A
Portrait of James Connolly V: The Link Between Connolly's
Catholicism and Marxism
James T Farrell, New International No. 14, 1948
RM Fox in his biography
James Connolly: The Forerunner (which has led me to write this
essay), remarks:
He
[Connolly] was a man of great individuality, combining an acceptance
of the Marxian view of economics and of history – as a
record of social struggles – with the Catholic outlook
which emphasized the value of the human soul. Connolly is not
by any means the first man to
realize the revolutionary implications of Christianity. If a
man is simply a bubble of gas, a product of chemical action,
he may be used as a machine
or as cannon fodder without any question of the degradation of
humanity. But once admit his possession of a soul and the case
against human degradation
becomes infinitely stronger. 1
Here it is
clear that Fox is seeking to explain the fact that Connolly
was both a Marxist and a Catholic. And
while this explanation is, in
a sense, true to the spirit of Connolly, it is, I think, unnecessary.
The revolutionary implications of Christianity need to be seen historically.
The Christian idea of the immortality of the soul – even though it
be the soul of a slave – was, in the humane sense, an advance over
the ideas of the pagan world. The concept and the practice of charity,
the ideas of love and of brotherhood of Christ and of the early Christians – these
also should be seen as attitudes which signified moral progress.
But even so, we shouldn't regard the pagan world and pagan ideas in
a monolithic sense. It is a well-known fact that the Greeks laid the
basis
for western
civilization. Also, prior to the rise of Christianity, the ideas of
the Greek materialists had already been exhausted, and the main streams
of
Greek thought had been given their course by Socrates, Aristotle and
Plato. Lange, the nineteenth-century scholar, in his History
of Materialism,
points
out that when the great progressive ideas of an age wear out, become
exhausted, insight and observations are then linked up with regressive
ideas, so that
inasmuch as human beings do constantly have good insights, they tend
to believe that these are necessarily related to regressive ideas,
if these
regressive ideas are the dominant ones of an age.
Lange here was criticizing Socrates, Plato and Aristotle; he
defended the early Greek materialists. One of his arguments was
that materialism
had
produced a high conception of morality. This is true for all
ages. Philosophical materialism – as distinguished from the crude materialism of money-grubbing – has
given voice to the most noble moral sentiments and ideals, and it stands
in no need of apologizing before the bar of anti-materialist criticisms.
Many examples could here be cited, but I shall merely refer to the nobility
of expression of Lucretius.
At the same time that we realize this fact, we need also to see that
Christianity and its contributions to western civilization cannot be
taken merely on
the level of philosophical discussion and criticism, as the anti-materialists
so often tend to take it when they attack materialists. Socially, Christianity
made a major contribution to civilization. It advanced a broader idea
of the dignity of man. This relates to the positive side of Christian
ethics.
The negative side is to be seen in the doctrine of Christian meekness.
Christianity cannot, then, be seen as a unified and strictly logical
and intimately consistent body of ideas. And our consideration of Christianity
here is not a philosophical one. The above remarks have been made merely
in order to try to clarify issues.
Just as Christianity registered an ethical advance for mankind, so
did the philosophy of political democracy. The best of Christian ethics
was
absorbed by democracy. There is a direct connection between the idea
of the equality of the soul of man and the ideas of such great democrats
as
Thomas Jefferson. Thus: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident;
that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator
with certain inalienable rights; and among these rights are life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness.’
At the same time, we should observe that mankind has advanced in the
realm of ideas much more than it has in the realm of overt action.
In all ages,
we can observe that, on the one hand, there is a wide and frightening
difference between the ethical conceptions of conduct of the noblest
thinkers of the
age, and, on the other, the gross realities of day-to-day living. The
entire history of civilized mankind is a history of exploitation, slavery,
cruelty,
war and injustice.
I have quoted from Swift's Modest Proposal concerning conditions in
Ireland in the seventeenth century, and I have, mainly with references
from Connolly's
own writings, given additional quotations which indicate the injustices
from which the Irish people have suffered. Readers of this essay will
be sufficiently familiar with the story of the injustices in advanced
capitalist
countries, in the past and in the present, so that I need not document
these facts here. Suffice it for me to point, in modern America, the
freest and the richest country in the world, to the phenomenon of Jim
Crow, of
lynchings in the South, and of the slums of all of our major cities.
