Ludwig Feuerbach: Philosopher of Revolution

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Reading 1

Our hearts are filled with compassion, for it is old Jehovah himself who is making ready to die. We have known him so well, from his cradle in Egypt where he was brought up among the divine crocodiles and calves, the onions and the ibises and sacred cats….We saw him bid farewell to those companions of his childhood, the obelisks and sphinxes of the Nile, to become a little god-king in Palestine to a poor nation of shepherds. Later we saw him in contact with the Assyro-Babylonian civilization; at that stage he gave up his far-too-human passions and refrained from spitting wrath and vengeance; at any rate, he no longer thundered for the least trifle…We saw him move to Rome, the capital, where he abjured everything in the way of national prejudice and proclaimed the celestial equality of all peoples; with these fine phrases he set up in opposition to old Jupiter and, thanks to intriguing, he got into power and, from the heights of the Capitol, ruled the city and the world, urbem et orbem….We have seen him purify himself, spiritualize himself still more, become paternal, compassionate, the benefactor of the human race, a philanthropist….But nothing could save him!

Don't you hear the bell? Down on your knees! The sacrament is being carried to a dying God!

Heinrich Heine: 1834

Reading 2

…What manner of infinite wisdom and power is it that merely palliates the consequences of an evil or deficiency? Why does it not prevent the evil itself? Why does it not prevent the cause? If the carriage I am riding in collapses, but I break no bones, should I attribute my good fortune to divine Providence? Why couldn't it have prevented the carriage from collapsing? ….How…can one take refuge in the religious conception of divine wisdom and goodness, when even religion, faced with the contradictions between the world as it is and divine goodness and wisdom, does not claim that God made the world as it is, but prefers to suppose that this world has been corrupted by sin and the Devil, and therefore holds out the prospect of a better, divine world?

From Lecture 15 of the Lectures on the Essence of Religion: Ludwig Feuerbach: 1848

The talk

Human beings are essentially good. The proof is their conception that god is good. Never mind that the song says that "Amazing grace … that saved a wretch like me." How we came to abase ourselves before an infinitely good god was made clear in Ludwig Feuerbach's analysis of religion and Christianity.

Ludwig Feuerbach was the most remarkable member of a remarkable family (of men, that is). His mother figures in his biography as the descendent of a long line of gifted…men.

His father, Anselm, was the leading German criminologist in the Napoleonic era; he had a lasting influence on criminal law on the continent. He also for a time lived openly with another woman than his wife, the wife of a friend of his. He had a fiery temper and was known in the family as Vesuvius. Ludwig's oldest brother was a well-known archeologist, while his nephew was a gifted painter. And there were others. But we are concerned with Ludwig.

Feuerbach-the fiery brook-was the philosopher who inspired the abortive revolution of 1848 in Germany, who inspired Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber…and Karl Marx. Indeed, for a hundred years he was known almost exclusively through Marx's acknowledgement of his influence. Then came a revival of interest in him, as Marxism waned and Humanism waxed.

Sidney Hook, the eminent critic of Marxism, wrote about 1940:

…increasing interest in the philosophy and psychology of religion have gradually brought Feuerbach into the field of philosophic consciousness. It would be more accurate to say that he is being restored to his rightful place, for as lonely and modest a figure as he was, during one brief decade the whole of German philosophy and culture stood within his shadow….Feuerbach was the philosophical arch-rebel from the publication of his The Essence of Christianity to the eve of the revolution of 1848.

The Essence of Christianity was translated into English by none other than George Eliot. Between the German philosophical style and Eliot's early Victorian style, that book makes difficult reading. But its message is clear. Clearer still are the Lectures on the Essence of Religion, given in the winter of 1848-1849, at the height of the revolution. These were addressed to a Heidelberg audience of academics, students, townspeople and workers. They marked his last public appearance. Our second reading was taken from lecture 15 of that series.

Feuerbach was the first to analyze religion as a psychological phenomenon, the product of the human psyche. He came into a Germany dominated by idealist philosophers, philosophers who attempted to derive the world from human thought. Hegel was the continuer of Plato: behind the tree is the concept of tree. Feuerbach, on the contrary, derived human thought from human experience. For Feuerbach there can be no concept of tree without the real trees. And this is how he approached religion.

