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man brought to perfection in the utopia of the dictatorship of the proletariat. We shall return to this point. For the moment, however, let us tum to the notion of ideology, since it is the result of Marx's grappling with transcendence and registers his disagreements with the critiques of Bauer (Marx's The Holy Family is against Bauer) and Feuerbach (the These ilber Feuerbach). THE CONCEPT OF IDEOLOGY
The word ideology has several meanings, two of which are especially relevant to Marx. First, an ideology is the consciousness of an era, so that in this sense an official ideology ac¡ curately reflects an existing socio-economic state of affairs. Inversely, an ideology may be the expression of the false consciousness of men actually unaware of the true historical reality. For Marx's epigoni, this latter meaing became the primary one; the idea of a distorting rather than a reflecting image of reality became predominant. How, then, did religion become a component in Marx's theory of ideologies? The more deeply Marx studied the critiques of Bauer and Feuerbach, the more dissatisfied he became with their reductionism. Religion, to be sure, is a phenomenon or datum, and one does not satisfy the request to explain it by the bland assertion of a "human projection." Why, Marx wanted to know, does man project this mythical world? What precisely is it in anthropology that accounts for theology? In his polemics Marx ransacked whatever sources he could for information about the origins of religion. (Contemporary historians of religion have dismissed the question of origins as impenetrable). In the main, however, he contented himself with emphasizing that the critiques of Bauer and Feuerbach were far from radical. "Feuerbach,'' he indicated in the 4. These ilber Feuerbach, "takes as his point of departure the fact of religious self-es¡ trangement, the bifurcation of the world into religious and secular aspects. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But the fact that the secular basis