Erich Fromm:
The Dogma of Christ

Chapter 2 on his theories about mythology and religion examined by Stefan Stenudd

Fromm was already in 1930 inclined towards the social perspective, if not outright sociological. Nor did he shun from the political dynamics in society. This is evident in the essay from that year quoted in the introduction, The Dogma of Christ, where Fromm explained what he saw as a change of Christian dogma during its first few centuries, in interaction with social changes.

Archetypes of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Jungian theories on myth and religion, from Carl G. Jung to Jordan B. Peterson. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

Psychoanalysis of Mythology

by Stefan Stenudd
This book examines Freudian theories on myth and religion, from Sigmund Freud to Erich Fromm. Click the image to see the book at Amazon (paid link).

In his foreword to the 1963 edition, Fromm confesses to some hesitation about republishing the old text. "First of all, it was written in a period when I was a strict Freudian."^[1] That was to change later on, although his respect for Freud and some of his theories remained. Still, Fromm was convinced by others to have the text republished, and he found that "the method of the application of psychoanalysis to historical phenomena is the one which has been developed in my subsequent books."^[2]

The theme of the essay, the interaction between Christian dogma and social change, may seem rather far from psychology, but Fromm is examining "the extent to which the change in certain religious ideas is an expression of the psychic change of the people involved and the extent to which these changes are conditioned by their conditions of life."^[3] To Fromm, these two aspects are inseparable. He is convinced of the major role of the unconscious in this process:

The evolution of dogma can be understood only through knowledge of the unconscious, upon which external reality works and which determines the content of consciousness.

Fromm, not unlike Freud, explains God as a transference of childish emotions towards the parents "to a fantasy figure, to God."^[4] And here, most definitely, the Freudian psychologist speaks: "In the adult's attitude toward God, one sees repeated the infantile attitude of the child toward his father."^[5]

But then the socio-political perspective enters. Religion has the task of bringing people into the socially necessary infantile docility toward the authorities.^[6] Therefore, God is always the ally of the rulers. A little later in the essay, Fromm expands on the role of religion:

Religion has a threefold function: for all mankind, consolation for the privations exacted by life; for the great majority of men, encouragement to accept emotionally their class situation; and for the dominant minority, relief from guilt feelings caused by the suffering of those whom they oppress.^[7]

The first generations of Christians were mainly suppressed people of the lower classes: "They were the masses of the uneducated poor, the proletariat of Jerusalem, and the peasants in the country."^[8] So, like John the Baptist, the early Christian doctrine addressed itself "not to the educated and the property owners, but to the poor, the oppressed, and the suffering."^[9]

The early Christian community was loosely organized without any rigid hierarchy, "a free brotherhood of the poor, unconcerned with institutions and formulas."^[10] Accordingly, the Jesus to whom they confessed their faith had like them been a regular human, who was adopted by God. Jesus was not the son of God to begin with, "but became so only by a definite, very distinct act of God's will."^[11]

Although this needed God's active will, Fromm sees it as a rebellion against the father-god. He suddenly had a co-regent. That indicated a wish for a complete replacement:

The belief in the elevation of a man to god was thus the expression of an unconscious wish for the removal of the divine father.^[12]

To confirm this early Christian belief, Fromm mentions Psalms 2:7, where God says: "You are my son, today I have begotten you," which is quoted in Acts 13:33, where it is applied to Jesus. Still, Fromm admits to at least one important exception in early Christianity: "But to Paul, Jesus was the Son of God from the very beginning."

Psychologically speaking, this Christianity was filled with aversion against the authorities — including the highest of them all, their god. When Jesus rose to his side, it was almost a rebellion. A man became a god, thereby challenging the existent one.

The early Christians believed that the misfortune of their lives would be reversed at the second coming, which they regarded as imminent: "The core of the missionary preaching of the early communion was, 'The kingdom of God is at hand.'"^[13] That would also be the day when their oppressors would be punished. Fromm refers to Luke 6:20-25, where Jesus promises that the poor and the hungry are blessed and will be compensated, whereas the opposite shall happen to the rich and full.