Let us start with Feuerbach's conception of what it is to be human. What is his divine trinity? He wrote:

"What then is the nature of man, of which he is conscious, or what constitutes the specific distinction, the proper humanity of man? Reason, Will, Affection. To a complete man belong the power of thought, the power of will, the power of affection….We think for the sake of thinking; love for the sake of loving; will for the sake of willing-i.e., that we may be free." And in a footnote he adds:

The obtuse Materialist says: 'Man is distinguished from the brute only by consciousness-he is an animal with consciousness superadded;" not reflecting, that in a being that awakes to consciousness, there takes place a qualitative change, a differentiation of the entire nature. For the rest, our words are not intended to depreciate the nature of the lower animals.

For Feuerbach, god is an anthropomorphism, but an anthropomorphism that has taken on an independent reality.

"Whatever man conceives to be true, he immediately conceives to be real (that is, to have an objective existence), because originally, only the real is true to him-true in opposition to what is merely conceived, dreamed, imagined….Now God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth-the truth of man; but God, or what is the same thing, religion, is as various as are the conditions under which man conceives this his nature, regards it as the highest being….The qualities of God are nothing else than the essential qualities of man himself."

So, if our god is good, it is because we are good. "It does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom, are chimeras because the existence of God is a chimera, nor truths because this is a truth. The idea of God is dependent on the idea of justice, of benevolence; a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God; but the converse does not hold. The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine….Justice, wisdom, in general every quality which constitutes the divinity of God, is determined and known by itself independently."

This is Feuerbach's defiant answer to those who tell us that without god there can be no morality. Humans are first moral and then they project their morality into a conceived object, a god.

We meet here Feuerbach's concept of "alienation," translated by George Eliot by "projection," known to us today through Freud, who openly acknowledged his debt to Feuerbach. Projection is the attribution of our own properties to an external subject, in the current context, our most basic human characteristics to the concept of God.

But alienation is more than projection. Entäuserrung, the German word used by Feuerbach, implies divestiture, a parting with. In attributing to god our divine qualities we have lost them for ourselves. And so it happens that we grovel before the god we have created, we fear god, our god declares that he is "a jealous god." Even the man become god, Jesus, the incarnation of love, warns us of the final judgement for does not Matthew quote him as saying: "When the man comes into his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne. In front of him will be gathered together all the peoples; he will separate them from each other, just as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats on his left. Then the King will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you who have been blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom which has been prepared for you from the foundation of the world'….He will then say to those on his left hand, you accursed ones! Go away from me into the eternal fire which is prepared for the devil and his agents'…. And they will go into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life."

Am I glad we're Universalists!

The message of powerlessness before god is even stronger in Job. Here is a perfectly righteous man. He does everything according to the Book. And he knows that god knows this. And yet his life and his family are destroyed by a silly wager god makes with Satan. When his friends say he must have committed some secret sin Job protests his perfect righteousness. He demands to be heard by god. When god comes to him out of the tempest and flaunts his power and his total unaccountability, Job cowers and abandons his case. Only then is he rehabilitated, having won god's wager with Satan for him. Of course, his dead children are dead. There is no everlasting life in the Hebrew Bible a.k.a. Old Testament. He is given a new brood.

It is "Amazing Grace" that saves wretches like us. Feuerbach points out that in the religious conception, all good flows from god, all evil from Satan.

"Grace and its works are the antitheses of the devil and his works. As the involuntary, sensual impulses which flash out from the depths of the nature, and. In general, all those phenomena of moral and physical evil which are inexplicable to religion, appear to it as the work of the Evil Being; so the involuntary movements of inspiration and ecstasy appear to it as the work of the Good Being, God, of the Holy Spirit or of grace. Hence the arbitrariness of grace-the complaint of the pious that grace at one time visits and blesses them, at another forsakes and rejects them….In relation to the inner life, grace may be defined as religious genius; in relation to the outer life as religious chance. Man is good or wicked by no means through himself, his own power, his will; but through that complete synthesis of hidden and evident determinations of things which, because they rest on no evident necessity, we ascribe to the power of 'chance.' Divine grace is the power of chance beclouded with additional mystery. Here we have again the confirmation of that which we have seen to be the essential law of religion. Religion denies, repudiates chance, making everything dependent on God, explaining everything by means of him; but this denial is only apparent; it merely gives chance the name of the divine sovereignty. For the divine will, which, on incomprehensible grounds, for incomprehensible reasons, that is, speaking plainly, out of groundless, absolute arbitrariness, out of divine caprice, as it were, determines or predestines some to evil and misery, others to good and happiness, has not a single positive characteristic to distinguish it form the power of chance. The mystery of the election of grace is thus the mystery of chance. I say the mystery of chance; for in reality chance is a mystery, although slurred over and ignored by our speculative religious philosophy, which … has forgotten the profane mystery of chance."

