Faith and revolution. 3/4 The premiss of relativity. By Roger Garaudy

III/ The premiss of relativity

My second premiss is that of what may be called, for want of a better

term, relativity. If the first premiss asserts the possibility of a radical

break with nature as given, the second asserts the possibility of a radical

break with ail forms of social alienation. This is the premiss that all

historical achievements are relative. The postulate of a possible escape

from alienation might also be called the 'prophetie' premiss, since the

prophets of Israël were here the pioneers, with their struggle against

idolatry, against what we call 'alienation'. The prophets taught that no

work of man's hand or brain should ever be regarded as absolute, as

permanent, as definitive. This second premiss could also be expressed

as follows : no historical achievement can ever be treated as a final goal ;

that is the way all institutions are perverted. When a Church thinks

of itself as the visible image of the City of God, when a monarchy claims

divine right, when capitalism claims to fulfil natural law, when Stalinism

claims to be the embodiment of socialism, then the society in question

is perverted. Any dogmatism of this kind robs a political system of its

essential human dimension, namely of the possibility of transcending

itself. Bertolt Brecht spoke truly when he declared : 'We must change

the world, and then we shall have to change the changed world.' This

prophetie challenge seems to me indispensable, not least to Marxism

if this is not to degenerate into a new form of Stalinism.

Seen in this way, the act of artistic creation may perhaps provide both

revolutionary action and the Christian faith with the example they need.

The act of creation is an attempt to break out of the closed world of

man. In his Voix du silence, Malraux says : 'Bound though art may be

to the civilization which gives it birth, it often goes beyond it and perhaps

even transcends it, as if it were summoning up forces beyond its

ken, appealing to a human wholeness beyond its reach.'

Affirmation of another world cannot be used as a pretext to cast an

aura of sanctity over our actions in this world, or over established orders

or counter-revolutions, or even revolutions.

We have no positive criterion, of course, to enable us to determine

what is going in fact to live, no way of judging between the various

possibilities for the future, i.e. what does not yet exist and what may

perhaps never exist. But the great merit of the Christian faith in this

respect, and the reason why Marxism needs its challenge if it is not to

become a closed dogmatism, is that this faith not only teaches us a

negative theology which prevents us from saying that God is this or that

and so enclosing Him in a definition, but also provides us with a negative

anthropology which prevents us from saying that man is this or that,

and so enclosing him in a definition. Perhaps it also provides us with a

negative ethics and a negative politics which prevent us from saying this

or that is the good or the perfect order and thus enclosing them too in

a definition.

A certain way of posing questions

Looked at in this light, faith is perhaps a certain way of posing questions,

beginning with the most basic, the question of meaning and purpose.

This means a break with the established system of values. In this respect,

I think the Roman authorities were not mistaken ; even if Christ could

not be identified as a Zealot, i.e. had no political programme for the

overthrow of the Roman Empire, it was still the case that he challenged

ail established values ; they did not mistake their target in striking at

Christ as someone who seemed to them to be a revolutionary, more

subversive indeed than if he had sponsored a programme of direct

political action like that of the Zealots. Jesus had in fact made a radical

breach in the most fundamental law of society, that which is based on

property, power and expertise. He refused to play the game — even

the game of justice — according to the rules.

In this connection it may be noted that our textbooks of philosophy

often solve the problem of reconciling justice and love much too easily,

as if love were merely a slightly larger measure of justice. But love is in

fact the contrary of justice. Let me illustrate this. Victor Hugo's Les

Misérables was recently presented on French television. Many viewers

must have asked themselves which of the characters represented justice:

Bishop Myriel or Javert the policeman ? It is surely Javert who is on

the side of justice, since justice here means treating people as they are,

the criminal as a criminal, the innocent as innocent. And when the

bishop helps a thief to evade punishment by claiming that he had given

him the stolen candlesticks, love is seen to be the contrary of justice,

not its complement. This is why the upholders of law and order usually

have little sympathy for love, since love is always a fomenter of disorder.

