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conditions, although it originated at a time when liberalism and romanticism were still flourishing. But Marx addressed himself to those elements in the modern world which were already deprived of any share in the heritage of humanist culture. He found the proletariat enslaved to the machine, and he sought, not to destroy this servitude, but to equalise and rationalise it by extending it to the whole social organism.
Thus, in Marx, the cult of equality and social justice led to the sacrifice of human freedom and spiritual creativeness to an inhuman economic whole. He condemned the whole humanistic morality and culture as bourgeois, and accepted the machine, not only as the basis of economic activity, but as the explanation of the mystery of life itself. The mechanical processes of economic life are the ultimate realities of history and human life. All other things—religion, art, philosophy, spiritual life—stand on a lower plane of reality; they are a dream world of shadows cast on the sleeping mind by the physical processes of the real world of matter and mechanism. Hence Marxism may be seen as the culminating point of the modern tendency to explain that which is specifically human in terms of something else. For the Marxian interpretation of history is in fact 2 0
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nothing but an explaining away of history. It professes to guide us to the heart of the problem, and it merely unveils a void. And thus, according to Berdyaev, the essential importance of Marxism is to be found not in its constructive proposals, but in its negations, its sweeping away of the semi-ideological constructions of nineteenth-century thought. For the optimistic rationalism of the nineteenth century tended to hide the true significance of the conflict between materialism and spiritualism. Just as behind all religion and all spiritual philosophy there is a metaphysical assent—the affirmation of Being— so behind materialism and the materialist explaining away of history there is a metaphysical negation—the denial of Being—which is the ultimate and quasi-mystical ground of the materialistic position. In Berdyaev’s words, ” Man must either incorporate himself in this mystery of Not-being, and sink in the abyss of Not-being, or he must return to the inner mystery of human destiny and unite himself once again with the sacred traditions ” that are the true basis of the historical process.*
The western observer will probably question the metaphysical importance which Berdyaev attributes to the Marxian doctrine. It is, however, impossible to deny the connection between * Berdyaev, Der Sinn der Geschichte, pp. 34-35.
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Communism and historical materialism, and the former actually derives much of its moral driving force from a quasi-religious devotion to the materialistic theory. There is no mistak-ing the note of sombre religious enthusiasm that characterises, for example, Lenin’s attitude to the metaphysical side of the Marxian creed. When he attacks Mach for having ” betrayed materialism with a kiss,” he is not speaking in jest. He is condemning what he regards as an act of spiritual apostasy.
But this attitude finds a much more congenial atmosphere in Russia, where the religious impulse has always had a tendency towards Nihilism, t h a n in the West. In Western Europe the decadence of the humanist tradition has left the European mind so weak that it is no longer capable of any metaphysical conviction.
The greatest danger here is not that we should actively adopt the Bolshevik cult of Marxian materialism, but rather that we should yield ourselves passively to a practical materialisation of culture after the American pattern. The Communists may have deified mechanism in theory, but it is the Americans who have realised it in practice. They have adapted themselves to the conditions of the new age earlier and more completely than the peoples of the Old World, partly because the external 22
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circumstances of American life were more favourable, but most of all because they were spiritually more independent of the humanist tradition. The Renaissance culture that had its centre in the courts and capitals of Europe left America almost untouched. The American tradition is founded on Calvinism, which governed the social life of the Northern States down to the nineteenth century, and which possessed an almost complete monopoly of higher education ; while in the new lands outside the old colonial territory, the churches, whether Calvinist or Baptist or Methodist, were still all-important, and humanist education, which was still so powerful in Europe, was practically non-existent.
Now the social effect of Calvinism and of American Protestantism in general is to create an immensely strong moral motive for action without any corresponding intellectual ideal.
It is a culture of the will rather than of the understanding—a purely ethical discipline which neglects intellectual and aesthetic values. This attitude remains characteristic of American civilisation even in its secular development.
Thus the ideals of humanist democracy, which were received from France in the revolutionary period, were stripped of their intellectual element and moralised as a justification for the