David Tenner
2016-08-25 18:31:06 UTC
The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, as one might expect, shares Lenin's
negative view of it:
"Bogostroitelstvo
(god-creating), an ethical tendency that arose among Marxist men of
letters during the first decade of the 20th century in Russia, which
regarded the creative activity of human beings as religious. The
proponents of bogostroitelstvo proclaimed that it was based on the
teachings of Marx, which they understood in distorted fashion.
They aimed at discovering in Marxist theory the key to solving personal
problems that are beyond the control of science, such as the fear of
death, loneliness, and so forth without appealing to a superhuman force.
The representatives of this trend--A. Lunacharsky, V. Bazarov, and to some
extent M. Gorky--declared their task to be the founding of a new
proletarian religion without a god, which in fact became the deification
of the collective and of progress, which are called on to arouse the
'complex creative feeling of faith in ones own powers and hope for the
victory of the love of life' (M. Gorky, Otvet na anketu 'Frantsuzskogo
Merkuriia') and to link the ideal with reality in practice. The theory of
bogostroitelstvo proceeds from the proposition that every ideology has as
its basis a Weltanschauung which unites people in the emotional sense with
the 'sacred,' which need not necessarily be god. Here bogostroitelstvo
came close to the 'positive religion' of A. Comte and the 'religion of
humanity' of L. Feuerbach. The representatives of bogostroitelstvo
propagandized their ideas in the press (the collection Studies in the
Philosophy of Marxism, 1908; V. Barazov, 'Bogoiskatelstvo and
Bogostroitel stvo,' in Summits, book 1, 1909). In 1909 they organized a
school for workers on the island of Capri, which was called a 'literary
center for bogostroitelstvo' (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed.,
vol. 47, p. 198), and later they organized the factional Vpered (Forward)
group. G. V. Plekhanov sharply criticized bogostroitelstvo as a theory
incompatible with Marxism ('O tak nazyvaemykh religioznykh iskaniiakh v
Rossii.' Soch., vol. 17). V.I. Lenin linked bogostroitelstvo with the
political tactics of the otzovisty (recallers) and ultimatisty in Russia.
In June 1909 a conference of the enlarged editorial board of the Bolshevik
newspaper Proletarii evaluated bogostroitelstvo as 'a tendency which has
broken with the fundamentals of Marxism' (KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh 7th ed.,
part 1, 1954, p. 222). V. I. Lenin wrote that this tendency objectively
coincided with the desires of the reactionary bourgeoisie 'to revive
religion, increase the demand for religion, invent religion, innoculate
the people with religion, or strengthen the hold of religion on them in
new forms' ('O fraktsii storonikov otzovizma i bogostroitel-stva'; see
Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 19, p. 90).
Bogostroitelstvo did not become very widespread, and its supporters
subsequently renounced their attempt to give a religious interpretation to
Marxism."
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Bogostroitelstvo
***
A critic of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski, does not take a much more
favorable view (*Main Currents of Marxism*):
"6. The'God-builders'
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (1875-1933) is noted in the history of
Russian Marxism not only for helping to spread the empiriocriticai heresy
and for his work as a literary critic and dramatist (not of the first
rank) and art theoretician but also for his plan, which especially
infuriated Lenin' for a 'socialist religion.'
This plan, known as 'God-building' (Bogostroitelstvo), was a Marxist
counterpart to the general increase of interest in religion after the 1905
Revolution, just as the empiriocriticism of the social democrats was a
result of the permeation of the revolutionary intelligentsia by
philosophic modernism. The movement is chiefly associated with the names
of Lunacharsky and Gorky, and was a kind of reconstruction of the
'religion of humanity', expounded by Comte and especially Feuerbach.
Lunacharsky developed his idea of an anthropocentric Marxist religion in
several articles and in a book entitled *Religion and Socialism* (1908,
second volume 1911). G. L. Kline, an authority on the Russian religious
tradition, observes that the God-builders adopted not oniy Feuerbach's
deification of humanity, but perhaps in an even greater degree,
Nietzsche's ideal of the superman.
The new religion was to be an answer not only to the 'God-seeking'
movement (Bogoiskatelstvo) of Christian philosophers but also to the arid
old-fashioned atheism of Plekhanov and the other orthodox Marxists, for
whom the history of religion was summed up in the opposition between it
and science. Lunacharaky and Gorky argued that historical religions were
not a mere bundle of superstitions, but were the expression, albeit
ideologically false, of desires and feelings that socialism should take
over and ennoble, not destroy. The new religion was purely immanent and
had no need of belief in God, the supernatural world, or personal
immortality, but it embraced all that was positive and creative in
traditional faiths: the sense of community, man's yearning to transcend
himself, a profound communion with the universe and the rest of mankind.
Religion had always sought to reconcile men with their lives and give them
a sense of the meaning of existence: this, and not metaphysical
explanation, was its chief function. The old myths had collapsed, but men
still sought to find a meaning in life; socialism opened up dazzling
prospects and was able to inspire feelings of unity and enthusiasm that
deserved to be called religious. Marx was not only a scholar, but equally
a prophet. In socialist religion God was replaced by humanity; a superior
creation in which the individual could find an object of love and worship:
he could thus rise above his insignificant ego and experience the joy of
sacrificing his own interest to the infinite increase of collective Being.
