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of the soil, of idols, and of the state"?-the word is synonymous with
too many morally weighted terms, such as childish, reactionary, super–
stitious, and totalitarian.
I have put off mentioning Fromm's views on religion for so many
paragraphs partly because his book does not really deal with religion,
but only with the ethical humanism he finds at the core of all great
"religious" beliefs: Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Taoism, Socratism,
Spinozism, the "religion" of R eason of the French Revolution. The point
of his book is to show that religion and psychoanalysis are neither identi–
cal nor opposed to each other. His mode of proof is to translate both
religion and psychoanalysis into ethics, a process whereby they become
if not identical in every respect, then identical in most of their aims.
On this point, Monsignor Sheen strikes me as more perspicuous than
Fromm; for there really is and ought to be a fundamental clash between
religion and psychoanalysis.
The reader will perceive how many distinctions are lost in such a
method as Fromm's. His loose terminology allows him to prove that
Freud himself was religious. In short, Fromm does not allow the pos–
sibility of being nonreligious. H e believes that the only choice open to
mankind is between "humanistic religion" and "authoritarian" or idola–
trous religions such as are seen in Calvinism and modern totalitarianism.
It occurs to Dr. Fromm himself that he is unconscionably obscur–
ing the difference between religion and humanist ethics, and at one place
in his book he seeks to discriminate the qualities of experience which are
peculiarly those of religion. They are wonder and a sense of the marvel–
ous; a sense of "ultimate concern"; an attitude of oneness with oneself
and with all of universal life. And these, he says, are experiences which
analysis opens up to the unhappy and the neurotic. Perhaps it does.
But are these experiences necessarily religious? Fromm, at least, does not
show them to be such. Even in quoting Tillich on "ultimate concern" he
has translated a theological idea into a humanist sentiment. According
to usual definitions of the word
(i.e.,
any definition which allows the
possibility of
not
being religious), Dr. Fromm is himself not religious.
Or so one concludes when he declares against all forms of theistic belief
which present God as anything but a symbol of man's own powers and
when he describes the current "escape from freedom" to the church as
a "failure of nerve."
If
we wonder why, in this case, he tells us that our
only choice is b etween different forms of "religion," I suppose we must
recall the tradition of central European humanism from which he
descends, with its tendency to see narrow-mindedness and philistinism
in every naturalist position, its tendency to stress whatever ethical mild-