At the present time, various Christian and especially Catholic thinkers
deal with the phenomenon of modern injustice, cruelty and slavery from
the standpoint of Christian moral precepts. They argue on this basis
that inhumanity in capitalist countries flows from the principle of
bourgeois liberalism, and that the inhumanity of Stalinism 2 flows
from the principles
of socialism as a continuation of bourgeois liberalism. Later on, I
shall have more to say on this point. Here I shall only suggest to
the Christian
critics of liberalism, socialism and materialism that they consider
the history of men in society since the advent of Christianity. I shall
offer
merely passing reminders to them.
On the opening page of the first volume of Henry Charles Lea's
great scholarly work, A History of the Inquisition of the
Middle Ages, we
can read:
History
records no such triumph of intellect over
brute strength as that which, in an age
of turmoil and battle [the
twelfth century
and
the early
thirteenth], was wrested from the fierce warriors of the time
by priests who had no material force at their command, and
whose power was based
alone on the souls and consciences of men. Over soul and conscience
this empire
was complete. No Christian could hope for salvation who was
not in all things an obedient son of the
Church, and who was not
ready to
take up
arms in its defense; and, in a time when faith was a determining
fact of conduct, this belief created a spiritual despotism
which placed
all things
within reach of him who could wield it. 3
And
Lea also writes of the priest:
Not
only did the humblest priest wield
a supernatural power which marked him
as one elevated above the common
level of
humanity, but his person
and possessions were alike inviolable.... The man
who entered the service of the Church was no longer a citizen.
He owed
no allegiance superior
to that assumed in his ordination. 4
Here we can
see some of the historical factors which served as a basis
for
the Inquisition. And Lea shows that the
development of the Inquisition ‘was
. . . a natural – one may almost say an inevitable – evolution
of the forces at work in the thirteenth century.
. . .’ Lea documents
statements such as these with the most minute detail.
He shows that the Inquisition was a development of
the social struggles of the times. The
punishment of heretics, the burnings at the stake,
the tortures, all of this was part of a complicated
historical evolution in the process by which
Rome emerged triumphant over local interests. Writing
of the rise of the mendicant orders – one of
which was founded by the great and lovable St Francis – he
concludes that even though their work was not lost ‘they
soon sank to the level of the social order around
them.' 5 This social order was marked by cruelty,
pitilessness, misery. Heresies, called forth
by the wretchedness of the poor and by their
desire to find the early Christ, were mercilessly
crushed.
Out of such social conditions, the Inquisition
was founded.
The life of mankind goes on, as it were, on both
the material and the moral level. The written history
of mankind reveals
to us, in a confused
way,
the growth of moral ideas which are, however, constantly
contradicted by actual practice. Moral realities
and moral statements do
not harmonize. And yet moral and ethical ideas
do have their influence. They have
given even a sense of dignity to slaves, to the
poor and ignorant. The story
of the growth of moral ideas is as elevating as
the story of their repudiation and betrayal is
in practice odious
and frightening.
The continuity in ideas and ethical conceptions
in our society is one which stands in the background
of Connolly.
From Christianity
he absorbed
its
moral values, and in his mind there was no apparent
contradiction between his Catholicism and his socialism.
This is, I think,
an important point
to keep in mind if we study his life.
In the previous parts of this essay, I have indicated
that there were circumstances in the history of
Ireland which
easily led Irishmen to
see the Reformation
differently than did European Continentals. On
the European continent, the Reformation was a major
revolutionary development
leading to the
breaking of the chains of spiritual despotism.
Early voices of the Reformation, such as Martin
Luther, were spiritually
revolutionary
and socially conservative.
The Reformation was part of the complex historical
development which saw
the rise of capitalism.
As Tawney says in Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, ‘The
storm and fury of the Puritan revolution has been followed by
a dazzling outburst
of economic enterprise . . . . ' 6 This
economic enterprise, with all the suffering entailed, led men
a step nearer to that emancipation of which
they still dream and from which they are
still so far away. But Ireland, as we have already noted, was
part of the underside of this development.
As Fox states, the Reformation was to Connolly ‘the
capitalist idea appearing in the religious
field.’ He quotes
Connolly:
As capitalism
teaches that the social salvation of man depends solely
upon his own individual
efforts, so Protestantism,
echoing it, taught
that the
spiritual salvation of man depends upon
his own individual appeal to God. 7
Fox further
remarks on this conclusion of Connolly's that capitalism is
the parent, the
Reformation
is the child,
and that it is
irrational to
condemn only the child.
