IV. Evolution of the Idea of God

The idea of God, planted and germinated in the human brain by the unknown elements of the natural environment and the social environment, is not something invariable; it varies on the contrary according to time and place; it evolves in proportion as the mode of production develops, transforming the social environment.

God, for the Greeks, the Romans and other ancient peoples, had his dwelling in a given spot, and existed only to be useful to his adorers and hurtful to their enemies; each family had its private gods, the spirits of deified ancestors, and each city had its municipal or state god. The municipal god or goddess dwelt in the temple consecrated to him or her and was incorporated into the image which often was a block of wood or a stone; he or she was interested in the fate of the inhabitants of the city of these alone. The ancestral gods concerned themselves only with family affairs. The Jehovah of the Bible was a god of this kind; he lodged in a wooden box, called Ark of the Covenant, which was carried along when the tribes changed their location; they put it at the head of the army, that Jehovah might fight for his people; if he chastised them cruelly for their infractions of his law, he also rendered them many services, as the Old Testament reports. When the municipal god was not in the best of circumstances, they associated another divinity with him; the Romans, during the second Punic war, brought over from Pessinonte the statue of Cybele, that the goddess from Asia Minor might aid them in their defense against Hannibal. The Christians had no other idea of divinity when they demolished the temples and broke the statues of the gods in order to oust them and keep them from protecting the pagans.

The savages thought that the soul was the replica of the body, so their deified spirits, though incorporated into stones, blocks of wood or beasts preserved the human form. Similarly for St. Paul and the apostles, God was anthropomorphic, they made of him a Man-God, like to them selves both in body and mind; while the modern capitalist conceives him as without head or arms, and present in all the nooks and corners of the earth, instead of being quartered in one certain locality.

The Greeks and Romans, like the Jews and the first Christians had no thought of their god being the only god of creation; the Jews believed in Moloch, Baal and other gods of the nations with which they warred as firmly as in Jehovah, and the Christians of the first centuries and of the middle ages, while they called Jupiter and Allah false gods, still took them for gods, who could work wonders quite as well as Jesus and his Eternal Father. This belief in a multiplicity of gods made it possible for each city to have a god attached to its service, shut up in a temple and incorporated into a statue or some such object; Jehovah was in a stone. The modern capitalist who thinks that his God is present in all places of the earth cannot but arrive at the notion of one sole God; and the ubiquity which he attributes to his God prevents his representing him with face and buttocks, arms and legs, like Homer’s Zeus and St. Paul’s Jesus.

The municipal divinities, which belonged to the warlike cities of antiquity, always at strife with neighboring peoples, could not answer to the religious needs which mercantile production created in the bourgeois democracies of the commercial and industrial cities, obliged on the contrary to maintain pacific relations with surrounding nations. The necessities of commerce and industry forced the new-born Bourgeoisie to demunicipalize the city divinities and create cosmopolitan gods. Six or seven centuries before the Christian era we observe in the maritime cities of Ionia, Magna Grecia and Greece attempts to organize religions whose gods should not be exclusively monopolized by one city, but should be recognized and worshiped by different nations, even hostile ones. These new divinities, Isis, Demeter, Dionysos, Mithra, Jesus, etc., several of whom belonged to the matriarchal epoch, still took on the human form, though the need was beginning to be felt of a Supreme Being which should not be anthropomorphic; but it is not until the capitalist epoch that the idea of an amorphous god has imposed itself, as a consequence of the impersonal form taken on by the property of corporations.

Impersonal property, which introduced a mode of possession absolutely new and diametrically opposed to that which had previously existed, was necessarily destined to modify the habits and customs of the bourgeois and consequently transform his mentality. Until its appearance, the possibilities of ownership were limited to a vineyard in the Bordelais, a weaving establishment at Rouen, a forge at Marseilles or a grocery in Paris. Each of these properties, distinct in the character of the industry and in its geographical situation, was possessed by one single individual, or by two or three at the most; it was a rare thing for one individual to possess several of them. It is otherwise with impersonal property: a railroad, a mine, a bank, etc., are possessed by hundreds and thousands of capitalists, while one and the same capitalist may have side by side in his portfolio bonds of France, Prussia, Turkey and Japan, with stocks of goldmines in the Transvaal, electric railways in China, a line of trans-Atlantic steamers, a coffee plantation in Brazil, a coal mine in France, etc. No such ties of affection can link the capitalist to the impersonal property he possesses as bind the bourgeois to the property that he administers, or that is operated under his control; his interest in it is proportioned only to the price paid for the stock and the rate of dividend it bears. It is a matter of absolute indifference to him whether the dividend be declared by a scavenger enterprise, a sugar refinery or a cotton-spinning mill, and whether the production be carried on at Paris or at Pekin. Once the dividend becomes all-important, the distinguishing characteristics of the properties producing it disappear, and these properties in different industries, differently situated, are for the capitalist one sole dividend-bearing property, whose certificates, circulating on the stock exchange, continue to keep various names of trades and of countries.

