Religion and Socialism

God, it seems, Is Not Altogether Dead, even in the countries whose governments consider themselves “objectively socialist.” To be sure, Viterslav Gardaysk), the Marxist philosopher who chose this for the title of his book, found himself transferred from the post of full professor at Prague’s Charles University to that of a state-farm laborer, but that was to be expected. Gardaysk sought to understand reality; but, as Karl Marx tells us, the task of a Marxist philosopher is to change it— and the “objectively socialist” regimes know just how they want it changed. Yet someone else once said that, if men fell silent, the very stones would prophesy. Where the writ of Karl Marx runs unchallenged, philosophers have indeed been silenced, but out of that silence the spontaneous vitality of religious faith has emerged as both an irrepressible and an incomprehensible fact.

I am not speaking now of the continued functioning of ecclesiasti...