IX

Rome, July 2, 1897.

You refer to those critics of different character and nature, who maintain, for many different reasons, that Christianity recoils from a materialistic interpretation of history, and who think that they have thereby raised an insurmountable objection.

Must I enter into these woods, which, though perhaps not impenetrable and wild, are certainly very dark for me? You know how repugnant all hard and fast systems are to me. I am not of the opinion – and it would be fatuous to think otherwise – that any theory of history will ever be so good and excellent in itself that it will be a key to the understandings of every particular phase of history, without first devoting ourselves to special research in such cases. Now, I have not made a special study of the history of the Christian church so far, and therefore I am not able to handle the subject with ease. The ordinary sort of objectors mouth about this subject on the strength of general impressions. In my young days, I read Strauss and the principal writings of the T�bingen school, just as all those did who studied German classic philosophy. And I might exclaim with many others, by slightly varying Faust's cry: "I, too, have unfortunately studied theology."

But later on I did not occupy myself any more with these matters. Still, I have adhered to the conviction that the T�bingen school was the first to begin definitely and earnestly that study of Christianity which alone has a claim to the term historical, and that latter-day progress in this line, so far as any has been accomplished or is in process of accomplishment, consists mainly in corrections and supplements of the results of that school. The principal correction should be in my opinion the following: The scientists of T�bingen devoted themselves primarily, although not exclusively, to a study of the origin and development of creeds and dogmas, while later it became necessary, and is still necessary, to study the formation and development of Christian associations. To the extent that we approach this method of considering the question, which I shall call the sociological method for brevity's sake, we shall get nearer to an objective research. For an understanding of the how and why of the origin and development of the associations will give us the means to understand, for what reasons, and in what way, the souls, the imaginations, the intellects, the desires, the fears, the hopes, the aspirations of the members of these associations had to seek expression through certain creeds, adopt certain symbols, and arrive at the formulation of certain dogmas; in other words, how it happened that these associates had to piece together a whole world of doctrines and imaginary concepts. Once that this step has been made, we are on the road which leads directly to historical materialism. For we have then arrived at the general statement that ideas should be regarded as products, not as the causes, of certain social structures.

If I am mistaken – for, as I said, I understand comparatively little of these arguments – the recent studies of ancient Christianity have followed mainly this realistic line. And it seems to me that writers like Harnack are in the front ranks of this study. Incidentally I refer to the very remarkable work of the Englishman Hatch, which I have read. He demonstrates with the greatest lucidity and by means of documentary evidence that the Christian association, beginning at a certain point after its first origins, developed and consolidated by means of adaptation to the various forms of corporative law which flourished in the different regions of the Roman empire. In other words, the movement adapted itself to the conditions peculiar to Roman law, or to local and national customs, especially to Grecian and Hellenist institutions. I hope our bishops may not take it amiss. The Holy Ghost will have come in by elevating the bishops above the remaining mass of the faithful, to the extent that the original democratic organization was transformed into a hierarchy by the differentiation into clergy and lay members (or common people). The name certainly indicates that the Christian organization was modeled after those bodies of boatmen, fish dealers, bakers, and others, who had their episcopi et reliqua (overseers and other folk).

At this point we must make another step forward. We must abandon the abstract concept of a uniform history of all Christianity and take up the particular history, in time and place, of Christian associations. These associations were first a part of that greater civilized, semi-civilized, or directly barbarian society, in which they developed during the first three centuries. Then it seems that they absorbed and molded all the complex relations of that semi-civilized or semi-barbarian society, as was the case, for instance, in the Latin West during the so-called Middle Ages. And finally, when the unity of Catholicism was broken by Protestantism, the liberty of conscience was recognized, especially after the Great Revolution. The Christian associations then became a settled part of the political and social life, playing a predominant role here, a minor role there, or remaining insignificant in another place, as the case might be. It is along this line that the problem of the relations between state and church must be handled, for this is a question of historical relations, not of theoretical formulae.

This method is being more and more applied to the study and explanation of those material conditions, by which the Christian associations were created, perpetuated, and carried to partial or local dissolution, just as other forms of common life were. All the causes and reasons of these different changes become easily evident by this means. And then it is understood that creeds, dogmas, symbols, legends, liturgies, and other things of a similar nature, are matters of secondary consideration, the same as every other superstructure of ideas.

To continue writing history on Christianity as an entity means to multiply the errors of those men of letters and sages who commit the methodical mistake of writing histories of literature or philosophy as though these were independent entities. In these handiworks of manufactured wisdom it seems as though the poets, orators, and philosophers of different epochs, isolated from the other life of their respective times, were grasping hands across the centuries to form a chain of celebrities; or as though they had not succeeded in getting the material and opportunity for poems and philosophical essays out of the conditions and the stage of evolution of their period and had therefore tried to go off to some corner by themselves. This is the studied mark of learned compilations. Of course, it is very convenient to have on hand some manual containing all the information on that which we call French literature, say from La Chanson de Roland to the novels of Zola. But the chronology of thousands of years does not run simply from one thing to another, nor does the gift of poetry vary simply from case to case. It is rather a question of transformations in the entire relations of life in all its great outlines. But literary expressions are but relative indices, specific sediments, particular cases, among this mass of social transmutations. It is very convenient, especially for the artificial cramming common in our universities, to reduce all that we mean historically by the term philosophy to a compendium. But who is there that is able to tell, after such instruction, how it happens that the individual philosophers came to hold so many different, and often contradictory, opinions? How is it possible to make one single line of independent progress out of the antique philosophy, which up to Plato constituted about all the science there was, then out of scholasticism made over by theology with an almost complete absence of science, then out of that philosophy of the 17th century which was a sort of mental exploration running parallel with the new contemporaneous science based on experiment and observation, and finally out of that new criticism which tends to make of philosophy a mere summary of the special knowledge of the individual sciences, which have become so widely differentiated?

In short, it is absurd to continue writing universal histories of Christianity, except it be done for academic convenience. I am not referring to those who think with the minds of believers. These think that the leading thread of such universal histories consists of the providential mission of the church through the ages. We have nothing to say, or to suggest, to people who think like that, and who look upon this ideal and eternal history as a sort of immanent or continuous revelation. They are standing outside of our field. I am referring to those critics, who write universal histories of Christianity as though it were one homogeneous whole, although they know and admit that this material in their hands is a part of the variable and more or less necessary successive conditions of human life. How is it that they do not see that their continuous and straight line of presentation rests on a very slender thread of tradition and reflects a diagrammatic and vague picture of things which can hardly be reconciled?

