43 pages • 1 hour read
Ludwig FeuerbachThe Essence of Christianity
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1841A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapters 19-22Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The False or Theological Essence of Religion”
Part 2, Chapter 19 Summary: “The Essential Standpoint of Religion”
The primary purpose of religion is to provide salvation. More than any other religion, Christianity focuses on this essential aspect. In so doing, it also emphasizes the importance of suffering and sacrifice, through which individuals realize their need for salvation. Salvation attained through grace springs from what is good about nature; when nature becomes a conscious player and interjects itself between the individual and God, then religion begins to fade away.
The idea of nature is what draws human beings away from God and themselves: “One day there will be no Nature, no matter, no body, at least none such as to separate man from God: then there will be only God and the pious soul” (121). In heaven, the relation between God and the soul will be the only existing reality, which is what makes prayer an essential aspect of religion. This relational aspect of reality makes miracles essential as well, as they open up the individual to the subjective nature of existence:
Every true prayer is a miracle, an act of the wonder-working power. External miracles themselves only make visible internal miracles, that is, they are only a manifestation in time and space, and therefore as a special fact, of what in and by itself is a fundamental position of religion (123).
Religion illuminates the fact that even nature must be subject to the subjectivity found in humans, God, and religion (characterized by prayer and miracle). Faith in God is faith in the ultimate satisfaction of human longing and desire, and the belief that happiness is possible.
Part 2, Chapter 20 Summary: “The Contradiction in the Existence of God”
Religion at its core is simple: It is “the relation of man to his own nature” (125). As religion grows and matures, it always moves away from its core and evolves into something else. When contemplating arguments that claim to prove the existence of God, one recognizes a perversion and contradiction in religion. Proving the existence of God causes God to become an external object, while religion is meant to demonstrate the interior and subjective notion of the idea of God, which, in the end, is really the perfection of human nature. Arguments for the existence of God separate God from the individual, when in reality it should be the opposite.
In other words, proving God exists destroys God’s true nature, which in turn leads to atheism, because when someone goes looking for God, they end up unable to find him: “When [their expectations] are not fulfilled—when, on the contrary, [they find] experience in contradiction with these conceptions, [they are] perfectly justified in denying that existence” (127). Ironically, the proofs for God end up supporting the logical conclusion that God does not exist.
Part 2, Chapter 21 Summary: “The Contradiction in the Revelation of God”
Related to the existence of God is the question of divine revelation, in which God communicates with the individual. A God who does not reveal himself is subjective, but Christianity also claims that God is objectively real. This claim requires revelation: “A God who gives me a knowledge of himself through his own act is alone a God who truly exists, who proves himself to exist” (129). Revelation lies at the heart of the religious experience because it forces the individual to take on a passive role. If God is activity, then the human must be receptive to that activity; human beings are determined by God alone, not themselves.
Moral rules, for example, are not created; they are simply revealed by God and observed by humans. The problem is that the Bible, the record of revelation, is contradictory to reason:
The Bible contradicts morality, contradicts reason, contradicts itself, innumerable times […] How does the believer in revelation elude this contradiction between the idea in his own mind of revelation as divine, harmonious truth, and this supposed actual revelation? (133).
The answer is intellectual dishonesty, for “only by the silliest subterfuges, only by the most miserable, transparent sophisms” could one argue that the Bible contains universally normative moral prescriptions (133).
Part 2, Chapter 22 Summary: “The Contradiction in the Nature of God in General”
The question on the nature of God leads to a contradiction in the very question of who, or what, God is. For God must at once consist of contraries and logical contradictions, God must be spiritual and yet perceptible, he must be distinct and yet intimate, he must be transcendent and yet immanent. The problem of God is the problem of religion:
The essence of religion is the immediate, involuntary, unconscious contemplation of the human nature as another, a distinct nature. But when this projected image of human nature is made an object of reflection, of theology, it becomes an inexhaustible mine of falsehoods, illusions, contradictions, and sophisms (134).
The concepts of religion and God are contradictory because they are things that are felt to be true, not thought to be true.
One must also contend with the idea of Christian grace and spiritual participation. When human beings come to recognize themselves related to God by grace, they come to recognize themselves, and only themselves: “The man adopted by divine grace is only the man conscious of his divine nature and dignity. Moreover, the only-begotten Son himself is nothing else than the idea of humanity, than man preoccupied with himself” (140). Understanding God’s nature means understanding human nature; when the relationship between humanity and God is as close as it can be, then the idea of God fades into the idea of humanity; the difference between them disappears.
Part 2, Chapters 19-22 Analysis
Part 2 of The Essence of Christianity begins to deal more explicitly with the Tensions or Contradictions Within Christian Doctrine. To begin this critique, Feuerbach returns to a critique of religion in general, positing that the problem with religion and tracing all things back to a divine cause is that it obfuscates the manner in which human activity and the natural world interact.
In the language of philosophy, there are primary causes and secondary causes. Religion, according to Feuerbach, insists on God’s primary causality and nothing else. All things need to be traced back to God, and the more pious one is, the more one associates things with their divine source. Natural reason, however, recognizes that there are secondary causes as well. For instance, God may wish a farmer’s crops to grow, but in order to accomplish this, rain must fall and the sun must shine. Feuerbach’s critique is that religion insists on ignoring the natural, secondary causes at work in the world in favor of the primary cause alone.
This traces back to the criticism that Feuerbach offers in earlier chapters about Christianity cutting human beings off from the natural world. The benefit of this worldview is that if one can ultimately see that God is just a stand-in for human beings themselves, then one can see Human Nature as the primary cause of all things. The danger of this worldview is that religion clouds the true nature of human perfection and simultaneously insists on rejecting secondary causes. Ultimate clarity will come once humans see their own perfection for what it really is, and embrace the natural world in a way that balances the unique capacity of human consciousness and the symbiotic relationship that human beings have with the world.
Moving away from the critique of religion in general to a sustained investigation of Tensions or Contradictions Within Christian Doctrine, Feuerbach zeroes in on Christianity’s paradoxical teachings on the nature of God. God’s contradictory nature is not a problem unknown to the Christian theological tradition; indeed, almost every major Christian thinker in history has engaged with the primary problem of God’s existence and nature—how God can be both transcendent and immanent at the same time. “Transcendent” means that God is above and beyond all things, separate from the world, and a wholly other kind of being. A truly transcendent God is not a being in the world, but is the source of all being. “Immanent means” that God is near to all things, by them and within them, capable of being experienced.
The tension between these two assertions is that transcendence and immanence appear to be mutually exclusive; it would seem that God cannot be both transcendent and immanent at the same time. Feuerbach’s resolution to this classical theological problem is to posit that God’s contradictory nature can be resolved by understanding that God is simply the imagination’s projection of all that is intrinsic to humanity onto an objective being. In other words, God’s transcendence is an illusion, and all that seems to be separate and beyond human nature is in fact derived from humanity’s perfection. Thus, there is no contradiction between the transcendent and the immanent; everything is immanent, contained with humans.
