Frei Feuerbach and Theology

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American Academy of Religion

Feuerbach and TheologyAuthor(s): Hans W. FreiReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Sep., 1967), pp. 250-256

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FeuerbachandTheology

HANS W. FREI

J N HIS incisive ritique f JohnA. T. Robinson's onesto God,AlasdairMacIntyredrawsattention o two kindsof atheism hatwaxedvigorousin the nineteenthcentury.'The one says that theisticlanguages mean-

ingless,the otherthat it is disguised alkaboutmanhimself.

I

The firstform of atheisms aninheritanceromthe skepticism f Hume,

thoughone rathersuspects hatit is the commondistillateof the thoughtofboth rationalistsand empiricistswho were skepticalin mattersreligious.But undoubtedlyHume gave it classicalexpression,perhapsnowheremore

succinctlythan in the eleventhessay of the Enquiry Concerning uman

Understanding,herehe suggests hefoolishness f tryingto establish heistic

religionon

principlesof reason.

Specifically,the

groundingof

particulareventsin particular rovidence andlet us rememberhat no doctrinewasheldin higheresteemby the commonheritageof traditionalheism,to whichmenas diverseasCalvinandLeibnizhadgivenexpressionn theearlymodern

period is a purely speculativenotion that really explains nothing.As

Humesays, "We can never be allow'dto mountup fromthe universe, he

Effect, to Jupiter,the Cause; and then descenddownwards, o infer anynew Effect fromthatCause.... The knowledgeof the Causebeingderiv'd

solely fromthe Effect,theymust be exactlyadjustedo eachother,andthe

one canneverpointtowardsany thingfarther,or be the Foundation f anynew InferenceandConclusion."2 he thrust of this comment s muchthesame as Laplace's amousremark o Napoleonthat he hadno need of thetheistichypothesis. n a universemadeup solely of specific temsandmove-

ments, hehypothesisof a divinecause orparticularventsexplainsnothing.Indeed,the hypothesis s meaningless,and were we to use the metaphor"Godis dead" n connectionwith this pointof view, we would haveto saythat he is deadonly in the sense that he never lived in the firstplace.

HANS W. FREI is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University.His essay was originallypresented n slightly different form at the Annual Meeting ofthe AmericanAcademyof Religionat VanderbiltUniversity in December, 1965.

1Alasdair MacIntyre, "God and the Theologians," Encounter,XXI (September,1963), 3. The essay is excerpted(ratherpoorly) in David L. Edwards,ed., The HonestToGodDebate,Philadelphia:The WestminsterPress, 1963, pp. 215-28.

2 DavidHume,An EnquiryConcerningumanUnderstanding,ew York:WashingtonSquarePress, 1963,p. 134.

250








FEUERBACH AND THEOLOGY 251

Thinkers in the second atheistic traditionwere not at ease with this kindof reasoning. There are many differences between the two traditions, butone or two stand out quite

clearly.

In the first

place,

Kant intervened in thetime span between them. According to him, the mind imprintsits own formsand categories on the sensory material it meets. We cannot grasp the raw

perceptualimmediacy in our apprehensionof nature. This represents a sharpbreak with the empiricist theory of knowledge that supportedthe first sortof atheism. Secondly, there was Hegel with his dialectic, especially - forlater atheism-the dialectic of history. What human beings learn in the

process of cultural accumulation becomes part of them. Man not only hasa history; as a species he is his history in the unfolding of its mutually anti-

pathetic and then synthetic stages. Man's changing metaphysics is but oneideological mirroringof the historicalprocess, in which man becomes himself.There are many other background differences between the two types ofatheism. But if we put them all together I suspect we still get the same view,to which these two items point: The second form of atheism has somethingin common with the tradition of Western theism which the first does not.Thinkers in the secondtradition do indeedagreewith the theme of materialismthat man is in principle nothing more than a collocation of atoms, like therest of the material

world;or else

theyremain

piously agnosticon the

subject.Still, they agree with traditional Christian theists that the perspective hatman has on the world, and especially on himself, is quite unique. Here KantandHegel made all the difference. No thinker in the second atheistic traditionholds to the theory of knowledge which claims that the mind is passive insense experience. Marx is the most obvious example of this Kantian and

Hegelian break with empiricist epistemology.We may characterize the second kind of atheism somewhat as follows:

