This something was communism—a unity of idea and reality—which would satisfy people's eternal longing for an ultimate meaning. The notion of secular and political religion—stated in such explicit terms—would have been probably rejected by Marx, but he would have certainly agreed with other socialists that the new system was not simply an institutional arrangement but that it was meant to satisfy deeper expectations expressed by the human race from time immemorial.

Hence there has always been, in the socialist and communist tradition, a touch of religiousness—not only in the enthusiasm felt by its adherents, but also in the comprehensiveness and profundity of the project it was meant to accomplish. A unifying set of ideas, a church-Iike organisation, a system of dogmatics, a selected group of the interpreters of this dogmatics, a belief in the Book, a secular Revelation, communist prophets, an imperative of social compassion, etc. These were the characteristics of communism that could be—to what extent they should be is a debatable point—seen as mirroring their respective elements in Christian religion. One could therefore understand why Thomas Mann made one of his characters both a Jesuit and a communist, the latter said to have been modelled on the person of George Lukacs, a Hungarian Marxist notorious for his high position among the Western intellectual circles and the uncompromising loyalty to the Stalinist dogma.

This alleged affinity worked both ways. Some of the Christians believed that there might be natural attraction between the two movements, and that since socialism and communism are deeply altruistic the Christian moral sensitivity would rather favour those systems than free market and capitalist civilisation. This inclination one finds both among Catholics such as Emmanuel Mounier and early Jacques Maritain, and among the Protestants such as Barth, Tillich and Niebuhr, also in their early writings.

2. Theory and Practice of Communist Atheism

A lot has been written about communism as a caricature of religion proper, and many of these analyses shed light on the theory of communism, giving us an important insight into the totalitarian temptations of the human mind. And yet this diagnosis only partly corresponds to the actual practice of the communist regimes. The propaganda and the state-controlled education never really followed the Marxian-Hegelian argument about communism overcoming or superseding religion. I never heard a communist apparatchik, a party propagandist, an educator of Marxism, a cultural commissar, say anything positive about religion, be it only as a historical phenomenon. Religion, both as an institution and a faith, was declared worthless from the beginning of its existence. It would be more accurate to maintain that the communist attitude towards religion was not of the Hegelian-Marxian type, but rather followed the simple and crude anti-religious and anti-clerical pattern one had encountered in the Enlightenment, among the nineteenth century positivists or in the diatribes of Lenin and Stalin. In other words, religion—every religion, from that of ancient Egyptians to the Roman Catholic Church in her entire history—was considered a fraud, a gigantic intellectual humbug invented by the cunning few to rule over the ignorant many, an offence to human intelligence, and an ultimate degradation of the intellect.

One of the standard texts of philosophical education in communist countries was Lenin' s Materialism and Empiriocriticism—perhaps Lenin' s only work having some philosophical ambition—in which the main argument consisted of two parts. First, it was claimed that the history of philosophical thought was a struggle between materialism and idealism, and all those who tried to go beyond this dichotomy to find the third way not only played into the hands of idealists but were idealists themselves. The second part of the argument was that every form of idealism could be finally reduced to some version of Berkeleyan philosophy which in turn could be reduced to fideism, religious faith and the rule of the clergy. In other words, whatever is not materialism is idealism, and every idealism is a masked religion.

This view of philosophy did not dominate the thinking among the educated circles of the communist countries—at least not in Poland. This view of religion, however, according to which religion was something both sinister and contrary to reason and science, became—perhaps until I970—a basic component of communist propaganda, not without effect on the way people thought. The general pattern on which the propaganda was based was the idea of the obvious clash between religion on the one hand and modernity, or rather, modernisation on the other. But the words "modernity" and "modernisation" did not have a precise meaning and did not necessarily imply—contrary to what is usually claimed—a radical project of making a new man that would replace the obsolete model of a human person.

There was little Promethean message—even of the type that inhered in the Hegelian-Marxian argument about the communist ideology superseding religion—in the anti-religious crusade. Those who saw in Marxism the deification of man or aversion of the Promethean tendency, originating perhaps in the Rennaissance or even in the Gnostic religion as some maintain, and then continued later during the Enlightenment and in Romanticism, would certainly not easily find corroboration of their claim in the actual practices of the communist governments. The propaganda not only made use of the old anti-religious and anti-Church prejudices, with little regard for the Marxist Aufhebung of Christianity and Judaism, but also readily inspired and supported all variants of human pettiness: intellectual, moral, social, and—if that term could be applicable at all—spiritual.