Impersonal property, embracing all trades and extending all over the globe, unrolls its tentacles armed with suckers greedy for dividends, in a Christian nation just as it does in realms of Mohammedanism, Buddhism or fetichism. The accumulation of wealth is the absorbing and mastering passion of the capitalist, and so this identification of properties of different sorts and countries in one sole and cosmopolitan property was bound to reflect itself in his intelligence and to influence his conception of God. Impersonal property without any doubt leads him to amalgamate the gods of the earth into one sole and cosmopolitan God, who according to the various countries bears the name of Jesus, Allah or Buddha, and is worshiped according to different rites.

It is a matter of historical fact that the idea of one sole and universal God, which Anaxagoras was one of the first to conceive, and which through the centuries lived only in the brains of a few thinkers, did not become a current idea until capitalist civilization appeared. But as by the side of this impersonal, sole and cosmopolitan property there still exist countless personal and local properties, so certain local and anthropomorphic gods touch elbows in the capitalist’s brain with the one and cosmopolitan God. The division into nations, which are commercial and industrial rivals, compels the Bourgeoisie to parcel out its one God into as many gods as there are nations; thus every nation of Christendom thinks that the Christian God, who is all the while the God of all the Christians, is its national god, like Jehovah of the Jews and Pallas-Athene of the Athenians. When two Christian nations declare war, each prays its national and Christian God to fight on its side, and if it is victorious, it sings Te Deums to thank him for having beaten the rival nation and its national and Christian God. The pagans made different gods fight among themselves the Christians make their one God fight with himself. The one and cosmopolitan God could not completely dethrone the national gods in the bourgeois brain unless all the bourgeois nations were centralized into one single nation.

Impersonal property possesses other qualities which it has transmitted to its one and cosmopolitan God. The proprietor of a wheat field, a carpenter’s shop or a haberdashery can see, touch, measure, and appraise his property, the clear and precise form of which strikes his senses. But the owner of government bonds and of shares in a railroad, a coal mine, an insurance company or a bank cannot see, touch, measure, appraise the parcel of property represented by his bonds and stocks, in whatever forest or government building, in whatever wagon, ton of coal, insurance policy or bank safe he might suppose it to be. His fragment of property is lost, buried in a vast whole that he cannot even picture to himself; for if he has seen locomotives and stations, as well as subterranean galleries, he has never seen a railroad nor a mine in its entirety; and a national debt, a bank and an insurance company are not capable of being represented by any image whatever. The impersonal property of which he is one of the co-proprietors can not assume in his imagination other than a vague, uncertain, indeterminate form; it is for him rather a rational being, which reveals its existence by dividends, than a tangible reality. Nevertheless this impersonal property, though indefinite as a metaphysical conception, provides for all his needs, like the Heavenly Father of the Christians, without requiring from him any more labor of body and brain than to take in his dividends: he receives them in blessed laziness of body and soul as a Grace of Capital, of which the Grace of God, “the truest of Christian doctrines,” as Renan says, is the religious reflection. He troubles his brain as little to study the nature of the impersonal property which gives him interest and dividends as he does to know whether his one and cosmopolitan God is man, woman or beast, intelligent or idiotic, and whether he possesses the qualities of strength, ferocity, justice, kindness, etc., with which the anthropomorphic gods had been endowed. He wastes no time on prayers, because he is sure that no supplication will modify the rate of interest or dividend on the impersonal property of which his one and cosmopolitan God is the intellectual reflection.

