Pagan Goddess?

What is the basic issue between Christianity and Communism? A correspondent asked Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr: "Is it not quite simply that the Christian faith values the individual and respects his dignity, while Communism values the state and subordinates the individual to the collective?"

Last week, in the Niebuhr-edited fortnightly Christianity and Crisis, Protestant Theologian Niebuhr gave his answer: no. The point of view held by his questioner, Niebuhr points out, represents "a most pathetic perversion of the Christian faith and a serious misinterpretation of Communism." Far from being a Christian concept, says Niebuhr (who is a left-of-center Democrat in politics), the value and dignity of the individual is a Renaissance notion which infiltrated Christianity in opposition to the Christian doctrines of providence and sin.

"The Christian doctrine of providence was inconvenient to the rising bourgeois man because it seemed to estimate the forces of historical destiny, beyond the control of the human will, too highly, and did not conform to the self-confidence of the new commercial civilization . . . The Christian conception of man's sinfulness was in conflict with the easy conscience of modern man, who sought the cause of historical evil in ignorance, in social institutions, in everything but in himself."

Individualism, according to Niebuhr, is a false and pagan goddess. "The individual is not an end in himself, and cannot live within himself. Love is the law of his existence. The community is as primordial as the individual. Both Nazi and Communist forms of collectivism are inevitable reactions to the individualism of the bourgeois age. They are just as much in error as the individualism; but hardly more so."

It is also quite wrong, says Niebuhr, to oversimplify Communism as the individual's subordination to the state. Theoretically, Communism is committed to the belief that the state will "wither away," once the evil institution of property is abolished. This illusion is the characteristic error of Communism. "Communism is so cruel and so fanatical because it has a completely erroneous conception of human nature. Living by the illusion that the abolition of a social institution will redeem man of all sin, it naturally feels justified in using any means which will attain this end.

"It is the more fortified in its fanatical illusions by the belief that nations, oligarchies, commissars and all historical forces on the side of its revolution are by definition virtuous, while those [on the other side] are by definition 'fascists,' 'imperialists' and 'warmongers' . . . There is a certain pathos in the fact that these illusions are merely a 'hard' variety of the soft illusions which Christian and secular sentimentalists hold who talk so endlessly about the 'dignity of man' without any Christian understanding of the total problem of human existence."

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