4 ° TRIER, BONN AND BERLIN^41gaard and Bakunin were all present at his inaugural lecture. The reaction
of the Hegelians was strong and Marx's not least: his technique here was
to contrast what Schelling was then saying with his earlier writings, and
point out the disparity between his dogmatic Berlin lectures and his
earlier belief in the freedom of speculation. Marx went on to claim that
Hegel had inverted the traditional proofs for the existence of God and
thereby refuted them. For Marx, either the proofs for the existence of
God were tautologies or they were 'nothing but proofs for the existence
of an essentially human self-consciousness and elaborations of it'.^133 Marx
finished his note - with its strange mixture of post-Hegelian philosophy
and the simple rationalism of the Enlightenment - by quoting two more
passages from the early Schelling: 'If you presuppose the idea of an
objective God, how can you speak of laws that reason independently
creates, for autonomy can only be ascribed to an absolutely free being?'
'It is a crime against humanity to conceal principles that are communicable
to everyone.'^134
The second note appended to the thesis takes up the themes already
treated in the passage in the preliminary notes on the future of philosophy
after Hegel's total system, and elaborates for the first time (though still
in a very idealistic manner) the notions of the abolition of philosophy
and praxis that were to be so central to his later thought.^135
At the same time as extending his thesis by means of these rather
theoretical discussions, Marx was engaged in more immediate and polemi-
cal projects - mostly in collaboration with Bruno Bauer whose increasing
difficulties with the government authorities seemed to be jeopardising the
prospective university careers of both of them. For Bauer was engaged in
writing his Criticism of the Synoptic Gospels, a work which denied the
historicity of Christ and portrayed the gospels as mythical inventions.
Since March 1841 the two men had planned to found a review entitled
Atheistic Archives, which would take as its foundation Bauer's gospel criti-
cism.^136 Certainly Marx's atheism was of an extremely militant kind. Ruge
wrote to a friend: 'Bruno Bauer, Karl Marx, Christiansen and Feuerbach
are forming a new "Montagne" and making atheism their slogan. God,
religion, immortality are cast down from their thrones and man is pro-
claimed God.'^137 And Georg Jung, a prosperous young Cologne lawyer
and supporter of the radical movement, wrote to Ruge: 'If Marx, Bruno
Bauer and Feuerbach come together to found a theological-philosophical
review, God would do well to surround Himself with all His angels and
indulge in self-pity, for these three will certainly drive Him out of His
heaven... For Marx, at any rate, the Christian religion is one of the
most immortal there is.'^138
These plans came to nothing, however. Instead, Bauer published