What is Feuerbach's theory?

Ludwig Feuerbach, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

Ludwig Feuerbach answers

The whole of it can be stated in one sentence, and then the sentence must be unpacked until it becomes undeniable: the true sense of theology is anthropology.¹ What that means is this. Every predicate theology assigns to God — wisdom, love, benevolence, justice, existence itself — is a predicate drawn from human nature and projected outward onto an imagined being.

Thou believest that God is wise and good because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than wisdom and goodness; thou believest that God exists because thou thyself existest, and the consciousness of all reality is for thee bound up in the consciousness of being a subject.² The divine being is the human being seen in a mirror, magnified to infinity, and then mistaken for another thing entirely.

The method I use to demonstrate this is inversion. Where theology says God is the subject and his attributes are predicates, I reverse the relation: the predicate is the truth, the subject only the predicate conceived as existing.³ Turn the predicate into the subject and you have the unconcealed truth that theology had been encoding all along.

What remains of God when you subtract every human attribute? Nothing — not even existence, for the necessity of the subject lies only in the necessity of the predicate.⁴ Now, the book that made my name — The Essence of Christianity, published in 1841 — falls into two parts that prove the same thing by opposite routes.⁵ The first part is affirmative: it takes religion at its word, reads its doctrines carefully, and shows that their genuine content is human.

The Son of God is a son in the same sense in which a man is the son of a man; the relation is a human relation stated as though it belonged to another world.⁶ The second part is polemical: it takes theology's own attempt to distinguish itself from mere anthropology and shows that every such distinction collapses into absurdity and contradiction.⁷

Development is light, the first part says; contest is fire, the second demonstrates. Both parts arrive at the same place. What I am doing is not destruction but unveiling. The love, the reverence, the sense of solidarity with something larger than oneself — all of that is real and remains when the false object is removed. What I attack is not religion but theology, which takes the genuine human content and mystifies it into a relation with a being outside humanity.

Strip the mystification away and what you recover is not an empty room but the human being in full — sensuous, needy, turned toward a thou, capable of the very infinity he had been worshipping at a distance.

Sources

1. Thus in the first part I show that the true sense of Theology is Anthropology, that there is no distinction between the predicates of the divine and human nature.

   The Essence of Christianity

2. Thou believest in love as a divine attribute because thou thyself lovest; thou believest that God is a wise, benevolent being because thou knowest nothing better in thyself than benevolence and wisdom.

   The Essence of Christianity

3. We need only turn the predicate into the subject and thus, as subject, into object and principle—that is, only reverse speculative philosophy in order to have the unconcealed, pure, and untarnished truth.

   The Fiery Brook: Hanfi's Introduction, pp. 43–44

4. The necessity of the subject lies only in the necessity of the predicate. Thou art a subject only in so far as thou art a human subject; the certainty and reality of thy existence lie only in the certainty and reality of thy human attributes.

   The Essence of Christianity

5. It consequently falls into two parts, one of which is mainly affirmative and the other, including the Appendix, mostly but not wholly, negative. In both parts, it is, however, the same thing that is demonstrated, albeit in different or even contradictory ways.

   Preface to the Second Edition of The Essence of Christianity, pp. 268–269

6. In the first part I prove that the Son of God is in religion a real son, the son of God in the same sense in which man is the son of man, and I find therein the truth, the essence of religion, that it conceives and affirms a profoundly human relation as a divine relation.

   The Essence of Christianity

7. in the second part I show that the Son of God...is not a son in the natural, human sense, but in an entirely different manner, contradictory to Nature and reason, and therefore absurd, and I find in this negation of human sense and the human understanding, the negation of religion.

   The Essence of Christianity