Karl Marx as a religious type

Published in the Moscow Weekly in 1906 and in a separate publication (by D. E. Zhukovsky). St. Petersburg, 1907. (His attitude towards the religion of man-theism of L. Feuerbach) The theme of this sketch may cause confusion and therefore requires some explanation. In my opinion, the determining force in a person’s spiritual life is his religion - not only in the narrow, but also in the broad sense of the word, that is, those highest and final values ​​that a person recognizes above himself and above himself, and the practical attitude in which he becomes towards these values. To determine the real religious center in a person, to find his true spiritual core - this means to find out the most intimate and important things about him, after which everything external and derivative will be clear. In this sense, we can talk about religion in every person, equally in a religiously naive person and in a person who consciously denies any specific form of religiosity. For the Christian understanding of life and history, in addition, there is no doubt that the human soul is controlled and history is driven by real mystical principles, and, moreover, fighting among themselves, polar, irreconcilable. In this sense, there are, strictly speaking, no religiously neutral people; in fact, in their souls there is a struggle between Christ and the “prince of this world.” We know that there may be people who do not know Christ, but serve Him and do His will, and, conversely, who call themselves Christians, but are in fact alien to Him; finally, among the deniers and religious hypocrites there are those who, in their spirit, foretell the coming impostor, who will come “in his own name” and find many adherents. Whose spirit owns this or that historical figure, whose “stamp” lies on this or that historical movement, this is the usual question that has to be asked when thinking about the complex phenomena of an increasingly complex life. And it especially often happens again and again to rethink this question in application to such a complex, contradictory and at the same time significant current in the spiritual life of modern times as socialism, understood precisely as a manifestation of spiritual life, because the economic content of the demands of socialism may not arouse fundamental disputes and doubts. The very historical body of socialism, i.e., the socialist movement, can be inspired by different spirits and belong to the kingdom of light or become prey to darkness. A mysterious line separates light and darkness, which exist in mixture and, however, cannot mix with each other. And when thinking about the religious nature of modern socialism, the thought involuntarily stops at the one whose spirit left such a deep imprint on the socialist movement of modern times, so that it should be considered one of its spiritual fathers - Karl Marx. Who is he? What is its religious nature? What god did he serve with his life? What love and what hatred ignited the soul of this man? To give perhaps a definite, final answer to this fundamental and decisive question of Marxism was also a personal need for the author, who for several years was under the strong influence of Marx, who devoted himself entirely to the assimilation and development of his ideas and then so difficultly and painfully freed himself from the hypnosis of this influence. I want to make ends meet, check myself one last time and, leaving forever from my previous home, look with a cooled, critical eye at the object of my ardent young passion. 1 To the question posed, the reader does not expect, of course, to receive a truism and simple answer, capable of satisfying only zealous Marxists from the beginning, namely, that Marx’s soul was entirely woven from socialist feelings, that he loved and pitied the oppressed workers, and hated the capitalist oppressors and, moreover, selflessly believed in the advent of the bright kingdom of socialism. If all this were so simple, there would, of course, be nothing to talk about. However, this is both true and at the same time not entirely true, in any case, it is immeasurably more complicated and wiser. And, first of all, as for Marx’s personal psychology, the way I perceive it, it seems rather doubtful to me that such feelings as love, direct compassion, generally warm sympathy for human suffering, played such a truly primary role in his mental life. It is not for nothing that even his father, during Marx’s student years, once dropped the phrase in a letter to him: “Does your heart correspond to your head, your talents?” And he, therefore, hesitated before this question. Unfortunately, when characterizing the personality of Marx and the history of his life, we are faced with the complete absence of any documentary material. There are almost no characteristics of his personality, made by a subtle and competent observer and not pursuing the goal of giving an indispensable social-democratic “life” (such as the memoirs of Lafargue and Liebknecht). Therefore, in the characterization of Marx there inevitably remains room for subjectivism. Judging by Marx's printed works, his soul was generally much more accessible to the elements of anger, hatred, vengeful feelings than to the opposite feelings - sometimes holy anger, it is true, but often completely unholy. It deserves all sorts of sympathy and respect when Marx hurls thunder at the cruelty of capitalists and capitalism, at the heartlessness of the current social system, but somehow this is perceived differently when right there, along with these thunder, one encounters arrogant and malicious antics against those who disagree, no matter who it is - Lassalle 2 or McCulloch, 3 Herzen 4 or Malthus, Proudhon or Senior. Marx was unusually easily drawn into personal polemics, and it must be admitted that in general this polemic is very unattractive, no matter how hard they try to refute it. Marx wrote as many as three polemical books (not to mention trifles), and these works are now painful to read, and not only because polemics in general arouse more interest among writers than among readers. One of these books is directed against Vogt and is full of emigrant squabbles and mutual accusations of the most unworthy actions, in particular espionage; the second book is against Marx’s former friend Bruno Bauer, because of whose removal from the Berlin university Marx allegedly abandoned the idea of ​​a professorship, full of mockery and for some reason unnecessarily given a blasphemous title (“The Holy Family”); finally, the third is the most famous and valuable book against Proudhon, the tone of which also does not correspond either to the topic or to Marx’s recent relationship with Proudhon. And how many of these polemical beauties, which were difficult to reconcile even at the time of the greatest passion for Marx, are in the bibliographical notes of the first volume of Capital, how many cannon shots there are at sparrows, unnecessary sarcasm and even just rudeness (how else can one define it, for example, a note about Malthus and the Protestant clergy and their excessive childbearing, pp. 516–518 trans., ed. Struve)” The memories of some of his contemporaries from the outside, from neutral circles, coinciding with this immediate impression, portray Marx as a self-confident, imperious person who does not tolerate objections (one must remember the struggle between Marx and Bakunin in the International and, in general, the history of its collapse). It is well known what a sharp characterization of Marx, based on a number of verified facts, is given by Herzen, who, however, did not personally know Marx. (In the new, legal edition of Herzen’s works, see volume III, “The Past and the Duma,” chapter: “Germans in Emigration.” Herzen tells here how Marx accused Bakunin of espionage when he was in prison and could not defend himself, as well as a number of attempts to cast the shadow of accusations on Herzen himself, whom Marx did not even know personally.) “Democratic dictator” - this is how Annenkov defines Marx (in his famous memoirs). And this definition seems to us to correctly express the general impression of Marx, 5 of this impatient and imperious self-affirmation, which permeates everything in which his personality is imprinted. A characteristic feature of dictatorial-type natures is their straightforward and rather unceremonious attitude towards human individuality; people turn for them, as it were, into algebraic signs, intended to be a means for one or another, even very lofty, goals or an object for more or less energetic, even the most benevolent, influence. In the field of theory, this trait will be expressed in a lack of attention to a specific, living human personality, in other words, in ignoring the problem of individuality. This theoretical ignoring of the individual, the elimination of the problem of the individual under the pretext of a sociological interpretation of history, is also unusually characteristic of Marx. For him, the problem of individuality, the absolutely indecomposable core of the human personality, its integral nature does not exist. Marx the thinker, unwittingly submitting here to Marx the man, completely dissolved individuality in sociology, i.e. not only what is truly soluble in it, but also what is completely insoluble, and this feature of it, by the way, has facilitated the construction of bold and generalizing concepts of the “economic understanding of history,” where a funeral song is sung for personality and personal creativity in general. Marx was not embarrassed, did not even make any noticeable impression by the rebellion of Stirner, who was his contemporary and from whom Marx’s teacher Feuerbach had