As some Marxists readily admit, Marxism is a religion, or a secularized version of Christianity. As scholars like Eric Voegelin have well documented, Hegelians and Marxists are full-blown, secularized Christian heretics: neo-Gnostic millenarians who conflate in their nature principles of neo-Pelagianism, neo-Catharism, and neo-Albigensianism (the three being pretty much identical). They tend to consider this conflation to be true science (as opposed to the hate-filled, backward thinking rhetoric of those they call, “science-deniers”).
Heavily influenced by the millenarianism of the 12th-century Catholic monk, Joachim of Flora (aka, Joachim of Fiore), the neo-Averroistic dream of 14th-century Italian humanist, Francesco Petrarcha (Petrarch) to unite poetry, philosophy, and theology into a humanistic/historical social science capable of reviving the cultural greatness of Rome in a Christianized form, and then greatly shaped by the neo-Gnostic spiritualism of 18th-century Enlightenment intellectual, Jean-Jacques Rousseau – all Enlightenment thinkers came to divide human history into four ages, one of which they considered to be prehistoric/pre-cultural and pre-social science:
- Prehistory (an initially barbaric, pre-socialist age of war of individual human being against individual human being; for Hegel, Humanity’s/Absolute Spirit’s Age before logically-planned, external emergence);
- The first age of human history (imperfect social science, under the Old Law, from the time of Adam to Christ), characterized by a heavy influence of external formalism on human consciousness and behavior (Humanity/Absolute Spirit wandering around the Far East, China and the environs for Hegel);
- The second age of human history in which human consciousness achieved greater perfection in historical consciousness as social-science (in the sense of being a more universal and deeply emotional love of humanity). Human consciousness, under the New Law, by the entrance of Spirit into human history, within the context of the administrative Catholic Church (the Greek and Latin Age for Hegel); and
- The final age of human history, the Age of the Eternal Gospel, of Perfect Social Science, in which the influence of Spirit perfects human behavior so widely, deeply, and intensely that no need any longer exists for a Church administration or organized religion (the Lutheran/Germanic Age and end of history for Hegel during which, for the first time in human history, conscience and all science come into being and humanity becomes aware that it is identical with Perfect Social-science: Perfect Good Will Consciousness/God).
Sometime after his death, Europeans started to refer to followers of millenarianism of Joachim of Flora as “Joachitic enthusiasts” and often called their teaching “Joachitic enthusiasm.” As is evinced in his famous work, Education of the Human Race, 18th-century Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was one of these millenarians. So, too, under his educational influence, were 18th-/19th-century Enlightenment intellectuals, Immanuel Kant and Georg Hegel.
After the crumbling of the Berlin Wall (9 November 1989) and dismantling of Soviet communism toward the tail end of the 20th century, the period celebrated by Western liberal elites and popularized by Francis Fukuyama, was supposed to be “the end of history,” in the sense of being the time in which enlightened liberal democracy would finally transcend the transitional period of communist dictatorship and eradicate from the world the influence of backward religious consciousness.
To understand the euphoric, Joachitic enthusiasm, that overtook Western Europe during this time and fully to comprehend the nature of Marxism, Enlightenment-Utopian Socialism in general, and neo-liberal, atheistic democracy (like that of John Dewey), it is crucial to recognize this enthusiasm as neo-Averroism, deeply influenced by the neo-Averroistic, religious, and educational humanism of Petrarch which devolved – through 19th-century neo-Averroistic social science (with its three stages of social evolution: [1] theological, [2] metaphysical, and [3] positive/scientific) proposed by Isidore Marie Auguste François Xavier Comte – into the secular educational humanism of the 20th-and 21st-century West.
