Hannah Arendt's Article “Religion and Politics”

Religion and Politics

Author: Hannah Arendt

Translator: Mohammad Saeed Hanai Kashani

"Religion and Politics" was written as an article for delivery at a Harvard University conference on the question, "Is the struggle between the free world and communism fundamentally a religious struggle?" The article was published in the journal Confluence, Vol. 2, No. 3, 1953. Jules Monnerot responded to Arendt's article in a letter addressed to Henry Kissinger, the editor of Confluence, and this response was published in the next issue of the journal, Vol. 2, No. 4, 1953. In his letter, Monnerot, noting that Arendt "accuses [him] of confusing ideology with religion," in turn criticizes her for an inability to define either of them. Arendt's reply was published in the subsequent volume of Confluence, Vol. 3, No. 1, 1954.

One of the surprising aspects of the struggle between the free world and the totalitarian world has been a strong tendency to interpret this struggle in religious terms. We are told that communism is a new "secular religion" against which the free world defends its transcendent "religious system." This theory has implications beyond its proximate cause and has brought "religion" back into the realm of public-political affairs, a realm from which it had long been banished since the separation of church and state. Similarly, although the proponents of this theory are often unaware of it, they have placed the almost forgotten issue of the relationship between religion and politics back on the agenda of political science.

1

The interpretation of new political ideologies as political or secular religions has, paradoxically, though perhaps not accidentally, followed Marx's famous condemnation in rejecting all religions as mere ideologies. But the true origin of this view is even older. It was not communism but atheism that was the first "ism" to be condemned or praised as a new religion.[1] This statement resembled nothing more than a humorous paradox, and it was initially intended as such, until Dostoevsky and many others after him gave it content. For atheism was more than the rather foolish claim that we are capable of proving God's non-existence; atheism was conceived as the actual rebellion of modern man against God himself. In Nietzsche's words: "If there were gods, how could I bear not to be one myself?"[2]

The justification for calling atheism a religion is precisely related to the nature of religious belief in the age of secularity. Since the rise of the natural sciences in the seventeenth century, belief has been scarcely less subject to doubt than unbelief; Kierkegaard's famous theory of the leap into faith had its precursor in Pascal, and Kierkegaard, like Pascal, sought to answer Descartes' dictum that, "De omnibus dubitandum est," "one must doubt everything."[3] They believed that absolute doubt is impossible, self-contradictory, and a self-destructive attitude, unsuitable for human reason, since in this state doubt itself becomes the object of doubt. For Kierkegaard, doubt "is not overcome by knowledge but by faith, just as faith brought doubt into the world."[4] Modern faith, the faith that has leaped from doubt to belief, and modern atheism, the atheism that has leaped from doubt to unbelief, share this: both are rooted in modern spiritual secularism, and this secularism has resolved its inherent confusions once and for all with a violent solution. In truth, the leap into faith has perhaps undermined genuine faith more than the usually clichéd arguments of professional enlighteners or the vulgar arguments of professional atheists. The leap from doubt to faith was only possible by doubting faith, and thus religious life itself began to assume that strange tension between atheistic, blasphemous doubt and faith, a tension we know from Dostoevsky's great psychological masterpieces.

Our world is, spiritually speaking, a worldly or secular world, precisely because it is a world accompanied by doubt. If we seriously intend to eliminate secularity, we must eliminate modern science and the transformation of the world it has wrought. Modern science is founded on a philosophy of doubt, and thus this science is distinct from the science of the ancients, a science founded on the philosophy of thaumadzein, or wonder in which what is, is what it is. Instead of marveling at the miracles of a world that reveals itself in its appearance to the human senses and reason, we become suspicious that things may not be what they seem. Only when we became distrustful of our sense perceptions could we discover that, contrary to all our everyday experience, the earth revolves around the sun. From this fundamental distrust of appearances, this doubt that appearance reveals truth, two fundamentally different conclusions can be drawn: Pascal's despair that "the senses deceive reason with false appearances" les sens abusent la raison par de fausses apparences[5], from which follows the "acknowledgment of man's wretchedness without God"[6], or the pragmatic affirmation of modern science that truth itself is by no means evident but is, rather, the constantly changing process of working hypotheses.

Against this scientific optimism, which must assume that the question of God's existence is incommensurate with the (admittedly) limited possibilities of human cognition, stands the religious insight of the modern age that no doubt and no working hypothesis provides a satisfying answer to the riddle of the nature of the universe and the even more disquieting riddle of human existence itself. But this insight only reveals once again the thirst for knowledge of man himself, and it is this fundamental failure of faith in the truth-revealing capacity of appearance that lies at the foundation of the modern world, whether in the form of divine revelation or natural revelation. The religious character of modern doubt is still present in this Christian suspicion that a demonic spirit, and not divine providence, sets limits to man's thirst for knowledge, and that a superior being could deliberately deceive us.[7] This suspicion can only arise from a very intense desire for security[8] in which humans forget that the freedom of human thought and action, as Kant philosophically demonstrated, is possible only under conditions of uncertain and limited knowledge.

The religious belief of the modern age is distinct from pure faith because it is the "belief in knowing" of those who doubt that knowledge is possible at all. It is noteworthy that the great writer who introduced us to so many fictional characters could only show a face of true faith in the character of the idiot, one that speaks to the modern age's religious tension between belief and doubt. The religious person of the modern age belongs to the same secular or worldly world as his atheist opponent, precisely because he is not an "idiot" in this world. The modern believer who cannot endure the tension between doubt and belief immediately loses the integrity and depth of his belief. The justification for calling the apparent paradox of atheism a religion, in short, derives from the intimate mental familiarity of the greatest religious thinkers of the modern age—Pascal, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky—with the experience of atheism.

