V. I.

Lenin

To:   MAXIM GORKY

... [1]
On the question of god, the god-like and everything connected with it, there is a contradict ion in your
position—the same, I think, which I used to point out in our
talks when we last met in Capri. You broke (or appeared
to break) with the Vperyod people, without having noticed
the ideological basis of “Vperyodism”.

The same has happened now. You are “most vexed”, you “cannot understand how the words ‘for the time being’ crept
in”—that is how you write—and yet at the same time you defend the idea of God and god-building.

“ God is the complex of those ideas, worked out by the tribe, the nation, mankind, which awaken and organise
social feelings, having as their object to link the individual, with society and to bridle zoological individualism.”

This theory is obviously connected with the theory or theories of Bogdanov and Lunacharsky.

And it is clearly wrong and clearly reactionary. Like the Christian socialists (the worst variety of “socialism”,
and its worst distortion), yon make use of a method which
(despite your best intentions) repeals the hocus-pocus of
the priests: you eliminate from the idea of God everything
about it that is historical and drawn from real life (tilth,
prejudices, sanctified ignorance and degradation, on the
one hand, serfdom and monarchy, on the other), and instead of the reality of history and life (here is
substituted in the idea of God a gentle petty-bourgeois phrase
(God=“ideas which awaken and organise social feelings”).

Your wish in so doing is to say something “good and kind”, to point out “truth and justice” and the like. But your
good wish remains your personal affair, a subjective “ innocent desire”. Once you have written it down, it goes out
among the masses , and its significance is determined not
by your good wishes, but by the relationship of social forces ,
the objective relationship of classes. By virtue of that
relationship it turns out (irrespective of your will and
independently of your consciousness) that you have put a
good colour and a sugary coating on the idea of the clericals, the Purishkeviches, Nicholas II and the
Struves, [2] since in practice the idea of God helps them keep the people in slavery. By beautifying the idea of god,
you have beautified the chains with which they fetter ignorant workers and
peasants. There—the priests and Co. will say—what a good and profound
idea this is (the idea of God), as even “ your ” leaders
recognise, Messrs. democrats: and we (the priests and Co.) serve that idea.

it is untrue that god is the complex of ideas which awaken and organise
social feelings. That is Bogdanov idealism , which suppresses the
material origin of ideas. God is (in history and in real life) first of all
the complex of ideas generated by the brutish subjection of man both by
external nature and by the class yoke—ideas which consolidate
that subjection, lull to sleep the class struggle. There was a
time in history when, in spite of such an origin and such a real meaning of
the idea of God, the struggle of democracy and of the proletariat went on
in the form of a struggle of one religious idea against another.

But that time, too, is long past.

Nowadays both in Europe and in Russia any , even the most
refined and best-intentioned defence or justification of the idea of God is
a justification of reaction.

Your entire definition is reactionary and bourgeois, through and
through. God==the complex of ideas which “awaken and organise social
feelings, having as their object to link the individual with society and to
bridle zoological individualism

Why is this reactionary? Because it falsely colours the idea of
“bridling” zoology preached by priests and feudals. In reality,
“zoological individualism” was bridled not by the idea of God, it was bridled both by the primitive herd and the
primitive community. The idea of God always put to sleep and
blunted the “social feelings”, replacing the living by the dead, being
always the idea of slavery (the worst, hopeless slavery). Never
has the idea of God “linked the individual with society”: it has always
tied the oppressed classes hand and foot with faith in the divinity of the oppressors.

Your definition is bourgeois (and not scientific, not historical)
because it operates with sweeping, general, “Robinson Crusoe” conceptions
in general, not with definite classes in a definite historical
epoch.

The idea of God among the Zyrian savages, etc. (including semi-savages)
is one thing. With Struve and Co. it is something quite different. In both
cases class domination supports this idea (and this idea supports it). The
“popular” conception of God and the divine is “popular” ignorance,
degradation, darkness, just like the “popular conception” of the tsar,
the devil and dragging wives by the hair. I completely fail to understand
how you can call the “popular conception” of God “democratic”.

It is untrue that philosophical idealism “always has in view only the
interests of the individual”. Did Descartes have the interests of the
individual more in mind than Gassendi? Or Fichte and Hegel as compared with
Feuerbach?

That “god-building is the process of the further development and
accumulation of social elements in the individual and society” is simply
terrible!! If there were freedom in Russia, the entire bourgeoisie would
praise you to the skies for such things, for such sociology and theology of
a purely bourgeois type and character.

Well, that’s enough for the time being: this letter is too long as it
is. Once again, I shake your hand and wish you good health.

Yours,

V. I.