Rudolf J. Siebert. Erich Fromm's Dialectical Attitude toward Religion

Erich Fromm's Dialectical Attitude toward Religion

Rudolf J. Siebert

Professor Emeritus in Religious Studies and Theology

Contrast of Reality and Idea

According to Max Horkheimer, the founder of the critical theory of society of the Frankfurt School, and the former collaborator and friend of Erich Fromm, the relationship ofGerman idealism, from Kant to Hegel, to the thinking of the emancipated Jews, was sealed through great Jewish disciples and successors of the idealist philosophers: fromMarx to Bloch, Horkheimer, Fromm, Adorno, Marcuse and Löwenthal.(1) The relationship proved itself in individual teachings of idealism, as well as in its universal dialectical structure. This logical structure united the sense for reality with the imperturbable holding on to the Idea, be it in religious or philosophical form, the very contrast to reality. Among the identical traits in particular was one essential one: namely the impossibility, to call the Divine by its name, or to makeimages of it.(2) There was a similarity between German idealism and the Talmud, which was more than accidental.What counted in both of them was the truth, which one could not express affirmatively, but which was nevertheless. This contradiction lay in the Jewish tradition as well as in the dialectical philosophy and theology, in which it had become explicit as moment of a thinking which aimed at the truth. That the Jews through the long centuries of persecution preservedtheir teaching, in which neither the reward of individual bliss, nor the eternal punishment of the individual was decisive, that it remained loyal to a law after the Jewish state had disappeared two thousand years ago , which could have inforce it, only on the basis ofthe hope,which was valid for the just people in all nations in the future, that precisely was the contradiction which connected it with the great philosophy in Germany, really with all what in a popular way and ironically was continually named idealism in everyday discourse. Here we concentrate on Erich Fromm and his teaching on the revolutionary, or democratic and authoritarian personality, as well as on the being and having character, in the religious as well as the secular sphere. In our concentration on Fromm's dialectical attitude toward religion,we assume with Georg W. F. Hegel, the greatest idealist,that the character and the social morality of a nation, on one hand, and its constitution and laws, on the other; were in interaction with each other, and thus caused each other.(3) If we consider, e.g. ,the customs and morals of theancient Spartan nation as the effect of its constitution and , vice versa, this constitution as the effect of its social morality, then this consideration may after all be correct. However, this conception didtherefore not grant us satisfaction,becausethrough it indeed neither the constitution nor the social morality of this Spartan people were comprehended. That could only happen thereby in that way, that those two, constitution and morality and likewise all the other particular sides, which the life and the history of theSpartan nation showed, were recognized asmoments of a third and of something higher, namely the notion as the unity of the universal, the particular and the singular, and as being groundesdin this dialectical notion : the notion of the state as the unity of family and civil society. To this highest point of idealism, Fromm and the other critical theorists did no longer proceed. They wanted to be materialists .They were no longer systematic philosophers. They put systematization under ideology suspicion: ideology understood as false consciousness, as the cover up of parricular economic motivations, shortly as the untruth. Critical theory of society is essentially ideology critique, and precisely as such it is materialistic. During the axis time, Socrates and Jesus held on to the Idea, in its philosophical and religious form, and both of them were executed unjustly, one by the Athenian state and the other by the Jewish state, and both states were in decline.

