What is the problem with ideologies? Alexey Losev, an early 20th-century Russian philosopher, philologist, and culturologist, was one of the few Orthodox intellectuals who openly criticized Marxism as a modern myth â and managed to survive Stalinâs era without being executed. He was arrested in 1930 and sentenced to ten years of hard labor at the Belomor Canal camp.
In The Dialectics of Myth, Losev exposed the glaring inconsistency in the Bolsheviksâ view of myth and religion. They mocked ancient mythological and religious consciousness as primitive, yet relied heavily on mythological and religious symbols for their own purposes.
To advance their rhetoric in the 1920s, they referred to the counter-revolution as the many-headed Hydra. They called themselves Promethean heroes bringing enlightenment â science, progress, industry â to the masses, in defiance of âdivineâ or bourgeois authority.
In monumental Soviet art, giant workers, farmers, and soldiers embodied the Titans, while Tsarism, religion, and Western powers were personified as the âdragon.â Leninâs Mausoleum, too, drew inspiration from ancient monumental tomb architecture, particularly the Egyptian pyramids.
The examples could go on. Losev was despised mostly for making one point unmistakably clear: ideologies cannot exist without myth. Even when they reject myth and religion as primitive or obsolete, they immediately create new myths to replace them. They ridicule other peopleâs myths, yet remain blind to the ones they are constructing themselves.
Ideologies need myth as they need air. Their power is drawn from it â and they begin to crumble when their myth grows weak. By the beginning of the 20th century, the Russian Orthodox myth had become very weak. As Nikolai Berdyaev writes in The Truth of Orthodoxy:
âIts external weakness and lack of manifestation, its deficiency of outward activity and realization, have been evident to all.â
The Marxists did not come armed with rational arguments; they came with a well-constructed myth. Arguments do not persuade â myths do.
The utopian myth of âWe will build a bright future on this earthâ replaced the fading myth of âThe Kingdom of God after death.â
If you watch old Soviet films capturing the enthusiasm and fervor of the 1920s, you can still feel the pulse of that mythic energy. Wars are never won with weapons; they are won with myths. The more deeply a nation believes in the truth of its own myth, the more righteous it feels in its mission to prove to others that their myth is false.
Where does the power of myth come from? J.R.R. Tolkien writes:
âWe have come from God, and inevitably the myths woven by us, though they contain error, will also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light.â
Marxistsâ myths are not all wrong. They contain error, but they also reflect a splintered fragment of the true light. Thatâs why myths are so appealing! Thatâs why ideologies need them as air. Every ideology â or rather, idolatry â rests on a half-truth, sometimes even an eighty-percent truth. The danger lies not in falsehood, but in mistaking a fragment for the whole.
The moment we recognize our ideology as myth, we cease to believe in it absolutely. It no longer claims the totality of our lives. We donât have to reject it, but we must fulfill it â bring it to completion. Every partial narrative must be carried toward wholeness. If we reject one, we will instantly create another. When we renounce one idol, we instinctively bow before its opposite.
Healing doesnât come through rejection but through transcendence â through seeing the partial in light of the Whole. When we look through our idol â our ideology â we begin to recognize it as a glimpse, a splintered fragment of the true light.
Idols thrive on opposition. They grow stronger when attacked, but they cannot endure being seen through. When we look through them âas through a glass, darkly,â they lose their power and become nothing but good dreams. As C.S. Lewis said in Mere Christianity:
âGod sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life againâŠâ
Check out my 4th book in the Mystical Vision of the Inklings series Fairy Tales for Grown-Ups: Rediscovering Myth and Meaning through Tolkien, Lewis, and Barfield