But our question is not whether, in calling communism a religion, we are entitled to use the same word that is used for both believers and unbelievers, but whether communist ideology belongs to the same category and the same tradition of doubt and secularism that gives more than a merely formal justification to considering atheism a religion. And of course, it does not. Atheism is a marginal feature of communism, and if communism pretends to know the law of history, it does not attribute this law to history in the same way that "believers of the customary and familiar religions [attribute it] to God."[9]

Communism as an ideology, although among the things it denies is the existence of a transcendent God, is not identical with atheism. Communism never attempts to answer religious questions specifically, but rather assures that adherents educated in its ideology will never raise such questions. Ideologies that always discuss the explanation of the movement of history also do not provide the same kind of explanation that theology provides. Theology discusses man as a rational being who asks questions and whose reason requires consistency, even if he is expected to believe in something beyond reason. An ideology, and Communism in its politically effective form more than any other, discussed man as if he were a falling stone that had been granted the faculty of consciousness and therefore the ability to observe Newton's laws of gravity while falling. To call this totalitarian ideology a religion is not only a wholly undeserved compliment, but also ignores the fact that Bolshevism, although it grew out of the history of the West, no longer belongs to the same tradition of doubt and worldliness, and its doctrine as well as its practices have opened a complete abyss between the free world and the totalitarian parts of the world.

Until recent years, all of this was nothing more than a dispute over terminology, and the use of the term "political religion" for explicitly anti-religious political movements was nothing more than a play on words.[10] Some liberal sympathizers, precisely because they did not understand what was happening in Russia's "great new experiment," were particularly fond of this term. It was somewhat later that disaffected Communists used the term for Stalin's idolization of Lenin's corpse or the inflexibility of Bolshevik theory, which seemed reminiscent of the methods of "medieval scholasticism." But recently, the term "political or secular religion" has been adopted by two completely distinct trends in thought and approach. First, there is a historical approach, according to which secular religion is quite literally a religion that grows out of the spiritual worldliness of our own contemporary world, and therefore Communism is only the most radical version of an "immanentist heresy."[11] And second, there is the social-science approach, in which religion and ideology are discussed in exactly the same way because in these sciences it is believed that Communism (or nationalism or imperialism, etc.) performs the same "function" for its adherents that religious sects perform in a free society.

2

The great advantage of the historical approach is its acknowledgment that totalitarian domination is not merely an explorable incident in the history of the West, and that its ideologies must be discussed in terms of the understanding they have of themselves and the criticism they make of themselves. The specific shortcomings of this approach lie in a twofold misunderstanding of the nature of worldliness or secularism and the secular world.

Secular, initially, has a political as well as a spiritual meaning, and the two are not necessarily the same. Secularism, politically, means precisely that religious beliefs and institutions have no binding public authority and, conversely, political life has no religious sanctity.[12] This meaning of secularism raises the important question of the source of authority of our customary "values" and the source of our laws, customs, and standards for judgment, things to which religion had lent sanctity for centuries. But the long alliance between religion and authority does not necessarily prove that the concept of authority itself has a religious nature. On the contrary, it seems to me more likely that authority, insofar as it is based on tradition, has a Roman origin itself, and the Church only monopolized it when it became the political as well as the spiritual heir of the Roman Empire. Undoubtedly, one of the major crises of our time is the collapse of all authority and the broken thread of our tradition, but it does not follow from this that this crisis is primarily religious or has a religious origin. It does not even necessarily indicate a crisis of customary and familiar faith, although it has also endangered the authority of the churches insofar as they are public institutions, among other things they are.

The second misunderstanding, it seems to me, is more obvious and more pertinent to our discussion. The concept of freedom (and this is, in the first instance, a struggle between the free world and totalitarianism) certainly does not have a religious origin. To justify an interpretation of the struggle for freedom as something fundamentally religious, it would not be sufficient to prove that freedom is compatible with the "religious order" of our time. And this would, in fact, be difficult, despite Luther's "freedom of a Christian." The freedom that Christianity brought to the world was freedom from politics, a freedom to be outside and to remain outside the realm of secular or worldly society as well, something unheard of in the ancient world. The Christian slave, insofar as he was a Christian, remained a free man if only he kept himself free from worldly attachments. (This is also the reason why the Christian churches could remain so indifferent to the question of slavery while quickly seizing upon the doctrine of the equality of all human beings before God.) Thus, neither Christian equality nor Christian freedom could ever, by their very nature, lead to the concept of "government of the people, by the people, for the people" or to any other modern definition of political freedom. The only interest Christianity has in secular government is the protection of its own freedom, to try to ensure that the secular powers grant freedom from politics alongside other freedoms. But the free world does not mean by freedom that one should "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's," but rather that everyone now has the right to lay hands on those matters that were once Caesar's right. The very fact that we, insofar as our public life is concerned, are more concerned with freedom than with anything else proves that we do not live in a religious world in our public life.[13]

The fact that communist systems destroy religious institutions and persecute religious beliefs, along with many other social and spiritual associations holding the most diverse attitudes toward religion, is only the other side of this same coin. In a country where even chess clubs must be destroyed overnight and resurrected in a Bolshevik manner, because "playing chess for the sake of chess" is seen as a challenge to the official ideology, the persecution of religion cannot properly be attributed to specifically religious motives. The evidence we have concerning the persecutions and harassments in totalitarian countries does not support the oft-heard claim that religion was felt to be the primary challenge to the ruling system, more so than any other free and spiritual activity. A Trotskyist in the thirties or a Titoist in the late forties was certainly in greater danger of his life and livelihood in the Soviet-dominated sphere than a Catholic or Protestant priest. If believers, on the whole, were often persecuted more than non-believers, it is simply because they were harder to "convince."

Communism, in fact, carefully avoids being mistaken for a religion. When the Catholic Church recently decided to excommunicate communists from the Christian community, due to communism's obvious incompatibility with Christian teachings, no corresponding move occurred on the part of the communists. Certainly, from the perspective of the individual Christian, this is a religious war, just as for the philosopher it is a war for philosophy. But, for communism, it is nothing of the sort. It is a war against a world in which all these things—free religion, free philosophy, free art, etc.—are not possible at all.