Attidude

Erich Fromm's dialectical attitude toward religion, and critical theory of character, society and religion, reached its climax not in his encounter with Judaism, the Religion of Sublimity, or withChristianity, the Religion of Becoming, Freedom and Full Manifestation, or with Buddhism, the Religion of Inwardness, but rather in his encounter with the great, High-Medieval, panentheistic (from Greek Pan En Theo - All in God) philosopher and theologian, Meister Eckhart (1260-c.1327), whose influence has reached into Modernity, into historical idealism, as well as into historical materialism.(4) The panentheistic way of being and of acting was a dialectical one, filled with wonder and beauty. It was wonderful to be dialectical in both ways:in beingoutside and inside, in seizing and in being seized, in seeing and at thesame time in being seen, in holding and being held. That precisely was the dialectical goal of panentheism, where the spirit remained at rest, united with Eternity. As Meister Eckhart let see Georg W. F. Hegelthe dialecticof enlightenment a century before Max Horkheimer, the founder of the critical theory of society, and his friend Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, and bring him back to religion, to Christianity, so he helped Fromm to revise the Marxian and the Freudian enlightenment, and to rediscover religion again, Judaism, as well as Buddhism, and Christianity. Meister Eckhart's panentheism helped Fromm to mediate between the pantheism of the oriental religions, e,g, Daoism, the already trinitarian, Chinese Religion of Measure,andHinduism, the likewise trinitarian, Indian Religion of Imagination, on one hand, and the theism of the occidental religions, e.g.the trinitarian Christianity and the unitarian deism, invented by Voltaire and Rousseau in preparation of the bourgeoise enlightenment and revolution, on the other. What alienated Fromm, as well as his former friendsHorkheimer, Adorno, and Herbert Marcuse, from the religion of his youth, his family's Judaism, were the aggression, the destruction, and the wars of annihilation, willed, commanded, and ordered by the authoritarian God, Here in Judaism the Israelites, liberated by Jahweh andthrough Moses,from Egyptian slavery, had slaves again, and engaged in wars of colonization, and were severely punished for it.Here having received , from Jahwe through Moses, the Ten Commandments, the Israelites returned, with the help of Aaron, to the Golden Calf again, to idolatry, and were severely punished for it. There was a revolutionary and liberating, being - God,and his prophets and men, and there was an authoritarian and aggressive, having - God and men.In the name of this authoritarian God, Joshua subdued the whole land of Canaan: the highlands, the Negeb, the lowlands, the hill sides, and all the kings in them.(5) He left not a man alive and delivered every single soul over to the ban, as Yahweh, the authoritarian God of Israel, had commanded. Joshua conquered them from Kadesh - barnes to Gaza. Joshua's slaughteredthe thirty one kings West of the Jordan, starting out with the king of Jericho, the oldest city of the area, and the king of Ai near Bethel, and others East of the Jordan, with all their people, men, women and children. In Jericho only a prostitute and her familywas allowed to survive, because she had helped to rescue two spies sent by Joshua before the campaign.After the Anakim had been wiped out by the Israelites,

the country had rest from war.( 6)

The Israelites who were liberated by Moses and his God from Egyptian slavery, were identical with those who rebelled against Moses and his God and their liberation, and wanted to return to Egypt's meatpots, but also radically different from each other. The Israelites , who were to receive the Decalogue from Moses and his God on Mount Sinai, were identical with those who made the Golden Calf and fell into idolatry, but also radically different from each other. The first group of Israelites elevated themselves to the Idea.The second group conformed to reality.There could be no greater contrast than that between idealists and realists.

Authoritarian Structure

In the midst of the authoritarian structure of the commanding God and the obeying humans, there was present already the seed of revolution, liberation , being, and peace. (7) According to Fromm, one of the main themes of the Hebrew Bible wasthe dialectic of the authoritarian and the revolutionary character. (8)Another theme was the dialectic of the having and the being character: leave what you have. Free yourself from all fetters, be! The history of Hebrew tribes began with the command to the first Hebrew hero, Abraham,to give up his country around Ur, and his clan, and to go to the unknown.(9) Yet Abraham's descendants settled on a new soil, and new clanishness developed. This dialectical process lead to more severe bondage. Precisely because the Hebrews became rich and powerful in Eypt, they became slaves. They lost the vision of the one God of their nomadic ancestors.They worshipped idols.The gods of the rich turned later into their masters. The second Hebrew hero was Moses. He was charged by God, to liberate his people. He was tolead them out of the country of Egypt, that had become their home, even though eventually a home for slaves.The people were to go into the desert, in order to celebrate. Reluctantlyand withgreat misgiving, the Hebrews followed their leader Moses into the desert, themystical key symbol in this liberation. Later the Hebrews conquered new lands. They exterminated heir enemies. They settled on their enemies' soil. They worshipped their enemies' idols. They transformed their democratic tribal life into that of oriental despotism and authoritarianism. They had slaves. They colonized. In his critical theory of society and religion,Fromm held on to the double dialectic first of revolutionay and authoritarian tendencies, and then of being and having tendencies. For Fromm, in the midst of the fascist temptation, there was present already the democratic resistance.(10)Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, and Adorno concretely supersededrevolutionaryand being - oriented Judaism and Christianity into their critical theory of society and religion:negating the authoritarian and having element in them, and preserving the revolutionary and liberatingelement in them. Horkheimer did not believe, that authoritarian Adolf Eichmann's illegal capture, and his trial and execution in Jerusalem, would diminish Antisemitism: nor did Fromm, Marcuse, or Adorno.(11) Fromm hoped,that the Israelites' prophetic, Messianic message offreedom and being could finally conquer Antisemitism, and all other dualisms.(12) The critical theorists may not have known, what could stop authoritarian Antisemitism. But they knew, that authoritarianpolice or military actions could not do it. Otherwise, World War II, the massive military victory over fascism by socialist Russia and liberal America, should have finished authoritarian Antisemitism forever. It obviously did not!

