April 26, 1956

Today I want to continue what I started just at the end of last hour, talking about the concept of the economic. The reason why this is important is the fact that we have, through Marxism,Cf. the review by the noted American historian, Charles A. Beard, of PT 's The Interpretation of History (1936), which appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, xliii (Jan. 1938), 666. Beard expresses his surprise that here, for once, is a theologian who has read his Marx!—Ed. something which is usually called “the materialistic interpretation of history.” And I want to say a few words about this, about the meaning of this word and about the implications of it.

First of all the word “materialistic interpretation of history” is a bad word—poor word—because the term materialism has three meanings, and the confusion of meanings is frequently a wonderful weapon in a political struggle, and I will show you how this came to pass in this case. “Materialism” is basically a metaphysical term derived from philosophers like Democritus and Epicurus in the ancient world and their successors in the Renaissance and in the present. “Materialism” here means the interpretation of reality as a whole in terms of material particles called atoms, or otherwise. This concept of materialism is to be valuated very positively because it was the first step into a methodological science of nature, and, as you know, the fundamentals of this first step, the concept of atom, is still a valid concept in spite of all changes of its qualification in modern sciences.

The second meaning of materialism is a moral attitude of desire for goods which satisfy the drives of libido and of power, and especially of libido (power, more as a means to satisfy the libido drives). If this meaning is used, then it is always used, by everybody, in a devaluating sense,

except in some radical philosophical materialists at the end of the 18th century in France, where ethics itself were identified with the fulfillment of the most rudimentary desires and strivings.

The third concept of materialism is historical materialism, which has nothing to do with these two other meanings. It has nothing to do with the first meaning. In one of the most important early writings called the Theses Against Feuerbach , Karl Marx has expressed his radical and monumental criticism of metaphysical materialism. And it was only later, through his friend Engels, and through the general development of the second half of the 19th century, that elements of metaphysical materialism came into the movement which called itself “Marxist.” In principle these two things have nothing to do with each other.

Now what is the meaning of historical materialism? The meaning is that the act of production and reproduction of one's physical existence is the basis from which all other activities must be understood and derived. The way in which the fundamental desires of reproduction of our existence in time and space are satisfied is, at the same time, the way in which all cultural creativities are to be interpreted. Special artistic forms are expressions, in this view, of a special society which is either aristocratic or bourgeois or proletarian, and so of course equally the religious ideas and the philosophical ideas. This derivation is the essence of historical materialism.

Now the demonic trick of propaganda has identified the historical materialism, which is a method of understanding man's cultural creativity, with the moral materialism which is a derogatory statement for everybody and by everybody, and with metaphysical materialism which

is a declaration of philosophical stupidity in the way in which this materialism was carried through, at the end of the 19th century. So if you call Marx himself, or the Marxist movement, “materialist,” you have the great advantage that besides the genuine meaning of the word, namely historical materialism (where it should be applied), you have the coloring coming from the ethical and the metaphysical materialism, which has nothing to do with the Marxian materialism. That is the first thing we must say, and this is a fair statement and a statement of protection against a kind of propagandistic attitude which is beneath the dignity of academic honesty.

Then the second point, a critical one: how valid is this derivation? There I gave you at the end of the last hour the I think basic logical criticism which must be applied to this form of deriving all in life on [i.e. from] the economic, namely that that from which these things shall be derived is already a summary of these things, so that the whole thing becomes a vicious circle. You have, in what one calls the economic, not only special activities of production, you have also special techniques which are results of special scientific analysis of nature, and you have further a special system of law and right which makes this kind of production possible, you have special forms of ultimate concern—and this means, of religion—which valuate the goods produced by this economy in different ways. The tremendous valuation of gadgets which we have in this country is a religious phenomenon because it expresses an ultimate concern. And the opposite—which would make a kind of dynamic economy, as we have it, impossible—is based also on the religious idea of being born into a special estate and to be asked by destiny to fulfill oneself

within the limits of this special estate, be it the king, be it the beggar, and everything in between. Now these are what I could call economic will, or economic valuation, not in terms of prices but in terms of expressions of the meaning of life. So if you discuss these things, don't complain, with a kind of complaining sentimentality, that this bad materialistic interpretation of history devaluates all the wonderful high values which we have in our wonderful society—don't say this, especially that it is atheistic and has many other moral failures from the point of view of suburban bourgeoisie, but use your academic mind and criticize, not in terms of sentimental complaint about these bad people, but criticize in terms of logical analysis and show them what actually the concept of the economic means. And if you do this, then you also do something else: you show how right they are in their analysis; that actually you cannot write a history of the artistic interpretation of the human face, in the Western world, without continuous references to the economic foundation. I once have written an article, in a collective work called The Christian Answer (1945)—“The Analysis of Our Time”The actual title is “The World Situation,” in the book edited by H. P. Van Dusen. Note that in later republication, the pictures are omitted.—Ed.—and to show the way in which the idea of personality (which I have discussed in the last hours) has developed, I added pictures: the personality in a man like Giotto, in a man like Titian, in a man like Rembrandt, and in a man like American 19th-century Sargent, showing the differences, not looking so much at the valuation or

devaluation, from the point of view of higher or lower art, but from the point of view of good art in all of them, which shows a tremendous transformation of the interpretation of the human countenance in relationship to the development of the economic realm. Therefore, if you, write a story of portrait painting and leave out the economic foundation, then you do something which cannot be justified and which makes the whole story a matter of living in thin air.

