Feuerbach Essence Of Christianity Quotes

I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood.

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established.

God did not, as the Bible says, make man in His image; on the contrary man, as I have shown in The Essence of Christianity, made God in his image.

The power of thought is the light of knowledge, the power of will is the energy of character, the power of heart is love. Reason, love and power of will are perfections of man.

The idea of God is the ignorance which solves all doubt by repressing it.

[T]ruth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred

Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires, but for that very reason ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and his striving to attain such a life. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason failed to give him what he really and truly desires.

The joys of theory are the sweetest intellectual pleasures of life

[Theology is a] web of contradictions and delusions.

A circle in a straight line is the mathematical symbol of miracle.

Though I myself am an atheist, I openly profess religion in the sense just mentioned, that is, a nature religion. I hate the idealism that wrenches man out of nature; I am not ashamed of my dependency on nature; I openly confess that the workings of nature affect not only my surface, my skin, my body, but also my core, my innermost being, that the air I breathe in bright weather has a salutary effect not only on my lungs but also on my mind, that the light of the sun illumines not only my eyes but also my spirit and my heart. And I do not, like a Christian, believe that such dependency is contrary to my true being or hope to be delivered from it. I know further that I am a finite moral being, that I shall one day cease to be. But I find this very natural and am therefore perfectly reconciled to the thought.

If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism — at least in the sense of this work — is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

The essence of faith … is the idea that that which man wishes actually is: he wishes to be immortal, therefore he is immortal; he wishes for the existence of a being who can do everything which is impossible to Nature and reason, therefore such a being exists[.]

To know God and not oneself to be God, to know blessedness and not oneself to enjoy it, is a state of disunity or unhappiness.

Certainly my work is negative, destructive; but … only in relation to the unhuman, not to the human[.]

The law holds man in bondage; love makes him free.

But certainly for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, the appearance to the essence... illusion only is sacred, truth profane. Nay, sacredness is held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.

Consciousness consists in a being becoming objective to itself; … it is nothing apart, nothing distinct from the being which is conscious of itself.

[T]he object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.

In the object which he contemplates … man becomes acquainted with himself.

To every religion the gods of other religions are only notions concerning God, but its own conception of God is to it God himself, the true God.

[L]et it be remembered that atheism … is the secret of religion … ; religion … in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature.

The consciousness of the infinite is nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; … in the consciousness of the infinite, the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature.

Each planet has its own sun. … [I]t really is another sun on Uranus … The relation of the Sun to the Earth is therefore at the same time a relation of the Earth to itself, or to its own nature … Hence each planet has in its sun the mirror of its own nature.

Man cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of another so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature; the conditions of being, the positive final predicates which he gives to these other individuals, are always determinations or qualities drawn from his own nature – qualities in which he in truth only images and projects himself.

Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity. Not because … God is love, but because of his love, of the predicate, … ; thus love is a higher power and truth[.] Love conquers God. It was love to which God sacrificed his divine majesty. … [W]hat sort of love was that? … [I]t was love to man. … [T]hough there is … a self-interested love among men, still true human love … is that which impels the sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our saviour … ? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality. As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and, in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism.

[T]o a limited being its limited understanding is not felt to be a limitation; on the contrary, it is perfectly happy and contented with this understanding[.]

[M]an [has] the power of abstraction from himself[.]

We know the man by the object[.] Even the moon, the sun, stars, … [t]hat he sees them is an evidence of his own nature.

Whatever kind of object … we are at any time conscious of, we are always at the same time conscious of our own nature[.]

Wherever this idea, that the religious predicates are only anthropomorphisms, has taken possession of man, there has doubt, has unbelief, obtained mastery of faith.

[T]he present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original[.]

God as God is feeling … yet shut up, hidden; … Christ is the unclosed, open feeling of the heart. … Christ is the joyful certainty of feeling that its wishes hidden in God have truth and reality, the actual victory over death, over all the powers of the world and Nature, the resurrection no longer merely hoped for, but already accomplished; … the Godhead made visible.

Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. … God is … infinite, man … finite … ; God … perfect, man imperfect; … God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful.

[S]o much worth … a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man, his God; the two are identical.

Nature is precisely what separates man from God … [R]eligion believes that one day this wall of separation will fall away. 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[.]