The origin, growth, diffusion, organisation, or even disappearance (in some parts of the world, as in Asia Minor and North Africa) of the Christian associations, the various attitudes assumed by them toward the remainder of practical life, the many links that connected them with other political and social bodies and powers: all these things, which make up a true and lifelike history, cannot be understood, unless we take our departure from the complex conditions of each individual country, in which the adherents of Christianity were few, or many, or in which all the inhabitants and citizens were Christians, either members of some modest sect, or of imperious Catholicism, persecuted or tolerated, or themselves intolerant and persecuting others. Only in this way do we set foot on solid ground and are enabled to estimate objectively the historical claims of things. And from this position to that of historical materialism we advance with no more effort than is required in any other branch of our knowledge of the past.

In brief, the history of real life is a history of The Church, or of the various churches, that is to say, a history of a society which has a certain economic basis, which means a definite arrangement of its economy, and a definite mode of acquiring, producing, distributing, and consuming goods (which rests on the control of land – Woe is me!). Others may continue to mean by Christianity exclusively a mere complex of creeds and of opinions concerning the destiny of mankind. But, to quote only one illustration, these creeds differ as much as does the free will of Catholicism after the council of Trent from the absolute predestination of Calvin. And it is time that those writers should become reconciled to the understanding that this complex of outlooks and tendencies arose and developed within the circle of definite associations, which differed continually in various respects, and which were always more or less surrounded by a vast and complicated historical environment, to use a favorite term of modern writers.

There is still another thing to consider. In that quarter of an hour of scientific prose, in which we are living at present, no thinking man will believe any more that the great mass of believers in those associations of Christians had any accurate understanding of the different dogmas, or of the subtle discussions of the learned and professors. We do not know anything very precise about the passions, interests, conditions of daily life, the natural and habitual state of mind, of the people of Antioch, Alexandria, Constantinople, and others, who gathered around the banners of Arius and Athanasius. We cannot describe these things as accurately as we can in the case of present-day Naples or London. But we shall never be credulous enough to believe that those crowds understood one word of the dispute waged over the question whether the substance of the Son was identical with that of the Father, or only similar to it. Nor shall we measure the real difference between the artisans of Geneva and those of Italy in the 16th century by the theoretical differences between Calvin and Bellarmino. In this respect the history of Christianity remains very obscure, because it has been handed down in an envelope of ideological concepts, which were the dogmatic and literary reflex of the underlying development of the movement. Under these circumstances we know relatively little of the practical life of the Christian movement, and this little dwindles to a minimum the more we approach the first centuries.

Furthermore, the mass of the associates always preserved in their hearts, and carried into their inmost beliefs and into their legends, many of the superstitions and most of the myths which had been theirs before they were converted, and they had to use these, and create others, in order to make the metaphysical and abstract doctrines of Christianity in some way plausible for themselves. This came to pass quite visibly in the second half of the second century, when Christian society had lost some of the democratic character of comrades waiting for the coming of a Kingdom of Heaven, comrades who were all filled with the holy spirit, and began to assume the form of organized catholicism, not only in the orthodox meaning of the term, but also in the sense of a semi-political hierarchy of a multitude no longer composed of saints, hut of simple human beings. Then grew that transfer of local, national, and ethnological superstitions, which accompanied the gradual transformation of Christianity into an official and territorial church, to the extent that the capable thinkers were zealously and scrupulously picked out and separated from the great mass of those, who had simply to believe and conform to ready-made rites and formalities. Gradually the Western empire disintegrated, while the barbarians of the German and Slavic tribes were forcibly converted, and in proportion grew the power of those creeds, which became the daily food of the masses, who were compelled to adopt symbols and ideas which were as far beyond their mental horizon as were those compounds of many different semi-philosophies. All these Christian populations lived, and continued to live, according to their manifold faiths. For this reason they effectually transformed the common elements of Christianity into ways and means for new and specious mythologies. In view of this independent barbarian life, the definitions of the learned and the decisions of the councils remained suspended in the air, became intangible conceptions for the multitude, and assumed the garb of utopian doctrines.

What, then, were the reasons and causes, the aims and means, which held the Christians together in those times, in which religion is supposed to have been the sole fulcrum and soul of all life? I will not discuss the insults and violent assaults, which form one of those thorny chapters, to which passionate adversaries of Christianity usually resort. I will leave aside this chapter, which unrolls before our eyes a history of the most odious tyranny, the most ferocious and inhuman persecutions, and the most refined hypocrisy. Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum! So many evils could religion bring forth! The point which I wish to emphasize especially is that the principal force of cohesion is found precisely in those despised material means, the use, management, and control of which promoted the growth of the association into a powerful economic organization, with its own offices, its own hierarchy, its own law, its own servants, slaves, dependents, colonists, ministers, prot�g�s and beneficiaries. Ecclesiastic property represents many stages of variation, from the obolus of semi-communism to the legal corporation, and from this to the concentration of the serfs, to the constitution of the territorial complexes into latifundian estates, followed by feudalism with its tithes and trade in souls, up to the most modern attempts at industrial colonization (the Jesuits), and so forth. The poor were then, as they are largely now, held together by gifts of charity, assistance to the sick, destitute, orphans, widows, etc., by systematic management of the fields, the clearing of newly acquired lands and their cultivation. It is these means which made of the Christian association a vital thing, as they do of any other human collectivity. They permitted a handful of doctrinaires, especially in the Middle Ages, to press a vast economic association into the service of relatively higher, nobler, more altruistic and more progressive ends than fell within the scope of strictly feudal property in the hands of sovereign blackmailers, robbers, and pirates. The bourgeoisie, in its different stages, later made an end to this economy of the Christian people by more or less rapid and revolutionary steps. It incorporated this property in various ways in its private property and made it fluid under the capitalist system. Wherever ecclesiastic property partially resisted, or still resists, the blows of this progressive age, it did, and does, for the reason that it still performed some useful service, which other organizations, and the state that represents them, did not care to take upon themselves, or permitted to stay in the hands of the church by way of competition.

The story of this economy is the essence of that interpretation of changes in Christianity, which further critique must elaborate. None other than Gregorious Magnus, who so early held the conviction that the bishop of Rome was destined to hold sway in the disintegrated empire of the West, and who is known generally to cultured persons by his visions, by his love of music, and by the apostolate of his delegate Augustine in Anglia, dictated the economic laws by which the ecclesiastic latifundia were administered. After the lapse of a few centuries, throughout all the adversities of the imperfect states and semi-political communities, which developed within the boundaries of the always unstable and badly reconstructed Western empire, it was this vast ecclesiastic property which, by its universal diffusion and penetration, gave rise to that diplomacy, which from Gregory VII. to Boniface VIII aimed to make an heir of Augustus out of the successor of Peter. This diplomacy was not what it was because its theory had been thought out by monks in their cells, or because Gregory VII and Innocent III were excellent men – of course, they were – but because the possibilities for a great scheme of organization were offered only by that vast economic system. But this system was combatted, not only by the other more or less powerful rulers of that time, but also by some portions of the plebeian population and of the just developing bourgeoisie, in the more developed industrial and commercial regions (for instance in Flanders, the Provence, North Italy), for various reasons, such as monkish asceticism, or the civil liberty of Christians. In fact, the humiliation heaped upon Boniface VIII in Anagni indicates merely the climax of the policy of Philip the Fair, who, as a very early harbinger of the revolutionary princes of the 16th century, for the first time had the hardihood to lay hands upon the substance of the Christian people.