such a hard time 6 he safely passed, also without any visible consequences for himself, the powerful ethical individualism of Kant and Fichte, whose breath filled the very air of Germany in the 30s (how this influence is felt even in Lassalle!). And even more so, the corrosive criticism of the “underground man” Dostoevsky, who, among other rights, defends the natural right to... stupidity and whim, just to “live according to his own stupid will,” did not seem possible to Marx. There was not the slightest premonition of the rebellious individualism of the coming Nietzsche as he laced life and history into a rib-crushing sociological corset. For Marx’s eyes, people form into sociological groups, and these groups decorously and naturally form regular geometric figures, as if apart from this measured movement of sociological elements nothing happens in history, and this abolition of the problem and concern for the individual, excessive abstraction is the main feature of Marxism, and it thus goes to the strong-willed, imperious mental makeup of the creator of this system. In the memoirs of Marx by his daughter (Eleanor), it is reported that Marx loved Shakespeare's poetry and often reread it. We cannot, of course, suspect the correctness of these indications, all sorts of whims of taste are possible, however, looking for traces of this passion and tangible influence of Shakespeare on Marx in the works of the latter, we must say that such is not noticeable at all. And this is not surprising, because it is simply impossible to imagine an element more alien and contrary to all of Marxism than the world of Shakespeare’s poetry, in which the tragedy of the individual soul and its unsearchable destinies are the center. Indeed, it seems that almost the only trace that we find in Marx of Shakespeare is a quotation from “Timon of Athens” about gold and then a mention of Shylock, no less befitting an economic treatise, but it is the external nature of these references that only confirms my idea that Marx has no internal contact with Shakespeare and the music of their souls does not merge into one at all, but produces a monstrous dissonance. Mars, despite his turbulent life, belongs to the number of people alien to any tragedy, internally calm, least akin to the restless soul of Shakespeare. The main feature of Marx’s personality and worldview that we have indicated, his ignorance of the problem of the individual and the concrete, largely predetermines his general religious appearance, predetermines his comparative insensitivity to the severity of the religious problem, for this is, first of all, a problem of the individual. This is a question about the value of my life, my personality, my suffering, about the relationship of the individual human soul to God, about its personal, and not just sociological, salvation. That one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable, absolutely unrepeatable personality who flashed only once for a moment in history lays claim to eternity, to absoluteness, to an enduring significance that only religion can promise, the living “God of the living” of religion, and not the dead god of the dead of sociology. And it is this insoluble, even simply inconceivable, problem, apart from and outside of religion, that gives religious consciousness, religious doubt, and religious experiences in general such acuteness, burningness and torment. Here, if you want, is individualistic egoism, but of a higher order, not empirical self-love, but the highest spiritual thirst, then the highest affirmation of the self, that holy egoism that commands to destroy one’s soul in order to save it, to destroy the empirical, corruptible and tactile in order to save the spiritual, invisible and incorruptible. And this is not a problem, but the torment of individuality, this riddle about man and humanity, about what is the only real and lasting thing in them, about the living soul, accompanies thought in all its bends, does not allow a person to fall asleep religiously, from it, like from the grain of a plant, religious teachings and philosophical systems grow, and isn’t this need and ability to “search for the heavenly” a clear evidence of the alien origin of man! As we said, Marx remains little accessible to the religious problem, he is not worried about the fate of individuality, he is completely absorbed in what is common to all individuals, therefore, what is non-individual in them, and this non-individual, although not non-individual, is generalized into an abstract formula, relatively easily discarding what remains in the individual minus this non-individual in it, or with a calm heart equating this remainder to zero. This is what the notorious “objectivism” in Marxism consists of: individuals are extinguished into social categories, just as the personality of a soldier is extinguished by the regiment and company in which he serves. Vlad. Solovyov once expressed himself regarding Chicherin that this is a primarily “managing” mind, that is, doctrinaire in the true sense of the word, and Marx also possessed such a managerial mind. Therefore, the real aroma of religion remains inaccessible to his spiritual sense of smell, and his atheism remains so calm, non-tragic, and doctrinaire. He has no doubt that the sociological salvation of humanity, the prospect of a socialist “Zukuftstaat”, may turn out to be insufficient for the salvation of man and cannot replace the hope for religious salvation. The torment of Ivan Karamazov about the hopelessness of historical tragedy, his questions about the price of historical progress, about the cost of future harmony, about the “tear of a child,” which are dangerous for faith in the sociological salvation of mankind, are incomprehensible and alien to him. To resolve all issues, Marx recommends one universal remedy - the “practices” of life (die Praxis); It is enough to deafen yourself with the hubbub and noise of the street, and there, in this hubbub, in the worries of the day, you will find the solution to all your doubts. To me, this invitation to treat philosophical and religious doubts with the “practice” of life, in which there would be no time to breathe and think, as an outcome precisely from these doubts (and not for the sake of the special independent value of this “practice”, which I do not think of either denying or diminishing), seems something tantamount to an invitation to drink yourself into insensibility and thus also become insensitive to your mental pain. The invitation to wallow in the “thickness of life,” which has recently become the last word of street philosophy and a recipe for resolving all philosophical questions and doubts, also plays the role of the ultima ratio of philosophy in Marx, although not in such a naked and vulgar form, of course. “Philosophers have sufficiently interpreted the world, it’s time to begin its practical reconstruction” - this is Marx’s motto, not only practical, but also philosophical. Although Marx was insensitive to the religious problem, this does not at all make him indifferent to the fact of religiosity and the existence of religion. On the contrary, internal alienation, as often happens, does not cause indifference, but direct hostility towards this alien and incomprehensible world, and this was precisely Marx’s attitude towards religion. Marx treats religion, especially theism and Christianity, with fierce hostility, as a militant and militant atheist, striving to liberate and cure people from religious madness, from spiritual slavery. In Marx’s militant atheism we see the central nerve of all his activity, one of its main incentives, the fight against religion is, in a certain sense, as will become clear in the subsequent presentation, the true, albeit hidden, practical motive of his most important purely theoretical works. Marx fights the God of religion and his science and his socialism, which in his hands becomes a means for atheism, a weapon for the liberation of humanity from religion. The desire of humanity to “settle without God, and, moreover, forever and finally,” about which Dostoevsky wrote so prophetically and soulfully and which was the subject of his constant and painful thoughts, among others, received one of the most vivid and complete expressions in the doctrine of Marx. This internal connection between atheism and socialism in Marx, this true soul of his activity, is usually either not understood 7 or not noticed, because in general there is little interest in this side of him, and in order to show this as clearly as possible, one must turn to the history of his spiritual development. What exactly was Marx’s general philosophical worldview, and to what extent is it even appropriate to talk about it? A whole legend has been created on this score, which says that Marx came from Hegel and was initially under his determining influence, and therefore was, in a sense, also a Hegelian and belongs to the Hegelian “left”. This is how Marx and Engels themselves were apparently inclined to understand their philosophical genealogy in later times. We know, at least, the flattering self-characterization that Engels gave in 1891 to German socialism, i.e., Marxism (in Engels’s mouth these are, of course, synonyms), in the inscription on his portrait: “We, German socialists, are proud that we come not only from Saint-Simon, Fourier and Aries, but from Kant, Fichte and Hegel.” Here a direct continuity is established between classical German idealism and Marxism, and recognition of such a connection has become a commonplace in social and philosophical literature. 