43 pages • 1 hour read
The Essence of Christianity
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Themes
Critique of Theology as Anthropology
As with many philosophers in the post-Enlightenment era, Feuerbach deals explicitly with the question of God and Christianity in relation to his philosophy. In a book explicitly dealing with these questions, as the title suggests—The Essence of Christianity—Feuerbach is naturally going to center the questions of the existence of God, the truth claims of the Christian Church, and the theology that underpins Christian teaching. While Feuerbach has plenty to say about the errors into which theology falls, especially concerning the nature of God and the practice of religion, one of the key points he makes throughout the work—and which will be one of the most influential for thinkers after him—is the idea that theology and religion in general are surreptitiously placing God in the place of human beings.
The very first mention of this idea occurs in the book’s preface. Feuerbach states: “It is not I, but religion that worships man, although religion, or rather theology, denies this” (6). Theology pretends to study the nature of God, his thoughts and his actions and his words, and yet all the time is simply misunderstanding what it is studying. As he notes in the first chapter, “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” (24). In other words, Christian theologians have placed God, religion, and the supernatural upon a pedestal that should rightly be occupied by humans, the study of human nature, and the natural world.
His most poignant remarks come toward the end of the book in his discussion of the various contradictions within the nature and study of God and divine revelation. Observing that what is revealed about God is ultimately about the nature of humanity, Feuerbach makes an emphatic claim: “Here we have a striking confirmation of the position that the secret of theology is nothing else than anthropology—the knowledge of God nothing else than a knowledge of man!” (131). The tragedy of theology, as Feuerbach sees it, is that it has replaced a study of humanity with the study of divinity, making claims about God that it should really be making about human beings. Theology must become anthropology if it is to mature beyond the infancy of holding to a religious worldview.
Tensions or Contradictions Within Christian Doctrine
Feuerbach sees tensions and contradictions in the most fundamental Christian teachings. He devotes the majority of the second part of the book to this topic, addressing apparent contradictions in the existence of God, divine revelation, God’s nature, the theology of God, the Trinity, the Christian sacraments, and the relationship between faith and love.
Treating each topic as a separate issue, Feuerbach dismantles them one by one, pointing out various contradictions, flaws in reasoning, and faulty assumptions. At the root of Feuerbach’s criticisms is the fact that theology and religion do not understand their subject. In Chapter 20, he states:
Religion is the relation of man to his own nature,—therein lies its truth and its power of moral amelioration;—but to his nature not recognised as his own, but regarded as another nature […] herein lies its untruth, its limitation, its contradiction to reason and morality (125).
In other words, religion is flawed, and filled with things contrary to reason, because it mistakes God for humanity.
Since this error lies at the foundation of the entire edifice, it is no surprise that the whole body of Christian doctrine should have a host of tensions and contradictions. The tension between faith and love is ultimately the most damaging, in Feuerbach’s view, since those are the two most essential elements of the Christian religion. All religion forces the believer to be at war with themselves; faith enjoins the believer to accept the claim that God is real, and must be worshipped, and that the divine nature is the source of all that is good, pure, and best in the world. In fact, humanity itself is the source of all these good things, and God is merely an outer expression of what humans contain within. Thus, the person is made to hold an explicit faith claim that is fundamentally untrue.
For the Christian, however, the tension is heightened on account of the faith claim that God is love, even though, Feuerbach argues, love is the opposite of faith: “Love knows no law but itself; it is divine through itself; it needs not the sanction of faith; it is its own basis. The love which is bound by faith is a narrow-hearted, false love, contradicting the idea of love” (163-64). Love and faith cannot coexist; therefore, Christianity’s God is impossible. If there is contradiction in such basic and essential aspects of the Christian religion, it is no wonder that the rest of Christianity is riddled with flaws and incongruities.
Human Nature
Central to Feuerbach’s philosophy is his perspective on what constitutes human nature, and what is capable of revealing the facts of human nature. The study of the human alone is not all that gives insight into human nature, for even experience of other objects ultimately redounds to the human. As he notes: “We know the man by the object, by his conception of what is external to himself; in it his nature becomes evident” (15). In other words, human nature is not just identified and investigated by looking internally; it is also illuminated by human experience.
This is not to say that outside objects define human nature, but rather that human nature comes to light through the experience of outside objects. In similar fashion, the subjective experience of God reveals human nature. Feuerbach speaks of this throughout the book, insisting that all theological descriptions of God are actually descriptions of the human being and human nature in general: “The divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human nature purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective […] the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature” (20). For Feuerbach, there is ultimately no such thing as the divine, there is only the human.
God is multifaceted because human nature is so varied and complex: “The mystery of the inexhaustible fulness of the divine predicates is therefore nothing else than the mystery of human nature considered as an infinitely varied, infinitely modifiable” (26). Thus far in human history, it has been more palatable to investigate human nature by relating it to God and religion, but with the progress of the Enlightenment and advances made in the philosophical and anthropological sciences, Feuerbach is sure that the time has come to release science and philosophy from the hold of religion, and to be honest about human nature.
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