Marx, Rousseau and Nietzsche Mistake A Priori and A Posteriori

Marx, Rousseau and Nietzsche have much to say about Christianity. Rousseau's free-thinking Wolmar in his Julie or The New Héloise approves of Christian piety for his docile wife as it serves as "an opium of the soul." And, of course, Marx speaks of religion being the "opium of the people." Rousseau also writes, because Christianity regards another world as superior to this one:

I know of nothing more contrary to the social spirit (than Christianity).

And, because Christianity preaches humility and submission,

Its spirit is too favourable to tyranny for tyranny not to take advantage of it. Thus Christians are made to be slaves.

Thus, Christians are drones and slaves. When one places such comment alongside the lives of notably courageous and famous Christians such as Saint Paul and St Peter or of Don John of Austria or the Polish King John III Sobieski who led the largest cavalry charge in history, of Charles Martel, Martin Luther King or even of a literary swashbuckler like GK Chesterton contradictions may be seen to arise.

The mistake that the trio cited above make is not to undertsand the nature of Christianity. They see it as purely political in its effects and its aims. The whole purpose of it, according to them, is to be a means to sedate a populace at the disposal of a tyrannical ruler. They seem to posit a sinister political committee that cynically exploited it in this way and never explain how it came to be available in the first place. Because of its success it inevitably entered the political realm but its effect is not at all political. It operates at the personal level of individuals as a kind of subversive yeast.

It is certainly not the a posteriori moral code or prescription for conduct in the public world which it is often characterised as. Many want it to be this because that creates a straw man that is easily tilted at and toppled. But this is to misunderstand the nature of morality. The Old Testament, in the form of the handing down of the Ten Commandments to Moses on the mountain, for example, does not invent and then vindictively impose an arbitrary set of rules on people. All it does in such stories is to codify and organise (just as we organise legal systems for the good of all) moral intimations that arise or are 'discovered' (in the way which English Common Law is by judges) spontaneouly within all of us in the situations that the human condition inevitably brings about. Those who want such a process to be arbitrary and vindictive impositions describe the process as exactly that in order to portray them as the type of vindictive and arbitray imposition we all hate and, then, to reject in a self-fulfilling straw man prophesy.

Christianity is not a posteriori though. It occurs a priori before we go out into the public forum in the private world of individuals (unavailable to public science but no less real nevertheless) where they meet with their maker. In that private sphere souls are doctored much as TS Eliot describes in East Coker:

The wounded surgeon plies the steel
That questions thye distempered part;
Beneath the bleeding hands we feel
The sharp compassion of the healer's art
Resolving the enigma of the fever chart.
Our only health is the disease
If we obey the dying nurse
Whose constant care is not to please
But remind us of our, and Adam's curse,
And that, to be restored, our sickness must get worse.
The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire. 

Once doctored the Christian re-emerges into the world as a well-equipped free-lance warrior unhampered by his failings. He has no moral prescription to live by but is in possession of the usual moral nature all humans are defined by. Just like them he is obliged to navigate and negotiate the moral world with all of its challenges applying moral instincts on a case by case basis as each case arises. As real moral virtue is synonymous with health and happiness there will be no struggle in choosing the good even though it may prove hard to discern sometimes.