The life of Friedrich Engels (1820-1895) spanned the greater part of the 19th century—a period which in many parts of the western world saw both the ripening and the rottening of capitalism and its ideological ally, Christianity. From childhood through adulthood Engels was so situated that he could easily observe and reflect upon these processes in capitalism and Christianity. In the second half of the 18th century Engels' great-grandfather founded a thriving textile business in Barmen, a major industrial center of Germany. It is significant that, swayed by the humanistic promptings of Christianity, he supplied houses and ground for those many factory workers who wandered homeless about the countryside—deducting an appropriate amount, of course, from their weekly paycheck. Such concern for the workers was good business, as Robert Owen realized and demonstrated. But it showed that capitalists were still influenced by an ideology which, while in the main devoted to ideologically justifying the enormities of wage slavery and colonialism, could in its humanistic aspirations be antagonistic to the dehumanization of capitalism. As a child Engels felt this humanistic side of Christianity and its implicit incompatibility with the miseries of the factory system that he beheld with his own child's eyes. As a youth he began to understand that Christianity, while in one respect alienated from capitalism, was itself a reflection and form of capitalism's pervasive economic alienation; and that the humanistic philosophy and program that would lead the great masses of workers out of their misery had to be—not an outworn Christian ideology tied to slave, feudal, and capitalist societies—but a new humanism based on the needs and human relations and daily productive activities of the workers themselves. Thus while Engels witnessed first-hand the ripening and rottening of capitalism and Christianity, he saw also within these processes the seeds of a new economic order and a new humanism. He saw the transition of history, and he spent his life in the struggle to enlighten and guide that transition.

The boy Engels was deeply rooted in Christian Pietism. Influenced by mystics like Jacob Boehme and initiated by men like Philipp Spener and August Francke in Germany in the second half of the 17th century, Pietism was one of those many unorthodox movements in Christianity which originally aimed at vitality in the midst of dead and dying institutions. In its verbal and moral expressions, early Pietism was a revolt against the stiff sacramentalism and doctrine of Lutheranism, the legalism of Calvinism, and the empty creedalism and sterile intellectualism of Christianity in general. It was an evangelical call for a purification of the Christian life. Spener appealed for a return to Bible study in informal groups; the priesthood of all believers; practical everyday Christianity; love in dealing with unbelievers; vital, personal, heartfelt religion in theological education; and deeper spirituality in preaching, simplicity, and sincerity. Economically and socially, the Pietistic movement was a reaction to the personal suffering and social chaos of the Thirty Years' War and to the irrelevancy of the Protestant forms in dealing with those problems. Originally Pietism was a protest of the small bourgeoisie against the restrictive production and commerce of a decadent feudal system. It was an echo, an after-tremor, of the great Reformation earthquakes of the 16th century in Germany. Pietism was an abortive ideological revolution. For economic movement toward change in Germany had been abortive. Like the great Reformation earthquakes, the social unrest that gave rise to Pietism revealed the incompetence¹ of the German bourgeoisie in creating a new and revolutionary commerce. The result: German states languished in economic and social backwardness—while other European countries, like the Netherlands and England and France, advanced in industrialization and made their own bourgeois revolutions. Pietism evinced a certain humanistic purity; and while it generated attraction for feudal and bourgeois classes, it was essentially a flight into the inner world of self and feeling. But in its ambiguity it helped to shape the most productive period of German philosophy through men like Herder, Kant, Schleiermacher—and Engels.

Engels, however, got his Pietism first with his mother's milk. She came of a pious, scholarly, and poor family, though her religion did not dampen her capacity for laughter. Engels' father was a practical and successful businessman who believed in the verbal inspiration of the Bible. The young Engels appears to have reacted to the Pietism of his youth in a negative way. The oldest of eight children, he carried a special burden of family expectation and hope: like all eldest sons of the bourgeoisie, he was to become the perpetuator of the family name, business, and style of life. From October, 1834 to September, 1837 Friedrich attended the Gymnasium at Elberfeld. In a letter of his father, written to his mother August 27, 1835, we have evidence that the seventeen-year old was resisting the strict discipline of his father. The father complained that Friedrich received “middling reports” and that “in spite of severe punishment in the past” he was not learning obedience. His father recorded his vexation at “finding in his desk a dirty book from a lending library, a romance of the thirteenth century.”²