At the very time when impersonal property was transforming the anthropomorphic God of the Christians into an amorphous God and a rational being, – into a metaphysical conception, it was taking away from the religious feeling of the Bourgeoisie the virulence which had produced the fanatical fever of martyrs, crusaders and inquisitors; it was transforming religion into a matter of personal taste, like cookery, which each suits to his fancy, with butter or with oil, with garlic or without. But if the capitalist Bourgeoisie needs a religion, and finds liberal Christianity to its taste, it cannot accept without serious amendments the Catholic Church, whose inquisitorial despotism descends to the details of private life, and whose organization of bishops, curates, monks and Jesuits, disciplined and obedient to wink and nod, is a menace to its public order. The Catholic Church was endurable for the feudal society, all of whose members, from serf to king, were graded in a hierarchy and bound to each other by reciprocal rights and duties; but it can not be tolerated by the bourgeois democracy, whose members, equal before the law, but divided by their interests, wage perpetual industrial and commercial war among themselves, and always claim the right to criticize the constituted authorities, and hold them responsible for their economic mischances.

The capitalist, who does not want any obstacle to his getting rich, found it equally impossible to tolerate the guild organization of master-workmen, which supervise the manner of producing and the quality of the product. He crushed it. Freed from all control, he now has but his own interest to consult in making his fortune, each according to the means at his disposal: on his elastic conscience alone depends the quality of the goods that he makes and sells; it is for the customer to see that he is not deceived with regard to the quality, weight and price of what he buys. Every one for himself, and God, in other words money, for all. The freedom of industry and commerce could not but reflect itself in his way of conceiving religion, which each one under stands as he likes. Each makes his own arrangements with God, as with his conscience in a business matter; each according to his interests and his light interprets the teachings of the church and the words of the Bible, which is put into the hands of the Protestants, as the Code is put into the hands of all the capitalists.

The capitalist can be neither martyr nor inquisitor, because he has lost the furor of proselytism which inflamed the first Christians. They had a vital interest in increasing the number of believers, in order to swell the army of malcontents, giving battle to pagan society. Yet he has a sort of religious proselytism, without breath and without conviction, which is conditioned by his exploitation of woman and of the wage- worker.

Woman must be pliable to his wishes. He wishes her faithful and unfaithful according to his desires. If she is the wife of a brother capitalist, and if he is courting her, he demands her infidelity as a duty toward his Ego, and he unfurls his rhetoric to relieve her of her religious scruples; if she is his lawful wife, she becomes his property, and must be inviolate; he requires from her a fidelity equal to every test, and employs religion to force conjugal duty toward him into her head.

The wage-worker ought to be resigned to his lot. The social function of exploiter of labor requires the capitalist to propagate the Christian religion, preaching humility and submission to God, who chooses the masters and sets off the servants, and to complete the teachings of Christianity by the eternal principles of democracy. It is quite to his interest that the wage-workers exhaust their brain power in controversies on the truths of religion and in discussions on Justice, Liberty, Ethics, Patriotism and other such booby-traps, in order that they may not have a minute left to reflect on their wretched condition and the means for improving it. The famous radical and free-trader, John Bright, appreciated this stultifying method so thoroughly, that he devoted his Sundays to reading and commenting on the Bible for his laborers. But the profession of Biblical brain-destroyer, which English capitalists of both sexes may undertake to kill time or as a whim, is of necessity irregular, like any amateur work. The capitalist class needs to have at its disposal professionals in brain destroying to fulfill this task. He finds them in the clergy of all cults. But every medal has its reverse side. The reading of the Bible by wage-workers presents dangers that one day some pious Rockefeller will recognize; and to meet this situation he will organize a company for the publication of popular Bibles expurgated of the plaints against the iniquities of the rich and of the cries of envious wrath against their scandalous good fortune. The Catholic Church, foreseeing these dangers, had provided against them, by forbidding the faithful to read the Bible, and by burning Wycliffe, the first to translate it into a vulgar tongue. The Catholic clergy, with its neuvaines, its pilgrimages, and its other mummeries, is of all clergies that which practices most wisely the art of brain- destruction; it is also the best equipped for furnishing ignorant brothers and sisters to teach in primary schools, and nuns to stand guard over women in factories. The great industrial capitalists, on account of its manifold services, sustain it politically and financially, in spite of their antipathy for its hierarchy, its rapacity, and its intrusion into family affairs.