LESSON 1: LUDWIG FEUERBACH, “Theology is Anthropology;

Anthropology is Theology.”
Religion as an Illusion. He considered religion merely as a past phase in man's
intellectual progression, called for a new religion of action, and insisted on man's
undivided concentration on this world so that an "efficient, spiritually and physically sound
people could be formed from this revolutionizing liberation from the absolutist God.”

1. Hegelian influence - Georg W.F. Hegel was far from being an atheist himself but
he set the stage for the assault upon God. he questioned whether the philosophers
or the theologians had succeeded in attaining the real God. he protested that the
God of the christian experience was an inadequate, a premature, not-yet-developed
God. he thus set himself the mission of rescuing the God of christianity from the
vagueness of imagery, the symbolism of myths, the simplistic charm of parables.

moreover, Hegel had a bill of particulars against the christian God. the trouble with
the christian God is that he is only experienced and remembered when the human
conscience is sick or in trouble. but this jewish-christian God, who is unapproachable
and inscrutable in his aloof transcendence and unattainable by the imagination, mind
or heart of man, arouses in man resentment against the only choice he is offered by
this mysterious God - obedience or revolt. frustrated by the demoralizing experience
of failing futilely to satisfy his hunger for communion with the transcendent God,
humbled by the degrading knowledge of his abject powerlessness, man resents the
situation that equates God's glorification with his own depreciation. in effect, says
Hegel, the judaeo-christian God is a cruel tyrant who fosters between himself and
men the infamous dialectical relationship of master and slave.

despite the apparent liberation of the spirit found in the new testament, the apparent
snapping of the bonds of fate, the seemingly magnificent release from the master-
slave degradation, Hegel brands judaeo-christianity as a backward religion, a religion
of endless, hopeless waiting whose devotees are either wandering in a desert looking
for a land flowing with milk and honey or sighing in a vale of tears scanning the
horizon for the advent of the new heaven and earth beyond time. jews and christians
suffer from unhappy consciences which beget not true religion but sentimental
religiosity. both insist God is apart, beyond, divorced from this world which at best is
a sinners' prison, an exiles' passing and dying city.
 2. critique of Christianity - christianity broke upon an ancient, pagan world,
burdened down with countless Gods, spirits, demons and controlled implacably by the
tyrannical stars and fates above, as the great liberator. its good news proclaimed that
man is the effect of infinite, creative love. a divine seal within man's nature reflects,
however dimly yet unmistakably, the ineffable nature of his absolute creator. reason,
liberty, immortality, providence over cosmos and community are divine endowments
which God shares with man, his favorite image. man, having been liberated by
christianity, found reason to rejoice in a world expanded with newly revealed horizons
for intelligence, freedom, love. each man, one by one, was now seen to be the known,
the chosen, the person individually embraced by the absolute lover. "i have loved you
with an everlasting love, therefore have i chosen you, taking pity on you." so the
initial emotions that christianity released in a converted world that was formerly pagan
and idolatrous were those of intense, exhilarating gladness, radiant joy, triumphant
applause, inexpressibly peaceful relief at the deliverance from fatalism and the
reception of new human life in the divine family of the holy trinity. from now on man's
greatness was to consist in his grateful recognition of his divine origins and in his
enthusiastic cooperation for the attainment of his divine destiny - eternal, supernatural
communion within the unveiled family of God.

when Feuerbach looked at the world of his times, alas, he discovered an astonishing
phenomenon. illusion, indecision, immorality were rampant in a supposedly christian
civilization. he wrote: “we are living on the perfume of an empty vase.” yet, even
though men were no longer moved by the christian ideal and no longer strove for
supernatural greatness, they were, nevertheless, still haunted it. Feuerbach himself
testified that “because of its indecisive half-heartedness and lack of character... the
superhuman and supernatural essence of ancient christianity still haunts the minds of
men - at least as a ghost.” he planned to dissolve the ghost, dispel the perfume. he
made it his sacred mission to restore man's spiritual coherency by "erasing this most
rotten stain, the stain of our present history." he would break man's ties to both God
and christianity, myths that held a guilt-ridden society in total bondage.

3. atheistic humanism - Feuerbach was convinced that he could account for the
christian illusion in particular, and for the illusion of religion in general, through
psychological and anthropological causes. in his essence of religion, he proclaimed
that God is merely a myth which embodies the highest aspirations of the human
consciousness. “those who have no desires have no Gods… Gods are men’s wishes
in corporeal form.” so he vowed to make it his mission to displace religion.

