According to Catholic theology, «a direct and accurate study of the facts has led to the discovery of a cult of the Supreme Entity, which is found more or less among all primitive peoples. The Supreme Entity or Great God is presented as creator of everything, even of spirits or lower divinities, as omnipotent, immense, just. This fairly constant fact among the most ancient peoples proves that Monotheism is anterior to Polytheism and that the latter is a degeneration of the former (…) Monotheism, admirably preserved in the Jewish tradition, (…) was the primitive religion» (Dictionary of Dogmatic Theology, Rome, 1945). Ever since its appearance, or better its ‘creation’, man would have been aware of the existence of a Supreme Entity, a sole and omnipotent God. And this would have been possible through the ‘revelation’ which, theologically, is the act by which God reveals himself, first and foremost in the creation of the Universe. It is the so-called ‘natural revelation’.

Man, from the very beginning, would have had a voluntary disposition of the soul to recognise God as the Supreme Entity and master of the Universe and to render him the due worship. Not to mention that God, it is read in Genesis, spoke with man, walked with him, ate with him, and even measured his physical strength in battle. The Bible (Genesis, 32:24-32) tells of the all-night physical confrontation between Jacob and God in person and how, following this event, God himself changed the name of Jacob into Israel, ‘he who fights’, ‘the warrior’.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church continues: «Throughout their history, and up to the present day, men have in many ways expressed their search for God through their religious beliefs and behaviours (prayers, sacrifices, cults, meditations, etc.). Despite the ambiguities they may present, such forms of expression are so universal that man can be defined as a “religious being”».

Therefore, if idolatry, fetishism, polytheism, represent only a degeneration of primitive monotheism, they would nevertheless confirm the necessity, linked to human nature, of the belief in a Superior Being.

In The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Engels describes the lower stage of the savage state in these terms: «Childhood of the human race. Man still lived in his original habitat, in tropical or subtropical forests, and was partially at least a tree-dweller, for otherwise his survival among huge beasts of prey cannot be explained. Fruit, nuts and roots served him for food. The development of articulate speech is the main result of this period. Of all the peoples known to history none was still at this primitive level. Though this period may have lasted thousands of years, we have no direct evidence to prove its existence; but once the evolution of man from the animal kingdom is admitted, such a transitional stage must necessarily be assumed».

In this initial stage of human history, when tools were almost non-existent, the representative faculties minimal and even phonetic language almost non-existent, our progenitors led a life too similar to that of animals to be able to express any religious form.

But man’s evolutionary capacity, stimulated by the necessity of providing for his own needs, has created the first technical means to produce the necessities of life. «It is in this mechanism of the development of social needs, of social organisations, and thus of the development of knowledge, that, at a certain point in the progress of mankind, that intellectual phenomenon is formed and appears, at various times and in an almost equal manner in the various groupings of it, that intellectual phenomenon which, at a certain degree of its evolution, assumes the characteristics for which it is designated by the name of religion».

We can therefore say that after a very long period in which the idea of religion was completely non-existent, human evolution has known the religions of primitive communities, which were followed, after a long course of millennia, the religions of slave society, then those of feudal society, and finally those of capitalism. Since man has created God in his own image and likeness, he depicts him according to the ideas of the society in which he lives. Already the Greek philosopher Xenophanes, who lived about five centuries before Christ, stated: «If oxen, horses, and lions had hands and could paint with those hands, horses would paint gods like horses, oxen like oxen, and would forge their bodies as each is forged (…) The Ethiopians claim that their gods are snub-nosed and black, the Thracians that they have cerulean eyes and red hair».

After a very long period during which the life of man differed little or not at all from that of other animals, when man finally succeeded in forging the first technical means to produce the necessities of life and individual human societies acquired characteristics that differentiated their members from the rest of the living animals, at that point there is formed and appears that intellectual phenomenon that is designated by the name of religion.

There are no different religions according to the differences of tribes or peoples summarily compared, but according to the fundamental historical epochs into which the evolution of individual peoples is divided.

«The human spirit’, writes L. Morgan in The Ancient Society, «which is the same in all individuals, in all tribes, in all nations, and limited with respect to the extent of its powers, operates and must operate in uniform and constant directions and within narrow limits of variability. The results it arrives at in countries distant in space and time constitute the links in a logical and continuous chain of common experiences (…) Like successive geological formations, the tribes of mankind can be catalogued in successive strata according to their development: thus classified, they reveal with almost absolute precision the complete course of the human process, from the savage state to civilisation (because) the course of human experience has followed almost uniform paths».

If philosophical, religious, moral thought etc., follows determined and analogous stages, this means that peoples, whatever their race and geographical environment, in the course of their development experience analogous material and intellectual needs corresponding to analogous processes of production. The conclusion is therefore that, since religions correspond to common necessities of interpreting phenomena not controllable by man, albeit in different epochs and in different regions, the same religious ideas correspond to the same social development.

The most ancient form of religion, predating the division of society into classes, is the so-called ‘totemism’. The word Totem, taken from the Algonquian dialect, means ‘the brother’s kin’ or ‘the consanguineous one’. It is the bond of kinship that exists between the clan and its presumed progenitor, who is most often found in an animal, a plant, a river, on which the clan’s livelihood depends, guarantees its survival and continuity. In the Latin myth of Romulus and Remus suckled by the She-wolf, the legendary remnants of an ancient totemic society emerge, and the same emerge in the biblical myth of the Serpent (only later to become a deceiver) that allows man the knowledge of Good and Evil. In the Judaic religion, the totemic animal figures, especially the Serpent and the Bull, have left strong traces, demonstrating how entirely false it is that Monotheism, admirably preserved in the Jewish tradition, was the primitive religion; on the contrary, it is shown that religion has, like the others, passed through all the stages in conjunction with the development of the modes of production, of exchange, and of social organisation, referring not only to national boundaries, but, at the very least, to those of a geographical area stretching from the Nile Valley to that of the Tigris and Euphrates.

