Marx as Millenarian
One reason why I continually claim Karl Marx to be a Christian millenarian heretic, is that when the history of such heresies is examined, even superficially, the parallels are too striking to be ignored.
Here is a quote from Chapter 16 of Paul Johnson’s magisterial work A HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. The words below are his.
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Christianity also had its orthodox tradition of apostolic poverty, and its theory that the world, in its pristine state, was egalitarian and just, before the irruption of sin produced the rule of the strong and the degradation of the weak. In the later Middle Ages, many millenarian movements launched themselves on crazy careers from these propositions.
They took two main forms, some combining both. The first group, usually termed ‘Free Spirits’, were antinomians, of a type St Paul had had to deal with in Greece. They believed themselves to be perfect and above moral norms.
The Abbot of St Victor, a fourteenth-century orthodox mystic, wrote of them indignantly: ‘They committed rapes and adulteries and other acts which gave bodily pleasure; and to the women with whom they sinned, and the simple people they deceived, they promised that such sins would not be punished.’
Some taught that women were created to be used by the brothers of the Holy Spirit; a matron, by having intercourse with one of the brethren, could regain her lost virginity; this was linked to their belief that they had rediscovered the precise way in which Adam and Eve had made love.
They were often arrested for attempting to seduce respectable middle-class wives; or for eating in taverns and then refusing to pay. ‘They believe that all things are common,’ noted the Bishop of Strasbourg in 1317, ‘whence they conclude that theft is lawful to them.’ These men were often executed, sometimes with hideous cruelty.
But many free spirits were not fraudulent or antisocial. In Flanders and the Rhine valley, the orthodox Brethren of the Free Spirit formed one of the largest and most admirable religious movements of the later Middle Ages, running schools and hospitals for the poor, and engaging in a variety of welfare work.
Female free spirits, of Beguines, though not exactly nuns since they did not live in convents, worked among the poor in the Rhineland cities – at one time there were 2,000 of them just in Cologne – and were models of piety and orthodoxy. Rome did not like these patterns of religious behaviour, since they did not fit into established categories. So the bishops and the Inquisition kept a close watch, and frequently acted to break up groups of brethren or beguines who looked like toppling over into heterodoxy.
The second broad category combined millenarian egality with an overt assault on clericalism and the established Church. The belief that the millennium was imminent was the signal for an attack on the rich – they were to be dragged to the ground in an earthly apocalypse before being committed to eternal flames in the next world. Such ideas were expressed in the sermons of John Ball during the Peasants’ Revolt in England; they recur constantly in France and Germany during the fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
In Bohemia, the only part of Latin Christendom where heterodoxy successfully established itself before the sixteenth century, egalitarians formed the radical wing of the Hussites after 1419; they had communal chests and kibbutz-type communities.
These movements were the obverse side of the Augustinian coin: they were the ‘alternative society’ to the total Christian society of which Augustine had been the ideologist and which had been successfully brought into existence in the West during the Carolingian period.
But, of course, so the argument ran, the orthodox Christian society had in every respect betrayed its origins and accepted the norms of the world; it was thus the society not of Christ, but of Antichrist, and to overthrow it would be the prelude to the parousia.
As Latin Christianity began to crack up under the growing weight of the enemies it harboured, the possibility of these alternative societies establishing themselves, if only briefly, became far stronger. There were egalitarian outbreaks in Germany in the 1470s, and again in 1502, 1513 and 1517.
While Luther was conducting his theological debate with Rome, and while various brands of Protestantism were establishing themselves as official Christian religions, mirroring social needs as Catholicism had done since the fourth century, efforts to overthrow society completely, and replace it by a new social Christian dispensation, were vigorously pursued by religious fringe-men.
These men and their movements tell us a great deal about Christianity and its distortions.
Their inspiration was often early Christian; sometimes pre-Christian. They spoke with the authentic voice of the Montanists or the Donatists, whom orthodox Christianity and the Roman empire had joined forces to persecute; indeed, they echoed the moral rigorism of the Essenes, likewise victims of a combination of official priests and the established secular order. They were an indisputable part of the Christian tradition, shaped by one of the matrices which Christ had implanted in human minds in the first century.
But they lacked the balance of the whole Christian vision. Outraged by the wickedness of official Christian society, anxious to replace it, they ended simply by trying to smash it, even caricature it.
They embraced violence, denied culture, devalued human life and adopted purely arbitrary – and volatile – systems of morality.
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In 1534, millenarians seized the German town of Munster, which they held until the following summer. This was by no means the first time Christian fanatics had seized a city in the West; there are many examples, especially in northern France and Flanders, from the twelfth century onwards. But Munster is the first case in which we have a proper documentation, and thus know what it was like to live under a medieval egalitarian terror.
The episode began on 25 February 1534, when the religious radicals captured the municipal council and their leader, John Mathijs, announced a Christian popular dictatorship. The ‘godless’ were identified: one, a critical blacksmith, was killed by Mathijs on the spot, the rest expelled – ‘Get out, you Godless ones, and never come back.’ At the same time a number of radical refugees were admitted, to form a police-force and bodyguard for the leadership.
The entire population was then re-baptized, the city fortified, all food, money, gold and valuables impounded and communized, and housing reallocated on a basis of need. Mathijs was killed in a sortie, and his replacement, John Beukels, the actor-son of an unmarried female serf, reconstructed the regime on a more formal basis.
He ran naked through the town, lapsed into prayer, and then announced a new constitution: himself as messianic king, or ‘John of Leyden’, assisted by twelve elders or judges, as a committee of public safety.
There was to be a new moral code. All books, except the Bible, were to be burnt. A long list of offences, including blasphemy, swearing, adultery, backbiting, complaining, and any form of disobedience, were to be punished by instant execution. There was to be control of labour, and compulsory polygamy. The regime was violently anti-women.
A man sexually dependent on one wife, thought Beukels, was led about ‘like a bear on a rope’; women ‘have everywhere been getting the upper hand’ and it was high time they submitted to men. Hence any women who resisted polygamy were to be executed; and unmarried women had to accept the first man to ask them. Beukels instituted competitions to see who could collect himself the most wives.
His histrionic talents, and the fact that Munster contained a large number of skilled craftsmen, enabled him to conduct his court as ‘king of righteousness’ and ‘ruler of the New Zion’ with considerable style. He had clerical vestments remade into royal robes, and designed for himself a golden apple, or orb; a new gold coinage was issued, stamped ‘The word has become flesh and dwells amongst us.’
His harem of wives, all under twenty, and his courtiers, were all beautifully dressed; and the ‘king’ staged dramatic performances and universal banquets, at one of which he distributed communion and then personally carried out an execution, being inspired to do it.
This gaudy terror was particularly hard on women, forty-nine of whom were killed for infringing the polygamy decree alone…
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