a. negative thesis – alienation: according to Feuerbach alienation arises in man

when man discovers that, in his struggle for a better life, his existence is
dependent, limited, threatened; he is agitated by needs, ideals, desires, fears; he
is buffeted by loves and hates, attractions and abhorrences, values and disvalues;
he is forced to sift the good from the evil, all the time realizing from distressing
 experience that he finds in himself unstableness and weakness yet, at the same
time, an attraction for noble virtues and deeds. in his desire to stabilize the noble
qualities he finds in his nature, man hypostasizes, idolizes, absolutizes them
outside his own changeable being into an absolute other who is unchangeable.
this other is endowed with wisdom, will, justice, love, all the noble feelings and
virtues which man himself experiences from time to time, both in himself and in
his fellowmen. thus the absolutized attributes appear to man as if they were the
exclusive ornaments of another, an infinitely more perfect being than himself.
spontaneously, religiously, man projects and objectifies his own goodness and
greatness in the fantastic being he calls God. God is thus the product of pure
human imagination.
God is for man the commonplace book where he registers his highest feelings and
thoughts, the genealogical album into which he enters the names of the things
most dear and sacred to him.

in this way man simultaneously dispossesses himself and enriches his God; in
affirming God he denies himself; the poorer he becomes, the richer his God
becomes; nothing really exists in God except what belongs and actually really still
is in man's heart.

God as the epitome of all realities or perfections is nothing other than a

compendious summary devised for the benefit of the limited individual, an epitome
of the generic human qualities distributed among men, in the self-realization of
the species in the course of world history.

thus man strips himself and the human species of his highest attributes and creates
with these virtues the essence of his own God. man must die that God may be
born.

b. positive thesis – repossession: following the hegelian dialectic, Feuerbach

contended that every antithesis must rise to the synthesis; every rejection must
move to a higher reception; every alienation becomes a more perfect repossession.
man has reached that point in his historical development where he has to take
back from religion and God that nature which he had rejected in their favor.
Feuerbach saw himself as the prophet and the expediter of this process of
reclamation and the herald of the advent of the kingdom of man. thus he set out
to destroy the vampire of God, to dispel the phantom of religion, to liberate man
from the mighty myth of the absolute other, to restore man to man and hence to
his own greatness. Feuerbach indicated that the principal aim of his mission was
to present mankind to the greatness of his own essence and thereby to inspire
men to have faith in their humanity.

“God was my first thought, reason my second and man my third and last - 1 deny
only in order to affirm. i deny the fantastic projection of theology and religion in
order to affirm the real essence of man. - while i do reduce theology to
anthropology, i exalt anthropology to theology; very much as christianity while
lowering God into man, made man into God.

i aim to change the friends of God into friends of man, believers into thinkers,
worshippers into workers, candidates for the other world into students of this
world, christians, who on their own confession, are half-animal and half-angel, into
men - whole men… theologians into anthropologians… religious and political
footmen of a celestial and terrestrial monarchy and aristocracy into free, self-
reliant citizens of earth.”

here was an atheistic humanism that destroyed God as the absolute other; yet
simultaneously here was a theistic humanism that divinized man.

the divine essence is the glorified human essence transfigured from the death of
abstraction. in religion man frees himself from the limitations of life; here he
throws off what oppresses, impedes or adversely affects him; God is man's self-
awareness, emancipated from all actuality; man feels himself free, happy, blessed
only in his religion because here only does he live in his true genius; here he
celebrates his sunday

Feuerbach did not divinize individual man in his particularity, but he identified God
with the essence of man, with humanity. his is a religion of humanity, the
apotheosis of man though the apotheosis of mankind.

it is the essence of man that is the supreme being… if the divinity of nature is the
basis of all religions, including christianity, the divinity of man is its final aim… the
turning point in history will be the moment when man becomes aware that the
only God of man is man himself. ‘homo homini deus! man spontaneously
conceives of his own essence as individual in himself and generic in God; as limited
in himself and infinite in God.

but when man finally sheds this mythical view and accepts personal participation
in his common humanity, man finally realizes the divine dimension of his own
being.

i have only found the key to the cipher of the christian religion, only extricated its
true meaning from the web of contradictions and delusions called theology; but in
doing so i have certainly committed sacrilege. if therefore my work is negative,
irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism - at least in the sense in
this work - is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the
surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition,
but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity
of human nature.
5. authentic atheism - thus what theology and philosophy have held to be God, the
absolute, the infinite, is not God; but that which they have held not to be God is God:
namely, the attribute, the quality, whatever has reality. hence, he alone is the true
atheist to whom the predicates of the divine being - for example, love, wisdom, justice
- are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing. and
in no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily also a negation of the predicates
considered in themselves. these have an intrinsic, independent reality; they force their
recognition upon man by their very nature; they are self-evident truths to him; they
prove, they attest themselves. it does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom are
chimeras because the existence of God is a chimera ...the fact is not that a quality is
divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine: because
without it God would be a defective being… but if God as subject is the determined,
while the quality, the predicate, is the determining, then in truth the rank of the
Godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.

the essential message of all religion and of the gospels of christianity is that they are
treating fundamentally about man and human greatness under the myth-symbols of
God and supernaturalism.