For one thing, it represents an insideview of humanexperience, cultural and

natural. Our human experience is indeed unique- not because we are dif-ferent, say, from the other animals except in mechanical complexity, butrather because ours is the only experience or existence of which we have aninside view. Secondly, in this inside view of experience, the specificallyunique quality of the humanbeing is his ability to differentiate himself, notinto body and soul (a traditional error) but into the totality of himself as

objectof knowledge and action (even his own) and that same totality as

subject knowing, acting, feeling. He exists in this duality-in-unity. In

nineteenth-centuryphilosophyandpsychology, the usual (though pre-Marxist)term of description for this form of existing was "self-consciousness." But,

thirdly, self-consciousness is never simply given as a finished datum forexternal examination. It is instead a process,which is at once psychologicaland, on the level of the species, cultural. No one stands outside the process,and this must apply to the philosopher in the very practice of his craft. So

self-consciousnessis an individual,but even more a generic, epic or Odyssean,voyage. On that journeyI (the subject) come to myself (or mankindto itself),to the place from which I (or the race) started out primitively or unself-








252 HANS W. FREI

consciously, but only after going out from myself in an agonizing but also

enriching circumnavigationof the whole globe of self-conscious experience.This is a vast and, until the climactic homecoming, mysteriously searchingform of the process of self-differentiation or self-alienation into subject and

object. The process is also a search for "reconciliation," i. e., for the tran-

scendence of this subject-object split or self-alienation in individual self-

consciousness as well as in society.

II

For Feuerbach the epitome of this split is my projection of my subjectivity

into a supposedly differentiated object over against me, which I call Godbut which is merely the shadow of my alienated self or of the whole race.

Indeed, God is not only the epitome but also the turning point for the Odysseyof self-consciousness. The process of coming to true self-consciousness, then,is my own discovery and the race's discovery of the secret identity of God

and man.

Whether or not this form of atheism can be wholly independentof the

first kind is a question of its own. It is an important and unsolved issue in

Feuerbach's

thought.

One can find in Feuerbach'swritings during

theperiodof his greatest influence, from the middle of the 1830's to the middle of the

1840's, rudimentary statements of theories of knowledge pointing toward

both critiques of religion. Sometimes these statements lie virtually side-

by-side, yet without connectingarguments.3 n any case, Feuerbach'sclassical

way of expressing the second form of atheism is shaped with the help of

Hegel rather than that of Hume. What comes to Feuerbach's help, evenmore than Hegelian dialectic, is Hegel's logic, for which all statements abouta subjectmust also be statements about its predicate (andvice versa): "Now

when it is shown that what the subject is lies entirely in the attributesof thesubject; that is, that the predicate is the true subject; it is also proved that ifthe divine predicates are attributes of the humannature, the subject of those

predicates is also of the humannature."4We recollect that this discovery ofthe human subject or true self-consciousness as the secret of the falselyobjectifieddivine attributes is for Feuerbach the discovery of the self as morethan thinker. The humanbeing so discovered is the material, sensualperson.Man is the unity of thinking, sensuous being, and social agency. Feuerbachcriticizes

Hegelfor the abstractness of the

latter's idea of self-consciousness,just as he himself was to be accused in turn, by Max Stirner, Moses Hess,Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels, of holding an abstract ideology of man.All of these men searched for the concrete humanbeing beyond the abstrac-

8 See, for instance, "Grundsitze der Philosophieder Zukunft,"in L. Feuerbach,Kleinephilosophischechriften,Leipzig: Verlag Felix Meiner, 1950, pp. 92-3.

*L. Feuerbach,The Essenceof Christianity,rans. George Eliot, New York: HarperTorchbooks,1957,p. 25.








FEUERBACH AND THEOLOGY 253

tions of ideology - the concrete man whom to know and to change are not

two different things but one. Feuerbach writes, "A new principle alwayscomes forward with a new name.... If one translates the name of the new

philosophy, the name of man with self-consciousness, then one interprets the

new philosophy in the rubrics of the old and puts it back to the older pointof view; for the self-consciousness of the old philosophy as separated from

the human being is an abstraction without reality [an accusation against

Hegel who in this respect representsfor Feuerbachat once the epitome of the

old and the turningpoint to the new philosophy]. Man is self-consciousness."''The problem of God, then, is that of demythologizing him, so that in-

stead of being confronted with an alienated form of his own subjectivity,

the human subject may own himself in his true, concrete, sensuous, self-consciousness. "The Divine Being is the subjective human being in his

absolute freedom and unlimitedness."6The death of God, to return to that

metaphor once more, is in this view a genuine psychological and cultural

process, a climactic part of the dialectic of history and of self-realization.

