In The Essence of Christianity (1841) by Ludwig Feuerbach, we encounter the first of the four men who would be called “masters of suspicion” because of how their assaults on Christianity shifted the mode of argumentation to whether the thing could be demonstrated, to how the sort of person who believes such thing is to be understood. Thus begins a painfully annoying history of “thinkers” who make their whole business talking about their opponents very much like Jane Goodall describing the monkeys in her documentaries. Feuerbach may not have written as many enduring works on the subject as would Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, yet he is important in that he stood at the front of the line and contributed two key components which they also assumed—materialism and mental projection.

When we come to the modern idea that man has projected this or that element of his human nature, or perhaps the human condition, upon the divine nature, we are apt to think of this in terms of the anthropomorphisms of the Bible. In one sense, Feuerbach does begin his critique with a predictable division between the simple practitioners of religion for whom God-talk literally means what it says versus those who reflect on religion. When one arrives at Chapter 2 of Part I, Feuerbach attempts to reduce the being of God to the understanding of man. This is where what we today call “classical theism” is placed in the crosshairs. He had already argued that “in religion man contemplates his own latent nature.”1 The reader must remember the assumptions that preceded, chief among them materialism as a philosophy and how self-consciousness fits into that. 

The Problem of Ontotheology in Materialism

Ontotheology is the knowledge of God’s being as being. That may not seem very helpful. In the flow of thought from Kant to Heidegger, it is not entirely helpful because those coining the terminology are all speaking from the post-mortem of natural theology. For Heidegger the idea was more expansive, comprehending the whole metaphysical way of doing theology. But the original idea was this:

Whereas cosmotheology is the knowledge of God gained from the world (cosmos), ontotheology has only the a priori conceptions of being (ontos) as its starting point. Thus one rather awkward way to put it, though they know of no other, is that while cosmological reflection knows God from revelation, ontological reflection knows God from reason.

We must remember that Kant set about to criticize the ontological argument of the rationalist sort, most immediately via Christian Wolff.

At any rate, this breakdown is particularly interesting in Feuerbach because his whole point was that theology is begotten of anthropology. Man thinks of God by first reflecting on himself. Since physical phenomena constitute the only real being in the materialist framework, the only thing that can be thought about in an a priori way is thinking itself. Imagination alone can make those “thought-objects” any other than that which can again be materially analyzed.

God as Perfect and Objective Understanding

For Feuerbach, self-consciousness is what separates us from the lower animals. In this act, the mind makes itself the object of its contemplation; and indeed, since, material objects are all that can be thought of (even leaving aside whether they are all that exist), it follows that this falls within that unique arena of “things” we can think about that are, so to speak, invisible. Of all the attributes that religious people call “God,”—which are in fact dimensions of themselves—intelligence, or understanding, is most perfect. Another attribute associated with classical theism comes to the forefront.

“The understanding knows nothing of the sufferings of the heart; it has no desires, no passions, no wants, and, for that reason, no deficiencies and weaknesses, as the heart has.”2

He couples this to the objective, in the sense of impartial, and “the impersonal power in man.” Not only so, but “the heart represents particular circumstances, individuals—the understanding, general circumstances, universals.”3 But Feuerbach does not wholly collapse the objective into that particular form of subjectivity for which the former term is so often used today—e.g., “Science takes ‘the objective,’ that is, dispassionate and unbiased, stance”—but to be objective is also to be abstracted toward. It is that which is opposite the knowing subject. The knower stares across at the known, which is “outside” of him, even in those cases where the object of contemplation is some aspect of man’s internal life. There is still this “objectification.” Yet, he consistently argues, God is the only object of thought as thought. In addition to ruling out passions, anthropomorphisms are improper. Pure intellect cannot have composition, body, limit, and so forth, and thus is known only by abstraction and the via negativa.4  

Another dimension of this perfection is logic. Here we may expose Feuerbach’s argument at its weakest, and frankly most self-congratulatory, point. But the equivocation must be noted. Here it is: “That which is opposed to the understanding, that which is self-contradictory, is nothing; that which contradicts reason contradicts God.” I certainly agree that that which is self-contradictory is nothing, and that all such utterances would also contradict God.