3

The social-science approach of equating ideology and religion as functionally equivalent things has gained greater importance in the current discussion. This approach rests on the fundamental assumption of the social sciences that they never deal with the essence of a historical and political phenomenon, such as religion, or ideology, or freedom, or totalitarianism, but only attend to the function that this phenomenon has in society. Social scientists do not trouble themselves with the fact that both sides in the struggle, the free world as well as the totalitarian rulers, have refused to call their struggle religious, and they believe that they can “objectively” discover whether or not communism is a new religion and whether or not the free world is defending its religious system, and this without paying heed to what each side has to say. In any previous era, this refusal to take each side on its own terms, as if it were a normal matter that what these sources themselves say can only turn out to be misleading, would at least have seemed utterly unscientific.

The father of social-science methods is Marx. He was the first person who systematically — and not merely with the natural awareness that speech can conceal as well as reveal the truth — viewed history as revealing itself in the sayings of great statesmen, or the intellectual and spiritual manifestations of an era. He refused to take any of them at face value and denounced them as “ideological” facades behind which the true historical forces hide themselves. He later called this the “ideological superstructure,” but he did not begin this by decreeing that one should not take seriously “what men say,” but only decreed concerning “real, active men” that their thoughts are “the ideological reflexes and echoes of their life-process.”[14] Thus, among all materialists, he was the first to interpret religion as something more than mere superstition or the spiritualization of concrete human experiences, and considered it a social phenomenon in which man “is dominated by the product of his own head as, in capitalist production, he is dominated by the product of his own hand.”[15] For him, religion had become one of the possible ideologies.

Certainly, the social sciences of the present age have grown out of Marxism; they no longer share in the Marxist prejudice in favor of his own “ideology.” In fact, since Karl Mannheim’s Ideology and Utopia, these sciences have become accustomed to speaking boldly and telling Marxists that Marxism, too, is an ideology. But, by the same token, these sciences have lost even that degree of awareness of a substantive difference that was still a matter of course for Marx and Engels. Engels could still protest against those who in his day called atheism a religion and say that this makes as much sense as considering chemistry to be alchemy without the philosopher’s stone.[16] It is only in our time that one has the right to call communism a religion without even thinking about its historical background and without even asking what religion actually is, and whether, when a religion is without a god, it is anything at all.

Moreover, while the non-Marxist heirs of Marxism have realized the ideological character of Marxism and have thus, in a way, become cleverer than Marx himself, they have forgotten the philosophical basis of Marx’s own writings and have retained this basis for their own writings because their methods originate from those writings and only make sense within their framework.

Marx's reluctance to take seriously "what every epoch says about itself and imagines itself to be" stemmed from his conviction that political action was primarily violent, and that this violence was the midwife of history.[17] This conviction did not arise from the gratuitous savagery of a revolutionary temperament, but had its place in Marx's philosophy of history, a philosophy which held that history, which men had brought into being in a state of false consciousness, i.e., in the state of ideologies, could be made by men with full consciousness of what they are doing. It is precisely this humanistic aspect of Marx's teachings that leads him to his emphasis on the violent character of political action: he saw the making of history in terms of fabrication; historical man was for him primarily homo faber. The fabrication of all man-made objects necessarily implies a violence done to the material which is the basic stuff of the fabricated object. No table is made without killing a tree.

Marx, like all serious philosophers since the French Revolution, was faced with the double riddle that human action, as distinguished from fabrication and production, rarely achieves exactly what it intends, because it acts within a framework of "many wills acting in different directions,"[18] and that the sum total of recorded actions which we call history nonetheless appears to make sense. But he refused to accept the solution of his immediate predecessors, who had introduced a deus ex machina into human affairs in the "ruse of nature" (Kant) or the "cunning of reason" (Hegel). He proposed instead to explain this riddle by interpreting the whole realm of explicable meaning as a "superstructure" upon the more elementary productive activity, an activity in which man is master of his productions and knows what he is doing. The hitherto explicable in history was now seen as a reflection of a meaning that was as surely a human product as the technical development of the world. The whole problem of the humanization of political-historical affairs was consequently how to become masters of our actions as we are masters of our productive capacity, or, in other words, how to "make" history as we make other things. Once this was achieved through the victory of the proletariat we would no longer need ideologies—ideologies which are the justification of our violence, because this violent element will be in our hands: violence thus tamed will be no more dangerous than killing a tree to make a table. But until then all political actions, legal judgments, and spiritual thoughts cover up the hidden motives of a society that only pretends to act politically but actually "makes history," albeit in an unconscious, i.e., inhuman, way.

Marx's theory of the ideological superstructure, based on the distinction "between what a man pretends to be and what he really is," and the concomitant disregard for the truth-revealing quality of speech rests entirely on this identification of political action with violence. For violence is in fact the only kind of human action that is by definition mute and is neither mediated by words nor brought into action through words. We, in all other types of action, political or non-political, act with speech and our speech is action. In normal political life this close relationship between words and deeds is broken only by the violence of war, and then, but only then, nothing else relies on words and everything relies on the mute ruthlessness of weapons. The agendas of war therefore always have an unpleasant ring of insincerity: here words become "mere talk" and no longer have any capacity for action, and everyone knows that action has departed from the realm of speech. This "mere talk," talk that is nothing but justification or pretext for violence, has always been defenseless against distrust and has been considered merely "ideological." Here the search for hidden motives is entirely justified, as historians have been famous for doing since Thucydides. Typically, religion in religious war has always been in great danger of becoming, in the Marxian sense, an "ideology," i.e., a mere pretext and justification for violence. The same is true, to some extent, of all causes of war.