Law and Sabbath

When Erich Fromm produced his books entitled The Jewish Law.A Contribution to the Sociology of the Diaspora-Judaism in 1922,and The Sabbath, in 1927, the year of my birth in Frankfurt am Main, he had left behindtheauthoritarian Judaism of his youth, the Jewish diaspora in Frankfurt, and was touched not only by the bourgois, but also by the Marxian and Freudian democratic enlightenment and revolution.(13) He was still concerned with revolutionary and liberating Judaism and religious contents, but not in theological, but rather in psychological and sociological forms, in vocabulary, produced by Marx and Freud: not on the phenomenological level of speculative, or dialectical reason, but rather on the phenomenological level of analytical understanding. The dialectic of the sacred and the profane, the religious and the secular, hadfully opened up for Fromm, and thereby also the need for their reconciliation.(14) Fromm had entered the Freud Institute at the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität. The Freud Institute had joined Max Horhheimer's Institute for Social Research. Fromm and Horkheimer worked together in the Institute, combining, like the non-believing, Jewish psychoanalyst, Wilhelm Reich, Marx and Freud, sociology and psychology,and became friendswith each other on the basis of their Jewish background and of the critical theory of society.(14) They were both trying to hide their Judaism as well as their Marxism in pre-fascist Germany and in liberal America. They both, as well as Adorno and Marcuse and Ernst Bloch, emigrated from pre-fasist and fascist Germany, to liberal America, where they metironically enough with anative fascist wave, with followers of the fascists and Antisemites Henry Ford and Jesuit Father Charles Caughling, and Protestant ministers, and members of the Bund. Originally, critical theory may very well have beena covername for historical materialism.

Frankfurt East Side

Fromm had grown up, like Adorno, on the rich, middle - bourgeois Eastside of Frankfurt, he in a fully Jewish family, and Adorno in a mixed, Jewish-Catholic family, close to the globally known Jesuit center, St.Georgen. Adorno was baptized a Catholic, educated a Protestant, finally to become a Marxist, and a Freudian, and a Hegelian, concluding his life with a clear Non Credo, as confessedalready to his Catholic friends Eugen Kogon and Walter Dirks, during a public discourse at the University of Münster in 1958.(15) During Adorno's funeral in Frankfurt's Main Cemetery no religious symbolism of any kind appeared. Adorno's Non Credo happened inspite of Hegel, who had been helped by the panentheist Meister Eckhart , to return in Switzerland fromtheenlightenment to religion, to Christianity, toLutheran Christianity,and from whom Adorno andHorkheimer had learned a century later about the dialectic of enlightenment.(16) Adorno waited for a better, less contradictory revelationthan offered in Judaism,Christianity or Islam, or in any other positive religion. Not so withFromm! He received a fully Jewish education in a fully Jewish family, like his former friend, Horkheimer. The firstpart of verseone of Psalm 91 was written on Horkheimer's parents' gravestone in the Jewish cemetery of Zürich, Switzerland, and the second part on his own and his wife Maidon's grave stone, a late convert from Anglican Christianity to Judaism:

In you, Eternal one, alone I trust!

