What exactly was this? Terry Eagleton may be right to state that “The Eucharist, then, celebrates a convivial being-with-others, as a love-feast which prefigures a future kingdom of peace and justice but it is one founded on death, violence and revolutionary transformation, conditions which lie beyond the pleasure principle altogether.” But this was not social protest as such. Nor at bottom a vehicle for any kind of social revolution, indeed Hannah Arendt claimed that no revolution was made in Christianity’s name until modern times – rather uneasily calling millennialist revolts ‘mass hysteria’ rather than revolutions or even serious rebellions. If Arendt observed that some claim that modernity (has “liberated the revolutionary germs” inside it, this, “begs the question” as to what its premises were. In fact Christianity had accepted slavery, inequality precisely because its Kingdom was to come, in which these injustices would be resolved. It adjusted to the late Roman Empire, as it has adapted, and shaped later Western class societies and states, feudalism and capitalism, because it primary vision was and is not of this world. Where was this kingdom? Not in out time, but, as Charles Taylor – no timid defender of Faith, states, “The Great Time is thus behind us, but it is also in a sense above us.” Thus, “In each case, as well as the ‘horizontal’ dimension of merely secular time, there is a vertical’ dimension, which can allow for the ‘warps’ and foreshortening of time which I mentioned above. The flow of secular time occurs in a multiple vertical context, so that everything relates to more than one kind of time.” Frank Kermode related the vision of the Apocalypse to precisely this domain “We project ourselves – a small humble elect, perhaps – past the End, so as to see the structural whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.” But, as this prophecy failed, as all Eschatology does, the faithful will turn to the here and now, from the eternity of the nunc stans to the nunc movens. This shift, interest or theologically motivated, so common in the history of Christianity, will not doubt be considered irrelevant to those who hold to the idea that just beneath the surface Christianity stands for the prospect of an immanent leap into eternity. That is an engine for a radical surge channelled to the powers that be. It bears a strong resemble to the idea, whose form was given expression by Henri Bergson, of time as “duration”, a realm where myths are born. To Georges Sorel projections about the future from this domain formed the basis of the ‘myth’ of the proletarian general strike, a mental picture that frames a course of action. Sorel, however, was at pains to underline, that in assigning the religious and socialist impulse an dietetically origin in the motor, that “il faut se garder de conclure à l’identité des forces intérieures “one has to wary of concluding that these internal forces are identical). The meaning of the religious excursion into the pure flow of duration demonstrates by its materialised ideology that what it discovers in its own ‘time’ is a the basis of social practice which refers backwards to this endless source, not forwards to the collective democratic projects of the socialist movement. Its institutional materialisation is sufficient proof of the capacity of religion to proclaim universalism through exclusivity-through-faith. As such the utopias that have emerged in all kinds of religion, institutionalised or more purely mystical, suffer from their arbitrary origin, something of what William James found in the religious experience. Sorel came to believe that democracy too was infested with the faults of the Church’s practices in regulating these experiences. This can be strongly contest: the democracy of the workers’ movement is the mechanisms against any utopian vision that traces its origins back to what Williams James called a “a willingness to close our mouths and be as nothing in the floods and waterspouts of God.”

For us, then, the important fact is that Christianity became part of the world. It cannot be judged apart from this, and if it retained a perpetually destabilising element of religious stasis this should be confused with the idea that by the nature of hope for a ‘beyond’ it embodies (or embodied) is made up of displaced revolutionary energy. Within this frame its impulses were directed from waiting for the arrival of the Beyond to the immediate shaping of lives in line with what was thought to be the commands of Heaven and God. Its institutional framework embodied something which is a distinct type of stasis: the unsettling it bore within itself was not only driven by a desire for a better here and now (for its own interests or for, generously, others), but is smoothed out by the institutionalisation of the Transcendental It settled disputes by administrative authority and soon drifted to repression. The process of establishing this order is one of the roots of all modern suppression of ideological dissent, which has spilled out into politics and has left its mark on the left, from Stalinism onwards. Only the political forces that established a secularist edifice over the religious intrastate contains the dangers of this perpetual glowering over God. Without limits it could function as an ideological apparatus that controls and dominates people in the crudest form, agitating them through new revelations, making them accept their lot on this authority. Not that one would wish to follow Onfray and others further in thereby asserting all religious belief, practised in civil society, that is independently, follows this path. If we take Feuerbach’s suggestion to heart, without too much patronising, we might reflect that religion incorporates mundane wishes for better lives of the believers, and deeds of pleasant generosity and friendship towards humanity. It is in this sense we would heartily accept that Christians have often been do-gooders in the real sense. Though too often this has meant offering some, charitable, relief of distress, not the overthrow of oppression. But, to repeat, it is only as part of the world that believers act. Their actions can be assessed on the same grounds as anyone else’s. It is when they make special claims, that these have to be, for a materialist, an atheist, challenged. Institutionally there is not the slightest reason to give them any power whatsoever. Indeed their existing organisations benefit too much from public recognition, even in ostensibly secular states. As for the role of Christian radicalism in politics, it cannot be weighed with special measures. Only that is, when it raises a privileged right to proclaim truth, not to Preach at, but to act for the faiths; goals it should be fought with, and by all democratic means, prevented from accumulating any legislative administrative power. Eschatology, radicalism no doubt attractive to those who have abdicated from political intervention in the existing world, and spurn power altogether, remains a source for the potential clash of religions, of an overwhelming desire to impose its truth. It is very far from the ethics and politics of Marxists who seek to resolve real problems in the here and now by, from the start, grasping their temporal roots. If there is one thing the new eschatology resembles, not in detail but in inspiration it is, as the religious tradition of Islamism that seeks to thrust its Sharia ruled world down the throats of the faithless. That is, a claim to special knowledge that we can never share, unless we accept the premises of the belief, and lend ourselves to the delirium of the divine.

Marxists find it hard to categorise religion, at once a relatively unitary phenomenon (doctrines and organisations), and yet, it is distributed across the realms of the traditional ‘levels’ of historical materialism, ideological (belief, culture), politics (relation to the state, political parties), and economics (historically Churches have had an important role in land ownership, today they remain significant in wider capital investment – or in Islamic shape, in foundations running businesses). Kautsky offered some important ideas, centred on the internal institutional logic of organised religion, which suggest that the adaptive function of faith to social and political power is a significant tendency derived from the way its internal (ideological, and organisational) mechanisms play out in the world. If recent discussion about Marxist (?) Messianism has a merit it has uncovered something which does not fit easily into these categories. There is a motor at work that remains wild, erupting and destroying, however temporarily brought under control, and tamed, an inspiring panorama of the sublimity of the universe which is anchored not stably in (as some contemporary atheists claim) a fixed Book, but an unstable premise, a gaze into the Beyond. The complexity involved in assigning religion a ‘place’ is then the major difficulty about religion. Not its function as an adaptive method of explaining events through supernatural causes, not its function in reconciling people to the existing class structure (more and more explicit as the Church triumphed), nor its ‘revolutionary’ role in some unrest, swiftly muted, nor its internal balance between rank hypocritical oppression and sincere efforts to better the lot of believers (including their material conditions). It is its claims about ultimate being. That is the fundamental illusion the lies behind the generative structures operating in the social institutions which came into existence in the – willed-for, negotiated, fought over – presence of faith as the ideological and political apparatus of the state is something which remains itself to be given a materialist account. One point is certain: there is nothing of Bloch’s ‘atheism in Christianity’, for all its temporal demands, at this level, and never will be, in this, the loadstone of religion. If mysticism ends in politics, so much the better. Though one would not wish for it to result in the hatred Péguy poured out against socialist internationalists on the Eve of the First World War. It is for this reason that all who despise the cult of the Eternally Beyond, out of the Love of This World, and the Marxist fight for human liberation, shun religion. Not individual believers as people, but for their claims about a transcendent intelligible to believers alone. Love the sinner hate the sin. (11)

SOME REFERENCES.

1. Pages 115, 115. Charles Péguy. Notre Jeunesse. Folio. 1993. Geoffrey Hill. Colleted Poems. Penguin. 1985.
2. Page xxiv. Introduction. Peter Thompson. Atheism in Christianity. Ernest Bloch. Verso. 2009. Toni Negri states, “It is possible to recuperate religious impulses toward the common inside materialist conditions of common existence.” Page 197. Toni Negri, Goodbye Mr Socialism. Serpent’s Tail. 2008. John Roberts. The ‘Returns to Religion’: Messianism, Christianity and the Revolutionary Tradition. Part 1; ‘Wakefulness to the Future’. Part ll. The Pauline Tradition. Historical Materialism. Vol.16. Nos. 2,3. 2008. Page 132. La Vie de Jésus. Ernest Renan. Marabout. 1974. On Biblical criticism see: David Strauss (Chapters from) The Life of Jesus. The Young Hegelians. An Anthology. Edited by Larence S.Stepelevitch. Cambridge University Press. 1983. Karl Kautsky. The Foundations of Christianity. 1904. Marxist Internet Archive. Page 6. The History of British Socialism. Vol. 1 Belford Bax. G. Bell & Sons. 1929.
3. Esprit. Des intellectuels dans la Cité Michel Winock. Seuil. 1996. Pages 23, 27, 37, 39. Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate. Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press. 2009. Pages xxi., xxi. Terry Eagleton Present Jesus Christ the Gospels. Verso, 2007. Pages 309, 17, 109, 197, 207. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Norman Cohen. Granada. 1978. Red Sh’ism. Alistair Crooke. Red Pepper. Oct/Nov 2009. For a Christian survey of the similarities and differences, with Marxism, Karl Marx. David Lyon. Alan Lion Books. 1979. On the God-builders and God-Seekers see, Chapter lV. Dialectical Materialism. Gustav. A Wetter. Routledge, Keagan and Paul. 1960.
4. Christian Origins. The Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism. Christopher Rowland. Second Edition. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 2002. Pages 439, 452, Class Struggle in the Ancient World. G.E. M de Ste Croix. Duckworth. 1981. Chapters IV to Vl. Page 46 Against All Gods. A C Grayling. Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness. Oberon Books. 2007. Kautsky. Religion. Social Democrat 1903 –4. Marxist Internet Archive. Page 189. On Christian Theology. Rowan Williams. Blackwell. 2000. Page 29. A Shorter Commentary on Romans. Karl Bath. SCM Press. 1956. My Life and Thought. Albert Schweitzer. George Allen and Unwin. 1933.
5. Page 128 – 9. Atheism in Christianity. Ernest Bloch Verso. 2009. See also, The Principle of Hope. Ernest Bloch. Basil Blackwell. 1986. The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Macmillan. 1982.Pages 110, 150. Slavoj Žižek The Fragile Absolute. Verso. 2008.
6. The Apostolic Fathers. Vol. 1. Edited Bart DEhrman. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University 2003. AD 381. Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State. Charles Freeman. Pimlico 2008 .The Thirteenth Apostle April D. DeConick. Revised Edition. Continuum 2009. Thus shows a tiny fragment of what we have lost: and recently rediscovered of this tradition,
   ”The Gospel of Judas is an unfamiliar story, from its description of a laughing Jesus to its bitter feelings about the twelve disciplines to its orgasmic conception of the universe. Oddly, the one aspect of the story that is probably most familiar to us is Judas, the demon-possessed man who betrayed Jesus! The Gospel’s unfamiliarity results from the fact that Sethian Christianity did not survive into the modern world. It was actively suppressed and forgotten by apostolate Christians, who became the keeps of the keys to the Kingdom.”(P 195)
7. Pages 91 – 3, 332. The History of the Early Church. Eusebius. Penguin. 1989. It is worth noting that Eusebius uses the concept (or rather the translator renders it thus) of a ‘faction fight’ to describe the conflict between ethnically Jewish inhabitants of Egypt and Greeks. During Trajan’s reign he states, “When the emperor was about to enter his eighteenth year another rebellion broke out and destroyed vast numbers of Jews. In Alexandra and the rest of Egypt, and in Cyrene as well, as if inflamed by some terrible spirit of revolt they rushed into a faction fight against their Greek fellow citizens, raised the temperature to fever heat, and in the following summer started a full-scale war.” (Page 105) We shall return to the issue of ethnicity and factionalism latter. Pages 145 – 6. In Defence of Atheism. Michel Onfray. The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Trans: Jeremy Leggatt. Serpent’s Tail. 2007.
8. Page 8. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction Frank Kermode. Oxford University Press. 1967.Pages 307 – 310. Vol. ll. Page 88. Vol. lll. Gibbon. Op cit. Worth noting are the earlier sectarian fights of the Manichean heresies (dual forces in the world, good and evil), which sustained an underground life for centuries – up till the Medieval Cathars, and beyond never became part of the state. The Other God. Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy. Yuri Stuyanov. Yale University Press. 2000. Factional splitting here is not well recorded.
9. Page 221 On the History of Early Christianity. F. Engels. In Marx and Engels. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Fontana. 1972. Marx and Engels on Religion. Foreign Languages Publishers. 155. Pages 71, 77, 112. Praise of Folly. Desiderius Erasmus Translator Roger Clarke. Oneworld Classics. 2008. Page 123. Ethics. Alain Badiou, Verso 2001. Alain Badiou. Universal Truths and the Question of Religion. Interview with Adam S, Miller. Journal of Philosophy and Scripture. Volume 3, Issue 1 Fall 2005 Pages 111, 150. The Fragile Absolute. Slavoj Žižek Verso 2008. Pages 158, 174. Karl Barth. A Shorter Commentary on Romans. SCM Press. 1959. All Biblical references, New English Bible unless otherwise specified.
10. Early Christianity. Robert Browning. New Left Review 168. 1988. Revelation Revisited. Minitris Kyrtatas. New Left Review. 190. 1991. Page 114. On the Genealogy of Morals. Frederick Nietzsche. Cambridge, University Press. 1994. Pages 486 – 7. Annals. Tacitus. J.M.Dent. 1943. Gibbon Op cit. Vol. 1. Chapter XV, Vol. 2 Chapter XX. Page 174 Onfray op cit The Conversion of Europe. Richard Fletcher. Fontana Press. 1998. Page 161. Bede. A History of the English Church and People. Penguin.”1968. Christianity. A Global History. David Chidester. Penguin. 2001. Languages and History in the Early Germanic World. D.H.Green. Cambridge University Press. 2000. Page 253. Saint Augustine. The City of God. Vol. ll. J.M.Dent 1957. On the Empire’s legacy through, noticeably, role of Latin as a bond within post-Roman Christianity see: Ad Infinitum. A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler. Harper Press. 2007.
11. Page 323.The Trouble with Strangers. Terry Eagleton. Wiley-Blackwell. 2009. Also, Holy Terror. Terry Eagleton. Oxford 2005. Page 27. On Revolution. Hannah Arendt. Penguin. 1990. Page 57 A Secular Age. Charles Taylor. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2007. Page 8. Frank Kermode. Op cit. Oxford University Press. 1967. Georges Sorel. Matérieux pour une Théorie du Prolétariat 1918. Internet Sorel Archive. Democratic decrees “ressemblant fort aux décrets des conciles et des papes qui forment une suite d’éclaircissements de la révélation, sont étrangers à la science expérimentale et ne sont jamais rectifiés par des retours en arrière.” On Sorel, L’Illusion du Politique. Shlomo Sand. La Découverte. 1985. Page 47. The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James. Longmans Green & Co. 1929.

“Tout commence par la mystique et tout finit en Politiq

Everything starts in mysticism and ends in politics.

“la mystique ne soit point dévorée par la politique à laquelle elle a donné naissance.”

Mysticism must not be devoured by the politics to which it gave it birth.

Notre jeunesse. Charles Péguy. (1910)

“Did Péguy kill Jaurès? Did he incite

the assassin? Must men stand by what they write

as by their camp-beds or their weaponry

or shell-shocked comrades while they sag and cry?”