In Connolly's mind, ideas of the dignity
of the individual and of community
were linked together. ‘We
are all members of one another,’ he
declared in The Reconquest
of Ireland. And in his conclusion
to this same book he declared:
The
objective aimed at is to establish
in the mind of the men and
women of Ireland, the necessity
of giving effective
expression,
politically
and socially, to the right
of the community (all) to control for the good of
all, the industrial activities
of each, and to endow such activities with the
necessary means.
8
Here is one
of the ways in which Catholicism was tied
in with his thinking. He
linked up ideas of
community and
conceptions of the dignity
of the
individual. The link, historically,
in the chain of political
and moral ideas
in Connolly's
mind was political democracy
.9 This is important. He
absorbed, largely
through his Irish predecessors
like Lalor and others
as well as from
Marx, the political ideas
of the Great French Revolution.
He did this as an Irishman.
The differences in the historical
experiences of the
Irish and of
the English and the continental
Europeans here
tell in the whole outline
of Connolly's ideas. To him,
individualism
was moral
and it was also political – political democracy.
As a moral doctrine, it found its source in his
feelings and beliefs as a simple Catholic. He
believed in the equality of souls. The ideas
of community flow into the
ideas of the nation. The struggle for a free
Ireland was, for Connolly, the idea of a free
Irish community. Among the Irish, the race is
often
seen as a family. The Irish nation, the Irish
community, the Irish as a family, these ideas
touch on one another. 10
Connolly's ideas about the
Irish nation and his views
on democracy are similar
to the view of
the nation as the
republic of virtue
held by the
earlier French revolutionaries,
particularly the Jacobins.
In the Abbé Sieyes'
pamphlet – The
Third Estate – What Is It? – which
was so influential in the Great French Revolution,
the author's emphasis was
on the legal and political arguments which would
justify and show the rights of the third estate
to constitute itself the nation. In their thinking,
jacobins like Robespierre and Saint-Just went
a step further than this.
They envisioned the nation not only in terms
of popular will and sovereignty but also in terms
of the individuals who would be the members of
the nation.
In their thinking, one finds
an austerity suggestive of
Protestantism. And the
dignity of man, to them,
was not
associated with
Catholic thinking. Reason
and republicanism provided
them
with their
basic premises. To
them, the foreign foe was
outside the country. The
enemies within
were the
aristocrats.
This suggests a difference
in the outline of their political
ideas as compared
with the outline of
political ideas in
the mind of Connolly,
who was, in
a sense, one of their heirs.
Speaking of religion and
theocracy in his Esprit
de la Révolution,
Saint-Just expressed the opinion that if Christ were reborn in Spain – in
the time of the French Revolution – he would be crucified again by
the priests, on the ground that he was a factious man who, under the signs
of charity and modesty, meditated the ruin of church and state. He argued
that a reign of virtue, patience and poverty would be a danger to monarchy,
and also that the Christian churches had lived most purely in countries
that had become republican. He thought that the people of Spain – a
Catholic country – would be the last to
conquer their liberty, and he contrasted Spain
with England where the hand of the priests did
not
lie heavy on the people as it did in Spain. Historically,
of course, Saint-Just is a predecessor of Connolly.
But he serves as a good concrete illustration,
nonetheless, to suggest more clearly the historical
features of Connolly's
own thought.
France was the cradle of
modern liberty in Europe.
The progressive
features
of national ideas, of
ideas of the
nation, come
from France. The French
Revolution would inevitably
have influenced the Irish,
as it did, and its political
features
and ideas would be
absorbed
by the Irish. The
Irish
did not pay a price for the
French
Revolution; they did for
the earlier English Revolution – the
price of the Cromwellian invasion of Ireland.
From France, the Irish could get ideas of the
politics of liberty; from England, they got the
economics of capitalism. Along with the latter
came
the Puritan invader with gun and cannon.
A man as deeply sincere as
Connolly, a self-educated
Irish working lad,
a man devoted to the struggle
of his own people
like Connolly,
most obviously
would not see the Reformation
as a Continental would see
it. The so-called
peculiarities
in historical developments
register
not only in social
and economic relationships,
but also in the outlines
of the thought of men
and in their feelings. Connolly's
own thought was
one such register of the
peculiarities of Irish history.
RM Fox quotes an article
of Connolly's in which
he replied to a priest, Father
MacEarlen, who had
criticized socialist
thought. In
this reply,
Connolly wrote:
I
admit unquestioningly the obligation resting
upon the Holy See to recognize the de facto Government and
the de facto social order in
any given country
or age. But side by side with, part and parcel of, that admission,
and not to be divorced from it, I insist upon the right of
the individual Catholic to disregard that
obligation and to be a
reformer of, or a
rebel
and reformist
against, the Government which the Holy See is compelled by
its international position to recognize.
