Socialism, Gnostic Heresy
The idea of the Kingdom of God being brought about on Earth is behind all revolutions since the Puritan one, that intend to modify society.
By Dalmacio Negro
September 16, 2023
Taken from: https://ideas.gaceta.es/el-socialismo-herejia-gnostica/
Translated from the Spanish by Roberto Hope
Ortega y Gasset said «there are times of odium Dei, of great escaping from the divine. The present time is one of those». But the agnostic John N. Gray claims that «politics in the Contemporary Age constitutes one more chapter in the history of religion». [1] And, paradoxically, religions founded on odium Dei have emerged and keep still emerging. Modern forms of gnosis, said Augusto del Noce, for which Creation, the work of God, is defective so that man has to reconstruct matter, to which the gnosis opposes the spirit. [2] Gnostic thinking, said Ortega in Dios a la Vista, springs out of «a deep revulsion towards the world» because it does «not even admit that it was made by God».
Socialism is a form of gnosticism that fosters atheism, and is gaining ground against Christianity and other traditional religions, it heads toward totalitarianism, and ends up in the nihilism prophesied by Nietsche.
Its religious character explains its subsistence in spite of the failures and disasters in all the regimes that espouse such ideology, a mimicry of Christianity.
1.- Gnosticism, strengthened, but not justified, by scientism, has probably never been as intense in Christendom, as it is in our times. «Faith, wrote Hillaire Beloc in 1938, is now in the presence, not of a particular heresy as in the past ... or in the presence of a generalized heresy ... The enemy that the Faith has to face, which can be called "modern attack", is a massive assault against the foundations of the faith, against the existence of the faith itself ... The duel is to death». [3]
Belloc confessed not to know how to name the regime of heresy under which «we are living today» since «it is only distinguished from the earlier periods, in that the heretical spirit has been generalized». It is so diffuse, that «each person has to give it its own name».
Worried by the growth of statism, [4] and perhaps because of a lack of historical perspective, Belloc would consider socialism a mere political phenomenon — in England, laborism — and Leninism a political revolution. In 1938 it was not easy to interpret, for instance, fascism — politically a reaction against the internationalism of Soviet socialism — or the civil war in Spain, as religious responses, nationalist the former, and national, though Catholic, the latter, to the communist version of Russian religious socialism. The great heresy that Belloc did not know how to name is socialism.
Voegelin did attribute the growing post-war irreligiousness, which spawned from the French Revolution and favored disorder, to eternal gnosticism, which, allied with rationalism, promoted the despotism of reason [5] made actual in the «dictatorship of science» and the scientificist ideologies, practically all of them. But the gnosticism that has accompanied Christianity since the beginning was not the novelty. The novelty was the boom of socialism, certainly a gnosticism practically equal to all Christian heresies. Heresy that could be described as a Christian scientism or scientificist Christianity, since one of its unconscious idea-beliefs is the promise of the Kingdom of God, one of the causes of millennialism, that lends itself to attempts to bring it about in this world by political means when the living faith decays or when emotions, desires, passions or injustices bewilder the sensibility or reason. It constituted the objective of the group of the Fifth Monarchy, quite active in the English Puritan Revolution (1642 - 1649), against which Hobbes recalled Christ's sentence "My kingdom is not of this world" [6]
The idea of the Kingdom of God being brought about on Earth is behind all revolutions since the Puritan one, that intend to modify society. United to the égalite and the fraternité of the French one, it fosters socialist ideas. Peter Watson suggests, according to Habermas, that the Kingdom of God is the successful counterpoint of secular reason, generating the «uneasy» feeling that something is missing, as endorsed by Thomas Nagel or by economicism supporter Ronald Dworkin. [7] One of the missing things, said Hannah Arendt, is the sense of authority,a consequence of the crisis of the Church, upon the auctoritas of which had depended the legitimacy of the political regimes. [8]
3.- The major, most important and most decisive culture war of the present time is actually, a continuation of the war against religion, which began with the Glorious Revolution. A revolution against the Christian revolution, in a certain way the mother of all revolutions in being the religion of liberty — «Truth shall make you free» —, to alter the socio-political order determined by Christianity.