The same is true of the history of religion, the history of the Church. You cannot derive the Reformation (as has often been done by Marxist writers) from the fights between the upper classes in the south German cities and the lower classes in the guilds, the dissolution of the guilds, and all this. This has been done, and there is some truth in it. I think the best way in which it has been done is Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom. But there also, the limits become visible. In the moment in which you derive the contents of the Reformation from these structural changes in the trading cities in Germany and northern Italy, in the moment in which you do this you never reach the reality of the Reformation, although you make understandable special trends in the development.

All this could be carried through almost indefinitely, but I want to stop it and want to sum it up in the concept of society creating culturally as a living Gestalt —you know that word from Gestalt psychology, and it has also been used in sociology, and even in physics. It can be translated not so easily, and therefore it has been introduced by the psychologists into the English language—if a translation were possible, we would need two words, namely “living structure.”

But you must add the word “living,” because if you say only “structure” then the full meaning of the German word Gestalt is not grasped.

Now if I say a social group, society as a whole, in a special period, is a living Gestalt, then this means what every doctor can tell you, that there is no point in the human body whose function is the cause of all the others, but the functioning of each of them is implanted in the functioning of the whole, and the functioning of the whole is determining for the functioning of each of them. In this sense the cultural functions in human groups are completely interdependent, and the whole scheme of causality, especially this terribly mechanistic scheme of substructure and superstructure (which have not even the dynamic element of causality in it, but is even more external and mechanical) should be dismissed radically. This is my genuine criticism against Marx, but not that his so-called materialism has ethical and bad metaphysical connotations.

Now I want to give you a description of the relationship of culture in its economic-social functioning, to religion—not in terms of abstract categories but in terms of a story, namely the story of the German religious socialism, after the First World War. I give you this story not only because I am largely responsible myself for the theoretical formulations of this movement, but also because I believe that from the point of view of our subject during this whole year, “Religion and Culture,” it is a very useful model to study, because it went down to the principles not in abstracto, but on the basis of the given German situation in the year 1919.

In this way it becomes an example from which you yourself, and perhaps I myself partly, can and will derive some more universal statements.

When in Germany 1919—or 1918 first, and then further, 1919—the First World War came to an end, through the revolutionary movement in which the German emperor and all the different German princes were thrown out and Germany was transferred into a republic under the leadership of the Social Democratic Party (which combined Marxist principles with democratic principles)—in this moment, two very opposite attitudes developed in this tense situation. The one came from the Lutheran tradition, which is all-decisive for the German situation. This Lutheran tradition is determined partly by Luther himself, but Luther himself and Lutheranism are largely determined by the structure of Germany in the age of the Reformation, in the 16th and already in the 15th century, by an innumerable mass of small princes with absolute authority over their subjects, and the beginning of a bureaucracy and a standing military force under the control of these princes. In this situation, Lutheranism developed a point of view which one can call negative-transcendental, namely the attempt to save the individual soul on the basis of the Christian message of justification by faith, but leaving history to the earthly powers without interfering from the side of the Church. This was quite different in the Calvinistic countries where, in the name of the law of God, which confirms the natural law, the Catholic princes were attacked by the Protestants, the revolution was preached and carried through, and the authorities were dispossessed. In Lutheranism this never happened. And during the Thirty Years' War

the idea of suffering obedience—since anyhow the world is in the power of the devil—was the attitude of almost all Germans who were influenced by this Lutheran attitude. Authority was God-sent. If the authority is bad, you have to pray for a better one, but there is no right of resistance or revolution except if they command something which is, in your personal situation, against the law of God: then you have to suffer. This point of view never was out, in Germany, and you cannot understand Nazism, for instance, without this point of view—not the content of Nazism (this has nothing to do with Lutheranism or, as some people think, Hegelianism), but the authoritarian acceptance of it without a serious resistance and revolt in the beginning, before it came to power—later on, it was impossible anyhow.—This is historical guilt, tragic guilt, connected with the German history.

