coming of the Messiah. It is an evolutionary world: you get somewhere

MARXISM AS A CHRISTIAN HERESY

Rev. Gabriel Franks, Ph.D.

In July 1970 Professor Nicholas Lobkowicz (now of the University

of Munich) gave a series of lectures at Notre Dame University. I had

the good fortune to attend these discussions on the ideas of Karl Marx.

We of the Western world tend to look upon Marx as being utterly

evil, as having nothing of importance to tell us, as having been a

cause of much woe and nothing good. In the countries of the so-called

Eastern bloc, on the other hand, there is a tendency to regard his

every word to be of i n f a l l i b l e inspiration, and to take the view that

Marx could do no wrong, a view which Marx himself would have looked

upon with some trepidation.

Like Prof. Lobkowicz, I would like to take a somewhat middle

course, and show in what way Marx was the cause of some good in the

world, but also at the same time show some serious flaws in his thinking.

These two aspects of Marx's thought are, I hope, somewhat succinctly

summed up in my t i t l e : "Marxism as a Christian heresy."

One of Prof. Lobkowicz's more important themes in the Introduction

to the book which he edited, Marx and the Western World (Notre Dame

Press, 1967) is that we cannot look upon Marx's philosophy as something

alien to the Western world. We tend to forget that Marx was not a

Russian, that as a matter of fact he was somewhat suspicious of the

Russians. He was very German--German to the core--German, however, in

that tradition of the German Rhineland where he was born and where he

spent his early life which has a somewhat international flavor. We

find a sort of dialectical interplay--in the ouy__o_u_n_~ Marx, at least--between

an almost exaggerated loyalty to the Prusslan state--which he

identified with as a force directed toward liberalism and progress--

while at the same time he shared the Rhinelander's tendency to look

upon France and even England as f e r t i l e soil nourishing his cultural

roots.

Marx was baptized into the Lutheran church, as had his father

been before him, his background was Jewish (he came from a long line

of Rabbis) and perhaps I should have chosen the t i t l e "Marxism as a

Jewish heresy". But since Christianity i t s e l f is a sort of meta-

Judaism, I hope I will be justified in subsuming the two together.

Ever since the time of Vico it has become commonplace in the Western

world to look upon Greek thought as being cyclical and Hebraic

thought as being linear. By this I understand that it is meant that

the Greeks thought of the world as never really getting anyplace--

nothing ever really new happens, according to this interpretation, in

the world of Aristotle and Plato: the Platonic forms which Aristotle

brought down to earth (to use Gilson's phrase) were always the same

old forms. There was really no progress in the Greek view of the world.

To this we can contrast the Hebrew view of the world, which begins

with creation out of nothing and ends up in a sort of grand and

glorious triumph of the forces of Good in either the f i r s t or second