The French Revolution (1789) opposed the radical secularism of the State, to the faith of the Church. An opposition that led to paroxysm in the twentieth century with the triumph of the Marxist-Leninist revolution in Russia that transformed the Jacobin secularist statism into a religious communism that promises Paradise on Earth. Schumpeter said: «Marxist socialism belongs to that subgroup that promises Paradise this side of the gravestone»
4.- The most important manifestation of the great heresy is the Marxist one, about which Simone Weil (1909 - 1943) in an unfinished manuscript headed 'Is there a Marxist doctrine?' wrote in 1943: «Marxism is fully a religion in the most impure sense of the term. In common with all inferior forms of religious life, it shares the fact of having been used as opium for the people in accordance with Marx's exact expression»
The ideas of Paradise and Fall can be found in all cultures. They are the foundation of the mythical world. And Socialism promises the restoration of Paradise lost by the original sin committed by Adam and Eve in disobeying God's prohibition to eat of the fruit of the tree «of knowledge of good and evil» (Genesis 2 - 3). That promise is the great attraction underlying all socialisms, indebted also to Count Saint Simon (1760-1825) who, fascinated by the power of modern science which at that time was not distinguished from technology, inverted the most ancient myth of the Golden Age, situating it in the future, and conceived a new Christianity, [10] the fundamental principle of which was to «improve as quickly as possible the moral and physical existence of the poorest class of people». The Saint Simonian apostles and the positivist followers of August Comte, former secretary of the Count, who decreed that the ultimate and definitive stage of human history had begun with the science, they divulged the myth of the Golden Age. Carl Marx's thinking, whose point of departure was Hegelian, as Hegel was the first metaphysicist seriously interested in political economics, cannot be well understood without taking into account the Saint Simonian and Comtean ideas.
A myth, said Benito Mussolini, «is faith, passion; it is not necessary that it be a reality». And the myth of the Golden Age is one of the belief-ideas that foster the ideologic way of thinking, that fights to replace traditional religions; the mythical ones because they place the Golden Age in the past. The monotheistic ones, Judaism. Christianity and Islam — one of those heresies, says Belloc —, because they consider the Golden Age a myth (not so much Islam. though, even when it does not use such an expression).
5.- The cult of the divine is as ancient as humanity. Maybe because of that it is that it is in vogue. The churches, "the deposit of the faith", and the priesthood are in a low tide in the world that can call itself culturally Christian, affected by the influence of progressivism, a clearly gnostic derivative of socialism, the patron saint of which, according to English historian John Lukacs, is Adolph Hitler, a socialist gnostic. [11]
However, religion is fundamental to human life. Not only because of the well-known sentence of Dostoyevski's,«If God does not exist, everything is allowed». As René Girard says, whose Christocentric conception of history has ever more followers, believers and unbelievers, «humankind is the daughter of religiousness», and «religiousness is the mother of everything». Zubiri expressed it this way: «Man has no religion; man is religion». «The two spheres, of systematic religion and of politics, far from being independent of each other, are identical in principle» wrote the Agnostic George Santayana. «A people is dead when its gods are dead» Dostoyevski makes one of his characters say.
Inspired by the historical success of Europe and of European science and technology — made possible thanks to Christianity, that demystifies nature — the utopian way of political thinking that seeks perfection and seems to be exclusive of the culture and the civilization that were molded by Christianity, irrupted in Romanticism, in the atmosphere of which the socialist ideas began to take root. Man, said Ortega, is a utopian being. He dreams and imagines a better reality. And the Industrial Revolution and the social question coincided with the Romantic movement that impregnated the spirit of socialism.
The utopian way of thinking strengthens in turn the ideologic way of thinking — the illusion that human nature and society can be remodeled capriciously — [12], that competes with religions with the purpose of substituting the religious truth founded on faith with ideological truth founded on pure reason which guides practical reason, [13] The philosophy of the praxis is the democratic philosophy, said Gramsci.
6.- Dispensing with antecedents, details and variants of collectivism, it was Marxist scientism what established the ideological way of thinking, inverting Lutheran theologian Hegel, [14] for whom everything depends on God´s will and Christianity. [15]
According to Gray, the major political conflicts of the twentieth century, the consequences of which have not yet disappeared, were religious conflicts induced by the faith in scientism of Marxism-Leninism. Especially Lenin's religious faith in the power of science. Without Lenin, [the world] would not have been «devastated by the demiurgy of totalitarismism, that responded to attempts to transfigurate the human world» [16]
In truth, science should limit itself to recommend religion as a therapy to cure the ever increasing psychopathies due in great measure to the crisis in traditional religions. [17] But facts govern: if the twentieth was the century of socialism, it continues being so in the twenty-first, even when the socialist religiousness strictu sensu is also in decadence. Affected by atheism, of which it is one of the causes, it functions as a pretext for the oligarchies to get hold of power. Nevertheless, it keeps on recruiting followers attracted by its success, as is normal, thanks to propaganda or out of convenience, which is also normal.
