{"id":10588,"date":"2017-11-12T22:27:36","date_gmt":"2017-11-12T22:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/?p=10588"},"modified":"2017-11-13T03:05:15","modified_gmt":"2017-11-13T03:05:15","slug":"bolsheviks-millenarians-and-the-reformation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/bolsheviks-millenarians-and-the-reformation\/","title":{"rendered":"Bolsheviks, Millenarians and the Reformation"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Writing in the Hedgehog<\/em><\/a>, from, it seems (but perhaps that\u2019s just me), a hard left perspective, Eugene McCarraher takes a look at the millenarian aspects of Bolshevism, and, more specifically its connection with the Reformation:<\/p>\n

Shortly after the Bolshevik victory, the young German philosopher Ernst Bloch suggested an even longer historical lineage for Lenin. In The Spirit of Utopia (1920), Bloch sketched a genealogy of revolution that included the Jewish prophets, St. John of the Apocalypse, medieval heretics and millenarians such as Joachim of Fiore, and radical Protestants such as Thomas M\u00fcntzer and John of Leyden (John Bockelson). Speaking the language of theology, this pre-Marxist vanguard had imagined the kingdom of God as a communist paradise. Bloch linked the Protestant and Soviet moments even more pointedly in Thomas M\u00fcntzer as Theologian of the Revolution (1921), whose protagonist envisioned \u201ca pure community of love, without judicial and state institutions\u201d\u2014in marked contrast to the conservative and submissive Luther, who by supporting the German nobles\u2019 suppression of the peasants\u2019 rebellion of 1524\u201325 had consecrated the \u201chard and impious materiality of the State.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Two cheers for the hard and impious materiality of the State, I reckon, but I interrupt.<\/p>\n

\u00a0If M\u00fcntzer\u2019s political theology was mired in mythopoeic conceptions of time, Lenin\u2019s scientific appraisal of history ensured the fulfillment of Christian hope. The Soviet state heralded \u201cthe time that is to come,\u201d Bloch declared with eschatological flourish. \u201cIt is impossible for the time of the Kingdom not to come now,\u201d he concluded; hope \u201cwill not be disappointed in any way.\u201d (\u201cWhere Lenin is, there is Jerusalem,\u201d Bloch would later write in The Principle of Hope.)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ubi Lenin, ibi Jerusalem.<\/em><\/p>\n

Elsewhere in The Principle of Hope<\/em>, \u00a0Bloch was to claim that “the Bolshevist fulfillment of Communism [is part of] the age-old fight for God, ” even if, as the Christian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev observed (as I noted in a post<\/a> yesterday) they did not know it themselves.<\/p>\n

M\u00fcntzer\u00a0(1489-1525)\u00a0<\/a>was to become something of a hero<\/a> in that \u2018pure community of love\u2019 better known as East Germany.\u00a0 The regime even made a film<\/a> about him.<\/p>\n

Then again, as McCarraher makes clear, however pretty its label, M\u00fcntzer\u2019s \u2018community of love\u2019 had its rough edges too:<\/p>\n

[Lenin and M\u00fcntzer] both insisted on the necessity of an intrepid and steadfast revolutionary elite. M\u00fcntzer and his associates set up the Eternal League of God after failing to win election to M\u00fchlhausen\u2019s town council, while Lenin believed that only a vanguard party could identify and direct the proper course of revolution. And both men had no scruples about wielding violence against opponents. Because the bourgeoisie posed a threat to the party\u2019s trusteeship of proletarian dictatorship, Lenin insisted in \u201cThe State and Revolution\u201d (1917) that \u201ctheir resistance must be crushed by force,\u201d an edict that echoed M\u00fcntzer\u2019s dictum that \u201ca godless person has no right to life when he hinders the pious.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

M\u00fcntzer\u2019s rejection of election results is something else he and Lenin had in common.<\/p>\n

McCarraher:<\/p>\n

The two currents of communism that appeared in the Reformation align with two forms of eschatological expectation: one, represented by M\u00fcntzer, in which the \u201cgodly\u201d or the \u201celect\u201d\u2014theological precursors to the secular \u201cvanguard\u201d\u2014must clear a path for the impending beloved community by enlisting any means at their disposal, however coercive and cruel; and a second, exemplified by Winstanley, in which the love of the people\u2019s republic to come must leaven its apostles and their actions. M\u00fcntzer\u2019s belief that the ungodly have no rights augured Bertolt Brecht\u2019s rueful principle that those who seek a world of kindness cannot themselves be kind. Winstanley\u2019s conviction that the sword embodied \u201can abominable and unrighteous power\u201d betokened a nonviolent revolutionary tradition. The yearning to see heaven on earth is at once an imperative and an impossible desire, and its political articulations stem from how the tensions of eschatological expectation are resolved. If Soviet communism was a secular parody of M\u00fcntzer\u2019s millenarian hysteria, Winstanley\u2019s \u201crealized eschatology\u201d\u2014his insistence that the love on the other side of the eschaton can appear in the here and now\u2014offers a more modest but also more generous and humane revolutionary vision.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Needless to say, Winstanley (Gerrard Winstanley,<\/a> one of the founders of England’s mid-17th<\/sup> Century \u2018Diggers\u2019, someone who McCarraher discusses at length, and admiringly) got nowhere. Nor will his successors. Communism is impossible without collective psychosis, coercion, or both, and, as a millenarian creed, it (as, according to the story, did Jesus) insists on a reckoning, which will be anything other than peaceful\u2014something that has undeniably always added to its appeal.<\/p>\n

Ubi communismi, ibi infernum.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Writing in the Hedgehog, from, it seems (but perhaps that\u2019s just me), a hard left perspective, Eugene McCarraher takes a look at the millenarian aspects of Bolshevism, and, more specifically its connection with the Reformation: Shortly after the Bolshevik victory, … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":64,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[9,90,711],"tags":[143,358,390,154,1100],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10588"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/64"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10588"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10592,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10588\/revisions\/10592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/secularright.org\/SR\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}