8 Although there are no biographical materials regarding Marx’s youth, clarifying the question of the actual course of Marx’s philosophical development is now made easier by the fact that through Mehring’s works we have a complete edition of Marx’s old, inaccessible works, 9 especially valuable because they relate to his early years and the time when he had not yet become a Marxist, although he was already standing on his own feet, but had not yet developed his own doctrine. And so, reviewing the literary and scientific activity of Marx in its entirety, from the philosophical dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus to the last volume of Capital, we come to a conclusion that is quite sharply at odds with the generally accepted: there is no successive connection between German classical idealism and Marxism; the latter grew up on the basis of the final decomposition of idealism, therefore, only as one of the products of this decomposition. If some, albeit weak, connection between socialism and idealism still existed in Lassalle, then it was finally broken precisely as a result of the influence of Marx. The pinnacle of German idealism ended with a sheer cliff. Shortly after Hegel’s death, an unprecedented philosophical catastrophe occurred, a complete break in philosophical traditions, as if we were returning (to the age of “enlightenment” (Aufklärung) and French materialism of the 18th century (to which Plekhanov dates the genesis of economic materialism, and this is in any case closer to reality than the opinion about Marx’s Hegelianism). The opinion about the significance of Marxism as an “exodus” or the liquidation of classical idealism is refuted first of all, in our opinion, by the fact that Marx himself remained alien to its influence and although during his student days he made outward concessions to him - in the spiritual atmosphere of the University of Berlin in the late 30s this was almost inevitable - but he got rid of them very quickly. There is no reason to classify Marx as a member of Hegel’s “school” in the same sense as the representatives of its “left” wing – Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Strauss, etc. – belong to it. All of them, indeed, grew up in the spiritual bosom of Hegel and forever retained traces of this spiritual closeness to him, which can be stated. Nothing similar can be said about Marx. His Hegelianism goes no further than a verbal imitation of the peculiar Hegelian style, which so appeals to many, and a few completely random quotations from him. 10 But what do we find in Marx that makes him spiritually related to Hegel beyond this external imitation? First of all, the chapter on the form of value in Volume I of Capital was written “under Hegel,” to the fear of beginning readers. But Marx himself later admitted that here he was “coquettish” by imitating Hegel, and we will also add that he did it completely in vain. Given the generally meager ideological content of this chapter, which is essentially unnecessary for presenting the economic system of Capital, this deliberate pomposity rather makes one doubt the author’s literary taste than to believe on this basis that the author is spiritually close to Hegel or is a serious expert on him. They further say that Marx is brought closer to Hegel by the notorious “dialectical method.” Marx himself wrote on this occasion that “my dialectical method in its basis not only differs from Hegel’s, but is also its direct opposite.” We are of the opinion that one simply has nothing to do with the other, just as a degree on a thermometer scale is not “the complete opposite” of a degree on a geographical map, but simply has nothing in common with it except the name. Hegel’s “dialectical method” is in fact the dialectical development of concepts, i.e., first of all, it is not at all a method in the usual sense of the word, or a method of research or proof of truths, but is an image of the internal self-disclosure of a concept, the very being of this concept, existing in movement and moving in contradictions. Marx, however, does not have any special dialectical method at all, which he himself presupposes, moreover, different from that of Hegel. If we assume that he understands it in the sense of one of the logical methods, i.e. method of research, finding scientific truths, then such a method does not exist at all at the disposal of inductive, experimental sciences. What Marx (and his school after him) mistakenly called his method was in fact only a manner of presenting his conclusions in the form of dialectical contradictions, a manner of writing “like Hegel” (a predilection for antitheses generally distinguishes Marx’s style). The contradictions of modern economic development are a conclusion from actual study, and not at all a deliberate method of such study. Marx’s special “dialectical method” is in any case a pure misunderstanding, no matter whether logic is understood in Mill’s sense, i.e., the methodology of the experimental sciences, or in Hegel’s sense, i.e., as a metaphysical ontology. That is why the following tirade in the preface to the second edition of the first volume of Capital sounds so strange coming from Marx: “I openly recognized myself as a student of this great thinker and flirted even in some places in the chapter on the theory of value, resorting to a peculiar Hegelian manner of expression. The mystification that dialectics experiences in the hands of Hegel does not in the least eliminate the fact that he was the first to comprehensively and consciously reveal the general forms of its movement. She is standing upside down. We need to turn it over to find the rational grain in the mystical shell.” As the reader can see, Marx here declares himself a student of Hegel, but in this one has to see either a continuation of the same “coquetry” as in the chapter on value, or a direct mockery of Hegel, or simply complete philosophical insanity and, of course, least of all reverence for the “great thinker.” Having declared as a “mystification” everything that Hegel actually did only as Hegel, and projecting to somehow “turn his system upside down,” Marx at the same time declares himself his disciple and claims to defend his memory and honor against his detractors. If you trust only your immediate impression, and so to speak, purely artistic intuition, you can say that the above tirade itself is the strongest proof of Marx’s entire alienness to Hegel, and after it all further evidence of this becomes unnecessary. Traces of Hegel's influence in Marx are finally seen in his evolutionism. However, the idea of ​​evolution in its positivistic understanding is again deeply different from the dialectics of the concept in Hegel, insofar as the external alternation of events and states, although occurring naturally, or the external fact differs from the disclosure of internal, given and complete content, only emerging in a series of successive and internally related stages and positions, or from the unfolding idea. Despite their external similarity, dialectics in Hegel and evolution in the sense of natural science and positivism are complete opposites. Of course, the idea of ​​historical and, in particular, economic evolution could appear in Marx and under the external impression of Hegel, but it could also be completely independent, especially since it was generally in the air, almost simultaneously appearing in Saint-Simon, and Comte, and Darwin, and L. Stein (however, under the impression of Hegel), and among various socialists, both French and German (Lassalle, Rodbertus). Therefore, on the basis of Marx’s evolutionism, his genealogy with Hegel cannot be established with any sufficient basis. One can generally say that a gifted student at a Berlin university in the 1930s, while remaining internally alien to Hegelianism, could have assimilated even more of its external features than we find in Marx. Internal, more serious signs of closeness not only to Hegel, but also to classical idealism in general, to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, the indelible signs of this philosophical school are completely unnoticed in Marx, even to the point of astonishing. It is hard to believe that, having come into contact with the problems and teachings of classical idealism, one could remain so unaffected by them; this can only be explained by an internal repulsion from them, incompatibility with these problems, so one can only wonder why it was necessary to establish a non-existent historical connection between Marxism and classical idealism. It is especially striking that Marx remained completely alien to any epistemological doubts and critical caution, was not at all affected by epistemological skepticism and criticism of knowledge by Kant, but is a pre-critical dogmatist and, as the most naive materialist, puts forward the following thesis as his main position (in the preface to the “Critique of Political Economy”): “It is not the consciousness of people that determines the forms of their existence, but, on the contrary, social existence forms of their consciousness." Or another thesis, in the preface to the second edition of volume I of Capital: “For me, the ideal beginning is only a material beginning that has passed through the brain (sic!).” It is clear that these dark and inarticulate propositions, full of such meaningful and explanatory terms: being, consciousness, ideal, material, could not come from the pen of a person touched by Kant, whose criticism represents the only entrance into the edifice of all classical idealism. What kind of continuity can we talk about here! Marx says about the general initial course of his scientific studies: “My specialty was jurisprudence, but the study of it was subordinated and went alongside the study of philosophy and history” (preface to “Krpol ek”). In