As far as the Serpent is concerned, we can recall, in addition to the well-known reptile of the earthly paradise, the one of bronze constructed by Moses and placed in the middle of the encampment so that those who had been bitten by a serpent, by looking at it, could be healed (Numbers, 21:8-9). The people of Israel continued burning incense and worshipping the bronze Serpent until it was broken to pieces by King Hezekiah (IV Book of Kings, 18:4). Jesus himself, in the Gospel of John (3:14-15), is likened to the Bronze Serpent raised by Moses. Aaron, brother of Moses, was the high priest of the Golden Bull, later downgraded to a calf as a derogatory sign. The totemic cult of the Bull, very widespread throughout the Mediterranean basin, still had great prestige among the Jews, so much so that the God of Hosts had serious difficulties before succeeding in ridding himself of this tenacious competitor. See in the Bible III Book of Kings (12:28) and IV Book of Kings (10:29 and 17:16).

The totemic figures take on the role of progenitor, relative, friend. The relationship established between the human group and the Totem is one of mutual dependence. The Totem is not yet a God, it is only the progenitor; no prayers are addressed to it, on the contrary, orders are given, manifesting with rites, held as magical, the collective will of the clan.

The man who lived in a society of communist character, reasoned in a communist manner. He resorted to fantastic representations of reality to supplement the relative partiality… of his knowledge. This, however, did not prevent him from taking a lucid view of the relationship between man and nature. «It is clear that if spontaneously arising religions – like the fetish worship of the Negroes or the common primitive religion of the Aryans – come to being without deception playing any part, deception by the priests soon becomes inevitable in their further development» (Engels, B. Bauer and Early Christianity). In primitive religions, no separation existed between religion and life: the two were one.

As a demonstration, we report excerpts from a speech by Chief Seattle of the Duwamish tribe in the Washington Territory (North West Coast) in 1855. The United States government had proposed to the Native American chief the purchase of certain lands belonging to his tribe. The parts of the speech that we report concern the response of the chief of the savages.

«The Great Chief of Washington makes known to us his desire to buy our Land. The Great Chief also sends us expressions of friendship and peace. It is a kind gesture on his part, since we know that he does not need our friendship much in return.

«We will examine your proposal, since we know that, if we do not sell, the white man can come with rifles to take our land.

«How can one buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the earth? It is an absurd idea to us. How could you indeed buy from us the coolness of the air or the gushes of water, since they do not belong to us? (…) Every corner of this land is sacred to my people. Every shimmering pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the shady woods, every clearing, every buzzing insect is sacred in the memory and existence of my people. The sap flowing in the trees carries the memory of the red man. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The fragrant flowers are our sisters; the deer, the horse, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky peaks, the saps in the meadows, the wild rush of the horse and the man, all belong to the same family (…) The clear water that flows in streams and rivers, for us is not just water, but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and tell them that every shadow reflected in the clear water of the lakes speaks of deeds and memories of the life of my people. The murmur of the water is the voice of my father’s father. The rivers are our brothers, they quench our thirst. The rivers carry our canoes and feed our children (…)

«We know that the white man does not understand our way of thinking. For him, one piece of land is worth the other, for he is a stranger who arrives by night and takes from the land everything he likes. The land is not a brother to him, but an enemy, and once he has conquered it, he abandons it. He leaves behind the grave of his father and does not care about it. He does not mind depriving his children of the land. He neglects the graves of the fathers and the vital rights of the children. He treats his mother the earth and his brother the sky as things to be bought, plundered, and sold, not unlike sheep and glittering gems. His voracity will devour the earth and leave behind the desert.

«I am a savage and do not understand a way of thinking different from mine. I have seen a thousand buffalo rotting on the prairie, left behind by the white man who had shot them from a moving train. I am a savage and do not understand how the steaming iron horse can be more important than the buffalo we kill just to survive. What is man without animals? If they were to disappear, man would die from a great loneliness of the spirit. Everything that happens to the animals soon happens to man too; all things are connected to one another. Everything the earth suffers, is also suffered by the children of the earth. If men spit on the ground, they spit on themselves.

«This we know: the earth does not belong to man, it is man who belongs to the earth. This we know: all things have a bond, like the blood that unites a family. Everything is connected to everything else. Whatever happens to the earth, will also happen to the children of the earth (…)

«The white man too will pass away, perhaps faster than other peoples. Continue to sully your bed and one night you will die choking on your own waste».

The primitive, in his feeling of life, does not set man against nature, he identifies him with nature itself and on this basis, he organises his labour and his social relations. The Totem is a naive, but not false, representation of these relations. Modern science’s theory of the continuity of species had not only already been intuited by Renaissance thinkers and fine-tuned by naturalists of the late 18th century, but was known and lived by the savage.

When the nomadic groups, who lived almost exclusively off the produce offered by the natural environment, began to establish fixed dwellings and cultivate the land, in order to stimulate the vegetal cycles so as to obtain more produce, they had to adapt to the seasonal cycles and set rules that the first chiefs had an interest in determining and making known generally. Hence the need to bring attention to the movement of the stars, first and foremost for its effect on the climate, the Sun, which, in almost all religions, is the most important of the Gods. The word God, in almost all Indo-European languages, is related to the principle of light: the root div, deiv, in Latin became deu(m), is an ancient adjective meaning luminous. This derivation is well evidenced by the Latin word dies (the day), as opposed to the concept of darkness, identified with malefic powers, a concept that has survived to this day.