But only on the assumption that all history is fundamentally class antagonism and can only be resolved through violence, and the assumption that political action is inherently “violent” and hypocritically conceals its true nature, if such an interpretation is permissible, except during the wars and revolutions it instigates, are we entitled to deem this self-interpretation irrelevant. This, it seems to me, is the basis for ignoring what the free world and communism say about themselves.

4

If we look at this same issue from a purely scientific perspective, it seems clear that one reason for the formalization of social science categories is this scientifically understandable desire to find general rules that can subsume the events of all ages and types. If we are to trust Engels’s interpretation of Marx, Marx was also, in this purely scientific sense, the father of the social sciences. He was the first to compare the natural sciences with the human sciences and, concurrently with [Auguste] Comte, conceived of “social science” as a comprehensive discipline, “the synthesis of the so-called historical and philosophical sciences,”[19] a discipline that would possess the same standards as natural science and behave accordingly. “We do not live in nature alone, but also in human society”[20] and society must therefore, like nature, be open to the same methods and rules of inquiry. The emphasis on the complementary character of nature and society henceforth formed the basis of the formal and ahistorical categories that began to dominate the historical and social sciences.

Such categories included not only Marx’s “class struggle,” which was thought to be the law of historical development, just as Darwin’s law of the survival of the fittest was the law of natural development,[21] but also, more recently, Toynbee’s “challenge and response” or Max Weber’s “ideal types,” though as they are used today, not as Max Weber himself used them. It seems as if “political or secular religions” is the latest addition, insofar as this term, although initially intended for totalitarian movements, has now become generalized and is now used to encompass a wide range of phenomena, scattered in time as well as in space.[22]

Social science owes its origin to the desire to find a “positive science of history” that could rival the positive science of nature.[23] The “positive science of history,” because of this derivative origin, it is only natural that it should always remember that it is one step behind natural science, which was its great model. Thus, natural scientists today know what social scientists have yet to discover: that almost any hypothesis with which they approach nature yields positive results to some extent, and the malleability of observed events appears so great that they always give a plausible answer to man. It is as if, at the very moment man poses a question to nature, everything hastens to rearrange itself in accordance with his question. The day will come when social scientists will discover, to their dismay, that this is even truer in their own discipline, and that there is nothing that cannot be proven and very little that can be refuted, and history arranges itself as readily and coherently under the category of “challenge-and-response” or conforms to “ideal types” as it arranged itself under the category of class struggles. There is no reason why the same compliance should not be shown when history is approached with the term secular or worldly religions.

To take a more comfortable example, Max Weber cut his ideal type of the “charismatic leader” from the pattern of Jesus of Nazareth; Karl Mannheim’s students saw no difficulty in applying this very category to Hitler.[24] From the viewpoint of the social scientist, Hitler and Jesus [pbuh] were one because they actualized the same social function. It is obvious that such a conclusion is only possible for those who refrain from listening to what Jesus or Hitler said. Now it seems that something similar has happened with the word “religion.” It is no accident, but lies in the very nature of this tendency, to see religions everywhere in this way, as one prominent proponent of this tendency approvingly cites, in a marginal note to his book, the astonishing discovery of a colleague “that God is not only a being who entered religion late, but that his entry into religion was not even necessary.”[25] Here the danger of blasphemy, always inherent in the essence of the term “secular religion,” reveals itself freely. If secular religions are possible in the sense that communism is a “religion without God,” then we no longer merely live in a secular world that has excluded religion from public affairs, but in a world that has even eliminated God from religion—something Marx and Engels also believed to be impossible.[26]

It is undeniable that this desubstantializing functionalization of our categories is not an isolated phenomenon occurring in the ivory tower of scholarly thought. This phenomenon is precisely connected with the increasing functionalization of our society, or, more precisely, with the fact that modern man is increasingly becoming a mere function of society. The totalitarian world and its ideologies do not reflect the radical aspect of secularism or godlessness; they reflect the radical aspect of the functionalization of human beings. Their methods of domination are based on the assumption that human beings can be conditioned because they are merely functions of superior natural or historical forces. The danger is that we may all be well on our way to becoming members of what Marx still enthusiastically called “socialized humanity” (gesellschaftliche Menschheit). It is astonishing to see how often the very same people who passionately oppose the “socialization of the means of production” unknowingly contribute to and support the far more dangerous socialization of man.

5

In this atmosphere of terminological disputes and mutual misunderstandings, the fundamental question concerning the relationship between religion and politics becomes very obscure and indistinct. To approach it, it may be good to consider secularism from its political aspect, the non-spiritual aspect only, and ask which religious element in the past was so politically connected with it that it lost its direct influence in our political life? Or, to ask in another way, which specifically political element was customary and familiar in religion? The justification for this question lies in the fact that the separation of the public and religious spheres of life, which we call secularism, does not merely separate politics from religion in general but also, very specifically, from Christian beliefs. And if one of the major causes of the confusions of contemporary public life is this very secularity of it, then the Christian religion must possess a strong political element whose loss has itself altered the character of our public existence.

A preliminary remark might be the unusually crude and vulgar saying of a badly frightened king who, terrified by the upheavals of 1848, cried out, “The people must not be allowed to let their religion go to ruin.” This king showed that he was sure of the worldly power of Christian beliefs, and this statement is quite astonishing if we recall that Christians and non-Christians alike had considered Christian beliefs, during the first centuries of its existence, at best irrelevant to the public sphere of life, if not dangerous and destructive to it. Tertullian’s phrase: “Nothing is more foreign to us [Christians] than public affairs” merely sums up the attitude of the early Christians toward worldly and political life.[27] What had happened in the meantime that now, in an almost secular age, the preservation of that very political life could be demanded?[28]

Marx’s answer, as crude as the king’s remark, is very famous: “Religion is the opium of the people.”[29] This answer is highly unsatisfactory, not because it is vulgar but because it is highly unlikely that Christian teachings in particular, with their inflexible emphasis on the individual and his own role in the salvation of his own soul, and their insistence on human sinfulness and the concomitant drawing up of an elaborate list of sins present in every religion, could even serve as a substitute for something as soothing as opium. Certainly, the new political ideologies in totalitarian countries ruled by intimidation or terror, by explaining everything and preparing for everything in an atmosphere of unbearable insecurity, are far more suited to securing the human soul against the shocking impact of reality than any conventional religion we know. Pious submission to the will of God, compared to these ideologies, is like a child’s pocketknife compared to atomic weapons.

