Feuerbach and Theology

American Academy of Religion

Feuerbach and TheologyAuthor(s): Hans W. FreiSource: Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Vol. 35, No. 3 (Sep., 1967), pp. 250-256Published by: Oxford University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1461632 .

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Feuerbach and Theology HANS W. FREI

JN HIS incisive critique of John A. T. Robinson's Honest to God, Alasdair MacIntyre draws attention to two kinds of atheism that waxed vigorous in the nineteenth century.' The one says that theistic language is mean-

ingless, the other that it is disguised talk about man himself.

I

The first form of atheism is an inheritance from the skepticism of Hume, though one rather suspects that it is the common distillate of the thought of both rationalists and empiricists who were skeptical in matters religious. But undoubtedly Hume gave it classical expression, perhaps nowhere more succinctly than in the eleventh essay of the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, where he suggests the foolishness of trying to establish theistic religion on principles of reason. Specifically, the grounding of particular events in particular providence - and let us remember that no doctrine was held in higher esteem by the common heritage of traditional theism, to which men as diverse as Calvin and Leibniz had given expression in the early modern period - is a purely speculative notion that really explains nothing. As Hume says, "We can never be allow'd to mount up from the universe, the Effect, to Jupiter, the Cause; and then descend downwards, to infer any new Effect from that Cause.... The knowledge of the Cause being deriv'd solely from the Effect, they must be exactly adjusted to each other, and the one can never point towards any thing farther, or be the Foundation of any new Inference and Conclusion."2 The thrust of this comment is much the same as Laplace's famous remark to Napoleon that he had no need of the theistic hypothesis. In a universe made up solely of specific items and move- ments, the hypothesis of a divine cause for particular events explains nothing. Indeed, the hypothesis is meaningless, and were we to use the metaphor "God is dead" in connection with this point of view, we would have to say that he is dead only in the sense that he never lived in the first place.

HANS W. FREI is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. His essay was originally presented in slightly different form at the Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Religion at Vanderbilt University in December, 1965.

1 Alasdair MacIntyre, "God and the Theologians," Encounter, XXI (September, 1963), 3. The essay is excerpted (rather poorly) in David L. Edwards, ed., The Honest To God Debate, Philadelphia: The Westminster Press, 1963, pp. 215-28.

2 David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, New York: Washington Square Press, 1963, p. 134.

250



FEUERBACH AND THEOLOGY 251

Thinkers in the second atheistic tradition were not at ease with this kind of reasoning. There are many differences between the two traditions, but one or two stand out quite clearly. In the first place, Kant intervened in the time span between them. According to him, the mind imprints its own forms and categories on the sensory material it meets. We cannot grasp the raw perceptual immediacy in our apprehension of nature. This represents a sharp break with the empiricist theory of knowledge that supported the first sort of atheism. Secondly, there was Hegel with his dialectic, especially - for later atheism -the dialectic of history. What human beings learn in the process of cultural accumulation becomes part of them. Man not only has a 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 one ideological mirroring of the historical process, in which man becomes himself. There are many other background differences between the two types of atheism. 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 something in common with the tradition of Western theism which the first does not. Thinkers in the second tradition do indeed agree with the theme of materialism that man is in principle nothing more than a collocation of atoms, like the rest of the material world; or else they remain piously agnostic on the subject. Still, they agree with traditional Christian theists that the perspective that man has on the world, and especially on himself, is quite unique. Here Kant and Hegel made all the difference. No thinker in the second atheistic tradition holds to the theory of knowledge which claims that the mind is passive in sense 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 inside view of human experience, cultural and natural. Our human experience is indeed unique - not because we are different, say, from the other animals except in mechanical complexity, but rather because ours is the only experience or existence of which we have an inside view. Secondly, in this inside view of experience, the specifically unique quality of the human being is his ability to differentiate himself, not into body and soul (a traditional error) but into the totality of himself as object of knowledge and action (even his own) and that same totality as subject - knowing, acting, feeling. He exists in this duality-in-unity. In nineteenth-century philosophy and psychology, 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 for external examination. It is instead a process, which is at once psychological and, 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-consciousness is an individual, but even more a generic, epic or Odyssean, voyage. On that journey I (the subject) come to myself (or mankind to 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 circumnavigation of the whole globe of self-conscious experience. This is a vast and, until the climactic homecoming, mysteriously searching form 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 God but 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 Odyssey of 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 independent of 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's writings during the period of 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 connecting arguments.3 In any case, Feuerbach's classical 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, even more than Hegelian dialectic, is Hegel's logic, for which all statements about a subject must also be statements about its predicate (and vice versa): "Now when it is shown that what the subject is lies entirely in the attributes of the subject; that is, that the predicate is the true subject; it is also proved that if the divine predicates are attributes of the human nature, the subject of those predicates is also of the human nature."4 We recollect that this discovery of the human subject or true self-consciousness as the secret of the falsely objectified divine attributes is for Feuerbach the discovery of the self as more than thinker. The human being so discovered is the material, sensual person. Man is the unity of thinking, sensuous being, and social agency. Feuerbach criticizes Hegel for 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 human being beyond the abstrac-

8 See, for instance, "Grundsitze der Philosophie der Zukunft," in L. Feuerbach, Kleine philosophische Schriften, Leipzig: Verlag Felix Meiner, 1950, pp. 92-3.

* L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot, New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957, p. 25.




tions of ideology - the concrete man whom to know and to change are not two different things but one. Feuerbach writes, "A new principle always comes 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 point of 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 represents for Feuerbach at once the epitome of the old and the turning point to the new philosophy]. Man is self-consciousness."''

