The Essence of Christianity

Contents

1. Preface to the Second Edition 34 min 11

   Feuerbach answers the uproar over the first edition. His book, he says, is no speculation but a faithful translation of Christianity from the language of images into plain speech: it starts from facts and the senses, not from thought, and it rejects Hegel’s absolute philosophy. Part I proves directly that theology is anthropology; Part II proves it indirectly through theology’s contradictions. Religion is the dream of the human mind; he only wakes it. He defends his treatment of the sacraments, distinguishes himself from historical critics such as Strauss and Bauer, and declares Christianity already dead in modern life.

2. I Introduction 1 h 27 min 34

   The Introduction sets out the whole theory. Humans differ from animals by consciousness of their species; religion is consciousness of the infinite, which is really the infinity of human nature. Reason, will and love are divine powers in man. In religion consciousness of God is self-consciousness, though the believer does not know it: God is human nature freed from individual limits and worshipped as another being. Divine predicates are human, so the subject is human too; to call God unknowable is disguised atheism. Man impoverishes himself to enrich God, then receives his nature back from God.

3. II God as a Being of the Understanding 32 min 9

   Religion begins by setting God against man: infinite against finite, perfect against sinful. This division is within man himself. The God of metaphysics, impersonal, passionless, infinite, one and necessary, is the human understanding regarded as an independent being. Every attribute that philosophers and theologians give God as such, from being the first cause and the most real being to unity and infinity, describes the nature of thought. God depends on reason, not reason on God; to think is to be God.

4. III God as a Moral Being, or Law 15 min 11

   The abstract God of the understanding means little to religion, which cares only for a God with human attributes. The chief of these is moral perfection, but a perfectly moral God, the law personified, only shows man his own sinfulness and divides him from himself. Release comes through love: a God who forgives must be more than moral, a being of flesh and blood who shares human suffering. Love reconciles God and man, spirit and matter; it is the true bond of humanity.

5. IV The Mystery of the Incarnation; or, God as Love, as a Being of the Heart 24 min 7

   The Incarnation reveals that God was already human: he became man out of compassion, so human feeling preceded the event. Religion reverses cause and effect, making man’s exaltation the consequence of God’s descent. Love, not God, is the real redeemer; a God held apart from love becomes the God of fanaticism. Every prayer is an incarnation, since a God who hears prayer suffers with man. The love of God to man is man’s love of himself made objective.

6. V The Mystery of the Suffering God 16 min 8

   Christ’s Passion shows that Christianity consecrates suffering. Ancient philosophy worshipped activity; Christians placed passivity and feeling in God. Inverting the religious statement, suffering for others is divine. Christ’s tears and fear express human sensibility against Stoic composure, and Christian worship is sighs and tears. A suffering God means that feeling itself is divine. God is the mirror of man, the book in which people record what they hold most sacred, and everyone needs an aim to live by.

7. VI The Mystery of the Trinity and the Mother of God 24 min 14

   The Trinity is human consciousness of itself as a whole, uniting thought, will and love. More deeply, it expresses the need for community: a solitary God lacks love, so religion places a Son beside the Father and a Spirit of love between them. Father and Son are meant literally. Monks who renounced family found a divine family instead, and the Mother of God completes it. Protestantism, dropping the Mother, weakened the whole Trinity. Only the poor man has a rich God.

8. VII The Mystery of the Logos and Divine Image 16 min 9

   The Son, the second Person, is the real God of Christianity, as mediators are the real objects of religion. He is the Image of God, the human imagination made divine, and the principle of image-worship, which the Church sanctioned. He is also the Word: language is a product of imagination with real power to bind, free, console and reconcile. The Word of God is the divinity of the human word.

9. VIII The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God 18 min 6

   Religion derives the world from God through the Son, a being between God and creation. This expresses the imagination’s role in linking abstract thought and sense, and, more deeply, a psychological truth: we become conscious of the world only through another person like ourselves. Man is the God of man; reason and feeling are products of society. Creation out of the divine understanding only shows that difference is a basic law of thought.

10. IX The Mystery of Mysticism, or of Nature in God 39 min 13

    Feuerbach attacks Schelling’s doctrine, taken from Jacob Böhme, of a dark nature in God. Behind its mystical language lies a materialist truth: mind arises from nature, and nature means body, flesh and sexual difference. Theology is disguised psychology. Böhme himself is treated sympathetically as a religious mind overwhelmed by nature. A personal God is an abstraction from nature; to smuggle nature back into him is incoherent, and creation from nothing simply says that nature counts for nothing.

11. X The Mystery of Providence, and Creation out of Nothing 27 min 13

    Creation out of nothing is the highest expression of subjectivity: a world made by bare will has no reality of its own and can be willed away. Providence is the same principle. It works through miracle, suspends natural law for man’s sake, and so expresses man’s faith in his own infinite worth; God’s love for me is my self-love deified. Feuerbach dismisses the speculative quarrel over God’s personality. A personal Creator is human personality freed from nature, and theologians should exchange their “perverted anthropology” for a real one.