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Geoffrey Hill. (1)

Does Christianity in its “fabulous unreality” contains “love, hope and faith, beyond the realm of the state and of authority?” Was Jesus the bearer whose message may yet bring “Utopian light on the problem of universal alienation and its cure?” To Ernst Bloch the real Christ was less important than what he was, has been, and is seen to be. Standing at the gateway of Time. The revival of this Messianic thread in Marxism – the belief that communism is woven in the pattern of religious tapestry – needs materialist critique. Starting from the Herald of Good News. Yet, it is widely accepted, that we will never end the Quest for the Historical Jesus. That is, the search, carried out by sceptics such as David Strauss, and, later by Ernest Renan as thoroughly by Christians as dedicated as Albert Schweitzer, for the ‘real’ history of the Messiah, peeled away from all the idolatry, superstitions and myths of centuries. Or – without a purely theological (critical, that is) excursion into how to begin to conceptualise the Life, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection – to even approach the issue of what this means. Or grapple with what God presented, in believers’ minds – across the ages. One should, as a materialist, surely refuse to separate wholly the areas of what we can know about the Messiah and what his Crucifixion signified theologically. The documents we have, the witnesses collected in the New Testament, and the context, the culture and social structure of the time, are rich enough to sustain the voyage of many present and future quests. We shall only try to keep our journey on one path. That is we can start in one of its dimensions: the historical record of how Christianity became a Church, the moments when profane existence took up a picture of the Divine and built an institution around it. For an influential strand of thought, portraying Messianism and eschatology, within Christianity, above all in Saint Paul, that there is a relation (hidden through many dark glasses) between the “living hope” of the Resurrection-Event, followed by the Second Coming (Parousia) and “invariant communism.” And that by probing these mysteries (set down by Badiou, Amabgan, Žižek and others), that, we may discover Toni Negri’s “religion without God”? Or, as John Roberts asserts, “Marxists have to become messianists in order to live and struggle and organise in the here and now.”

That the Church was founded from, and (as it compromised) against, a vision and practice of Communism is normally made in far less abstract terms – ones that might even be grasped by the poor themselves. This has a long popular history. One that results partly from traditional feeling that religion preached equality not just of souls, but also of conditions. Another source was Biblical criticism which, amongst many topics, talked of the sharing of resources of the early Church faithful, described in Acts. Ernest Renan, the late 19^th century critic and conservative republican, was one of those. He claimed in La Vie de Jésus (1863) that Jesus’ doctrine was that “les pauvres (ébionim) seules seront sauvés, que le règene des pauvres va venir” (the poor (ebionim) alone will be saved, and the rule of the poor was coming). That even within Christianity this idea persisted, as “un levan” (yeast) never lost. This is widely accepted, often for its own mythic quality rather than its tested historical accuracy. Karl Kautsky in his pioneering Marxist study, The Foundations of Christianity (1904) stated that of the early Christians that “the community had been permeated by an energetic though vague communism, an aversion to all private property, a drive toward a new and better social order, in which all class differences should be smoothed out by division of possessions.” The English socialist Belford Bax, in his History of British Socialism (1919) described Christianity as “a religion of the lowly and humble it came into the world, endowed with the sentiment that communism was capable of raising economic life to a high moral level.” More recently the idea has crept in that religious fervour contains within it deeper, germs of communism, that the Kingdom of God, as proclaimed by the Son of Man was a mythologised projection of what was at root a materialist striving. That, put simply, the theory is that Christianity (and all religion?) contains, amongst other things, a communist impulse. This claim turns on its head the idea that Communism is a distorted religious urge: faith possesses revolutionary elements always beyond the grasp of the state and authority. To put it another way, using a Christian simile, it as if the passing of the seasons of the religious world bear witness to the operations of the Communist Spirit. (2)

The early 20^th century French writer Péguy marked well the outlines of this view. For him, against both the ‘bourgeois’ atheism and secularism of the French state and his anti-clerical opponents on the left, and clericalism itself, Christianity, with its centuries of charity, had once been rooted in the people’s egalitarian needs. Could this be revived? To the utmost degree: a real social revolution would be the “mystérieux assujttissment de l’éternal même au temporal.” (the mysterious subordination of the eternal itself to the temporal). Péguy, the emerging lyrical Christian revolutionary (and future ultra-nationalist) was but one influential and talented poet of politics and faith amongst a host of others. From his epoch, the Gospel has inspired layers of ethical Continental Christian social democrats who pullulated in the Second International and the first Labour parties, above all in Britain, connecting to an older conservative tradition of Christian social-ism. From the former we have the ‘personalist’ tradition, present today on the Catholic left, influential through the French journal, Esprit. Its founding thinker, Emmanuel Mounier, defended human rights within the Church, and outside, announcing, not without gravitas and true meaning, that the task of such Christians (who centred upon the person, not eternity) was to make both socialism and the holy institutions democratic and equalitarian. By contrast, the latter tradition of religious socialism was based on the equality of all in spirit, but in the founding writings of John Maurice, Thomas Hughes and Charles Kingsley, they supported the proper hierarchy of society, provided it was due to merit in an organic ‘social’ order. Neither strand is much discussed on the Anglophone Marxist left. However, in France and other Latin countries personalism has an important influence, extending to this left; here Tony Blair and Gordon Brown are Kingsley’s direct ideological descendents.

Radical Christian movements are, by contrast, frequently flagged. The rise of Liberation Theology, which offers a more radical ‘Gospel of the poor’ for the temporal realm, is often cited as incontrovertible proof of how Christianity can be progressive. Social issues take greater precedence, but Christian love still permeates a life of dedication to Justice. And not far behind, to the message of the Cross. On this strand of the left, critical distance from the religious establishment, combines with belief in the popular aspirations of religion. That is, in the theory of the ‘two churches’, the one of the poor, objectively fighting for social justice, the other, of the state and the wealthy, holding them down. Engels wrote of Early Christianity and socialism that, “Both Christianity and the workers’ socialism preach forthcoming salvation from bondage and misery; Christianity places this salvation in a life beyond, after death; socialism places it in this world, in a transformation of society.” Others, have developed Engels’ observation that early Christians were waiting not for a social transformation, by the millennium.” They have suggested that we can find, as with, say medieval millennialist movements, such as the German Peasant revolt led by Thomas Müntzer, religiously expressed protests against class oppression. And that in their distress the way out for the “enslaved, oppressed and impoverished” was not only in salvation in the afterlife, but an apocalyptic reign of Justice here and now.

Terry Eagleton claims that the Christian message shows that the Gospel’s vision is “not a prudently reformist project of pouring new wine into old bottles but an avant-gardist epiphany of the absolutely new – of a regime so revolutionary as to surpass all image and utterance, a reign of justice and fellowship which for the Gospel writers is now striking into this bankrupt, dépassé, washed up world.” At the same time he has noted that the Gospel of Saint Mark is both a witness of a “revolutionary act” – the Crucifixion, in which “faith flows from the powerless” but that “The Kingdom of God to early Christians was a gift of God, not a work of history”. That Jesus’ disciples could not more bring about the kingdom of God by their own efforts than socialism for deterministic Marxists can be achieved by intensified agitation.” Nevertheless, according to many, the Faith that “the powerless can come to power” can become caught up in history, as belief in inevitable events requires at some point a last push to help it come into being. Even the most deterministic Marxist, of course, equally, considers that at some point socialism needs a final effort to spring into existence. This then is the Robert’s “politics of the chiliastic.” To be learnt from. This may be taken in a mild form: that in working for this moment Christianity can inspire worldly movements for social justice, inspired by the very wish for eternal life that Engels thought diverted them from improving this one. Yet one cannot exclude the prospect, common amongst these Apocalyptic movements, from Müntzer’s Anabaptists onwards, that seized by the fervent “metonia, or conversion” common in such groups, that a more lengthy ‘transition period’ to the Kingdom is fought for, in which the prophetic Messiahs, reign the world, driving out or exterminating unbelievers.

Such a perspective can, naturally, with a degree of adaption, be applied to any religion. So we have, under the generous banner of progressive social protest, Shi’ite followers of the reign of the Twelfth Imam, Unitarian Alter-globalisers, Buddhist human rights activists, and Jewish protestors for global righteousness, Hindi peace campaigners, and Pagan Green anarchists. They key, for Eagleton, is that here there is a “commitment and allegiance” “faith in something” – not the “inherently atheistic” advanced capitalist system. Even without such a parti pris many, following Ernest Bloch, have a belief that there is something precious to be gleaned from the religious corpus: an inherent utopian striving for a better world. That it is not just fractious conflict but the nature of how we picture an improved world that lies there, in however odd a form. Many on the left have drunk from this well, not to mention other, even doctrinal, aspects of religions and esoteric faiths. Such as the Russian early 20^th century God Seekers, who spoke of a Third Testament, and their rival God Builders, like Lunacharsky, who made the forces of production the Father, the proletariat the Son and scientific socialism, the Holy Ghost. Today’s Messianic Marxists are in crowded company in their search for Delivery from our Vale of Tears. (3)

The theory of the ‘two churches’ then is a common belief. Though that of the eschatological seeds of the Church of the oppressed is much less widely shared. Where does it begin? If religion ever succeeded in attracting followers through a picture of genuine leap into the beyond, and was thoroughly imbued with the Eschatological picture of the Coming End Days, here and now, one such picture emerged amongst the early Christians. Whether signalled by the Son of God, the Son of Man, the story of how this was adapted, domesticated, and became transferred to a more orderly picture of inner change; a life in God within this world, while storing up treasures in Heaven, is highly complex. We will see that Engels (and his countless followers) were too hasty to describe the journey of Christianity as one of support from the oppressed to (quasi-venal) incorporation into the state – this lacks both a mechanism to explain the change and an accurate class analysis of its support. For the former area, a radical Christian, deeply informed about the historical sources, this change managed “the maintenance of the tension (of that is the appropriate goal) between the vision of the new creation and the necessity of living life in the old aeon.” Ultimately Christianity emerged through a conflict between the “real world” and the “radical practice of Jesus”. That is an internal ideological evolution predicated on the existence of a Church facing up to its own need to sustain itself in a world without visible signs of God. We should not however, forget that Engels and the believers in the Church of the poor, betrayed by its surrender to Rome, that to some Christianity always stood up for the existing order. To G.E.M. Ste Croix by contrast, each side showed “complete indifference, as Christians, to the institutions of the world in which they lived.” A fact that “prevented Christianity from even having much effect for good upon the relations between man and man.” Marx himself indicated that Christianity “justified the slavery of Antiquity, glorified the serfdom of the Middle Ages…” Or that there remain other possibilities. Some might refuse to choose. That there are those, whose like Kierkegaard, who considered the journey to faith as something entirely different, beyond ethics (that is, human rules) an ‘absurd’ choice for the infinite, is clear. They remind us that the whole process begins with belief in something beyond normal rational explanation.

Not everyone agrees that Christianity was either initially radically opposed or subsequently indifferent to its own incorporation into the Roman system of rule, for human betterment or otherwise. Theologians and scholars have offered countless fascinating accounts of what is one of the most interesting eras, the founding of a new religion – when all these choices, social, class, constraints and reflections were intermingled. From these readings we can largely see that there was never a clear, final resolution of this tensions, either by surrendering to the Roman state, or faith-absorbed standing-aside, but rather a process of contradictory absorption in the political world. One in which issues of abstract philosophy (speculation about the ultimate nature of the world, and humanity) were worked out through the emergence of a religious current that became a form of counter-society, and then, an establishment, which through negotiations and Councils, became an official adjunct (in, again, deeply complex ways) of the State in late antiquity. In the process becoming a different obstacle to political and class liberation, far more profound, than suggested by most modern atheists. That, to follow, A.C. Grayling, “Religion is a man-made device, not least of oppression and control (the secret policeman who sees what you do even in the dark on your own), whose techniques and structures were adopted by Stalinism and Nazism, the monolithic salvation faiths of modernity, as the best teachers they could wish for.” The problem is that the emergence of Christianity, often accompanied by, despite what Grayling asserts, great acts of kindness, was to seal in a box the human capacity for relating politically, and to transpose the critical wish for a better world into ways that could never be resolved in the human City except by this force. It was its investment of these ideas into the life before death, not in its wishes for the eternity beyond, that hurt the most.

This is a vast area. But for us the important elements can be brought into some focus. What was one principal feature of the Jesus movement? If there was an illumination of the divine, it proceeded vertically, through contact with the Godhead, and if he had a prophetic content it would be realised, horizontally, through, initially the looming prospect of the Last Days. Thus the Gospel was, from inception, differently received. It was factionalism: the divisions that ran throughout the creation of orthodoxy, the definition of heresy, and the setting up of mechanisms, institutions and powers that defined the nature of Christianity. Far from overwhelming human beings with a sense of the Divine, the faith began with splits. This made its presence known at the start, during the process by which the Christians separated themselves from Judaism, in the Corinthian and Jerusalem churches, in the expansion of the movement across the Roman Empire, and the absorption, and confrontation with classical culture. We can align these processes to the real class and social contexts which led to the institutionalisation of the Church through suggesting plausible mechanisms.

Kautsky offered one. Without the Kingdom of God on Earth, “The Church could not therefore suppress the antagonism between rich and poor, but instead she made of it a new social antagonism. In its origin, her organisation was democratic and her functionaries were elected by the members of the community. But as the Church grew and her wealth increased, her functionaries – the clerics – became more independent. The constitution of this authority is the social condition inherent to all collective religion..” (My emphasis) These are bound to depend on general explanations about religion’s relation to social processes, and, from lack of detailed documentation, much depends on interpretation and contextualisation of the process, not the kind of solid data that, say Marx, used to develop a concrete account of how Capital operates. This development of Christianity through doctrinal conflict began before there were any real institutions; they were the founding of them. If there was a change between the early hope for a world transformed, Eschatology into the Pauline acceptance of the transformation in the present by inner illumination, these were not crude opposition between the ‘revolutionary impulse’ and the ecclesiastical Order. But for all that, one things is fairly well established in mainstream accounts, Paul was not concerned with the immanent arrival of the Apocalypse, his transcend framework was firmly bound to the relation between the believer and God, now.

Not that order was irrelevant. A key moment was when the late Roman Emperor, Theodosius, in the 381 CE Constantinople Synod, imposed the orthodox creed through state power, the hoomusion (of the same substance) doctrine of the Trinity. That is that God, the Son and the Holy Spirit co-existed, different, but identical. This set the seal on the efforts to suppress all alternative versions of Christianity, and sounded the death-kneel of tolerance of Greco-Roman ‘Paganism’ and any non-Christian faith (Manicheism, the belief the world was ruled by Two Deities, was probably its first victim). Not did this spiral of many-sided changes end with this version of the Nicene Creed. It has continued. Not only the density of this process has struck many modern accounts, but also by the parallels between the Jesus movement and contemporary cults. Many modern writers think so, providing that we grasp that word (Cultus – worship) more accurately, embracing a range of introverted, revolutionary, magical, reforming groups. Or as we, more realistically, would call them, sects, factions, and tendencies and, in sum, splinters. Is it there, in the early years, that we can find the origins of a conflict between materiality and religious belief, and a reflection on how division in one sphere (faith) can cross over into – interact with – another (politics)? Did the reign of Orthodoxy, as Ste Croix alleges, set up an ingrained diversion from social issues? That, “I doubt if a better means could have been devised of distracting the citizens of the class struggle from thinking about their own grievances and possible ways of remedying them than representing to them, as their ecclesiastical leaders did, that religious issues were infinitely more important than social, economic or political ones, and that it was heretics and schismatics (not to mention pagans, Manicheans, and Jews) upon whom their resentment could be most profitably be concentrated.” Or was Christianity divided within itself, and that those who took the road to the State were capitulating and abandoning their commitment to resolve matters of injustice, poverty and oppression? That despite this, the institutional carapace covered a perpetually unstable ‘second Church’ with more generous human ambitions, and a utopian zest for God’s justice on Earth? A third possibility that the religious dimension of human society contains both utopianism and craving for institutional recognition; they are not diversions but part of the architecture of (all previously known) social formations. These lend themselves to being drawn into irreconcilable differences about ultimate being, that spread intolerance and suppression when taken up in the political realm, may attempt to link the two claims, without satisfying supporters of either. Or, they may find themselves welded into a relatively stable social form, in the apparatus that ensures social cohesion – up to the point when it cracks open again. The history of subsequent religious dissension better illustrates its nature than the idea that at its core belief in God contains something good, a ‘rational kernel’ hidden behind its hieroglyphics. To explore what this means needs some guiding thread. We might usefully invert and take over a strand within Karl Barth’s theological ‘actualism’. Instead of following Barth and seeing history as a series of God’s action that shape reality, as we have known it, we might see Church History through the angle of how God came to be considered existent. That is that the presence of religion in history is not only the outcome of its relations with the wider social (class and political) structures that lay down the ties that ultimately place it in different social forms. But that it has its own internal dynamic – as a set of ideological signifiers. Thus, to give one instance, there is dialectic between forms of orthodoxy and heresy which far from offering a space for liberation, is a rent in the fabric of social being without any rational and progressive goal. Or that the process of recognising the State was not just a matter of self-interest but had its own dynamic doctrinally and institutionally, with the relation between knowledge and power, accumulating ideological capital as much as political and financial capital. Or more generously, and perhaps obviously, pursuing what the Church indeed claimed to do (however falsely) to save human souls.