Engels' father removed him from the Gymnasium in September, 1837, a year before finishing. It is not completely clear why this was done. In his final report the headmaster said that Friedrich “believed himself inclined” to adopt business as his career, “in spite of his earlier plans for going to the University.”³ It may be that Engels' father forced him to leave school; or, what seems more likely, it may be that Engels, having decided that ultimately he would have a business career, saw that he would get to that eventually whether he went to the University or not, and elected to take his freedom away from home at age 17 instead of waiting another year for it. For years the mature Engels combined business with a life of personal, literary, and political freedom, so it is probable that this career is what he chose—or did not resist—in 1837.

Friedrich was sent to work as a clerk in a firm of his father's in Barmen. He remained there until July, 1838, when he was sent to Bremen for his commercial training in a large trading firm. He remained in Bremen until March, 1841—a period of almost two years. It was in Bremen that the first steps in Engels’ shift from Pietism to communism occurred.

The young Engels in Bremen, though ostensibly being schooled to take over his father's business, showed more interest in beer-drinking, the reading of poems, singing in the local choral society, writing, fencing, swimming, conversing with other apprentice youths, observing the teeming life of the harbor city, learning the score of languages spoken there, reading the English and Scandinavian newspapers, and enjoying and educating himself. Bremen at this time was the leading port of the German states, serving Baltic grain ships and sending out German ships as far as Brazil for sugar and coffee. Ships brought raw cotton from the slave plantations of the United States to supply the expanding textile mills like those of Engels' father in Barmen. Bremerhaven had been constructed in 1827 and Bremen was the chief port of embarkation in Germany from which emigrants sailed for the new world. This was a new world for the youth—the global world of navigation, commerce, nationalities, languages, political conflicts. For a land-locked, narrowly religious, and business-oriented youth, who was already rebellious and seeking change, the experience in this city open to currents of a world in transition was profoundly moving. His observations of social conditions, and the ideas which he eagerly seized upon, began to work a transformation in his previous ideas about society and religion, dominated by the ideology of Pietism.

At an early age Engels had been exposed to the harsh conditions inflicted by capitalism on workers and their families. For three centuries, up to 1810, Barmen and Elberfeld held the monopoly on yarn bleaching for the Bergisches Land. After the introduction of silk weaving in 1760 and red dyeing in 1785 Barmen textiles became famous, and the Engels family for several generations, riding this current, took the tide at its flood and advanced their fortunes. The price on the other side was massive human misery. At a young age the boy Friedrich walked to school past factories filled with dust and smoke, where children as young as six years worked. He observed artisans doing back-breaking work in their homes from sunrise to sunset and later. He could see the homeless laborers, drunkenly reeling in the streets, or flopping down in a stupor in empty stables.⁴ Such conditions would have touched the heart of any sensitive person, but ultimately Engels came to evaluate them critically through the ideology which had risen in their defense—the ideology of Christian Pietism.

The first and unmistakable signs of this criticism in Engels appeared in March and April, 1839, in a series of newspaper articles in Telegraf für Deutschland, edited by the young writer Karl Gutzkow. In 1835 Gutzkow had written Wally, die Zweiflerin (Wally, the Skeptic), an attack on marriage and a bugle call for freedom of the flesh, which awakened the revolt of Young Germany against romanticism. Engels' articles were called “Briefe aus dem Wuppertal” and were signed by “Friedrich Oswald”; the real identity of the writer was never guessed by the readers among whom Engels had created a sensation.⁵ Engels pitilessly exposed the unbridled zeal, self-righteous intolerance, effete mysticism, and mind-deadening Pietism of the area of Wuppertal. He described the heresy-hunting inquisitions, the mysticism among craftsmen, the damnation of even close friends. Engels' attack centered on Friedrich Adolf Krummacher, the leading minister of the region. Recognizing his homiletical and poetic talents, Engels decried his zealotry, fanaticism, and pathos. Krummacher threw away reason and planted himself absolutely on the Bible, which he believed to be literally inspired by God. The young listener considered Krummacher's performances affected and absurd, and he did not know whether to call those dark portrayals of hell nonsense or blasphemy.