But there is a strong element in conventional religion whose usefulness for supporting authority and governance is obvious, and whose origin is probably not of a religious nature, at least not primarily — and that is the medieval teaching of Hell. Neither this teaching nor its detailed description of the place of punishment after death owes much to the preaching of Jesus[30] or to the Jewish heritage. In fact, several centuries had to pass after the death of Jesus for this teaching to express itself at all. It is noteworthy that this claim coincided with the fall of Rome, that is, the decline of a secure worldly order whose authority and responsibility only then fell to the Church.[31]

In striking contrast to the scarcity of references in early Hebrew and Christian writings stands the powerful influence of Plato’s myth of the other world in ancient political thought and the Christian teaching of the later period, and it is with this myth that Plato concludes many of his political dialogues. Between Plato and the worldly triumph of Christianity, with which the religious sanctity of the teaching of Hell came into being (henceforth this teaching became such a general feature of the Christian world that political treatises felt no need to mention it specifically), there is scarcely any important discussion of political issues — except in the philosophy of Aristotle — that does not end with an imitation of the Platonic myth.[32] For it is Plato who is the most important forerunner of Dante’s detailed descriptions, and not the strictly Judeo-Christian sources; it is in Plato’s works that we find the geographical separation of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven, and not merely the concept of a final judgment concerning eternal life or eternal death and a reference to possible punishment after death.[33]

The implicit and thoroughly political meaning of Plato’s myth in the last book of the Republic, as well as the closing sections of the Phaedo and Gorgias, is beyond dispute. This myth in the Republic corresponds to the story of the cave, a story that is the center of the entire work. A parable, the story of the cave, is used for those few who are capable, without fear of the other world or hope for it, of performing the Platonic “preliminary training” [periagogē] and turning away from the shadow-life of apparent reality to face the clear sky of the “Ideas.” Only those few understand the true standards of all life, including political matters, although their interest in political affairs will no longer be for the sake of these affairs themselves.[34] Those who could understand the story of the cave were not expected to believe in the concluding myth about reward and punishment in the afterlife, for whoever grasped the truth of the Ideas as transcendent standards[35] no longer needed any tangible standard such as life after death. The concept of life after death holds little meaning for them because the story of the cave now describes life on earth as a kind of life in the underworld. Indeed, Plato’s use of the words eidōlon and skia, which were the key words in Homer’s description of Hades in the Odyssey, interprets this entire story as a reversal of Homer, and a response to him, and it is not the soul that is a shadow, nor is its life after death in substantial motion, but rather it is the life of the ordinary mortal body that fails in turning away from the cave of earthly life; our life on earth is in an underworld, our body is a shadow, and our sole truth is the soul. Since the Ideas are self-evident, the true standards for earthly life can never be satisfactorily reasoned and demonstrated.[36]

Therefore, belief in another world is necessary for those creatures who lack the eyes to see the invisible standards of all visible things. Whatever the nature of Plato’s own belief in the immortality of the soul, the myth of degrees of corporal punishment after death is clearly an invention of a philosophy that considered political matters secondary and therefore subject to a truth accessible only to a few.[37] In truth, only the fear of the majority’s rule could compel a few individuals to undertake their political activities.[38] Those few cannot persuade the masses of the truth, because persuasion is the only way to deal with the masses. But while the masses cannot be taught the truth, they can be persuaded to believe an opinion as if that opinion were true. The suitable opinion that conveys the truth of the few to the masses is belief in hell, and persuading citizens of its existence compels them to behave as if they knew the truth.

In other words, the doctrine of hell in Plato’s philosophy is clearly a political instrument invented for political purposes.[39] Conjectures about life after death and descriptions of the other world are undoubtedly as old as humanity’s conscious life on earth. Nevertheless, it is perhaps in Plato’s philosophy that we see “for the first time in the history of literature such a fable (in the sense of reward and punishment among the dead) specifically enlisted in the service of righteousness”[40], that is, in the service of public and political life. This seems to be supported by the fact that purely secular writers in antiquity used this Platonic myth so eagerly, writers who, as clearly as Plato, showed that they did not seriously believe in it, while on the other hand, Christian belief, as long as Christianity remained without worldly interests and responsibilities, does not exhibit such a doctrine about hell.[41]

Whatever other historical influences may have been at work in the elaboration of the doctrine of hell, it continued to be used for political purposes during the ancient period. Christianity officially adopted this doctrine only after its purely religious development had taken place. When, at the beginning of the Middle Ages, the Christian Church became increasingly aware of political responsibilities and sought to assume them, it found its Christian faith confronted with a perplexity similar to that of Plato's political philosophy. Both tried to enforce absolute standards in a realm whose very essence seems to be relative, and this under that eternal human condition that the worst thing a human being can do to another is to kill him, for a day will come when he must somehow commit this act. The "progress" in this situation proposed by the doctrine of hell is precisely that punishment can mean something more than eternal death, namely eternal suffering in which the soul longs for death.[42]

The outstanding political characteristic of our modern secular world seems to be that more and more persons are losing the belief in reward and punishment after death, while the performance of individual consciences or the capacity of people to perceive invisible truth is politically as unreliable as ever. In totalitarian states we see an almost deliberate attempt to construct a kind of earthly hell, concentrated in camps and torture chambers, whose main difference from medieval images of hell lies in technical advances and administrative organization, and of course it also lacks eternity. Moreover, Hitler's Germany showed that an ideology that almost consciously overturned the commandment "Thou shalt not kill" did not need to face any strong resistance from a conscience trained in the Christian tradition. On the contrary, Nazi ideology was often able to overturn the performance of this conscience, as if this conscience were nothing but a mechanism for indicating whether or not the individual was in conformist agreement with society and its beliefs.

