KARL MARX

PARIS 79
tual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement,
its universal basis for consolation and justification.' 65
Marx continued with a series of brilliant metaphors to show that
religion was at one and the same time both the symptom of a deep social
malaise and a protest against it. Religion nevertheless stood in the way
of any cure of social evil since it tended at the same time to justify them.
Thus,
the struggle against religion is indirectly the struggle against that world
whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is at the same
time an expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering.
Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feeling of a heartless
world and the soul of soulless circumstances. It is the opium of the
people.. .. The criticism of religion is therefore the germ of the criticism
of the valley of tears whose halo is religion. 64
Marx did not write much about religion (Engels wrote much more) and
this is the most detailed passage in all his writings. What he said here -
that religion is a fantasy of alienated man - is thoroughly in keeping with
his early thought. (Later, the element of class ideology was to be much
more dominant.) He thought religion at once important and unimportant:
important, because the purely spiritual compensation that it afforded men
detracted from efforts at material betterment; unimportant, because its
true nature had been fully exposed, in his view, by his colleagues -
particularly by Feuerbach. It was only a secondary phenomenon and,
being dependent on socio-economic circumstances, merited no independent
criticism.
Attempts to characterise Marxism as a religion, although plausible
within their own terms, confuse the issue, as also do attempts to claim
that Marx was not really an atheist. This is the usual approach of writers
who stress the parallel between Marxism and the Judaeo-Christian history
of salvation 65 - though some say that Marx took over this tradition when
already secularised by Schelling or Hegel into an aesthetic or philosophical
revelation. 66 It is true that Marx had in mind the religion of contemporary
Germany dominated by a dogmatic and over-spiritual
Lutheranism, but he wrote about 'religion' in general and his rejection
was absolute. Unlike so many early socialists (Weitling, Saint-Simon,
Fourier), he would brook no compromise. Atheism was inseparable from
humanism, he maintained; indeed, given the terms in which he posed the
problem, this was undeniable. It is, of course, legitimate to change
the meaning of 'atheism' in order to make Marx a believer malgre lui,
but this tends to make the question senseless by blurring too many
distinctions. 67