As a religious phenomenon, it is a contemporary revival of the very ancient heresy of apocatastasis; close, according to the great theologian von Balthasar, to gnosticism as is not unusual in all heresies. Apocatastasis (restitution to the original condition) to say it this way, hidden, but widely extended, interprets the statement «restore all things in Christ» as a return of everything to their original condition. It includes that everybody will be saved, because hell is not eternal according to Saint Gregory of Nyssa.
7.- Religion is the mother of cultures and civilizations. Inseparable, however, from politics, which presupposes some people command and some others — the majority — obey, the essential infrastructure of the peoples is the degree of power of the religious spirit incorporated in customs, traditions, and institutions. Wer Religion verkennt, erkennt Politik nicht (those who understand religion do not understand politics). [18]
Thus, atheist or unbeliever anarcho capitalist Murray R. Rothbard, recognized that, in every society, a predominant religion has to exist: «If Christianity, for instance, is despised or rejected, some horrendous form of religion will occupy its place: be it Communism, New Age occultism, feminism, or left wing Puritanism»
8.- Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) understood this very well. To end the religious (though mixed with politics) wars of his time, [19] he would relegate religious confessions to people's inner fora of conscience, and postulated a compulsory State religion, neutral deus mortalis like Aristotle's immovable theos. The State's deus mortalis concentrates power, and from that power, which involves religation, source of obedience, emanates civil religiosity, which over time will become that of ideologies, secular religions, the religious nature of which it was Carl Christian Bry (pseudonym of Carl Decke, 1982 - 1926) perhaps the first one to perceive. He called Soviet Communism, Fascism and Nationalsocialism «disguised religions». [20] Raymonf Aron and Jules Monnerot named them secular religions. [21] Other common denominations are: Voegelin, influenced by Bry, political religions; Emilio Gentile, religions of politics; Marco Revelli, religions of war for «the unforeseen fusion of religion and politics»
Ideologies are immanentisms «nostalgic of the absolute» (G. Steiner), that tend to substitute for Christianity, a transcendent religion. By elevating temporal values into metaphysical dogmas, as straightjackets they constrain free thinking and common sense, which is based on traditional beliefs and life experience. A. de Murat proposed this definition of ideology: «set of ideas organically linked in an apparently necessary discursive progress, which represent human passional aspirations, to rationality and truth on the one hand, and to peace, happiness, and security on the other» [22]
9.- Today, the socialisms of Marx and Lenín are indistinguishable from each other. But there are differences. To Marx, die Religion ist das Opium des Volkes (religion is the opium of the people); a myth. Lenin was more categorical. Since he was Russian and in Russia, as Walter Schubart testified, everything is religious; atheism is not indifferentism but reproach, opposition and hatred of God. «Every thought dedicated to God is an unspeakable vileness» is Lenin's phrase akin to that of the cosmopolitan German. Socialist ideology has the advantage, in being atheist, of not being affected by the question of legitimacy nor of the right to resist, because, as Dostoyevsky said, everything is permitted. Whence, according to some, the absolute lack of morality characterizing socialism, which assigns no importance to corruption or to the crimes of its followers.
