Loyola, Lenin, and the road to liberation - Ignatius Loyola, Vladimir I. Lenin

Monthly Review, Oct, 1984 by Ludo Abicht

LOYOLA, LENIN, AND THE ROAD TO LIBERATION

The daydream of a better life, here on earth or in heaven, in the near future or on a faraway island, runs like a golden thread through the history of Western civilization. Often that dream was the expression of an attempt to escape from unbearable reality, away from hunger, toil, and oppression. Next to the fantasies about a return to a golden age or some miraculous intervention, there were those utopias which were considered reachable through religious conversion or social and political action. For the latter category the term "utopia' (no place) could be more properly translated as "that which has not-yet taken place.' Without this semantic shift we cannot understand the dynamic role of utopia in the moral, social, and political thought of the West.

In order to avoid the trap of an ahistorical utopian "modus,' authors like Frank and Fritzie Manuel1 propose a structural approach, in which the various utopias are grouped within a particular historical period, so that their differences illustrate the spectrum of possible reactions within one and the same era. Furthermore one has to distinguish between authors who create a theoretical counter-model (More, Campanella) and utopian activists who try to turn this model into reality (Plato, Owen). In his study of seventeenth-century utopian writings, J.C. Davis points out the closed character of these ideal societies, for which survival and internal cohesion go together with isolation from the rest of the world or, as in the Millenium, with the previous destruction of "the others' (the unbelievers, the counter-revolutionaries).2 Jost Hermand, on the other hand, defends the necessity of a new form of utopian thought as the only escape from the pessimism, the conformity, and the many false utopias of the present generation.

Thus, 450 years after Thomas More the debate about the use and the dangers of utopia is still raging.3 The undeniable authoritarian character of many historical utopias should suffice to push these dreams of a better society aside as suspect and dangerous thinking, if at the same time they did not have a liberating function, "the dream' as the first step on the path to liberation.4

This insight, that utopian thinking is always a "transcending' of narrow intellectual horizons or of oppressive conditions, leads us to a most difficult point, the question of the path between an existing reality and "the realm of freedom' or "the kingdom of God on earth' the utopians are striving toward. At the beginning of the bourgeois era, almost simultaneously with Luther's Reformation and More's Utopia, Loyola founded the Society of Jesus. And at the end of that period Lenin translated Marx's ideas into the founding of the vanguard party which assumed the task to bring about the new socialist society. In order not to commit the sensationalist mistake of trying to create affiliation between the Basque saint and the Russian Bolshevik based upon a number of superficial similarities, I intend to question each of these movements about their utopian character and to come to some hypotheses that are structural rather than substantial and historical. That this is hardly an academic exercise is illustrated by the attitude of some military dictatorships in Central America today which without much ado equate "Jesuits' with "Communists' and exile or persecute them as such. This equation indicates the confusion in the minds of some who feel just as threatened by the religious utopian as by the political utopian--and who will say that they are totally wrong?

Loyola and the Militia Christi

In his autobiography Inigo de Loyola speaks about the enlightenment which taught him that the devotion of the saints in God's service is a much higher ideal than the knightly service to which he had hitherto committed himself. This contradiction between a glorification of the religious past and the fundamental renovation of religious life of which he was to become one of the main architects is not the only one we shall find in the life and work of Ignatius. Another striking feature is the balance between a mystical, often overwhelming emotionality (visions, tears) and a never failing rationality which enables him to distinguish between bad and evil "spirits' (ideas, feelings). Very early Ignatius was already aware of the importance of control over our insights and motives. Does a particular decision still hold after the excitement of the initial moment has disappeared? Furthermore, there is the almost natural transition from the personal to the political: from the personal experience of the time of his conversion (1521-1522) and the studies in Spain and Paris (1524-1535), the conviction grows that more is at stake than his own salvation or the imitation of the saints. Influenced by Augustine's De civitate Dei, he came to regard his experience as part of God's overall plan for the world. All these sources feed the utopian river that must carry us to a new Christianity in a new world. In itself this could be considered a modern version of the traditional teachings of the Church, if Ignatius had not developed the instrument with the help of which he wanted to reach that ideal, the Society of Jesus.