Horkheimer's mother had prayed Psalm 91 throughout the fascist time for protection, and was finally recued by a Catholic taxi driver, who drove her and her husband to neutral Switzerland. Fromm and Horkheimer remainedJewish believers. Their Jewish faith bound them together, When Fromm finally left the International Institute of Social Research at Columbia University in New York, out of financial, or philosophical reasons, maybe the suspicianof a possible regression to idealism , Horkheimer saw in his departure the greatest loss for his Institute of all its losses. Both, the believing Fromm, and the non-believing Adorno,encountered Antisemitism in the highly developed school system of the very commercialand very liberal,and very Jewish, city of Frankfurt. When a generation later I studied in the same school system, in the humanistic Lessing Gymnasium, Lessing having been a German eniightener, Antisemitism came to its climax. Jewish students, believing or not, disappearedquitely fromthe class rooms. When in the afternoon before the Kristallnacht in Fall 1938, I came as 11 year oldstudent, out of the central Frankfurt swimming pool, I saw the nearby famous synagogue in flames. I was amazed, that the firemen did not try to extinguish the fire in the synagogue, but that they rather did only try to protect the surrounding buildings from the flames. Famous Jewish philosophers and theologians, like Martin Buber, had visited the synagogue. The Fromm Family as well as the Adorno family were familiar with the synagogue. When I came to the Zeil, the main street of Frankfurt, I saw all kinds of objects flying out of the Jewish stores, including christall lamps, which gave the night its name, on the empty street. only when I came home in the evening I heard through the Volksempfänger, that a young Jew had asassinated a German diplomate in Paris, and that, therefore, thousands of Jews had been imprisoned in the Reich, I lived on the poor, working class, Westside of Frankfurt, only ten minutes walk away from the Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Universität, andfromHorkheimer's Institute for Social Research on its campus, in which also Fromm worked. It was known to the Frankfurters, living around the area, as Caffee Marx.The Institute was knownto the people for its Marxism more than for its Judaism. In 1933, the Institute was closed by the National Socialist Cultural Minister in Berlin for both, its Judaism and its Marxism, as well as for its Freudianism. My Grandfather, Martin Bopp, was a conductor on the streetcar driving between University and Opera House, dedicated to the Beautiful, the Good andthe True, in the center of Frankfurt. He met dayly the scholars from the Institute, including Fromm, Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, etc., as they travelled in his streetcar fromtheUniversity to the center of the city, and back again. He took their money.He did not know, who and what they were, critical theorists. They did not know, who he was, a former owner of afarm and a bakery in Münzenberg, in Oberhessen, and now a street car conductor, a Lutheran, a social democrate, a member of the proletariate, which they as Jews, Marxists and Freudians wanted to liberate. Instead, fascism grew dayly in Frankfurt, and Germany, and Europe., and America. A fascist academic colleague of Adorno, Fromm and Horkheimerat the University wanted to put Adorno against the wall and shoot him. All members of the Institute ,Horkheimer, Fromm, Marcuse, and Adorno, etc. were inthe same danger, being believers or not.

Christ Dogma

WhenFromm wrote his essay Psychoanalysis andSoziology,in 1928 and 1929, and his book On the Development of the Christ Dogma.A psychological Studyof thesocial psychological Function of Religion in 1930, and on the State as Educator to thePsychology of Penal Justicein the same year, and on thePsychology of the Criminaland of the punishing Society, one year later, and on the Method and Task of an analyticalSocialpsychology, in 1932, and on the PsychoanalyticalCharacterology and its Significance for the Socialpsychology in the same year, he had concretely, dialectically superseded religion,mainly Judaism and Christianity, into theFreudian and Marxianenlightenment movements, into the critical theory of society,which summed up these movements.(17) While Fromm negatedthe clanishness, and the bondage, andthe slavery,andthe idolatry, the gods of the rich, who later on turned into their masters, the aggressiveness, the wars, he held on, nevertheless, andstillretrieved and preserved at the same time,whatever may be good in religion: in Judaism the memoryof the Hebrew heroes Abraham and Moses, and in Christianity, the revolutionary Jesus of Nazareth, his teaching and his struggle. Fromm did those writingsonly a few years before Adolf Hitler and national socialist authoritarianism came into power, and broke the democratic resistance.

Workers

Fromm worked on a social - psychological inquiry, examination and investigation ofblue and white color workers on theevening before the Third Reich, around 1930.(18 )The research dealt with the dialectic of the revolutionary personality and the authoritarian character.8000 workers wereinterviewed and questioned. Religion appeared, if at all, more on the counter-revolutionary, authoritarian side, than on the revolutionary side. The authoritarian character was romantic, religious, nationalistic, capitalistic, sadstic masochistic, and more or less racist. The revolutionary character was future - oriented, secular, cosmopolitean,socialistic,sublimated in terms of aggression and libido, open toward all races. 12% of the authoritarian personalities, and a passive mayority of workers, made Hitler's victory possible and predictatble. The bourgeois Catholic Center Party gave Hitler the emergency laws, and thus made him legitimately a dictator, and then desolved itself with the agreement of the Vatican. Adorno took Fromm's labor study as a model for his authority studies. He emphasized the authoritarian character. one of Adorno's Californian studies on authoritarianism in labor unions found such a majority of authoritarian personalities, that it could not be published, and is still part of Löwenthal's unpublished estate in California.(19) A broader study on authoritarianism, which emphasized religious aspects of the authoritarian personality, and was entitled the Authoritarian Personality, could be published.(20) It took the religious side of the authoritarian character seriously.Adorno made special studies of fascist , Protestant ministers. They would today be called Christian nationalists.In the beginning of the 1960ties, Adorno predicted a new rise of the authoritarianpersonality for the future.(21)His prediction was verified by history in the 2020ties.When Fromm emigrated to the very conservative, liberal America, to Chicago, he changedtheMarxist revolutionry character of his labor study into the democratic charater, in order not to offend his friends in conservative America. After Fromm had left the Interntaional Intitute for Social Research, and started his work as practical psychoanalyst in New York, he superseded the dialectic of revolutionary charater and auhoritarian personality in his laborstudy into the dialecticof the being-personality and the having - character.(22) Now he found support for his being-character in religion, in Budhism,Judaism and Christianity.