First, the communist ideology of atheism propagated a crude form of empiricism: whatever did not meet the vulgar requirements of experience did not exist. The reasoning was as follows: religion dealt with the entities that are beyond our experience; therefore, they do not exist, and religion is a sham.

Secondly, it propagated a crude form of progressivism: whatever is progressive will take the upper hand; religion is a thing of the past, therefore, it will sooner or later find itself in the dustbin of history.

Thirdly, it propagated a crude form of modernism: a modern man is a product of disenchantment, which makes him technology-, industry- and science-oriented. Religion is a form of enchantment; therefore it cannot capture the imagination of the modern man.

Fourthly, it propagated a crudely materialistic interpretation of the human behaviour; the people are after material gains and power; the Church is in fact, and has always been, the institution preoccupied with material gains and power and it used the idea of other-worldliness solely for that purpose.

3. Effects of the Policy of Atheism

My point is thus—let me say it once again—that the atheistic policy of the communist government was rather simple and unimaginative as far as its intellectual content was concerned, and repeated what had been the standard unsophisticated arguments and propaganda ploys in the whole anti-religious and anti-clerical tradition. In the product of the communist propaganda—a communist atheist—there was nothing heroic, or rebellious, or magnanimous, or even hubristic. He was not even a great sinner, if we use a religious qualification to his thoughts and actions. I do not think he ever considered himself being a creator of or cared for the new civilisation that the communist visionaries once hoped for. He was a rather passive and conformist person, with no philosophical ambitions, satisfying himself with using or listening to the same slogans and stereotypes, never tired of the stories about God invented by the rich to keep the poor in poverty, of the priests who were usually after fancy food, money and mistresses, of the Church that used the Spanish Inquisition to burn scientists and freethinkers. The hate he felt for religion and the people of religion was not passionate or diabolic. It was a routine hate, something that seemed so ordinary—like breathing or getting up in the morning—that one did not give much thought to. In general what was striking in an atheist in a communist country was probably the same as in a religion-hater everywhere: dogmatism, narrow-mindedness, predictability of associations and arguments, obsessive preoccupation with fundamentalism, Inquisition, intolerance, theocracy. In both cases we fmd the same mixture of unsophisticated utilitarianism and liberationist ideology: the abolition of religion was to open a way to a society when everyone would be free to experience ordinary pleasures without guilt.

One should not be therefore surprised that after the fall of communism a lot of those who were exposed to the atheistic propaganda and became convinced by its message found a common language with the representatives of the Western trend of anti-religious thinking. A general picture of what religion is and why one should be afraid of it was practically the same in the eastern part of Europe after decades of the rule of state-imposed atheistic ideology and in the western part of Europe after decades of spontaneous secularisation. Atypical agnostic from Western Europe or from America has probably more in common—in terms of the intellectual approach to religion—with an atheist educated by the communist propaganda than with a Roman Catholic from an ex-communist country: what they share is—I think—a conviction that religion and religious institutions pose danger to a modern society, and that therefore the decline of religion should be welcomed as a symptom of civilisational progress. Both would—I think—agree that it is with the Church and the religious groups that rests the burden of proving their innocence, that is, of proving that they do not threaten the values of modern society, and the best way of proving it is to embrace wholeheartedly what is generally regarded as the modernist catechism.

Let there be no misunderstanding: I am not saying that there is a fundamental similarity between communism and liberal democracy. I am saying that in spite of the abysmal differences between the two, a deep mistrust of religion on which the communists based their atheistic crusade derived from similar anti-religious sentiments which had played an important role in the processes of secularisation in liberal democratic countries. The arguments and rhetoric that were used by the communists and those raised by the intellectual movements that inspired or justified the processes of secularisation, stemmed from the same historical sources of which the philosophy of the Enlightenment with its more or less simplistic variations was perhaps—though I do not want to put too much weight on this point—most decisive.