And here I would fain stop in my digression. For this economic history has not yet been written, and I am not inclined to begin it with these passing hints.

However, it seems to me that the usual objectors will say: But will everything else be clear, after this economic history has been written? Here we have once more the ordinary case of those who build a house of cards in order to have the pleasure of blowing it over. To explain a process means generally to resolve it into its most elementary conditions, so far as we can discern and follow their successive phases (from the lowest to the highest limit), passing from cause to effect.

No one will dream of claiming, for instance, that if we are thoroughly familiar with the economic structure of the city of Athens between the close of the 5th and the beginning of the 4th century before Christ, we can then pass straight on to an understanding of the whole ideological content of every dialogue of Plato, without any further ceremony, that is, without the critical assistance of the intellectual elements gathered by tradition. We must above all be able to explain Plato, the man, his esthetic and mental disposition, his pessimism, his flight away from the world, his idealism, and his utopianism. All these things are products of conditions, which developed in the mind of the individual Plato as they did equally in so many other contemporaries of his, who otherwise could not have understood, admired, and followed him to the extent of creating around him a sect, which lived on for centuries with so many modifications. If any one tries to separate this ideological formation, from the environment in which it arose as a first precursor of Christianity, he would render it unintelligible, or almost absurd.

This applies still more to those dispositions and inclinations to fantastic or reflective thought, which gave rise to the need of so many creeds, symbols, dogmas, legends in so vast an association as the Christian was, with its many offices and its different relations. It is assuredly easier to understand the relations, which lead in a general way from certain determined material conditions of common life to all those ideas, than to explain the particular content of each individual idea. This difficulty of an adequate explanation is due to the fact that we are dealing with times of terrible catastrophes, of indescribable confusion, of decadence of the aptitudes for correct science; times, in brief, in which unprejudiced testimony, critique, and public opinion are almost always missing, and in which the strongest minds, isolated from life, incline toward the abstruse, the subtle, the verbalistic.

It is indeed the difficulty of explaining precisely the way in which ideas arise out of material conditions of life, which lends strength to the argument of those, who deny the possibility of clearly explaining the genesis of Christianity. In general it is true that the phenomenology, or psychology, of religion, whatever you wish to call it, presents great difficulties and carries within itself rather obscure points. It is not always an easy matter to understand fully, how the experienced facts of nature and social life are transformed, at certain determined times and under certain determined ethnological conditions, and after passing through the crucible of some particular fantasy, into persons, gods, angels, demons, and then into attributes, emanations, and ornaments of these same personifications, and finally into such abstract and metaphysical entities as The Logos, infinite Goodness, supreme Justice, etc. On this field of derived and complicated psychic production we are still far removed from the most elementary conditions necessary to enable us by observation and experiment to follow the rise and development of the first sensations from one extreme to the other, that is, from the peripheral apparatus to the cerebral centers, in which the irritations and vibrations are converted into conscious apperception, into consciousness.

But is this psychological difficulty a privilege of the Christian creeds? Is it not characteristic of the genesis of all creeds, all mythical and religious imaginations? Are the very original creations of the most primitive Buddhism, or the more second-hand collections of Mohammedanism, perhaps clearer? Or, going beyond these great systems of religion, are the processes of fantasy in the creation of the most elementary myths of our Aryan forefathers perhaps clearer and more transparent at first sight? Is it, perhaps, easy to account for every detail in all the transitions of fantasy in the course of centuries and generations from the pramantha, that is, the stick used in making fire by rubbing and chafing it against another piece of wood, to the gradual rise of the hero Prometheus? And yet this is the best known myth of the Indo-European mythology. We have more data by which we can follow its successive embryogenetic phases, from the most ancient Vedic hymns in honor of the God Agni (fire) to the creation of the ethical and religious tragedy of Aeschylus, than of any other myth.

Furthermore, such psychic productions of men of past centuries present very peculiar difficulties of their own to our understanding. We cannot easily reproduce in ourselves the necessary conditions, by which we might approach their state of mind concerning those productions. Long training is required, before we acquire that aptitude of interpretation, which is characteristic of the connoisseur of languages, of the philologist, the critic, the student of prehistory, or the mental attitude of a man, who through long training and repeated trials has acquired an artificial consciousness, as it were, which is congruous and consonant with the object of study.

Under these circumstances, Christianity (and I mean here the creed, the doctrine, the myth, the symbol, the legend, not merely the association in its oikonomika) becomes more easily intelligible to us to the extent that it approaches our own time. We are surrounded by it, and we have to consider all the time its consequences and its influence on the literature and various philosophies with which we are familiar. We can observe every day, that the multitude crudely combines ancient and modern superstitions with a more or less indistinct general acceptation of the underlying principle, which is common to all confessions, namely the principle of redemption. We can see Christianity at work and watch its accomplishments and its struggles. And we are enabled to draw conclusions from the present as to the past by analogy, which places us in a position to undertake the interpretation of more remote creeds. We also watch the creation of new dogmas, new saints, new miracles, new pilgrimages. And comparing this with the past, we may exclaim in most cases: Tout comme chez nous! Just what we see todav! In other words, we have at our command a store of observation and experience in psychology, which permits us to bring the past once more to life with less effort than is needed for the purely documentary analysis of the conditions of most remote antiquity. How long is it that we understand anything definite about: the origin of language? It dates from the very moment that we realized that we have no better means of experience in this respect than to study the way in which children still learn to speak.

The problem of the origin of Christianity is furthermore obscured for many by still another prejudice. They imagine that it is due to first causes which created it out of nothing, as it were. These people forget that those who became Christians did so by renouncing other religions; and that the problem of the origin of Christianity reduces itself above all to the prosaic task of studying the way in which the elements of former periods took on new shapes within the environment of that association, which formed the actual nucleus of the new organization. This event took place in historical times. And among those religions which preceded it, the most noted is that of advanced Judaism, whose great masses were waiting for the coming of a new Messiah, while its doctrinaires were splitting fine hairs. We are also fairly familiar with the cults, superstitions, and creeds of the various pagan religions in the Roman empire, and with the religious inclinations of many of the thinkers of that time, just as we know the leanings of the multitudes of that period, who were ever ready to accept new faiths, new promises, and good tidings.