Falvius Josephus’ (37 – C.100 CE.) History of the Jewish War places 1^st century inter-Hebrew conflicts within the wider clash with 1^st century Roman Rule. That is, not only were there religious differences, different groupings (from Pharisees and Sadducees, to cult-like groups like the Essenes, the presumed authors of the Dead Sea Scrolls). Writers on theology have often discussed the importance of the Jewish Eschatological tradition (visions of the last days) during this period. To Christopher Rowland the first century saw an “increase in the yearning for deliverance of the people of God, such as were told in the Scriptures.” That “the period when the early Christian movement emerged was one which favoured the utopian dreamer..” From Albert Schweitzer onwards those who based their Messiah in history considered fundamental his debt to the visions of the Book of Daniel as prophecies of the coming of God’s Kingdom that had been taken over by Jesus and his followers. There was therefore a cauldron of religious discontent, in which Christianity, post Christ, emerged. This area is not easy for a non-specialist to understand. However¸ this fractiousness, if obscurely located, and hard to grasp in our terms, sets a standard for vicious religious in-fighting. Before looking therefore at the deeper issues of the underlying theological – in fact ontological (beliefs about ultimate being) – views of Christianity-in-formation, might this capacity for division be of great significance? We have suggested that politics is based on stasis. That the epic struggles of religion, above all that of Christianity, are often said to set down the blueprint for modern European political and social currents, tendencies, factions, sects and cults, and to have extended from that across the world into many other political cultures (formally in institutions, informally, through cultural globalisation) goes to its heart. Or that they have at least left a heavy imprint (however written over, and re-stamped), as the last two words indicate, one which is in effect changed – but how? What then are the differences and similarities at work here?

What exactly is there in these multiple histories that indicates such a path? One that starts in a visions and books, lives of preaching and conversions, building institutions, and warding off enemies and binding together disciples and appears to be undergoing a revival, whose effects are felt today. A world whose origins, it is often claimed, have been distorted for us by hundreds of years of institutionalised religion to the point where only a kind of leap into the beyond can even hope to grapple with the nature of the original messages of these believers. We may speculate that much of the dispute took place about a realm whose time Frank Kermode has described as truly alien to rationalist categories “Its predictions, though figurative, can be taken literally, as the future moves in on us we mat expect it to conform with the figures.” That signified that “the whole of history, and the progress of the individual life, have it also, as a beneficiation from the End, now immanent.” We have noted that this structure of feeling did not last, at least dominantly, as the most pressing concern of Christians – relegated to Gnostics, and eventually suppressed, eschatology was transformed into soteriology. The most registered fact remains that all these early doctrines, visions, and eschatological desires were eventually channelled into (or half contained by) institutions, whether post-Temple Rabbinic Judaism, or, as we will look at, the nascent Christian Church. The tangible, nunc movens of time and matter, from which Kermode suggest couriers from the Mind of God, Eternity, appeared in the form of Angels rather than bolts that shook the foundations of the Roman state.

What did this imply about the growing Christian community’s ideological glue? The present Archbishop of Canterbury well describes the theological side of the process across a wide sweep of time, “Jesus is active in the corporate life of the Church what he gives to human beings, he gives in significant part through the mediation of the common life, which is itself his ‘body’ his material presence in the world, though it does not exhaust his identity or activity. To be incorporated into the community by its imitation rite is to become a ‘bearer’ of what Jesus has to give to other believers, to be entrusted with his renewing or creative agency by means of a ritual setting aside of ordinary; identity.” However, this still neglects the fully human aspect, how the religion came to be through its material practice. Most importantly Christianity became a State doctrine. During most of history Christianity has, in the process, nevertheless, been distinct from Theocracies (states ruled by Priests, or religious law-givers) by its relative separate place in the regime of power and truth of which it is, nevertheless, a pillar. Does this not indicate something about the complex character of the social nature of religion? That we have the foreground of how stasis plays out in the sphere of civil society, how faith, the belief in the transmundane, and the political sphere of the mundane, both bear the same fundamental fissiparous destabilising elements? That they are related through their mutual tendency to shape social arrangements? Or, by contrast, that this incorporation, negotiation or, simply, sell-out, to politics, can be fought? Indeed for some leftists there is common ground here, in the dissidence the political aspirations of the Kingdom of God that is valuable. That is, in Ernest Bloch’s words, a “utopian potentiality”. That “When atheism drove out the hypostatised reality of Lord and Master from the topos of the ‘divine’, it opened up this topos to revive the one and only final mystery, the pure mystery of man. In Christianity, and even post Christum, this mystery is called our Kingdom.”

The realm of the Church, however, is much more visible. And its history is one in which the mysteries of God are less odd, perhaps endorsing a rather cruder proof of Ludwig Feuerbach’s opinion that the faith owed a great deal to projections of human characteristics onto the infinite. Those dedicated to the anointed one, Christ, who unfolded the Word. Or was the Word. Whether there was an ‘original violently loving God’ or not, or that this image is an appropriate one outside of a very particular theological take, we have plenty of evidence that he inspired many angry exchanges about his Nature. These definition may escape our comprehension s they wander into infinity, but what guided their doctrinal success is all too human. It may be said, anachronistically no doubt, that it is the ideological intensity and the organised caucuses, fervid meetings, writings and Councils about the phrases they used that provide an easy comparison with modern politics, from street agitation to lobbies and Parliaments. Not to mention the relative fluidity and a degree of equality (however formal and temporary) between disputants – something whose genesis is beyond the reach of Emperors and Sovereigns (until the Papacy became its own religious Sovereignty). Its unity was/is the Body of Christ (Romans 12:4,5); the Church was made as a gathering, defined by a ritual (sacramentum) that celebrated its participation in the corpse of the Lord through the Eucharist. Many of Christianity’s divisions as it took off as a religion in the first half of the first millennium occurred over the nature of that frame, its Human or Divine nature. Further back the split over the body was more direct; Saint Paul’s faction clashed with the more orthodox Jesus congregation, Jewish Christians over the flesh, in this instance about the need for circumcision. To Rowland, “The period of the Law had come to an end with the cross, for the crucifixion of the Messiah had effectively shown that he Law was never intended as a means of salvation, but as witness to the glory to come. The cross is to be understood as the gateway to eschatological glory for Christ and ultimately for believers. Its stands before humanity as a scandal, representing a moment of crisis.” A great deal of Paul’s letters are concerned with the dominance of faith and spirit over traditional Judaism, and extended it to an appeal to overcome the whole heritage of the orthodox Law, in the Torah and Talmudic exegesis. “ ..if it be true that that God is one…he will therefore justify both the circumcised in virtue of their faith, and the uncircumcised through their faith.” (Romans 3:30) As Karl Barth and others have commented, this is not a trivial matter, but one negotiated through a sense of how the Kingdom of God became not, an apocalyptic immediate possibility, but the way in which the Christian concept of the Lord entered the faithful, by grace. Israel and the synagogue are in a state of “unnatural disobedience” by their refusal to accept the Saviour.

It is hard, though an enormous amount of effort has been put into revealing these early years of Christian proselytism and growth, to reconstruct the primal division within the Jesus movement between those who continued to behave as Jews (in the sense of fully observing the Torah’s Law) and Paul’s burgeoning Christ-group. Christ may have been a Messianic figure amongst others, a Bringer of news about the coming Apocalypse, or a teacher of ethics, but in each case he is marked off not by what he was (peeled away as if we could ‘see’), but by how his Being became Embodied in the Church. The Gospel must have been open to the Gentiles, the issue was whether, how or if, a conversion should accommodate to Jewish customs. A frequent way – taken now by believers as well as those who claim neutrality – is to describe the organised form of the religious groundswell is in terms of ‘factional’ differences in the broadest sense (two groups within one not fully defined movement). Or, to consider Paul, for example, as an Organiser of a movement, come organised sect – with factions inside and decidedly bizarre cults just outside. As a mixture of charismatic enthusiast and pragmatic (up to a point) community leader. Evidence for them as truly rival organised forces lies in sparse recorded doctrinal distinctions. Outside the Canon we have obscure references in the writings of the Apostolic fathers, such as Ignatius’ letters ((early second Century), to uprooting heresies, whose full identity (whether remaining Law-bound Judaisers, or followers of Docetism – Christ was not really human, or other groups) remains a matter of dispute. Or to get more than a glimpse of all the other variant beliefs that soon sprung up in contact with the movement. Not much other than glimpses of how these messages were more widely received. Doctrinal disputation was a feature of ancient world Judaism which Christianity carried on, but the very process of breaking from that religion would have allowed it to assume a different character. (4)

But more significantly this might be said to herald a basic change in ancient politics. Religion began not to be treated as something fixed by birth and tradition that by unexamined right illuminated a community’s whole culture. It became an area both aside from and part of it. The emerging faith community of choice (or self-election), Christianity, upset social arrangements by claiming to decide anew all the rules. Here, instead of previous disagreements about policy, or fights between rival organised factions based on clan, ethnic and class interests, we have disputes about universal claims to link the mundane to the transmundane. Moral behaviour and worship were matters for discussion together. These received a test in the form of disputes about their truth. In principle these affect everybody, but only those who believe can take part in making decisions. So we find significant marking points: arrangements for organising social order that appear in Christian (and other religions’) history that shaped the foundations of modern politics. The Christians, whatever the exact character of their ideas, opened up a new mechanism for large areas of social order, one based on Revelation which simultaneously appeared as solid as a rock (Scripture), and as shaky as a Rocking Horse (Interpretation). Suppression of heretical beliefs was not unique to Christianity (as ancient Persia indicated) but what is highlighted here is that the drift back to absolute freedom of interpretation remained a permanent possibility. However theoretical. Having grasped the political mettle, as will be seen, to resolve differences which, even if only indirectly, after all, affected the state and public sphere, it is hardly surprising that this tool remained in use. History does not show many examples of those who make claims of absolute truth depriving themselves, when available, of the weapons of coercion. In contrast to both to the Jewish notion of the Chosen People the victorious religious Truth (initially merely theoretically, later administratively) was applicable to reshaping the fabric of everyday life of everyone. In a difference of lesser degree, the ethical turn of late antiquity’s philosophical schools (Epicureans and Stoics), to the ‘care of the self’, this became a matter of the duties of the self to God’s Revealed Word. When the legal apparatus of the State was in play we can see how factionalism developed, over what this revelation was, and from synods to strenuous efforts to end them by state repression, there are indications here of a gamut of responses that politics has yet to have done with.

From its genesis, Christianity, Paul had clearly not settled its doctrine around the Resurrection or the Spirit. It did not present a fixed internally consistent truth In its disentanglements from Post-Temple Judaism we learn of disagreement already emerging over the justification of faith by works, or by grace alone, present in the New Testament’s texts themselves, and of the different conceptualisation of Jesus’ Godhead (listed below). One area stands out against the entire modern Marxist (?) Messianistic interpretation of Saint Paul In the absence of the Second Coming, and an only partially stabilised textual Canon, dissension would be rife if ultimate issues of religion were examined in any detail. There was no way, short of the actual creation of the Kingdom of God on Earth, to settle any matter of debate other than by purely human means; the different sides had no intrinsic proof of their rightness outside of their hearts. As a result Christianity hatches, from its beginnings, differences. Tertullian in the Second Century emphasised the role of tradition and the apostolic succession in defining ‘true’ – orthodox – belief (against the existence of apocryphal texts). Describing the process of reaching certainty Origen writing in the 3^rd Century, when the practice must have been relatively codified, listed three main ways of reading Scripture, through its ‘body’ (immediate meaning) its ‘soul’ (analogously) and through its ‘spirit’ (images of heavenly things). These remain signposts to the fact that there could be no fixed reading, or creed, other than of human creation. All the apparently seamless system of signs that bound our world to the ‘other’ existence of the Divine, cracked when people began to weigh the merits of different accounts of that revealed Being. That far from being a negative side to the process of factionalising – or simply differences of opinion – was a part of the general upsetting, or what we can call the specific stasis of religious order, which has ensured that one can never achieve beyond the Self the welding of the world at hand with the beyond. Despite the wishes of some philosophers and theologians that is. Or rather, that only force and strongly governed ideology and culture can construct a consensus at the base of any society around a Faith. In La Fontaine’s meaning, the logic of the strongest wins out. Which, historically, has been as great a part of the legacy of Christianity to politics as all its other aspects, from its opening of the gap to a secular existence, since the Church is ultimately based on a beyond that always escapes exact definition – Barth’s famous absence of a secure bridge to either the full meaning of the Gospel or to the living God, to its detailed culture and morality. To Slavoj Žižek its universalism cut against was a miraculous Event that disturbs the balance of pagan ontologies that assimilate the human into the “One-All” by positing difference. This can be put a lot more simply. That Christianity set up a difficulty (how to connect the to the universal) and then has spent two thousand year trying to resolve it. So that what we will look at is not a foundation stone on which politics has been built, but a process by which religion became only partly domesticated, part of politics, material in a far broader base and in the process something contestable, inherently so. A perpetually recurring doubt in the building of Chains of Being that tie us to the Divine. One that leads, just as inevitably, to efforts to enforce Closure. That is an urge to nail down the shifting chain of the signifiers from the human world of the Symbolic to the (imaginary) Real of God, to pass over the crossing to the Beyond.

Epic, and well-recorded (by the victors) intellectual battles commenced when Christianity had seized the imagination of large swathes of the population of the late Roman Empire. That is, when it has a material presence, and practice, culminating in a negotiated absorption into the State. Whether this was a capitulation or largely willed-for expansion into institutionalised social recognition and power (which seems more likely) the spores of earlier types of stasis remained. Here we have the most lucid examples of how the translation from abstract discussion into social form took shape. Indeed they could be said to be its early years – in the way that all we have are records shot through with these debates, and their echoes, rather than a real chronology. According to Ernest Bloch the absence of the Second Coming meant that the early indifference to the world developed into “Inward-looking spirituality and concentration on the other-world began to take the place of the Kingdom coming down from heaven. The rich were pardoned and almost assured of their place in heaven if they gave arms…” Yet there remained, despite the victory of the “Church and state authorities” a savoury remnant. That “something of the social threat” in that a “desire for Exodus and for a break-through into the Kingdom” long lingered. Another narrative would be that the failure of the Apocalypse to arrive was, to say the least, inevitable, and it is curious for anyone other than the believers to regret this. What became at stake was the nature of other vehicles for the faithful to realise themselves through and with their Deity. That this was not so hard for the majority of Christians suggests that their aspirations for God’s kingdom on Earth had not involved much earthly effort. We have little evidence of much effort made to realise this world other than in building a counter-community, none at all of any revolutionary; action – for all Terry Eagleton’s second-hand Liberation Theology about Christ ‘associating’ with ‘anti-imperialist’ (theocratic) Zealots. Despite well-documented analysis of its all-importance, the turn from early Christian eschatology, to the private celebration of faith (a ‘horizontal’ view that the resurrection and the Kingdom would come on Earth) to ‘vertical’ practice (towards God as something to be approached, at however a distance, here and now) appears to have left much less trace than completely different disputes. The question is therefore what happened not only to channel ‘utopian’ hope to existence after death, but why, in recorded debates, more pressing topics emerged.