If I were to indicate what differentiated communist atheism, I would mention three elements:

First, the communists did not use the argument about religion being repressive sexually and giving rise to repressive culture, the argument made famous by Freud and his successors. The communists did not use it probably because they considered Freudianism an offshoot of bourgeois culture and a symptom of decadence, and also because the argument became socially effective rather late, during the time of sexual revolution in the sixties and could not be then easily incorporated into the body of communist dogmatics. The idea of sexual liberation—quite common in nineteenth and early twentieth century socialism—did not find its way to the communist power structure. It is interesting to note however that the moment communism fell, former communists and their ideologues quickly espoused the cause of sexual liberation which they had taken over from current western fashions, and by doing so again placed themselves—as they had so often done in the past—in the avant-garde of social and cultural modernisation.

Second, the factor that made the difference was, of course, terror. It is so obvious that I need not elaborate it. Let me however make one point. The terror varied from country to country. In Poland the peak of the terror was between 1948 and 1955; then from 1956 until 1970 we had repressive policies, but they would not amount to terror. Since 1971 onwards the government changed its policy, largely abandoning the ideology of atheism and replacing it with the ideology ofmodernisation, which they consider more efficient in neutralising the influence of Catholicism and the Church.

Third, the factor that made the difference was the intensity and omnipresence of anti-religious propaganda. And here again the situation varied from country to country, and from government to government. In Poland, and I suspect in other countries in Eastern Europe too, with a possible exception of Albania, the official policy of atheism was finally dropped at a certain moment, being replaced by a policy that was meant to be encourage the processes of secularisation, not unlike those that were going on in Western Europe. The state and the politics were no longer qualified as atheist, that is, as having an ideological objective, but rather as secular, which was to suggest that the Polish state is to a considerable degree similar to Western political institutions which were all built on the assumption that the state by its very nature cannot espouse any religious cause. This argument sounded plausible, but was in fact fraudulent. The communist state had far more power and penetrated deeply into the lives of the citizens; thus the politics had a considerably larger sense in Eastern than in Western Europe. It is however symptomatic that the communist propagandists fmally moved quite substantially from the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, and decided to defend their hostility to religion not on the communist grounds, resorting instead to what they wanted us to believe were the standards of Western civilisation.

By saying that the atheist ideology consisted of well-known cliches and prejudices I do not want to depreciate its social impact. The fact that they were cliches, that for some time the terror stood behind them, and that they were omnipresent, could only increase their effectiveness. One of the consequences of the Polish people being exposed to this propaganda for a long time, is the emergence of a peculiar group: these are nominally Roman Catholics, regular church goers, who at the same time are, or could be easily provoked into being vehemently anti-clerical, and to a certain degree also anti-Catholic. What they are positively, I do not know. They are characterized a strange mixture of cynicism, Soviet mentality, misanthropy, liberal rhetoric and a caricatured version of modernity. This group is quite numerous and its existence considerably modifies a general picture of Polish society as predominantly Catholic. Theoretically those people count as Roman Catholics, and practically they could be qualified as non-religious, or anti-religious, or quasi-sectarian, or possibly in several other ways.

4. Anti-religious Propaganda and Intellectuals

The most interesting aspect of the anti-religious propaganda was its effect on intellectuals. The communist Party propaganda was of the most primitive type, and yet the intellectuals seemed to be—for a long time—quite sincerely supportive of it. In any case the majority of them not only did not show any sign of dissatisfaction or contempt, but quite a lot of them believed it was morally justified and served a just cause.

The anti-religious stance of the intellectuals—let us remember—had a long tradition, so the simplicity of the propaganda did not strike the writers, painters, university professors, as particularly shocking. What is more puzzling is the fact that the intellectuals did not see the reality as it was, namely, they did not interpret it in terms of the totalitarian system brutally imposing absurd ideology on the people. Instead they tended to see the state as the vehicle of modernity crushing the strongholds of obscurantism and themselves as the apostles of scepticism, as those who dared to cast doubts, to undermine the taboos, to refute what seemed irrefutable, to go against the current. That was, probably, one of the greatest self-mystifications that the intellectuals fell prey to during those times in which—to put it mildly—the record of fulfilling their duties as independent thinkers was far from exemplary .Being humble and obedient servants of the monstrous politics whose monstrosity was obvious to anyone who had an elementary ability to think, and of the ideology so incredibly crude that any educated mind should reject it with disgust, they deluded themselves of being the daring sceptics who courageously stood against the formidable opposition of religious superstition.