This sympathy with the people at the bottom of the hierarchy and antipathy towards the ones at the top explains "the enormous influence which the teaching about the crucified and suffering savior immediately had upon the Jewish masses, and soon upon the pagan masses as well."^[14]

But here Fromm might have gotten carried away. There was not much of an influence on the Jewish masses, and the pagans took some time convincing. Through the 1^st century, Christians were hardly more than a nuisance in Rome. Their worship was even a crime until the beginning of the 4^th century. Were it not for the gradual acceptance of the religion in the ruling classes, Christianity might have remained little more than a cult that eventually faded away.

But during the first couple of centuries after its introduction in Rome, the upper classes increasingly adopted Christianity, until even the Roman emperor Constantine did so, decriminalizing it in the year 313. In 380 Christianity was declared the state religion.^[15]

The success came at a price. In that long process towards recognition and government acceptance, the Christian dogma transformed to primarily fit the ruling class. Although the change was in the dogma, the reason for it was social: "The theological change is the expression of a sociological one, that is, the change in the social function of Christianity."^[16]

The revised dogma was fixed by the Nicene Creed in a lengthy process during the fourth century. Fromm describes it as a fundamental transformation of Christianity from the religion of the oppressed to the religion of the rulers and of the masses manipulated by them.^[17] He goes on:

Christianity, which had been the religion of a community of equal brothers, without hierarchy or bureaucracy, became the "church," the reflected image of the absolute monarchy of the Roman Empire.

A strictly organized church was the consequence of this, as was the idea that now, salvation was made accessible through the church instead of simply through the trust in Jesus and the following of his commands. The church became holy, and became an intermediary between the Christians and their god:

Originally it was not the church but God alone who could forgive sins. Later, Extra ecclesiam nulla salus;^[18] the church alone offers protection against any loss of grace.^[19]

The bitter irony of it was that "the priests granted pardon and expiation for the guilt feeling which they themselves had engendered."^[20]

The most important change was in how Jesus was viewed. He was no longer regarded as adopted by God, but his son, a part of him, present since before the dawn of creation. It made all the difference in the world: "A man was not elevated to a god, but a god descended to become a man."^[21] Jesus was no longer ever really human — he just walked the earth for a few years in the disguise of one.

In reality, according to this new doctrine, he was of one nature with the heavenly father. Fromm emphasizes it with italics: "The decisive element was the change from the idea of man becoming God to that of God becoming man."^[22]

Thereby, the rebellion against the highest authority was gone, since God now was regarded as identical with Jesus. The hostility towards the father and the Oedipus crime it implied were gone. Authority was again revered.

For the people in the shadows of the castles and the churches, the victims of the new dogma, there was still one comfort, although illusionary: "The masses found their satisfaction in the fact that their representative, the crucified Jesus, was elevated in status, becoming himself a pre-existent God."^[23] And instead of hoping for the reckoning of a second coming, the people settled for being satisfied in the fantasy of a blissful hereafter.^[24]

Fromm finds this development inevitable. The masses had little or no chance against the establishment. The authorities, all the way up to the god, were immovable. What was left for the people was to accept the situation:

It was hopeless to overthrow the father, then the better psychic escape was to submit to him, to love him, and to receive love from him. This change of psychic attitude was the inevitable result of the final defeat of the oppressed class.^[25]

The real winners were, of course, the high and mighty. When previously the blame was with the oppressors, each person was now personally responsible for any shortcomings and in need of relief from the sense of guilt. Everyone was a sinner:

No longer were the rulers to blame for wretchedness and suffering; rather, the sufferers themselves were guilty. They must reproach themselves if they are unhappy.^[26]

Since suffering was now the grace of God, with the model of Jesus, the rulers were innocent: "It relieved them of the guilt feelings they experienced because of the distress and suffering of the masses whom they had oppressed and exploited."^[27]

The model with the son and the father being one from the beginning did create a logical problem, actually a contradiction. How could the father and the son be identical? In order to convince the believers, Fromm states that the doctrine had to have a specific, unconscious meaning. And he finds one: "There is one actual situation in which this formula makes sense, the situation of the child in its mother's womb."^[28] They are two, yet one. That demanded quite a metamorphosis, leading to a very different deity: "The strong, powerful father has become the sheltering and protecting mother."