It is, therefore, not a question of creation, but of transformation, and we carry on our inquiry on the same field as that of any other history. The question is, for instance, (to give a few general hints), how Jesus became the Messiah of the Jews (a primitive form of development), how the Messiah of the Jews became the Redeemer of all mankind from sin (Paul), and finally, how the Word combined with the NeoPlatonism of Philo (fourth gospel). This is the outline of the ideological development. And on the other hand we must find out, how the primitive communistic association (a communism of consumption) of comrades expecting the impending end of the world and the final catastrophe (the Apocalypse) became a congregation (a church), which deferred the coming of the millennium indefinitely (the second epistle of Peter) and grew into an organization that evolved its own economy and progressively assumed more complicated attributes and functions. In this transition from a sect to a church, from naive expectation to a complicated doctrine, lies the whole problem of the origin of Christianity. With the expansion of the association came in due time an adaptation on its part to the prevailing forms of law, and the requirements of the doctrine fell in with the diffusion of decadent Platonism. Of course, we shall never be able to get close to those things with our vision and observation by an intuitive mode of chronicling. We shall never watch Philip, Matthew, Peter, James, and their next successors, in conversation, and so forth, in the way that we may observe Camille Desmoulins in a caf� of the Palais Royal, at 3 p.m., on Sunday, July 12., 1789. We shall not be able to follow the genesis and establishment of those dogmas as we may the compilation of the articles of the Encyclopedia. For we are dealing with times of vague impressions and of fermentations such as have never been seen since. Great moral epidemics invade the souls of men. The most elementary relations of life approach a period of acute crisis. Under the surface of that civilization of the Mediterranean countries, which combined the political and administrative power of the empire with all that was most useful and refined in Hellenism, vegetated a thousand forms of local barbarisms and festering and rotten products of decadence. It is enough to remind the reader that Christianity, as a thing in itself, took its start, both in fact and in name, from Antioch, that cesspool of all vices, and that Paul addressed his subtle meditations, which show him to us in the light of one of those Jews, who later compiled the Talmud, to the Galatians, that is, to Jews scattered through a country of real barbarians. Christianity was spread among the lowly, the outcasts, the plebeians, the slaves, the despairing multitudes of those large cities, whose vicious life is to a small degree revealed by the satires of Petronius and Juvenal, the Voltairian tales of Lucian, or the gruesome writings of Apuleius. Is there anything precise that we know about the conditions of those Jews in the city of Rome, among whom this new sad superstition, as Tacitus called it, first developed, that superstition which in the course of centuries grew into the most powerful social organism ever known in history? We cannot reconstruct those first origins by intuitive descriptions, but must have recourse to conjecture and combination. This is the main reason for the interminable literature on this subject. And it applies especially to the learned of Germany, who are in the habit of calling such critical and erudite literature theological, even though they are not believers themselves.

The relative obscurity of the first origins of Christianity gives rise in the minds of many to the queer belief in a true Christianity, which is supposed to have been quite different from that other which later assumed the name of Christian. This so-called true Christianity, or original Christianity, which is in its turn so obscure that every one can interpret it in his own way, serves often as a motive for the polemics of those rationalists, who hurl invectives against that historical church, which we know by experience, and then extoll with a great flow of oratory that ideal church, which is supposed to have been the first communion of saints. This is but a historical myth, the same as the Sparta of the Athenian orators, the antique Rome of the decadent Ghibellines of the 14th century, and all other fantastic creations of a lost paradise, or of a future paradise which is as yet out of our reach. This historical myth has assumed various shapes. The sectarians, who revolted against Catholicism in its inception or in its prime, these sectarians, whose democratic equality under definite historical conditions, from the Montanists to the Anabaptists, rove in rebellion against the profanely worldly and hierarchically orthodox church, felt the need of reconstructing in their imagination the true Christianity, that is, the simple primitive life of the first evangelists. At the same time they wailed about the decadence, aberration, works of Satan, and the other things that happened after that time. It is this truest of true Christianities, which was often invoked by the naive communists, who drew pictures of their own aspirations in the absence of any other adequate ideas concerning the way of living under these disgraceful conditions of inequality in this unjust world. And these pictures could find inspiration and color in the evangelical poetry and in so many other true or fantastic records. This happened also to Weitling, who on his part composed a Gospel of a Poor Sinner. And why should I not mention those followers of Saint Simon, who fabulised about a truer Christianity of the future, into which they projected all the aspirations of their heated imagination.

For all these and other reasons, there is hung in the air, in the fantastic imagination of many, the picture of an ultra-perfect Christianity, which shall be different, or is absolutely different, from the one which vulgar history knows and depicts, a Christianity that stoned Stephen, that instituted the Holy Inquisition, which dispatched so many multitudes of infidels to the other world; from the barefooted fisherman Peter, who played the part of a Sancho Panza by his cowardly denials, to Pope Pius, who consoled himself for the loss of his temporal power by assuming infallibility; from the spontaneous agape of the poor visited by the comforter to the Jesuits who arm squadrons and contract commercial loans, like daring harbingers of the colonial policy of the bourgeois world; from the Rabbi of Nazareth, who says that his kingdom is not of this world, to the bishops and other prelates who occupy in his name from one fifth to one third of the land, according to various countries, and who rule as its sovereigns and proprietors, enjoying even the jus primae noctus. Whoever believes in this so-called true Christianity, for one reason or another, even were it only for literary hypocrisy pure and simple, is naturally confronted by the obligation to explain whence the other less true Christianity came later on, which differed so completely from the one which we know. And it is evident that this true Christianity must become a miracle, if not of revelation, at least of human ideology. We are not obliged to furnish an explanation for this miracle, either in the name of materialism, or in the name of any other theory, for the same reason, that no rational mechanics is obliged to explain either the flight of Icarus or the hippogriff of Ariosto.

Nevertheless, we must not forget that this true Christianity, this ideal antagonist of the positive and realistically human Christianity, which we know and which developed under conditions accessible to our research, performed also a historical function, and serves to-day in our hands as a key, by which we may enter into the state of mind and conditions of life of the primitive Christians. For this true Christianity is but a symbol of the various revolutions of the proletariat, the plebeians, the lowly, the manumitted, the serfs, the exploited, up to the 16th century.