The expression of these rules, having the force of laws, could only take vague, mysterious, and fantastic forms, nevertheless arising directly from a real need and from an experimental procedure.

The birth of religion indicates that man has reached such a point in his intellectual evolution that he seeks a causal relationship between the phenomena he witnesses or participates in and attempts to formulate a theory, albeit a fantastic one, that can explain these phenomena.

The magical practice of primitive peoples presents itself as an ‘experimental’ attempt at material pressure exerted by man upon nature. Like later philosophy and science, religion had the task of fulfilling the need to formulate hypotheses to explain the phenomena of the Universe. Religion and science were generated from the same causes and, in essence, represent the same phenomenon at different degrees of development.

The sciences proceed by constructing hypotheses that subsequent observations eliminate, in whole or in part, in order to formulate new ones. These are possible and constitute progress insofar as they make use of previously formulated notions that served as a basis, even if sometimes in contradiction with them. Every step forward, however, finds itself imprisoned within the limits constituted by the socially acquired knowledge. Thus also in religion, the new doctrine, considered ‘truer’ than the one that until yesterday was considered as such, takes the field and supplants the previous one because it succeeds in giving an explanation to natural or social phenomena that were hitherto unexplained or non-existent, or it gives a more acceptable, complete, precise explanation.

With social evolution comes religious transformation. Man, having become a shepherd and farmer, acquires new relationships of dependence with nature hitherto not perceived. Man, who until then had looked to the Earth, now turns his eye to Heaven: to the sun, the clouds, the seasons. The belief in personalised forces presiding over the succession of cycles and atmospheric alternations is born. This belief, most likely, arose in this way: there was the ancestral observation that there were beings that moved, fed, changed, and died; there were other beings that changed and died, but did not move or feed; there were, finally, beings (or things) that neither changed or moved of their own accord and in order to move they had to be transported or pushed by other beings that had the faculty to move. The idea of motion was among the first to be formed. It was then a significant step in knowledge that consisted in the formulation of the hypothesis that bodies (such as the Sun and Moon) not belonging to those that moved by themselves, had to be pushed or pulled by beings similar to humans or animals endowed with enormous power, even if not visible. Having admitted the existence of these beings, the characteristic of immortality also had to be admitted. The idea of divinity was born.

The word ‘religion’ is said to derive from the Latin relegere (to rethink), or religare (to bind tightly), or reeligere (to reelect). However, in the final analysis, religion constitutes a law, a moral constraint, a rule, which binds men in their relations: it is the ‘sense of justice’. The concepts that in the various epochs and societies have constituted the idea of justice depend on the social relations existing at different stages of human historical and economic evolution.

P. Lafargue, in Social and Philosophical Studies, writes: «The passions and the concepts existing in man before the establishment of property, and the interests, passions and ideas which this engenders, acting and reacting one upon another, have ended by begetting, developing, and crystallising in the brain of civilised man the ideas of the Just and Unjust. The human sources of the idea of justice are the passion for vengeance and the sentiment of equality».

Vengeance is one of the most ancient sentiments of the human soul. Savages transmit from father to son the memory of an offence suffered and the commitment to avenge it. The Bible teaches us that God avenges «the iniquities of the fathers upon the sons and grandsons unto the third and fourth generation» (Exodus, 34:7).

The Hebrew God did not differ at all from the Babylonian, Egyptian or any other people’s gods. The primitive, in continual struggle with the hostile environment, animals and other peoples, did not conceive the sense of individuality. Unable to live in isolation, he gathered in tribes; the members of the tribe acted and thought in harmony: they hunted, fought, and farmed in common. The savage man could not conceive of individual life outside the communal social order. The gravest punishment inflicted on those who broke the rules of the social contract was expulsion from the tribe, a thing that was equivalent to a death sentence. Cain, cast out after the murder of his brother Abel, raises his lament: «Behold, thou shalt cast me out this day from the face of the earth, and I shall flee thy face, and be a fugitive and a wanderer in the world. Therefore whoever finds me shall kill me» (Genesis, 4:14).

The tribe believed it had the same ancestor, the same blood was the blood that flowed in the veins of all; to shed the blood of one member of the tribe was equivalent to shedding the blood of the community. All members had a duty/right to vengeance. It is presumable that this communal sentiment, guarantee of protection against the offence suffered at the hands of a stranger to the tribe, even included the member cast out for unworthiness. To Cain who fears for his fate, God assures: «No, it shall not be so. On the contrary, whoever kills Cain will be punished sevenfold. And the Lord put a sign on Cain so that no one who met him would kill him» (Genesis 4-15).

If the tribe considers itself offended by an injustice suffered by any one of its members, the whole tribe was likewise held responsible for the offences committed by one of them. The murder of a savage was tantamount to the declaration of war between two tribes, because the individual offence was transformed into collective offence and vengeance struck all, including women and children, as well as their animals. Just as the biblical God does towards the Egyptians, the inhabitants of Jericho, and all other enemies.

However, collective vengeance could, in the long run, endanger the very existence of the community. In the need to prevent the disastrous consequences of vengeance extended to the clan or tribal level, the savages had to adopt systems aimed at taming their feelings of reprisal by subjecting them to regulation. This system, which apparently seemed to fall short of the sense of solidarity, consisted in sacrificing the sole member who had committed the offence by handing him over to the clan to which the victim belonged so that only on him could vengeance be exercised. It was only guaranteed that the punishment would not exceed the offence caused. Thus was born the law of retaliation: «Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, wound for wound, sore for sore» (Exodus, 21:23 ff.).

The law of retaliation, which today, according to bourgeois morality, appears so brutal and savage, on the contrary served to guarantee both the guilty (who would receive no punishment greater than the damage done) and his clan (who would suffer no retaliation).