The problem of God, then, is that of demythologizing him, so that instead 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."6 The 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 rejection of 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 presuppose the empiricist critique 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 ... deity of the attribute, is the first true Divine Being. . . . he alone is the true atheist to whom the predicates of the Divine Being, - for example, love, wisdom, justice, - are nothing; not he to whom merely the subject of these predicates is nothing."' We have here the basis for an ardent, buoyant, atheistic humanism.

The first sort of atheism, Hume's heritage, remains an external threat to the theologian; the second becomes an internal one. The first tells him merely that his claims are either meaningless or, if significant, false. The second tells him two other things. First, it says to him that the words which form the intellectual scheme of his religion - in other words, his dogmas - are words of bad faith. Their real meaning lies only in the religion from which they are in fact separated - on the one hand, because religion is an affair of the heart and not of the head (as theology or dogma is), and, on the other hand, because religion has for the most part long since vanished. However, secondly, as for the religion itself, it is a true affair of the heart; its significance is real but esoteric, because it is bound to the imagination of a by-gone day. Its secret must be brought out into the open, demythologized, and translated.

6 "Vorliiufige Thesen zur Reform der Philosophie," in Kleine philosophische Schriften, op. cit., p. 76.

6 The Essence of 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 wholly different 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's concrete representation of 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 just because it contains within itself the essence of Christianity it gives up the name of 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 of systematic theology most trenchantly after the death of Hegel and Schleiermacher were Feuerbach and D. F. Strauss. Both have been called left-wing Hegelians, which is equivalent to 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 of Feuerbach's critique of religion apart, its substance is empiricist and so contains little that is new. That this is indeed true of Feuerbach in his later writings, and true in a very crudely materialistic way, is undoubted. Whether it is also true of him during the period of his most influential writing is another question. If, as we have said, both critiques may have been present in his thinking without clear relation to each other, it may be asked, which is more clearly the focus of his attack against religious theory? Is it really the 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, Feuerbach had finally forsaken the remnants of Hegelian abstraction concerning any supposed reality of the human species over and above the individual, and before he finally turned to straightforward materialism, he still focused on the secret identity of God and man as the heart of his positive proclamation. In other words, what is taken to be, in the empiricist interpretation, the cultural or imaginative form, rather than the underlying substance, of Feuerbach's position, is probably

8 "Vorliufige Thesen ...," op. cit., p. 78.




his distinctive contribution. Feuerbach's basic position is that of a uniquely atheistic theology and hence, unlike the skepticism of Hume, a stinging internal critique, evaluation, and restatement of the "real" meaning of Christian theism.

III

The contrast with the other, determined left-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 intrinsic truth 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, supernatural miracle, especially that of the Incarnation. That is the heart of your religion and your dogma. Now stand still long enough to say how you plan to defend that sort of claim in the modern world of science and historical criticism."

While this may be a most unimaginative and flat-footed way of attacking Christian 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 analysis of what "self-consciousness," "existence," "imagination," or "modern cultural consciousness" really is? In short, if during the 1830's and 1840's Feuerbach 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 him there also were such skeptics as Hume and Strauss criticizing Christian theism.

This, of course, is not meant to detract from Feuerbach's significance. But it does indicate its limitations. Paradoxically, it seems that he was really overly preoccupied with the problem of religion, and was too much an "insider" to the theological enterprise. Religion was the great problem to be solved, if man were to conquer his false ideologies and so become truly himself and a free being. To the extent that they shared this exclusive and persistent preoccupation with religion and theology, Feuerbach and Strauss

9 D. F. Strauss, Die Christliche Glaubenskhre, I, Tiibingen: C. F. Osiander, 1849, pp. 19 ff.



256 HANS W. FREI

were spiritual kinsmen. It is undoubtedly a related fact that both finally forsook the way of dialectic (Strauss, as we just saw, had never really been profoundly committed to it) and hence also, in their later years, the Hegelian or second sort of atheism. They became skeptics of the first type. This seemed to be the only way they could shake off the theological habit.

It is fascinating that of the original and most prominent left-wing Hegelians, only Marx remained loyal to the great master and continued as a dialectical thinker. This fact is perhaps related to the crucial discovery which Marx made, that religion is not the basic problem of man but only its ideological symptom, and similarly, therefore, that dialectical thinking is basically neither theology nor (except at the symptomatic level) anti-theology. This discovery, in turn, is probably one of the reasons why Christian theologians, when reasoning in the dialectical mode, have found that in the long run critical conversation with Marxism is more fascinating than concern with Feuerbach, important though he is to a limited extent.10 If one is going to base his critique of Christianity on a critique of ideology, and on a comprehensive dialectic of man in culture as the material subject of thought and change, then it is well to start with a doctrine of man that is more than simply religious or anti-religious. In this respect Feuerbach, even before he became an outright and non-dialectical materialist, was at best ambiguous and uncertain of himself. Marx had much surer footing, even if he himself was bound to suffer the countercharge, inevitable within the tradition of dialectical reasoning, that he was himself "ideologizing" human existence. Marx understood far more clearly than Feuerbach that man (including his thinking) exists both as the moving, dialectical relation of individual and society and as the conjunc- tion of culture with material nature. He offered to Christian theologians the greater challenge and perhaps also the more powerful - albeit in part an- tagonistic - kinship.

When the Christian theologian wishes to be instructively chastened, both the tradition of Hume on one side and in one way, and that of Marx on the other side and in a wholly different, way will oblige him. Compared to both, critiques such as the "God-is-dead" theology of Feuerbach seem limited in scope and in penetrating power.

10 The most recent and perhaps most significant Christian-Marxist discussion is taking place 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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Feuerbach and Theology

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