Marxism is an inversion of Hegelian Lutheranism. Leninism is an inversion of Orthodox Christianity supported by the myth of a Third Rome: «Listen to me, pious Tsar, had written Monk Philoteus in 1511: all Christian kingdoms have converged in yours ... Bizance is the second Rome; the third will be Moscow. When the latter falls there will be no more» [23]
Robespierre had said: «Half of the world revolution has been carried out already; the other half is yet to be done». And Jacobin Marechall, in the Manifesto of the Equals (1794): «The French Revolution is nothing but the precursor of another revolution, much greater, much more solemn, and which will be the last one». Lenin, religious spirit admirer of the Jacobins, imposed upon himself the duty to carry out the half that was still uncompleted. He evoked Robespierre and Marechall when he proclaimed malgré tout, the last and definitive translatio imperii with the myth of Moscow as the Third Rome in arrière pensée: «Russia is but a stage in world domination». His objective was to instaurate the sole empire wished by God. For the gods, would men in antiquity say, although Marx and his disciple would say for History, the great trickster, God's Ersatz in Marxism and Leninism. It has not been that way, but the socialist churches have an impossible-to-pay debt with Lenin. If Marx was Moses, then Lenin was Joshua, who demolished the obstacles to make out of socialism, in their intention, a world religion. Paradoxically, socialist missionaries have spread Christian ideas all over the world, such as those that all men are free and equal. It is a cause of current confusion over what liberty and equality consist of and how they are to be guaranteed.
Of Bolshevik socialism, Schubart said that it has left its mark on all socialisms: «It is a battle against religion and for religion» ... «it is a pseudomorphosis, a parody, of religion. A new doctrine of salvation (Heilslehre) without a god. It pretends to be the political religion, and the State to be the church. This is why it combats the Church and religion, but this struggle against the faith does not destroy it but enlivens (aufrüttelt) it»
10.- There have always been and will always be tribalist and collectivist ideas. Socialism, which today is the true opium of the people, fosters tribalism and collectivism.
It began configuring itself as a mythical religion after the Glorious Revolution, and today it is a veiled religion, the secular, political religion, the religion of politics or the religion of war, dominant in the world of a culture and a civilization determined by a demythification religion of liberty. Not only does It compete with Christianity but it is defeating it due to the Christian churches' intellectual incapacity to confront it or to their worldlyfication that leads them to become interested in matters foreign to religion, for instance, the social justice and climate change myths. Will Pope Francis end up establishing a Church of Climatology? It could be said that, while socialism and its idol, the State, continue being religious, the churches, the priesthood and the Christians, are disengaging themselves from religion.
Donoso Cortés noted the religious character of socialism almost two centuries ago. «Socialism is not strong but only because it is a satanic theology. Socialist schools will prevail on account of what they have of theological, over the liberal ones because of what they have of anti-theological and skeptical». [26] More recently, the famous Russian mathematician Igor R. Shafarevich (1923 - 2017), who lived uder the Soviet system, in his great book, The Socialist Phenomenon, [27] published clandestinely, insisted on the religious character of socialism: «Socialist ideas often played, in one form or another, a role in the movements and sects that emerged around the nascent Christianity» [28]
11.- The gnostic faith in the primacy of knowledge over and above the religious faith connatural to human beings, apparently confirmed by modern science and technology, which are impossible without the demystification of Nature achieved by Christianity, invigorates the «impure» religiosity of today's socialism, as referred by Weil, of which the guiding belief-idea is the faith in the earthly self-redemption of humankind. It is a secularization or politicization of the Christian belief in life eternal and in the Kingdom of God of the Our Father and of other teachings. Secularization or politicization done by means of revolution in the case of communism or radical socialism, or by means of the revoutionarism referred to by Monnerot, transforming the structures by means of the law.
Revolutionary mentality is anti-historic: it intends to change history, to stop it once its objective has been attained (or once the revolutionaries have gotten comfortably settled). Antihistoricism is a typically gnostic attitude, said J. Ratzinger: «A faith that leaves the historic aside actually converts itself into 'gnosticism'» [20]
12. - The metaphysical foundation of the socialist faith is the absolutization of the principle of immanence by subjectivist rationalism, influenced by protestantism, which eliminates the spirituality inherent to transcendence, substituting it with gnostic spirituality. [30] In the USSR, the religious spirit of the Russians, described by Walter Schubart in Europe and the Soul of the East (1938) [31] explains that convinced communists ordered by Stalin to be executed, died crying «Long live Stalin!». An attitude shared by many communists — the 'rigid' ones would Pope Francis say — and socialists of times gone, as the living faith of today´s socialist priests is faltering. Naturally, there are many in good faith, but the majority, and even those in good faith, when they inadvertently let themselves be swayed by the dominant trend, are demagogues — demagogue, by the way, is not a synonym of populist although a demagogue can be a populist — [32] that, proclaiming themselves democrats, today a conditio sine qua non for anything — «tell me what you brag about and I´ll tell you what you lack» — they profit from the credulity of the believers in the wahre Demokratie, the true or authentic democracy promised by Marx. In purity, real socialism benefits, partly out of necessity, only those who command, their close associates, the bureaucracy and their clientele..They characterize themselves by the use of eristic, the rhetoric of untruth. The only thing they do well, their detractors say, many with good reason, is propaganda. Whence their zeal to control the information media, most of which are today disinformation media, and education.
