suasions could well agree that the Christian notion of a world without
death was sound while rejecting the idea that God, during a final show-
down called the Last Judgment, would decide when and where the vic-
tory over death was to occur.

In fact, heretically inclined materialists and unconventional religious
thinkers could share considerable ideological space. To lean on Wiles
once more, he believes some aspects of a religion that regards matter as
spirit-bearing could be brought into harmony with an Engelsovian vision
of matter moved by dialectics, the latter playing "the part of spirit" ( 1965,
1: 130). On this basis, the notion of physical immortality as a gradual
spiritualization of matter could gain respectability for those who saw
themselves as rational materialist thinkers. Similarly, Christians seeking a
revitalization of faith could support the idea that death should be abol-
ished as soon as possible without necessarily feeling they were going
against Christian thought, since Revelations stated that death not only
had been deprived of its sting by the prospect of celestial bliss but also
was to be eliminated as a phenomenon at some point. Orthodoxy even
intimated that the elimination of death somehow lay embedded in an evo-
lutionary plan conceived by God himself, who desired that matter be-
come spiritualized, although he left unspecified the time when this trans-
figuration, initiated by him, would take place. Since present-day duality
was bound to become monistic synthesis, however, the sooner this hap-
pened, the better. Human initiative should hasten the advent of a death-
less world.

On the other hand, there was also official atheist Marxism-Leninism,
and this ideology opposed both innovative and traditional Orthodox be-
liefs as well as revisionist tendencies within its own thought system.
Furthermore, it demanded no less, and in fact more, loyalty from its
adherents than Christian Orthodoxy, being correspondingly less tolerant
of opponents of any kind, including its own heretics. Unlike religion,
ideology considers all its doctrines rational and verifiable. The ideology
of Marxism-Leninism is no different; it regards its doctrines as logically
proven and consequently views any form of doubt or deviation as a mani-
festation of perverse obstinacy or a fatal social taint, a kind of inherited
social sin. A useful distinction between religion and ideology is that re-
ligion is based on faith, or a "conscious unknown," whereas ideology,
likewise based on faith, imagines this faith to be proven. Lenin, for ex-
ample, "does not know that he believes. He believes that he knows" ( Besançon
1981: 9). Besançon's definition of Lenin's "faith" is confirmed by
Gorky's statement that Lenin "believed so firmly because he had such
solid knowledge" (quoted in Prozhogin 1974: 109).

Now, in regard to immortality, the new ideology firmly "knew" there
was no transcendental afterlife. But it was very certain, too, that the "no

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