Communists are bound together by no secret oath. The tie that binds them … even unto death, is a simply conviction: It is necessary to change the world. Their power, whose nature baffles the rest of the world, because in a large measure, the rest of the world has lost that power, is the power to hold convictions and act upon them. It is the same power that moves mountains; it is also that part of mankind which has recovered the power to live or die — to bear witness — for its faith. And it is a simple, rational faith that inspires men to live or die for it.

It is not new. It is, in fact, man’s second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil: “Ye shall be as gods.” It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different version of the same vision: the vision of God and man’s relationship to God. The communist vision is the vision of Man without God.

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The vision is a challenge and inspires a threat. It challenges man to prove by his acts that he is the masterwork of the Creation by making thought and act one. It challenges him to prove it by using the force of his rational mind to end the bloody meaninglessness of man’s history — by giving it purpose and a plan …

It is an intensely practical vision. The tools to turn it into reality are at hand — science and technology, whose traditional method, the rigorous exclusion of all supernatural factors in solving problems, has contributed to the intellectual climate in which the vision flourishes, just as they have contributed to the crisis in which Communism thrives. For the vision is shared by millions who are not Communists (they are part of Communism’s secret strength). Its first commandment is found, not in the Communist Manifesto, but in the first sentence of the physics primer: “All of the progress of mankind to date results from the making of careful measurements.” But Communism, for the first time in history, has made this vision the faith of a great modern political movement.

Hence the Communist party is quite justified in calling itself the most revolutionary party in history. It has posed in practical form the most revolutionary question in history: “God or Man?” It has taken the logical next step which three hundred years of rationalism hesitated to take, and said what millions of modern minds think but do not dare or care to say: “If man’s mind is the decisive force in the world, what need is there for God?” Henceforth, Man’s Mind is Man’s Fate.

This vision is the Communist revolution, which, like all great revolutions, occurs in man’s mind before it takes form in man’s acts. […] On the plane of faith, it summons mankind to turn its vision into practical reality. On the plane of action, it summons men to struggle against the inertia of the past which, embodied in social, political and economic form, Communism claims, is blocking the will of mankind to make its next great forward stride.

This is Communism’s moral sanction, which is twofold. Its vision points the way to the future; its faith labors to turn the future into present reality. It says to every man who joins it:

“the vision is a practical problem of history; the way to achieve it is a practical problem of politics, which is the present tense of history. Have you the moral strength to take upon yourself the crimes of history so that man at last may close his chronicle of age-old suffering, and replace it with purpose and a plan?”

The answer a man makes to this question is the difference between the Communist and those miscellaneous socialists, liberals, fellow travelers, unclassified progressives and men of good will, all of whom share a similar vision, but do not share the faith because they will not take upon themselves the penalties of the faith. The answer is the root of that sense of moral superiority which makes Communists, though caught in crime, berate their opponents with withering self-righteousness.

The vision inspires, the crisis impels. The workingman is chiefly moved by the crisis. The educated man is chiefly moved by the vision. The workingman … can afford few visions — even practical visions. An educated man, peering from the Harvard yard, or any college campus, upon a world in chaos, finds in the vision the two certainties for which the mind of man tirelessly seeks: a reason to live and a reason to die.

No other faith of our time presents them with the same practical intensity. That is why Communism is the central experience of the first half of the 20th century and may be its final experience — will be, unless the free world, in the agony of its struggle with Communism, overcomes its crisis by discovering, in suffering and pain, a power of faith which will provide man’s mind, at the same intensity, with the same two certainties: a reason to live and a reason to die. If it fails, this will be the century of the great social wars. If it succeeds, this will be the century of the great wars of faith.

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It is a fact that a man can join the Communist Party, can be very active in it for years, without completely understanding the nature of Communism, of the political methods that follow inevitably from its vision. One day such incomplete Communists discover that the Communist Party is not what they thought it was. They break with it and turn on it with the rage of an honest dupe, a dupe who has given a part of his life to a swindle. Often they forget that it takes two to make a swindle.

Others remain communists for years, warmed by the light of its vision, firmly closing their eyes to the crimes and horrors inseparable from its practical politics. One day they have to face the facts. They are appalled at what they have abetted. They spend the rest of their days trying to explain, usually without great success, the dark clue to their complicity. As their understanding of Communism was incomplete and led them to a dead end, their understanding of breaking with it is incomplete and leads them to a dead end.

…. Not grasping the source of the evil they sincerely hate, such ex-Communists in general make ineffectual witnesses against it. They are witnesses against something; they have ceased to be witnesses for anything.