The Hamburg censors at first refused permission to print the Letters, but later relinquished. The editor of the Elberfeld newspaper took the articles as calumny, called the author a “Jungdeutscher”, and denied that the author could have obtained his data in Elberfeld. The young Engels, showing his fighting spirit, replied and asked why no evidence was given for these allegations. Since leaving Barmen, Engels had had a limited connection with the Young Germans, though Gutzkow's journal had provided a forum for them. And their ideas blew like fresh winds through the edifices of dogmatic assumptions in which the businessmen and church-goers of Wuppertal had immured themselves.

Ironically, however, the Young Germany movement had had an earlier liberating effect on the young Engels. In December, 1835 the Bundestag forbade certain literature, such as anti-Christian writings. Included in the ban were works of Heinrich Heine and Karl Gutzkow, whose Wally, die Zweiflerin was a mixture of Voltaire, German rationalism, and Hegel's Weltgeist. Gutzkow scoffed at religion as a fairy tale and a voice of despair.

The encounter of the young Engels with this novel was crucial. So far as we know, it was the first acquaintance of the teen-ager (he was 15 when the novel was published) with the critics of his religious tradition. He went on to read Ludwig Börne, the major influence on Gutzkow, as well as Gustave Kühne, a Magdeburg satellite of the Jungdeutscher. From Kühne's “Weiblichen und männlichen Charakteren” Engels took most of the “characteristic” for his “Briefe”.

During his period in Barmen Engels was passing through a crisis of belief. He said that at this time he was a very liberal supernaturalist critical of rationalism. The doubts and conflicts raised in his mind by his new social horizons in Bremen and his heretical reading disposed him to return to the halcyon days of childhood—“a happy time when one could still childishly believe in teachings whose contradictions one could count on one's fingers, when one glowed from holy zeal against religious enlightenment—over which one now laughs or blushes.” Engels had put aside Gutzkow's Wally as a “harmless” book and judged that his own religion was “calm, blessed peace … which I have no reason to believe God will ever take from me.” But he was quite aware of the contradiction between Pietist orthodoxy and the “terrible poverty among the lower classes, especially among the factory workers in Wuppertal.”⁶ He wrote in Briefe aus dem Wuppertal: “In Elberfeld alone, of 2,500 children of school age 1,200 are denied education and grow up in the factories, so that the factory owner does not have to pay adults double the wage he pays the child. The rich factory owners have an elastic conscience, and to let one child more or less go to ruin will send no Pietist's soul to hell, especially if he goes to church twice each Sunday.”⁷ The Pietists moved freely among the manufacturers and lent their weight to the oppression of wage labor, particularly as the charities of the Church proved incapable of coping with growing unrest and poverty. They were “long-haired preachers” (of whom Joe Hill later wrote in the U.S.)—promising that the hungry will “eat by and by, in that glorious land above the sky.”

As Karl Kuppisch has observed, Engels' rejection of Christianity cannot be explained by the simple thesis that Engels examined its dogmas, found them wanting from the point of view of reason, and at the same time took up the standpoint of rationalism.⁸ He was dissatisfied with “rationalism” and “liberalism” as well as with “pietism” and “orthodoxy.” To the young Christian Engels, Krummacher, the spellbinder who played on the fears and hopes of poor and ignorant people, was at least attractive and original. The eighteen-year old Engels had an ideology, a world-view, and he was not going to give it up easily. His instinct revolted against Krummacher's claims and techniques; yet he was not on that account ready to reject his life-long orientation merely because of a hypnotic preacher.

What bothered Engels about his faith, and about Krummacher and the other preachers—though it was only half-conscious at this time—was their social relations and effects. The revived Pietistic movement, and its alliance with Orthodoxy, was a response to the conditions of economic restoration in the area. It served, as we have seen, as a cover and justification for the manufacturers and as an individualistic, emotional outlet and diversion for the mass of industrial workers. In 1828 Krummacher had written Blicke ins Reich der Gnade (A look into the Kingdom of Mercy). About this work Goethe had some penetrating things to say. Krummacher's public, he said, consists of manufacturers, retail dealers, and workers, for whom the weaving of textiles is the chief thing in life; they live in narrow confines as moral men; they let nothing eccentric take place; the preacher complains of their unmet needs and presents a hope for a future good. “Man könnte deshalb,” wrote Goethe, “die Vorträge narkotische Predigten nennen.” (“One can therefore call these discourses narcotic sermons.”)