Authoritarian Family

Around 1936,hortly before Fromm left the International Institute for Social Research at Columbia University, he worked with Horkheimer and Marcuse on a Study on Authority and Family.(23) The project concentrated not only on the authoritarian character of Catholicism, but also of the Reformers, and the way how they dealt with the family. The Institute was interested not only in the authoritarianism in family, civil society,state, and history, but also in culture, in art,religion, and philosophy. As Adorno continued his study in terms of the dialectic of democatic character and authoritarian personality, Fromm continued his study in terms of the dialecticof being -personality and having – character, without coming in conflict with each other. From never forgot completely his former paradigm.

Nontheistic Mysticism

In his book You shall be as Gods ARadical Interpretationof the Old Testament and its Tradition, of 1966, Erich Fromm defined and summed up his religiological and theological position approximately as nontheistic mysticism, just another name for Meister Eckhart's panentheism, situated between pantheism and theism.(24) Fromm took the title of his book from Genesis 3. According to Genesis, it had been the serpent in paradise, whohad promised Eve, that in case she and Adam wouldeat from the tree in the middle of the Garden, they would not die, as threatened by God, but that their eyes wouldrather be opened, and they

shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.( 25 )

Separated from the Institute for Social Research in New York and Frankfurt, Fromm continued, nevertheless, to share still in Horkheimer's and Adorno's emphasis onthe Exodus prohibition against making images of God, or even naming him:

You shall not make yourselfa carved image or any likeness of anythingin heacen or on earth beeneath or in the waters under the earth; you shall not bow down to them or serve them.For I, Yahweh your God, am a jealous God and I punish the father's fault in the sons, the grandsons, and the great- grandsons of those who hate me; but I show kindness to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments.

You shall not utter the nameof Yahweh your God to misuse it, for Yahweh will not leave unpunished the man who uttershis name to misuse it.( 26 )

The critical theorists radicalized both prohibitions of image and of name. Sometimes inthe historyof Judaism, God's name had not beenallowed to beexpressed at all. There was never any hostility between Fromm and the Institute. In their emphasice on the prohibition of image and name, they remained most deeply united. In hisYou shall be as gods, Fromm tried to show the developmentof the concept of God and man within theHebrew Bible and the post-biblical Jewish tradition in ealy Christianity from authoritarianism to revolution and liberation. The development began with an authoritarian God and an obedient man.But even in this authoritarian structure the seeds of freedom andindependence could already be found: the dialectic of authoritarianand revolutionary character. From the very beginning of the development, God was to be obeyed precisely in order to prevent men from obeying idols, authoritarian idolatry.(27 ) The worship ofthe one Godwas the negation of the negation of the worship of men and things. Thetrue worship of God as Spirit in the spirit andin the truth had not yet been announced by the non-authoritarian Jesus of Nazarethto the woman in Samaria, in what is today the Westbank:

Believe me, woman, the hour is coming

when you will worshipthe Father

neither on this mountain (Gerizim) nor in Jerusalem.

You worship what you do not know;

we worship what we do know;

for salvation comes from the Jews.

But the hour will come - in fact it is herealready -

when true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit

and truth:

that is the kind of worshipper

the Father wants.