In Karl Barth, there was in these days a theologian who himself came from religious socialism, who was a member of the Swiss religious socialist movement, but who turned transcenden- talist in the beginning of the twenties; who gave up the combination of the religious principle with the socialist principle, and was, as I once told him, largely responsible for the fact that the theology students who in the beginning of the twenties, after the First World War, were still in sympathy for religious socialism and able to resist the coming of Hitlerism, were not able any more because the relationship to the history, to the historical responsibility of a theologian, was undercut by Barth's transcendentalism.

Now this was the one position: Lutheranism, pessimistic about changing history,

demanding subordination to the powers in power, especially the old traditional conservative ones, much less those who are now in power—or were then in power—the republican, democratic ones—but anyhow, even there they subjected themselves. This is the negative-transcendental point of view which was almost inborn in every German at that time—except one group, namely the socialist group, which had the opposite point of view: the utopian-immanent point of view, the point of view that history is the place to change the given reality, to change it under the criteria of the natural law, the justice, equality, and realizing this in history and not beyond history. In this, an either revolutionary or more progressivistic socialism was in political power, while the churches and all those directly or indirectly influenced by them were looking above, towards the transcendent fulfillment.

Now how could this situation be bridged? This was a question we had to face when we came out of the First World War. This was the radical conflict which tore the whole nation to pieces—at least two parts in radical conflict with each other. It was the idea of religious socialism to overcome this situation. In doing so, we introduced a large amount of fundamental concepts which expressed the valuation of our situation. First of all we criticized the Lutheran solution that the world remains unchanged in the power of the Devil. We accepted this as a universal truth, but we refused to accept it with respect to any special demonic power. We said: of course there will be no utopian actualization of the kingdom of God in time and space. In this we were in the line of universally Christian thinking. But we believed that it is possible,

in the name of the ultimate, to fight against the concrete demonic powers. And we found two of them especially important, in the social realm, namely at that time nationalism and capitalism. In the name of the ultimate principle of love and justice, we demanded a fight against these demonic forces, their undercutting, their destruction. This was the meaning of the fight of religious socialism against the one side, the Lutherans.

We had the same critical attitude toward utopian Marxism. We said that, in time and space, under the conditions of man’s estrangement—which by the way is a Marxian and Hegelian term—there is no possibility of actualizing the kingdom of God in time and space. Every attempt to do so is utopia, and utopia is a form of idolatry which, like all idolatry, after a certain time necessarily leads to what I like to call metaphysical disappointment—not a disappointment about a concrete expectation, but disappointment about an ultimate commitment, and therefore a tragic and destructive disappointment, the disappointment the consequences of which always are emptiness and the danger of falling into other demonic powers. This was our criticism of Marxism, of the utopian progressivistic belief in the coming of the kingdom of God in terms of justice on earth.

On this basis we used a term which in the meantime—several terms, but the first of them—which has in the meantime been accepted largely, namely the term kairos. This term was not simply taken from the New Testament language, where kairos means the time of fulfillment, the right time, the time in which the eternal breaks into the temporal and makes it infinitely meaningful. This concept was taken out of the New Testament and applied to an interpretation of history. We accepted

the central kairos, the center of history, in the event on which Christianity is based. But then we said: there are kairos moments everywhere in history. They are not always there, but they are sometimes there. And it is the function of the prophetic spirit to discover them, to feel them, to feel their presence, their coming, as the Prophets always did. Such moments are moments in which a whole form of cultural existence has disintegrated in itself, and the new breaks in from above as judging the old, and as promising and demanding the new. Wherever these things happen, there kairos is present.

Now we said, over against both sides—Lutheran transcendentalism and Marxian utopianism—“there is a kairos,” and in this kairos a special demonic force might be overcome—we never know it in terms of certainty because it depends on the chances of history and not only on the trends in history—but it is here, it is “at hand,” as the New Testament term is; and it might come.

Now this eliminates transcendentalism because the eternal breaks into the temporal; and it eliminates utopianism because one knows that it is a here-and-now situation, but not a universal one.

The second concept connected with this was the concept of the demonic. This concept couldn’t be used even in the beginning of the twenties of this century, because it was too much connected with the superstitious use of special spirits which grasp us, which run from one place to the other, and have special paint-able characteristics—and painters always like them very much.

But the demonic became visible as something quite different. It became visible as the structure of destruction, and it became visible both in social reality and in personal reality. In personal reality, it is the great merit of depth psychology that it showed us that there are structures in the totality of us, including our unconscious, which we cannot simply break by good will. The rediscovery of the demonic was the death-blow against the loose talk about the “man of good will,” which was still so strong twenty years ago, and always connected with the nice term “if only”—namely “if only we, the men of good will, got together!”

The discovery of the demonic is the discovery of a structure transcending every individual good will. It is the structure which is present in the individual psychological reality, as a neurotic or psychotic structure of a demonic character, and everybody knows about that that if it is there, you cannot overcome it by good will. This would save you too much money from the psychoanalyst but you cannot—it would make you like God, who only can do it, actually.

