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PARTISAN REVIEW
to religion was in the air. Sensitive, as creative writers, to all .the
currents charging the surrounding atmosphere, they now turned their
attention to religion, about which the whole intelligentsia had been
talking. Not that they proposed to serve religion, as Lenin was to
charge against them. Quite the opposite: they sought to fight the
recrudescence of religious orthodoxy by borrowing metaphorical
weapons from its arsenal for use against it.
In 1908, Lunacharsky published
Religion and Socialism
(the first
volume had appeared in 1907). It was a mixture of the history of
religion, sociological analysis, and poetic enthusiasm. The second
volume culminated in an apotheosis of Marxism as a "natural,
earthly, antimetaphysical, scientific, and human religion" which was
to put an end to
all
supernatural, unscientific, fetishistic, authori–
tarian, hierarchical faiths and substitute the "faith" of man in his
socialized self, in his own powers, unity, solidarity. Hitherto God had
been a reflection of man's dreams and aspirations projected into an
external object of worship. God's omnipotence had been but the
reflection of man's potentially unlimited power over nature, once
he had socialized his own nature. "Religion is enthusiasm, and with–
out enthusiasm nothing great can be accomplished by man." But
Marxism would tum that enthusiasm and faith into their proper
channels, from belief in external gods, a belief which humiliates man,
into an enthusiasm for and faith in man's own creative powers. The
future socialized humanity was the only "god" worthy of man's
worship.
Gorky, doubtless influenced by Lunacharsky, next wrote a novel,
The Confession,
which reached its climax in such passages as this:
"The people, they are the creators.... In them dwells God.... I
saw the earth, my mother, in space between the stars. . . . And I
saw her master, the omnipotent, immortal people ... and I prayed:
Thou art my God, the creator of all the gods.
..."
Lenin's first impulse was to pronounce anathema against the
two of them:
A Catholic priest who violates young girls [he wrote to Gorky]
is much less dangerous to democracy than are priests who do not
wear surplices, priests without vulgar religion, ideological and
democratic priests, who preach the creating and construction of
little gods....
Yet at bottom he was tolerant of the vagaries of artists and had
a deep and abiding affection for the two "little-god creators."
More~
over, the real opponent was Bogdanov, free, to be sure, from all