Any transition from contemptuous rejection to integration, of Church and State, (an anachronistic idea since this scarcely appeared even on the distant horizon to the primitive Church) the new course opened up a different set of disputed issues for the believers to quarrel about. That is, over the nature of Christ, as a hinge between our world and the Other world, or as such a part of Godhead that he was divine semblance, a sign of the Lord. In other words, the key issue for Christianity was not whether an effort to plunge into a world to be realised in the future, or even whether to devote themselves to realising the Kingdom within themselves. It was, infinitely more realistically, whether there was any ‘bridge’ between themselves and God at all, through Christ and through Scriptural teaching. Many of them (the most abstract) are comprehensible today largely because of their borrowings from ancient philosophy (Plato and the neo-Platonists), not the other way around. This should not obscure the fact the hook they offered was far from abstractly appealing: it joins together the here-and-now with the heavens. Without it we have no sense of how Christianity’s apparently ‘illogical’ creed of the Trinity could be immensely attractive, it is a far more ‘rational’ link between the mundane and extramundane than the vehicles offered by religions which leave the believer stark and alone on the planet faced with something infinitely beyond them. Or bound to the chains of a cold Book. (5)

Edward Gibbon, in celebrated lines, traced a great deal of Christian speculation to this source, present in the Gospel of Saint John. “The respectable name of Plato was used by the orthodox and abused by the heretics, as the common support for truth and error..” “The same subtle and profound questions concerning the nature, the generation, the distinction and the equality of the three divine persons of the mysterious Triad or Trinity, were agitated in the philosophical and in the Christian schools of Alexandria.” Justin, considered one of the Fathers of the Church, (100 – 175), preached a transcendent God present in the world, with clear reference to the Greek’s ideas of the divine Logos-made-flesh. Others, only briefly cited by Gibbon, but considered today of importance, diverged radically from this. Marcion (85 – 160) offered his view of the two Gods, (one the incompetent designer of the existing world, the other Christ, the redeemer from this) The Gnostic Valentinus (100 – 175) took a different Platonic angle on the Divine human light that was above all material being. More usually disagreements were expressed over the precise ‘balance’ of the Trinity. Variations on these, and other issues, came to have graver consequences as the Church expanded. As a historian Gibbon’s central judgement was that such disputes mattered very little until the Church was an authority, and the masses of people became devoted to these differing views. One will see in the latter an entrenched hostility to popular sectarianism in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as if such disputes were not the concern of ordinary people. Others could say that this illustrated a democratisation or at least an extension to a wider public, of thinking about the basic make-up of the world. This latter observation is of as much significance in illuminating the nature of this quasi-social religious stasis as all the previous allegedly important transition from the hope and fears of the approaching Apocalypse. It is to be considered, that, within an ideologically constructed salvation factory’ (Jesus), the character of the machines and instruments that produced salvation (Christ’s clockwork), the tools of soteriological trade as were a more serious matter of dispute than the timing of an Event Beyond Time whose coming had been infinitely postponed for a long period of time-as-at-hand

The history of Christianity’s factions and sects, schematics and dissenters the coalescence of ideas broad currents and what tends to be accepted, begins in the writings of these Church’s polemicists, the early hagiographers and herisologists, the heretics’ works being largely and successfully suppressed (though many of the Gnostics writings have since been re-discovered). They ceased to be viewpoints expressed by shifting groups and became attached to, or against, existing church structures. Take some of the most marked epochs, at Christianity’s institutional foundations, recorded (imperfectly) by the Fathers of the Church. Eusebius (260 – 339), one of the first historians of the struggle to establish Orthodox (Catholic) Doctrine. These are far richer than the records of the Apostolic Fathers. His account is full of dangerous heresies, caught by the “evil demon”. To take a few: Ebonite’s, who held “poor and mean opinions” about Christ (i.e. questioned his absolute Divinity), the sect of Cerinthus, one of the first millennialists who heralded Christ’s Kingdom would be on earth, and indulged in “unlimited indulgence in gluttony and lechery at Banquets.” Plenty of other enemies of God get cited amongst an account of genuine suffering at the hands of the Roman state’s persecution of Christians and their eventual victory in the Empire. The travails of the martyrs, and the works of the first Christian intellectuals, were, he concludes, bound to so finish. At the conclusion of this factional battle, Eusebius celebrated the Emperor Constantine’s Christian rule in extravagant language (whose modern echoes do not need underlining), “Men had now lost all fear of their former oppressors; day after day they kept dazzling festival; light was everywhere, and men who once dared not look up greeted each other with smiling faces and shining eyes. They danced and sang in city and country alike, giving honour first to of all to God our Sovereign lord, as they had been instructed, and then to the pious emperor with his sons, so dear to God. Old troubles were forgotten, and all irreligion passed into oblivion…” In reality the institutional triumph came later in 381 when Theodosius, partly promoted by another Church father, Ambrose of Milan succeeded imposing the Constantinople Synod slightly amended Nicene Creed, and set up the legal framework to ensure it was obeyed. Nevertheless, Eusebius might be said to one of the first narratives of a victorious factional ideological battle. (6)

Well, not quite. The battle lines were not fixed. Eusebius himself is sometimes considered unorthodox, a sympathiser with Arius (C256 – 356) whose views tore the Church apart. Disagreements about the nature of Christ, the Divine Logos (with a Platonic shade of meaning as Absolute Being) as manifested in the Trinity, became for centuries the “badges of factions” (as Gibbon put it). The struggle over Arianism (the Father is greater than the Son), the mysteries of the Homoousion (the Consubstantiality, equality of nature of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost of the Trinity – the Nicene creed), and the vast, colourful array of different opinions on the topic, burning in their day, became, as Christianity was established, an issue of state policy, and a sign separating the Arian Germans from the Latin and Greek Orthodox. Another rift was caused by the Donatists – which contained a political challenge in effect, since it stood for the purity of those giving Communion and opposed the very existence of imperfect sinners inside the Church hierarchy. Saint Augustine, a former Manichean heretic himself, spent his years as Bishop of Hippo fighting them – even writing a sectarian chant against the influential group (no doubt the forerunner of many student union songs about rival leftist groups). These and other splits had been incipient at Christianity’s origins. Gibbon noted that in the century following the death of Christ, the dogmatic wars had already begun. A transposition of ancient philosophy (the speculations on being of Plotinus and other neo-Platonists) into religion (often regarded as present in St John’s Gospel) provided the mainspring. Budding theological divisions were soon “exposed to the public debate”. They were no longer philosophical speculations, debated at legislature in the Athenian Academy, but were expounded by those “least qualified to judge” who were “least exercised in the habits of abstract reasoning.” He lists 18 variant creeds (excluding the outsiders such as Gnosticism and Manicheans). We can see how differences became concentrated in their most developed form in bishops’ synods, such as the ecumenical Council of Nicaea, (325 CE). Which while not democratic in a modern sense (the ecclesiastical hierarchy to begin with) certainly saw a strong degree of easily recognisable factionalism – over Arianism. Driven out of Orthodoxy it survived, as one would expect, only through the use of power, by the Germanic tribes who were faithful to the belief, and withered when that might receded. As Councils followed, the authority of the Church, as it became established, gave an ever-severer cast to their arguments, a matter of life and death as persecution of Pagans and Heretics on grounds of sedition were replaced by the ferocious battles for religious power, and organised heresy hunts took over from the condemnation of conciliar assemblies. Intra-Christian fights were well in presence at the other celebrated Council of Nicaea (787 CE) over Iconoclasm – banning the veneration of images (and thus religious icons themselves). They have never ended, through Protestantism to the break-away Churches who refused to accept Vatican 11.

These disputes were not confined the ecclesiastics and the devoted, as they tend to be today. Famously Gibbon quoted Jortin, writing of the time following Eusebius (334 to 389). In the seat of Macedonius, “‘This city,” says he, ‘ is full of mechanics and slaves, who are of them profound theologians, and preach in the shops and in the streets. If you desire a man to change a piece of silver, he informs you wherein the Son differs from the Father, if you ask at the price of a loaf, you are told, by way of reply, that the Son is inferior to the Father; and if you enquire whether the bath is ready, the answer is, that the Son was made out of nothing.” Nobody can miss the disdain of the vulgar herd here. Gibbon believed with Plato that the humble mechanic should best stick to toiling in his allotted role. In opposition, it’s worth reminding ourselves of the point already made, that here there is a vigorously democratic aspect of a dispute in which all can join in with their own opinions. It is no doubt wearisome to have the villager crowd expressing an opinion on subjects of the delicacy only the refined can grasp – an attitude repeated today by the religious who dislike sceptics and atheists trampling on their cherished myths and poetic yearnings. The fact remains that they had become wrapped up in social forces that were inherently conflictual. But what was not in doubt in the ancient disputes is that democracy only existed to a degree. Power was at stake, a battle between those in charge, and did not depend initially on winning a row amongst the people, except for the immediate auxiliaries of the notables fighting it out. It was surely the role of the Church as prize, wielder of such power, arbiter, and caster into the flames, that is the objectionable legacy of the early religious faction-fights, and one with significant echoes in later systems of censorship and the more violent repression of ideas. Micheal Onfray does not exaggerate much when he states that Constantine alone, established this rule by “use of constraint, torture, acts of vandalism, destruction of libraries and symbolic sites, unpunished murder, ubiquitous propaganda, the leader’s absolute power, the remoulding of the whole of society on the government’s ideological lines, extermination of opponents, monopoly of legal violence and the means of communication, abolition of the divide between private life and the public sphere, overall of politicisation of society, destruction of pluralism, bureaucratic organisation, expansionism – attributes of all totalitarianisms, including that of the Christian Empire.”(7)

Preceding the rise to power, and during their entire history, the established or dominant Churches has been confronted with their own type of stasis. Not just internally but externally. There are obvious similarities between the historical record of intense faith groups and what we would today call religious cultish behaviour. But as factionalising was initially a political phenomenon of the pre-Christian world, so religious cults appear to have very ancient roots. Bearing in mind, of course, that the most available descriptions are made from a hostile perspective. The first surviving satirical (and hostile) treatment of a recognisable religious cult is said to be the Epicurean Lucian (Lucianus) of Samosata’s satire, Alexander the False Prophet. Writing in the 2^nd Century Lucian’s description of this – real – person, with his acts of wonder and his ability to dazzle followers, amass money and devotion, is said to provide a recognisable prototype of a modern cultish leader. Perhaps one should go back further to Simon the Magician. He had (Acts 7.9 to 24) swept the Samaritans “off their feet with his magic arts, claiming to be someone great”. The New Testament is not known for its developed sense of humour as Saint Peter, accusing him of dishonesty with God, castigated him and that he was “doomed to taste the bitter fruit and wear the fetters of sin.” Here, perhaps is another type of dislocation in the pre-existing fit between religion and society that preceded and accompanied the Christianisation of the Common Era.

But was not the spread of Christian inspired stasis that overturned the order of the Roman Empire’s mixture of gods and civic worship, itself the action of a cult? More mundane, but equally important, information can be seen in the post-Gospel writings generally. A po-faced attitude towards building the cause of the ‘Citizens of heaven’ is the, less poetically theological tone of much the letters of Paul and the other records of the earliest church. Their frequent disagreements, display a remorseless need to sustain discipline in the face of disagreements, sexual misconduct, monetary dodgy dealing, how to deal with the authorities, rivals (Jewish Christians who held to the ‘law), disreputable individuals, and the details of organisation. Its more than possible to read the lot, callously, as a series of tracts and internal documents on Building the Christian Party – though there is far more depth and beauty in it all than in the average left group’s publications. No doubt their had, their, unrecorded, mockers, beyond the ranks of the more heavy handed Roman Pagan critics. Not to mention the tales of orgies, which had a long life, extending – in a displaced way – to stories about the later heresies and millennialists (and not strictly speaking always inaccurate). Here, like many contemporary religious commentators, we may feel that later writings offer an illumination into what happened. Aspects of sectarian fighting, and nit-picking, not to mention rank religious hypocrisy were the stock of trade of medieval parody and satirical barbs, in Chaucer (such as the Summoner’s tale of the greedy friar) and Langland’s Piers Ploughman, in which Mendicant Friars that “”preached the peple, for profit of hem-seleum’), or Rabelais’ Gargantua and his Abby of Theleme, and their motto, Do What Thou Wilt, to cite but a few well-known poetic source of anti-clerical (as distinguished from anti-religious) this phenomenon was well known by the middle ages. Erasmus’ Praise of Folly (Moriae Encomium, 1511) a magnificent work of great humour largely at the expense of theological sectarianism, Scholastic quibbling that is. A “phalanx of professional definitions, validations, deductions and propositions, both simple and complex”. Or theologians, who “enjoy themselves too, describing every aspect of hell with such accuracy as to suggest they’d been resident citizens for years.” Erasmus’ attack on the Pope’s Party, in Pope Julius Barred from Heaven is in another, vein, directly attacking real figures of authority. The full range of types of social upsetting, organisational consolidation and recruitment, propaganda, are at work in the New testament, though the barbs, counter-jibes, which we have in abundance from later periods, have survived less well- from the time when Paganism and Judaism were suppressed or sidelined. (8)

Engels drew his own, rather lesser, though often entertaining, sometimes misleading, stories from amongst the early Christian disputants and sects. He made some telling comparisons between their disputes about the nature of the divine throve and the controversies at the beginnings of the socialist movement. But over-extend, as we shall see, the comparison. This effort has never ceased to be reproduced, to the point where some points of order need to be raised. He offered a sketch of a parallel causal explanation of Christian and early socialist ideology which may show something about the specific nature of Christianity’s entry into the political world, and the nature of its factionalising. That both emerged as an expression of a social push, for reform, which, in the religion’s case was then turned around to serve the greater needs of social stability. Sympathetic to the early Christians’ travails, at many points, Engels subscribed at times to the comforting opinion that there was something in common between the early years of Christianity, and belief that the “word of God is alive and active” (Hebrews 4,12), and socialist pioneers. They were displaced manifestations of protest, the one a transference of class conflict into imaginary other-worldly salvation, that other (also in the realm of the imaginary) a condensation of popular unrest in this-worldly (but still unreal) dreams of an equal society. Engels tended to avoid going far into the nature of this claim, thereby becoming one of the first historical materialists to downplay the materiality and depth of people’s world-views, which formed the chief bonds that drew them together.

The issue here is that the process of transfer and condensation in each example produced a format of material practice that generated its own causal determinations. Thus, the Church, thus the Trade Unions and Socialist Sects. These bodies would not exist without these ideological ties, which are not just human beings; way of living their relation to the world, but the structure which guides their actions in making social links. Whatever else formed them and caused their appearance they have causal weight. A unified movement is only possible in certain conditions, and certainly all the evidence for disagreement uncovered – from variants about doctrine to the different social groups involved in each movement, to the concrete aims of each body (as the religious strove to conquer not just Souls but the State, or the Socialists tried to change Laws as well as Men) are the most compelling sources. Nevertheless one can say of Engels that he revealed an important part of sectarianism, small group dynamics, and the appearance of providential oracles, more or less fraudulent (or self-deceiving). These appear to stud the social field and puncture ideologies as such, and are far from unique of religion or early socialism. . So, the display of charismatic leadership, and cult behaviour (transferring the original meaning of cult, worship of any kind, to blind obedience to a Chief), was and is a feature in common to just about any kind of movement, that is, anything emerging out of the people. The examples in the studies of Early Christianity and their socialist counterparts are striking. But was Engels original in comparing them? Or in telling the tale of often fraudulent cults? He knew he was not. These phenomena are sufficiently historically frequent and noteworthy to have been mentioned and to have inspired the parodies already mentioned. From the ancient world Engels cited the case of the preacher, Proteus, “a prophet, an elder, a master of the synagogue”, a “new Socrates”, and became entirely supported by the Christian community. Until thrown out for violation of their law. In short a charlatan. Engels remarked that he had known of the ‘prophet Albert’ who had lived off the Weitling communist communities in Switzerland in the 1840s, and acted in much the same way – as well as a number of other characters.

Engels suggested another comparison between Christianity and Socialism, “Neither of these two great movements was made by leaders or prophets – though there are prophets enough among both of them – they are mass movements. And mass movements are bound to be considered at the beginning, confused at the beginning, confused because the thinking of the masses at first moves among contradiction, and also because of the role that prophets still play in them at the beginning. This confusion is to be seen in the formation of numerous sects which fight against one another with at least the same zeal as against the common external enemy.” A note of caution should be added: Christianity became an established institution, not just a movement, the masses were brought together by faith in an ancient world, socialism’s masses were formed by industrialisation, brought together by conditions, not belief, and it has been institutionalised in a very different manner – which is the topic of later sections. It was through the decisive transformation of the apocalyptic vision, which helped the process, which shows something about the nature of this faith, that it could, by its nature, never have seen a Kingdom of God on Earth. It resolved its differences, which arose in the wake of this failed hope, through administrative means, initially through internal procedures, then, with a handle on the state, through power and repression. If Socialism has taken over anything from this heritage it is dire: the effort to settle truth by bureaucratic and repressive means. But in fact the very nature of its political ambitions gives the labour movement a very different dimension: its crises can be negotiated through negotiation in the mundane world, not through the decisions of guardians of Doctrine. Its sources are social, not the visions and the Revelations of the Gospel or religious pundits. There is a democratic chasm between the love of this world that lies at the root of socialism and the yearning for the Beyond that anchors Christianity and all religion. Were socialists to take the path back to the gaps into the world rent by Faith and seek an Eschatological return they would soon find themselves erecting new tyrannical means to enforce the validity of the Good News they discovered: by appealing to the unsettled Infinity they abdicate human negotiation. The rest is secondary. If one wants to cite the importance of magnetic personalities, that can be accounted for in all political trends, from the popular to the elitist, and the fraud a certain type of cultish leader thrives on (not least their own self-deceptions) is so commonplace a human fault that it extends far into the area of business practice, academia. So obviously that the word itself, fraud, has been around from the classical Latin fraus-fraudis to describe it. As yet nobody has produced a thorough non-psychological explanation of how this happens, and, as will be argued, this remains a difficulty for politics not to say those caught up in these cults. Yet the dead-end that religious and political charisma in small inward looking and manipulative groups offers is far less significant than that created by widespread delusions fostered by mass support for non-negotiable Eschatology and the refusal of political negotiation.