12. XI The Significance of the Creation in Judaism 20 min 15

    Feuerbach derives the doctrine of creation from a “practical” standpoint that treats nature only as an object of will and use, which he calls egoism and attributes to ancient Judaism. He contrasts it with the Greeks’ “theoretic” delight in the cosmos, the root of art and science, and calls Jehovah the personified self-assertion of Israel. He states his genetic method: man first unconsciously creates God in his image. The chapter repeats idealist stereotypes of Judaism and supplied Marx’s On the Jewish Question with its terms.

13. XII The Omnipotence of Feeling, or the Mystery of Prayer 16 min 10

    Christianity is Judaism freed from national limits: what Israel did for the nation, the Christian does for human feeling. God is love, the heart’s wish raised to certainty, “the optative of the human heart” made indicative, a sigh that finds a hearer. Prayer, religion’s simplest act, reveals its essence. In a dialogue with itself the heart assumes that its wishes are absolute and nature’s laws no barrier. Prayer expresses confident trust, as a child trusts its father, not dependence; omnipotence is the omnipotence of feeling.

14. XIII The Mystery of Faith—the Mystery of Miracle 23 min 13

    Faith is belief in the absolute reality of subjectivity, and miracle is its outward form, a wish fulfilled instantly, without means. Luther’s sayings (“as thou believest, so is He to thee”) show that God’s nature is the nature of faith. Miracle is a product of the imagination, a contradiction no philosophy can deduce, and agreeable because it satisfies wishes without labour. Feuerbach links the triumph of Christianity with the eclipse of classical, “objective” culture, and early Christians’ expectation of the world’s end with their indifference to nature.

15. XIV The Mystery of the Resurrection and of the Miraculous Conception 12 min 8

    The Resurrection and the Virgin Birth are “dogmatic miracles” that satisfy feeling. The resurrection of Christ turns the ancients’ open question of immortality into a sensible fact, a guarantee of personal survival. The Virgin Birth unites two incompatible objects of feeling, virginity and motherhood, which explains Catholicism’s holding both marriage and celibacy holy. Protestants kept the dogma but dropped its practical meaning and married, a split between faith and life that made Protestantism a source of freedom. The Immaculate Conception follows naturally.

16. XV The Mystery of the Christian Christ, or the Personal God 25 min 9

    Christianity’s dogmas are realised wishes of the heart. Feeling experiences its own activity as something done to it from outside, as dreaming does, and religion is the dream of waking consciousness. Christ fulfils the law and replaces it with a living example, freeing believers by a miracle of grace from the labour of becoming good. In Christ the hidden God becomes visible, touchable and able to suffer, and his blood proves his reality. Christ alone is the personal God, the union of feeling and imagination.

17. XVI The Distinction between Christianity and Heathenism 26 min 10

    The heathens limited themselves by nature and subordinated the individual to the species and the commonwealth; Christianity ignored the species and made the individual absolute. Yet all divine attributes are attributes of the human species, unlimited as a whole though limited in each person. God is the species imagined as one individual. Men complement one another in love, friendship and judgment, and the other person, the Thou, is conscience and the measure of truth. Hence a natural reconciliation, man is a god to man, needing no supernatural redeemer.

18. XVII The Christian Significance of Voluntary Celibacy and Monachism 22 min 19

    Having lost the idea of the species, Christianity finds everything in God and so needs neither culture nor sexual love. Belief in heaven devalues earthly life, and monasticism is its consistent practical expression, derived from Christianity itself and not from the East. St Anthony took the gospel literally. Marriage is at best a concession, excluded from heaven. Feuerbach scorns the modern Christianity that postpones renunciation, enjoys property and permits divorce while claiming to honour God’s word, and argues that man and woman together form the true human being.

19. XVIII The Christian Heaven, or Personal Immortality 40 min 15

    Personal immortality presupposes a sexless, self-sufficient individual cut off from the species; one who lives for humanity through his calling needs no other afterlife. Belief in immortality and belief in a personal God are identical: God is the implicit heaven, heaven the explicit God. Heaven is this life purified of what displeases us, a “critical florilegium” drawn from earthly goods. “Savage” afterlives continue the homeland, cultured ones judge and select. Part I closes: religion begins, continues and ends with Man.

20. XIX The Essential Standpoint of Religion 31 min 15

    Part II begins. Religion’s standpoint is practical and self-interested: it views the world only in relation to salvation, assigns involuntary good to grace and evil to the devil, and turns chance into divine election. Second causes and the mechanical view of nature push God back to a first moment, a compromise between belief and unbelief. For religion God is the immediate cause of everything, “the night of theory.” Prayer and miracle subject nature to human ends, and God stands in for the contemplation of the world that religion lacks.

