produce works that challenge man’s immobility risks sharing Christ’s fate. In Ernest
Hemingways’s words: “If people bring so much courage to this world the world has to kill
them to break them, so of course it kills them. ... It kills the very good and the very gentle
and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too
but there will be no special hurry.”^22
Thus, Christ is the most vivid example of the murder of the living. Moving freely
through history, Reich cites instances everywhere. Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake by
the Inquisition, becomes a poignant example. Reich sees himself as another, and reviews the
persecution he has suffered from “the people” as well as from various “orthodoxies.” At the
time of writing The Murder of Christ, Reich felt hunted by the Food and Drug Administration,
increasingly misunderstood by and isolated from even his closest followers. In my view, he
knew somehow that he was facing his own awareness saturates the book, giving it a haunt-
ing power.
Reich’s bold self-references together with discussions of the historical Christ have
led to the mistaken conclusion that Reich identified with him in a literal, psychotic fashion.
Such a diagnosis does not so much miss the point as collide with it, to use a phrase the crit-
ic John Leonard employed in another context. Of course, Reich “identified” with Christ if
Christ represented the unimpeded flow of life—precisely the point Reich was trying to
make.
Reich’s most tragic conclusion is that the killing of Christ and of orgonomy, if not
by literal murder then by silence, made sense from the viewpoint of armored man. He can-
not live in the way that Christ and orgonomy represent. More, the existence of such a life
represents the unbearable provocation of being desirable but unattainable. If armored peo-
ple try to make contact with the teachings of Christ or orgonomy, there is the danger that
they will act out secondary, destructive impulses. Conservatives in whatever guise have a
point when they call for ‘law and order” against the messianic message. As Reich put it:
The human race would meet with the worst,the most devastating disaster
ifit obtained full knowledge of the life function, of the orgasm function or of the
secret of the murder of Christ with one stroke as a whole. There is very good rea-
son and sound rationality in the fact that the human race has refused to acknowl-
edge the depth and the true dynamics of its chronic misery. Such a sudden break-
ing in ofknowledge would incapacitate and destroy everything that still somehow
keeps society going^23.Reich’s grim realism here is akin to that of Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor in The
Brothers Karamazov. The Inquisitor tells the reincarnated Christ that he erred in offering man
truth and freedom. “By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel
for him, for Thou didst ask too much from him. ... Respecting him less Thou wouldst have
asked less ofhim.That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been
lighter, He is weak and vile.” In seeking freedom, men are like “little children rioting. ...
27 : Personal Life and Other Developments: 1950-1954 369