God is spirit,

and those who worship

must worship in spirit and truth.(28 )

According to Fromm, thedevelopment of biblical and post-biblical ideas represented the growth of the seed of revolution, freedom and independence. God the authoritarian ruler became God the constitutional monarch, who was himself bound by the principles he had announced.(29) The anthropomorphically described God became a nameless and imageless God, and eventually a God, of whom no essential attribute could be predicated. Man, the obedient servant, became the free man, who made his own history, for better or for worse, free fromGod's interference, and guided only by the prophetic message, which he could either acceptor reject. In Fromm's view, as far as the God-concept was concerned, what he called the X-concept, we should ask , whetherwe should continue to use a concept which could be understood only in terms of its social-cultural roots: the Middle Eastern cultures with their authoritarian tribal chieves, and slaveholders, and omnipotent kings, and later authoritarian medieval feudal lords and absolute monarchies. In the West the renaissance of an anti-authoritarian, revolutionary, democratic humanism was occuringin the end of the 20th century, and in the beginning of the 21st century, among adherents of Catholicism, Protestantism, Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam as well as among Marxist and Freudian socialists, including Frommians . It was a reaction to the three - foldthreat, which humankind facee today: that of the environmental disaster, that of the nuclear extinction, and that of the authoritariantransformation of men into appendices of machines, the rise of the totally administered and bureaucratized world, guided by artificial intellience. If the spirit and the hopes of the Prophets were to prevail, it would depend on the strength of this new revolutionary, democratic, being-oriented humanism.

Despair and Hope

Fromm disagreed with many Christian theologians, in that he let the non-authoritarian Jesus of Nazareth not die in despair, by pointing out the Jewish custome to quote the whole Psalm 22 to its very end by quoting its first verse.( 30 ) When Jesus quoted thedesperate first verse of Psalm 22 on thecross,

My God, my God why have you deserted me,

he intended to say the whole Psalm 22, including the hopeful, prophetic, Messianic ending:

The whole earth,from end to end, will remember and come back to Jahweh;

all the families of the nations will bow down before him.

For Jahweh reigns, the ruler of nations!

Before him all the prosperous of the earth will bow down,

before him will bow all who go down to the dust.

And my soul will live for him, my children will serve him;

men will proclaim the Lord to generations still to come,

his righteousness to a people yet unborn. All this he has done.( 31)

Jesus was hopeful and prophetic and Messianic upto the very end of his life.The death on the cross came through a heartattack, which in any case did not leave much time for the quotation of the very long Psalm 22. Its endgave the hope, that theauthoritarian,having structureof the totally administered world would not have the final word, nor theenvironmental or atomiccatastrophy.Meister Eckhart was like centuries later Franz von Baader, the Catholic friend of Hegel, and Fromm a religious psychologist of psychology, and a religious sociologist of sociology.(32) As such Eckhart and Baader and Fromm were able to differentiatethe trueprophets of revolution,and freedom, and being and demoracy, from the false , deceitful, prophets of authoritarianismand fascism, truth from propaganda, in what Hegel had called the spirit of times.

Double Difference

According to Fromm, Meister Eckhart had describedandanalyzedthe difference not only between the authoritarian and the revolutionary or democratic character, but also the difference between the having and the being modes of existence with a penetration and clarity not surpassed by any teacher in Antiquity, Middle Ages, or Modernity.(33) Eckhart was a scholarly theologian like his contemporaries Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus, and the greatest representative and deepest and most radical, and most influentical thinker of German mysticism,who even influenced in the 19^th, , 20^th , and 21^st cenrury thinkers likeKarl Marx and the critical theorists of society, like Fromm and the Frommians, who were seeking authentic guidance to a non-theistic, panentheistic, rational, yet religious, philosophy of life. Even Marx may not have been an atheist, buta pantheist following Spinoza like other young Jewish revolutionaries. ( 34) According to Marx's greater teacher Hegel, Spinoza was according to his origin a Jew.It was in general the oriental perception, according to which everything finite appeared merely as something transitory and disappearing. It had in Sponoza's philosophyfound itsthoughtful expression. This orientalexpression of the substantial unity constituted now admittedly the foundation of all truthful further developments. But one could not remain standing at this point. What was still missing in this position was the occidental principle of individuality.Thisrevolutionary principle of free subjectivity, or subjective freedom, orbeing , stepped forthin philosophical form contemporaneously with the Spinozism first of all in the monadologie of Leibniz. Spinoza was not an atheist. Spinoza did not only not deny God, but he rather recognized him as alone truly being. His atheism was the very opposite of itself: acosmism. Fromm's main sources for Eckhart, JosephL. Quint andRaymond B. Blackney, have in the meantime been superseded by Matthew Fox's Eckhart studies.(35).

