The Essence of Christianity

“God is not what man is—man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful. God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely negative, comprehending all negations.”

The definition of God is always in reference to the divine attributes, which are considered perfections in God. Thus, God is always defined by perfection, and humanity by contrast is everything that God is not. This is part of the reason why Feuerbach spends time discussing why it is that the human consciousness has projected all of its perfections and goods onto an outside and objective being, rather than identifying them as interior human attributes.

“In religion man seeks contentment; religion is his highest good. But how could he find consolation and peace in God if God were an essentially different being?”

One of the first tensions the author finds in the idea of religion is that religion is supposed to be a source of comfort, and yet it demands one find solace in something completely foreign. This is a contradiction and goes against reason, and it will be one of the pieces in the argument that religion is intrinsically self-contradictory, and is not what it seems.

“Nevertheless the essential idea of the Incarnation, though enveloped in the night of the religious consciousness, is love. Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity.”

Here, Feuerbach has an interpretation of the Incarnation that hews very close to the traditional Christian understanding, whereby the Word of God condescends to take on a human nature and become a man. The difference is that Feuerbach takes this as a sign that the worship of Christ is merely a psychological reality of the appreciation of human nature, while Christians believe that this is an objective fact in the world.

“If God as actus purus, as pure activity, is the God of abstract philosophy; so, on the other hand, Christ, the God of the Christians, is the passio pura, pure suffering,—the highest metaphysical thought, the être suprême of the heart.”

Here, the author contrasts the classical notion of God as pure act, and thus not capable of any suffering on account of the impassibility of the divine nature, with the Christian teaching that one of the Trinity has suffered in Jesus Christ. It seems as if both of these claims cannot be true at the same time, and thus there must be some contradiction here that needs to be teased out.

“God the Father is I, God the Son Thou. The I is understanding, the Thou love. But love with understanding and understanding with love is mind, and mind is the totality of man as such—the total man.”

The persons of the Trinity are in mutual relation with one another. The Father, the first person, and the Son, the second person, are related and directed toward one another as I and Thou (Feuerbach would go on to be a major influence of Martin Buber, who will write a seminal work on this I-Thou relationship). As the Father and Son are understanding and love, which make up the spiritual reality in human beings that we call mind, it is seen that the theology of the relation between Father and Son is really an investigation into the human mind.

“Man, as an emotional and sensuous being, is governed and made happy only by images, by sensible representations.”

Human beings are notoriously material creatures. As knowledge can only enter into the mind by one of the five senses, the sense of sight is particularly suited to be related to understanding. In light of this, sensible representation—images—are particularly pleasing to the soul.

“The world is not God; it is other than God, the opposite of God, or at least that which is different from God. But that which is different from God cannot have come immediately from God, but only from a distinction of God in God.”

The tension between the doctrine of creation and the doctrine of God as creator lies in the fact that they seem to be infinitely different. Since they have nothing in common, the question becomes how creation could emanate from God if they share nothing in common (similar to the adage that “one cannot give what one does not have”).

“Religion is a judgment. The most essential condition in religion—in the idea of the divine being—is accordingly the discrimination of the praiseworthy from the blameworthy, of the perfect from the imperfect; in a word, of the positive from the negative.”

Here is an example of how Feuerbach distinguishes, subtly, between theism and religion. Theism is merely the conviction that God, of some kind, exists. Religion, however, as he points out, is a judgment in favor of a particular mode of understanding God and the divine will, as well as how human beings are to know God, interact with him, and relate to the world in light of this fact. It is, as he says, a particular judgment of what is right and what is wrong.

“To speak is an act of the will; thus, creation is a product of the Will: as in the Word of God man affirms the divinity of the human word, so in creation he affirms the divinity of the Will: not, however, the will of the reason, but the will of the imagination—the absolutely subjective, unlimited will.”

The Bible provides a revelation of creation through the divine word. The Book of Genesis comments on how God speaks creation into existence, and the Gospel of John calls Jesus the Logos, the Word, and equates this Word with divinity. Anthropologically, however, this is not about how creation emanates from the divine word, but about how human language, and the human will, is in fact divine; the biblical revelation is merely a metaphor for the divinity of human nature and the human will (which is part of the unique reality of human consciousness).

“The question, Whence is Nature or the world? presupposes wonder that it exists, or the question, Why does it exist? But this wonder, this question, arises only where man has separated himself from Nature and made it a mere object of will.”

Asking the question about the origins of the universe presupposes the fact that human beings are able to recognize this as a possible question, and to reflect on the fact of their own existence. The universe does not ask questions about itself, human beings do; this fact speaks to the reality of humans’ ontologically special place in nature.

“As Israel made the wants of his national existence the law of the world, as, under the dominance of these wants, he deified even his political vindictiveness; so the Christian made the requirements of human feeling the absolute powers and laws of the world.”

Both the Israelites and the Christians, in Feuerbach’s judgment, made their subjective view of the world, along with their desires, the measure against which the world is measured. For ancient Israel, this measure was their national identity and the legal system that accompanied their Temple worship and political status. For Christians and their Church, this measure became the subjectivity of faith.

“But faith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason,—that is, of natural reason.”

While Christians view faith as a source of knowledge that never contradicts the truths of reason (even if they transcend natural reason at times), Feuerbach holds that faith and reason are natural enemies. Faith, as a form of imaginative confidence, allows the subject to experience reality in a way that conforms to their own interior subjectivity, even in the face of evidence to the contrary.

“To the Christians the immortality of the reason, of the soul, was far too abstract and negative; they had at heart only a personal immortality, such as would gratify their feelings, and the guarantee of this lies in a bodily resurrection alone. The resurrection of the body is the highest triumph of Christianity.”

