Atheists: Two Kinds of Humanism

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For the past three years, a surprisingly amiable intellectual dialogue between Christians and Marxist atheists has been under way in Europe. Although there are few domestic Communists around who are worth debating, U.S. theologians are showing interest in joining the discussion — even if they have to import a Communist. Thus Manhattan's Union Theological Seminary, the Harvard Divinity School and Jesuit-run St. Louis University were among the dozen institutions that played host to Roger Garaudy, the chief theoretician of the French Communist Party, while he was on a brief U.S. lecture tour this month. Last week officials of the Soviet embassy in Washington went out to Maryland's Woodstock Seminary for an evening of informal discussions with the Jesuit faculty and seminarians, including Father John Courtney Murray.

In Europe, Christian-atheist dialogues are becoming almost as commonplace as Roman Catholic-Protestant talks. Germany's Paulus Society, a Catholic intellectual organization, has sponsored three major seminars with European Marxists, plans a fourth next spring. The Vatican's Secretariat for Non-Believers, headed by Vienna's Franziskus Cardinal König, has set up a dozen joint Christian-atheist study groups. On the Marxist side, such leading Red theoreticians as Garaudy and Poland's Adam Schaff have taken part in the Paulus Society seminars. Many European Communist thinkers quote approvingly from the works of French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, whose The Phenomenon of Man was recently published in Moscow.

More Than Opium. Appropriately, the introduction to that edition was written by Garaudy, the Communist who has probably done more than anyone else to make the dialogue possible. Raised as a Protestant, Garaudy has been a party member for 33 years; in addition to his duties as a member of the French Politburo, he teaches philosophy at the University of Poitiers. Last year Garaudy gained enthusiastic reviews from Christian thinkers with From Anathema to Dialogue (TIME, Jan. 7), a summons to theoretical conversation that was published in the U.S. recently by Herder & Herder, a Catholic firm. A sequel to Anathema, Garaudy's 20th Century Marxism, is already a bestseller in France, one month after publication.

The underlying premise of the Communist quest for dialogue is that Karl Marx actually was not so ill-disposed toward Christianity as might be supposed from his famous dictum that "religion is the opium of the people." Garaudy argues that this condemnation must be understood as a response to the church's alliance with 19th century Europe's capitalist and authoritarian regimes. Marx and even Lenin, says Garaudy, were careful to distinguish the institutionalized church as they knew it from early Christianity, which was genuinely "revolutionary and democratic in spirit." Moreover, Marx acknowledged that Christianity had raised the right questions about man's alienation from society even if it gave the wrong, otherworldly answers.