Socialist religiosity is kept most pure and sincere among the popular masses that follow, vote for, and support the gurus. Whether out of tradition or habit or out of resentment because of abuse received from non-socialist leaders in the oligarchies — generally statist — [33], because of discontent with their social status — the egalitarian envy —, because of education and propaganda, or other motives. The mass of moderate and radical socialist believers, among which Christian socialists and socialist Christians abound, sincerely believe, consciously or unconsciously, that die wahre Demokratie, an inversion of Hegel's der wahre Geist, the authentic or true Spirit or way of thinking, is Paradise lost and recovered, «whose kingdom will never end» as the Christian [Nicene] creed puts it.
13. Socialism is a political myth based on egalitarian envy «the reactionary social sentiment par excellence», as put by Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora. [34] Envy free from a sentiment of guilt, that tends to be the cause of resentment, being it collective. Envy «the root of infinite evil and corroder of virtues», said Cervantes, is a part of the human condition. Virtues control it usually by relegating it to private life, and there is a healthy envy that moves to emulate those who are better. In the economy, competence, criticized by many socialists, stimulates, when not contaminated, Schumpeter's creative innovation. And as Pedro Schwartz says, it is very important to limit the power of the rich, [35]
The mentality or spirit of the heresy of Apocatastasis, combined with those of the irenicist, almost normal more or less conscientiously — the hedonist at all costs pacifism — and the gallican or regalist of the absolute monarchies founded on their mythic droit divine des rois (Bossuet), a divine right to reign, of protestant origin, attributed to dynasties, Rousseau transferred it to the volunté générale of the people, preparing inadvertently the collectivist mentality of socialism, the gnosticism of which rejects, however with good reason, the mythical divine right of kings —the only justification of hereditary Monarchy, Jouvenel would say — invented by James I of England and IV of Scotland (1566 - 1625).[36]
14.- The religious character of socialism explains perhaps attitudes such as that of philosopher Alexander Zinoviev (1922-2006), oscillating between Soviet Russia and the capitalist free world. Formed in orthodoxy, in the socialist environment, but opposed to totalitarianism, he was very critical of Gorbachev's (1931-2022) attempt to save the Soviet Union, which was in a comma, with the perestroika (restructuring) and the glasnost (transparency) — Fidel Castro commented that «sad things were happening» in the Central and Eastern European countries —, because a certain degree of capitalism or free initiative was being admitted in the economy. Zinoviev [37] believed that the capitalist world also tended toward totalitarianism and supported the Communist Party against Gorbachev. Solzhhenitzyn and other Russian anti-communist dissidents shared his opinion on the West. Bukowski said about Europe that it was the new Soviet Union. To tell the truth, they were not mistaken.
[1] Misa negra. La religión apocalíptica y la muerte de la utopía. Barcelona, Paidós 2008. Gray takes into consideration the 1957 book by N. Cohn, En pos del milenio: revolucionarios, milenaristas y anarquistas místicos de la Edad Media. Barcelona, Barral 1972.
[2] The origin of gnosis, to which the manichæism combated by Saint Augustine is not foreign, are mythical Perian and Greek ideas. The key idea is that spirit and matter are the two uncreated principles that eternally struggle to determine the order of the world. The spirit is the good and luminous principle; matter, the principle of evil, is the cause of the physical world, of the body, of sexual activity, etc., that, on account of this, are evil. On gnosticism: E. Voegelin's Nueva Ciencia de la Política (Buenos Aires, Katz, 2006) and Los Movimientos de masas gnósticas como sucedáneos de la religión (Madrid Rialp 1966); H. Jonas' La gnosis y el espíritu de la antigüedad tardía, de la mitología a la filosofía mística, (Valencia, Alfons el Magnánim 2000); of the same author, La religión gnóstica: el mensaje del Dios extraño y los comienzos del cristianismo (Madrid, Siruela 2000); Ch. Markschies', La gnosis (Barcelona, Herder 2007).
