THE INTOXICATION OF POWER

Transcription

1 THE INTOXICATION OF POWER

2 SOVIETICA PUBLICATIONS AND MONOGRAPHS OF THE INSTITUTE OF EAST-EUROPEAN STUDIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF FRIBOURG/SWITZERLAND AND THE CENTER FOR EAST EUROPE, RUSSIA AND ASIA AT BOSTON COLLEGE AND THE SEMINAR FOR POLITICAL THEORY AND PHILOSOPHY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MUNICH Founded by J. M. BOCHEN"SKI (Fribourg) Edited by T. J. BLAKELEY (Boston), GUIDO KUNG (Fribourg), and NIKOLAUS LOBKOWICZ (Munich) Editorial Board Karl G. Ballestrem (Munich) Bernard Jeu (Lille) Helmut Dahm (Cologne) George L. Kline (Bryn Mawr) Richard T. DeGeorge (Kansas) T. R. Payne (Providence) Peter Ehlen (Munich) Friedrich Rapp (Berlin) Michael Gagern (Munich) Andries Sarlemijn (Eindhoven) Felix P. Ingold (St. Gall) James Scanlan (Columbus) Edward Swiderski (Fribourg) VOLUME 43

3 MAUREEN HENRY St. John's University, Jamaica, New York THE INTOXICATION OF POWER An Analysis of Civil Religion in Relation to Ideology D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY DORDRECHT : HOLLAND / BOSTON: U.S.A. LONDON:ENGLAND

4 library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Henry, Maureen, The intoxication of power. (Sovietica ; v. 43) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Christianity-United States. 2. Religion-History. 3. Communism. I. Title. II. Series. BR515.H ' ISBN-13: e-isbn-13: DOl: / Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company, P.O. Box 17, Dordrecht, Holland Sold and distributed in the U.S.A., Canada, and Mexico by D. Reidel Publishing Company,Inc. Lincoln Building, 160 Old Derby Street, Hingham, Mass , U.S.A. All Rights Reserved Copyright 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any informational storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner

5 For my teacher, Gerhart Niemeyer

6 T ABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE ~ ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xili CHAPTER 1/ Foundations: The Roman Civil Religion 1 CHAPTER II / Errand Into the Wilderness: The City Upon a Hill 23 CHAPTER III / The Reordering of the Cosmos 43 CHAPTER IV / The Public Philosophy 61 CHAPTER V / The Civil Theology: Myths of Destiny 81 CHAPTER VI/Christianity and the Civil Religion 101 CHAPTER VII / Hobbes: The Religion of Terror 110 CHAPTER VIII / The Christian Tradition and Hobbes' Civil Theology 132 CHAPTER IX / Rousseau: The Religion of Self-Love 150 CHAPTER X / Saint-Simon and Comte: The Religion of Progress 175 CHAPTER xi/hegel and Marxism- Leninism: The Resolution of the Conflict 194 CHAPTER XII / Postscript 223 INDEX 228

7 PREFACE [God) wql com11ul1ld a ble',ing on u, In all our way" '0 that we,hall,ee much more of Hi, wisdom, power, goodnell8, and truth than we have formerly known. We,haH find that the God of I8TIlei is among U', and ten of us shall be able to rellist a thoubilnd of our enemie,. The Lord will make our name a prai,e and glory, '0 that men 'hall BIlY of succeeding plantation,: 'The Lord make it like that of New England'. For we must consider that we Ilhall be like a city upon a Hill; the eye, of all people are on u,. John Winthrop to early Puritan settlers in America, 1630 When the Soviet people will enjoy the ble,"ngr of Communism, new hundred, of molion, of people on earth will BIly: 'We are for CommuniBml' It i, not through war with other countries, but by, the example of a more perfect organization of society, by rapid progress in developing the productive force, the creation of all conditions for the happiness and well-being of man, that the ideab of Communism win the mind, and hearts of the masses. The force of Bocial progress will inevitably grow in au countries, and this will assist the builden of CommuniBm in the Soviet Union. Programme of the C.P.S.U., 22nd Congress, 1961 There is now in America, and also in the West as a whole, a much-debated crisis of confidence which is described in many ways but which can best be understood as the very simple fear that the Soviet Union's appropriation of Christianity and the Christian myth for its own purposes has proved to be more powerful, more appealing, more efficacious than the Americ,an version of the same myth. The fear is not expressed quite so explicitly, but this is nevertheless the crux of it - the tacit assumption that America has botched the job of creating the perfect society and has in the process revealed itself to be as evil and corrupt and generally as fallible as every other society. The result is not so much the feeling that the Mandate of Heaven has passed to Communism which becomes the new City Upon a Hill, as the feeling that the failure of the American experiment to achieve the ideal society has been the failure of mankind, a failure that leaves behind a vacuum, a complete lack of defense against the more resolute forces of totalitarianism. In the process two things are not sufficiently considered: one is that both the American civil theology and Communist ideology are basically a more-or-iess secularized ix