Krummacher called his view “Biblical realism,” contrasting it with false modern theology. He attacked the critics who were then subjecting the Bible to historical examination. The foremost of these was David Friedrich Strauss, whose work Leben Jesu (Life of Jesus) in 1835 evoked bitterly hostile criticism and ruined his academic career. A follower of Hegel, Strauss argued that the fundamental idea (Begriff) of religion was not contained in the Gospels; rather, what appeared there was the temporary Vorstellung (image, representation) not essential to faith. This representation consisted of poetry and “myths” based on Old Testament models like that of the Jewish expectation of the coming of the Messiah, and on the disciples' own responses to Jesus. Strauss shook the long standing assumption that a necessary relation obtained between acceptance of the Gospels and the Christian faith, i.e., he challenged the dogma of literal scriptural inspiration. In doing so he also raised the whole question of the ground for any religious faith whatsoever. Hegel had argued that that ground had to be Reason, and it was in the direction of Hegel that the young Engels increasingly turned his attention.

The followers of Hegel, whose thought dominated German philosophy, split sharply down the middle. The Rightists upheld the compatibility of Christian dogma and Hegelian metaphysics. The Leftists, however, followed the logic of Strauss' critical analysis. The more moderate Leftists, including Strauss himself, became pantheists: religious symbols signify a God identical with all of nature. At first the young Engels sided with this group. The more radical Leftists took their lead from Ludwig Feuerbach, who argued in 1841 that religious symbols are nothing more than projections of human aspirations, symbols whose true reference is mistaken. But the radical Leftists, whom Engels later joined, did not become a coherent group until the appearance of Feuerbach's Das wesen des Christentums in 1841.

Engels wrote to his friend Wilhelm Graeber on October 8, 1839, “If you could refute Strauss—fine, then I'd become a Pietist again.”⁹ He confessed himself to be a “Straussist” and a “first-class mystic.” Strauss did not resolve his religious questioning. On the contrary, Strauss' criticisms of Christian dogmas only deepened his devotee's doubts. To Engels, who was familiar with Strauss, the rationalists, and the strict orthodoxy of the Evangelische Kirchenzeitung of E.W. Hengstenberg, it was incredible that one could not doubt the beliefs of orthodoxy, given its many contradictory claims. The only alternative was not to think as one read. “Where does an apostle say that everything he says is literal inspiration?” To argue so is “the murder of the godly in men, in order to replace it with dead letters.” At this time Engels averred he was still a supernaturalist—without orthodoxy. He would accept only a religion that did not contradict reason.

An influence that during this period advanced him along the road of spiritual liberation was the thought of Friedrich E. D. Schleiermacher. Taking off from Hegel, Schleiermacher stressed the human, subjective base of religion in man's feelings, particularly his feelings of unity with others and with nature. This influence shows itself in Engels' letters, as when he describes religious conviction as a matter of the heart, having to do with dogma insofar as men of feeling are contradicted. “It is quite possible that the spirit of God may give you evidence through your feeling that you are a child of God.” He accepts Schleiermacher's view that religion is rooted in the heart and not in the reason:

Religion is a thing of the heart, and whoever has a heart can be devout; but he whose devoutness has its roots in understanding or also in reason has none at all. Out of the heart sprouts the tree of religion and it overshadows the whole man and takes in its nourishment from the air of reason; but its fruits, which carry the noblest heart's blood in them, are dogma; whatsoever is more comes from evil. That is Schleiermacher's teaching, and I stand by it.¹⁰

All the while the young Engels was undergoing a struggle which engaged him in daily prayers, doubts, and tears. “I pray daily for the truth,” he wrote, “yes, almost the whole day. I have done so from the moment I began to doubt, and yet I don't find my way back to your beliefs. … Tears come to my eyes as I write this, I am moved through and through, but I feel I will not go astray, I will come to God, for whom my whole heart yearns.” He ridiculed the complacency of his orthodox friends: “You lie freely and comfortably in your beliefs as in a warm bed and cannot know the struggle which we have to go through.” But he was determined to endure: “I search for the truth wherever I hope to find only a shadow of it from you; and still I cannot recognize your truth as eternal.”¹¹