Internal Poverty

For Meister Eckhart, the internal, spiritual poverty lead into the divine Abyss, the quiet Desert, the imageless and nameless Divinity. (36)It may have been after his departure from the International Institute of Social Research at Columbia University, and during his praxis as psychoanalyst in New York, that Fromm supersededhis orginalconcept ofauthoritarian or fascist character into thehaving personality,and his original Maxist as well Freudian notion of revolutionary, or democratic character, into being personality, for which he then found proof in Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism, as well as in historical materialism and psychoanalysis.(37) Fromm's life work reached its climax, and ended with the mediationof thenotion of internal, spiritual poverty, as absence of having, and presence of being in Meister Eckhart's panentheistic theology, and religious psychology and sociology.(38)Fromm's paradigm change from the revolutionary and authoritarian character to thebeingand having personality in his psychoanalytical praxis in New York , and even in his own political party during the 1960ties, was a response to the challenge ofthe global capital of capitalism, of Wall Street and the Wall Street Journal. Here in New York students of a Jesuit highschooldid not choseJesuitGeorgetownUniversity in Washington D.C for their graduate school, but rather Harvard University, in order to make as much money as possible in their lives. Here the having personality developed to the extreme of a psychological decease. Here Fromm tried to transform having personalities into being personalities , with the help of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism.According to Fromm, the classical sourse for Meister Eckhart's views on the modes of havingand being was not Platon, or the Neo-Platonists, or Proclos, but rather Christianity, Matthew, Jesus's revolutionary Sermon on the Mount:

How happy are the poor in spirit;

theirs is the kingdom of heaven.(39)

Fromm came to his definition of having dialectically, through its opposite, throughpoverty, as presented through the Sermon on the Mount, summed up in the Golden Rule. From Eckhart's panentheistic theology, Fromm learned, that according to the New Testamentthere were two types of poverty: an externalpoverty of things, and an internal poverty, refered to in the gospel verse, which Eckhart defined by saying:

He is a poor man who wants nothing, knows nothing and has nothing.(40)

For Eckhart, a person who wants nothing was not one, who had chosen an ascetic life in the Church. Eckhard scolded those pious people, who understood not wanting anything as an exercise of repentance in confession and external religious praxis, thereby anticipating the reformer Martin Luther and the Lutheran philosopher and theologian Hegel.(41) According to Fromm, Eckhart saw the subcribers to that concept as people who held on to their selfish egos: ego seen by Fromm, with Freud, as center between Id, including aggression and libido, and superego, and environment.(42) For Eckhart, these people had the name of being saintly on the basis of the external appearances, but inside they were asses, because they did not grasp the true meaning of divine truth. For the comparative religiologist Fromm, Eckhart was concerned with the kind of wanting, that was also fundamental in Buddhist thought: that was, greed, craving for things and for one's own ego.(43)The Buddhaconsidered this wanting to be the cause of human suffering, not enjoyment. When according to Fromm, Meister Eckhartspoke of having no will, he did not mean that one should be weak. The will, Eckhart spoke of, was identical with craving, an arbitrary will, that one was driven by,that was in a true sense not will at all. Eckhart even postulated, that one should not even want to do God's will, because this also was a form of craving. The person, whowanted nothing, was the person who was not greedy for anything.This was, according to Fromm,the essenceof Eckhart's panentheistic concept of non-attachmen: of letting go, of letting be. According to Fromm, Eckhart approahed the problem of having and not having, or poverty, on another level, when he discussed the relation between possession and freedom. Human freedom was restricted to the extend, to which we were bound to possession, firstly and lastly, to our own egos, understood in the Eckehartian and Freudian sense.(44) By being bound to our egos, by egoboundness, or egomania, we stood in our own way, and were blocked from bearing fruit, from being creative, from realizing ourselves fully. Fromm identified completely withDietmar Mieth'sbook The Unity of Vita Activa and Vita Contemplativa of 1969.(45) Mieth maintained, that freedom as theprecondition of true creativity and productivity was nothing but giving up one's ego, as love in the Paulinian sensewas free from all egoboundness.(46) Freedom in the sense of being unfettered, free from the cravingfor holding onto things, and one's ego , was the preconditionfor love and productiveand creative being. According to Paul and Eckhart and Fromm , one had to get rid of the fetters of egoboundness and egocentricity,that was to say of thehaving mode of existence, in order to arrive at full being.Fromm had not found any author, whose thoughts about the nature of the having orientation in Eckhart were as similar to his own thinking, as those expressed by Mieth. Josef Mieth spoke of the reconstruction of man, the property structure of the people, in the same way asFromm spoke of the having mode, or the having structure of existence under global capitalism. Mieth refered to the Marxian concept of expropriation, when he spoke of the breakthrough of one's own inner property structure, adding that it was the most radical form of expropriation.(47).According to Fromm, Eckhart's second, more universal and more fundamental meaningof being waslife, activity, birth, renewal, breakthrough, outpuring, flowing out, creativity, productivity.(48) In this broader sense, being was the dialectical opposite of having, of egoboundness and egocentrism as revolution, or democracy, had been the opposite of authoritarianism, in Fromm's earlier work. Here for Eckhart being meant to be active in the classical sense of the creative expression of one'sown human powers, not in the contemporary sense ofkeeping busy under all circumstances. According to Fromm, for Eckhart activity meant dialectically to go out of oneself, while at the same time staying in oneself: acting and beeing as boiling, giving birth, flowingand flowing in itselfand beyond itself. Sometimes Eckhart used the symbol of running in order to indicate the active character of being: running into peace! The man who was in the state of running into peace, was a noble and heavenly man. This man continuallyrun, and moved, and was seeking peace in running. The active, alive man was like a vessel, that grew as it was filled, and would never be full.In Fromm's perspective, breaking throughthe mode of having was the precondition forall genuine activity and being. In Meister Eckhart's ethical system, being rooted in hispanentheistic metaphysical and theological system, the supreme virtue was the state of productive and creative inner activity and being, for which the premise was the overcoming, the negation of all forms of egoboundness, and craving, and having.Being was the negation of negation. Virtue was the foundation of democracy, without which it could not prosper.