Eventually, that also led to the Mary cult, the increased Catholic focus on the mother of Jesus, which would in a way make her the mother of the god who created her — another paradox. But Fromm is not interested in this paradox. He refers to the mother cult as such, the transformation of the god as a father-figure to one with the traits of a mother-figure. And it makes the psychoanalyst in him wake up:

The full significance of the collective fantasy of the nursing Madonna becomes clear only through the results of psychoanalytic clinical investigations.^[29]

He does not expand on the subject, but finds another consequence: "This meant also that men had to regress to a passive, infantile attitude."^[30]

The process, then, from a father-god with an adopted son to more of a mother-god being one with the son, as if pregnant with him, had some psychological implications for the believers:

Described psychologically, the change taking place here is the change from an attitude hostile to the father, to an attitude passively and masochistically docile, and finally to that of the infant loved by its mother. If this development took place in an individual, it would indicate a psychic illness.^[31]

But in the case of the Christian population, the reality was different because the situation was. Instead of the symptom of a psychic illness, it was a question of adaption: "It is an expression not of pathological disturbance but, rather, of adjustment to the given social situation."

Still, this is no ideal situation, since it renders people passive and helpless against the powers that rule them. Fromm finds hope in the emergence and continued presence of Protestantism, which does not have the same dogmatic trap. He ends his text by praising the potential of Protestantism, which must mean that he dismisses Catholicism for going in the opposite direction:

Only Protestantism turned back to the father-god. It stands at the beginning of a social epoch that permits an active attitude on the part of the masses in contrast to the passively infantile attitude of the Middle Ages.^[32]

The Trinity and Other Anomalies

Fromm's analysis is clear and worthy of thought, but there are gaps in it. Since he discusses at length the Father and the Son and their fusion in the Nicene Creed, it is strange that he completely omits the third part of the Trinity — the Holy Spirit. It was adopted later, but before the end of the 4^th century, and it has remained in Christian dogma ever since.

Fromm mentions neither the Trinity nor the Holy Spirit (or Ghost) even once in his essay. One has to wonder why. An obvious possibility is that the Holy Spirit does not fit the Freudian focus on the Oedipus complex, which has only the three roles of the father, the mother, and the son. Fromm's model needs to keep this tight cast.

Furthermore, Freud was not much for speculations about something as elusive as a spirit. That was more Jung's department, and by 1930 they were wide apart. At a time when Fromm confessed to have been a strict Freudian, he would avoid such a concept. But it weakens his discussion. It is too big an omission. By ignoring the Trinity, he has given up on explaining the anomaly of it. And it is not the only anomaly.

Fromm claims that the idea of Jesus adopted by God is a kind of revolt against the latter. That is hard to fathom. An all-seeing god would not willingly invite a rebel to the highest position imaginable — the one right next to him. And where was there a sign of animosity towards God? Certainly not from Jesus, in anything he said according to the Gospels, nor from his disciples or from Paul in any of his letters.

The mere idea of rebellion against God would make people in that era horrified — or burst out laughing. God was the creator of the world, the ultimate power since forever. That was not questioned. There was no revolting against him. The trouble lay in understanding him and his will. Opposing it was out of the question.

There were lots of rebellions, the Bible as well as other sources tell us, but they were against the Romans or against Jewish rulers. Humans saw other humans as the main causes of their suffering or discontent. There is a lot of historical evidence for that. It is much harder to find indications of Fromm's claim that there would instead be discontent aimed at God.

Job of the Old Testament would be an example of someone blaming God for his misfortune — and not without cause. That was what Jung wrote a substantial text about, but several years after 1930, when Fromm's essay was originally written. And the Book of Job ends with God laboriously explaining that Job simply has no right to question the actions of his God. Only someone just as elevated and powerful could.

No, people of that era would hardly even unconsciously foster the idea of a rebellion against God. It would be like trying to alter the very fabric of the cosmos.