Wherever morality is based on theology, wherever the right is made dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, infamous things can be justified and established. I can found morality on theology only when I myself have already defined the Divine Being by means of morality. In the contrary case, I have no criterion of the moral and immoral, but merely an unmoral, arbitrary basis, from which I may deduce anything I please. Thus, if I would found morality on God, I must first of all place it in God: for Morality, Right, in short, all substantial relations, have their only basis in themselves, can only have a real foundation—such as truth demands—when they are thus based. (…) Where man is in earnest about ethics, they have in themselves the validity of a divine power. If morality has no foundation in itself, there is no inherent necessity for morality; morality is then surrendered to the groundless arbitrariness of religion.

Faith in the power of prayer … is … faith in miraculous power; and faith in miracles is … the essence of faith in general. … [F]aith is nothing else than confidence in the reality of the subjective in opposition to the limitations or laws of Nature and reason, … The specific object of faith, therefore, is miracle; … To faith nothing is impossible, and miracle only gives actuality to this omnipotence of faith[.]

Man distinguishes himself from Nature. This distinction of his is his God: the distinguishing of God from Nature is nothing else than the distinguishing of man from Nature. … [S]peculations and controversies concerning the personality or impersonality of God are therefore fruitless, idle, uncritical … ; … they in truth speculate only concerning themselves, only in the interest of their own instinct of self-preservation[.]

But for the present age, which prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, representation to reality, appearance to essence . . . truth is considered profane, and only illusion is sacred. Sacredness is in fact held to be enhanced in proportion as truth decreases and illusion increases, so that the highest degree of illusion comes to be the highest degree of sacredness.” —Feuerbach, Preface to the second edition 
of The Essence of Christianity

[I]t implies great force of subjectivity to accept as certain something in contradiction with rational, normal experience. … Wishes own no restraint, no law, no time; they would be fulfilled without delay on the instant. And behold! miracle is as rapid as a wish is impatient. … [I]t is not in its product or object that miraculous agency is distinguished from the agency of Nature and reason, but only in its mode and process; … The power of miracle is … the power of the imagination.

Because of … this concentration of all that is universal and real in one personal being, God is a deeply moving object, enrapturing to the imagination; whereas the idea of humanity has little power over the feelings, because humanity is only an abstraction; … God is … a subject; … the perfect universal being as one being, the infinite extension of the species as an all-comprehending unity. But God is only man's intuition of his own nature; thus the Christians … deify the human individual, make him the absolute being.

True love is sufficient to itself; it needs no special title, no authority … [I]t is … the original source of love, out of which the love of Christ himself arose. … Are we to love each other because Christ loved us? Such love would be an affected, imitative love. Can we truly love each other only if we love Christ? … Shall I love Christ more than mankind? Is not such love a chimerical love? … What ennobled Christ was love; … he was not the proprietor of love … The idea of love is an independent idea: I do not first deduce it from the life of Christ; on the contrary, I revere that life only because I find it accordant with the … idea of love.

The idea of man as a species, and with it the significance of the life of the species, of humanity as a whole, vanished as Christianity became dominant. Herein we have … confirmation … that Christianity does not contain within itself the principle of culture. Where man immediately identifies the species with the individual, and posits this identity as his highest being, as God, where the idea of humanity is thus an object to him only as the idea of the Godhead, there the need of culture has vanished; man has all in himself, all in his God, consequently he has no need to supply his own deficiencies by others as the representatives of the species, or by the contemplation of the world generally; and this need alone is the spring of culture.

That he is, he has to thank Nature; that he is man, he has to thank man; spiritually as well as physically he can achieve nothing without his fellow-man. Four hands can do more than two, but also four eyes can see more than two. … In isolation human power is limited, in combination it is infinite. The knowledge of a single man is limited, but reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind; … the scientific genius of a particular age comprehends in itself the thinking powers of the preceding age[.]

Only through his fellow does man become clear to himself and self-conscious; … A man existing absolutely alone would lose himself without any sense of his individuality in the ocean of Nature; he would neither comprehend himself as man nor Nature as Nature.

[P]ersonal theism conceives God as a personal being, separate from all material things; it excludes him from all development, because that is nothing else than the self-separation of being from circumstances and conditions which do not correspond to its true idea. … [I]n God … beginning, end, middle are not to be distinguished … [H]e is at once what he is, is from the beginning … ; he is the pure unity of existence and essence, reality and idea, act and will. … [T]hey [gods] have bodies like men, but bodies from which the limitations and difficulties of the human body are eliminated.

[T]he effect of the creation, all its majesty for the feelings and the imagination, is quite lost if the production of the world … is not taken in its real sense.