later years, according to Marx’s own statements and the content of his printed works, his studies focused exclusively on political economy (though Engels, who firmly believed in the universality of Marx’s genius, mentions his intention to write both logic and history of philosophy, along with plans for natural science, mathematical and economic works; however, not confirmed, on the contrary, refuted by the facts, this statement of a devoted friend does not seem to us to be based on anything more compelling than fleeting thoughts or distant dreams). In view of the fact that the time of Marx’s most intensive studies in philosophy can only relate to his early years, we must look in them for the key to understanding the real philosophical appearance of Marx. Unfortunately, we know very little about Marx’s student years, but even during these years it is impossible to state his significant closeness to Hegel. Marx spent one year at the University of Bonn (judging by his father's letters; without much results for his studies), and from October 1836 to 1841 he was a student in Berlin. The list of courses he took here for 9 semesters (cited by Mehring in his comments to the publication of Marx’s early works) does not indicate that even then classes in philosophy, as well as history, played a primary role: of the 12 courses, more than half; relate to jurisprudence, only one to philosophy, two to theology (!), one to literature and not a single one to history. 11 Mehring wants to weaken the evidence of this list, which contradicts Marx's later statement about the progress of his studies, by citing the fact that after the invention of the printing press, listening to lectures generally lost its importance. Of course, Carlyle’s saying that the best university is books is true, but even now this is not entirely true, and in the 30s of the last century, and even regarding the departments of the University of Berlin, which attracted students from all countries, this was not at all true. And in any case, the choice of subjects for listening, given the existence of academic freedom, still indicates the dominant direction of interests. What did Marx do besides lecture? We have only one piece of evidence about this, and even that is very early evidence, namely Marx’s letter to his father, written at the end of his first year as a student (November 1837). This letter aims to justify himself before his father, who reproached Marx for idleness, and contains a long, one might say, colossal list of everything read, studied and written during this year. The overall impression from this overly intimate letter is that although it testifies to the outstanding inquisitiveness, diligence and efficiency of a 19-year-old student, but, written under a certain mood, it should not be taken too literally, and this is impossible. It talks about two systems of legal philosophy (one of which is 300 pages long!), which a young author composed during this year in order to immediately become disillusioned with them, about an entire philosophical dialogue, two dramas, poems for a bride (which Marx sent more than once), etc. In addition, it contains a very long list of books read and studied, which even with good abilities would not be enough for a year. Youthful ardor together with youthful narcissism, great diligence, however, with some scatteredness, were clearly reflected here, but this is precisely what makes us treat this letter with caution, which, by the way, not only did not calm down, but even more irritated the old man Marx. 12 In any case, in this letter we see Marx with great demands, but not yet established tastes in the Sturm-und-Drangperiod. We know nothing about Marx’s further student years, except for the list of lectures. In 1841, Marx received his doctorate for a dissertation on a philosophical topic: “The Difference in the Philosophy of Nature between Democritus and Epicurus” (published by Mehring). It differs little from the usual type of doctoral dissertation and provides little material to judge the philosophical individuality and general philosophical worldview of the author (we leave the assessment of special research to specialists in the history of Greek philosophy). Judging by the dedication (to his future father-in-law), Marx here is a supporter of “idealism,” although it is not clear which one. Hegelianism is not seen here either (except in the preface, Hegel’s “History of Philosophy” is respectfully mentioned). In any case, we can say that those exaggerated expectations that could have arisen on the basis of the youthful letter were not realized here. Marx, however, at this time dreams of a department of philosophy, but soon abandons this idea under the impression of the expulsion of his friend Bruno Bauer from the university for freethinking. We think, however, that, judging by this ease of refusal from the department, this removal was rather a pretext, and the reason was his undoubted internal dissimilarity to this type of activity. The philosophical uncertainty of Marx’s appearance, together with the vague student “idealism,” soon, however, disappears, and after two or three years Marx emerges as himself, that materialist positivist and student of Feuerbach, under whose general influence he remained all his life. Marx is a Feuerbachian, who subsequently somewhat changed and supplemented the teacher’s doctrine. It is impossible to understand Marx without focusing on this basic fact. Marx himself did not call himself a student of Feuerbach, which in reality he was, preferring for some reason to call himself a student of Hegel, which he was not. After the 40s, the name of Feuerbach no longer appears in Marx, and Engels mentions him as a hobby of the past and sharply contrasts himself with him. And yet, to use Feuerbach’s favorite expression, it should be said that Feuerbach is Marx’s unspoken secret, his real solution. It is easy to understand that, having adopted Feuerbach's worldview, Marx must have finally and forever lost his taste for Hegel, even if he had ever had one. It is known what role the struggle with Hegel plays for Feuerbach, and this struggle is not at all a symptom of the further development of the system in the hands of the student, although moving away from the teacher, but continuing his work, but a real revolt, the final negation of speculative philosophy in general, which was then personified in Hegel, a fall into the crudest materialism in metaphysics, sensualistic positivism in the theory of knowledge, hedonism in ethics. All these traits were adopted by Marx, who thereby put an end to the philosophical past he had. Feuerbach stood between classical idealism and Marxism and forever separated them with an impenetrable wall. That is why Marx’s unexpected inclusion of himself among Hegel’s students in 1873 is some kind of whim, perhaps coquetry, historical reminiscence - nothing more. We know 13 that the central place in Feuerbach’s philosophy is occupied by the religious problem; its main theme is the denial of the religion of God-manhood in the name of the religion of man-theism, the atheistic militant atheism. It was precisely this motive that had the greatest resonance in Marx’s soul; From all the abundance and variety of philosophical motives that were heard in this era of the disintegration of Hegelianism into all sorts of directions, Marx’s ear singled out a religious motive, and specifically an anti-God one. In 1848, Feuerbach’s “Das Wesen des Christenthums” was published, and this work made such an impression on Marx and Engels (according to the latter’s stories) that both of them immediately became Feuerbachians. In 1844, Marx, together with Ruge, edited the magazine “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher” in Paris, from which, however, only one book (double) was published. Here Marx placed two of his articles: “Zur Kritik der Hegelscnen Rechtsphilosophie” and “Zur Judenfrage”, which are of great, paramount importance for characterizing his worldview. In both articles (as well as in the “Heilige Familie” dating from the same time), Marx appears as an orthodox Feuerbachian. One can only note a peculiar shade in the perception of Feuerbach’s teaching on religion, which has, so to speak, two fronts. Feuerbach not only criticizes Christianity and all theism, but at the same time preaches the atheistic religion of humanity, wants to be the prophet of this new religion and even reveals a kind of “piety” in this role, which Stirner so mercilessly ridicules in him. It is this “piety” of Feuerbach, his touching desire to worship something sacred, even if it were the crudest logical idol, that is completely alien to the soul of Marx. He takes only one side of Feuerbach's teaching - the critical one, and the edge of his criticism turns against any religion, probably making no exception in this regard for the religion of his teacher. He strives for the complete and final abolition of religion, for pure atheism, in which no sun no longer shines either in heaven or on earth. However, let us better give the floor to Marx himself. The article “On a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law” 14 begins with the following decisive statement: “For Germany, criticism of religion is essentially complete (!!), and criticism of religion is the presupposition of all criticism. The basis of non-religious criticism is this: man makes religion, not religion makes man. It is religion that is the self-awareness and well-being of a person who either has not found himself or has lost himself again. But man is not an abstract being standing outside the world. Man is the world of people, the state, society. This state, this society produces religion, a perverted