Another discovery was a social structure. Here we must pay tribute to the analysis of the social schizophrenia, or neurosis, which was connected with the later stages of bourgeois capitalism. This analysis also doesn’t say what Marxist propagandists always did, later on, as all propagandists always do, namely distort truth as the basis of his propaganda. He [Marx] never said that there are the evil capitalists and we must kill them—this was what he called utopian socialism. This is still in the structure of “if-only”—“if only the 10,000 bankers would disappear, then the world would be safe for justice!” Now the same thing like that is deep, deep under the level

of Marx’ s analysis. His analysis shows structures in which everybody is involved, but in which also saving elements can be discovered, and he saw them in an almost Christ-like character of the proletariat of the 19th century—a phenomenon which you don’t know because it doesn't exist in this way in this country, but it certainly did exist in the middle of the 19th century in England and Europe. There he saw the saving possibilities and gave an analysis so convincing of the inescapable structure within the capitalist system that it changed the surface of the world in all sections of the world, as the 20th century has shown.

Now this is the other side of the rediscovery of the demonic: structures of destruction which we cannot escape.

Now this sounds again very much pessimistic-Lutheran-negativistic, and seems to exhort us to look up and not forward. But this was not our attitude. We said: No, there is a special demon, which we know. It is one special, only—others will follow. But this, we have to fight. This is the way in which the presence of the divine power in the world must express itself, in fighting a concrete demonic force. We saw it first mostly in the capitalism of the 19th century, then more in the nationalism of the early 20th century, which led to Nazism where we had a fully developed unambiguous expression of the demonic.

Now all this meant something which we find mythologically expressed in the last book of the Bible. There we find that the fight of the angelic powers against the demonic powers leads to

a temporal [i.e. temporary] banning of the demonic from the earth, but only temporal, not final. Finally, towards the great struggle at the end of history, the demonic will let loose again, out of its underworld prison, and will reappear.

This is the language of the myth. Now we tried to translate this language in the problem of the European situation in the twenties, and it is easy to do this. The biblical vision is not utopian. The development of the divine is connected with the development of the demonic. Both of them grow in power and destructiveness. But there is always one special demonic power which can be fought against and which will be thrown into the prison and banned for a time. This is the depth and wisdom of the biblical symbolism, which you could see in the actual history of this century. Some demons were de-demonized, for instance the capitalists. Others grew in power, for instance the nationalistic. But also the nationalistic was conquered, for a certain time. These demonic forces are not the ultimate; they can be attacked and they can be conquered. And in the very attack against them, even Lutheran Christianity in Germany has developed its greatest spirituality and power against the transcendentalism of the Lutheran tradition. A man like Karl Barth changed several times when he saw that Hitler represents what religious socialism had told him, years and years before, namely not a secular phenomenon of history only, but in its depth-dimension a demonic force reaching down to dimensions of the ultimate—then he changed his position, and again started the fight which he had done as religious-

socialist, in his younger years.

Now this shows that we have here a double answer, not a utopian answer: “The demonic will never be banned from earth completely,” and on the other hand, the preliminary answer, “In the fight of the Church and of every individual Christian against this, we will have a victory, a partial victory, and will become greater in Spiritual power by this fight.”

These were the fundamental ideas. And with these ideas I believe we have actually done something which should be done always, if such controversies between religion and social and political culture appear.

Now let me add something which I don’t want to forget—although it is already time to stop—namely, religious socialism was not a matter of the churches. We always kept it away from the claim to be official message of the churches, for the following reason: the word “socialism” is not only a word of prophetic criticism, but it is also a word in which concrete suggestions are implied, and these suggestions may be erroneous. And the Church cannot go into the situation of positive suggestions about social transformation. As [a] minister, I can criticize very badly, when milk is officially spilled, if children are hungry—as a preacher in Chicago did—[I can] give, in the name of my pulpit, or what the pulpit stands for, a suggestion how this best can be avoided, by a better organization of trucking. That is not the matter of Christianity. Now this was a very important protection against a pitfall of American Christianity when it believed that it is

called upon to fight not only against the abuse of drinking, alcoholic drinking, but also to introduce special laws, special techniques, to suppress it, in the moment of prohibition. Nothing has more damaged the authority of the Church's message than their simple identification of what they had to say, with a special law of the state which proved to be, after a certain time, only an immense and unhoped-for gift for all gangs[ters], in this country. [little laughter] So the Church has to state the principles, negatively and positively, but the Church cannot, as church, speak about the remedies. And we religious socialists were very much aware of this. We never said that our analysis of the time, our suggestions of transformation, are identical with the message of Jesus-as-the-Christ But as christians, we dared to fall into error and to make statements daringly, and [to] be judged by history itself. And we were!