What made that mystification possible on such a scale was, among others, a philosophical device known in the history of Marxism as false consciousness. Stated in Marx and Engels's German Ideology in a small and rather, one would think, insignificant passage it gave a stimulus to a philosophy of suspicion which was later on to turn into a powerful instrument of demystification: we believe certain things to be true, not because they are true, but because we have been conditioned by economic structure, social environment and historical circumstances, to perceive them as true. The false consciousness category justifies a division of a society into two groups: those that live in a world of illusion, and those who know it to be an illusion and want to destroy it for the others to see things as they are or as they should be seen in the light of the new and better criteria of rationality.

In the context of the atheistic policies of the government this device turned out most helpful. The persistence of religious beliefs did not mean for the intellectuals that those beliefs expressed experience worth reflecting upon and even learning from; it meant that the false consciousness was even more false than the intellectuals had previously thought, and thus needed more energetic counteraction. The atheistic propaganda was seen as a suitable means to achieve this end. Its simplicity and vulgarity did not matter considering the object against which it was directed. In away , for some intellectuals who might have doubts whether justice was indeed the highest value of the new regime, the only objectives they were willing to give this regime credit for—beside, of course, "economy of compassion"—was the curbing of religion. They might have deplored the excesses of power, but they understood and accepted the deeper idea that was believed to set this politics in motion.

The false consciousness concept had further implications. The intellectuals were perhaps the only group who believed in the Marxian-Hegelian argument about communism overcoming religion. They thus accepted the anti-religious politics of the government and ignored the primitive propaganda not only because they knew how hopelessly conditioned the religious believers were, but also because they hoped—at least some of them did—that some kind of a new secular religion of humanity will be built on the ruins of Christianity .The false consciousness theory gave them both the wisdom to see the deeper sense of the historical process and the necessities of power. For some philosophers God was replaced by History and they willingly surrendered to the verdicts of the new deity: Hegel's well-known phrase from The Philosophy of Right—whatever is real is rational and whatever is rational is real—acquired a perverse communist interpretation that justified every political action. The philosophers could look at the religious beliefs, so well-entrenched in social life, as not rational and therefore not existing; at the same time, they could interpret the brutality of the government policies as real and therefore rational; also, they could talk of ideological fictions such as the Brotherhood of Man and the Classless Society as something rational, therefore existing and real, more existing and more real than the Gulag, secret police and ruthless indoctrination.

The mind of the communist intellectual was thus a peculiar combination of elements that to everyone thinking in a standard way had to seem irreconcilable. There was an element of scepticism and revolt, going back, perhaps, to the Voltairian ideas of dissent; there was an element of quasi-religious fatalism expressing itself in the cult of History which Czeslaw Milosz in his book The Captive Mind called New Faith; there was also an element of triumphant humanism, sometimes expressing itself in the millenarian expectations of the world in which Man will be finally freed from all the chains, and all contradictions standing in his way to self-realisation will be removed. The coexistence of these divergent elements was possible only because of the strange dialectics that the communist thinking had developed. The result of it was incredible self-deception and self-entanglement that the mind of the communist intellectual created for itself and could henceforth never totally free itself from it. The best example of this self-entanglement is probably Tadeusz Kronski, professor of philosophy at the Warsaw University from the late nineteen-forties until the middle fifties (when he died), a man of little intellectual achievement but of astonishingly powerful influence on other people, including the most distinguished personalities of Polish culture such as Leszek Kolakowski and Czeslaw Milosz. Surprisingly, or, perhaps, not surprisingly, some of those people still defend his record and see in his life, in what he said and did, a fascinating philosophical adventure rather than an illustration of frightening intellectual degradation.