The political result of the secularization of the modern age, in other words, seems to be, alongside the elimination of religion from public life, the elimination of the fear of hell from public life as well, that is, the sole political element in traditional religion. This loss is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most important distinction between our present period and previous centuries. Certainly, from the viewpoint of sheer utility, nothing could compete better with the inner compulsion of totalitarian ideologies in exercising power over the human soul than the fear of hell. But, no matter how our world may become religious again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or to what extent our moral values may have deep roots in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among those motives that deter or incite the actions of the majority of people. This seems inevitable, if the secularity of the world entails the separation of the religious and political realms of life and under these conditions religion was obliged to lose its most elementary political element, just as public life was obliged to lose the religious sanctity of its transcendent authority. This separation is a fact and, moreover, has its unique advantages for both religious and non-religious persons. The history of the modern age has shown time and again that the alliance between "throne and altar" can only discredit both. But while in the past the danger mainly consisted of using religion as a mere pretext, and hence the suspicion of cloaking political action as well as religious belief in hypocrisy, today the danger is infinitely greater. The greatest danger of it, in confronting a full-fledged ideology, is confronting it with our own ideology. If we try to breathe "religious fervor" back into public-political life or use religion as an instrument for political distinctions, the result could very well be the metamorphosis and perversion of religion into ideology and the corruption of our fight against totalitarianism with a fanaticism that is absolutely alien to the very essence of freedom.

[Arendt's Response to Jules Monnerot's Criticism]

The fundamental point in Monroe's argument is that he overlooks the difference between Marx's proposition that religions are ideologies and his own theory that ideologies are religions. For Marx, religion, like many other things, falls within the realm of ideological superstructures, and of course, not everything in this realm was the same; religious ideology was not the same thing as non-religious ideology. The distinction in content between religion and non-religion was reversed. Monroe and other proponents of "secular religions" say that it does not matter what the content of the ideology is; all ideologies are religions. In this theory, but not in Marx's teaching, religion and ideology have become one.

The reason given for this identification is that ideologies do the same work that religions do. One could, with equal validity, identify ideology with science, and this is something Monroe almost does when he states that communist ideology "usurps the prestige that science has in the eyes of the masses." Of course, identifying science with communist ideology would be wrong for this reason, but this error would actually contain more truth than the logically similar identification with religion, insofar as communism pretends to be "scientific" but not "religious," and argues in a scientific manner; in other words, communism answers scientific questions more than religious ones. As far as Monroe's questions are concerned, the only respect he holds for science (as distinct from religion) might prevent him from seeing, according to his own argument, that there is no reason why he should not identify communist ideology with science rather than with religion.

The underlying confusion is simple and is very clearly visible in Monroe's statement that "the Communists have an answer for everything. This is the characteristic of all orthodoxies," indicating that therefore communism is an orthodoxy. The fallacy in this argument has been familiar since the time when the Greeks amused themselves with fallacies and followed a similar logical process that delighted them by leading to the definition of man as a plucked chicken. But unfortunately, in the present day, this kind of thing is not just laughable.

Monroe complains that I do not follow current equivalent methods and do not "define" religion and ideology. (The question of what ideology is can only be answered historically, because ideologies first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I tried to answer such a question in the article "Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government," in The Review of Politics, July 1953, though not in the form of giving a definition.)[43] I cannot address here the question of what a definition is and to what extent we can arrive at definitions by investigating the nature of things. One point is obvious: I can only define what is distinct, and only arrive at definitions, if at all, by making distinctions. To say that ideologies are religions is not to define either of them, but on the contrary, it destroys even that amount of distinction that is vaguely felt, the vague distinction inherent in the nature of everyday language, and a distinction that scholarly research is supposed to highlight and clarify.

Having said that, while it may be possible to define such a relatively new phenomenon as ideology, how arrogant must I be to dare to define religion! Not because many scholars before me have tried and failed to do so, but because the treasury and storehouse of historical material should rightly humble anyone who still holds respect for the sources, history, and thought of the past. Suppose I defined religion and some great religious thinkers — not kangaroo worshippers, of course, whom I could easily have taken into account as well — escaped my consideration! In historical research, arriving at ready-made definitions is not what matters; what matters is the continuous drawing of distinctions, and these distinctions must follow the language we speak and the subject we discuss. Otherwise, it will not be long before we find ourselves in a situation where everyone speaks their own language and, before beginning to speak, arrogantly declares: what I mean by … What help is this talk to me, and what occurs to me at that moment.

This confusion and conflation arises in part from the particular perspective of sociologists who — methodically ignoring chronological order, the location of facts, the impact and uniqueness of events, the substantial content of sources, and historical reality in general — focus on "functional roles" in and of themselves, thereby absolutizing "society" and relating everything to it. Their underlying assumption can be summarized in one sentence: everything has a function, and its essence is the functional role that this essence performs.

Today, in some circles, this assumption has attained the dubious status of something trivial, and some sociologists, like Monro, cannot simply trust their eyes and ears if they encounter someone who does not share their view. I, of course, do not suppose that everything has a function, nor that function and essence are one, nor that these two altogether different things — as, for example, belief in the law of history and belief in God — perform a single function. And even if, in some strange circumstances, it should happen that two different things perform the same "functional role," I would no more suppose them to be identical than I would suppose the heel of my shoe is a hammer because I use it to drive a nail into the wall.

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Notes:

* The Persian translation of this article was first published in Ishraq, New Series, Nos. 2 & 3, Spring & Summer 2005, pp. 65–238. This article is a translation of:

Hannah Arendt, “Religion and Politics”, in Essays in Understanding: 1930-1945, ed. by Jerome Kohn, Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994, pp. 368-90.