Without this right, Catholicity would be synonymous with the
blackest reaction and opposition to all reforms. As an example
Ireland is illuminating.
For
the greater part of seven centuries, the de facto Government
of Ireland has been a foreign Government imposed on the country
by force, and
maintained by the same means. The Holy See was compelled by
its position to recognize
that government, but the holiest and deepest feelings of the
Catholics of Ireland were in rebellion against that government,
and, in every
generation, the scaffold and the prison and the martyr's grave
have been filled in
Ireland with devout subjects of the Holy See, but with unrelenting
enemies of the de facto government of Ireland. The firm distinction
in the minds
of Irish Catholics between the duties of the Holy See and the
rights of the individual Catholic has been a necessary and
saving element
in keeping
Ireland Catholic, and he, by whatever name he calls himself
or to whatever order he belongs who would seek to destroy that
distinction, or make
acquiescence in the political obligations of the Papacy, a
cardinal article of Catholic
faith, is an enemy of the faith and the liberties of our people
. 11
And
also in the same article, he declared:
As
individual Catholics, we claim it as
our right, nay, as our duty to refuse
allegiance to any power or social system
whose authority
to rule
over us we believe to be grounded upon injustice. 12
Connolly
then fused in his thought Christian and
democratic ideas of the past. He was
not, however, fighting the battles
of the past, but
those
of his own present. As he indicated, he considered these
to be battles against injustice. He believed in economic
justice,
and he wrote: ‘Socialism
is neither Protestant nor Catholic, Christian nor Freethinker,
Buddhist, Mohammedan, nor Jew; it is only human.’ 13 It was his idea of what was human, of human dignity, which
was central in all of his thinking.
1 Fox, James Connolly: The
Forerunner,
pp.131 Back
2 Farrell's Note: In passing let me observe
that Stalinism has even abrogated those
rights which man had in feudal society.
Morally it
represents a
backward swing of history which goes beyond the abrogation
of the rights of man
attained through the rise of political democracy and bourgeois
liberalism. Back
3 Farrell's Note: It is my opinion
that Aquinas' conception of God can
be correlated with spiritual despotism: ‘God is
not only His own essence ... but also His own being.... God is
the first efficient cause.... There can be nothing caused in
God, since He is the first
cause.... God
is absolute form, or rather absolute Being.... God is His own
existence.’ These
and many other sentences could be culled from Aquinas
to show that God, as conceived by this scholarly saint,
is completely
and totally independent
of man and of all the laws of matter. He is utterly
sufficient unto Himself, a principle above all principles.
God, demonstrated
as a self-evident existence
and proved by the principles of Aristotelian logic,
is so above
humanity that I would consider Him here to be unapproachable.
Face to face with
God as He is verbalized in the cold pages of Aquinas,
humanity becomes totally dependent. I would suggest
that the interested
reader compare Aquinas
on God with Augustine, who was a poet and an artist
as well as a theologian. The conception of God as a
logical principle,
in
my opinion, offers the
best possible source for, and rationalization of, spiritual
despotism. Back
4 Henry Charles Lea, A History of the Inquisition of the
Middle Ages,
3 vols. (New York: Harper, 1888), 1:2. Back
5 Ibid., 1:304 Back
6 RH Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926) p.197. Back
7 Fox, James Connolly: The Forerunner, pp.133 Back
8 Connolly, Labour in Ireland, p.333 Back
9 Farrell's Note: Connolly also wrote in The Reconquest of
Ireland,
'As Democracy enters Bureaucracy takes flight.' Back
10 Farrell's Note: An interesting illustration of this is
to be seen in Frank O'Connor's great short story ‘Guests
of the Nation.’ This
story, told in the first person, recounts how members of the
IRA, during the Black and Tan struggle, hold two Limeys as hostages.
They become fond of the Limeys,
who, in turn, regard these Irish boys as friends. Then the Irish
lads are ordered to execute their prisoners. The human sentiments
of the
narrator are wrenched as a result of the execution. Heretofore
he had felt that ‘disunion
between brothers seemed to me an awful crime.’ These
are the words with which he translated national spirit into
personal
emotion. This feeling
was, however, shaken by the execution of these English guests
of the nation. Back
11 Fox, James Connolly: The Forerunner, pp.135-36 Back
12 Ibid., p.135 Back
13 Ibid., p.132 Back
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