During a late Medieval, academic battle about the relationship between philosophy and theology that the great Islamic scholar Averroes (ibn Rushd, 1126-1198) had with a previously-existing Islamic scholar named al Ghazali (who died in 1111 and had considered philosophy to be inferior to theology and fake science), Averroes had countered Ghazali’s reductionist claim that the whole of truth is contained in the Quran, by, knowingly or not, reviving a threefold distinction about the hierarchy of human knowing, first introduced centuries before by Plato, through his famous analogy of a divided-line of learning in which Plato had made a distinction between three lower and higher forms of knowing: the qualitatively-lowest being belief (which Averroes would later identify as a mindset common to poets);
a second, qualitatively higher one, being a kind opinionated imagining (that Averroes would later maintain is proper to theologians); and the highest one being science (which Averroes would later reserve for Aristotelian philosophers).
According to Averroes, while the whole of truth is contained in the Quran, only the Aristotelian philosopher knows how to read and unravel that hidden truth, or the meaning of what the Quran actually says.
Seizing upon this method of Averroes, Petrarch made the mistake of buying into an esoteric interpretation of philosophy/science as a hidden teaching, or body, or scientific system of knowledge, known only to an enlightened group of intellectuals. In so doing, he treated philosophy/science as if it were reducible to a dialectical logic apprehensible only by some spiritually-elect group. While Petrarch hated Averroes (had called him a “mad dog”) and was no fan of Aristotle, in criticizing Averroes, unwittingly he came to adopt the understanding Averroes had promoted that:
- philosophy is a hidden teaching, or body of knowledge known only to some enlightened individuals,
- who alone can pass this understanding on to posterity.
Unhappily, to paraphrase a common sense gem of wisdom from Étienne Gilson: We think, and choose, the way we can, not the way we wish.
Outraged by Averroes’s disdain for poetry, because Petrarch made the mistake of doing no more than dialectically turning Averroes’s teaching on its head and not essentially changing it. But, unwittingly, by so doing, in effect he adopted in his own principles a kind of neo-Gnostic understanding of philosophy/science for which he would become a conduit to intellectual posterity. Petrarch assumed, and popularized among humanists of the Italian Renaissance, that philosophy/science is an esoteric metaphysical and moral teaching, or body of knowledge, that was first given by God to Moses.
Subsequently, to protect this teaching from being ridiculed by unenlightened, vulgar, illiterate masses, Petrarch and other Italian Renaissance humanists claimed true philosophy/ science had been intentionally buried in the works of epic poets like Homer, Hesiod, and Virgil and esoterically transmitted to other enlightened poets.
Over the several centuries that comprised the Italian Renaissance, this Petrarchan popularization of philosophy as an esoteric teaching, or body of knowledge (which was to become a general assumption about philosophy maintained by Italian Renaissance humanists) became the popular understanding of philosophy that entered into Western Europe around the time of the Father of Modern Philosophy – René Descartes. Disliking the poetic nature of the Jesuit education he had received, and much favoring logic over poetry as the only sort of knowing worthy of being called philosophy/science, Descartes maintained that the whole of truth is a body of knowledge buried, hidden, in some train of obscure thought of wandering images seeking to become a clear and distinct idea which he called a “mind,” or human consciousness.
Descartes claimed, further, that this hidden teaching was apprehensible not by poets, but only by a person of exceptionally strong logically-regulated will-power who alone could focus on the idea of a Perfectly-Good God, and thus was capable of stabilizing the wandering imagination common to poetic types in order to be see truth as a systematic train of ideas, so clear and distinct that a strong, logical human will (one with which Descartes identified common sense) cannot deny their reality, including that of a human person being a totally-disembodied mind or spirit. In short, centuries before Friedrich Nietzsche, Descartes had moved truth, and with it common sense, out of human intellect, and placed it in some logically-systematic train of ideas or feelings, thoughts – which he called human “will.”