8 x PREFACE version of Christianity and are in many respects remarkably alike; the second is that, underneath even its most extravagantly nationalistic rhetoric, America has always possessed a much more realistic understanding of the world and the tradition from which the American society developed. This is a luxury which the Soviet Union, in its public discourse at least, has never allowed itself to enjoy. The difference is crucial, for the fundamental question is whether man prefers a myth that he controls or a myth that is created to control him. It seems, then, an instructive exercise to examine the developments of both the American civil religion and the Communist ideology in order not only to arrive at a better understanding of the true philosophical meaning of both, but also to understand the process in modern European philosophy of which Marxism-Leninism can be seen as the culmination. The American civil religion is studied here also for a secondary purpose - as perhaps the most articulate example of a civil religion that developed gradually and spontaneously within a historically acting people, it can serve as a kind of standard against which we can compare those civil religions developed in abstraction by isolated thinkers. The last such civil religion has been forcibly imposed on a society from without, although it now serves as its civil theology, and the similarities between Communism and the pre-revolution Russian civil religion derive mainly from the ideology's susceptibility to manipulation for nationalistic purposes. In its essential emphasis on the country's salvific mission, expressed, for example, in the symbol of Moscow as the Third Rome, the earlier Russian civil religion was similar to the American. Nevertheless, the inner structural articulation of this civil religion is inferior to that of America, and so the latter has been chosen as providing a more adequate basis for philosophical, metaphysical analysis, as well as for reasons of contemporary international politics. The purpose of this discussion is in no case to provide an exhaustive analysis of any of the topics or thinkers examined, nor is this intended to be a history of civil religion. What is attempted is a thorough exegesis of the endogenous, metaphysical structures of civil religion and what these imply for an understanding of the meaning of civil religion in general and Communist ideology in particular. The discussion begins with an analysis of certain aspects of the Roman state religion to provide an introduction to the major concepts to be used in the analysis. The treatment is cumulative and analytic, the analysis being carried on within a definite framework which is more fully articulated in chapter VIII. Throughout the focus is on the metaphysical structures and implications of man's attempts to provide his earthly existence with a

9 PREFACE xi purely earthly meaning, which is, to a great extent, his search for power to determine and satisfy his earthly desires. A few acknowledgments are in order. The Earhart Foundation of Ann Arbor, Michigan, supported me with a grant while I did the research for the first part of this book, and during the same time the School of Philosophy of the Catholic University of America gave me a special post-doctoral research appointment. My philosophical debt to Eric Voegelin should be fairly obvious to those familiar with his work, but my debt to Professor Gerhart Niemeyer, although less obvious, is the greater. It was his suggestion that got the second part of the book underway as my doctoral dissertation six years ago and during the course of that work he contributed many suggestions and criticisms and much general influence. My thanks also to Professors Joseph Evans, Walter Nicgorski, and Edward Goerner of the University of Notre Dame, who read the second part of this book in its dissertation form and provided many helpful suggestions. To my parents lowe much for all their support over the years, and for the fmishing of this book lowe a special debt of gratitude to Mr. and Mrs. Elias Koster of Manhasset, New York, whose gifts to me have made all the difference. MAUREEN HENRY

10 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author and the publishers would like to extend their thanks to the following publishers for permission to quote copyright material appearing in their publications: Penguin Books Ltd.: The Confessions o[saint Augustine Tr. by R. S. Pine Coffin (penguin Classics, 1961, pp. 21,24,36,52,146-7,165,171,210, 211,213,223,231). Encyclopaedia Britannica: Great Books of the Western World: Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics; St. Augustine, The City of God; Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan; Hegel, The Philosophy of History; and The Federalist, Vol. 43. Also, from the Series Annals of America, quotations from John Winthrop, Peter Bulkley, John Cotton, Joel Barlow, John L. O'Sullivan, and Abraham lincoln. J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd., and E. P. Dutton and Co. Inc.: J.-J. Rousseau, Emile, The Social Contract, Discourse on the Origin of Equality, and Discourse on Political Economy Tr. by Barbara FoxIey (Everyman's library). The proprietors of the Southern Review: Maureen Henry, 'Tradition and Rebellion' (appeared originally in The Southern Review, January 1976, Vol. 12, No.1, pp ). M c G ~ a wbook - H icompany: l l Karl Marx Early Writings Ed. by T. B. Bottomore, 'Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts' and 'On the Jewish Question'. xiii