This law, with the institution of private property gradually fell into disuse until it was altogether supplanted. Property stopped the flow of blood due to deaths and amputations: no longer ‘life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth’, but ‘goods for life, goods for eye, goods for tooth’. Blood no longer called for blood but mere material compensation. This new custom forced man to enter into the world of abstraction to solve the new problems he was called upon to solve. He had to find equivalents between things that had no direct material relation; to find the economic equivalent for a life, an injury, an insult, something which, according to the law of retaliation, was completely immoral if not unthinkable.

Lafargue continues: «The transformation of retaliation was probably facilitated by slavery and the slave trade, the first international commerce which was regularly established. The exchange of living men for oxen, arms and other objects accustomed the barbarian to giving for blood some other equivalent than blood. A new household phenomenon contributed even more energetically than the slave trade toward modifying the law of retaliation. Woman, so long as the matriarchal family exists, remains in her clan, where she is visited by her husband or husbands; in the patriarchal family the young girl leaves her family to go and live in that of her husband. The father is indemnified for the loss of his daughter, who by marrying ceases to belong to him. The young girl then becomes an object of traffic, a finder of oxen, alphesiboia according to the Homeric epithet. It was for oxen that the Greeks exchanged her. The father began by trafficking in his daughters and ended by selling his sons, as is shown by the Greek and Roman laws. The father by selling his own blood breaks the ancient solidarity which united the members of the family and bound them in life and death. The parents, exchanging for beasts and other property their children, their living blood, became for a still stronger reason disposed to accept beasts or other property for blood that had been shed, for a son who was slain. The children, following the example of their parents, came in their turn to satisfy themselves with an indemnity, whatever it might be, for the blood of their father or mother».

One must not, however, believe that this ‘unnatural’ custom, which subverted all the laws of primitive egalitarianism, succeeded easily and in short time in eradicating from the human heart the sentiments and instincts that had been inveterate for so long. Both religion, guardian of ancient customs, and the sense of honour and dignity long opposed the substitution of blood and offence with money.

Ajax, who, together with Ulysses and Phoenix, had been sent to Achilles to persuade him to accept Agamemnon’s gifts and, with these having placated his wrath, to return to battle, addressed the offended hero in these terms: «Unpitiying! Yet a blood-fine man accepts / Ev’n from a brother’s slayer, or for death / Of son: and so the slayer dwelleth on / In his own people, when full price is paid / And stayed from vengeance is the kinsman’s soul / And haughty spirit, when the fine he holds» (Iliad, IX). These few verses demonstrate how the price of blood now managed to quiet the ancient instinct of revenge. But evidently the resistance to the new custom was still strong because not only did Achilles not wish to bend before Agamemnon’s gifts: «No, not if gifts in number as the sand / Or dust he bring, not even so my mind / Will Agamemnon move, till he have made / For grievous outrage done atonement full».

In the text of the Catechism of the Catholic Church we read that man «Discovers certain “ways” to arrive at the knowledge of God’. These «are also called “proofs of the existence of God” not in the sense of the proofs sought in the field of natural sciences, but in the sense of “convergent and convincing arguments” that allow true certainties to be reached. These “ways” to approach God have as the starting point the creation: the material world and the human person’. Such proofs would be: 1) «The world: starting from the movement and from the becoming, from the contingency, from the order, and from the beauty of the world, one can come to know God as origin and end of the Universe’; 2) «Man: (…) he perceives signs of his own spiritual soul. Germ of the eternity which he bears within himself, irreducible to matter alone. His soul can only have its origin in God alone (…) God can be recognised with certainty by the natural light of human reason starting from created things».

In this regard, there has been no lack of profound insights since antiquity. For example, the Latin poet Lucretius, who lived in the time of the Republic, on the origin of religion leaves us in De Rerum Natura these powerful verses:

«How the idea of the divine spread among the peoples / and why the cities are full of altars, of cults / and of solemn rites that still today are performed in / unusual events, and from whence comes to mortals the horror / that in the whole earth gives rise to this endless / series of temples and festivals crams them with people; / it is not difficult to explain.

«From the weary wakes and dreams of men / tall figures arose, perhaps memories of the / tormented day; and we believed them alive because it seemed to us / that they moved and from their imperious faces they sent / haughty voices. And as they remained / immense phantoms fixed in the depths of our soul / we thought that no enemy force could ever / destroy them; and thus they were / of immortal life imagined. And also / they seemed more fortunate and serene than us / because fear of death could not touch them / and because without toil in those far-off dreams / they were born free and beautiful and authors of wonders.

«And men also looked / at the immutable norm of the heavens / and the constant returns of the seasons: / but to discover the causes it was not enough to look. / Then it was only refuge that they owed everything to the Gods, / all to their nods they put the things of the world. / And at once they set up seats in the sky for the Numina, / temples of mists, / because in the sky you see the light, the moon, the day; / in the sky you see the night and you see / to the stern silences the clear going of the stars; / in the sky the clouds, the sun, the rain, the snow, / the hail, the lightning, the wind; and the dark / howls of thunder seem long / murmured threats spreading through the air.