And in a footnote he adds:

"Doubtless, this unveiling of the mystery of predestination will be pronounced atrocious, impious, diabolical. I have nothing to allege against this; I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood."

As I have written elsewhere, I would rather believe in a random, but not arbitrary universe than in an arbitrary but not random god.

Turning to prayer, Feuerbach labels it "the essential act of religion….Prayer is all-powerful. What the pious soul entreats for in prayer God fulfils." But, he adds, in a footnote to his discussion of prayer, "It is only unbelief in the efficacy of prayer which has subtly limited prayer to spiritual matters."

Do not get the idea from all this that Feuerbach was not a religious person. His quarrel was not with religion, but with religions. He was an atheist, true, but his definition of religion as the alienation from mankind of mankind's true characteristics enabled him to define a religion without alienation. We UUs have our flower communion and our water ceremony. Here's Feuerbach on Baptism:

"The Water of Baptism is to religion only the means by which the Holy Spirit imparts itself to man. But by this conception it is placed in contradiction with reason, with the truth of things. On the one hand, there is virtue in the objective, natural quality of water; on the other, there is none, but it is a merely arbitrary medium of divine grace and omnipotence. We free ourselves from these and other irreconcilable contradictions, we give a true significance to Baptism, only by regarding it as a symbol of the value of water itself. Baptism should represent to us the wonderful but natural effect of water on man. Water has, in fact, not merely physical effects, but also, and as a result of these, moral and intellectual effects on man….To purify oneself, to bathe, is the first, though the lowest of virtues."

And in another of his marvelous footnotes he adds:

"Christian baptism also is obviously only a relic of the ancient Nature-worship, in which…water was a means of religious purification. Here, however, water baptism had a much truer, and consequently a deeper meaning, than with the Christians, because it rested on the natural power and value of water….When therefore the Persians, the Hindoos, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, made physical purity a religious duty, they were herein far wiser than the Christian saints who attested the supranatural principles of their religion by physical impurity. Supranaturalism is only a euphemism for anti-naturalism."

"The course of religious development … consists specifically in this, that man abstracts more and more from God and attributes more and more to himself….That which to a later age or a cultured people is given by nature or reason, is to an earlier age, or to a yet uncultured people, given by God. Every tendency of man, however natural-even the impulse to cleanliness, was conceived by the Israelites as a positive divine ordinance. From this example we again see that God is lowered, is conceived more entirely on the type of ordinary humanity, in proportion as man detracts from himself. How can the self-humiliation of man go further than when he disclaims the capability of fulfilling spontaneously the requirements of common decency? The Christian religion, on the other hand, distinguishes the impulses and passions of man according to their quality, their character; it represented only good emotions, good dispositions, good thoughts, as revelations-of God; for what God reveals is a quality of God himself; ….The Christian religion distinguishes inward moral purity from external physical purity; the Israelite identified the two. In relation to the Israelitish religion, the Christian religion is one of criticism and freedom. The Israelite trusted himself to do nothing except what was commanded by God;….the authority of religion extended itself even to his food. The Christian religion , on the other hand, in all these external things made man dependent on himself, i.e., placed in man what the Israelite placed out of himself in God. In relation to the Israelite, the Christian is an esprit fort, a free-thinker. Thus do things change. What yesterday was still religion is no longer such today; and what today is atheism, tomorrow will be religion."

And he concludes:

Let bread be sacred for us, let wine be sacred, and also let water be sacred! Amen.

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Copyright 1997, Morton Nadler; Commercial Duplication Prohibited

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