Sárospataki Füzetek 1. (1997)

1997 / 2. szám - Dr. Frank Sawyer: The roots of totalitarianism (A totalitarizmus gyökerei)

DR. FRANK SAWYER

also a search for true human identity.1 As John Calvin says at the opening of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, self- knowledge and the knowledge of God belong together. In One Day, Ivan debates with his fellow work camp prisoner, Alyosha, who is a Baptist, about what kind of God we can believe in. While he finds Alyosha’s piety too other-worldly for himself, it is far from Ivan’s thought to believe in no God at all. At the end of the hard day’s work under harsh conditions, Ivan still mumbles a prayer of gratitude for health and strength: "Thanks be to thee, O God, another day over!"

The deepest roots of totalitarian horrors do not lie in some miscalculation of strategies, but in atheism. Is humanity free when freed from God? This was a central question in Dostoevsky’s prophetic novels, which remain relevant to both Eastern and Western Europe. Early in The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky says: "...socialism is not only a problem of iabour...but is in the first instance a problem of atheism...the problem of the Tower of Babel".1 2 Exactly the same can be said of capitalism. Karl Marx, like many modern secularists today, socialist or capitalist, made a bad choice when he accepted Feuerbach’s homo homini Deus est (man is God for man).3 This is the same as saying: "we have no need of God; therefore he does not exist".4 Pope John Paul II correctly writes in his encyclical Centesimus Annus that when communist or other forms of atheism (capitalist and technological) try to "uproot the need for God from the human heart" they plant the seeds of

1 cf.Erich Kellner, ed., Christenum und Marxismus - Heute (Wien: Europa Verlag, 1966). David Lyon, Karl Marx: A Christian Assessment of His Life & Thought (Illinois: Intervarsity Press, 1979). J.Verkuyl, Voorbereiding voor de dialoog over het evangelie en de ideologic van het marxistisch lennisme (Kämpen: Kok, n.d.)

2 Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers of Karamazov, first published in 1980; trans.David McDuff (Penguin Books 1993), p.26.

3 cf.Hans Küng, Existiert Gott?, Eng.trans. Does God Exist? (New York: Crossroad Pub., 1978), Section C: The Challenge of Atheism’

4 cf.John Courtney Murray, S.J. The Problem of God (Yale University, 1969), 86ff: The Godless Man of Modernity’. See also the introduction to Roger Garaudy, Avous-nous besoin de Dieu? (Paris, Desclées de Brouwer, 1993)

84