«Certainly the race of men was unfortunate / such facts believing and other cruel wrath / to come from the Gods. / How many fears they would have avoided for themselves / and how many for us pains and cries and misfortunes. / Yet to show oneself with a veiled head / near a statue, to visit altars / is not religion; it is not religion to fall / lying on the ground, to raise one’s recumbent palms towards the marbles / and to soil / the altars with the blood of strong animals; / it is religion, if ever, to be able to look / with a quiet mind at the immensity / of matter (…)

«And still men’s petty souls tremble / in vain fear of divine wrath when / struck by lightning the torrid earth trembles / and under the airy rush of thunder in the liquid clouds / the profile of the mountains disappears and the celestial roar / spreads and beats on the hills and is heard from afar / if from the valleys the vast echoes answer; / then the proud tyrants remember / the course of faith and hide themselves and fear / that the grave punishment’s time has come. / And when on the sea the heavy fleet of armies / and elephants enters the shadow of the gale / the captain prays from the sky for the calm of the winds / in vain: for as he goes up the prow / to the supplicating vow a violent whirlwind rises / and seizes him and against the rocks slams him, to the ford / unknown of implacable death. / At such a sign a secret force tramples on things / human and seems to mock, mock / the haughty beams and the fierce axe. / And in the end, when all the earth / underfoot falters and falls to the ground / or our cities are about to fall, / what wonder if men keep vile / themselves and leave to the deities an immense / occult power that governs everything?»

Man, says the poet, created for himself the idea of the Gods in view of his own weakness in the face of terrible and unsettling forces, unable to comprehend their phenomena: a lightning bolt, a sudden death, the eruption of a volcano. All this has led man to imagine the presence of supernatural beings to whom he has given partly human and partly animalistic forms, material or invisible and immaterial bodies. To reconcile these forces, to make them friendly to himself, he erects temples, offers sacrifices, establishes cults. The power of the verses stands out: «It is religion, if ever, to be able to look with a quiet mind at the immensity of matter». That of Lucretius is a naive materialism because it lacked solid scientific premises. Religious superstition does not take nourishment from ignorance, but from the oppression of the masses, crushed by the mechanism of class domination. God, whom science has driven out of both Heaven and Earth, continues to reign in society.

On the occasion of the publication in Italian of the Origin of Species, ‘La Nazione’ of Florence, on 30-31 May 1865, wrote: «On 24 November 1859 Mr. Charles Darwin published in England a book entitled; The Origin of Species by Natural Selection etc.’. Mr. Charles Darwin was for a long time known in England as a distinguished naturalist, and known to the learned of all nations for the celebrated voyage of circumnavigation made on board the English vessel The Beagle in the capacity of naturalist (…) The new book was at once eagerly sought out and read in England, and was found to be in accordance with the author’s true and steadfast reputation, and rich in qualities admired in his other writings. But the subject matter here was different: it was not a matter of description or comparison of species, but the question of species in general (…) Darwin, relying on a series of observations and facts, and promising more copies of facts and observations in a larger work to be published soon, argues that the species can change, and must change as the external conditions in which the animal lives change (…) Darwin relies on the facts, and from the facts he studies to draw his deductions; he develops at every step those serious objections that come to him, showing well that he values all their importance, and he proceeds with respect, with caution, doubtfully: which increases the value of his arguments and makes the reader attentive and confident, who feels himself called upon rather to be a companion in a difficult research, than as auditor of a new theory. And indeed, Darwin’s book was well received (…) But things soon changed, because, having read the book more closely, they found in it, as Dante says, the poison of the argument. Admitting the transformations of the species and the derivation of one from the other instead of the successive creations, one comes to oppose the word of the Bible where it expressly says that God created the various species of animals one after the other, and the English theologians, many of whom are also worthy naturalists, rose up against the new theory shouting as much in the name of revelation as in that of science».

Openly materialist doctrines have accompanied advances in scientific research throughout the ages. Materialism was born in the days of the republics of classical Greece and Rome. But Darwin’s book came to revolutionise the natural sciences and marked a very important stage in the elaboration of modern materialist thought, which had a flourishing revival by the French encyclopaedists at the end of the 18th century and was to reach its highest point, by the work of Marx, in the doctrine of dialectical materialism. The encyclopaedists, who had already achieved remarkable results, lacked the precious documentary material accumulated from geographical, geological, and palaeontological research that Darwin was to ingeniously undertake, reading the secret history of life on Earth.

The importance of Darwin’s evolutionary doctrine, in the field of scientific knowledge of organised living matter, undoubtedly equals the works of the founders of modern celestial mechanics: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. The discoveries of these greats of astronomical investigation were consequently to lead to hypotheses on the formation of celestial bodies and, in particular, of the solar system. From the time when Kant, and later Laplace, formulated the well-known hypothesis of the formation of the planetary system by the emission of solar matter, cosmogonic hypotheses have followed one another. They differ from one another, but all have in common the guiding principle of the evolution of the cosmos. The discoveries of modern astrophysics allow no doubt that the constellations, the stars, the planets, all the way down to our small Earth all have a history, even if it is measured in millions of years. Astral bodies are neither fixed nor eternal: besides being in perpetual motion, they arise, they live, they transform in the immensities of space. Matter evolves. The physical world and the stellar Universe itself that falls under our observation are the present stage of an evolutionary process that is undeniable, even if, at the moment, we do not know all the laws of its development.

Cosmic evolutionism was a great achievement of thought, but before Darwin there was still a lack of a doctrine that materialistically explained the laws that govern the realm of life. The nebular hypothesis, formulated by Kant in 1755 and later perfected by Laplace, had driven out the creationist myth at least from the confines of the solar system. However, it remained unassailable in the field of biology and, ultimately, continued to appear as the only explanation for the origins of man, proposed by religion in its allegedly contradictory nature of matter and spirit, body and soul. The undying glory of Darwin is to have unravelled the mystery surrounding the origin of the different forms of life on Earth. The Origin of Species conquered for evolutionism the great realm of organised living matter; it introduced the dialectical principle of transformation into the biological field. Since then we know that not only nebulae, stars, and planets bear witness to the perpetual motion of matter, but the very forms in which life manifests itself on Earth.