The creation of the world expressed nothing else than subjectivity, assuring itself of its own reality and infinity through the consciousness that the world is created, is a product of will, … When thou sayest the world was made out of nothing, thou conceivest the world the world itself as nothing, … for the world is the limitation of thy will, … ; the world alone obstructs thy soul; it alone is the wall of separation between thee and God, … ; thou thinkest God by himself, … the subjectivity or soul which enjoys itself alone, which needs not the world, which knows nothing of the painful bonds of matter. In the inmost depths of thy soul thou wouldest rather there were no world, for where the world is, there is matter, and where there is matter there is weight and resistance, space and time, limitation and necessity. … How dost thou expel the world from thy consciousness, that it may not disturb thee … ? [B]y making the world itself a product of will, … hovering between existence and non-existence, always awaiting its annihilation. … [H]ence its end is daily looked forward to with longing.

[M]an … makes Nature merely the servant of his will and needs, and … degrades it to a mere machine, a product of the will. … [I]ts existence is intelligible to him, … he explains and interprets it out of himself, in accordance with his own feelings and notions.

[T]he object to which a subject essentially, necessarily relates, is nothing else than this subject's own … objective nature.

[T]he understanding or the reason is the necessary being. … [I]f there were no reason, no consciousness, all would be nothing; existence would be equivalent to non-existence. Consciousness first founds the distinction between existence and non-existence. In consciousness is first revealed the value of existence, the value of nature.

The conception of the morally perfect being is no merely theoretical, inert conception, but a practical one, calling me to action, to imitation, throwing me into strife, into disunion with myself; for while it proclaims to me what I ought to be, it also tells me to my face, without any flattery, what I am not. … [R]eligion renders this disunion all the more painful … [I]t sets man's own nature before him as a separate being.

[E]very understanding which I posit as different from my own, is only a position of my own understanding, i.e. an idea of my own, a conception which falls within my power of thought, and thus expressed my understanding. … What I think of as united, I unite; what I think of as distinct, I distinguish; … [M]y understanding or my imagination is itself the power of uniting … ; understanding is only the understanding which exists in man[.]

We consume the air and we are consumed by it; we enjoy and are enjoyed.

In breathing I am an object of the air, the air the subject; but when I make the air an object of thought, of investigation, when I analyse it, I reverse the relation - I make myself the subject, the air an object.

God does not negative himself in the Incarnation, but he shows himself as that which he is, as a human being.

So long as love is not exalted into substance, … an essence, so long there lurks in the background of love a subject who even without love is something by himself, an unloving monster, a diabolical being, [who] … delights in the blood of heretics and unbelievers, - the phantom of religious fanaticism.

Love determined God to the renunciation of his divinity.

Faith in Providence is faith in one's own worth, … [H]ence also false humility, religious arrogance, which, it is true, does not rely on itself, but only because it commits the care of itself to the blessed God. God … wills that I shall be blest; but that is my will also: … God's love for me [is] nothing else than my own self-love deified.

God as God is the sum of all human perfection; God as Christ is the sum of all human misery. … If God … is … abstract philosophy: … Christ … is … pure suffering - … what makes more impression on the heart than suffering? especially the suffering … of the innocent endured purely for the good of others ..?

God is the mirror of man.

That which has essential value for man, which he esteems the perfect, the excellent, in which he has true delight, - that alone is God to him. … Therefore, the feeling, sensitive man believes only in a feeling, sensitive God, … [T]hat alone is holy to man which lies deepest within him, which is … the basis, the essence of his individuality. To the feeling man a God without feeling is an empty, abstract, negative God[.]

[O]ne need only be attentive … to convince oneself that the true principle of creation is the self-affirmation of subjectivity in distinction from Nature. God produces the world outside himself; at first it is only an idea, a plan, a resolve; now it becomes an act, and therefore it steps forth out of God as a distinct and, relatively at least, a self-subsistent object. But just so subjectivity in general, which distinguishes itself from the world, which takes itself for an essence distinct from the world, posits the world out of itself as a separate existence, indeed, this positing out of self, and the distinguishing of self, is one act. When therefore the world is posited outside of God, God is posited by himself, is distinguished from the world. What else then is God but your subjective nature, when the world is separated from it?

Everything that exists has value, is a being of distinction … [H]ence it asserts, maintains itself.

In order to banish from the mind the identity of the divine … recourse is had to the idea that God, as the absolute, real Being, has an infinite fulness of various predicates, of which we here know only a part, … those such as are analogous to our own; while the rest, by virtue of which God must have quite a different nature from the human … , we shall only know in the future – that is, after death.