I had occasion, as I said once before in another letter, to occupy myself at length in my academic lectures with Fra Dolcino, who marks the culmination and impending decline of the Apostolic sect. After I had described the general conditions of the economic and political development of Northern and Middle Italy, and those of the particular environment (or of the social classes) in which the Apostolic sect arose and developed, I had to explain, at a certain point, the doctrine by which Dolcino held together the ranks of his followers, who were intrepid and tenacious fighters to the last and worked like heroes, martyrs, and harbingers of a new order of human life. His doctrine was likewise one of those apocalyptic returns to a purely evangelical Christianity. It was a negation of everything which the hierarchy had established since Pope Sylvester (at least the legendary one), and this negation was reinforced by an apostolic ardor, which the spirit of battle transformed into a duty to fight. It is natural that the first explanation for these ideas, as the literary men would say, should be sought in similar, immediately preceding, movements of rebellion against the hierarchy. By a short step we come to the Albigenses, and by another short step to those confused and many-colored popular movements known under the common name of Patarenian movements. And on the other hand we must try to understand the mystic and ascetic agitation, which often came near disrupting the papal empire, from the theoretical communism of Joaquin of Fiore to the active resistance of the Friars. If we penetrate another step into this inquiry, it is not difficult to see that behind this mystic veil of asceticism, and behind the exalted passion for true Christianity, there lurked those material conditions and material incentives, which rallied around certain symbols of revolt the lowly monks, the peasants of those countries, in which feudalism was still alive, the peasants of other countries, who, having been freed from feudalism, were forcibly proletarianised by the rapid formation of free communes, the poor people of these pitilessly corporate communes themselves, and finally, as ever, the idealists who espoused the cause of the oppressed as their own: in other words, all the elements of social revolution. From this close analysis we pass on to a more general, or, I should say, typical one. The movement of Dolcino is a link in that long chain of uprisings on the part of the Christian people, who revolted against the hierarchy with more or less good luck, and under complicated conditions, and who in the most acute crises came to the logical conclusion of espousing communism. The classic example, which was the most vigorous, as concerns circumstances of time, extension, and duration, is certainly the uprising of the Anabaptists. However, the revolt of the Dolcinians was by no means a small matter, especially since the valley of the Po, in the beginning of the 14th century, was precociously modern in its economic conditions.

Now, the instinct of affinity turned the minds of the representatives and leaders of revolting peoples to the image, or to the confused memory, or to an approximative reproduction in imagination, of that primitive Christianity, which consisted only of poor people, of afflicted and suffering humanity hoping for redemption from the miseries of this sinful world. True Christianity, to which these zealous rebels turned with so much ardor of faith and fantasy, out of sympathies arising from similar conditions, was a reality. It was a fact, not in the sense of an ideal or type from which poor weak humanity had strayed on account of mistakes or bad will, but in the sense of a sober historical reality. Primitive Christianity was, with due allowance for historical differences, much closer in type, as a whole, in its aspects and incentives, to that which Montano, Dolcino, or Thomas M�nzer wanted to re-establish at inopportune times, than to all the dogmas, lithurgies, hierarchic ranks, dominions and domains, political fights, supremacies, inquisitions, and other vanities, around which the sober and profane history of the church turns. In these attempts of the medieval rebels we see, as it were, a reproduction of an experiment of the past, we recognize what must have been, approximately, the original form of Christianity as a sect of perfect saints, that is, of perfect equals, without any differences of clergy and laymen, all of them equally partaking of the holy spirit, revolutionists and worshippers in one, all on the same level.

The most difficult and thorny problem in all the history of Christianity is precisely this: To understand by what means a sect of perfect equals was turned, in the course of but two centuries, into an association divided into hierarchic ranks, so that we have on one side the mass of believers, and on the other the clergy invested with sacred powers. This hierarchic division is completed by a dogma, that is to say, by regulations which suppress the spontaneousness of belief as a fact of personal practice on the part of the individual believers. A hierarchy means a rule by priests, an administration of things and government of persons by the clergy. This gives rise to political policies. And the inquiry into these policies is the pith of the history of the third century. The meeting. of church and state in the fourth century is but the result of the intermingling of two policies, in which religion and the management of public affairs are finally merged in one. This transition from a free association to an organized semi-state, which is responsible for the fact that the church has ever since dabbled in politics, either in support of the state, or against the state, or itself as a state, verifies but the truth of the statement that any organisation, which has things to administer and offices to fill, becomes of necessity a government. The church has reproduced within its confines the same antagonisms as any other state, that is, the antagonisms between rich and poor, protector and protected, patron and client, owners and exploited, princes and subjects, sovereigns and oppressed. Therefore is has had in its ranks class-struggles peculiar to itself, for instance, struggles between a patrician hierarchy and a plebeian priesthood, between high and low clergy, between catholicism and sects. The sects were largely inspired, up to the 16th century, by the idea of returning to the primitive Christianity, and for this reason they often colored their designs on existing conditions by ideological inspirations smacking of utopianism. The church, on the other hand, such as it grew to be, followed the methods used by the profane state and became a hierarchic congregation of unequals, instead of equals with the holy spirit, and exercised the rights of the privileged by means of oppression and violence, like a perfect empire, some parts of which were ceded to other rulers, with a superadded control of the souls, which must go hand in hand with a government of things, because souls cannot exist without material things. These human characteristics, which, once that a condition of economic inequality exists among men, make any religious association similar to any other government of things in this world, show at a glance that an association of saints can never have had any other but a utopian form, and on the other hand they show to us a constant tendency toward intolerance and toward catholicism in its various forms, to the extent that this association, forgetting the simple martyr of Nazareth, whose form has been left hanging pathetically to the cross on the altars, has made its kingdom of this world.

To stick to an illustration, which is familiar to me through recent studies, the super-imperial papacy fell in the person of Boniface VIII, just as had been prophesied by Dolcino, who survived him for three years. But it did not fall in order to give way to the apocalypse. It is true, the humiliation of the exile at Avignon was inflicted upon tile papacy, but not to give way to a new Caesarian empire, in keeping with Dante's utopia. The indications of the modern era, the forebodings of the bourgeois reign, were already manifest. Philip the Fair, who for a long time had been reaching out for that civil power, under which the bourgeoisie two centuries later went through the first stage of its political rule over society, condemned the Templars to death, as though he wanted to say that the heroic poem of the crusades ended by the hands of the Christians themselves. And in order that we might find the moral of the situation even in the anecdote, which always exposes and unmasks the strident passages on the irony of history, the agent of the Sire of France, who prepared the humiliation of Anagni, was not a captain of the feudal bands, but a civilian, who negotiated the money required to cover a bill of exchange delivered to a banker of Florence.