One point remains crucial and can be looked into: there may have been great convention-breaking bonds of belief that swept through each social trend, but one is anchored literally in the Not of This World, with an ambiguous relationship to the political, the Polis, the City of Men, the other has never had anything other than the Human City as its object. This should clarify and make us wary of too simply taking over Alain Badiou’s judgement (which is puts in a new form an old opinion) that what Saint Paul and (by implication) Pauline Christianity offered was based on new working out of the concept of Truth. Badiou premised this on a concept of ‘truth events’ that mark out history. They are “innovation in act”, singular but universal, “irreducible singularities, the ‘beyond the law’ of situations.” That “Every truth process is an entirely invented immanent break with the situation.” Thus Saint Paul (no doubt prefiguring Badiou’s Event, the Cultural Revolution) depended “entirely on a pure event, which is itself beyond all the prediction and calculation that our understanding is capable of” That from the seizure of the Crucifixion, its immanent scandal of suffering, and redemption, and resurrection, spread the form of Christian universalism “the Pauline conception of the church is not at all the realization of a closed separation. Instead, it proposes something that is open to everybody, a collective determination, and the realization of a separation in a universal field. So, naturally, there is, for Paul, in the process of universalism, something like division but this is a division internal to the subject itself. It is not an external division between the subject and others, but a division within the subject.” On the contrary, if the doctrine is universal, it is in the shifting political application we have sketched already, and behind this the ‘truth’ of the religion is strictly dependent on a much less path-breaking submission to Revelation. Or rather, to its vehicle in the community of Christ – the Church. Far from relishing its position as what Slavoj Žižek claims, as “’uncoupled’ outcasts from the social order” the universalistic impulse, thwarted by the perpetual absence of a divine mechanism to draw the individual into its presence, turned to coupling itself with the established social set up.

It should remain fixed in our minds that the Christians did not read their texts to sift out what was the truth that Paul proclaimed and the rest of the New Testament. There one can read, mixing references, that by Christ, “God choose to reconcile the whole universe to himself, making peace through the shedding of blood upon the Cross – to reconcile all things, whether on earth or in heaven – through him alone” (Colossians, 1, 20) and that “the solid reality is Christ’s” (Colossians 2, 19), and that Christians are “God’s chosen people” (Colossians, 2, 12). Lest we forget the followers of Jesus saw themselves as those who “stand before Mount Zion, and the city of the living God, heavenly Jerusalem, before myriads of angels, the full concourse and assembly of the first-born citizens of heaven, and God the judge of all.” (Hebrews 12,22) “aliens in a foreign land” (Peter 1,11), They highlight a Hope that Bloch underlined, which overturns our world, and creates a stasis in society, to be sure. But the drive is always from the horizontal dimension to the vertical one: the source of the other-worldliness of Christians. Karl Barth emphasised that Paul required, in Letter to the Romans, that believers should adjust to the authority of the state. But that the “which the Gospel calls eternity has fulfilled the time. That which the Gospel call the Spirit dwells in moral bodies”. Consequently in the “vast space of the gentile world” the believers are sanctified – thus apart. That this attitude has endured over the centuries (and it is so obvious to anyone who knows fervent believers of all religions that it hardly should need pointing out) is endorsed by Erasmus himself, a rather good witness one would think, affectionately jibbing that for the godly, “the visible world in all its manifestation is either utterly beneath their concern of at any rate of far less value than the things that cannot be seen.” Or that “in absolutely every aspect of life that the godly person recoils from the bodily domain and its transported to the realm of the eternal, the invisible and the spiritual.” So, the “eternal” guides the transient, or rather the knowledge of infinity, which only the believers have. This perhaps marks the area where any alignment of religion with the mundane becomes problematic, and where, optimists about Christian or other religious forms of democracy meet a crucial test. (9)

Amongst those Marxists who wrote of religion, steeped in Engels’ immediate intellectual contribution, Kautsky’s great work The Foundation of Christianity (1908) is largely a series of popularising footnotes (based on a great deal of learning) to Marx’s intellectual partner’s judgement. The premise, that Christianity was originally an anti-establishment movement, of the ancient ‘proletariat’ and slaves, remains a consolation for those who want to say something in its favour. Nietzsche of course found in this a direct parallel with socialism’s ressentiment, pity, and hatred of the Noble. The herd that followed Jesus was a prototype of every revolutionary mob. “Christianity is the revolt of everything that crawls along the ground directed against that is elevated.” This much seems the case. Christ was poor (if his life corresponded to the account given to us), and if the followers that made Christianity Christian were not always deprived of wealth, they were by definition at variance with the Roman or Jewish hierarchy. It equally seems to have been the practice of early Christians to hold strongly to the belief that they should care for others, share their wealth, and adopt modest and ascetic life-styles (at least if Acts are to be given credence). More recent research has cast doubt over the extent of this Charity, and there is no evidence for sharing the, means of production (though later in Monastic orders would practice this within their communities). ) The common life is became located in the meetings of Christian friendship – initially awaiting the Apocalypse, gradually adjusting to the need for the community to adjust to the Roman state, gradually becoming a factor within that state, and finally establishing its ‘universalism’, and distinction from Pagan concept of the particular allotted place of people in the Universe and the Polis with its own rules bent in favour of the Elect. In this way the transformation that turned on the inability of a vertical desire to find comfort in the Divine spread outwards into the social sphere with the principle objective of moulding society in its image. Thus we can see not that the Christianity ‘sold out’ to Power, but that it became part of it in the process of becoming more truly itself, a religion whose practice recognised that only the Earth existed, whole its theory was inclined upwards towards the heavens. As far as any radical economic doctrine went this was itself altered. Georges Sorel, for example, considered that the Fathers of the Church participated in the ancient economy, in a directly opposite manner, as a regulating force. That is with a conception of “possession contrôlée par l’Église “ Or limited by the needs their notion of Charity and equilibrium dictated, and behind this the real interests the Church administration had. From this, rather than the moment of the Eschatological longing of the early Church, we have a more solid source of Christian anti-commercial, anti-capitalist, energy: that idea that whatever the economic arrangements of markets and production everything should eventually be moulded in line with the doctrines of the Church. Everything was and is inclined to make mainstream Christian experience a part of the world in which everyone lived, and dwelt on the potential of redemption beyond time only through the inner light of the Spirit.

We still have to tease out what is unique, and what is not, the force that drives what Terry Eagleton repeatedly labels Holy Terror. But, instead of this underlying gap into the beyond, something more approachable is detectable. That this is prefigured in the Gospels is less surprising than the claims of people who take the words of the Gospels more lurid revelations as messages of outstanding eschatological depth. Enthusiasm for this, we have seen, passed soon enough (and when we come to examine revivals of the Spirit in this vein they too have not endured). Perhaps the greatness (and appeal) of the New Testament lies in the fact that it recorded the ordinariness of its characters. Something that won it the scorn of no less a figure as Nietzsche. For whom it was “nothing but petty sectarian groupings, nothing but Rocco of the soul”, it was from the people “regurgitating their most personal affairs, stupidities, sorrows and petty worries” that something of the taste of the time survives. No doubt the Christian Church (real or ideal) displayed many features common to the splitting, disagreements, ‘party-building’ and ideological apparatus of any social and political movement. It is human. But we stop at this point. We have discarded Nietzsche’s sneers at these efforts, but there remains something. There is a lot more at stake here than the work of people to find some home in the world: the Eschatological Vision of the Cross-as the point where the World meets the Divine. This is the essential point where we part company forever. For believers it is the other-existence that really counts. But in practice, one, which seems not to affected the behaviour of the majority too deeply.

The problem for the left arises in making conclusions too hastily about what will find amongst the domains where there is are resemblances. The theory of the ‘two churches’, that the radicalism of the ‘movement’ (considered ultimately a class protest) was ‘betrayed’ by the priestly apparatus, as it became part of the establishment, is politically entrenched today, at least amongst the popular ideology of the left, even if its historical basis looks shakier and shakier. We have said that the early Church was forced to negotiate its way out of this imposing origin by virtue of the simplest of event – the non-event of the Second Coming. The idea that on the one hand there was a proto-politically and socially radical Church – the Commons – and on the other, an establishment that thwarted them is a drastic simplification. It neglects the fact that the whole history of the Church is that it has sought to create an establishment. Stirring the masses, the followers of Christ eventually did, entering into the bones of Europe’s culture. But, on the facts, Engels was wrong to claim that early Christianity was a movement of the oppressed, or specifically slaves and proletarians (in the sense of the propertyless). It is now generally accepted that its original influence in the ancient world did not initially reach far beyond urban centres (hence pagans, from the Latin for country dweller). Within these districts it gained converts from all classes, but particularly the (free) artisans. There were equally many well-off converts, and others, while not rich, held some property. It is presently well-established that its chief difference with ‘mystery’ religions, the cults of the Pagan world, which apparently gained an audience amongst a not dissimilar layer of spiritual questers, was that the followers of Jesus were well-organised, had a generally stable doctrine (though this, we have seen was open to disputes), and was exclusive. Christianity built its unity around the process of establishing a Book, literally made the Book, deciding what went in and what was not Canon. This implied literary, at least for the organisers – not so widespread. In its first centuries Christianity developed around the activities of intellectuals to establish this, and an emerging hierarchy, not from a social protest. It added features of self-protection, a welfare state for the members, and a refuge from the violence of the time, a state that could descend at any moment and deprive people of their living. Or a shield against wars, a sense of familiarity and human contact faced with the sheer complexity of the Empire. And as Gibbons aid, its simple ideological appeal could not be gainsaid when its religious competitors offered no such certainty about the future (though here the explanation wobbles – Judaism still proselytising may have offered a not dissimilar vision).

The main point is that Christianity was not in any real sense proto-revolutionary. It did not preach abolition of slavery or participate in the ancient society’s most prominent form of class conflict, demands for debt relief. Revelations’ vision of the end of the World may have been a call to religious partisanship and separation from the world, not a revolutionary desire to overthrow it. The experience of living in the ‘last times’ was a hope for an end to the existing order, not a means to bring this about. When the time came for them to accommodate themselves to the persistence of the secular order, and, as cited, Bloch’s words that it was “granted implicit recognition” appeared to a degree true. Its however is to neglect the fact that the challenge of Christian universalism remained. Strangely the supporters of the ‘two Churches’ theory fail to give much attention to those who laid down their lives against this state, not for any social issue, but to Witness the Truth they wished to shine through. That those seized by this faith were more inclined to individual Martyrdom than to act to overthrow the existing order apparently does not register highly on the eschatological left. But as the saying went, ‘the Blood of the Martyrs is the seed of the Church’. Witnesses, and actors in a Theatre where only a minority could be admitted. Dying for the Cross may be a drama played out in the face of eternity; it was not the revolt of the oppressed for a new world, but for another universe entirely. As Saint Augustine indicated: its real interest was situated in a completely different time to the mundane. Combining in this way a challenge to what ‘is’ with the hallucinatory prospect of an ascent to heaven.

This great curtain, which falls down whenever the issue of early Christianity is discussed, is the basis of the Persecution that created many of these Martyrs equally failed to live up completely to Žižek’s grandiloquent claims about a clash between a Pagan hierarchical social ontology and the Christian assertion of universality, but nevertheless bears all the marks of one aspect of this: the political practice of absorbing religious cultures in a common obedience to Caesar. That is, not through their absence of tacit consent to the state, but their lack of minimal signs of active compliance. As an aspect of the cruelty of the Roman state, it should not be minimised, and if there were those who sought martyrdom for the reasons just sketched at least they (unlike certain modern religious zealots) did not try to kill anyone in their efforts. The point here is that the suppression of inconvenient religious cults was part and parcel of a ‘morality’ of penal servitude. One of the first Roman references to Christianity is in Tacitus’s Annals. After the Great Fire of Rome (63 CE) under the reign of Nero, the Emperor tried to “transfer the guilt” for the conflagration to Christians, a “race of men detested for their evil practices” These were convicted not on real evidence, “bur rather on account of their sullen hatred of the whole human race.” Their deaths were by “exquisite cruelty”. “At length the cruelty of these proceedings filled every breast with compassion. Humanity relented in favour of the Christians. The manner of that people were, no doubt, of a pernicious tendency, and their crimes called for the hand of justice, bit it was evident, that they fell a sacrifice, not for the public good but to glut the rage of cruelty of one man only”. Tacitus condemned the followers of Christ not, however, for political subversion, nor for religious heresy, but for withdrawing from common religious observance (educated Romans such as Cicero had long expressed scepticism about the details of Pagan religion). It was their disputative, withdrawing, practices, against the public nature of these rituals that attracted state repression. That is Christianity was attacked for its ‘superstition’ not just faith in exotic outlandish things but that it was a secretive cult-like worship of what was considered a patent fraud. One could say, with some exaggeration, that while Nero was being exceptionally vicious, the underlying attitude towards the Christians was an explainable dislike of people who clearly did hate if not all, at least a large proportion of the non-Christian human race. A few glances at the New Testament confirms this (and one imagines the Sermons of the early Church were often wild – if Revelations is any indication). Let’s begin with the after-life and the fate of the wicked, sinful, and the unbelievers. Few today would accept the justice of condemning the rich man who ignored Lazarus during life to suffer in the fires of Hades and have to hear Abraham tell him that no-one can help him, or even pass over the “chasm” between that realm and heaven (Luke 16: 19-31). Though of course the Tortures Christians imagined for their enemies were, during this period, confined to the pits of Hell. And that the martyrdom that many sought was, as Onfray observes, at least partly motive by the fact that its version of “monotheism is fatally fixated on death. It loves death, cherishes death; it exults in death, is fascinated by death.”

Why Christianity became the dominant European religion, was institutionalised and poured into the whole culture, is too complex to be discussed at length here: it is part, a back-commentary, on nearly everything we do. Nevertheless, if we have given a theological ‘causal’ outline (based on the transition from Eschatology to vertical worship) of how this might have appeared as a practice (even if not explicitly theorised) some social and political account has to be given, in order to weaken the two Churches theory. They, as our description accumulates, clearly involved the growth of a wealthy counter-establishment, half-integrated, and then, largely integrated, into the Roman administrative system. This can be summarised. Gibbon declared that Christian success was due to five main factors (none of which involve the idea of a revolutionary aspiration). These were, its “exclusive zeal”, in opposition (and loathing) to existing religious “harmony”, while nevertheless opening their doors to all; their belief in the afterlife, a “promise of eternal happiness”; belief in miracle, “The primitive Christians perpetually trod on mystic ground, and their minds were exercised by the habits of believing the most extraordinary events”; their virtues, bolstered by repentance for past sins and a wish to behave well to spread the Christian message; and their internal organisation, which developed from early popular selection of leaders to the eventual growth of “Episcopal Office” built on early forms of tithing and donations, which sustained their hierarchy and distribution of alms to the poor. Finally the Christians were kept together by the threat of excommunication for sinners, and heretics. In this, “the well-tempered mixture of liberality and rigour, the judicious dispensation for reward and punishments, according to the maxims of policy as well as justice, constituted the human strength of the Church”. For all its contestable nature these explanatory elements form a persuasive structure: combining ideological displacement (from the existence of the afterlife in ancient paganism to a guaranteed good place in it for Christianity), and a range of ideological-organisational means (their virtues – read their ability to offer material benefits to supporters) that favoured the growth of the Church. One could supplement these with structural position of religion-as-an-institution. That is a means of finding a degree of personal security in an Empire where the lives of people were often subject to exploitation (for slaves, the rural poor and most of the urban plebe) and oppression (whatever their social class) and where people looked for closer bonds in an impersonal and cruel administered world. This one would call as ideological ‘apparatus’ whose beliefs were the cement of the identity, which the Christian Church used to draw together its followers.

As such the Church was to remain the Empire’s last embodiment, after it had long disappeared in the West. Christianity gained influence when Emperor Constantine supported it. The Conversion of Constantine, Gibbon remarked in a succeeding chapter, was perhaps not unrelated to the fact that, “The passive and unresisting obedience which bows under the yoke of authority, or even of oppression, must have appeared in the eyes of an absolute monarch the most conspicuous and useful of evangelical virtues.” Yet this was paralleled by the establishment of a Christian republic, in which, initially elected, prelates began to assemble the rule of Bishops who ruled their flock. And spent a considerable amount of time, as we have seen, in what Gibbon described in a multitude of inventive levels of depreciation, “an idle mixture of metaphysical subtleties “puerile rites”, and “fictitious miracles”, and “on the religious merit of hating the adversaries and obeying the ministers of the church.” If winning the freedom to engage in this was a ‘betrayal’ then perhaps we misunderstand what treachery is all about. For no-one could doubt that these disputes were enjoyed by the very mechanics and city dwellers that Gibbon mocked.