[M]an in religion – in his relation to God – is in relation to his own nature[.]

Pelagianism denies God, … It has only the creator, i.e. Nature as a basis, not the Saviour, … – in a word, it denies God; … as a consequence of this, it elevates man into God, … Augustinianism denies man[.]

In the perception of the senses consciousness of the object is distinguishable from consciousness of self; … in religion, consciousness of the object and self-consciousness coincide. … The object of the sense is … indifferent … ; … the object of religion is a selected object; … it essentially presupposes a critical judgement, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy.

There may certainly be thinking beings besides men on the other planets of our solar system. But by the suppositions of such beings we do not change our standing point – we extend our conception quantitively not qualitatively.

Man has given objectivity to himself, but has not recognised the object as his own nature. … [T]he essence of religion … is evident to the thinker … . [T]he antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory; … it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual.

Religion, at least the Christian, is the relation of man to himself, … The divine being is … human nature purified, freed from the limits of individual man, made objective … All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.

[I]t is necessary to man to have a definite conception of God, … since he is man he can no more form other than a human conception of him. … [T]hese predicates are certainly without any objective validity; but … if he is to exist for me, he cannot appear otherwise than as he does appear to me, namely as a being with attributes analogous to human. … I cannot know whether God is something else in himself or for himself than he is for me; what he is to me is all that he is. For me, there lies in these predicates under which he exists for me, what he is in himself; his very nature; he is for me what he alone can ever be for me. The religious man finds perfect satisfaction in that which God is in relation to himself; of any other relation he knows nothing; for God is to him what he can alone be to man.

[M]an does not stand above this his necessary conception; on the contrary, it stands above him; it animates, determines, governs him.

[I]f God as a subject is the determined, while the quality, the predicate, is determining, then in truth the rank of the godhead is due not to the subject, but to the predicate.

[W]hen it is shown that what the subject is lies entirely in the attributes of the subject; … 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 … human nature.

[T]he understanding … has its essence in itself, consequently it has nothing, together with or external to itself, which can be ranged beside it; it is incapable of being compared, because it is itself the source of all combinations and comparisons; … we measure all things by understanding alone; … it is … the principle of all generalising, of all classification, … [I]t circumscribes all things and beings. The definitions which the speculative philosophers and theologians give … , all these definitions are … ideas drawn solely from the nature of the understanding.

[A] merely personal God is an abstract God; but so he ought to be – that is involved in the idea of him; for he is nothing else than the personal nature of man positing himself out of all connection with the world, making itself free from all dependence on nature.

[T]ime is indifferent: its existence or non-existence depends only on the will. But this will is not its own will:- not only because a thing cannot will its non-existence, but for the prior reason that the world itself is destitute of will. Thus the nothingness of the world expresses the power of the will. … The existence of the world is therefore a momentary, arbitrary, i.e., unreal existence.

[O]mnipotence is nothing else than subjectivity exempting itself from all objective conditions and limitations[.]

[I]n no wise is the negation of the subject necessarily also a negation of the predicates. … These have an intrinsic independent reality; they are self-evident truths to him. … It does not follow that goodness, justice, wisdom, are chimæras because the existence of God is a chimæra. … The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine.

The Christians made mental phenomena into independent beings, their own feelings into qualities of things, the passions which governed them into powers which governed the world, in short, predicates of their own nature, whether recognised as such or not, into independent, subjective existences.

God is the nature of man regarded as absolute truth, the truth of man; … God, or what is the same thing, religion, is as various as are the conditions under which man conceives his nature, … These conditions, then, under which man conceives God, are to him the truth, and for that reason they are also … existence itself.

The course of religious development … consists … in … that man abstracts more and more from God, and attributes more and more to himself. … That which to a later age or a cultured people is given by nature or reason, is to an earlier age, or to a yet uncultured people, given by God.

[T]hat which is the object of another being is dependent. … Thus the plant is dependent on air and light, that is, it is an object for air and light, not for itself. Physical life in general is nothing else than this perpetual interchange of the objective and subjective relation.

God is the reason expressing, affirming itself as the highest existence. To the imagination, the reason is the revelation of God; but to the reason, God is the revelation of the reason[.]

God as God, … as a being not finite, not human, not materially conditioned, not phenomenal, is only an object of thought. … [H]e is known … only by abstraction and negation … There is no other spirit, no other intelligence which enlightens him, which is active in him. … The 'infinite spirit,' is therefore nothing else than the intelligence disengaged from the limits of individuality and corporeality[.]