In order to justify and concretize the conviction that the soul is immortal, the doctrine of the resurrection of the body was necessary. The immortality of human reason is too abstract to be taken seriously and held widely by all, and so the idea of bodily resurrection accrued to the original conviction concerning the soul. This teaching is Christianity’s greatest achievement as far as human civilization and philosophy are concerned.

“The ancients said that if virtue could become visible, its beauty would win and inspire all hearts. The Christians were so happy as to see even this wish fulfilled. The heathens had an unwritten, the Jews a written law; the Christians had a model—a visible, personal, living law, a law made flesh.”

Feuerbach divides the manner in which the three different ages of humanity viewed law and ethics. Before the people of Israel, the age of so-called “heathens,” human beings had no written law and lived by feeling. During Israel’s reign, the law was written and encoded for people to read and follow. In the age of the Christians, however, the written law has been replaced by an actual person to be imitated and obeyed.

“The ancients were free from themselves, but their freedom was that of indifference towards themselves; the Christians were free from Nature, but their freedom was not that of reason, not true freedom, which limits itself by the contemplation of the world, by Nature,—it was the freedom of feeling and imagination, the freedom of miracle.”

The freedom of the ancient world was a freedom from considering their own personhood while they concerned themselves with the natural world, and the things outside themselves. The freedom of Christians, however, is freedom from being constrained by nature. Once liberated from the constraints of nature, the person is free to contemplate their own interior life, and the effects that the imagination brings about in the world.

“Separation from the world, from matter, from the life of the species, is therefore the essential aim of Christianity.”

One of the most unique features of Christianity is the desire and goal of separating from the world; most obvious is the Christian tendency toward celibacy and abstinence. Christian teaching is completely focused on the salvation of the individual soul without concern for the world and material things, and so natural desires that one would find in other animals is absent.

“The heavenly life, or what we do not here distinguish from it—personal immortality, is a characteristic doctrine of Christianity.”

In harmony with the preoccupation on the salvation of the person, quite apart from the usual tendencies of creatures, is the concern for a salvation that is individual (rather than communal). Personal immortality, in the eyes of Feuerbach, is the unique concern of the Christian religion, and is what is meant by speech about heaven; thus, talk about going to heaven is talk about how to gain personal immortality, and not really about going to a particular location.

“All so-called secondary forces and second causes are nothing to him when he prays; if they were anything to him, the might, the fervour of prayer would be annihilated.”

The miracle of prayer is the immediate, one-to-one connection the soul has with God. The introduction of outside forces and secondary causes would break the connection, and force the consciousness to recognize that God is not the immediate cause of things in the world. The miracle of prayer exists as a powerful experience thanks to the rejection of any other cause in the world except for God.

“But God is not seen, not heard, not perceived by the senses. He does not exist for me, if I do not exist for him; if I do not believe in a God, there is no God for me. If I am not devoutly disposed, if I do not raise myself above the life of the senses, he has no place in my consciousness. Thus he exists only in so far as he is felt, thought, believed in.”

The existence of God is not an objective reality, it is purely subjective. This means that God only exists where there are human beings, and only exists within human experience (much like sound only exists where there is an ear to hear it). The existence of God, then, cannot be proved outside one’s own personal apprehension of the divine nature.

“Faith in revelation is the immediate certainty of the religious mind, that what it believes, wishes, conceives, really is. Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, beings out of ourselves. The religious mind does not distinguish between subjective and objective,—it has no doubts.”

The distinction between the subjective and the objective is itself a result of the mind that disproves the reality of religious observance and faith. Since faith itself rejects the distinction, and takes all things as objective and true without doubt, one can see that the mind’s recognition of the subjective/objective distinction means that any subjective notion that would deny this must be false in some way.

“A peculiarly characteristic artifice and pretext of Christian sophistry is the doctrine of the unsearchableness, the incomprehensibility of the divine nature.”

Christian doctrine shows its cards as something false and the work of sophistry—tenuous logic masquerading as wisdom—since the divine nature is said to be simultaneously inscrutable and impenetrable while at the same time being the subject of theology. A thing cannot be unknowable and the subject of a field of knowledge at the same time.

“Only when we abandon a philosophy of religion, or a theology, which is distinct from psychology and anthropology, and recognise anthropology as itself theology, do we attain to a true, self-satisfying identity of the divine and human being, the identity of the human being with itself.”

Theology as theology can never be satisfying. This is the reason that there has been a never-ending parade of incompatible and competing theologies throughout the history of Christian teaching. The true nature of theology’s investigations as anthropology will clear this problem up, and reveal it to be a finally satisfying and definitive body of knowledge in a way that philosophy and theology could never be. Clarifying theology’s subject as human nature, rather than God, is a necessity.

“The idea of the Trinity contains in itself the contradiction of polytheism and monotheism, of imagination and reason, of fiction and reality. Imagination gives the Trinity, reason the Unity of the persons. According to reason, the things distinguished are only distinctions; according to imagination, the distinctions are things distinguished, which therefore do away with the unity of the divine being.”

The most complex doctrine of Christianity is that of the Trinity, a doctrine that attempts to unite multiplicity and unity in one single concept. The variety of multiple persons in relation with one another clashes with the unified theory of the divine nature; however, when theology is finally understood to be anthropology, the complexity of the Trinity is revealed to be nothing other than the complexity of human nature (which makes sense to Feuerbach since human beings are single persons with a practically infinite quantity of feelings, moods, thoughts, desires, and activities).