Until then, the formula of Charles Linnaeus that «as many species as from the beginning were created by God» had been almost unanimously accepted. Fossil findings, which documented the existence in the distant past of animal species that are now extinct, did not embarrass Linnaeus’ doctrine, which perfectly adhered to biblical dogma, and the French scientist George Cuvier argued by hypothesising a series of catastrophes, each of which would have eliminated existing animal species, but still attributed the creation of new and more perfect ones to the Eternal Father. With Darwin, on the other hand, the myth of the separate creation of species, both animal and plant, collapsed, which, up until then, had been considered fixed and immutable, just as, before Copernicus, the fixed stars of the Eighth Heaven. In the great Darwinist conception, the biological world as it surrounds us today has not existed forever, but has undergone a long and complex transformation, so that the animal and plant species now living, and among them the human one, are heirs of the vanished species.

But the real victory of materialist thought consists not so much in the principle of the transformation of the species as in the fact that biological transformation is explained by absolutely natural factors. In the struggle against the hostile environment, life comes to preserve by selection those mutations in organic functions, those new characteristics that facilitate survival. These characteristics, more capable of being transmitted hereditarily than others less favourable, end up constituting the fundamental traits of new species. This pushed scientific investigation from the inorganic, mineral world to that of the multiform world of life, overcoming the metaphysical antithesis between spirit and matter.

Darwin also attempted to demonstrate how physical life and psychic life obey the same objective laws of evolution. As Engels states, the mind appears as the highest level reached in the organisation of matter. In this sense, too, Darwinism represents a major milestone and a battle won in modern materialist thought.

The materialists, to whom Darwin furnished another formidable weapon of struggle against idealism and religious superstition, failed to realise the seemingly paradoxical fact that science had had to work harder to wrest God from the Earth than to wrest him from Heaven.

At the British Society’s annual conference in 1860, while the Darwinist theses on the origin of species were being discussed, the erudite Anglican Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce addressed Thomas Huxley, an advocate of evolutionism, in these terms: «Is it your grandfather’s or your grandmother’s side, Sir, that you are related to apes?» To which Huxley replied: «If I had to choose for my ancestor between an ape and a man who, however educated, uses his reason to deceive an uneducated public, I would not hesitate an instant to prefer the ape».

The Churches in fact immediately opposed Darwin’s theory. Only when one accepts the creation of man by direct intervention of God, can one admit that the idea of a Supreme Being was born with man. But when the thesis of evolution is admitted, the whole theological scaffolding collapses. If today the pope can afford to ‘rehabilitate’ Darwin without undermining the power of religion, but on the contrary garnering the applause of the entire ‘secular’ bourgeois culture, it does not at all mean that religion and science are not in contradiction, as priests and bourgeois scientists pretend to demonstrate. On the contrary, this demonstrates the correctness of the Marxist thesis that religion does not sink its roots in the soil of ignorance, but derives from deep social reasons and can only be abolished after the abolition of class-divided society. It also demonstrates the impossibility for eunuch bourgeois science of freeing itself from the embrace of religious superstition, its indispensable ally in maintaining the state of exploitation and domination over the proletariat.

Neither the discoveries of the great scientists of antiquity nor those that laid the foundations of modern science have been able to undermine the dominance of religion. The article in the Florentine newspaper, among other things, stated: «It is certain that today some theologians in England (…) say that the concept of creation does not lose any of its grandeur, indeed it gains it, considered in this new direction, and it is certain still that if Darwin’s theory is destined to prevail, the theologians will find that it is in the Bible clear and evident, and that it is entirely the fault of our poor eyes if, until now, we have not been able to read it».

Religion is inseparably bound to class-divided society. The intellectual can, without changing his social status, reject religious superstition and embrace the doctrines of bourgeois atheism, but for the great exploited masses, it is impossible, as they continue to live in the atrocious conditions imposed by class division, to free themselves from religious beliefs. Napoleon is said to have stated that the task of religion is to make people accept the ‘disparity of fortunes’ and that «one man starves next to another who has eaten too much». That the Corsican general was not unknowing in this matter is confirmed for us by the theoretical organ of the Catholic Church, which writes: «The idea of a “single” and “universal” Catechism goes back to Napoleon who, for political purposes, wanted a single catechism – the “Catechism of Napoleon” (1806) – for his entire empire» (Civilità Cattolica, 2 January 1993).

Engels, in his speech before the open grave of Karl Marx, uttered these words: «Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case».

This does not mean that Engels and the Marxists ignore the superstructures of every order and their effect, but they claim that every historical society has its own and that it is only by revolutionising the former are the latter revolutionised. The devotee believes: one religion is true, the others false; the bourgeois materialist opines: the religions are all false; the criticism of Marxist monism establishes that religions, insofar as they are man-made, are all true.

Marx writes in A Contribution to A Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: «Man makes religion, religion does not make man. Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man – state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realisation of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality (…) Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo. Criticism has plucked the imaginary flowers on the chain not in order that man shall continue to bear that chain without fantasy or consolation, but so that he shall throw off the chain and pluck the living flower. The criticism of religion disillusions man, so that he will think, act, and fashion his reality like a man who has discarded his illusions and regained his senses, so that he will move around himself as his own true Sun. Religion is only the illusory Sun which revolves around man as long as he does not revolve around himself. It is, therefore, the task of history, once the other-world of truth has vanished, to establish the truth of this world. It is the immediate task of philosophy, which is in the service of history, to unmask self-estrangement in its unholy forms once the holy form of human self-estrangement has been unmasked. Thus, the criticism of Heaven turns into the criticism of Earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, and the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics».

Lenin writes: «Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion – that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further. It says: We must know how to combat religion, and in order to do so we must explain the source of faith and religion among the masses in a materialist way».