5. The Priest and the Jester

The intellectual entanglement created by the false consciousness theory, historicism, humanism and other components of Marxist thinking—and these components, let me repeat, were also to be found in the western thought dominated by Marxism and philosophies of suspicion—outlived the era of triumphant communism. Suffice it to say that this way of thinking also determined the framework within which the intellectuals were beginning to distance themselves from communism. What once served to explain the value of communism was now used to undermine it. The alleged similarity between religion and communism was again invoked, this time in order to discredit the communist theory and practice. Not only—it was argued—was this theory and practice bad, resembling too much the theory and practice of religion, but whoever wanted to free himself from it should in a way imitate those theories and practices that had been used undermine the monolithic character of the church and her doctrine. Religion thus became an enemy again, but not as such, or not only as such, but rather as a symbolic representation of the communist ideology, communist party and communist system. The difference was that this time not all religious groups were condemned. Some of those groups and some of religious thinkers were praised, not for what they actually said but for the function they were believed to have in undermining the alleged homogeneity and rigidity of the Catholic doctrine and the Catholic Church.

The best known example of this thinking is an essay written by Leszek Kolakowski in the late fifties, called "The Priest and the Jester". Those two types represented two opposing attitudes. The priest stood for orthodoxy, hierarchy, monism, philosophical stability; the jester stood for individualism, scepticism, pluralism, irony. Kolakowski ended his essay with an unequivocal conclusion: I side with the jester, against the priest, that is, I am for individualism, scepticism, pluralism and irony, and against orthodoxy, hierarchy, monism, philosophical stability. The essay became extremely influential, and the Priest-Jester dichotomy determined the debate among the Polish intellectuals in the coming decades.

I greatly respect Kolakowski, but never liked this essay. The problem with it was that one did not really know who the Priest and the Jester were. Who was the Priest? The Pope or the General Secretary of the Communist Party? The Party ideologue or St. Thomas Aquinas? Was he both or either? And who was the Jester? Pascal or a Marxist revisionist? Erasmus or a communist sceptic? Was he both or either?

The essay—whatever the intentions of the author—not only reassured the intellectuals in their traditional distrust towards religion, which in the past had led them to unprecedented self-deception, but allowed them to turn that distrust—quite arbitrarily—into moral and intellectual authority. The argument was along the following lines: we made an error in our evaluation of communism and now we are entitled to judge what forms of religion are acceptable and what forms are not; religion follows more or less the same mechanism as communism and we have acquired exceptional experience about how it works. The good religion—in other words—is the Jester religion, the bad—the Priest religion. These terms have not been actually used and may not mean a thing—in fact, I am sure they are meaningless—but they easily lead to the standard, much used and much loved dichotomy of openness and closeness, pluralism and monism, horizontal and vertical, and other endless variants thereof. The self-confidence with which religion was judged according to these criteria was no less absolute than the self-confidence with which the communist intellectuals had judged religion in the light of dialectical materialism.

The Priest-Jester pattern marked a transition from the old times of triumphant communism to the new times of the non-communist (some would say, post-communist) era. The difference between those two epochs is enormous and only an insane person would deny it. Yet there is a certain current of continuity in the intellectual approach to religion: what has been preserved from the old times—and the Priest-Jester dichotomy had its role in preserving it in Poland—is the assumption that there is an obvious link between the metaphysical and the political, between the spiritual and the practical. In the orthodox communism the Church and religion were political in a simple and straightforward sense: the priests and theologians were deemed the conscious functionaries of a power structure. According to the false consciousness theory everything is political in a roundabout sense, either supporting the status quo or undermining it, and people are claimed to be usually unaware of the political roots of their ideas. In the light of the Priest-Jester dichotomy religion and metaphysics are also inherently political, and we are said to have reached the stage when we consciously and rationally recognise them as the ultimate sources of political authoritarianism or political freedom.

This tendency to create a new form of politicising religion and metaphysics, of deliberately intermingling the religious, the metaphysical and the spiritual on one side, and the political on the other; this tendency—which, let me add, I find profoundly mistaken and destructive of the very ideas of religion and metaphysics—has been largely accepted today by what one might call a Jester culture, a rather widespread and influential trend in today's world. The fact that this tendency persists and that the history of communism not only did little to break it, but seems to have reinforced it, I find puzzling indeed. I wish I could give you my own explanation why it happened. Unfortunately I have none.

© 2000 The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty
all rights reserved

This paper was presented at a conference entitled "Religious Liberty and the Ideology of the State," in Prague, Czech Republic, in August, 2000. It will be edited for publication. Do not quote without written permission of The Becket Fund.