These legists, and princes usurping historical rights, and bankers accumulating money that later on became capital, were the people who initiated modern history, which is so transparent in the prosaic structure of its aims and means. On the ruins of corporate and feudal society as well as on the ruins of the patrimony of ecclesiasticism settled that cruel bourgeoisie which, suspicious of mysterious forces, inaugurated the era of free thought and free research. And now the bourgeoisie is waiting to be dethroned. But assuredly this will not be done by true Christianity, nor by the truest of the true.

Whether the people of the future, of whom we socialists often entertain such exalted ideas, will still produce any religion or not, I can neither affirm nor deny. And I leave it them to arrange their own lives, which will not be easy, I hope, in order that they may not become imbeciles in paradisian beatitude. But I see this much clearly: Christianity, which in its entirety is up to now the religion of the most advanced nations, will not leave any room for any other religion after it. Whoever will not be a Christian henceforth will be without religion. And in the second place I note that the socialists have been wise enough to write into their platforms: Religion is a private matter. I hope that no one will interpret this statement in the sense of a theoretical point of view which might lead to the elaboration of a philosophy of religion. This wholly practical statement means simply that for the present the socialists are too busy with more useful and serious work than that kind which would liken them to those Hebertists, Blanquists, Bakounists, and others, who decreed the abolition of divinity and decapitated God in effigy. The historical materialists think, however, on their part and aside from all subjective appreciation, that the people of the future will very probably dispense with all transcendental explanations of the practical problems of daily life. Primus in orbe deos focit timor! Fear was the first in this world to make gods. The statement is very old. But it is valuable, and therefore I perpetuate it.

Resina (Naples), September 15, 1597.

Dear Sorel! In re-reading, revising, retouching the letters which I addressed to you from April to July of this year – I intend to publish them – I find that they make up a sort of series and on the whole deal with the same subject. Of course, if I had the intention of writing a book worthy of some high-sounding title as Socialism and Science or Historical Materialism and World Conception, or the like, I should have to sift this matter anew by elaborate meditation. And then the thoughts at which I have here merely hinted, the statements which I have but roughly outlined, the observations which are often made incidentally, and the bizarre criticisms scattered here and there, in short all those things which came to me as I wrote with a flowing pen would assume quite a different form and would be differently arranged. But since, in conversing with you at a distance, I have made use of the liberties peculiar to conversation, I shall now, in making these fleeting letters into a little volume, head it with the modest and appropriate title: a Discourse on Socialism and Philosophy, Letters to G. Sorel. It is the fault of the insistent advice of my friend Benedetto Croce that I commit this new literary sin. This blessed friend of mine became a torment and a cross to me. After he had read these letters, he did not give me any rest, until I promised him that I would publish them in book form. If I were to follow him, I should become in my old days a continuous and perpetual producer of printed matter. I have always preferred in the past to let the scattered manuscripts, which I accumulated in the course of years in my capacity as a teacher and passionate connoisseur of literature, slumber quietly in my desk. But in the present case, Croce continued to plead that it was my duty, now that Socialism was spreading in Italy, to take part, in such a way and by such means as suited my inclinations, in the life of the party that was growing and gaining strength. And that may be so. Still it remains to be seen whether the socialists feel the need of and a desire for, my help and participation.

To tell the truth, I have never had any great inclination for public writing, and I have never acquired the art of writing in prose. I have always written the things as they came to me. I have always been, and still am, passionately found of the art of oral instruction in every form. And attending to this work with great intensity, I have long lost the gift of repeating in writing the things which I used to express spontaneously, in ready and flexible speech, as fitted the occasion, pregnant with side issues and full of references. And who can really repeat such things from memory? Later, when I was born again in spirit and accepted Socialism, I became more desirous of communicating with the public by means of booklets, occasional letters, articles and lectures, and these grew in time almost without my being aware of it. Are not these the duties and burdens of the professional? Just then, about two years ago, my blessed Mr. Croce came along at an opportune hour with his advice that I should publish essays on scientific socialism, in order to give to my activity as a socialist a more solid footing. And, as one thing follows another, these chance letters may likewise be regarded as a subsidiary and supplementary essay on historical materialism.

It is evident, dear Sorel, that this discourse does not concern you, but only me. For I am seeking an excuse, as it were, to publish a new book, written by an Italian living in Italy. If these letters should be read by others in France besides you, those readers may probably say that I have not won them over to historical materialism, and perhaps they will justly repeat the observation of some critics of my essays to the effect that the intellectual moods of a nation are not changed by translations from a foreign language.

While I am writing this with a view of bringing these letters to a close, I have some misgivings whether I might not want to continue them. Cannot letters be multiplied indefinitely, just like fables and stories? Fortunately I had made up my mind, when I first began, to take up in a general way the problems which you raised in your preface by touching upon such very difficult questions. So one reason for coming to a close is given by the outlines of your own article, to which I have referred from time to time. If I were to abandon myself to the sweep of conversation, who knows where I would stop! The letters might grow into a literature. You would not thank me for that a bit. But it would please Mr. Croce, who would like to fill everybody with his instinct for literary prolixity. In this respect he forms a queer contrast to the leisurely habits of leisurely Naples, where men, like the Lotus Eaters, who disdained any other food, live in sweet enjoyment of the present and deem to mock the philosophy of history in plain view of the statue of G. B. Vico.

But I really wish to come to a close, and so I must put down a few more brief remarks.

It seems to me, first of all, that you ask, not on account of any curiosity of your own, but because you artfully place yourself into the position of your readers: Is there any way to explain to us in an easy and clear manner in what consists that dialectics which is so often invoked for the elucidation of the gist of historical materialism? And I think you might add that the conception of this dialectics remains obscure for purely empirical scientists, for the still surviving metaphysicians, and for those popular evolutionists, who abandon themselves so willingly to a general impression of what is and happens, appears and disappears, is born and dies, and who mean by evolution in the last resort the unknowable, not the process of understanding. As a matter of fact, by the dialectics we mean that rhythmic movement of understanding which tries to reproduce the general outline of reality in the making.

For my part – if these letters were not too long to render such a thing improbable – should I ever feel like taking this matter up once more, I should, before answering such difficult questions, remember that Grecian poet, who, on being asked by the tyrant of Syracuse: "What are the gods?" asked first for one day's respite then for a second, then for a third, and so on to infinity. And yet the poets, who create, invent, praise, and celebrate the gods, ought to be more familiar with them than I could be with dialectics, if a man held me in a tight place and demanded imperiously that I should answer him. I should take my time, a method of procedure not out of harmony with dialectic thought, and I should say in so many words (and this reply is implicit): We cannot give ourselves an adequate account of thought unless it be by an act of thinking. We must become accustomed to the various modes of applying thought by successive efforts. And it is always a dangerous things to jump with both feet from the concrete application of a certain concept to the formulation of its general definition. And if I were hard pressed for a reply, I should, in order to save the questioner the trouble of long, arduous, and complicated study, recommend a perusal of Anti-D�hring, especially of the chapter entitled "The Negation of the Negation."