Yet there is one experience which most sincere ex-Communists share, whether or not they go only part way to the end of the question it poses. The daughter of a former German diplomat in Moscow was trying to explain to me why her father, who, as an enlightened modern man, had been extremely pro-Communist, had become an implacable anti-Communist. It was hard for her because as an enlightened modern girl, she shared the Communist vision without being a Communist. But she loved her father and the irrationality of his defection embarrassed here. “He was immensely pro-Soviet,” she said, “and then — you will laugh at me — but you must not laugh at my father — and then one night — in Moscow — he heard screams. That’s all. Simply one night he heard screams.”

A child of Reason and the 20th century, she knew that there is a logic of the mind. She did not know that the soul has a logic that may be more compelling than the mind’s. She did not know at all that she had swept away the logic of the mind, the logic of history, the logic of politics, the myth of the 20th century, with five annihilating words: one night he heard screams.

What Communist has not heard those screams? They come from husbands torn from forever from their wives in midnight arrests. They come, muffled, from the execution cellars of the secret police, from the torture chambers of the Lubianka, from all the citadels of terror now stretching from Berlin to Canton. They come from those freight cars loaded with men, women and children, the enemies of the Communist State, locked in, packed in, left on remote sidings to freeze to death at night in the Russian winter. They come from minds driven mad by the horrors of mass starvation ordered and enforced as a policy of the Communist state. They come from the starved skeletons, worked to death, or flogged to death (as an example to others) in the freezing filth of sub-arctic labor camps. They come from children whose parents are suddenly, inexplicably, taken away from them — parents they will never see again.

What Communists has not heard these screams? Execution, says the Communist code, is the highest measure of social protection. What man can call himself a Communist who has not accepted the fact that Terror is an instrument of policy, right if the vision is right, justified by history, enjoined by the balance of forces in the social wars of this century? Those screams have reached every Communist’s mind. Usually they stop there. What judge willingly dwells upon the man the laws compel him to condemn to death — the laws of nations or the laws of history?

But one day the Communist really hears those screams. He is going about his routine party tasks. He is lifting a dripping reel of microfilm from a developing tank. He is justifying to a Communist faction in a trade union an extremely unwelcome directive of the Central Committee. He is receiving from a trusted superior an order to go to another country and, in a designated hour, meet a man whose name he will never know, but who will give him a package whose contents he will never learn. Suddenly, there closes around that Communist a separating silence, and in that silence he hears screams.

He hears them for the first time. For they do not merely reach his mind. They pierce beyond. They pierce to his soul. He says to himself, “Those are not the screams of a man in agony. Those are the screams of a soul in agony.” He hears them for the first time because a soul in extremity has communicated with that which alone can hear it — another human soul.

Why does the Communist ever hear them? Because in the end there persists in every man, however he may deny it, a scrap of soul. The Communist who suffers this singular experience then says to himself: “What is happening to me? I must be sick.” If he does not instantly stifle that scrap of soul, he is lost. If he admits it for a moment, he has admitted that there is something greater than Reason, greater than the logic of the mind, of politics, of history, of economics, which alone justifies the vision.

If the party senses his weakness, and the party is peculiarly cunning at sensing such weakness, it will humiliate him, degrade him, condemn him, expel him. If it can, it will destroy him. And the party will be right. For he has betrayed that which alone justifies its faith — the vision of the Almighty Mind. He stands before the fact of God.

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One thing most ex-Communists could agree upon: They broke because they wanted to be free. They do not all mean the same thing by “free”. Freedom is a need of the soul and nothing else. It is in striving toward God that the soul strives continually after a condition of freedom. God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor. External freedom is only an aspect of interior freedom. Political freedom, as the Western world has known it, is only a political reading of the Bible. Religion and freedom are indivisible. Without freedom the soul dies. Without the soul, there is not justification for freedom. … A Communist breaks because he must choose at last between two irreconcilable opposites — God or Man, Soul or Mind, Freedom or Communism.

Communism is what happens when, in the name of Mind, men free themselves from God. But its view of God, it knowledge of God, its experience of God, is what alone gives character to a society or nation, and meaning to its destiny. Its culture, the voice of this character, is merely that view, knowledge, experience of God, fixed by its most intense spirits in terms intelligible to the mass of men. There has never been a society or a nation without God. But history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations that became indifferent to God and died.

The crisis of Communism exists to the degree in which it has failed to free the peoples that it rules from God. Nobody knows this better than the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The crisis of the Western World exists to the degree in which it is indifferent to God. It exists to the degree in which the Western world actually shares Communism’s materialist vision, is so dazzled by the logic of the materialist interpretation of history, politics and economics that it fails to grasp that, for it, the only possible answer to the Communist challenge: Faith in God or Faith in Man? is the challenge: Faith in God.