Man's affective identification with humanity would liberate him from the
fear of suffering and death, restore his dignity and spiritual strength,
and enhance his creative abilities. The new faith was a premonition of the
great harmony of the future: individual mortality was cancelled by
collective immortality, and human actions thus acquired a meaning. The
true creator of God was the proletariat, and its revolution was the
fundamental act of God-building.
All this Promethean rhetoric and deification of humanity, with its stress
on a future harmony as a surrogate of transcendence for the individual,
was in effect a repetition of Feuerbach's philosophy, with anthropology
considered as 'the secret' of theology. It added nothing to Marxist
philosophy, and was merely an attempt to give emotional colour to
'scientific socialism'. As in Feuerbach, the words 'religion' and
'religious feeling' were used as mere ornaments and were unrelated to any
actual religious tradition. 'God-building' was an attempt to assimilate
the neo-Romantic vocabulary and to channel the religious inclinations of
the intelligentsia, and religious emotion generally, into the service of
socialism. Plekhanov and Lenin, however, condemned it as a dangerous
flirtation with 'religious obscurantism', and after the Revolution
Lunacharsky dropped the 'new style' and reverted to the traditional
language of atheism. Thereafter 'God-building' had no discernible
influence on Marxist ideology..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=qUCxpznbkaoC&pg=PA713
***
AHC: In spite of this consensus, have *Bogostroitelstvo* somehow get
somewhere in the Soviet Union. Maybe Lenin dies in exile, and his
political/philosophical opponents (Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, etc.) take over
the Bolshevik Party. Maybe the young Stalin supports their heresies, or at
least does not oppose them. (It is striking that in OTL, Stalin had some
sympathy with Lenin's' critics: "Stalin was irritated by Lenin's feud with
Bogdanov. 'How do you like Bogdanov's new book?' Soso asked his friend
Malakia Toroshelidze, in Geneva. 'In my view, some of Ilich's [Lenin's]
individual blunders are significantly and correctly noted in it. He also
notes that Ilich's materialism is...different from Plekahnov's
which...Ilich tries to hide.'"
https://books.google.com/books?id=Jrkl5e1joNMC&pg=PT313 (See
https://books.google.com/books?id=gOImZ1q6v2MC&pg=PA105 for a slightly
different translation.)
Of course whether Lenin's Bolshevik critics could make a successful
revolution is another matter...
negative view of it:
"Bogostroitelstvo
(god-creating), an ethical tendency that arose among Marxist men of
letters during the first decade of the 20th century in Russia, which
regarded the creative activity of human beings as religious. The
proponents of bogostroitelstvo proclaimed that it was based on the
teachings of Marx, which they understood in distorted fashion.
They aimed at discovering in Marxist theory the key to solving personal
problems that are beyond the control of science, such as the fear of
death, loneliness, and so forth without appealing to a superhuman force.
The representatives of this trend--A. Lunacharsky, V. Bazarov, and to some
extent M. Gorky--declared their task to be the founding of a new
proletarian religion without a god, which in fact became the deification
of the collective and of progress, which are called on to arouse the
'complex creative feeling of faith in ones own powers and hope for the
victory of the love of life' (M. Gorky, Otvet na anketu 'Frantsuzskogo
Merkuriia') and to link the ideal with reality in practice. The theory of
bogostroitelstvo proceeds from the proposition that every ideology has as
its basis a Weltanschauung which unites people in the emotional sense with
the 'sacred,' which need not necessarily be god. Here bogostroitelstvo
came close to the 'positive religion' of A. Comte and the 'religion of
humanity' of L. Feuerbach. The representatives of bogostroitelstvo
propagandized their ideas in the press (the collection Studies in the
Philosophy of Marxism, 1908; V. Barazov, 'Bogoiskatelstvo and
Bogostroitel stvo,' in Summits, book 1, 1909). In 1909 they organized a
school for workers on the island of Capri, which was called a 'literary
center for bogostroitelstvo' (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed.,
vol. 47, p. 198), and later they organized the factional Vpered (Forward)
group. G. V. Plekhanov sharply criticized bogostroitelstvo as a theory
incompatible with Marxism ('O tak nazyvaemykh religioznykh iskaniiakh v
Rossii.' Soch., vol. 17). V.I. Lenin linked bogostroitelstvo with the
political tactics of the otzovisty (recallers) and ultimatisty in Russia.
In June 1909 a conference of the enlarged editorial board of the Bolshevik
newspaper Proletarii evaluated bogostroitelstvo as 'a tendency which has
broken with the fundamentals of Marxism' (KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh 7th ed.,
part 1, 1954, p. 222). V. I. Lenin wrote that this tendency objectively
coincided with the desires of the reactionary bourgeoisie 'to revive
religion, increase the demand for religion, invent religion, innoculate
the people with religion, or strengthen the hold of religion on them in
new forms' ('O fraktsii storonikov otzovizma i bogostroitel-stva'; see
Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 19, p. 90).