There, and throughout the whole book, it will be seen that Engels did not only make great efforts to explain what he taught, but also tried to combat the wrong use to which mental processes may be applied, as they are by people who, instead of arriving at concrete thoughts in which the mental faculty shows itself alive and fresh, have an inclination to fall into a priori diagrams, or into scholasticism. And be it said, without prejudice to the ignorant, that scholasticism was by no means exclusively confined to the learned of the Middle Ages, and is not worn merely as a priestly robe. Scholasticism may fasten itself upon any theory. Aristotle himself was the first scholastic. He was, indeed, a good many other things, above all a scientific genius. Scholasticism is even presented in the name of Marx. The fact is that the greatest difficulty in the understanding and further elaboration of historical materialism is not the understanding of the formal aspects of Marxism, but a possession of the facts in which those forms are immanent. Marx possessed some of these facts and elaborated them, and there are many others left which we must find out and elaborate for ourselves.

In the course of many years which I have spent in education I became firmly convinced of the great injury done to young minds by steeping them without warning in formulae, diagrams, and definitions as though these were the forerunners of real things, instead of leading them by gradual and well weighed steps through a chosen department of reality and first observing, comparing, and experimenting with actual objects before formulating theories. In short, a definition placed at the beginning of a study is meaningless. Definitions take on a meaning only when genetically developed. In the course of construction it is often seen how injurious mere definitions are. The common interpretation given by untutored minds to certain passages of the Roman law is quite different from the real meaning. Teaching is not an activity which produces a bare effect by means of bare objects. It is rather an activity which generates another activity. In teaching we !earn to understand that the first germ of all philosophic thought is always planted by the Socratic Method, that is, by the accomplished talent of generating ideas.

In recommending Anti-D�hring, and the cited chapter, I do not mean to make a catechism of these things, but only to refer to them as an illustration of ability in teaching. Arms and instruments serve their purposes only so long as they are in use, not when hung on the walls of museums.

By the way, if I did not have to come to a close, I should like to dwell for a moment on that passage where you say that Italy deserves the homage of all, because it is the common cradle of all civilization. These words might seem rather high-sounding, seeing that you are speaking of socialism, which is really not greatly indebted to Italy. However, if it is true that socialism is the outcome of advanced civilization, then the mature and advanced of other countries may do well to turn their eyes occasionally upon this cradle. By thinking now and then of Italy, which for centuries made the greater part of universal history, all will always be able to learn something from us. And then they will perceive that they already had this Italy at home as the forerunner of that which they now are. Some Frenchmen have been of the opinion that Italy had been transformed from a cradle into a tomb of civilization. And like a tomb it must appear to all strangers who visit it as though it were a museum, but are ignorant of our present history. And in this they are wrong, and, however learned these visitors may be, to that extent they remain ignorant of the actual life of our country, a life which seems that of one risen from the dead. And this, at least, is worthy of note.

In what does this rebirth of Italy really consist and what prospects does it hold out to those who watch the general progress of humanity without prejudice and preconceived notions? I will not speak of the great difficulties, which must be overcome in the treatment of the actual history of each country from an objective point of view, that will not permit personal opinions to influence scientific research. In the particular case of Italy, we should have to go back to the 16th century, when the first beginnings of the capitalist era were inaugurated by the Mediterranean countries, in which Capitalism then had its principal seat. We should have to reach the positive and negative, internal and external, premises of the present conditions of Italy by way of the history of successive decadence. It is not necessary for me to say that my powers would not be equal to the task. I do not feel the slightest temptation to undertake it as an incident to an occasional and familiar discourse like the present. The man who can compress such a study into a book might claim to have made a contribution to the mental expression of the actual situation and of the actual thought life of the Italians. Here we have often blind optimists or blind pessimists among us, in the sense in which unphilosophical people use these terms. For in Italy there exists not only a great deal of ignorance concerning the actual condition of other countries, but also a valuation of conditions at home by a standard, which is entirely ideal, hypothetical, and often utopian, instead of comparative and practical. It is indeed a singular case that here in our country, where the sciences devoted to the observation of nature, sciences really cultivated for particularistic and anti-philosophical reasons, have had such a rise, we should meet with so little positive understanding of present social conditions, while at the same time we have such an extra large number of sociologists, who supply the seekers for truth with definitions. But it is well known that the sociologists of all countries have a queer antipathy against the study of history. And yet this same history is in the opinion of the profane the very thing by which society has developed.

Finally, few clearly see the fact that the Italian bourgeoisie, which is already the object of scorn and hatred on the part of the lowly, freed slaves, and exploited, the same as in all other countries, and on the other hand is pushed and crowded by the small tradesmen, is unstable, restless, and diffident in its own ranks, because it cannot compete with the capitalists of other countries on equal terms. For this reason, and for the other that they have the Pope, with his still marketable commodities which only the theoretical thinkers of liberalist utopianism proclaim to be forever outgrown, this bourgeoisie, which must still rise, is intrinsically revolutionary, as the Manifesto would put it. And since they have not had a chance to be Jacobins, as they would have liked very much to be, they have become used to the formula of a king by the grace of God and the nation, all in the same breath. Since this bourgeoisie could not count on a rapid development of industry on a large scale, which is in fact slow in coming, nor, consequently, on a rapid conquest of foreign markets, on account of the slow and uncertain progress of national economy which is largely agricultural, they practice the mediocre politics of expediency and spend all their talents in adroitness. This is the part played recently for a number of months by our navy in the Orient. It is playing the role of the fox in the fable, who declared that the grapes were sour, because he could not reach them. But this fox finds itself among other foxes, who guard the grapes or are about to seize them. And then the fox becomes an idealist for want of anything positive. This Italian bourgeoisie feels itself in the role of the whole nation, partly on account of the reactionary or demagogical abstention of the clericals from political activity, partly on account of the very slow development of a proletarian opposition. In the absence of party divisions in society, the bourgeoisie gave the name of parties to the factions that gathered around captains or proconsuls, enterprising or adventurous leaders. The first appearance of Socialism struck them like lightning.