What of Rome’s Imperial responsibilities? Saint Augustine pointed to the fact that his faith did not assume responsibility for the temporal power (even comparing the state’s origins to the rule of robber bands). But they had accepted it. It seems more probable on the above evidence that Official Establishment was not in itself an impediment to anything: it was merely a stage in a process of integration, which had begun with the religion’s consolidation amongst the upper classes, and, by the nature of authority in those centuries, within the Empire’s administration. Their own liberties secured what more could they want? A little cynical anti-clericalism, albeit it grating to the fine feelings of the religious, along the lines of vulgar Marxist explanations of religious ideology is in order here. It is all very well to talk of the Sermon on the Mount, and the dignity of the every-present poor. But if your goal is winning souls then the rich and mighty matter too: the more power and influence they have the better they are to carry the Word. And did not classical writers talk – quite openly, or in the case of Cicero, lightly hidden under a concern for religion’s role in sustaining social virtue – of the place faith has a pillar of Order. So, even if Gibbon was wrong about the appeal to Constantine of Christian humility, in the long term it proved an accomplice to political power – even if a separate domain – and not necessarily a bad thing for that. If it had tried to rule directly the decaying Roman Empire according to the Gospels then nobody can be sure that religious tyranny (already tightening around its parishioners) would not have been worsened. It would follow that the Church ultimately became a movement toward harmony when it spread its influence. As a sympathetic serious-minded historian observes, in its rise to power, “The rule of the Church depended upon the identification, suppression, and excommunication of heretics. The scope of Christian power therefore, was based not only on including people through conversion, baptism, participation in the Eucharist, and subscription to an orthodox confession of the faith. Christian power was also reinforced through the rituals of exclusion.” The fact that it persecuted its own, when believers challenged this impulse, illustrates the strength of the initial impulse toward unity and control.

This process reached across Europe, and most people who have an interest in the subject are aware that this was not accomplished bloodlessly. As an illustration of how religious zeal can act when it becomes a direct guide to policy, and to war, what followed does not indicate much that we would admire today. Celebrated are the conversions of the northern heathens. Some were made peacefully, as Bede in 8^th century England testified. But other, were made in ways far from this. Led by Charlemagne (768 – 814 CE). His efforts to create an Imperium chistianum began with the forcible conversion of the Old Saxons – involving large-scale massacres for ther recalcitrant. The culmination, in Europe, were the crusades of the Teutonic Knights who only finally subdued the pagan Balts in the 13^th century. Christianity’s spread outside the Roman limes and (after the Empire’s break up) to re-paganised lands was not only through force. A large literature demonstrates that in non-Roman ‘barbarian’ circles – notably in the Germanic world – Christianity in the period of conversion had an extremely aristocratic ‘heroic’ appeal, and conversion there went from the military governing elite downwards. No doubt the conquests of Charlemagne reinforced this view. So much for Nietzsche’s unhistorical speculations about its roots in ‘slave morality’. Beowulf, one of the earliest literate remains of the epochs of the encounter, has a Christian patina over a strong culture of the warrior band and the centrality of loyalty to its Lord of it – a factional loyalty that became the foundation of state power in much of the feudal world. A study of the conceptual translation of Christian language in the older Germanic tongues sheds light on just how this operated: adopting the roots of the vocabulary of the ancient barbarian comitatus for worship. That is by direct borrowings, loan translation (calques). Thus we have a word for Lord, truth, in Old High German, transferred from a military meaning (chief of a band) to an almost completely Christian usage, as the Lord. If the language was so deeply impregnated with this imagery then this indicates how thoroughly the ideological weight of the faith entered into the social resources of the West.

In the Romance lands a similar mechanism is evident in the first vernacular writings, La Chanson de Roland and the cycle of stories around Charlemagne, not to mention their real historical referent (to cite but the most obvious) show a Christian warrior aristocracy. It was by such means that the cult of the Nazarene undoubtedly became ‘popular’, melding state sponsorship after the Empire’s Conversion, during the centuries of expansion in the ‘Barbarian’ North and East, with earlier customs, and transcendental enthusiasm. The process operating here has more in common with how the ruling class spreads its ideological hegemony over the masses – the early feudal social structure in which there was in any case little in the way of organised oppositional class struggle – than a self-defined popular culture of belief. Eventually devotion did spread to all classes. The desire for distributive justice or at least equity (in the way of sharing, social, charitable), is not incompatible with an appeal to ruling elites or urban intermediate classes – good works, and cultish sacrifice are recurring features of a wide variety of religions and ideologies. Its factionalising theologically speaking, on what we would recognise as ideology (systems of ideas) – was a feature which has strikingly modern echoes. The dialectic between stasis and order has never finished. Nonetheless, this should not mislead us: the ultimate eccelsisiatical whole was a powerful absorbing machine. (10)

There remains the utopian element? What exactly was this? Terry Eagleton may be right to state that “The Eucharist, then, celebrates a convivial being-with-others, as a love-feast which prefigures a future kingdom of peace and justice but it is one founded on death, violence and revolutionary transformation, conditions which lie beyond the pleasure principle altogether.”(P 323). But this was not social protest as such. Nor at bottom a vehicle for any kind of social revolution, indeed Hannah Arendt claimed that no revolution was made in Christianity’s name until modern times – rather uneasily calling millennialist revolts ‘mass hysteria’ rather than revolutions or even serious rebellions. If Arendt observed that some claim that modernity (has “liberated the revolutionary germs” inside it, this, “begs the question” as to what its premises were. In fact Christianity had accepted slavery, inequality precisely because its Kingdom was to come, in which these injustices would be resolved. It adjusted to the late Roman Empire, as it has adapted, and shaped later Western class societies and states, feudalism and capitalism, because it primary vision was and is not of this world. Where was this kingdom? Not in out time, but, as Charles Taylor – no timid defender of Faith, states, “The Great Time is thus behind us, but it is also in a sense above us.” Thus, “In each case, as well as the ‘horizontal’ dimension of merely secular time, there is a vertical’ dimension, which can allow for the ‘warps’ and foreshortening of time which I mentioned above. The flow of secular time occurs in a multiple vertical context, so that everything relates to more than one kind of time.” Frank Kermode related the vision of the Apocalypse to precisely this domain “We project ourselves – a small humble elect, perhaps – past the End, so as to see the structural whole, a thing we cannot do from our spot of time in the middle.” But, as this prophecy failed, as all Eschatology does, the faithful will turn to the here and now, from the eternity of the nunc stans to the nunc movens. This shift, interest or theologically motivated, so common in the history of Christianity, will not doubt be considered irrelevant to those who hold to the idea that just beneath the surface Christianity stands for the prospect of an immanent leap into eternity. That is an engine for a radical channelled to the powers that be. It is after all, the eternal meaning of religion that they are concerned with, not its materialised ideology.

For us, by contrast, the important fact is that Christianity became part of the world. It cannot be judged apart from this, and if it retained a perpetually destabilising element of religious stasis this should be confused with the idea that by the nature of hope for a ‘beyond’ it embodies (or embodied) is made up of displaced revolutionary energy. Within this frame its impulses were directed from waiting for the arrival of the Beyond to the immediate shaping of lives in line with what was thought to be the commands of Heaven and God. Its institutional framework embodied something which is a distinct type of stasis: the unsettling it bore within itself was not only (we can judge with confidence) driven by a desire for a better here and now, but is smoothed out by a conception of what the Transcendental contained. It settled disputes by administrative authority and soon drifted to repression. The process of establishing this order is one of the roots of all suppression of ideological dissent, which has spilled out into politics and has left its mark on the left, from Stalinism onwards. Only the political forces that established a secularist edifice over the religious intrastate contains the dangers of this perpetual glowering over God. AS such it could function as an ideological apparatus that controlled and dominated people in the crudest form, and made them docile and accepting of their lot. Not that one would wish to follow Onfray and others further in thereby asserting that this mould stamps all religious belief, practised in civil society. If we take Feuerbach’s suggestion to heart, without too much patronising, we might reflect that religion incorporates mundane wishes for better lives of the believers, and deeds of pleasant generosity and friendship towards humanity. It is in this sense we would heartily accept that Christians have often been do-gooder in the real sense. Though too often this has meant offering some, charitable, relief of distress, not the overthrow of oppression. But, to repeat, it is only as part of the world that believers act. Their actions can be assessed on the same grounds as anyone else’s. Where they make special claims, then these have to be, for a materialist, an atheist, challenged. Institutionally there is not the slightest reason to give them any privileges whatsoever. Indeed their existing organisations benefit too much from this, even in ostensibly secular states. As for the role of Christian radicalism in politics, it cannot be weighed with special measures. Only that is, when it raises a privileged right to proclaim truth, not to Preach at, but to act for the faiths; goals it should be fought with, and by all democratic means, prevented from accumulating any legislative administrative power. Eschatology, radicalism no doubt attractive to those who have abdicated from political intervention in the existing world, and spurn power altogether, remains a source for the potential clash of religions, of an overwhelming desire to impose its truth. It is very far from the ethics and politics of Marxists who seek to resolve real problems in the here and now by, from the start, grasping their temporal roots. If there is one thing the new eschatology resembles, not in detail but in inspiration it is, as the religious tradition of Islamism that seeks to thrust its Sharia ruled world down the throats of the faithless. That is, a claim to special knowledge that we can never share, unless we accept the premises of the belief, and lend ourselves to the delirium of the divine.

Marxists find it hard to categorise religion, at once a relatively unitary phenomenon (doctrines and organisations), and yet, it is distributed across the realms of the traditional ‘levels’ of historical materialism, ideological (belief, culture), politics (relation to the state, political parties), and economics (historically Churches have had an important role in land ownership, today they remain significant in wider capital investment – or in Islamic shape, in foundations running businesses). Kautsky offered some important ideas, centred on the internal institutional logic of organised religion, which suggest that the adaptive function of faith to social and political power is a significant tendency derived from the way its internal (ideological, and organisational) mechanisms play out in the world. If recent discussion about Marxist (?) Messianism has a merit it has uncovered something which does not fit easily into these categories. There is a motor at work that remains wild, erupting and destroying, however temporarily channelled and tamed, an inspiring panorama of the sublimity of the universe which is anchored not stably in (as some contemporary atheists claim) a fixed Book, but an unstable premise, a gaze into the Beyond. The complexity involved in assigning religion a ‘place’ is then the major difficulty about religion. Not its function as an adaptive method of explaining events through supernatural causes, not its role in reconciling people to the existing class structure (more and more explicit as the Church triumphed), nor its ‘revolutionary’ role in some unrest, swiftly muted, nor its internal balance between rank hypocritical oppression and sincere efforts to better the lot of believers (including their material conditions). It is its claims about ultimate being. That is the ultimate illusion the lies behind the generative structures operating in the social institutions which came into existence in the – willed-for, negotiated, fought over – presence of faith as the ideological and political apparatus of the state is something which remains itself to be given a materialist account. One point is certain: there is nothing of Bloch’s ‘atheism in Christianity’, for all its temporal demands, at this level, and never will be, in this, the loadstone of religion. If mysticism ends in politics, so much the better. Though one would not wish for it to result in the hatred Péguy poured out against socialist internationalists on the Eve of the First World War. It is for this reason that all who despise the cult of the Eternally Beyond, out of the Love of This World, and the Marxist fight for human liberation, shun religion. Not individual believers as people, but for their claims about a transcendent intelligible to believers alone. Love the sinner hate the sin. (11)

SOME REFERENCES.

1. Pages 115, 115. Charles Péguy. Notre Jeunesse. Folio. 1993. Geoffrey Hill. Colleted Poems. Penguin. 1985.
2. Page xxiv. Introduction. Peter Thompson. Atheism in Christianity. Ernest Bloch. Verso. 2009. Toni Negri states, “It is possible to recuperate religious impulses toward the common inside materialist conditions of common existence.” Page 197. Toni Negri, Goodbye Mr Socialism. Serpent’s Tail. 2008. John Roberts. The ‘Returns to Religion’: Messianism, Christianity and the Revolutionary Tradition. Part 1; ‘Wakefulness to the Future’. Part ll. The Pauline Tradition. Historical Materialism. Vol.16. Nos. 2,3. 2008. Page 132. La Vie de Jésus. Ernest Renan. Marabout. 1974. On Biblical criticism see: David Strauss (Chapters from) The Life of Jesus. The Young Hegelians. An Anthology. Edited by Larence S.Stepelevitch. Cambridge University Press. 1983. Karl Kautsky. The Foundations of Christianity. 1904. Marxist Internet Archive. Page 6. The History of British Socialism. Vol. 1 Belford Bax. G. Bell & Sons. 1929.
3. Esprit. Des intellectuels dans la Cité Michel Winock. Seuil. 1996. Pages 23, 27, 37, 39. Reason, Faith and Revolution. Reflections on the God Debate. Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press. 2009. Pages xxi., xxi. Terry Eagleton Present Jesus Christ the Gospels. Verso, 2007. Pages 309, 17, 109, 197, 207. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Norman Cohen. Granada. 1978. Red Sh’ism. Alistair Crooke. Red Pepper. Oct/Nov 2009. For a Christian survey of the similarities and differences, with Marxism, Karl Marx. David Lyon. Alan Lion Books. 1979. On the God-builders (who saw mysticism as a necessary compliment to Marxism) and God-Seekers (who dropped Marx and became overtly religious) see, Chapter lV. Dialectical Materialism. Gustav. A Wetter. Routledge, Keagan and Paul. 1960.
4. Christian Origins. The Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism. Christopher Rowland. Second Edition. Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. 2002. Pages 439, 452, Class Struggle in the Ancient World. G.E. M de Ste Croix. Duckworth. 1981. Chapters IV to Vl. Page 46 Against All Gods. A C Grayling. Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness. Oberon Books. 2007. Kautsky. Religion. Social Democrat 1903 –4. Marxist Internet Archive. Page 189. On Christian Theology. Rowan Williams. Blackwell. 2000. Page 29. A Shorter Commentary on Romans. Karl Bath. SCM Press. 1956. My Life and Thought. Albert Schweitzer. George Allen and Unwin. 1933.
5. Page 128 – 9. Atheism in Christianity. Ernest Bloch Verso. 2009. See also, The Principle of Hope. Ernest Bloch. Basil Blackwell. 1986. The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. Macmillan. 1982.Pages 110, 150. Slavoj Žižek The Fragile Absolute. Verso. 2008.
6. The Apostolic Fathers. Vol. 1. Edited Bart DEhrman. Loeb Classical Library. Harvard University 2003. AD 381. Heretics, Pagans and the Christian State. Charles Freeman. Pimlico 2008 .The Thirteenth Apostle April D. DeConick. Revised Edition. Continuum 2009. Thus shows a tiny fragment of what we have lost: and recently rediscovered of this tradition,
   ”The Gospel of Judas is an unfamiliar story, from its description of a laughing Jesus to its bitter feelings about the twelve disciplines to its orgasmic conception of the universe. Oddly, the one aspect of the story that is probably most familiar to us is Judas, the demon-possessed man who betrayed Jesus! The Gospel’s unfamiliarity results from the fact that Sethian Christianity did not survive into the modern world. It was actively suppressed and forgotten by apostolate Christians, who became the keeps of the keys to the Kingdom.”(P 195)
7. Pages 91 – 3, 332. The History of the Early Church. Eusebius. Penguin. 1989. It is worth noting that Eusebius uses the concept (or rather the translator renders it thus) of a ‘faction fight’ to describe the conflict between ethnically Jewish inhabitants of Egypt and Greeks. During Trajan’s reign he states, “When the emperor was about to enter his eighteenth year another rebellion broke out and destroyed vast numbers of Jews. In Alexandra and the rest of Egypt, and in Cyrene as well, as if inflamed by some terrible spirit of revolt they rushed into a faction fight against their Greek fellow citizens, raised the temperature to fever heat, and in the following summer started a full-scale war.” (Page 105) We shall return to the issue of ethnicity and factionalism latter. Pages 145 – 6. In Defence of Atheism. Michel Onfray. The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Trans: Jeremy Leggatt. Serpent’s Tail. 2007.
8. Page 8. The Sense of an Ending. Studies in the Theory of Fiction Frank Kermode. Oxford University Press. 1967.Pages 307 – 310. Vol. ll. Page 88. Vol. lll. Gibbon. Op cit. Worth noting are the earlier sectarian fights of the Manichean heresies (dual forces in the world, good and evil), which sustained an underground life for centuries – up till the Medieval Cathars, and beyond never became part of the state. The Other God. Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy. Yuri Stuyanov. Yale University Press. 2000. Factional splitting here is not well recorded.
9. Page 221 On the History of Early Christianity. F. Engels. In Marx and Engels. Basic Writings on Politics and Philosophy. Fontana. 1972. Marx and Engels on Religion. Foreign Languages Publishers. 155. Pages 71, 77, 112. Praise of Folly. Desiderius Erasmus Translator Roger Clarke. Oneworld Classics. 2008. Page 123. Ethics. Alain Badiou, Verso 2001. Alain Badiou. Universal Truths and the Question of Religion. Interview with Adam S, Miller. Journal of Philosophy and Scripture. Volume 3, Issue 1 Fall 2005 Pages 111, 150. The Fragile Absolute. Slavoj Žižek Verso 2008. Pages 158, 174. Karl Barth. A Shorter Commentary on Romans. SCM Press. 1959. All Biblical references, New English Bible unless otherwise specified.
10. Early Christianity. Robert Browning. New Left Review 168. 1988. Revelation Revisited. Minitris Kyrtatas. New Left Review. 190. 1991. Page 114. On the Genealogy of Morals. Frederick Nietzsche. Cambridge, University Press. 1994. Pages 486 – 7. Annals. Tacitus. J.M.Dent. 1943. Gibbon Op cit. Vol. 1. Chapter XV, Vol. 2 Chapter XX. Page 174 Onfray op cit The Conversion of Europe. Richard Fletcher. Fontana Press. 1998. Page 161. Bede. A History of the English church and People. Penguin.”1968. Christianity. A Global History. David Chidester. Penguin. 2001. Languages and History in the Early Germanic World. D.H.Green. Cambridge University Press. 2000. Page 253. Saint Augustine. The City of God. Vol. ll. J.M.Dent 1957. On the Empire’s legacy through, noticeably, role of Latin as a bond within post-Roman Christianity see: Ad Infinitum. A Biography of Latin. Nicholas Ostler. Harper Press. 2007.
11. Page 323.The Trouble with Strangers. Terry Eagleton. Wiley-Blackwell. 2009. Page 27. On Revolution. Hannah Arendt. Penguin. 1990. Page 57 A Secular Age. Charles Taylor. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2007. Page 8. Frank Kermode. Op cit. Oxford University Press. 1967.