[1] Engels reports that in the Paris of the forties, one used to say, ["atheism is your religion"] Donc”, l’athéisme c’est votre religion“, he supposed this was because one "could only conceive of a man without religion as a monster of the desert." See:

“Feuerbach and the the End of Classical German Philosophy” in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, London, 1950, II, 343.

[2] Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part II, "On the Blissful Islands." — English Editor.

[3] Pascal’s negative reliance on Descartes is too well known to require further documentation. Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est belongs to Kierkegaard’s earliest philosophical manuscripts (winter 1842/43); Kierkegaard, who wrote as if composing a critical account of his own spiritual conduct, tells us how this sentence performed a fundamental task throughout his life, and he regretted that, after learning about Descartes’s philosophy from Hegel, he had not begun his philosophical studies with Descartes (p. 75). Following Hegel’s interpretation of Descartes, he saw in this sentence the essential element of modern philosophy, namely its principle and its beginning. This short treatise is contained in the Danish edition of Kierkegaard’s collected works, 1909, vol. 4. I used the German translation by Wolfgang Struve, Darmstadt, 1948.

[4] Ibid., p. 76.

[5] Pensées, ed. Jacques Chevalier, La Pléiade, Paris, 1950, No. 92, p. 370.

The entire paragraph shows even more clearly how deeply Pascal’s conviction was rooted in his despair over the possibilities of certain knowledge:

“L’homme n’est qu’un sujet plein d’erreur, naturelle et ineffaçable sans la grâce. Rein ne lui montre la vérité. Tout l’abuse. Ces deux principes de vérité, la raison et les sens, outre qu’ils manquent chacun de sincérité, s’abuscent réciproquement l’un l’autre. Les sens, abusent la raison par de fausses apparences; et cette même piperie qu’ils apportent à la raison, ils la reçoivent d’elle à leur tour: elle s’en revanche. Les passions de l’ àme troublent les sens, et leur font des impressions fausses. Ils mentent et se trompent à l’envie.”

Although Pascal tells us here, as elsewhere, that reason too is merely a source of error, it is clear that the primary source of error is the senses (reason only “takes its revenge”) in the dual sense of sensory perception and sensual desire.

[6] Ibid., No. 75, p. 416.

[7] Descartes, Principes, No. 5: one must doubt everything

“principalement parce que nous avons ouï dire que Dieu, qui nous a crée, peut faire tout ce qui lui plaît, et que nous ne savons pas encore si peut-être il n’a point voulu nous faire tels que nous soyons toujours trompés … car, puisqu’il a bien permis que nous soyons trompés quelquefois … pourquoi ne pourrati-il pas permettre que nous nous trompions toujours?”

[8] Descartes, Discourse de la Méthod, Première Partie : “Et j’avais toujours un extrême désir d’apprendre à distinguer le vrai d’avec le faux, pour voir clair en mes actions et mes actions et marcher avec assurance en cette vie”

(emphasis mine).

[9] Waldemar Gurian, in his excellent short history of Bolshevism, Notre Dame, 1952, gives the following reason for his understanding of the Bolshevik-Communist movement “as a secular, social, and political religion”: what believers in traditional and familiar religions attribute to God, and what Christians attribute to Jesus Christ and the Church, the Bolsheviks attribute to the allegedly scientific laws of social, political, and historical development, which … Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin have elaborated in established teachings. Therefore, the acceptance of these doctrinal laws … can be considered the distinguishing mark of a secular religion,” p. 5.

Only deists, who use God as an “idea” to explain the course of the world, or atheists, who believe that the riddles of the world are solved by assuming God’s non-existence, are to blame for this type of secularization of traditional concepts.

[10] As far as I can understand, this term first appears in a specific technical sense and with regard to the totalitarian movements of the modern age in Eric Voegelin’s small book (Eric Vögelin, Die Politischen Religionem), in 1938, and there he himself quotes his sole predecessor, Alexander Ular, see:

Alexander Ular, Die Politik (in the series Die Gesellschaft, ed. M. Buber, 1906, vol. III).

Alexander Ular claims that every political authority and dominion has a religious origin and nature, and that politics itself is necessarily religious. He draws his arguments primarily from primitive and tribal religions, and his entire reasoning can be summarized in the following sentence: “The medieval God of the Christians is in reality nothing but a totem of enormous dimensions …. The Christian is his child just as the Australian aborigine is the child of the kangaroo.” In his early book, Voegelin still primarily uses examples from Tibetan religions to justify his argument. Although he later abandoned this line of reasoning entirely, it is worth noting that the term was initially derived from anthropological research and not from the interpretation of the Western tradition per se. The anthropological and tribal-psychological implications of this term are still quite evident in its use by the social sciences.

[11] So far, the most brilliant and thought-provoking account can be found in the following book:

Eric Vögelin, The New Science of Politics, Chicago, 1952.

[12] I fully agree with Romano Guardini’s recent statement that the secularity of the world, the fact that our public and daily existence is “without awareness of a divine power,” “does not [mean] that individuals are becoming increasingly irreligious; rather, it means that public consciousness is increasingly moving away from religious categories,” although I do not follow him in concluding that where religion exists, [it] “is retreating into the ‘inner world.’” I quote from the journal:

Commonweal, vol. LXVIII, no. 13, July 3, 1953,

which prints extensive excerpts from an article in the current Dublin Review, London.

[13] To say that this struggle is essentially religious could very well mean that we want to make a claim beyond freedom. But such a claim would be dangerous, no matter how tolerant a definition of the more-than-freedom turns out to be; it might well involve us in a kind of spiritual civil war in which we exclude from our common struggle everything that is contrary to “religion.” And since in this sphere, as in others, there is no binding authority for a definitive and universal definition of what is compatible and what is not, we will be subject to ever-changing interpretations.

