Towards a Catholic Marxism II
I have been searching for a conception of the divine amenable to our own secular, scientific age. In the past iteration of this series, I discussed liberation theology which seems sufficient to describe God’s presence in our political struggles but insufficient to convey his presence in our personal, spiritual struggles. For this purpose, I have turned to a variety of thinkers who have tried to imagine a postmodern Christianity –– a God liberated from the constraints of modernity and scientism. More specifically, I turned to Alasdair MacIntyre, Jean-Luc Marion, and Richard Kearney.
At the precocious age of twenty-three, MacIntyre published Marxism and Christianity in 1968 which traced the influence of Christian thought from Hegel to Feuerbach and from Feuerbach to Marx himself. It is an intimidating work because of the depth of MacIntyre’s philosophical inquiry, but he eventually concludes that we must neither completely accept nor completely refute Marx. Indeed, MacIntyre implores us to consider the contributions Marx has made to our modern conceptions of social justice as Christians. We ignore Marx at our own peril because he offered insight into the conditions of the proletariat which are unconscionable when taking Catholic social teaching into account.
Marion, on the other hand, sought to define a God “beyond Being” in the post-Heideggerian world in 1982. Whereas the idol reflects our gaze and compels us to worship our own conceptions of the divine, the icon points our gaze towards the incomprehensible and compels us to worship the true divinity of the Triune God. God, according to Marion, reveals himself as a Gift that is beyond cognition, speech, and, indeed, Being. Simply put, God is incomprehensible according to our constructions of metaphysics and ontology.
Published in 2010, Kearney’s Anatheism is the latest installment in this gradual realization of God’s postmodern character. Drawing on the biblical story of Abraham and the three strangers, Kearney argues that hospitality is the defining characteristic of God. He asserts that we should welcome God into our lives via story, poetry, and art. MacIntyre, Marion, and Kearney’s visions of God are not incompatible with Marxism but, in fact, reinforce its central tenets. The overarching respect for the proverbial face of the stranger is present across these ideologies and throughout the history of phenomenology via Levinas. When we see the face of the proletariat in the visages of Palestinian, Ukrainian, Kashmiri, Sudanese, Armenian, and all children; we are called to respond with kindness. Such is the way of the postmodern, Neo-Marxist God.
