The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach

First published:Das Wesen des Christentums, 1841 (English translation, 1854)

Edition(s) used:The Essence of Christianity, translated by George Eliot. Introduction by Wolfgang Vondey. New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2004

Genre(s): Nonfiction

Subgenre(s): Critical analysis; theology

Core issue(s): Faith; God; knowledge; love; reason; religion

Overview

In contrast to the constructive theology that readers might expect from the title, The Essence of Christianity instead poses a sharp critique of Christian religion and a strong challenge to German philosophical idealism. The book had significant influence among European intellectuals of the early nineteenth century, including philosophical atheists such as Karl Marx. Ludwig Feuerbach’s text was especially important in the broader historical context of political confrontation with forms of nineteenth century religion perceived to be in “unholy” alliance with repressive political authority. Despite its fundamental critique of normative Jewish and Christian theology, The Essence of Christianity has remained important for a range of thinkers as theologically diverse as Swiss theologian Karl Barth and Jewish philosopher Martin Buber.

Feuerbach’s central thesis is that Christian religion has “projected” and thus “displaced” qualities of human consciousness onto “sacred” objects, and by doing so, it has misrepresented the true essence of religion and the fundamental reality of human nature and human consciousness. By constructing the sacred as an “object” that is external to the human being, religion has alienated humankind from the truth of its own nature. For example, the divine entities that Christianity calls “God” or “Christ” are actually human capacities for “understanding,” “creativity,” and “love,” but these human qualities have been falsely construed by religion as being the characteristics of a separate and supernatural being. For Feuerbach, there is no objectively real supernatural realm: God does not exist as a distinct supernatural reality. Instead, God is created by the human “subjective” capacity to imagine God’s existence. Like all aspects of existence, human imagination is an expression of “nature.” For Feuerbach, the starting point for all philosophy (including theology) is the human being, as both individual and species.

The Essence of Christianity is a difficult text, often structured via implicit critiques of particular philosophers such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Baruch Spinoza. However, on another level, its central arguments are straightforward and repeated often, especially in the first part of the book, entitled “The True or Anthropological Essence of Religion,” which consists of a detailed unmasking of traditional Christian theological categories. After establishing that humans have a unique capacity for “species self-consciousness” (that is, humans are capable of reflecting on human nature itself), Feuerbach argues that Christian theology falsely “makes divine” those qualities that are in actuality human “perfections”: reason (“power of thought”), will (“energy of character”), and affection (“power of love”). These perfections are the essence of humanity, and therefore humanity is the essence of religion.

The Christian God, the “mystery of the Incarnation,” and other central Christian categories such as suffering, the Trinity, Logos, mysticism, providence, omnipotence, miracles, and the Resurrection, are all analyzed by Feuerbach as case studies of what are actually qualities or capacities of human nature, of human psychology, and of human consciousness, wrongly refracted by religion as qualities of “the divine.” For Feuerbach, because “theology is anthropology,” and vice versa, the mistake made by Christianity is to get the grammar of reality wrong. God is not the objectively real “subject” of the cosmos, and humanity is not God’s “predicate” in a grand metaphysical sentence. Rather, human nature is the subject and the predicate, the first and the last thing.

In specifically Christian terms, for example, the claim that Christ is the Son of God is an example of a human category of relationship that Christian religion has problematically “externalized” and located outside of human experience. For Feuerbach, “Christ is the Son of God” is in essence a metaphor for “the relation of man to his own nature.” The problem with such theological “projections” of human nature onto divine nature is that religion thus ultimately disconnects human beings from the truth of—and accountability for—their own existence. Contrary to orthodox Christian metaphysics, Feuerbach insists that “The beginning, middle and end of religion is MAN.”

If the essence of Christianity is humanity, then morality, law, and salvation are located in the realm of human history, human action, and human moral agency. Along these lines, the second part of The Essence of Christianity, entitled “The False or Theological Essence of Religion,” develops in two directions: toward a sharpened indictment of the failings of historical religion and toward a universalistic optimism regarding humanity’s “natural” capacity for love, truth, and altruistic morality.

Feuerbach constructs a provocative distinction between faith and love: Faith is the terrain of religion, which has in turn alienated humans from their own nature. Faith is partisan, it “particularizes,” it separates humans from their true nature and from each other. Faith generates the tragedies of religious history, it is the “noxious source of religious fanaticism.” Love, on the other hand, is the terrain of true human subjective existence. Love is the “natural” expression of free human species-consciousness. Love “universalizes” and brings humans into relation with one another.

The Essence of Christianity thus closes with a clear indictment of the historical church: Faith (that is, “religion” as it is constructed via the church) becomes a vehicle for intolerance and human estrangement, while love becomes an anthropological category for fulfilling the “unity of the race.”

Christian Themes

Irony must carry the day in any effort to analyze Feuerbach’s thought for Christian themes, because in The Essence of Christianity he essentially rejects the truth claims of normative Christian theology and replaces them with truth claims grounded in human history and human subjective consciousness. What Christianity posits as a realm of divine reality existing outside and “in relation” to the human, Feuerbach instead “atheistically” posits as human nature, in and of itself, human always and only. Feuerbach essentially translates Christian categories such as God, Christ, revelation, freedom, love, and the Incarnation into secularized categories of human consciousness. For example, “God” is human reason made objectively real to itself. “Christ” is the open and fully “disclosed” reality of the human heart. “Revelation” is human self-determination, the reconciliation of the human being with human nature. “Freedom” is construed as “true existence,” which is mediated through the “perfect” trinity of human reason, human will, and human affection.

However, it has long been noted that Feuerbach’s philosophical rejection of Christian religion relies centrally on Christian categories of meaning, and nowhere is this clearer and more fascinating in The Essence of Christianity than in some of its closing passages, where Feuerbach claims that when love is recognized as the “subjective reality of the species” and understood correctly as the human capacity for unity and species self-consciousness, then Christ “disappears” and, paradoxically, “the real Christian” can emerge. The following paragraph makes it abundantly clear why Feuerbach remains a provocative thinker for a very wide range of readers:

But love . . . is nothing else than . . . the realisation of the unity of the race. . . . The species is not an abstraction; it exists . . . in the moral sentiment in the energy of love. . . . A loving heart is the heart of the species throbbing in the individual. Thus Christ, as the consciousness of love, is the consciousness of the species. We are all one in Christ. Christ is the consciousness of our identity. He therefore who loves man for the sake of man, who rises to the love of the species, to universal love, . . . he is a Christian, is Christ himself. He does what Christ did, what made Christ Christ. Thus, where there arises the consciousness of the species as a species, . . . Christ disappears, without, however, his true nature disappearing; for he was the substitute for the consciousness of the species, the image under which it was made present to the people, and became the law of the popular life.

Sources for Further Study

Barth, Karl. Introduction to The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach. Translated by George Eliot. New York: Harper, 1957. Barth examines Feuerbach’s work for its relation to Protestant theology. Also contains a foreword by H. Richard Niebuhr.

De Roover, Jakob. “An Unhappy Lover of Theology: Feuerbach and Contemporary Religious Studies.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 71, no. 3 (September, 2003): 615-635. Analyzes Feuerbach for underlying Christian presuppositions, critiquing issues related to pluralistic scholarship in comparative religion.

Harvey, Van A. Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Interpretive emphasis on “projection theory.”

Niebuhr, H. Richard. Foreword to The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach. Translated by George Eliot. New York: Harper, 1957. Niebuhr addresses Feuerbach’s significance for Protestant theology.

Wartofsky, Marx W. Feuerbach. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1977. Focuses on contexts of philosophy and intellectual history.