[3] Las grandes herejías )Buenos Aires, Sudamericana 1946) Pp. 216 y 219.
[4] See El Estado servil (1911). Madrid, El buey mudo 2010.
[5] A. Adam. Despotie der Vernunft? Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel. (Freiburg/Munich, Karl Albert Verlag 2002).
[6] «My kingdom is not of his world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world.”» (Jn 18, 36-37). See M Walzer La revolución de los santos, Estudio sobre los orígenes de la política radical (Buenos Aires, Katz 2008)
[7] La edad de la nada. El mundo después de la muerte de Dios (Barcelona, Crítica 2014) Intr. p. 15.
[8] R. Lazu Kmita, «Hannah Arendt y la desaparición de la autoridad». eldebate.com (9. X. 2023).
[9] In Internet. Printed in S. Weil, Opresión y Libertad (Buenos Aires,Editorial Sudamericana 1957).
[10] El nuevo cristianismo. Diálogos entre un conservador y un innovador. (Madrid, Instituto de Estudios Políticos 1981). The history of ideas gives little importance to the thinking of Saint Simon, because Marx and Engels classified him as «utopian socialist». But Marx and Engels would likely be unknown without Saint Simon. And without his discíple August Comte, Inventor off the Religion of Humanity, which is the backdrop of the humanitarian ideology in vogue, that now justifies what in the past was unjustifiable. For instance, abortion, euthanasia, woke hysteria, etc.
[11] Cinco días en Londres, mayo de 1940. Churchill solo frente a Hitler. (Madrid, Fondo de Cultura 2002) VII, p. 218. On gnosticism and national socialism: Abbé Alain René Arbez', «Hitler, el ocultismo y el nazismo». dreuz.info.com (11. IX. 2023).
[12] See M. Desmet, Psychology of Totalitarianism. Vermont, Chelsea Green Publishing 2022.
[13] If, as Comte and Picavet said, it was Hobbes the first of the great grandes ideólogues, Marx was right in saying that the State is a superstructure. According to Michael Walzer, it was Calvin who made theology deriv toward ideology, and modern polítical thinking carries his mark.
[14] G. A. Wetter, Die Umkehrung Hegels. Grundzüge und Ursprünge der Sowjetphilosophie. (Cologne, Wissenschaft u. Politik 1963)
[15] On this myth, a Slavophilic version of the theology of history: O. Novikova's, La Tercera Roma. Antología del pensamiento político ruso de los siglos XI al XVIII. (Madrid, Tecnos 2000.)
[16] Ch. Delsol, La haine du monde. Totalitarismes et modernité. (Paris, Le Cerf 2016) at the beginning.
[17] Religion as a democrátic, scientificist, moralizing therapy that has reached Europe, is replacing North America's religious faith according to B. S. Gregory´s, The Unintended Revolution. How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Harvard U. Press 2012). R. A. Rappaport in Ritual y religión en la formación de la humanidad (Madrid, Akal 2016) does not expressly recommend religion as a therapy, but it can be inferred from his study. This function underlies also in the syncretist religión in vogue. An ideology that intends to replace religión with ideological education of conscience. Its backdrop would be the «New age» el movement, that aims to create «a new conscience».
[18] Títle of the collective book edited by C.-E. Bärsch, P. Berghoff, R. Sonnenschmidt, subtitled Perspektiven der Religionspolitologie. Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann 2005. The book responds to the need to understand religión without confusing it with polítical theology to be able to understand polítics. Since «the Polítical proceeded originally 'from the spirit of religion', the religious implications of politics and the implicatio política of religion» are obvious..
[19] See W. T. Cavanaugh, El mito de la violencia religiosa. (Granada, Nuevo Inicio 2010).
[20] Verkappte Religionen. Kritik des kollektiven Wahns (1924). (Munich, Ehrenwirth Verlag 1984). Bry militated in NSDAP and abandoned it upon Hitler's muniqués Putsch, of whom he was one of the first critics. The book is a «masterwork» says Sloterdijk.
[21] See J. Molina, Raymond Aron, realista político. Del maquiavelismo a la crítica de las religiones seculares. (ICP Ediciones 2021). De Monnerot, Sociología del comunismo (1949).(Madrid, Guadarrama 1968)
[22] La estructura de la filosofía política moderna. Sus orígenes medievales en Escoto, Ockham y Suárez. (Madrid, Istmo 2002) II, p. 131.