NOTES ON RELIGION

Contested Till Death.

Chris Harman, a leading figure for decades in the SWP (more here), died last night (here).

There will be many obituaries. This is a critical-political one. That is, like the SWP, we do not feel a need to wrap and hide underneath sentiment fundamental  political disgreements. Tendance Coatesy comes from a very different political tradition, of Continental Marxist unorthodoxy. For us, anti-Stalinists and anti-anti-Communists,  the SWP’s main defining feature, its ’state capitalist’ theory, is of little interest. That is, the line against Stalinism has already been drawn, and there are better historical and theoretical explanations of the fate of the Soviet Union around. Perhaps more significant to our political activity has been the SWP’s political theory and practice. The organisation changed from an originally open Marxist grouping into the fractured, intolerant, opportunist mess we see today. We can see in Harman’s writings, noted for their lucidity and seriousness,  both sides of the SWP.

I wish therefore to make some comments on Harman’s political legacy.  It is far richer and more positive than today’s SWP party-structure would suggest. But not exactly without faults. These are some aspects,

Many of Harman’s political ideas, formed in the early International Socialists (forerunner of the SWP), has originally a libertarian cast. That is, their version of Marxism was based on socialism being introduced through a party which was  part of the self-organisation of the working class. Against what Trotsky called ’subsitutionism’, and taking something of Rosa Luxemburg’s views on the importance of spontaneous democratic ferment, they were set out in the pamphlet below,

Party and Class (1969) (Here) Harman concluded that,

“The need is still to build an organisation of revolutionary Marxists that will subject their situation and that of the class as a whole to scientific scrutiny, will ruthlessly criticise their own mistakes, and will, while engaging in the everyday struggles of the mass of workers, attempt to increase their independent self-activity by unremittingly opposing their ideological and practical subservience to the old society. A reaction against the identification of class and party elite made by both Social Democracy and Stalinism is very healthy. It should not, however, prevent a clear-sighted perspective of what we have to do to overcome their legacy.”

No doubt most people on the left remember more clearly the turn to Lenin in the 1970s, and the founding of the SWP on more inflexible democratic centralist grounds. The present-day regime of the Party stems from this period. It  as a time of expulsions, rules about limited factional rights (if at all), and the entrenchment of a quasi-eternal Central Committee. It should not be forgotten that the SWP was not alone in its ‘Bolshevisation’ – the IMG and most of the SWPs splinters (with the notable exception of the working class opposition – that left for ever-  based in the Midlands) were also seized with this delusion.  There is a massive literature on this. On this time it’s often said that Jim Higgin’s More Years for the Locust (here) is the best critical account and explanation.

This bureaucratic orthodoxy-in-perpetual-activism, did not prevent Harman from retaining a critical spirit.

Example, The  Prophet and the Proletariat (here)

The book contains a balanced analysis of Islamism - very different to the one promoted during the SWP’s time in respect (or the relativist views of present-day Islamophiles). Not that it’s without problems. Its conclusion is worth citing in full. Not the least because in its death notice the SWP for reasons not alien to its continuing attempts to trawl in Islamist waters claims that it said that (here),

One of Chris Harman’s articles ‘The Prophet and the Proletariat’ was written to help prevent the marginalisation of the Arab left before the rising tide of political Islam. The article attacked claims that political Islam represented a form of fascism and sought to explain its rise in terms of the failure of the nationalist left; the appeal that a return to pure Islam had for a middle class intelligentsia who suffered from the insults imposed on them by the empire; and the ability of such groups to garner support from sections of the urban poor.

Harman indeed engaged in some superficial class analysis of Islamism (neglecting its strong bourgeois roots and pro-mercantile and state bureaucratic capitalist direction). But his main focus was unrelentingly critical of Islamic groups and the reactionary nature of their politics. What it actually written is that,

“It has been a mistake on the part of socialists to see Islamist movements either as automatically reactionary and “fascist” or as automatically “anti-imperialist” and “progressive”. Radical Islamism, with its project of reconstituting society on the model established by Mohammed in 7th century Arabia, is, in fact, a “utopia” emanating from an impoverished section of the new middle class. As with any “petty bourgeois utopia” [128], its supporters are, in practice, faced with a choice between heroic but futile attempts to impose it in opposition to those who run existing society, or compromising with them, providing an ideological veneer to continuing oppression and exploitation. It is this which leads inevitably to splits between a radical, terrorist wing of Islamism on the one hand, and a reformist wing on the others. It is also this which leads some of the radicals to switch from using arms to try to bring about a society without “oppressors” to using them to impose “Islamic” forms of behaviour on individuals.”

Precisely. Opposing the imposition of ‘Islamic norms of behaviour’ is the dividing line between socialists and reactionary ‘anti-imperialists’, and multi-cultural relativists. Such Islamophile riff-raff has recently been libelling gay campaigners like Peter Tatchell for defending universalism against religious norms.

It would have been interesting to know Harman’s views on this.

“… socialists cannot support the state against the Islamists. Those who do so, on the grounds that the Islamists threaten secular values, merely make it easier for the Islamists to portray the left as part of an “infidel”, “secularist” conspiracy of the “oppressors” against the most impoverished sections of society. They repeat the mistakes made by the left in Algeria and Egypt when they praised regimes that were doing nothing for the mass of people as “progressive’ – mistakes that enabled the Islamists to grow. And they forget that any support the state gives to secularist values is only contingent: when it suits it, it will do a deal with the more conservative of the Islamists to impose bits of the shariah – especially the bits which inflict harsh punishment on people – in return for ditching the radicals with their belief in challenging oppression. This is what happened in Pakistan under Zia and the Sudan under Nimeiry, and it is apparently what the Clinton adminstration has been advising the Algerian generals to do.

But socialists cannot give support to the Islamists either. That would be to call for the swapping of one form of oppression for another, to react to the violence of the state by abandoning the defence of ethnic and religious minorities, women and gays, to collude in scapegoating that makes it possible for capitalist exploitation to continue unchecked providing it takes “Islamic” forms. It would be to abandon the goal of independent socialist politics, based on workers in struggle organising all the oppressed and exploited behind them, for a tail-ending of a petty bourgeois utopianism which cannot even succeed in its own terms.”

The Islamists are not our allies. They are representatives of a class which seeks to influence the working class, and which, in so far as it succeeds, pulls workers either in the direction of futile and disastrous adventurism or in the direction of a reactionary capitulation to the existing system – or often to the first followed by the second.”

Naturally one would say that Islamist movements are in theory and in practice demonstrably reactionary. Nor the central importance of secularism for socialists. As an explanation it lacks the central role in Islamism of the pious national bourgeoisie. Nor the irreconcilable principle of democratic Marxists that one would never align with such groups.  But at least Harman did not exalt Islamists as automatically on the ‘right side’ of ‘anti-imperialism’.

Unfortunately the third aspect of Harman’s SWP’s work (below) shows just how far they had gone down the road of treating social movements as fodder for recruitment. After the 1970s the SWP, stuck in a permanent round of recruitment through moving campaigns, period purges of anyone awkward, and ‘get rich quick’ schemes. That is winning central positions in perceived rising trends of political unrest. Their ‘united front’ strategy meant co-operation with anyone who seemed to be going in the direction of opposing the existing political system. Or at least who had a vaguely radical sound.

This example explains how the Party saw the one-time important ‘anti-Globalisation’ wave.

Spontaneity, Strategy, Politics 2004. (here)

“ In other words, a visible revolutionary organisation is a necessity, not an optional extra. Its members need to take part in the wider struggles and operate through party groups in localities and workplaces. They have to organise people around them through regular paper sales and draw them to meetings. And the discussion cannot just be about immediate tactics, but has to raise the question of transforming society in its totality, of revolution, not reform. Only in this way can we move towards fulfilling the full potential of the last five years—towards overthrowing this system and creating a better one.”

In fact in Britain the ‘anti-gloablisation’ movement was a heteroclite mixture of well-meaning NGOs, other left groups, individuals (Ken Livingstone onwards), fading magazines like Red Pepper,  and trade unions searching for new blood and inspired by anti-globalisation unrest in other countries which and genuine impact. It equally involved cranks of a variety of  stripes (Greens, animal rights nutters, onwards), all wrapped in an unwieldy Social Forum network, run in the interests of grandstanding various large egos. The SWP failed to get many recruits from this pool and turned to other fishing grounds. What Marxism, in the sense of basing politics on the self-activity of the masses, remained was soon channelled into the ever-turning priorities of sustaining the organisation. We might say that the SWP’s version of Leninism resembled a business plan, constantly drawing up not SWOTs (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) but OTs – Opportunities and Threats. Harman either instigated or, at the very least, connived, in this development. That is, under a lot of guff about the Party as the People’s Tribune.

The Respect Party was the culmination of this approach, aligning right up with the extreme-right-wing Islamists of the East London Mosque.  Of which it is hardly necessary to add further comment.

In conclusion, for all these remarks, Harman had a lot to offer. His original standpoint was not far from genuine democratic Marxism. That he, and the SWP, evolved into the hysterical dead-end we see today, requires more explanation than can be put into a few pages. One might feel that it’s a shame Harman bound himself to the SWP political project so thoroughly. That intense committment would have been better spent elsewhere. But, then, that is not a matter for us to choose.

Anne Frank: “Emotional”, ‘Zionist Promoter”?

Hezbollah censors the Diary of Anne Frank (Here).

“BEIRUT (AFP) – – Anne Frank’s diary has been censored out of a school textbook in Lebanon following a campaign by the militant group Hezbollah claiming the classic work promotes Zionism.

The row erupted after Hezbollah learned excerpts of “The Diary of Anne Frank” were included in the textbook used by a private English-language school in western Beirut.

Hezbollah’s Al-Manar television channel ran a report slamming the book for focusing on the persecution of Jews.

“What is even more dangerous is the dramatic, theatrical way in which the diary is emotionally recounted,” said the report aired last week and also published on the station’s website.”

Does one need to comment?

Friston Scene.

Friston is a village near Aldeburgh. Nearby is the home of a scion of the Wentworth family, Charles Vernon Wentworth  - once the most prominent aristocrats of  the district. During many years the  hamlet was very much “an estate village”. But their property has gradually been sold off, including the family home,  Blackheath Mansion. Even so Wentworth retains some of the clan’s fortune. He lives, apparently at Friston Hall. (More here) The gentleman farmer has been revealed to be a the biggest cash  donor to the British National Party. Personally I find his Suffolk and class background more interesting than the marriage to a woman of Serbian origins.

Friston was also home, in retirement, to my father and mother. Their house, Windmill Cottage, was bought from the Estate. They were Chair and Secretary of near-by Leiston Labour Party for over a decade. That’s to say, I know the village well. Though they moved from Friston at the end of the ‘eighties, and have now passed away, I still keep an interest in the place. The pubs in Snape, however, are better than the Chequers.

It’s worth saying that the hamlet should not be remembered as the residence of a loud-mouthed reactionary. Friston is better recalled as the site of great Chartist agitation,

One leading local chartist put Friston on the map in 1839. He was Thomas Hearn, a local shopkeeper who opened a branch of the Working Men’s Association in the village and aimed to make Friston the ‘metropolis of chartism’. The Friston meetings were held in the Chequers Inn and the Baptist Chapel and the following was good. A rally for farm-workers was held in Friston wd 1,000 people were present. The farmers were alarmed at this and laid on alternative entertainment, and one threatened dismissal for any worker found attending. Later in the same year, on Boxing Day, 5,000 people attended a second rally, some of whom had walked from Ipswich to meet up with Hearn’s group and others at Carlton. Although the Chartists failed to get their demands at that time, Thomas Hearn continued to support the movement. In 1851 he was living in Grove Road, probably on the site of the later grocer’s shop.”

There is more information in this book here.

Back to Charles Wentworth. I have always heard that he had a ‘colourful’ freedom-loving youth. Yet still, according to the Daily Mail, his upbringing and breeding tells,

His inherited wealth includes a 660-acre farm in Friston – a pretty hamlet of pink-washed cottages and narrow lanes. The village green and meeting hall also belong to him, so parishioners must seek his permission to stage fairs and other events there, just like commoners of old.

This fact (rather well-known to inhabitants) might be a reasonable explanation why Mary Wright, Chair of the Village Hall Committee (and former Independent Councillor for the Coastal District)  refused to comment on the BNP to the Ipswich Evening Star.

Will the Religious Regime Evolve Peacefully?

Agence France Press reports that there will be protests against the Iranian regime on Wednesday (in English here).

November 4 has emerged as an anti-US day in Iran, with thousands of Iranians, mostly students, gathering annually outside the US embassy building, dubbed the ‘Den of Spies’, to shout slogans such as “Death to America!” and “Death to Israel!” The event marks the capture of the embassy on November 4, 1979 — just months after the Islamic revolution toppled the US-backed shah — by radical Islamist students who took American diplomats hostage for 444 days.

Since then, the event which was aimed at condemning US policies towards Iran, has become one of the cornerstones of the Islamic regime.But this year the annual anti-US day could be marked by street protests against Ahmadinejad, whose re-election on June 12 triggered the worst political crisis in the 30-year history of the Islamic republic.

This is the time for genuine progressives to stand with the protestors. The movement’s detailed demands and aims are hard to judge from the outside. But we can agree that their fight for democracy against the Islamicist dictatorship has to be completely supported. ,

One wonders what the pro-faith left-leaning apologists for Islamisism  in  Britain will do.

On second thoughts, I’d prefer not to.

The Coming Insurrection has just been published in English. Under the prestigious MIT label (here) and the no less highly regarded Semiotexte (an imprint gracing all the best crystal tables of the Manhattan left). meanwhile the Tarnac Affair (details here) continues, at a slower pace.  The site just cited does not refer to the controversy which has shaken the French anarchist milieu over sabotage – the root accusation. Which it would be too dreary to detail, except to say it revolves around accusations against the ‘Official’ anarchists by the ‘real-Continuity’ anarchists that the former distinguished between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sabotage. More important news can be found on this Blog (here)

Be that as it may, this review, written as the Coming Insurrection gained notoriety, retains its relevance. Though some of its heat and rapidness. As we recently saw in Poitiers the autonomist left is capable of open street fighting on a scale not seen in France since the 1980s. Calls have been renewed for a ban on these groups. For all those buyers of the English version, and fans of these ideas, I republish it.