consciousness of the world, because they themselves represent a perverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritualistic point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn completion, its universal basis for consolation and justification. It is a fantastic realization of human essence (Wesen is Feuerbach's usual term), for human essence does not possess true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, also a struggle against that world, the spiritual flavor of which is religion. Religious squalor (Elend) in some is an expression of real squalor, in others it is a protest against real squalor. Religion is the sigh of an oppressed creature, the mood of a heartless (herzlozen) world, and also the spirit of a soulless era. She is opium for the people. The destruction of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is a requirement for their real happiness. The requirement to eliminate illusions regarding one's existence is the requirement to eliminate a state that requires illusions. Thus, criticism of illusions in the essence of the matter is a criticism of the vale of sorrow, in which religion is the ghost of holiness. Criticism plucked imaginary flowers from chains, not so that a person would carry chains devoid of fantasy, consolation, but so that he would throw off the chains and begin to pluck real flowers. Criticism of religion disappoints a person, so that he thinks, acts, defining the surrounding reality as a disappointed, come to his senses, so that he moves around himself, therefore, around his actual sun.” This is all a presentation of Feuerbach’s main points, made almost in his own words. But Marx expresses the practical, revolutionary application of this “criticism of religion” much more clearly. “Criticism of heaven,” he says, “turns into criticism of earth, criticism of religion into criticism of law, criticism of theology into criticism of politics... The weapon of criticism, of course, cannot replace the criticism of weapons, material force must be overthrown by material force, but theory also becomes a material force once it embraces the masses. A theory can reach the masses if it can demonstrate ad hominem, and it can demonstrate ad hominem if it is radical. To be radical means to take things at their roots. The root for a person is the person himself. The obvious proof of radicalism for German theory, therefore also for its practical energy, is its departure (Ausgang) from the decisive positive elimination of religion. The criticism of religion ends with the teaching that man is the highest being for man, therefore, with a categorical imperative it overthrows all the conditions in which man is a humiliated, shackled, abandoned, despicable being.” In this article, in conclusion, one hears the “music of the future,” the main motive of Marx’s sociological doctrine: “The only practically possible liberation of Germany is liberation from the point of view of a theory that declares man the highest being for man (i.e., the teachings of Feuerbach! - Author). The emancipation of the German is the emancipation of man. The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart is the proletariat. Philosophy cannot be realized without the elimination (Aufhebung) of the proletariat, the proletariat cannot be eliminated without the implementation of philosophy.” The work of philosophy, that is, the teachings of Feuerbach, namely the theoretical liberation of humanity from religion, and the work of the proletariat are united here into one whole - the proletariat is entrusted with the mission of the historical implementation of the cause of atheism, that is, the practical liberation of man from religion. This is where the real Marx is, this is where the real “secret” of Marxism, its true nature, is revealed! This passage is usually quoted to confirm the imaginary connection between Marxism and classical philosophy, as Engels also wanted to establish. The reader sees, however, that nothing of the kind can be seen in him. On the contrary, such a connection is rather rejected here, since classical idealist philosophy was invariably connected with one or another religious ideas 15 and since, in addition, the teaching of Feuerbach, which in fact is taken for granted here, denies idealistic philosophy at its core. In accordance with this worldview, in the language of Marx, “human emancipation” at this time means precisely liberation from religion. This point of view is especially clear in the dispute with Bauer on the Jewish question. He points out here the insufficiency of purely political emancipation, because religion still remains with it. “The question is, how does complete political emancipation relate to religion? If, even in a country full of political emancipation, we find religion not only simply existing, but also thriving, then this proves that the existence of religion does not contradict the completeness of the state. But since the existence of religion is associated with the existence of a certain flaw (Mangels), the cause of this flaw should be sought in the very essence of the state. Religion no longer appears to us as a cause, but only as a manifestation of non-religious (weltlichen) limitation. We therefore explain the religious narrow-mindedness of the citizens of a free state by their general (weltlichen) narrow-mindedness. We do not claim that they must free themselves from religious limitation in order to free themselves from general (weltlichen) limitation. We affirm that they are liberated from their religious limitation only by liberation from their general limitation. We don't turn worldly questions into theological ones, we turn human questions into worldly questions. History has already been dissolved enough in superstition, we are dissolving superstition in history. The question of the relationship between political emancipation and religion becomes for us a question about the relationship between political emancipation and human emancipation... The limits of political emancipation are manifested precisely in the fact that the state can free itself from a certain limitation without a person becoming free in this regard, that the state can become a free state without a person becoming a free person. Members of the political state are religious because of the dualism between individual and clan life, between the life of civil society and political life, religious, insofar as a person treats the state life, which is otherworldly for his actual individuality, as his true life, religious, since religion is the spirit of bourgeois society, the expression of the separation and removal of man from man. Political democracy is Christian because in it man - not man in general, but every man - is considered a sovereign, supreme being, moreover, man in his uncultivated, non-social form (Erscheinung), in a random (!) form of existence, man as he is in life, man as he is corrupted by the entire organization of our society, lost, detached from himself, given over to the domination of non-human elements and elements, in a word, man who is not yet a truly generic being (Gattungswesen). A fantastic image, the dreams of a dream, the postulate of Christianity, the sovereignty of man, but as an alien being, different from the real man, in democracy there is a sensual reality.” It is not difficult to recognize here Feuerbach's idea of ​​Gattungswesen, of the human race as the final supreme authority for man. In Marx, this “love for the distant” and the not yet existing turns into contempt for the existing “neighbor” as spoiled and lost, and Christianity is reproached for the fact that it professes the equality of all individuals and teaches us to honor the individual in every person. Here again Marx's characteristic disdain for the individual emerges. A real person will appear only under the following conditions: “Only when the actual individual man absorbs into himself (in sich zurücknimmt) the abstract state citizen and as an individual man in his individual position, in his individual labor, in his empirical life becomes a species being, only when man has recognized and organized his forces propres as social forces and therefore no longer separates the social forces from himself in the form of a political force, only then will human emancipation be accomplished.” So, when a person abolishes his individuality and human society turns into either Sparta, or an anthill or a beehive, then human emancipation will be accomplished. With the ease with which Marx generally steps over the problem of individuality, and here, in the name of human emancipation, that is, the destruction of religion, he is ready to dissolve this emancipated personality in the dark and thick fog from which this “generic being” is woven, presented to the imagination of Feuerbach and melting into the air with any attempt to touch it. But this judgment also reflects the characteristic impotence of atheistic humanism, which is not able to hold both the personality and the whole at the same time, and therefore constantly falls from one extreme to the other: either the personality, through its rebellion, destroys the whole and, in the name of the rights of the individual, denies the species (Stirner, Nietzsche), then the personality is abolished by the whole, some kind of socialist Sparta, as in Marx. Only on a religious basis, where the highest manifestation of individuality unites and unites everyone in super-individual love and common life, only the union of people through Christ in God, that is, the church, a personal and together super-personal union, is able to overcome this difficulty and, affirming individuality, preserve the whole. But the idea of ​​a church or religious community is so far from modern consciousness... We cannot pass in silence Marx’s judgments on the Jewish question, in which his harsh straightforwardness and peculiar spiritual blindness are revealed with particular sharpness. With the same ease with which he drowns personal individuality in the “tribal being” in the glory of “human emancipation,” he abolishes national self-consciousness, the collective national personality, moreover, of his own people, the most durable and insoluble in the waves and hurricanes of history, this axis of all world history. The Jewish question for Marx is the question of the “Jew” interest-bearer, which resolves itself with the abolition of interest. What Marx wrote on the Jewish question makes the most repulsive impression on me. Nowhere has this icy, blind, one-sided rationality manifested itself in such naked form as here. But let us cite instead Marx’s genuine judgments. 