It is the precondition of man's being born into true existence. This rejectionof theism is ardently humanistic, affirmative, and reformist in temper, and

for that reason is worlds away from the temper of empiricist skepticism.But, once

again,to what extent it

may actually presupposethe

empiricistcritique of theistic religion is another question. In any case, for the second

view, in all its ardent affirmativeness, true theism and atheism are one in

their positive religious stance. Concerning the pejorative use of the term

atheist, Feuerbach says, "Not the attribute of the divinity, but the ... deityof the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. . . . he alone is the true atheistto whom the predicates of the Divine Being, - for example, love, wisdom,

justice,- arenothing;not he to whom merely the subjectof these predicates s

nothing."' We have here the basis for an ardent,buoyant, atheistic humanism.

The first sort of atheism, Hume's heritage, remains an external threatto the theologian; the second becomes an internal one. The first tells him

merely that his claims are either meaningless or, if significant, false. Thesecond tells him two other things. First, it says to him that the words whichform the intellectual scheme of his religion - in other words, his dogmas -

are words of bad faith. Their real meaninglies only in the religion from which

they are in fact separated on the one hand, because religion is an affairof the heart and not of the head (as theology or dogma is), and, on the other

hand,because

religionhas for the most

part long since vanished. However,secondly, as for the religion itself, it is a trueaffairof the heart; its significanceis real but esoteric, because it is bound to the imagination of a by-gone day.Its secret must be broughtout into the open, demythologized, and translated.

6 "Vorliiufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie," n Kleine philosophischeSchriften,op. cit., p. 76.

6 The Essenceof Christianity, op. cit., p. 184.

SIbid., p. 21.








254 HANS W. FREI

In that way it will be rewon for our own time, though of course in a whollydifferent form. Having been attached too long to an outworn form of the

imagination, it will now be relocated by becoming attached to the concrete

imagination of our own day - the truly final imagination. This is man'sconcrete representationof his full self, his self-consciousness. In Feuerbach's

words,8 "The Christian religion has linked the name of man with that of

God in the one name of the God-man- it has elevated man's name to an

attribute of the highest being. The new philosophy has, in accordance with

truth, made the attribute into the substance, the predicate into the subject.The new philosophy is the realized idea, the truth of Christianity. But justbecause it contains within itself the essenceof Christianity it gives up the

nameof Christianity. Christianity has expressed the truth only in contradic-tion to truth itself. The non-self-contradictory,pure genuine truth is a new

truth- a new autonomous deed of humanity."8 So the seemingly endless

search for fitting the true but esoteric religious content to the proper com-municative form in harmony with modern imagination will be concluded

when the budding, future philosophy of man is fully established. The truth

of the claim that God became man will be understood when its meaning is

seen to be that mankind (the race, not the individual) is God.

The two critics who threatened the edifice ofsystematic theology

most

trenchantly after the death of Hegel and Schleiermacherwere FeuerbachandD. F. Strauss. Both have been called left-wing Hegelians, which is equivalentto making them members of the second group of atheists. As a matter of

fact, neither belongs there purely. It is sometimes argued that, the form ofFeuerbach's critique of religion apart, its substances empiricist and so con-tains little that is new. That this is indeed true of Feuerbach in his later

writings, andtrue in a very crudely materialisticway, is undoubted.Whetherit is also true of him during the period of his most influentialwriting is an-

other question. If, as we have said, both critiques may have been presentin his thinking without clear relation to each other, it may be asked, whichis more clearly the focus of his attack against religious theory? Is it reallythe case that in this latter connection - one that was after all crucial to

Feuerbach, to whom, as to most philosophers in the Hegelian tradition,

ideology made the difference between truth and falsity about man- he was

actually an empiricist with a left-wing Hegelian overlay? It seems more

likely that even when, in the mid-1840's, Feuerbachhad finally forsaken theremnants of

Hegelianabstraction

concerning any supposed reality of thehuman species over and above the individual, and before he finally turned to

straightforwardmaterialism, he still focused on the secret identity of Godand man as the heart of his positive proclamation. In other words, what istaken to be, in the empiricist interpretation,the cultural or imaginativeform,rather than the underlying substance, of Feuerbach's position, is probably

8 "VorliufigeThesen ...," op.cit., p. 78.








FEUERBACHAND THEOLOGY 255

his distinctive contribution. Feuerbach's basic position is that of a uniquelyatheistic theology andhence, unlike the skepticism of Hume, a stinging internal

critique,evaluation,and restatementof the "real"

meaning

of Christiantheism.

III

The contrast with the other,determinedleft-wing Hegelian anti-theologian,D. F. Strauss, is instructive. Far more clearly than Feuerbach, Strauss is

really an agnostic or atheist of the first type. Unlike Feuerbach,he does not

separate the dogma from the religion of Christianity, except in a rather

peripheral way at the end of his first Life of Jesus, where he tries to dis-

tinguish between historical truth-claims on the one hand and the intrinsictruth claims of dogma, religion, and philosophy on the other hand. But even

here the lines are obviously different from those Feuerbach had drawn.