21. XX The Contradiction in the Existence of God 19 min 7

    Religion becomes untrue when man treats his own nature as another being, and theology then makes this separation deliberate. The proofs of God’s existence, especially the ontological, try to show that the highest being exists outside us. But external existence means sensible existence, and God is never perceived: a contradiction that leads to atheism. Feuerbach sides with Kant against Hegel and argues that making morality depend on God’s existence denies the worth of virtue itself.

22. XXI The Contradiction in the Revelation of God 22 min 7

    Revelation is meant to turn God’s existence into an undoubted historical fact. But a “fact” in religion is a wish that may not be doubted; religion is a dream in which our ideas appear as beings outside us. God can reveal only what humans can grasp, so revelation’s contents are human, which proves again that theology is anthropology. Belief in a written revelation separates moral rules from conscience, breeds superstition when consistent and sophistry when it compromises, and sets understanding against itself.

23. XXII The Contradiction in the Nature of God in General 35 min 7

    The idea of God is the centre of Christian sophistry: God must be both human and superhuman, personal and universal. Originally God differs from man only in degree, an imaginative expansion of sensuous powers such as omniscience and omnipresence. Reflection hardens this into a difference in kind, the “incomprehensibility” of creation out of nothing, whose distinguishing “nothing” is literally nothing. Personality, kinship and resemblance (“image of God”) disguise the identity of divine and human nature.

24. XXIII The Contradiction in the Speculative Doctrine of God 15 min 7

    Feuerbach turns to Hegel’s speculative theology, which holds that man’s consciousness of God is God’s self-consciousness. He grants that this goes deeper than ordinary religion, which separates God’s being from our thinking of him. But if God becomes real, feeling and self-aware only in human feeling and consciousness, then human being is the real God. The mystical systems of Böhme and Schelling, which place the “not-God” inside a premundane God, only hide the same truth. The way out is to recognise anthropology itself as theology.

25. XXIV The Contradiction in the Trinity 10 min 8

    The Trinity, Feuerbach argues, turns the main distinctions within human nature into three divine persons. The dogma contradicts itself. If the Persons are real, as Olympian gods were, the result is polytheism. If they are merely relations, as monotheism requires, they are phantoms. The Father is a person only as father of the Son, and the Holy Spirit only expresses their relation. Imagination supplies the persons and reason the unity, so the believer must think the opposite of what he imagines.

26. XXV The Contradiction in the Sacraments 26 min 21

    Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, the sacraments of faith and love, show the contradiction of religion in visible form. Both require natural materials (water, bread, wine) yet credit them with supernatural effects. Feuerbach examines miracle and grace, the scholastic distinction of substance and accidents, Catholic and Protestant doctrines of the real presence, and Zwingli’s symbolic view. Since the sacrament works only through the believer’s faith, its reality lies in feeling and imagination. Treating it as objectively holy breeds superstition and immorality.

27. XXVI The Contradiction of Faith and Love 59 min 39

    This is the book’s central attack. Love expresses religion’s hidden essence, the unity of God and man and so of people with one another. Faith expresses its conscious form, which separates God from man and believers from unbelievers. Faith is exclusive, dogmatic and partisan. It contains “a malignant principle” that leads to damnation, hell and persecution. Christianity both sanctions and contradicts such deeds, because it subordinates love to faith. True love rests on the unity of the human species, which Christ only symbolised.

28. XXVII Concluding Application 20 min 11

    The conclusion draws the practical lesson: humanity must rise above religion and openly confess that the consciousness of God is the consciousness of the species. Religion is the first, childlike form of self-consciousness. Moral relations such as friendship, marriage and property are sacred in themselves, and grounding morality in theology can justify anything. The book ends by reinterpreting the sacraments naturally. Water stands for our debt to nature, and bread and wine for nature transformed by human hands. Eating and drinking become religious acts.

29. Appendix Explanations, Remarks, Illustrative Citations (§§ 1–12) 1 h 55 min 12

    The first half of the Appendix gives explanations and supporting citations for twelve theses. It covers man’s highest being as his species; feeling as the object and refuge of religion; reason as universal and the heart as personal; Christian indifference to nature and science; the Incarnation as religious self-love; Christianity as a religion of suffering; the Trinity as social life, the “I and thou”; creation from nothing; the egoism Feuerbach ascribes to Israel’s creation faith; providence as man’s distinction from the brutes; prayer’s power over nature; and faith’s need for miracle.

30. Appendix Explanations, Remarks, Illustrative Citations (§§ 13–22) 2 h 26 min 20

    The second half documents §§ 13–22: the bodily resurrection, Christian otherworldliness, celibacy and monasticism, original sin and sexuality, the sensuous heaven, and contradictions in the sacraments. It then turns to faith against love: arbitrary grace, the persecution of heretics (Servetus), and the limits of loving enemies. Further sections cover separation from unbelievers, Protestant versus Catholic morality, sacrifice, and the God-man as both union and division. It ends with Protestantism as the recognition that theology is anthropology.