[14] Die deutsche Ideologie, MEGA, Feuerbach, I, v, 15.

[15] Das Kapital, I, chap. xxiii, I.

[16] Engels, op. cit., “If religion can exist without its god, alchemy can also exist without its philosopher’s stone.”

[17] In Marx’s own words:

“Die Gewalt ist der Geburtshelfer jeder alten Gesellschaft, die mit einer neuen schwanger geht. Sie selbst ist eine ökonomische Potenz”. Das Kapital, chap, xxiv, §۶.

Also:

“In der wirklichen Geschichte spielen bekanntlich Eroberung, Unterjochung, kurz Gewalt die grosse Rolle.” Ibid., §۱.

[18] Engels, Selected Works, 354.

[19] Ibid., p. 340.

[20] Ibid.

[21] Engels frequently compared Marx to Darwin, most eloquently in the “Speech at the Graveside of Marx”: “Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history,” ibid., p. 153.

[22] A good example of this thoroughly confusing method is Jules Monnerot’s book entitled:

Sociology and Psychology of Communism, Boston, 1953.

[23] These two positive sciences together were thought to encompass not only the knowledge of all data, but also every possible substantive thought: “That which still remains of all earlier philosophy is the science of thought and its laws, i.e., formal logic and dialectics. Everything else is subsumed in the positive science of nature and history.” See:

Engels, “Socialism: Utopian and Scientific”, in Selected Works, II, 123.

At the same time, it would be worthwhile to show to what extent our new disciplines in formal logic and semiotics owe their origin to the social sciences.

[24] Thus, for example, in:

Hans Gerth, “The Nazi Party,” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 45, 1940.

My purpose in choosing this example is not to suggest that Max Weber himself could have been guilty of such extravagant identifications.

[25] Monroe, op. cit., p. 124, quotes from the following books:

Van der Leeuw, Phénoménologie de la religion, Paris, 1948, and Durkheim, De la Définition des phénomènes religieux.

[26] Marx and Engels believed that religions are ideologies; they did not suppose that ideologies could simply be turned into religions. According to Engels, “never [did the bourgeoisie] put a new religion [i.e., its own new ideology] in place of the old one. Everyone knows how Robespierre failed in his attempt.” See:

“Fuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy”, Selected Works, II, 344.

[27] Apol. 38: nobis nulla magis res aliena quam publica.

[28] The possible uselessness of religion for secular authority can only be observed under conditions of the complete worldliness of public-political life, that is, at the beginning of our era and in the modern age. During the Middle Ages, secular life itself had become religious and therefore could not be turned into a political instrument.

[29] The frequently misquoted phrase does not mean that religion was invented as a sedative for the people, but rather that it was used for such purposes.

[30] The Gospel of Luke, chapter 16, verses 23-31, is, as far as I know, the most explicit passage.

[31] See:

Marcus Dods, Forerunners of Dante (Edinburgh, 1903), and Fredric Huidekoper, Belief of the First Three Centuries Concerning Christ’s Mission to the Underworld, New York, 1887.

[32] Prominent among these is the Dream of Scipio, with which Cicero concludes his Republic, and the concluding vision in Plutarch’s On the Delays of the Divine Vengeance. Compare also with the sixth book of the Aeneid, which is very different from the eleventh book of the Odyssey.

[33] This view is especially emphasized in the aforementioned book by Marcus Dods.

[34] See especially the Republic, Book VII, 516d.

[35] “The idea that there is a high art of measurement and that the philosopher’s knowledge of values is the ability to measure, runs through Plato’s work right to the end. See:

Werner Jaeger, Paideia, II, 416, note 45.

[36] It is characteristic of all of Plato's dialogues on justice that a break occurs at some point and the strictly argumentative procedure must be abandoned. In the Republic, Socrates several times evades his questioners; the perplexing question is whether justice is still possible if it remains hidden from the eyes of men and gods. See especially the break at 372a, resumed again at 427d where Socrates defines wisdom and euboulia [good counsel]; he returns to the main question at 430d and discusses sōfrosynē [self-restraint]. He then begins the discussion again at 433b and arrives almost immediately at a discussion of the forms of government, 445d ff., until the whole argument is shifted to an entirely different, non-political level in Book VII with the cave story. Here it becomes clear why Glaucon cannot arrive at a satisfactory answer: justice is an idea and must be perceived; this is the only possible proof.

[37] The clearest proof of the political character of Plato's myths about the other world is that they, insofar as they speak of physical punishment, stand in sharp contradiction to his theory of the mortality of the body and the immortality of the soul. Moreover, Plato was fully aware of this inconsistency. See: Gorgias, 524.

[38] Republic, 374c.

[39] This is also evident from the concluding myths in the Phaedo and the Gorgias, myths which, like the cave story, contain no allegory and in which the philosopher tells the truth. The Phaedo discusses primarily the immortality of the soul, but it is a "revised apology 'more convincing than the speech (Socrates made) in defense (of himself) before the judges.'" See:

M. Cornford, Principium Sapientiae: The Origin of Greek Philosophical Thought, Cambridge, 1952, 69 .

The Gorgias, which demonstrates the impossibility of "proving" the statement that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, tells this myth at the end as a kind of ultima ratio [final guarantee], with much hesitation and clearly indicating that Socrates himself did not take it very seriously.

[40] Marcus Dods, op. cit., p. 41.

[41] Christian writers during the first centuries believed in Christ's mission to the underworld, his main purpose being to abolish hell, defeat Satan, and free the souls of dead sinners just as he freed the souls of Christians from death and punishment. The only exception was Tertullian. See: Huidekoper, op. cit.

[42] The longing for death was a recurring motif in Hebrew accounts of hell. See:

Dods, op. cit., p. 107ff.

[43] This essay was included in the 1958 edition and all subsequent editions of The Origins of Totalitarianism. — English Editor.

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PDF file of Hannah Arendt's article "Religion and Politics"

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