On the other hand, those deceive themselves who believe that every commotion of the multitude in this country, such as we have witnessed several times in various places of Italy, is an indication of a proletarian movement, which has for its concrete basis the economic struggle and turns its aspirations more or less explicitly in the direction of the socialism of other countries. More often these commotions are like revolts of elementary forces against a state of things, in which these forces do not find that controlling discipline which is typical of a bourgeois rule tending to train the proletariat in squads. Look, for instance, at the aggravated phenomenon of emigration, which, with a few exceptions, carries away men, who are able to offer to capitalist exploitation in foreign countries strong arms, incomparable diligence, and stomachs capable of any amount of privation. They are, in short, laborers from the fields who are superfluous, or artisans from decaying trades, whom the rule of capitalist education would join in squads for factory labor, if industry on a large scale were ready to develop that sort of thing, or whom our home capital would invite to our home colonies, if we had any, and if we had not been seized by the craze of founding colonies in places where it is almost impossible to do so.

Italy has become during recent years, for very natural reasons, the promised land of decadents, self-glorifiers, shallow critics, fastidious and posing sceptics. The sane and veracious part of the socialist movement( which has no other duties to perform for the present under the prevailing circumstances but to prepare the small middle class for democratic education) therefore contains admixtures of elements, who would have to admit to themselves, if they wanted to be honest with themselves, that they are decadents, that they are not moved to bestir themselves by the strong will to live, but by a vague satiety with the present. They are merely satiated and bored bohemians.

But I must really come to a close. It seems to me, however, that I hear a small voice of protest coming from those comrades, who are always so ready to raise objections. And this voice says: "All this is sophistry and doctrinairism. What we need is practice." Certainly, I agree with you, you are right. Socialism has so long been utopian, scheming, offhand, and visionary, that it is well to repeat now all the time that what we need is practice. For the minds of those who adopt socialism should never be out of touch with the things of the actual world, should continually study their field, in which they are compelled to work hard for a clear road. But my supposed critic should take care not to become a doctrinaire himself. For this term designates for those who understand it a certain mental disposition to lose one's self in abstractions and to claim that ideas which are pronounced excellent in themselves, and fruits which have been collected by experience at different times and places, can be applied straight to concrete cases and are good for all times and places. The practice of the socialist parties in their relations with other politics has so far been exercised rather in keeping with rational requirements than with science. It is the outcome of constant observation, of an incessant adaptation to new conditions. It is the tested fruit of the struggle for an alignment of often different and antagonistic tendencies of the proletariat in the same direction. It is the endeavor to bring practical plans to a realization by the help of a clear understanding of all the complicated and intricate interrelations which hold together the world in which we are living. If it were not so, with what right and by what claim could we speak of a vaunted Marxism? If historical materialism does not hold good, it means that the prospects for the coming of socialism are doubtful, and that our thought of a future society is a utopian dream.

Too often it is true, that all our contemporaneous socialism still contains within itself some latent germs of a new utopianism.

This is the case with those who continuously harp on the dogma of the necessity of evolution, which they confound with a certain right to a better condition. And they say that the future society of collectivist economic production, with all its technical and pedagogic consequences, will come because it SHOULD come. They seem to forget that this future society must be produced by human beings themselves in response to the demands of the conditions in which they now live and by the development of their own aptitudes. Blessed are those who measure the future of history and the right to progress with the yardstick of a life insurance policy! Those dogmatists of cheap ideas forget several things. In the first place, they forget that the future, just because it is a future which will be a present when we are of the past, cannot be used as a practical criterion for our present actions. It will be the thing at which we wish to arrive, but not the way by which to reach it. In the second place, the experience of these last fifty years should convince those, who can think critically, of the following truth: To the extent that the capacity for organization in a class party will grow among proletarians and small trades people, the process of this complicated movement will itself furnish the proof that the development of the new era will have to be measured by a standard of time considerably slower than that first assumed by the early socialists who were still tainted with Jacobine memories. It is evident that we cannot look forward across such long stretches of time with very great certitude. We must take into account the enormous complexity of modern life and the vast expansion of capitalism, or of bourgeois society. Who cannot see that the Pacific is now taking the place of the Atlantic Ocean, just as the Atlantic once upon a time took the place of the Mediterranean Sea? Finally, in the third place, the practical science of socialism consists in the clear observation of all the complicated processes of the economic world, and in a simultaneous study of the conditions in which the proletariat lives, becomes capable of concentration in a class party, and carries into this successive concentration the spirit which it needs in the economic struggle that shapes its own peculiar politics. Upon these present data we can base sufficiently clear calculations of our forecast and make connection with that point where the proletariat becomes dominant and shapes the political policies of the state. This point must coincide with the one where capitalism becomes unfit to rule. And from this point, which no one can very well imagine to be a noisy affray, we shall have the beginning of that thing which many, with tiresome persistency, call the social revolution par excellence, I don't know why, since the entire history is a series of social revolutions. To go beyond that point with our reasoning would be to mistake it for a fabric of our imagination.

The time of the prophets is past. Happy thou, Fra Dolcino, who in thy three letters wast able to transfigure the fleeting incidents of politics (such as Pope Celestine and Pope Boniface VIII, the champions of Anjou and Aragon, the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, the poor plebs and the patricians of the communes, and so forth) into types which had already been symbolized by the prophets and the Apocalypse, measuring the periods of providence by successive corrections according to years, months, and days. But thou wast a hero. And this proves that these fantasies were not the cause of thy struggles, but rather their ideological envelope, by means of which thou gavest an account to thyself, in the way that many others did, for a whole century in advance of thyself and Francis of Assisi, of the desperate movement of the plebeians against the papal hierarchy, against the growing bourgeoisie in the communes, and the rising monarchy. But all these envelopes have been torn, including the religion of ideas, as some would say who employ a hypocritical jargon out of superstitious reverence for the religion of others. Nowadays only the imbeciles are permitted to remain utopians. The utopia of imbeciles is either a ridiculous thing, or a pet idea of literary men, who pay a visit to that children's phalanstery which Bellamy built. Our humble Marx, on the other hand, wholly a prosaic man of science, went about modestly collecting in present society the indications for its transition into the coming society, for instance, the rise of co-operatives (real ones!) in England and similar things, and to him fell the task (especially by the work spent on the International) to be the midwife of the future, which is not quite the same as being its fanciful builder. He and Engels spoke of the society of the future, assuming the dictatorship of the proletariat as a fact, not from the intuitive point of view of one who thinks he can see it before him, but from the point of view of a principle of formation of the economic structure which should develop in opposition to the present society.

For the rest, if any one feels the need of living in the future as though he could feel it and try it on his own skin, and if he stammers in the name of such ideas and wants to invest members of the future society with their rights and duties, let him go ahead. I hope he will permit me, who has also a sort of right to send his visiting card to posterity, to express the sentiment that the people of the future will not lay aside their human nature to such an extent as to be no longer comparable to us of the present, and that they will have enough of the dialectic joy of laughter left to crack jokes over the prophets of today.

Now I close for good. And it is for you to recommence, if you should ever desire to do so.