The Essence of Christianity
기독교의 본질
Ludwig Feuerbach's critique of religion, published by Otto Wigand in Leipzig in 1841. It argues that God is man's own essence placed outside himself and worshipped as an alien being, so that "consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man" and "the secret of theology is anthropology". The book turned the Young Hegelians, who had been circling inside Hegel's system, towards materialism at a stroke; Engels recalled that on its appearance "the enthusiasm was general". Marx carried its inversion of God and man over into the critique of the state and of labour, and criticised its limits in the 1845 Theses on Feuerbach.
In depth
Why did one book make such an impact?
At the end of the 1830s the Hegelian school was splitting. As Engels recalled, politics was dangerous ground in Germany at the time, so the main battle was fought over religion: David Friedrich Strauss's Life of Jesus gave the first impulse in 1835, and Bruno Bauer countered that a good part of the gospel stories had been invented by their authors. In this struggle the most resolute Young Hegelians were pushed back towards English and French materialism by the practical needs of their fight against established religion. Yet in Hegel's system nature was only the "alienation" of the absolute idea, so they were caught in a contradiction between materialism and the system of their own school.
Engels described what happened next: "Then came Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. With one blow it pulverised the contradiction, in that without circumlocution it placed materialism on the throne again." Nature exists independently of all philosophy, human beings are themselves products of nature, and the higher beings our religious fantasy created are "only the fantastic reflection of our own essence". "One must have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it. The enthusiasm was general."
Da kam Feuerbachs „Wesen des Christenthums“. Mit einem Schlag zerstäubte es den Widerspruch, indem es den Materialismus ohne Umschweife wieder auf den Thron erhob. … Die Begeisterung war allgemein.
How does God become man's essence?
Feuerbach's starting point is simple: what people worship as God tells you what kind of beings they are. "Consciousness of God is the self-consciousness of man, knowledge of God the self-knowledge of man. From his God you know the man, and from the man his God; the two are one."
Das Bewußtsein Gottes ist das Selbstbewußtsein des Menschen, die Erkenntnis Gottes die Selbsterkenntnis des Menschen.
The believer, of course, does not know that the God he worships is his own essence. Feuerbach holds that this very lack of awareness is the peculiar character of religion, and calls religion man's "first and indeed indirect self-consciousness". "Man first places his essence outside himself before he finds it in himself." As a child looks at itself as if at another, humankind first meets its own essence as another being. That is why religion comes before philosophy, and philosophy gives back to man what religion placed outside him.
The key to the argument is the relation of subject and predicate. People readily admit that the predicates of God, love, wisdom, goodness, are borrowed from human qualities, while believing that God himself, the subject that bears these predicates, exists apart. Feuerbach argues the reverse: the predicate is the true subject, and if the predicates are human qualities, the subject too is human. "You believe in love as a divine attribute because you yourself love." This method of making the predicate in religion the subject and the subject the predicate was taken over wholesale a few years later when Marx took apart Hegel's theory of the state.
How is the book built and what does it conclude?
The book consists of two introductory chapters (on the essence of man and on the essence of religion in general) and two parts. Part One, "The True or Anthropological Essence of Religion", resolves doctrines one by one into human nature and human needs: God as a being of the understanding and as a moral being, the incarnation, the suffering God, the Trinity, prayer and miracle, resurrection and immortality. Part Two, "The False or Theological Essence of Religion", deals with the contradictions that arise when God is set up as a being separate from man: in God's existence, in revelation and in the sacraments, and the contradiction of faith and love.
In the preface to the second edition of 1843 Feuerbach explained that his book was negative, but "only against the inhuman, not against the human essence of religion". The first part is the affirmative one, resolving religion into its truth, where he set out to show that "the true sense of theology is anthropology". The final chapter, "Concluding Application", turns this result into practice: "the secret of theology is anthropology, the secret of the divine essence the human essence." The highest law must then be not the love of God but the love of man for man. "Homo homini Deus est, man is a god to man: this is the supreme practical principle, this is the turning point of world history."
Homo homini Deus est – dies ist der oberste praktische Grundsatz –, dies der Wendepunkt der Weltgeschichte.
The book went through several editions in Feuerbach's lifetime, beginning with the second of 1843, and in 1854 the novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) translated it into English.
How did Marx and Engels take it up and go beyond it?
In the preface to his 1844 manuscripts Marx called Feuerbach's writings "the only writings since Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic that contain a real theoretical revolution". The Introduction to the critique of Hegel's philosophy of right, published the same year, opens with the sentence "For Germany the criticism of religion is essentially completed", and the completed criticism is Feuerbach's. Having accepted Feuerbach's result that "man makes religion, religion does not make man", Marx goes a step further: why do people need such an illusion? Because the world of state and society is itself inverted. Hence "the criticism of heaven turns into the criticism of earth, the criticism of religion into the criticism of law, the criticism of theology into the criticism of politics."
The theory of alienated labour in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts carries the same pattern over to labour: "It is the same in religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself." The concept of man as a species-being (Gattungswesen) also comes from Feuerbach. But in 1844 Max Stirner attacked Feuerbach's "man" in The Ego and Its Own as just another abstraction standing in for God, and in spring 1845 Marx drew the decisive line in the Theses on Feuerbach: "Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of social relations."
Feuerbach löst das religiöse Wesen in das menschliche Wesen auf. Aber das menschliche Wesen ist kein dem einzelnen Individuum inwohnendes Abstraktum. In seiner Wirklichkeit ist es das ensemble der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnisse.
(This is Marx's 1845 notebook text; the version Engels edited in 1888 differs slightly in wording.) Looking back in 1886, Engels wrote that how enthusiastically Marx greeted Feuerbach's new conception, and how much he was influenced by it despite his critical reservations, can be read in The Holy Family. In Engels's judgement Feuerbach broke Hegel's system but did not critically overcome Hegel's philosophy; that task fell to Marx and Engels.