The underlying conflict in Engels was that between arrest and growth, between confinement and expansion, between complacent and thoughtless acceptance of tradition and a surmounting of it to something better. The youth felt challenged, oppressed, smothered by the whole weight of the past which had suddenly loomed over him—not merely his own personal and family past but also the past of society insofar as he understood it. Feudalism, absolutism, hierarchy, and pietism, he wrote, struggle to drive honor and free thought from the field; one must hack away the thick forest in which the place stands where king's daughter sleeps, if one is to be worthy of her kingdom. The alternative is to become a country minister, salesman, assistant judge, or a husband and father of a family; but the century will not recognize him as its son. “Only inspiration is true, which, like an eagle that disturbs the cloud of speculation, streamlined, purifies the air, not afraid of the upper region of abstraction when it is worthy to fly toward the sun of truth.”¹² These extravagant metaphors tell us about a deep ambition rising in the young Engels—rising like a young knight who will rescue beauty from the tyranny of a feudal lord of the past, and who will do it for love; rising like an eagle toward the lofty regions of a universal comprehension of things. These two metaphors signify the basic lines of action and thought that Engels' lifetime would follow—the revolutionary storming the gates of past power and privilege, and the philosopher who ever strove, in the fashion of Hegel, to fulfill the passion to understand the whole of nature and history.

Meanwhile, Engels' political interest grew as his disillusionment with religion increased. In society the political and religious institutions and thought were closely related, as they had indeed been for centuries under the Holy Roman Empire and even after the Reformation. From the time of Metternich's Carlsbad decrees in 1819 to the revolution of 1848, the German states had fallen under the control of Austrian reaction and had been police states. Censorship of the press and education was strictly enforced. Only a few voiced the ideals of national unity and democracy and dared to raise the tattered standards of the French Revolution.

Among these were those who called themselves Young Germany—a group of writers who were resolved to resist, in a literary way, the entrenched Bourbon reaction. This resistance was only indirectly political, but it introduced to Engels the adherents of the utopian “Christian” socialism of Saint-Simon. In his writings from 1839 to 1842 Engels hailed their hero, Ludwig Börne, a political journalist, as a “fighter for Freedom and Justice.” Calling him “the man of political practice,” he held him in the same esteem as Hegel, “the man of thought.” During this period Shelley, with his dreams of universal equality, freedom, brotherhood, and prosperity, inspired him, and in 1840 he expressed his romantic vision in his poetic cycle, An Evening. The young Engels, like the young Shelley, was opposed to monarchy, aristocracy, and clergy. He had passed vicariously through the French Revolution; he was living through an Industrial Revolution though he was not yet fully aware of it; and he was preparing himself for a still more momentous Political Revolution. At this time “God” for Engels probably meant no more than the universal and unified yearning of men for liberty, equality and fraternity. His transition to a new philosophical world-view was already well on its way.

In the spring of 1841 Engels left Bremen to return to Barmen, and the fall found him in military uniform in Berlin, where he elected to do his one-year service and to attend lectures at the University of Berlin as a non-registered student. There he made direct contact with the Young Hegelians—Bruno and Edgar Bauer, Karl Friedrich Köppen and others. Hegel, who then dominated the German cultural scene, had taught that the divine World-Spirit of Reason was driving toward its own completion in nature and particularly in history and in man's self-consciousness or freedom. But whereas Hegel had used his own reason to enshrine the Prussian state and the Christian religion as final and authoritative—he knew which side his bread was buttered on—the left-wing Young Hegelians undertook to extract the radical kernel from this reactionary husk. They showed that the dynamic method of dialectic, which seeks conflict and struggle in all things, proved that state and religion are only transitory phenomena. They showed that the Dialectic of Reason is man's work and not God's. They showed—to the consternation of the establishment's hireling Hegelians—that Hegel was in fact an atheist. “The question is posed,” wrote the young Engels, “What is God? And German philosophy answered: It is man.”

