Ernst Bloch: Class

Ernst Bloch was German philosopher. Explore interesting quotes on class.

Ernst Bloch: 32 quotes4 likes

“Jesus' own coming was by no means so introverted and other-worldly as a Pauline reinterpretation—always welcome to the ruling class—would have it. … To Jesus, the kingdom of this world was the devil (John 8:44). This is why he never suggested allowing it to go on; he did not conclude a non-aggression pact with it.”

Source: Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959), p. 123

“Now to get back to our given Church: it lives almost entirely for modesty and moneyed piety. It zealously inveighs against the harm done to Joseph and the sheep, but it has made its arrangements with the upper classes and serves as their spiritual defender. It bristles at see-through blouses, but not at slums in which half-naked children starve, and not, above all, at the conditions that keep three quarters of mankind in misery. It condemns desperate girls who abort a foetus, but it consecrates war, which aborts millions. It has nationalized its God, nationalized him into ecclesiastic organization, and has inherited the Roman empire under the mask of the Crucified. It preserves misery and injustice, having first tolerated and then approved the class power that causes them; it prevents any seriousness about deliverance by postponing it to St. Never-Ever's Day or shifting it to the beyond.”

Source: Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959), p. 144

“All Joachimism was an active struggle against the social principles of a Christianity which from St. Paul on would ally itself with the class society in a thousand compromises, a Christianity whose earthly salvation practice is itself a single catalog of sins, down—or up—to the last link: the understanding which Fascism was shown by the Vatican.”

Source: Man on His Own: Essays in the Philosophy of Religion (1959), p. 138