In so doing, however, as the more poetically and historically/humanist-inclined Rousseau had immediately recognized, Descartes cut off philosophy/science, and with it, common sense, from human wisdom, and from what Petrarch and the Italian Renaissance humanists in general had considered to be its historical roots, namely, a somewhat obscure religious body of knowledge first given by God as true philosophy/science to the Jews from whom all true culture and cultural institutions were born and passed on to posterity as historical descendants of an original race.
In so doing, Descartes entirely destroyed the nature of philosophy/science, and real common sense, as a somewhat social-science history, or historical, educational humanist enterprise. The principles he laid down for the nature of philosophy/science as a real genus included the clear and distinct conviction he inherited from Petrarch and Italian Renaissance humanists that the Jews were the historical conduit, historical race/genus from which all false philosophy/science and subsequent philosophical/scientific mistakes, intellectual and cultural backwardness, foolishness, lack of common sense, and sins had historically descended upon Europe and the world, prior to the coming of Descartes and the later Western Enlightenment.
Unwittingly, Descartes became a conduit to Rousseau’s educational principles, which in turn became a conduit for later forms of anti-Semitism, and as an essential principle of Nazi forms of philosophy/science. This included making the Jews a scapegoat for all of Europe’s prior socially- and culturally-caused problems, evils, and sins.
In a similar way, through Rousseau’s critique of him, Descartes unwittingly became a historical conduit passing along to posterity the mistaken notion that a real and scientific species is identical with a race historically descended from original parents (instead of being part of an organizational whole that generates proximately causes and organizational action: a division, or part, of a generic whole, or substance). In truth, a real genus only exists in a real species; and a real species only exists in real individuals. As Gilson once quipped, in the present, real species of animals exist only in real animals, such as those in zoos, not in historical descent or transmission, which no longer exists. If real species were historical descendants of ancestral species, since ancestors cannot historically-descend from themselves, the absurd consequence that would follow would be that historical ancestors could never belong to the same species as their historical descendants!
Worse. The only way we come to know anything is in and through defining it. Doing so, however, essentially involves locating some being within a genus and species. By becoming conduits for essentially racializing the concepts of genus and species, Petrarch, Italian Renaissance humanists in general, Descartes, and Rousseau became an essential part of the historical conduit that brought into existence the contemporary enlightened Woke, anarchic, youth generation, the “useful idiots” (who tend not to be able to distinguish real from apparent, anything logical or not logical, much less genera and species).
Rousseau contributed to the present-day fiasco, in part, by rightly criticizing Descartes for cutting off philosophy/science, and education in general, from its historical roots. While he admitted, with Descartes, that philosophy/science is a hidden body of knowledge, he denied that it (and with it, real common sense) is esoterically buried in an individual mind.
Instead, Rousseau maintained that philosophy/science/real common sense is/are a historical project of discrete, disconnected, emotions to assemble themselves into a historically-driven, social-science consciousness: Perfect humanity. In addition, he denied Descartes’s distinction between matter (which Descartes had conceived as inert extension) and mind (which Descartes had identified with thought, spirit).
According to Rousseau, only spirit exists. Matter is simply unconscious thought/spirit. And, in a way, clear and distinct ideas (clear and distinct, more progressive genera and species), historically and progressively descend from one time to another (earlier emotions being historic ancestors of later, more progressive, enlightened ones somewhat resembling historical, backward ones, like later races historically descending from and somewhat resembling ancestral parents).
After Rousseau, the idea of a real substance or nature, and real genera and species in the common sense way that Aristotle and Aquinas had conceived them to be (as organizational wholes possessing faculties like intellect, will, and emotions), became replaced in the West by essentially different ideas of human beings, genera, species, individuals, and real common sense.
According to Hegel, for example, human beings are born as essentially illogical, un-systematic trains of unscientific, barbaric, emotions, historically driven to project themselves and come into conflict with other historically driven, illogical, unscientific, barbaric emotions that (much like the savage Fuegians that the cultured, Enlightened-socialist Brit, Charles Darwin would later encounter on his first voyage on the Beagle) inhabit a wild geographical region (genus), so as eventually, at the end of history, to unite together into a systematic, or logical train of scientific, self-understanding, qualitatively-higher emotions (species): Perfect humanity, a Scientific, Pure Good Will in which all complete truth and perfect religion and perfect/science/wisdom will coincide in nature.