[23] See O. Novikova (ed.), La Tercera Roma. Antología del pensamiento ruso de los siglos XI al XVIII. (Madrid, Tecnos 2000).
[24] Dostojewski und Nietzsche. Sowie Aufsätze zum geistigen Verhältnis von Russland und Europa (1939). (BoD Norderstedt 2020) p. 198.
[25] Laymen from the Hispanic American countries have felt the need to form an International Cristero Army to affirm Christ´s social kingdom by means of a cultural counterrevolution. See of Mexican author Raúl Tortolero, one of the drivers of the movement, La Nueva Derecha: El Retorno de Dios a la Cultura ante el Supremacismo Progresista, (México, Ed. Kabod 2023).
[26] Quoted by A. de Villalmonte, «El pensamiento político de Donoso Cortés y el dogma del pecado original». (Cauriensia, Vol. IV 2009). Villamonte referenced E. Pagels' «La política del paraíso» (Adán, Eva y la serpiente, Barcelona, Crítica 1990)
[27] Málaga, Sepha 2015. Chap. I, p. 66.
[28] The sect of the nicolaítes o nicolaitans mentioned in the Apocalypse (first century AD), was, according to Shafarevich, the first manifestation of socialism. (Chap. I, p. 66). Shafarevich, agreed, however, with Popper in —erroneous{y— considering Plato one of the precursors of totalitarian socialism. In Greece, Rome and ancient civilizations in general the rulers respected customs, they would not intrude in family life, even though clientelism did exist, it cannot be called socialism in the current sense of the word. On clientelism: C. Yarvin, «Tanto el socialismo como el capitalismo son falsos». (La Gaceta de la Iberosfera.com 5. VIII. 2023).
[29] Jesús de Nazaret.(Madrid, Encuentro 2011). 8, 1, p 272.
[30] On the rise of immanence and the devaluation of transcendence, W. Weier, Die Grundlegung der Neuzeit. Typologie der Philosophiegeschichte. (Darmstadt, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1988) 7-9, pp. 109ss.
[31] Tarragona, Ed. Fides 2018.
[32] The first known populism was that of the Roman plebe, when in year 448 BC., retired to mount Aventino, that controlled commercial traffic on the Tíber, to threaten the senate oligarchy that ruled the Roman Repúblic. The senators had to yield, and granted the people the right to participate in government of the res publica. It is the origin of the Roman Empire's SPQR emblem, senatus populusque romanus. Erriguel distinguishes left wing populism, false populisms of the postmodern social democrat tendency, from right wing populisms. The latter follow the Roman model.
[33] Statismo is not necessarily socialist, though it tends to become so, and frequently prepares the terrain for it. Marx and Lenin were antistatists, but especially Lenin, considered the State necessary to achieve Paradise. It would be extinguished afterwards. Statist was Ferdinand Lassalle, Marx's social democratic rival in Germany. His phrase der Staat ist Gott, the State is God, is famous.
[34] La envidia igualitaria (1984). (Madrid, Áltera 2011).Also, H. Schoeck, La envidia y la sociedad (1968). (Madrid, Unión Editorial 1999). J.-P. Dupuy, El sacrificio y la envidia. El liberalismo frente a la justicia social. (Barcelona, Gedisa 1998).
[35] En busca de Montesquieu. (Madrid, Encuentro 2007).
[36] According to the Bible, Yahwéh resisted giving the Jews a king. See Samuel's first book. Rémi Brague comments: «The Bible is the only ancient text we conserve containing a similar crítique of monarchy; not of this or that concrete king but as opposed to other polítical system. The only legitimate domination considered is God's direct reigning», that admits free discussion with Him, being liberty the object of redemption. Brague quotes Saint Paul: «Christ has liberated us for us to be free» (Galatians 5, 1). Sur la religion. (París, Flammarion 2018). 7, pp. 184ss. The tendency of European civilization from its Greco-Roman orígins is toward democracy, of which the form of government is the Republic. It was deviated by absolute Monarchy. See P. Manent, Cours familier de philosophie politique. (París, Fayard, 2001). IV.
[37] In Spanish: La caída del Imperio del mal. Ensayo sobre la tragedia de Rusia. (Barcelona, Bellaterra 1999). Interesting prologue by F. Fernández Buey.