SOCIALISM AND LIBERATION
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acquainted with the history of ideas kpows that the same generic
terms and doctrines have encompassed the widest variations in per–
sonality, belief and practice. Communism as a secular religion has
often been compared with Christianity, and identified by Toynbee–
mistakenly, I believe-with one of its sects. But how vast and full
of incompatible elements is the spectrum of beliefs called "Chris–
tian." The development of Christianity is largely the history of radi–
cal changes, both in doctrine and in practice, by those who claimed
to be doing no more than returning to the pure essence of the
doctrine.
The evolution of Christian doctrine and organizational practice
is a very complex theme. We owe the very fact that Christianity is–
unlike its ancestral form, Judaism-a universal religion, to the first
great revisionist, Paul. But for Paul, Christianity might have re–
mained a Jewish sect with the complacent approval of Christ's im–
mediate disciples. Paul's was the first organizational revolution in
the history of Christianity and there have been many others. Even
more impressive are the major
intellectual
readjustments Christianity
made when confronted with different systems of belief; at the outset
it almost invariably suspected and opposed such systems as heretical.
But they were all assimilated, in time-some easily, others with dif–
ficulty. No matter how often the motto
semper idem
is proclaimed,
the irreversible phenomena of social, scientific, and technological
change enforce corresponding changes in organization, doctrine, dog–
ma, and above all
behavior.
Those who say only the extrinsic trap–
pings of faith change, overlook the fact that the distinction between
intrinsic and extrinsic is a shifting one and that the way in which
dogmas are
expressed
and
lived
determines their meaning.
What is true of religious movements is also true of other fields
of human experience. Even in so recondite an aspect of intellectual
history as pure philosophy, whose terms and meanings are presumed
to be controlled by the immanent logic of texts, we find William
of Ockham, the father of modern nominalism, claiming that he is
doing nothing more than returning to the orthodoxy of Aristode. Yet
hardly anything has more powerfully undermined European Aris–
totelianism and contributed to the rise of modern science than has
Ockham's criticism in the name of Aristode of the doctrine of sub–
stantial forms.
Whether we consider the actual content of the slogan "the re-
