Devotion to the Cause
Each decade, each half-decade, saw a completely new version of that evangel of universal salvation: through science, through the negation of tradition and convention, through literature and criticism, through nonresistence to evil, through a return to primitive Christianity, through the village commune, through love of the people and adoption of their way of life, through anarchism, agrarian socialsim, Marxism- whatever the gospel of the moment, its disciples were ready to live by it and remake the world utterly in its image.

Not having much else to live by, they acquired the power of living by ideas alone. "The thoroughly true-to-type intolerance of the Russian intelligentsia," observes Berdyaev, "was self-protective; only so could it perserve itself in a hostile world; only thanks to fanaticism could it weather persecution."

It was a fanaticism that served as a surrogate for the older religions. It idealized Russia, the peasant, the proletariate, science, the machine. It made a true gospel of its particular brand of salvation. It possessed singleness, exclusivism, dogma, orthodoxy, heresy, renegation, schism, excommunication, prophets, disciples, vocation, asceticism, sacrifice, the ability to suffer all things for the sake of the faith. Heresy or rival doctrine was worse than ignorance; it was apostasy. To the disciple even of so rational a doctrine as that of Marx, an ipse dixit was an irrefutable proof.

Onward to the Next!

Quote from Three Who Made a Revolution, by Bertram D. Wolfe.
Copyright 1983, Stein and Day Publications.
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