In fact, quite specifically against Feuerbach, Strauss is at pains to deny the

disjunction between dogma and religion in Christianity.9 Strauss fixes the

theologian in the way that empiricists and rationalists have always fixed

him and says, in effect: "You cannot get away from the claim to actual,

supernaturalmiracle, especially that of the Incarnation. That is the heart

ofyour religion

andyour dogma.

Now standstilllong enough

tosay

howyou

plan to defend that sort of claim in the modern world of science and his-

torical criticism."

While this may be a most unimaginativeand flat-footed way of attackingChristian religion and theology, surely there is a great deal to be said in

favor of it --as against the subtleties and profundities of someone who

constantly tells the theologian that the latter does not really mean what he

says and that the critic will have to tell him what he actually means. For

where does one ever reach bottom in the game of ideological analysis and

the resultant criticism of religion, since everyone can do his own analysisof what "self-consciousness," "existence," "imagination," or "modern cul-

tural consciousness" really is? In short, if during the 1830's and 1840'sFeuerbach was really at heart the great exponent of the second kind of

atheism,that of the God-has-died-in-the-dialectic-of-culture-and-of-the-human-

consciousness variety, one has good reason to rejoice that over against himthere also were such skeptics as Hume andStrausscriticizing Christiantheism.

This, of course, is not meant to detract from Feuerbach's significance.

But it does indicate its limitations. Paradoxically, it seems that he was reallyoverly preoccupied with the problem of religion, and was too much an"insider" to the theological enterprise. Religion was the great problemto be

solved, if man were to conquer his false ideologies and so become trulyhimself and a free being. To the extent that they shared this exclusive and

persistent preoccupation with religion and theology, Feuerbach and Strauss

9D. F. Strauss, Die ChristlicheGlaubenskhre,, Tiibingen: C. F. Osiander, 1849,pp. 19 ff.








256 HANS W. FREI

were spiritualkinsmen.It is undoubtedly relatedfact that both finallyforsookthe way of dialectic(Strauss,as we just saw, had neverreallybeen

profoundlyommitted o it) andhencealso,in their lateryears,theHegelianor second sort of atheism.They becameskepticsof the first type. Thisseemedto be the only way they could shakeoff the theologicalhabit.

It is fascinatinghatof theoriginal ndmostprominenteft-wingHegelians,only Marx remainedloyal to the greatmasterand continued s a dialecticalthinker.This fact is perhapsrelated to the crucialdiscoverywhich Marx

made,thatreligion s not the basicproblemof man but only its ideologicalsymptom,andsimilarly, herefore,hatdialecticalthinkings basicallyneither

theology nor (except at the symptomatic evel) anti-theology.This dis-

covery, in turn,is probablyone of the reasonswhy Christiantheologians,whenreasoningn the dialecticalmode,havefound hat n thelongruncriticalconversationwith Marxism s morefascinatinghanconcernwith Feuerbach,

importanthoughhe is to a limitedextent.10f one is goingto basehiscritiqueof Christianityon a critiqueof ideology,andon a comprehensiveialecticof manin cultureas the materialsubjectof thoughtandchange,then it iswell to start with a doctrineof man that is more thansimply religiousor

anti-religious.n this respectFeuerbach, ven before he becamean outrightand non-dialecticalmaterialist,was at best

ambiguousand uncertainof

himself.Marxhadmuchsurerfooting,even if he himselfwas bound o sufferthe countercharge,nevitablewithin the traditionof dialecticalreasoning,that he was himself"ideologizing" umanexistence.Marx understood armoreclearlythanFeuerbachhat man (including is thinking)exists bothasthe moving,dialectical elationof individual ndsocietyand as the conjunc-tion of culturewith materialnature.He offered o Christiantheologianshe

greaterchallengeandperhapsalso the more powerful albeitin part an-

tagonistic kinship.

When the Christiantheologianwishes to be instructivelychastened,both the traditionof Hume on one side andin one way, andthat of Marxon the other side andin a wholly different,way will obligehim. Comparedto both, critiquessuch as the "God-is-dead"theology of Feuerbach eemlimited n scopeandin penetrating ower.

10 The most recent and perhaps most significant Christian-Marxist discussion is takingplace in connection with the major work of the Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch, Das

Prinzip Hoffnung, Werke, V, parts 1 and 2, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1959-65,and the corresponding theological locus of eschatology.

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