Religion is not born as the ‘opium of the people’, it becomes so in a society divided into classes. Religion is the ‘opium of the people’, the ‘spiritual liquor’ the masses need to forget their material social subjugation and represent their yearning for a human humanity. The dispossessed seek in religion the realisation of their fundamental need for brotherhood and earthly happiness. This is why in all religious movements there have always been real currents of social revolt. The examples are innumerable: we can mention Jewish messianism and prophetism, the salvific cults of the Orient, primitive Christianity, the whole series of mediaeval heresies, revisions of Islam, various Protestant sects born in the wake of the Reformation, the freedom movements of colonial and ex-colonial peoples, etc. But the religious movements, which at times were genuine revolutionary parties, today are all in the service of the worst reaction, with the aim of diverting the proletariat from the path of its social emancipation, from rejoining Marxist revolutionary doctrine.

Only the conscious proletariat, which has broken the shackles of resignation and devoted itself to the struggle against capitalism by embracing the Marxist programme and theory, can emancipate itself from religion; on the other hand, it is not possible for advances in Science to threaten the survival of religious superstition in the masses. If, in spite of the scientific progress achieved in the investigation of the Universe and of life, religious superstition continues to dominate consciences, this is to be explained first of all by interpreting the real roots of religion. Lenin wrote in this connection: «Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry? Because of the ignorance of the people, replies the bourgeois progressive, the radical or the bourgeois materialist. And so: “Down with religion and long live atheism; the dissemination of atheist views is our chief task!” The Marxist says that this is not true, that it is a superficial view, the view of narrow bourgeois uplifters. It does not explain the roots of religion profoundly enough; it explains them, not in a materialist but in an idealist way. In modern capitalist countries these roots are mainly social».

Marxism affirms that religion, which subjugates and lulls the people, is not the result of a duel of ideas in the closet of conscience, but the only non-revolutionary way of reacting to injustice, to arrogance, to unpunished crimes, to the domination of terror inseparably linked to the economic class division of society, and that the victory of ‘science’ over religion cannot be the effect of Enlightenment preaching, but one of the consequences of the social transformation that erases the dreadful material condition of the masses. Such a task could not fall to the atheist thinkers of the bourgeoisie, but only to the vanguard of the class that historically opposes it, to revolutionary communism.

If the darkness of religion could be dissolved simply by the light of scientific discoveries, superstition ought to have long since disappeared. On the contrary, precisely in these very last few years we are witnessing a revitalisation of all religions, their offensive reassertion in society, the total abandonment by the bourgeoisie of Enlightenment atheism, the recognition of religious importance by all those men and parties that once flaunted Marxist ideology. Already Marx wrote, on 28 June 1855: «It is an old and historically established maxim that obsolete social forces, nominally still in possession of all the attributes of power and continuing to vegetate long after the basis of their existence has rotted away, inasmuch as the heirs are quarrelling among themselves over the inheritance even before the obituary notice has been printed and the testament read – that these forces once more summon all their strength before their agony of death, pass from the defensive to the offensive, challenge instead of giving way, and seek to draw the most extreme conclusions from premises which have not only been put in question but already condemned. Such is today the English oligarchy. Such is the Church, its twin sister. Countless attempts at reorganisation have been made within the Established Church, both the High and the Low, attempts to come to an understanding with the Dissenters and thus to set up a compact force to oppose the profane mass of the nation. There has been a rapid succession of measures of religious coercion».

The bourgeoisie was born atheist. With its triumph, Satan, taken as symbol of atheism, triumphed over God. «The bourgeoisie, the class which God held in small regard, possessed itself of power and guillotined the king He had anointed: natural sciences, which He had cursed, triumphed and engendered for the bourgeoisie more riches than He had been able to give to His favourites, the nobles and the legitimate kings; Reason, which He had bound, broke her chains and dragged Him before her tribunal. The reign of Satan had begun. The romantic poets of the first half of the nineteenth century composed hymns in his honour; he was the unconquerable vanquished, the great martyr, the consoler and hope of the oppressed; he symbolised the bourgeoisie in perpetual revolt against nobles, priests and tyrants» (P. Lafargue).

For the bourgeois artists, Satan, or the negation of God, represented everything that contributes to human progress, a kind of principle of life, indissolubly bound to civilisation, science, reason, freedom of thought, and social evolution. Satan embodied the spirit of revolt against all forms of authority and power that limit the material and spiritual potentialities of man. The bourgeois located in religion the reactionary and restraining force of history, the main expression of authoritarianism and violence upon man. Carducci ended his ode To Satan with these verses: «Hail, O Satan, / O rebellion / O vindictive force / Of reason! / Sacred to thee ascend / The incenses and the vows! / Thou hast vanquished the Jehovah / Of priests».

Even before coming to power, the bourgeoisie had in fact written on its flag and on its programme the cry of ‘Death to God!’. If we were not materialists, we would not be able to understand how ‘ideas’ in certain moments manifest themselves violently and impose themselves (irony of hard facts) in spite of the minds that have formulated them.

But the bourgeoisie, as soon as it seized power, not only took care not to put into action the extremisms of the deniers of the aristocratic regime, but also hastened to put back onto the altars the God that Reason had violently demolished. Our Lafargue continues: «[N]ot having entire faith in His omnipotence, it added to Him a troop of demigods: Progress, Justice, Liberty, Civilisation, Humanity, Fatherland, etc. who were chosen to preside over the destinies of the nations who had shaken off the yoke of the aristocracy (...) The final victory of the Bourgeoisie in England and in France impressed a complete revolution upon philosophic thought. The theories of Hobbes, Locke and Condillac, after having occupied the centre of the stage, were dethroned. People no longer deigned to discuss them and they were never mentioned unless truncated and falsified, to serve as examples of the wanderings into which the human spirit falls when it abandons the ways of God. The reaction went so far that under Charles X even the philosophy of the sophists of spiritualism fell under suspicion. An attempt was made to forbid their teaching in colleges. The triumphant Bourgeoisie re-established on the altar of its Reason the eternal truths and the most vulgar spiritualism.
As early as 1794, the French bourgeoisie instituted the festival of the “Supreme Being” with a decree (by Robespierre!) that states in Article 1: “The French Nation recognises the existence of the Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul”».