Actually, one might just as well say that the introduction of the principle of the Trinity was an action to diminish God, to divide his omnipotence. If Jesus was not adopted, but identical to God and still somehow separate, then God was no longer the sole ultimate. Add to that the Holy Spirit, and God is more like a team member than the sole sovereign. It does not matter that it was called a homoousios, a single essence. A god that can in some way be divided is divided.

According to the Gospels, Jesus repeatedly called himself "the son of man," which deviates from the Old Testament use of the indefinite form "son of man" as a way of expressing that someone is human and nothing more. While the meaning of the definite form is unclear among scholars to this day, it is hardly an argument for homoousios.

It is at least equally credible to claim that the Nicene Creed rebelled against the sovereignty of God as that the idea of adoptionism did. One thing is sure — the Christian church needed to define their god as something other than the god of the Jews. For that, it was not enough with Jesus as a prophet, not even as an adopted son of God. He needed to be God for the Christian church to have its own religion.

There is also something odd about the differences and consequences Fromm sees with a father-god versus a mother-god. One leads to optimistic and rebellious men, the other to masochistically docile infants. Why?

Again, the reverse is just as plausible. A dominant father-god could lead to submissive and scared humans, whereas a protective mother-god would fill them with confidence and self-worth, thereby fostering a strong stance against injustice to them.

Freud was not famous for gender equality. The way he dismissed the possibility of an Electra complex as a female counterpart to the Oedipus one is a tell-tale, and there are many more in his writing. Fromm might here have been prejudiced by that flaw in Freudian thinking.

What is undeniable, though, is Fromm's claim that by time Christianity developed a hierarchy, a church which soon became part of the oppression. The first generations of Christians in Jerusalem and in the catacombs of Rome could hardly have imagined that. It would seem nightmarish to them — probably to Jesus as well, considering his outspoken contempt for the priests of Jerusalem.

Fromm implies that this change came from above in the hierarchy. As the upper classes joined the movement they adapted it to their preferences, and the lower classes were unable to resist. He suggests that the latter were not even aware of the gradual change. That can be discussed.

Normally when a movement grows, its administration does, too, and its structure tends to become more rigid. Mostly it can be explained as the price of success, like the successful businessman having to spend more and more time with his accountants. There is not necessarily an initial evil intent in that. But of course, when a movement forms into a hierarchy, those on top and those at the bottom will live under very different circumstances. Usually, the top doesn't seem to mind.

The question is to what extent it was planned. As noted by Bishop François de Sales in 1604: "Hell is full of good wills or desires."^[33]

Notes

Ibid., p. 11. ↑
Ibid., pp. 12f. ↑
Ibid., pp. 20f. ↑
Ibid., p. 25. ↑
Ibid., p. 27. ↑
Ibid., p. 26. ↑
Ibid., p. 30. ↑
Ibid., p. 42. ↑
Ibid., pp. 43f. ↑
Ibid., p. 48. ↑
Ibid., p. 50. ↑
Ibid., p. 54. ↑
Ibid., p. 62. ↑
Ibid., p. 52. ↑
Fromm mistakenly claims that Christianity became the state religion under Constantine. Ibid., p. 60. ↑
Ibid., p. 69. ↑
Ibid., p. 65. ↑
"Outside the Church there is no salvation." ↑
Ibid., p. 66. ↑
Ibid., p. 71. ↑
Ibid., p. 66. ↑
Ibid., p. 67. ↑
Ibid., p. 68. ↑
Ibid., pp. 71f. ↑
Ibid., p. 69. ↑
Ibid., p. 70. ↑
Ibid., p. 71. ↑
Ibid., p. 72. ↑
Ibid., p. 74. ↑
Ibid., p. 75. ↑
Ibid., p. 92. ↑
Ibid., pp. 92f. ↑
"L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés ou désirs." In a letter to Madame de Chantal dated November 21, 1604, he attributed the proverb to Bernard of Clairvaux. Saint François de Sales, Œuvres complètes: Lettres, volume 1, Paris 1821, p. 411. ↑

Erich Fromm on Myth and Religion

Freudians on Myth and Religion

This text is an excerpt from my book Psychoanalysis of Mythology: Freudian Theories on Myth and Religion Examined from 2022. The excerpt was published on this website in February, 2026.

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Erich Fromm:The Dogma of Christ