16 “The question of the ability of the Jews to emancipate turns into the question, what special social element must be overcome in order to eliminate Jewry? For the ability of present-day Jews to emancipate is the relation of Jewry to the emancipation of the present world. This attitude is necessarily determined by the special position of Jewry in the present oppressive world. Let's look at a real, ordinary (weltlichen), not a Sabbath, but an everyday Jew. What is the secular basis of Jewry? Practical need, self-interest. What is the secular cult of the Jews? Money-broking (Schachern). What is his secular god? Money. So, emancipation from business and money, and therefore from practical real Jewry, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society that would destroy the preconditions for mercenary business would also make Jewishness impossible. His religious consciousness would have dissipated like a rare fog in the actual vital air of society... The emancipation of Jewry in this sense is the emancipation of humanity from Jewry. What was the very basis of the Jewish religion? Practical need, egoism... Money is the jealous god of Israel, next to which no other god can exist... The God of the Jews has become worldly, he has become a worldly god. The bill is the actual god of the Jew. His god is an illusory bill. What lies abstractly in the Jewish religion, contempt for theory, art, history, man as an end in himself, this is a truly conscious point of view, the virtue of moneyed humanity (Geldmenschen) ... The chimerical nationality of the Jew is the nationality of the merchant, the money man in general.” Why did the son raise his hand against his mother, 17 coldly turn away from her centuries-old suffering, and spiritually renounce his people? The answer is absolutely clear: in the name of rationalism and hostility to religion, in the name of consistent atheism. Br. Bauer put forward the assertion, with which Marx polemicizes in his article, that the Jewish question is fundamentally religious, a question about the relationship between Jewry and Christianity. I fully share this opinion, and from the point of view of Christian beliefs, any other understanding of the fate of Jewry is impossible. The historical and spiritual destinies of Jewry are connected with the relationship of Judaism to Christianity. We do not mean to go deeper into this question here, but for us there is no doubt that it is precisely religious affirmations and negations, attraction and repulsion, that fundamentally determine the historical destinies of Jewry. “Schacher,” the global role of Jewry in the history of capitalism, is only the empirical shell of the unique religious psychology of Jewry. Despite all the atheism of a significant part of modern Jewry, all its materialism, both practical and theoretical, under all these historical layers there still lies a religious subsoil, which the religious genius Vlad was able to feel and so amazingly discover. Solovyova. But Marx, of course, could not come to terms with the religious understanding of the Jewish question, and in order to pursue a consistently anti-religious point of view here, he had to sacrifice his nationality, blaspheme it and fall into a kind of not only practical, but even religious anti-Semitism. So, we see that already from the forties, Marx was completely alien to that fundamental indifference in matters of religion, which found its official expression in the program position of the Social Democratic Party of Germany and Austria that “religion is a private matter” (Privatsache). Of course, on the part of the party this is conditional hypocrisy, caused by tactical considerations, mainly by the conditions of agitation in the countryside. A superficial acquaintance with the literature and the general mood of the party of followers of Feuerbach and Marx is enough to be convinced of the insincerity of this statement, for, of course, this is still a party not only of socialism, but also of militant atheism. Marx never made a secret of this at all. In his famous critical commentary on the draft Gotha Program, Marx protests against the demand for “freedom of conscience” put forward there, calling it bourgeois and liberal, due to the fact that freedom of religious conscience is implied, while the workers’ party, on the contrary, must free the conscience from religious phantoms. It may be objected to us, however, that we became acquainted with Marx’s philosophical and religious worldview in statu nascendi, in an era when Marx himself was not a Marxist, having not yet developed that peculiar doctrine that is usually associated with his name in political economy and sociology. Without denying this last fact, we affirm, however, that in the “Deutsch-Französische-Jahrbücher” of 1844, Marx appears to us in a religious and philosophical sense finally formed and determined. After this, he did not experience any fundamental changes or revolutions in his philosophical faith. In this sense, the general spiritual theme of his life was already given; its main religious and philosophical motive was fully understood. It could only be a question not of what, but of how, and this how was Marxism, which in our eyes is only a special case of Feuerbachianism, its special sociological formula. The originality of Marxism belongs to a completely different area than the philosophical one that interests us here - it is a complication, if you like, an enrichment, a further development of Feuerbachianism, but not its religious and philosophical overcoming. Engels, in his pamphlet on Feuerbach 18, extremely exaggerates this difference, turning it into a fundamental one. Perhaps Engels was guided here by the idea of ​​​​defending the originality of Marx even in an area where he was completely unoriginal, namely in philosophy, so he presents here “economic materialism” as something fundamentally superior to Feuerbachianism. Meanwhile, this doctrine indicates only a certain sociological substrate for that historical process, which has the final result of the implementation of the Feuerbach-Marxian postulate: “human emancipation,” that is, the emancipation of humanity from religion, through its practical socialization, its transformation into “Gattungswesen” on the basis of a socialist economy. In all further works of Marx there is nothing that would cancel or limit the religious and philosophical program developed in the articles of the “Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher”. We have to believe that these articles represent, so to speak, the philosophical maximum for Marx, the highest point of tension in his purely philosophical thought. Subsequently, remaining faithful to what was accepted and learned in his youth, he deviates more and more from philosophical problems, so as not to return to them at all, obviously due to the complete inner peace that is given by the consciousness of his rightness and the absence of doubts in the accepted dogmas. It turns out to be a paradoxical conclusion that for getting to know Marx and judging him from the side that interests us and, moreover, the most essential side of him, the greatest material is provided precisely by the era when Marx was not yet a Marxist, when his true spiritual appearance was not yet obscured by the details of the special studies with which he made a name for himself. So, the world-historical task of human self-emancipation arose in the consciousness of Marx. It was necessary to find an appropriate means to resolve it. Such a means was “scientific socialism,” the system of which Marx began to develop in his scientific work. And from that time on, the range of his theoretical interests and activities, as far as we can determine it from his writings and his own testimony about himself, narrowed and concentrated primarily, not to say exclusively, on political economy and current politics. However, the most curious thing is that at this time Marx’s theoretical claims were by no means limited to political economy, but extended to the universal field of philosophy of history. At this time, he developed a “materialist understanding of history,” which claims to provide the key to understanding the entire historical existence. No matter how we feel about this famous “discovery” of Marx, 19 we are interested here in how it was actually made, what is its psychology, its internal motive. We know that during this time Marx was not, at least to any appreciable extent, engaged in either history or philosophy. 