Understanding human beings in somewhat this way, in his educational tome Émile, or Abstract Man (humanity), Rousseau wedded a Western neo-Gnostic, millenarianism to a neo-Pelagianism on a historical march to become Perfect Social–science Consciousness aware of itself as such – that is, aware of itself as god!
In so doing, like ancient Pelagius, Rousseau denied the reality of original sin as part of humanity, as pre-historic, selfish, barbaric, uncultured, abstract man: Someone like conscience-deprived, crude, vulgar, selfish, intolerant, insincere, socially and culturally backward, brute Donald Trump, emerging into concrete, selfless, socialistic, domesticated, cultured, sincere, tolerant, historic-scientific man: Someone like neo-Gnostic, neo-Averroestic, double-truth-advocate Catholics, like Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mario and Andrew Cuomo. And Rousseau did so for precisely the same reason that, as neo-Gnostics spiritualists, all Enlightenment intellectuals incline to so: They are, as he was, and as Chesterton rightly recognized about Hegel – Monomaniacs.
Like all the Enlightenment descendants he spawned, including Auguste Comte and his followers, Rousseau denied the evident, real, common sense truth that real multitudes (real organizational wholes, natures), exist independently of something he understood to be social consciousness. To him and them, reality is social consciousness – or the consciousness (systematic, scientific train of thoughts that once was blind emotions that has become Pure Social-Science Good Will). In actuality, for Enlightenment thinkers (the contemporary Woke culture), only one being is real – only total unity exists. Unity and social consciousness are identical and constitute what Marxists and all contemporary utopian socialists and neo-liberals call “humanity,” which they consider to be “God.” Hence, their often-repeated claims to be theists, good Catholics, and so on, not atheists or heretics.
The psychological constitution of a Marxist causes him to think that humanity is real, but “John Smith” is not. Like Hegel, the Marxist thinks that “John Smith” is simply where Absolute Spirit (which Hegel identified with God, which he conflated with Humanity) happens to be conscious of itself, at this or that historical moment. Reality, to a Marxist, is consciousness, historically and progressively realizing that only humanity (understood as collections of socially-conscious feelings, emotions; or consciousness feeling itself historically growing into self-awareness of being scientific feeling: Perfect, Pure, Sincere, Good Will) – is real. Anything apart from humanity, considered in this way, is an illusion, caused by disordered economic relations (the cause of all cultural illusions).
Quite frankly, if seriously maintained intellectually, to a sane human being, one with actual common sense, such a way of looking at reality would be considered sociopathic. Nonetheless, this way of looking at reality is a fundamental assumption, non-negotiable, Marxist and utopian-socialist, and Enlightenment-educational first principle – an essential part of Marxist and Enlightenment self-definition, self-identity, and self-understanding. And education for both begins with (and remains throughout its operation) – the application of this psychological principle behaviorally to modify the psychology of students. Knowingly or not to a Marxist and all Enlightenment utopian socialists, their educational principles essentially demand that they drive out from the psyche of their students any scintilla of real common sense.
Peter Redpath was Professor of Philosophy at St. John’s University. He is the author/editor of 17 philosophical books and dozens of articles and book reviews. He has given over 200 invited guest lectures nationally and internationally, and headed many prestigious organizations. He is the only non-Polish scholar to hold the Laudatio Achievement Award for attainment of intellectual and organizational wisdom, from the Department of Philosophy, Culture, and Art at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, in Poland. More information is found at his website.
The featured image shows the Tree of Pansophia, from Speculum Sophicum Rhodostauroticum by Theophilus Schweighardt Constantiens, ca. 1604-1618.