Moreover, in 1841 Ludwig Feuerbach's Das Wesen des Christentums burst like a bomb upon the scene. Feuerbach was a frank materialist and stressed sensuous perception as the test of all knowledge. God, he argued, is not observable; and the attributes ascribed to God are nothing more than the highest attributes of man unconsciously projected as ideals. God is alienated man: it was this Feuerbachian claim which, with its materialist underpinning, enabled the radical Young Hegelians to answer Hegel's claim that nature is alienated from the absolute idea of God.

To curb the dissidence and control the intellectuals, Friedrich Wilhelm IV appointed Schelling, an anti-Hegelian, as well as other conservatives, to important posts at the University. Thus the young Engels in 1842 took up the gauntlet in two pamphlets against Schelling—Schelling und Offenbarung, and Schelling, der Philosoph in Christo, oder der Verklärung der Weltweisheit zur Gottesweisheit . In the former Engels argued that Schelling failed to comprehend God as Hegel did, that is, as a process developing in man. At this stage the young Engels had relinquished religion entirely; his reading of Feuerbach, whose combined materialism and romantic apotheosis of “love” created such enthusiasm among the radical Young Hegelians, was the critical turning point. Moreover, Feuerbach's views helped Engels to free the Hegelian dialectic from an idealistic and poetic theory to a practical method for changing history. Engels' own observations on the factory system had started him on that path. But the practical method did not begin to take definite form until he went to Manchester as a young worker in his father's cotton mills of Ermen. Engels in late 1842 and for more than a year and a half there observed the massive miseries of the English working class. It is true that before going Engels had studied the work of the communist Moses Hess and had in 1843 written favorably of communism and of Hess in the Rheinische Zeitung. But it was his face-to-face contacts with the Chartists and the members of the League of the Just in England, and their struggles against brutalization and squalor, that firmly riveted Engels to a radical foundation and set him on a life-long career toward revolution and communism. The Pietist God of his childhood had been put behind; the goal of a communist society had become his single passion and his driving idea.

It should be noted that in this process of change from Pietism to communism Engels did not and could not put aside completely his early religious feelings and ideas and ideals. Rather, those religious elements were transformed or, in Hegel's concept aufgehoben—negated, preserved, and lifted up into a new synthesis. Engels like Marx rejected the alien and dehumanizing elements in his Christian upbringing, retained and affirmed the humanistic core, and added to this core his own observations and reflections about the state of affairs in the factory system. For both Engels and Marx, this process of transformation was greatly accelerated through their encounter with the thought of Hegel and Feuerbach. Facing the problems and Zeitgeist of the industrial and scientific revolution of their day, both Hegel and Feuerbach sought to reformulate the meaning of Christianity in a new way with a new world view that separated itself from feudal supernaturalism—Hegel with dynamic objective idealism, Feuerbach with sensuous materialism. Both took as axiomatic certain human values implicit in Christianity—love, truth, mutual aid. But as Feuerbach went one step beyond Hegel to the material world, so Engels and Marx went beyond Feuerbach to “socialized man” who must realize these values through dialectical, collective, political activity. For Engels not only Christianity but also Hegel's and Feuerbach's secular versions of it were abstract, alienated, inadequate ways to guide requisite social action. Yet he and Marx took something from all three and fashioned a new, world-wide, world-shaking philosophy.

Notes

1. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Band 18. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1969, pp. 590 ff.

2. Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels. A Biography. New York: Howard Fertig, 1969, p. 5.

3. Ibid., p. 8.

4. Ibid., p. 7.

5. See Karl Kuppisch, Vom Pietismus zum Kommunismus. Berlin: Lettner-Verlag, 1953. I am indebted to Margaret Parsons Meyers' translation of portions of this work.

6. To Friedrich Graeber, Werke, Band 1. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1970, p. 418.

7. Ibid.

8. Karl Kuppisch, op. cit., p. 47.

9. Werke, Ergänzungsband. Schriften, Manuskripte, Briefe bis 1844. Zweiter Teil. Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1967, p. 419.

10. Ibid., p. 409. To Friedrich Graeber, July 27, 1839.

11. To Friedrich Graeber, July 26-27, 1839, in ibid., pp. 407-408.

12. Cited by Karl Kuppisch, op. cit., p. 54.