L’Insurrection qui vient. Le comité Invisible. © La fabrique éditions, 2007

To the French Police and (some) Magistrates the country is menaced by the avatars of the Bande à Bonnot. These libertarian, individualist, anarchists, carried out the first motorised hold-up in France (1911), in the Rue Ordener, Montmartre. Some in the modern equivalent of the Sûreté have dreamt up a similar threat from anarchists. They are echoed by right-wing politicians. The President of Sarkozy’s Parliamentary group, François Copé calls the extreme left (from anars to the Nouveau Parti anti-Capitaliste) an “abcès idéologique” for the left as a whole. Today’s enemies of the State, the Tarnac accused, are accused of sabotaging rail tracks.

For their part those caught up in the affaire Tarnac (see above), have little time for any elected left, or conventional politics. Their central concerns lie elsewhere. The authors of L’insurrection qui vient, a certain Comité Invisible – which allegedly included Julien Coupat – denounce, as a major target ‘le quadrillage policier’ (omnipresent police control) of the country. In doing so they seem to have run up against something that goes back even further than the pre-Great War anti-anarchist Bloodhounds: the counterparts of Balzac’s early 19th century Peyrade and Corentin (Splendeurs et misères des courtesans). That is the state’s henchmen, with a flair for conspiracies. Such a secretive arm of the Sarkozy règime does exist: paranoid, manipulative and heavy-handed. It seems to have really got it in for the Tarnac accused.

The text at hand is probably the most lucid up-to-date summary in French of what is often called ‘Autonomism’. Seven sections are headed, circles, a title of no doubt profound significance that nevertheless leaves me neither cold nor hot (Dante had nine circles of Hell). It begins with customary French left grandiloquence that “ Le futur n’a plus d’avenir”. Or no future. Well, well. An equally strident and grating wrong-headed celebration of the 2005 riots in the French banlieues follows. “L’incendie de novembre 2005 n’en finit plus de projeter son ombre sur toutes les consciences. Ces premiers feux de joie sont le baptême d’une décennie pleine de promesses.” (the conflagration of November 2005 hasn’t stopped projecting a shadow on everyone’s conscience. These celebratory bonfires baptised a decade full of promise). Claiming that rioters arrested came from all social and ethnic groups, they assert that only a hatred of existing society united them. We should, they assert, revel in the destruction of these disturbances, identify with the ‘dangerous classes’ and ‘bandits’ and their violent rejection of the existing order. Right up to their violence. With an unpleasant sneer, teachers who regretted that their schools were burned down are described as having “pleurnicher” (snivelled) about it all.

With this kind of prose, well-known to aficionados of the French ultra-left, we know where we are going. Strikingly it leads us back to some ideas popular amongst anarchists during the Bande à Bonnot epoch. A meme transmitted across the generations? The anarchism here also has an equally individualistic flavour. That’s autonomy found in the difference between a capitalist-spectacular egotisically declaring the right to do as he’she wills, and real freedom. The problem is where this can be discvovered. So, «Devenir autonome», cela pourrait vouloir dire, aussi bien apprendre à se battre dans la rue, à s’accaparer des maisons vides, à ne pas travailler, à s’aimer follement et à voler dans les magasins.” (becoming autonomous, that means, as much: learn to fight in the street, take over empty houses, not working, loving each other madly, and stealing from shops). Action should not concentrate on the wage-labour capital sphere, but more widely in “insoumission” (insubordination),“Nous  avons la totalité de l’espace social pour nous trouver. Nous avons l’hostilité à cette civilization pour tracer des solidarités et des fronts à l’échelle mondiale.” (we have the totality of social space to find ourselves. We have the hostility of this civilization to lay down the path of solidarity and ‘fronts’ on a world scale – blocs of those in rebellion). So the marginal, the eternally stroppy, the true individual, in her own band of mates, is the Figure of Autonomy. 

With this language in full flow, no-one will be surprised to find written that, “L’État français est la trame même des subjectivités françaises, l’aspect qu’a pris la multiséculaire castration de ses sujets.” (The French state is the framework of all French individual subjectivity, the aspect which has for centuries castrated its subjects – a use of the word castrate which one imagines would not occur to an Anglophone leftist, I note). Nor is it long before the claim that, “Toutes les organisations qui prétendent contester l’ordre présent ont elles-mêmes, en plus fantoche, la forme, les moeurs et le langage d’États miniatures.” (all political organisations that claim to fight the existing order have themselves, in a puppet-show form, the customs, and the language of miniature states) is reeled out.

That’s a few leftist lives wasted, eh? What fools we labour movement and left political party activists are. What fools.

Capital, its transformations, its domination and integration of human tissue, and the sphere of value, have some presence. They “embrasserait toutes les qualités des êtres” (embrace every quality of human beings). This idea of an almost omnipresence of capital is rather sub-Negri, Hardy and Virno, with a dose of situationist ideas about commodity fetishism. That is the theorists of the ‘immateriality’ of capitalism’s central mechanisms – computerised and informatised at their core. As for work itself, with automation and information sciences, many “travailleurs sont devenus superflus.” (Workers have become superfluous). This leaves capital’s gigantic machine pumping out profits while excluding large sections of the masses. Those inside are dedicated to ‘personal development’ shaping themselves for Capital’s needs; those outside are in precarious, typically Agency work, or in the ‘slave’ sectors of domestic employment, even prostitution, in sum: ‘personal services’. Preferring not to have anything to do with the State, Politics and Capital marks off all the autonomist tradition and so we find it here. That is a Situationist-type social spectacle, (that vamps our energy), fought  with a  Bartleby refusal to work. An eagerness perhaps to smoke dope. As well as backing for wildcat strikes (grèves sauvages) – unions are lieutenants of Capital. For good measure they also throw in some stuff about the environmental catastrophes (Hurricane Katrina), and ecology being appropriated by the system. As a small mercy there is none of the usual anarchist drivel about animal liberation.

The positive alternative? A dose of playfulness. Communes, self-organized, outside the circuits of power and production, with an autonomy, a life in liberated zones, living off the black economy, even fraud; whatever resources can be found, and shared.

Thus the Comité ignores the potential positive side of the Labour movement and the left. The massive anti-revolutionary bloc in France, la Droite, (which managed rather effectively to get Sarkozy elected) is little more than an obscuring fog over the domination of Capital. The central enemy is the Police. Since resistance can come from nearly anywhere (though especially the poorer urban zones), why bother with even this sketchy economic and class analysis? Nobody would have any idea from this text that a massive financial crisis (signaled in advance by people such as Larry Elliot in the UK and plenty of writers in France’s Le Monde Diplomatique), was looming and would cause popular unrest across Europe – there is no economics here to speak of. Or investigation into the political economy of neo-liberalism. All is rolled down to the – in their opinion – central conflict between the police and the ‘dangerous classes’. As for these potential supporters: it’s a commonplace that autonomists have a crippling inability to relate to the popular masses. Except no doubt those who have ‘Mort aux vaches’ (Death to the Pigs) tattooed on their arms. Here the rhetoric smothers and ignores the hostility of the majority of the inhabitants of the Cités (Council estates) to the violence that unfolded in their areas during the Banlieue revolts, and which hurt them more than anyone else.

No doubt all this goes down well in their proto-Communes – though not possibly so swimmingly when they dine with their parents and grandparents on Sunday, as a majority of the French ultra-left, for all their radicalism (famillies je vous hais) tend to do.

As the L’Insurrection qui vient continues in this vein one wonders what all the fuss is about. Perhaps some clues lie in the analysis of the great metropolises. These are no longer anything but points in a network of flows, and “La métropole est le terrain d’un incessant conflict de basse intensité” (the metropolis is the site of a continual low-intensity conflict). Hah! Something for the experts in terrorism and counter-insurgency to grasp. They aim furthermore to halt the urban perpetuum mobile. Stopping its incessant movement can proceed by blocking production, and the circulation of goods. “les autoroutes sont des maillons de la chaîne de production dématérialisée” (motorways are the links in the chain of dematerialized production) – leaving aside the fact that Negri, Hardt and Virno see this originating in a rather more ethereal dimension (immaterial production in fact), we can see why keen coppers’ ears prick up. Isn’t the French Railway network, the SCNCF another essential link? Weren’t the accusations that led to the Tarnac all about breaking this circuit – by sabotage no less? The description of Paris as not a centre of power to be ‘captured’ but the “cible de razzia, comme pur terrain de pillage et ravage” (target of raids, a place to loot and wreak havoc in) touches some raw nerves. These after all are the chaps whose profession is to protect the Capital from such attacks. The rozzers must have also felt rather, well, personally, affected by the demand to “Libérer le territoire de l’occupation policière” (free the country from Police occupation). To say the least.

Unfortunately for anyone drawing neat conclusions from L’Insurrection qui vient tops its ‘circles’ by some further dense paragraphs, strongly opposing a strategy of armed struggle. Naturally they indulge in some waffle about all uprisings being armed. But, given that power is not truly centralised and autonomists have no wish to build a ‘counter-state’, even a ‘dual power’, they declare that, “la perspective d’une guérilla urbaine à l’irakienne, qui s’enliserait sans possibilité d’offensive, est plus à craindre qu’à désirer. La militarisation de la guerre civile, c’est l’échec de l’insurrection.” (the prospect of urban guerrilla warfare, Iraqian style, bogged down, without any possibility of going onto the attack, is more to fear than to wish, it’s a setback for the insurrection). The militarisation of civil war is a failure for the insurrection itself). All rather mealy-mouthed – the Islamists in Iraq are murdering reactionaries whom one would not even bother considering in a serious left perspective. But clear on the criticism of classic, RAF style, terrorism. In case even Inspector Plod doesn’t get the meaning of this they refer to the libertarian view that the Russian Revolution was set back precisely at this point. He might also reflect on the claim that new oppositions will emerge, in the wastelands of the banlieue, and that one day, all his fruits of his society will be “grandement ruinée” (ruined completely) and that “cette effroyable concrétion du pouvoir qu’est la capitale, “(Capital’s terrible concentration of power) will fall.

Or not.

So, a text whose politics boils down to a celebration of revolt, and (in real terms) a kind of late ‘sixties/early ‘seventies ‘alternative society’, filled with a great deal of lyricism, romanticism about the 2005 riots (as if the rioters were incarnations of Victor Hugo’s Gavroche) that makes some good, if unoriginal, points, about the nature of the social and institutional dislocations underway, rooted in the purest autonomist ideology – that’s to say, perpetual grandstanding – is the basis for a new version of Action Directe. Maybe. But I think not. Unfortunately, to continue the reference to Les Misérables, the presumed authors have a pack of would-be Javerts yapping at their heels.

Not Welcome Here.

Our old friend Dieudonné M’Bala M’Bala has been fined 10, 000 Euros for anti-Semitism (here). Dieudonné associates with Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson, radical Islamicists, ultra-orthodox Jews, the French ultra-Right, 9/11 Truthers, and  ’anti-imperialists’. He is the nearest we’ve got to living proof  of  theories about the sleep of reason leading to monsters.

Worth bearing in mind when he visits the UK again.

How far into the future this will be is anyone’s guess.

His coming show at Leicester Square has just been unceremoniously axed (here).

The Sorrow of Ipswich.

Local Conservative Councillor Steven Wells yesterday led an anti-Postal Strike Picket outside Ipswich Royal Mail Offices. (More info: here) Standing on the opposite side of the road to the CWU picket the Tory-led suits attacked workers. They demanded ‘their’ post. The demonstration was composed (according to Socialist Worker here)  of paid employees of Steven Wells’ company, Experience Direct.

Socialist Worker does not mention that Steven Wells lost his Ipswich Borough Council Housing Portfolio earlier this year. A sign of the esteem the local Tories hold him in is that he is now on the Community Improvements Committee (as a Substitute).

Those who seek a better postal service might be interested in this. Not long ago the Royal Mail commissioned a computer-based survey (Pegasus) in Ipswich. To improve deliveries it recommended employing much higher levels of staff.

Strange to say it was ignored.

People’s Choice for European President.

So it goes.

Blair for this.

Blair for that.

Blair’s like a cat that’s got the cream.

It is hard to imagine anyone who has done nothing at all for Europe except smirk is now, trying to be, well we know what.

Le Monde carries the news today that Blair faces competition for the post of European President (here). Jean-Claude Juncker, of Luxembourg, the plucky chap, is entering into the race. He is described as a David standing up to Goliath (shouldn’t that be Godzilla?) Blair.

Jean-Claude (as I call him) sounds a bit of a lad. Or an utter bastard to be frank. I once met the Luxembourg left. He was at a meeting in Paris. The country does not seem a workers’ paradise.

No matter.

Jean-Claude it is, and Jean-Claude it must be.

(*) I claim to have invented this pun btw. I made it back in 1996.

While the British Left is absorbed in a debate about whether to ‘No-Platform’ the BNP the French ‘left of the left’  is taking steps towards a political challenge. That is to ecocapitalists, social liberals, and the right. No prizes for guessing which more-to-the-centre parties the first two bits of jargon refer to. The occasion? Next year’s Regional elections (under decentralisation, the stake is a large amount of local government responsibility).  It would be good if we had this alternative. Rather more productive than discussing how horrible Nick Griffin and his policies are. Indeed it hard to imagine anyone in France even thinking about a strategy of denying the (declining) Front National space in the public media. Were the left in the UK serious we would spend some time looking at the Front de Gauche. Its strategy of successfully aligning separate left parties, and independent currents has something to say to our own fragmented left.

“Le PCF, fort de l’expérience positive du Front de gauche pour les élections souhaite contribuer à la formation d’un front de gauche élargi, ouverts à des forces nouvelles, à des personnalités, à des militants du monde syndical associatif travaillant autour de projets régionaux bien ancrés à gauche. (Here)

The PCF, strong following the positive experience of the Front de Gauche for the European elections (where they won seats for the European Parliament) supports creating a wider Left Front, with new forces, ‘personalities’, trade unionists, social movement activists, to work together on projects for the regional elections that are solidly anchored on the left.

This, involving the PCF, the Parti de Gauche (left wing democratic socialists), ex-NGA supporters and other left currents (alternatives, left republicans),  will be independent of the Parti Socialiste and the Greens. It would stand lists on own for the first round of the elections. However, negotiations with the Nouveau Parti Anticapitaliste (NPA)  have been less fruitful. The PCF would welcome their co-operation,

Le NPA aurait sa place dans ce mouvement, mais de la même manière qu’aux élections européennes, la formation d’Olivier Besancenot se refuse à prendre sa place dans des majorités de gauche dès lors que le PS y participerait.La semaine dernière, alors que Jean-Luc Mélenchon venait de déclarer qu’un accord était proche, la direction du NPA durcissait le ton sur le thème des « deux gauches inconciliables ».

The NPA will have its place in this movement but, showing the same behaviour as they did during the European elections, Olivier Besancenot’s Party has refused (in advance) to join with any left majority administration as soon as the Parti Socialiste is involved. Last week when Jean-Luc Mélenchon (Parti de Gauche) claimed agreement was close the NPA began to harden its line around the theme of the ‘two irreconcilable lefts’.

The sticking point remains the issue of alliances behind the Socialist Party (or Greens) in the second round of elections. For the NPA it is unthinkable that any backing could be formally given to the these parties. The reason? This would be negotiated by the Front de Gauche as a precondition for joining with them in local government. Which would imply more than blocking the route to the Right; it means co-operation with their policies. Or, as the Front would argue, putting more pressure on them to change them.

The Gauche Unitaire (ex-NPA) states (here) that a debate on this legitimate,

 Un débat est ouvert, au sein de la gauche de gauche, à  propos de la participation aux exécutifs des régions avec le Parti socialiste et Régions écologie. Ce débat a sa légitimité. Il n’en fait pas moins l’objet, depuis longtemps, d’échanges multiples. Il ne saurait, pour cette raison, constituer un préalable conditionnant la formation de listes unitaires de premier tour.

A debate is open, inside the left of the left, regarding participation with the Parti Socialiste and Ecologists,  in regional council executive.  This is a legitimate debate. However, despite this, acceptance of such participation should not constitute a condition for forming joint-lists in the first round of elections.

I would have thought that the issue is not really a question of fixed principle, but whether the Parti Socialiste and the Verts (Greens) have policies – in the Regional Government context – which make them beyond the pale for the left. It seems doubtful that they do have any. The relatively modest programmes they do have (a kind of  watered down version of municipal socialism with a green tinge), and the fact that they are mainly interested in sustaining the full-time political (paid) layer that dominates both parties (in the Verts over one third – 2,000 out of 5,000 -  of its real membership!) make one wary of them. What do you think of parties where the widely circulated  joke on their activists is they can be divided into two groups: those making a living out of politics, and those who’d like to. But does that mean refusing all co-operation? Before you’ve even had good enough electoral results to be asked?

A rather pleasanter dilemma than the one we face here. At least.