New Synthesis

According toFromm, for those people ,who were not authentically rooted in theisticreligions, e,g, the three Abrahamic religions, the principle question waa that of conversion to a humanistic religiosity without religion,without dogmas, and without ecclesiastical institutions.(49) Such religiosity had long been prepared by the movement of nontheistic, nonpantheistic, panentheistic religiosity, from Buddha through Meister Eckhart to Marx and Freud. People of the 20^th and alsostill of the 21^st century , were not confrontedwith the choice between selfish, bourgeis materialism and the acceptance of the theisticor pantheistic concept of God. There was the panentheistic option. In this option social life itself,- in all itsaspects in family,civil society, state, history, culture, including art, and philosopy and science, in work,in leisure, in pesonal relations, - would be the expression of the religious spirit or consciousness.No separate, positive religion would be necessary anylongr. Fromm did not intend his demand for a new nontheistic, noninstitutionalized , panentheistic relgiosity to be an attack on the existing, positive religions.Fromm's demanddid , however,mean , that the Roman Catholic Church, beginning with the Roman bureocracy, had to convert itself to the spirit of the gospel. I have been alifelong memberof the Roman Catholic Church, first in fascist Germany and thenin the liberaldemocratic America, During World War II ,I was a leader in the antifascist Catholiv Youthmovement in Nazi Germany. After the Second Vatical Council,I was together with my friends Hans Küng, Johann Baptist Metz, and Gregory Baum, part of the progressivereform wing of the Church, working for its conversion to the spirit of the gospels, for true evangelization. Fromm's demand did not mean, that the socialistcountries had to be desocialized , but that their fake socialism had to bereplacedby a genuine,humanistic socialism. (50) Fromm summed up his critical theory ofsociety and religion by remembering, that the Later Medieval culture flourished, because people followed the vision of the City of God.(51) Modern society flourished , because people were energizedby the vision of the growth of the Earthly City of Progress. It ended with the sinking of the Titanic and World War I. In the 20^th century this vision of Progress deteriorated to that of the Tower of Bable (52) It wasin the 20th century beginning to collapse, and, so we may add, it is now continuing to desintegrate with much confusion .Fromm predicted, that the collapsingCity of Progress as Tower of Bable would ultimately bury everybody in its ruins. If, so Fromm argued dialectically in Hegelian and Fichtean terms, the City of God and the Earthly City of Progress were thesis and antithesis, a new synthesiswas the onlyalternative to chaos: the synthesisbetween the spiritualcoreof the late Medieval World, most adequately expressed not only in the works of Thomas Aquinas, of Bonaventura, and of Albertus Magnus, but also in Meister Eckhart'spanentheistic theology, psychology and sociology, and the development of rational thought and science since the Renaissance.For Fromm, this new synthesis was the City of Being. Not only Fromm's critical theory of religion, but even his whole lifework was devoted to this goal. Likewise, a renaissance of Fromm's work wouldserve and promote this new synthesis.

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