20 This means that the “discovery” did not appear as a consequence of a new theoretical deepening, but as a new formula, dogmatically put forth and accepted on faith, a kind of artistic intuition, and not the fruit of scientific research (as, incidentally, many of the truly scientific discoveries will be born). The elements from the combination of which a materialist understanding of history was formed are easy to distinguish: on the one hand, this is the same Feuerbachian doctrine of militant atheism that we already know, on the other, a strong impression received from the facts of economic reality both through studies in political economy and current politics. Consequently, the new doctrine does not lead beyond the old worldview, although it complicates it. In particular, as for religion, its philosophical interpretation becomes even cruder, although it does not change in essence. It is declared, together with other “forms of consciousness,” to be a “superstructure” over the economic “base.” In the first volume of Capital we encounter the following judgment about it, which essentially does not take us any further than the articles on Hegel and other works of the 40s: “For a society of commodity producers, whose social production relation consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, that is, as values, and in this material form they relate one to another their private works as identical human labor - for such a society Christianity with its cult of the abstract man, especially Christianity in its bourgeois form - Protestantism, deism, etc. - represents the most suitable religion." 21 This is Feuerbach translated only into the language of political economy and, in particular, the economic system of Marx. The further general judgment about religion sounds like an echo of Feuerbach: “The religious reflection of the real world can disappear altogether only when the conditions of the practical everyday life of people daily present to them completely clear and reasonable relationships of man to man and to nature. The social process of life, that is, the material process of production, will only throw off its mystical veil when it, as a product of freely united people, comes under their conscious and planned control.” 22 We see from the example of these judgments - and this is all that can be found in Marx during this period - that Marx’s religious thought from the adoption of the dogma of economic materialism did not become any more complicated or enriched; it still repeats the provisions learned from Feuerbach. This dogma does not force us to give up anything here or revise it anew, but leaves everything as before, giving only a special formula that makes the special subject of new scientific studies - political economy - the science of all sciences, declares it the key to all “ideologies,” that is, to the entire spiritual life of mankind. In conclusion, let us touch upon the unique imprint that socialism received from Marx. And here we must state that the deepest, determining influence of Marx on the socialist movement in Germany, and later in other countries, was manifested not so much in his political and economic program, but in his general religious and philosophical appearance. The Social Democratic Party, in general the political form of the labor movement in Germany, was created not by Marx, who, in fact, made an unsuccessful attempt to divert it onto the wrong path of international organization (the “Communist Manifesto” also calls for it), but by Lassalle, who founded and finally put the labor party on the rails. Its further development and fate were determined by the specific conditions of the Prussian-German regime and subsequent historical events, but not by the influence of Marx. True, with his economic works, Marx determined the worldview of social democratic theorists and, through them, the official credo of the party. However, this theoretical credo is by no means so inextricably linked with the actual program, which is not theoretical Marxism, but the so-called minimum program, more or less common to all democratic parties, regardless of their relationship to Marx. The tangible influence of Marxism is reflected here only in the fact that its dogma still binds the party’s legs on the agrarian question, and even here the urgent need of life forces us to completely neglect this dogma, as the Russian Social Democrats have already done, and the Germans do too. In addition, it should be obvious to every economist how far behind the developing life and social science the purely economic doctrine of Marx has already fallen behind due to time; revealing more and more new flaws and simply becoming outdated, it is increasingly of purely historical interest, relegated to the shrine of the history of political economy, where the name of Marx, of course, should be ranked among the host of honorable names of Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Liszt, Rodbertus and other creators of political economy. So, no matter how risky such an assertion may be and no matter how contrary it may be to the prevailing opinion, we still consider it very plausible that even without Marx the labor movement would have taken its current political form, a Social-Democratic Labor Party would have been created with approximately the same program and tactics as the existing one. But Marx left on it the indelible stamp of his spirit (and, consequently, the spirit of which he himself was an instrument) in a philosophical-religious relationship, and through Marx and Feuerbach. The general concept of socialism developed by Marx, of course, is imbued with this spirit and meets the needs of militant atheism; he gave it the tone that, as they say, makes music, turning socialism into a means of combating religion. No matter how clear the general historical tasks of socialism may seem, the specific forms of the socialist movement, we know, can differ greatly in their spiritual content and ethical value. It may be inspired by high, purely religious enthusiasm, since socialism seeks the realization of truth, justice and love in social relations, but it may be distinguished by the predominance of feelings of a different, not so high order: class hatred, selfishness, the same bourgeoisism - only inverted - in a word, those feelings that, under the form of a class point of view and class interests, play such a dominant role in the preaching of Marxism. Indignation against evil is, of course, a lofty and even holy feeling, without which a living person and public figure cannot do without, but there is a subtle, almost elusive and yet extremely real line, crossing which this holy feeling turns into something not holy at all; we understand all the ease, naturalness, even imperceptibility of such a transformation, but the predominance of feelings of one order or another determines the spiritual physiognomy of both a person and movements, although in our practical age it is not customary to be interested in the inner side, unless it has immediate practical significance. The entire doctrine of Marx, as it flowed from his main religious motive - from his militant atheism: economic materialism, and the preaching of class enmity à outrance, and the denial of universal human values and universally binding norms outside the boundaries of class interest, and finally, the doctrine of the immutable abyss separating two worlds - the proletariat, endowed with a higher mission, and the “common reactionary mass” of its oppressors - all these teachings could act, of course, only in the direction of coarsening, grounding, giving a more prosaic and economic character to the socialist movement, making the notes of class hatred more audible in it than the notes of universal love. We by no means attribute the introduction of this shade into the movement to the influence of Marx alone; on the contrary, this spiritual temptation is too great for the socialist movement without it and, of course, has found and is finding many ways both before and now (and here in Russia), but Marx was its powerful instrument. Marx’s personal influence in the socialist movement was reflected most of all precisely by the strengthening of that anti-religious, godless element that rages in it, as in our entire culture, and which will not say its last word without receiving an adequate, albeit final, embodiment. With great wisdom and a deep understanding of the true nature of the anti-religious element, striving to take over the socialist movement and seduce it, Vladimir Solovyov in the story about the Antichrist portrays him, among other things, as a social reformer, a socialist. And in socialism, as throughout the entire line of our culture, there is a struggle between Christ and Antichrist... “Thy Kingdom come! Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven!” This is our prayer. This is also the ultimate goal of the world and historical process. This should be the highest and only criterion for evaluating human actions, defining them as a plus or minus in the universe, giving them an absolute and final, i.e., religious coefficient. Have we used the powers given to us by God to create the Kingdom of God, which we have been given not only to expect, but also to prepare to the best of our ability, at least as the last and insignificant masons - there is nothing insignificant in this matter - or have we wasted these powers in vain, in shameful idleness and laziness, or, finally, have we used them for work “in our own name,” alien and hostile to the goals of the Kingdom of God? In the life and activity of everyone, in different combinations, there are elements of all these three categories, and no one dares to draw the overall balance and pronounce the final verdict about his neighbor: he is an enemy of the cause of God! But this impossibility of a final assessment, which belongs only to the righteous judgment of God, in no way frees us from the duty to peer with an inquisitive gaze into life, where evil, as we know, wages an irreconcilable struggle with good and, what is most dangerous in this struggle, sometimes appears under the guise of good, differing from it not by external, but only by internal signs. And, true to this demand, although by no means daring to draw a general conclusion, we must discern in Marx, along with the work of the Lord, an energy of a completely different order, ominous and dangerous - he mysteriously and terribly doubles. The socialist activity of Marx as one of the leaders of the movement aimed at protecting the disadvantaged in capitalist society and transforming the social system on the principles of justice, equality and freedom, according to its objective goals, it would seem, should be recognized as work for the creation of the Kingdom of God. But the fact that he wanted to make this movement a means for destroying the sacred in man and putting himself in its place and was guided by this goal in his activities, from a religious point of view should receive a negative assessment; here we have precisely that subtle and most dangerous temptation when good and evil differ not from the outside, but from the inside. What outweighs here - plus or minus - we will know only when our own balance is drawn up, and we ourselves must leave the question open. However, to express here what, after many years of intense peering into the spiritual face of Marx, we saw in him and what many others do not see, we considered it our moral duty, a matter of conscience, no matter how accepted it may be by those who are akin to precisely this dark, shadow side of Marx’s spirit. I assume here that the external facts of Marx’s biography are known and I have in mind not a biographical, but a psychological interest. Look at the first page of Volume I of Capital at Marx’s attack against his colleague and friend, who was already long dead: instead of giving Lassalle his due here, Marx only accuses him, albeit in confusing terms, of plagiarizing himself. Here are some examples: “One of the virtuosos in this pretentious cretinism, McCulloch... speaks with the affected naivety of an eight-year-old child” (“Capital”, volume I, 363, note 216). In general, in the notes of Capital there are epithets “vulgar, ridiculous” and the like. are encountered at every step, and this bad taste was, unfortunately, adopted by the followers of Marx, in particular, and instilled in our literature. There was a rude and tasteless trick addressed to Herzen in volume I of Capital, in the first edition, which was subsequently eliminated by the author himself from other editions. Georg Adler in his book “Die Grundlagen der Karl Marx'schen Kritik der bestehenden Volkswirtschaft” (Tübingen, 1887) quotes an interesting passage from a letter from the democrat Trekhov, who visited Marx in London. Trekhov here, by the way, formulates his personal impressions of him: “Marx impressed me not only of rare mental superiority, but also of a significant personality. If he had as much heart as mind, as much love as hate, I would be ready to go into the fire for him, despite the fact that he not only made me feel in various ways, but in the end openly expressed his complete disdain for me. He is the only one and the first among us to whom I would entrust the right to rule and not get lost in trifles during great events. I regret only for the sake of our common goal that this man, along with his outstanding mind, does not have a noble heart. He laughs at the fools who piously repeat after him the catechism of the proletarians, as well as at the communists à la Willich, as well as at the bourgeoisie. The only people he respects are aristocrats, real aristocrats, with full consciousness of this. To remove them from power, he needs strength, which he finds only in the proletarians, which is why he brought his system to them. Despite all the assurances to the contrary, perhaps it was thanks to them that I received the impression that his personal domination was the goal of all his actions” (283, note). Of course, we do not at all think of accepting what is said here à la lettre, but the general tone is consistent with what both Annenkov and Herzen report. Pointing out this connection is, among other things, the merit of Prof. Masaryk in his famous book on Marxism, ch. XI. For example, even a researcher who has so carefully and widely studied the literature on the issue as Prof. Masaryk, in his book (Die philosophischen und soziologischen Grundlagen des Marxismus. Wien, 18$9) also confirms that “Marx’s socialism grew mainly out of German philosophy”, that “Marx’s philosophical foundations, his, so to speak, philosophical skeleton, is the philosophy of Hegel, Hegel, shaped the spirit of Marx”, finally, that “Marx appeared for the first time in literature as a Hegelian, an adherent Feuerbach" (p. 22 and passim). If we take into account that although Feuerbach himself was once an adherent of Hegel, he then became an irreconcilable and bitter antipode of him, we will understand what a sad philosophical confusion is contained in these words: a Hegelian, an adherent of Feuerbach. After all, this is almost the same as saying: a Marxist, a follower of Tolstoy, or something like that. Aus dem litterarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle. Herausgegeber von Franz Mehring. Erster Band. Gessammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels von März 1841 bis März 1844. Zweiter Band. Gessammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels von Juli 1844 bis November 1847. Mehring gives his comments to these articles, into which, despite their inevitable bias, a lot of work and knowledge was invested. Those who wish to check the validity of these words can easily do this with the help of the literary index attached to the translation of Volume I of Capital, edited by Struve. Here it is easy to see how outwardly and casually Marx quotes Hegel, as if for the sake of mentioning his name, rather than for the essence of the matter. Marx listened to lectures: pandects - from Savigny, criminal law and Prussian local law - from Hans, church law - from Heffter, criminal procedure with ordinary German civil procedure - from Rudolf Erbrecht, in addition, lectures on philosophy, theology, philology, logic - from Gabler, on Isaiah - from Brutto Bauer, about Euripides - from Gschnert, general geography - from Ritter and, finally, anthropology - from Steffens. Even for Mehring, who tries to take every word of this letter literally, the size of the manuscript of 300 pages seems dubious, and he suggests a typo or error here. It was also published in Russian translation. D'. Engels, in the same magazine, in the article “Die Lage Englands” (written on Carlyle’s Past and Present) is also a follower of Feuerbach. Here we read: “Until now the question has always been: What is God? And German philosophy (that is, again, only Feuerbach. - Author) resolved the question in this sense: God is a man. A person only needs to know himself, measure all his life circumstances by himself, discuss them in accordance with his essence, truly humanely arrange the world in accordance with the requirements of his nature, and then he solves the problem of time. One should seek truth not in otherworldly, non-existent areas, not outside of space and time, not in a “god” living in the world or in the opposite world, but much closer, in a person’s own chest. Man’s own being is loftier and more royal than the being of all possible “gods,” who themselves are only a more or less obscure and distorted being of man.” Marx's article "On the Jewish Question" from the "Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher", as well as the chapter on the Jewish Question from "Die heilige Familie" are translated into Russian, unfortunately, not entirely satisfactorily: Karl Marx. On the Jewish Question. St. Petersburg, 1906. Book publishing house "Hammer". Translation by G. Radomyslsky, ed. A. Lunacharsky. It is curious that F. Lassalle, who in his adolescence dreamed of fighting for the rights of his people (in his diary), in later letters to Solntseva also reveals an extremely negative attitude towards his tribe, and this despite all his nationalism regarding Germany. We note only this psychological riddle, without dwelling on it here. I believe that the last word has not yet been said about it, because here a problem of colossal importance is posed for religious and philosophical thought. It is noteworthy that even in the polemical work against Dühring, which, of course, does not represent a philosophical work of the first rank, Marx wrote only an economic chapter; nevertheless, the philosophical chapters belong to Engels. "Capital", vol. I. Transl. edited by Struve, p. 41. Right there. Volume I of Capital even allows for the possibility of not only explaining existing religious ideas from life, but also deductively, a priori constructing them from the facts of reality. This is the place: “Technology exposes man’s active relationship to nature, the direct process of production of his life, and at the same time his social life relations and the spiritual ideas arising from them. Even any history of religion that does not take into account this material basis is devoid of critical foundation. Of course, it is much easier to find the earthly essence of religious ideas through analysis than vice versa, that is, to derive their religious forms from given real relationships. The last method is the only materialistic, and therefore the only scientific method” (p. 300, note 89). It would be better if Marx showed this “materialistic”, or in our opinion, simply fantastic method in action, instead of just talking about it in a footnote - the most suitable place for such scientific “discoveries”!