Marx states in On the Jewish Question: «The question is: What is the relation of complete political emancipation to religion? If we find that even in the country of complete political emancipation (the United States, where there is neither state religion, nor religion declared to be of the majority, nor the pre-eminence of one cult over others – ed.) religion not only exists, but displays a fresh and vigorous vitality, that is proof that the existence of religion is not in contradiction to the perfection of the state (…) The political emancipation of the Jew, the Christian, and, in general, of religious man, is the emancipation of the state from Judaism, from Christianity, from religion in general. In its own form, in the manner characteristic of its nature, the state as a state emancipates itself from religion by emancipating itself from the state religion – that is to say, by the state as a state not professing any religion, but, on the contrary, asserting itself as a state. The political emancipation from religion is not a religious emancipation that has been carried through to completion and is free from contradiction, because political emancipation is not a form of human emancipation which has been carried through to completion and is free from contradiction. The limits of political emancipation are evident at once from the fact that the state can free itself from a restriction without man being really free from this restriction (…) The political elevation of man above religion shares all the defects and all the advantages of political elevation in general. The state as a state annuls, for instance, private property, man declares by political means that private property is abolished as soon as the property qualification for the right to elect or be elected is abolished (…) Is not private property abolished in idea if the non-property owner has become the legislator for the property owner? The property qualification for the suffrage is the last political form of giving recognition to private property. Nevertheless, the political annulment of private property not only fails to abolish private property but even presupposes it (…) Man emancipates himself politically from religion by banishing it from the sphere of public law to that of private law. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state, in which man behaves – although in a limited way, in a particular form, and in a particular sphere – as a species-being, in community with other men. Religion has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere of egoism, of bellum omnium contra omnes. It is no longer the essence of community, but the essence of difference (…) Hence, man was not freed from religion, he received religious freedom».

We wrote in L’Avanguardia on 14 February 1913: «The present bourgeoisie was atheist and broke the altars, when religion constituted the last defence of the feudal regime and of the absolute monarchy of kings by “divine right”, and represented an obstacle to its ascension. But, today, the bourgeoisie renounces its philosophical baggage and becomes again a little-Christian because, in turn, shaken by the revolutionary movements of the proletariat, it feels the need to cling to all the anchors of salvation. For us socialists who want to counter the effects of this alliance between capitalism and clericalism, it is therefore necessary not to leave religion out of the question. It is absurd to expect the priest not to involve himself with politics and remain neutral in economic conflicts. It is necessary to aim at the destruction of the ecclesiastical institution not only in its “temporal” manifestations, but also in its religious and spiritual essence, because it is impossible to separate those two explications of the activity of the priests».

For the Marxist party, therefore, the attitude of disinteresting oneself in the religious fact is unacceptable because it is considered to be a matter of private conscience alone, and to limit itself to denouncing to the proletarians the damage that derives to their movement from the dedication to the priest when they go beyond the strictly spiritual field. To this veritable surrender to the enemy we have exhaustively responded in point 20 of our Political Platform of 1945: «The proletarian-communist party cannot make the colossal mistake of considering the powerful organisation of the Church as neutral in class conflicts, nor allow itself to be led to this by the historical fact that the Church itself, the social and political fulcrum of the pre-bourgeois regimes, has today passed into total solidarity with the capitalist institutions which succeeded the democratic revolution. Indeed, precisely for this reason, the Church must be considered as a factor of the first order in the preservation of capitalist institutions, all the more so when, as in Italy, it is reconciled with the state and inspires parties that have laid down their anti-democratic and anti-social approach in correspondence with the parallel renunciation of the bourgeois parties to Masonic anti-clericalism. The class proletarian party, in the face of the unreserved collaboration between Catholics and the democratic left, certainly does not proclaim a return to the bourgeois anti-clericalism of the Masonic type, fiercely opposed by its best traditions, and does not oppose religion by an atheism of the old bourgeois type, inspired by the anti-Marxist formula according to which it is necessary first to free consciences from religious dogma in order to then have the right to want to free the lower classes from social exploitation. The party, however, in its propaganda emphasises the fundamental antithesis between its theory of the world and history and any transcendent, mystical, religious conception, and declares incompatible with belonging to the revolutionary ranks that of religious associations of any school. The proletarian regime, after the revolution, will programmatically exclude any religious association, believing that it cannot but present political characteristics, and will endeavour to progressively make every religious belief disappear, as the masses, freed from the extremes of economic depression, will be led more and more towards scientific knowledge and to the materialist conception peculiar to party doctrine. The same campaign of political and theoretical clarification must aim at the criticism, together with religious conceptions, of those of an “immanentist” nature, that is to say, those which sustain as the guidelines of human activity immaterial forces and values placed in the sphere of a purely ideal activity, and which today cover the vapid, empty talk of the supreme values of personality and human dignity. As a coefficient of theoretical degeneration, these conceptions can be even more dangerous than the transcendental ones which, by admitting an incomprehensible world of the beyond, prevent the concrete knowledge of real relations; so that any atheism falling back into the bourgeois Enlightenment type incredulity should not be considered as a step towards the doctrine of communism».

We do not accept, therefore, that religion can be considered a private matter, seeing in religion one of the means of defence of the bourgeoisie and a very important factor of social life.