Precisely for this reason a revolution can never be complete and irreversible

unless it bases its judgments not on justice but on love. To base

them on justice is to appeal to the past, and to be just then means

treating people in accordance with what they have done, i.e. in accordance

with their past, whereas love is a wager on the future, a risk of the

kind taken by Bishop Myriel in Les Misérables. A whole human life

can be radically changed by this act of love. It is not a matter of giving

each man his due, but of giving each man everything, namely the absolute

trust which leaves him room, prophetie room, to become a different

man. Without this there will be no revolution. There will be a transfer

of property, a transfer of power, a transfer of culture, but the tyrannies

and alienations will remain.

Seen in this light, the problem is to know what kind of society we can

bring about. Up to now we have known two kinds of society. There

is the individualist conception, that of Rousseau, for example, in his

Contrat social, where we have it in its pure form. Here, society does

not exist prior to the decision of individuals to establish it. Society is

a voluntary association of independent, rational, individual human

beings who decide to cooperate in order to provide for the corporate

satisfaction of specific needs. That is one type of society, French

Revolution type, if you like. Then there is the totalitarian conception

which holds on the contrary that society embodies a community which

exists prior to the individuals who constitute it.

Marx's criticism of both these types of society was twofold. He illustrated

by means of the Jewish question the superficial character of

democracy on Rousseau's pattern and demonstrated the mythical

character of totalitarianism in his critique of Hegel's political philosophy.

But though Marx showed that socialism is neither individualist (with

Proudhon) nor totalitarian (with Hegel), he was unable for historical

reasons to produce a model of the society he wished to see. Thus the

problem seems to me to be to devise a society in which personal freedom

does not degenerate into the individualism of the jungle — the spectacle

afforded us by the entire history of capitalism — and in which the

community ethos does not degenerate into totalitarianism — which is

unfortunately where non-capitalist societies have ended until now.

Totalitarian society based on the notion of a pre-existing community is

essentially an appeal to the past. Individualistic society on Rousseau's

pattern is merely the outcome of unrelated individual decisions, of a

contract which embodies these decisions at each given moment, and

appeals to the present. In the former case, society is an organic whole

composed of different objects. In the latter case, it is composed of

nothing but subjects, and, to tell the truth, of egoistic subjects. But

neither takes into account man's fundamental dimension, namely his

future. The one is based on man's past, the other on man's present.

One regards man as an object, the other as a subject. But man is first

and foremost a project. When we speak of a model of socialism different

from those already known to us, the problem is precisely to secure room

for this fundamental dimension to be respected, to allow for man's

future and for his possibility of, so to speak, projecting his prophetic

nature.

This is why — here again we find an aesthetic imperative — one of the

main criteria for defining any particular social system is its official

attitude to the creative work of the artist. It may do what capitalist

societies do and make works of art part and parcel of the market

economy, or it may do what present socialist régimes do and make them

subservient to apologias for current policies. In neither case is there

any respect for what is specifically human in man, namely for his capacity

to look ahead, for the prophetic character which is also the basic character

of ail great art and the criterion of society as it should be : neither

individualist nor totalitarian, based neither on the past nor on the

present but on the future ; a society which is 'eschatological', or, if that

smacks too much of theology, a forward-looking society, open to hope

and respectful of the prophetic character of each and every man.

Admittedly this model of society has still to be filled out and put into

practice, but the fact that it does not yet exist does not mean that it

never will. On the eve of any revolution there have always been those

who said : It has never happened before. It can't happen now.' I do

not believe such a society is utopian. Any new style, any new idea of

man has always been dismissed as folly. After ail, Christianity was

folly to the wise in their wisdom. The French Revolution, it was said,

was an absurd and criminal attempt to overthrow the inevitable and

eternal order of things.

To affirm this possibility of advancing beyond the present and the past

is the second essential premiss of ail revolutionary action as of ail faith.

Roger Garaudy

>> TO BE CONTINUED HERE >>
 

THE ECUMENICAL REVIEW – 1973-January - pages 59 to 79
 A lecture, transcribed from a recording, given at the Ecumenical Centre, Geneva, in October 1972 on the occasion of an exhibition of books and journals in French (see Ecumenical Diary , below). ROGER GARAUDY is Professor of Aesthetics in the University of Poitiers, France. His books include From Anathema to Dialogue (English édition : London, Collins and Co. and New York, Herder and Herder, 1966) and L'Alternative (Paris, Robert Laffont, 1972). The lecture was translated from the French by the WCC Language Service. The original is published in the Bulletin du Centre Protestant d'Etudes, Geneva, 1973.