To Hell With Karl Marx
Karl Marx: The Divine Tragedy
By Robert Orlando
TAN, 2025, 448 pages , $23
“To hell with both of them!”
So thundered Karl Marx in reference to his two sons-in-law, both of whom the miserable Marx considered useless morons, as he did most people he met. The two sons would ultimately sign suicide pacts with Marx’s daughters. Yes, two of Marx’s daughters committed suicide, as did many of the so-called “pale maidens” in Marx’s ghoulish poems and plays — consumed as Marx was with Lucifer. Marx had a bizarre, strange, chilling fascination with the Devil, a subject that I devoted a book to in 2020.
My colleague Robert Orlando, who recently did a film on the history of The American Spectator, has followed my 2020 book on The Devil and Karl Marx with a truly remarkable work of his own, as well as a companion film. The film is called To Hell With Marx, and remains a work in progress at this point. The book is called Karl Marx: A Divine Tragedy. It is Orlando’s best written work.
At the risk of effusive praise, I must say that Orlando’s thesis is brilliant. My meager mind had certainly never had this thought, nor had others. But given Orlando’s background and interests, perhaps it isn’t surprising that he did. The filmmaker/writer took his cue from Dante’s epic Divine Comedy, which Orlando has studied for decades as a scholar and fan. It turns out that Karl Marx himself was a scholar and fan of the great Italian poet’s master work. It was a Marx favorite, with Marx’s concentration being not La Divina Comedia’s take on Paradiso or Purgatorio but — typical of Marx’s trajectory — with Inferno.
The fictional scene is one of Karl Marx on trial, with Dante Allighieri doing the interrogation and rendering a verdict and a sentence.
Orlando lays out a captivating contrast. He begins with the reality that Dante Alighieri’s mind and soul was fixed upon Heaven, on moving up and out of Hell with Virgil. The pilgrims seek to ascend from Hell to Purgatory to Heaven. They endeavored to climb up. To the contrary, Orlando observes, Karl Marx fixed his gaze solely at Hell. The flames of the underworld became a lifelong fascination. Orlando notes that amid all of Marx’s writings, he said nothing about Heaven; the German philosopher is consumed by Hell. “Curiously — or perhaps not so — Marx and his long-time confidant Engels filled their pages with hell and its torments, with the march of history as purgation, but nowhere did they speak of paradise,” writes Orlando. “There was no ascent, no final vision of harmony — only struggle without end, revolution without transcendence. Their silence on Paradiso is perhaps the final revelation: they could imagine the fire, but never the light.”
As a scholar of Marx myself, I would add a slight correction to this, though it merely affirms Orlando’s point. In one of his many devilish poems, titled “The Pale Maiden” (1837), Marx did write of Heaven. He penned this disturbing statement: “Thus Heaven I’ve forfeited, I know it full well. My soul, once true to God, is chosen for Hell.”
Marx apparently thought so. Once baptized and confirmed as a Christian (Lutheran), and coming from an extended family of generations of faithful Jews, he rejected God entirely, beginning in his college years. He chose another side. Marx would write this in his 1841 poem, “The Player:”
Look now, my blood-dark sword shall stab
Unerringly within thy soul….
The hellish vapors rise and fill the brain,
Till I go mad and my heart is utterly changed.
See the sword — the Prince of Darkness sold it to me.
For he beats the time and gives the signs.
Ever more boldly I play the dance of death.
Karl Marx’s communist ideology would become precisely that: a dance of death. Over 100 million deaths in the 20th century alone, as the ideology’s hellish vapors filled the cemeteries of many unfortunate countries.
Robert Orlando uses Dante’s structures, metaphors, and allegories from the Divine Comedy to trace the arc of Karl Marx’s life. The book lays out nine “rings” as chapters, organized in three parts: Book One: Academic in Paradise; Book Two: Revolutionary in Purgatory; and Book Three: Author in Hell. Book One opens with a quote from Goethe’s Faust, specifically the line from the Mephistopheles (devil/demon) character that was frighteningly Karl Marx’s favorite quote: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.”
Yes, chew that one over. To repeat: Karl Marx’s favorite quote, from the devil/demon character of Faust: “Everything that exists deserves to perish.” That line serves as the destructive credo for Karl Marx’s vision.
Robert Orlando’s book is filled with such statements by Marx, from religion as the “opiate of the masses” and the “heart of a heartless world” and the “soul of soulless conditions” to lesser-known but likewise troubling assertions such as “communism begins where atheism begins” and “the criticism of religion is the beginning of all criticism.”
All of Marx’s awful remarks on religion and morality that constituted his grim worldview are in this book. Orlando, who’s working on his second master’s degree from Princeton Theological Seminary, meticulously references these remarks in 100-plus pages of 1,000-plus endnotes (most of them lengthy endnotes with extended observations) and with a 40-plus page bibliography. Though eminently readable to the layman, this is a very scholarly work. It isn’t a polemic. It’s a work of serious scholarship.
Returning to Orlando’s thesis, he darkly concludes: “In the end, there is no heaven for Karl Marx. No redemption, no absolution, no great reckoning in the stars.” He says of this despairing dénouement: “Marx’s tragic vision is one where the descent is final — an abyss where revolution consumes its own, and redemption is neither sought nor granted. It is a world abandoned to its illusions, where humans, having cast off the divine, are left to wander in the wreckage of their own making.”
And that, of course, is the utter opposite of Dante: “For Dante, descent is the necessary threshold to ascent, a harrowing but momentary passage through judgment, suffering, and transformation that leads to the light of redemption.” As Orlando notes, the Christian path, unlike the communist path, “does not demand the blood of millions to pave the way for paradise.” It demands only the blood of One — of Jesus Christ. And yet, Marx scorned this Christian notion of self-sacrifice. He snarled: “The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission.”
Jesus Christ certainly preached submission. He submitted to the will of God the Father. His will be done. Karl Marx submitted to the will of himself and his bleak eschatology.
The Dante vision, notes Orlando, offers the faith and hope of redemption — a climb upward rather than a descent nowhere but downward, built not on Marxist ruins where everything that exists deserves to perish but on Christian love.
With this book, we know what Marx did with Dante. But what would Dante do with Marx?
Ultimately, Rob Orlando brings together his filmmaker’s imagination and a scholar’s research skills to examine that intriguing, concluding question, namely: Where would Dante place Karl Marx? Or as Orlando more pointedly asks, “Would Dante place Marx in hell?” And here, Orlando’s creativity as a filmmaker really shines through.
Orlando speculates with a fascinating dialogue he imagines between Dante and Marx. The fictional scene is one of Karl Marx on trial, with Dante Allighieri doing the interrogation and rendering a verdict and a sentence.
Alas, where does Dante place Marx? To find out Robert Orlando’s answer, you’ll have to buy the book.
READ MORE from Paul Kengor:
Pope Leo XIV on Immigration: Order, Dignity, and Misconception