Bogostroitelstvo did not become very widespread, and its supporters
subsequently renounced their attempt to give a religious interpretation to
Marxism."
http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Bogostroitelstvo
***
A critic of Marxism, Leszek Kolakowski, does not take a much more
favorable view (*Main Currents of Marxism*):
"6. The'God-builders'
Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky (1875-1933) is noted in the history of
Russian Marxism not only for helping to spread the empiriocriticai heresy
and for his work as a literary critic and dramatist (not of the first
rank) and art theoretician but also for his plan, which especially
infuriated Lenin' for a 'socialist religion.'
This plan, known as 'God-building' (Bogostroitelstvo), was a Marxist
counterpart to the general increase of interest in religion after the 1905
Revolution, just as the empiriocriticism of the social democrats was a
result of the permeation of the revolutionary intelligentsia by
philosophic modernism. The movement is chiefly associated with the names
of Lunacharsky and Gorky, and was a kind of reconstruction of the
'religion of humanity', expounded by Comte and especially Feuerbach.
Lunacharsky developed his idea of an anthropocentric Marxist religion in
several articles and in a book entitled *Religion and Socialism* (1908,
second volume 1911). G. L. Kline, an authority on the Russian religious
tradition, observes that the God-builders adopted not oniy Feuerbach's
deification of humanity, but perhaps in an even greater degree,
Nietzsche's ideal of the superman.
The new religion was to be an answer not only to the 'God-seeking'
movement (Bogoiskatelstvo) of Christian philosophers but also to the arid
old-fashioned atheism of Plekhanov and the other orthodox Marxists, for
whom the history of religion was summed up in the opposition between it
and science. Lunacharaky and Gorky argued that historical religions were
not a mere bundle of superstitions, but were the expression, albeit
ideologically false, of desires and feelings that socialism should take
over and ennoble, not destroy. The new religion was purely immanent and
had no need of belief in God, the supernatural world, or personal
immortality, but it embraced all that was positive and creative in
traditional faiths: the sense of community, man's yearning to transcend
himself, a profound communion with the universe and the rest of mankind.
Religion had always sought to reconcile men with their lives and give them
a sense of the meaning of existence: this, and not metaphysical
explanation, was its chief function. The old myths had collapsed, but men
still sought to find a meaning in life; socialism opened up dazzling
prospects and was able to inspire feelings of unity and enthusiasm that
deserved to be called religious. Marx was not only a scholar, but equally
a prophet. In socialist religion God was replaced by humanity; a superior
creation in which the individual could find an object of love and worship:
he could thus rise above his insignificant ego and experience the joy of
sacrificing his own interest to the infinite increase of collective Being.
Man's affective identification with humanity would liberate him from the
fear of suffering and death, restore his dignity and spiritual strength,
and enhance his creative abilities. The new faith was a premonition of the
great harmony of the future: individual mortality was cancelled by
collective immortality, and human actions thus acquired a meaning. The
true creator of God was the proletariat, and its revolution was the
fundamental act of God-building.
All this Promethean rhetoric and deification of humanity, with its stress
on a future harmony as a surrogate of transcendence for the individual,
was in effect a repetition of Feuerbach's philosophy, with anthropology
considered as 'the secret' of theology. It added nothing to Marxist
philosophy, and was merely an attempt to give emotional colour to
'scientific socialism'. As in Feuerbach, the words 'religion' and
'religious feeling' were used as mere ornaments and were unrelated to any
actual religious tradition. 'God-building' was an attempt to assimilate
the neo-Romantic vocabulary and to channel the religious inclinations of
the intelligentsia, and religious emotion generally, into the service of
socialism. Plekhanov and Lenin, however, condemned it as a dangerous
flirtation with 'religious obscurantism', and after the Revolution
Lunacharsky dropped the 'new style' and reverted to the traditional
language of atheism. Thereafter 'God-building' had no discernible
influence on Marxist ideology..."
https://books.google.com/books?id=qUCxpznbkaoC&pg=PA713
***
AHC: In spite of this consensus, have *Bogostroitelstvo* somehow get
somewhere in the Soviet Union. Maybe Lenin dies in exile, and his
political/philosophical opponents (Bogdanov, Lunacharsky, etc.) take over
the Bolshevik Party. Maybe the young Stalin supports their heresies, or at
least does not oppose them. (It is striking that in OTL, Stalin had some
sympathy with Lenin's' critics: "Stalin was irritated by Lenin's feud with
Bogdanov. 'How do you like Bogdanov's new book?' Soso asked his friend
Malakia Toroshelidze, in Geneva. 'In my view, some of Ilich's [Lenin's]
individual blunders are significantly and correctly noted in it. He also
notes that Ilich's materialism is...different from Plekahnov's
which...Ilich tries to hide.'"
https://books.google.com/books?id=Jrkl5e1joNMC&pg=PT313 (See
https://books.google.com/books?id=gOImZ1q6v2MC&pg=PA105 for a slightly
different translation.)
Of course whether Lenin's Bolshevik critics could make a successful
revolution is another matter...
--
David Tenner
***@ameritech.net
David Tenner
***@ameritech.net