To suffer is the highest command of Christianity – the history of Christianity is the history of the passion … [T]he ancient Christians … rendered the highest honour to their God by … tears of repentance and yearning. … If God himself suffered for my sake, how can I be joyful, how can I allow myself any gladness, at least on this corrupt earth, which was the theatre of his suffering?

[E]very religion which has any claim to the name presupposes that God is not indifferent to the beings who worship him, … [A]s an object of veneration, he is a human God. … God is not deaf to my complaints; he has compassion on me; hence he renounces his divine majesty[.]

[T]he religious man … believes in a real sympathy of a divine being in his sufferings and wants, believes that the will of God can be determined by … prayer, … The … religious man unhesitatingly assigns his own feelings to God; God is to him a heart susceptible to all that is human.

Existence is one with self-consciousness; existence with self-consciousness is existence simply. If I do not know that I exist, it is all one whether I exist or not.

[T]he Christians of former days … rejected the real life of the family, the intimate bond of love which is naturally moral as … undivine, unheavenly, … [I]n compensation they had a Father and Son in God, who embraced each other with heartfelt love, with that intense love which natural relationship alone inspires. … [H]ere the satisfaction of those profoundest human wants which, in reality, in life, they denied, became to them an object of contemplation in God.

A word is an abstract image, the imaginary thing, or, in so far as everything is ultimately an object of the thinking power, it is the imagined thought: hence men, when they know the word, the name for a thing, fancy that they know the thing also.

This [love] ought to be a furnace that should melt us all into one heart, and should create such a fervour in us … that we should heartily love each other.' But that which in the truth of religion is the essence of the fable, is to the religious consciousness only the moral of the fable, a collateral thing.

[O]nly where man communicates with man, only in speech, a social act, awakes reason. … It is not until man has reached an advanced stage of culture that he can double himself, so as to play the part of another within himself.

The abstraction expresses a judgement, - an affirmative and negative one at the same time, praise and blame[.] What a man praises and approves, that is God to him; what he blames, condemns is the non-divine. … In religion man frees himself from the limits of life; … the self-consciousness of man freed from all discordant elements; … all which he excludes from God is … judged to be non-divine, and what is non-divine to be worthless, nothing. … The divine being is the pure subjectivity of man freed from all else, from everything objective, … The process of discrimination, the separating of the intelligent from the non-intelligent, of personality from Nature, of the perfect from the imperfect, necessarily therefore takes place in the subject, not in the object, the idea of God lies not at the beginning but at the end of sensible existence, of the world. … [T]his Omega of sensible existence become an Alpha[.]

[H]eaven … is inconceivable, … it can only be thought of by us according to the standard of this world, a standard not applicable to any other. … It is just so with God[:] what he is, or how he exists is inscrutable.

The future life is the feeling, the conception of freedom from those limits which here circumscribe the feeling of self, the existence of the individual. … The natural man remains at home because he finds it agreeable, because he is perfectly satisfied; religion … commences with a discontent, a disunion, forsakes its home and travels far, but only to feel … more vividly in the distance … home. In religion man separates himself from himself, but only to return always to the same point from which he set out [himself]. Man negatives himself, but only to posit himself again, and that in a glorified form: he negatives this life, but only, in the end, to posit it again in the future life.

If I know not now what and how I shall be; if there is an essential, absolute difference between my future and my present; neither shall I then know what and how I was before, the unity of consciousness is at an end, personal identity is abolished, another being will appear in my place; and thus my future existence is not in fact distinguished from non-existence. If, on the other hand, there is no essential difference, the future is to me an object that may be defined and known[:] … I am the substance which connects the present and the future into a unity. How then can the future be obscure to me? That which irreligious-religious reflection converts into a known image of an unknown yet certain thing, is … in the primitive, true sense of religion, not an image, but the thing itself. … The future life is nothing else than life in unison with the feeling, with the idea, which the present life contradicts. … [T]he other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish; it is only the removal of limits which here oppose themselves to the realisation of the idea. … [A]n image, a conception; still it is not the image of a remote, unknown thing, but a portrait of that which man loves and prefers before all else[:] … his soul.

The heavenly life is no other than that which is, already here below, distinguished from the merely natural life … That which the Christian excludes from himself now – for example, the sexual life – is excluded from the future: the only distinction is, that he is there free from that which he here wishes to be free from … Hence this life is, for the Christian, a life of torment and pain, because he is here still beset by a hostile power, and has to struggle with the lusts of the flesh and the assaults of the devil.