The doctrine of eternal damnation helped create the concept of the individual. The overarching embrace of the Roman Catholic church held forth the promise to this now terrified individual the possibility of salvation within the body of an eternal collective, the Church.
But this same church held out also the threat of damnation, which threat itself alienated, fragmented the collective more deeply into numerous individuals. In the midst of a tendency to threaten us with damnation and then wink and say slyly, “just be good, take communion, and don’t worry about it,” up rose Luther who took damnation very seriously, and Protestantism became the struggle of individuals not to be damned, but in the midst of this struggle individualized even further the organs of Christ’s body. Increasingly, as the obsession with individual damnation became more intense and conscious, the body of Christ fragmented into Catholic and Protestant, and then into countless Protestant denominations. Much of the conflict between the two churches was over this: how shall the individual be saved? Just as the first step – one might argue – to the Nazi holocaust was the unquestioned assumption (in the 19th century, before there was even a Nazi party) that there was such a thing as a “Jewish Problem,” after which much ink would be spilled over what, specifically, the “problem” was and what to do about it, the Christian holocaust against the soul began with the assumption that there was a soteriological problem on the individual level.
Once this coup was achieved, it was simply a matter of time before any powerful or empowering vision of a Christian Collective was increasingly weakened, disempowered to the point where the church could become a mishmash of angry, frightened, depressed, or indifferent individuals who cannot stand up to the world, who see the Kingdom of God as none of their business, and see politics as being beneath the contempt of religiously minded people or merely an authoritarian meddling in the rights of those not in the same faith. “Where is the body of Christ?” one might ask them, and if they answer what they truly think, it would be this: “elsewhere.”
Thus does our conception of the individual take root in the mysterious and thoughtless rejection of the doctrine of universal salvation, become exacerbated under Roman Catholicism with its avoidance of the issue, and made worse with Protestantism.
Is it any wonder that Protestantism, if it played its role in the birth of capitalism as per Max Weber—and I believe it did—should thereby have given forth the launching pad for the next and most extreme and destructive stage of individualism: capitalism?
In the meantime, who was left to take up the mantel of the collective self since the church had cast it off? Communism (in the broad and correct sense of that word, not the perverted “communism” of the Soviet Union) whose efforts were often heroic and, yes, loving, was left with this task.
But this collective body in communism was conceived not as the body of Christ, for the Christian churches had turned that conception into a corpse of itself to be venerated in a tomb far from empty, and which was by no means allowed to be site of a rebirth on or kin to this Earth. Truly, the Body of Christ was to be a neverlandish affair entirely, the business of God alone. The churches carried away this body and deprived and secularized and thereby disabled the promising bloom of the collective subject known as communism.
Thus was the church deprived of its earthly reality and communism of the soul it might have had, the church becoming thereby a ghost, and communism a corpse. What was to be the marriage of Heaven and Earth was abandoned.
The church and the communists were conceived then as natural enemies when they are by nature one and of the same collective.
But tragically, whenever communism failed, especially ethically, this failure was attributed to its atheism and to its belief in the collective. The first of these criticisms has truth in it, but not in the way the critics think. The second criticism is a lie.