The Ideas of the Christian Socialists of 1848

Abstract

T HE RELATIONSHIP of the Christian ethic to movements of social radicalism has given birth, historically, to an important body of political thought. The social composition of the early Christian communities led inescapably to the evocation of a Promised Land set within the terms of social equality. However, as Troeltsch has made evident,' the ideal thus created was deemed to be as much an organized religious community existing peaceably for its own purposes in an alien society as it was a utopian anarchism that was hostile to the life of secular institutions. Yet the very absolutism of the ideal, and the uncompromising character of the personal behavior it has exacted from its devotees, have made it contingently revolutionary. The very generality of its postulates has driven it to be sceptical of the particulars of any society in which it has grown up. The history of the Christian radical sects is, consequently, a commentary upon the meaning of Whitehead's remark that a general idea is always a danger to the existing order. The Franciscan Fraticelli, the Waldensian heretic, the Anabaptist, the agrarian Digger, the Christian Socialist, despite their separation in historical time, are united on the common ground of the radical utopianism of the Christian message. They appeal, substantially, to the same qualities: the passion for humility, the blessedness of poverty, the sufficiency of grace, the denunciation of riches and the suspicion that their ownership at least endangers the certainty of salvation, the distrust of organization in the life of the spirit. The replacement of the classical by the Christian virtues, it is true, was not always a noble advance, a fact which both Machiavelli and Rousseau employed effectively in their respective criticisms of a Christianity they both regarded (and legitimately) as the enemy of their civil religions. Rather, it was a replacement of the dispassionate Stoic, at best patiently bearing a fate he deemed irrevocable, with the spectacle of the Christian actively contemptuous of the world, yet convinced that its conquest is the final test of his creed. It is equally true, as such critics as Robertson have indicated,2 that the Christian victory over the Roman empire accelerated the degradation of its culture; yet, despite that antirationalist note, it widened the area of moralization beyond Platonic philosopher and Stoic dilettante to the disinherited multitudes of the ancient world. To its obscure devotees, it gave hope, a sense of worth, a conviction of unique