Whether one may equate “understanding” to that depends upon whether one is using it as a synonym for “right reason,” or, what amounts to the same, truth. We have no need to guess. Anyone who has read the earlier chapters will be head-deep by this point in the thesis that human nature is the ground and essence of the divine nature. Thus by the “reason” that cannot be contradicted, Feuerbach cannot now turn back. This reason is both man and God. Nor does he shy away from the conclusion: “The reason is not dependent on God, but God on the reason.”5

How and Why the Projection (or Disunion) Takes Place

Feuerbach takes the next step in saying that man “can do nothing more than separate the intelligence from the limitations of his own individuality.”6 Thus infinity and spirituality are the negation of the individual and the corporeal. But which is it, one might reasonably ask at this point—Is “God” a projection to the nth degree or else an utter opposite? The three ways of classical theology, first suggested by Pseudo-Dionysius, distinguished between eminence and negation. Feuerbach is vulnerable to the charge of having conflated them. Yet he makes what he thinks will be his sufficient maneuver in these words: 

“The ‘infinite spirit,’ in distinction from the finite, is therefore nothing else than the intelligence disengaged from the limits of individuality and corporeality,—for individuality and corporeality are inseparable,—intelligence posited in and by itself.”7

Thus God is “nothing else than the reason in its utmost intensification become objective to itself.”8 The ascent far beyond his materialism is difficult to ignore: “God is a need of the intelligence, a necessary thought—the highest degree of the thinking power. ‘The reason cannot rest in sensuous things;’ it can find contentment only when it penetrates to the highest, first necessary being, which can be an object to the reason alone.”9 It is almost as if he appropriates Anselm only for the purpose of explaining away the logic with the “need-fulfillment” tale he is telling: “Because with the conception of this being it first contemplates itself, because only in the idea of the highest nature is the highest nature of reason existent, the highest step of the thinking power attained.”10

Extending to Natural Theology and Theology Proper

The highest in thought will also wind up comprehending all of the other objects of thought. So if God is pure intellect, then this is precisely why He is all of His other attributes: “Hence all metaphysical predicates of God are real predicates only when they are recognized as belonging to thought, to intelligence, to the understanding.”11 It is quite interesting that Feuerbach defined his own materialism so sharply against the idealisms of Kant and Hegel, since the containment of metaphysics (albeit a product of imagination) in the human mind is a creature of this same philosophical era. But so it is that natural theology too was born out of man’s need to see the origins and ends of the universe as perfect as his more immediate idea of God. First and final causes (ends) do not belong to non-intellects but to intellects. On this point, Hume would heartily agree. 

It should have at least occurred to Feuerbach that in making God “the sum of all realities,”12 that this implies composition—even if an abstract composite—a supposition which would no longer represent the classical theology he is projecting.

At any rate, all of these divine attributes are ours, God’s being without limits. It is the understanding that does away with those limits. Running through this section is a conception of limitlessness that Feuerbach has of the understanding which is simply asserted and nowhere defended. He never so much as anticipates an objection to it. As he returns to self-consciousness, he traces out the link between thought and independence, as to consider one’s own thinking is to understand that it is “I,” the subject, who thinks, and not some other thing outside of me. So “that which is the object of another being is dependent.”13 They cannot think of me; I think of them. Now the convergence of his materialism and conception of self-consciousness come full circle: “Existence out of self is the world; existence in self is God. To think is to be God.”14

He adds one more attribute to complete his picture: “The unity of the understanding is the unity of God.”15 The same impossibility of entertaining contradictions prevents us from conceiving of two supreme beings. Like everything else he said that started sounding orthodox, he quickly reminds the reader of the starting point of projection. So it is here that this divided picture cannot be, ultimately, because one cannot think of their own consciousness as divided. Herein lies his “argument” for the aforementioned limitlessness of the mind. “Infinite is immediately involved in unity, and finiteness in plurality.”16 

Closing Evaluation

We might ask whether other things we experience, which have some superlative degree of the thing, are typically the cause or the effect of that which they exceed as the same in substance. It may be said that this is a false analogy, since Feuerbach is dealing with that which is in abstracto and not in concreto. But we may come right back and ask why that should matter. If the answer has to do with causality per se, then this only begs the question of whether that which is abstract is less likely to possess substance and thus causal power.

In fact, we might press further and ask whether it even makes sense to consider God “in the abstract,” or, as Plato would have put it, as the form or essence of this or that human superlative if we could not know the difference between this human particular and that human particular. In fact, Feuerbach is taking for granted that the classical way of forming the problem of the one and the many is irrelevant.

Like all of the infamous de jure objections against theism in the nineteenth century, Feuerbach is begging the whole question. Aside from the distaste most readers may receive from the self-deifying pronouncements throughout, it should be remembered that Feuerbach had the luxury of avoiding the actual work of demonstration.

He had no need to make any more criticisms of classical natural theology, as it was simply assumed that the arguments of Hume and Kant were more than sufficient. Having dispensed with rational, metaphysical theology, the next thinkers could safely move forward with deconstruction and alternative models of reality. Luxury or not, a genetic fallacy is still a genetic fallacy, and the de jure objection—that a view should be rejected, not on the demonstrated grounds of its failure to conform to the facts (the de facto objection), but on the supposed illegitimate fashion in which it was formed in the mind—is nothing if it is not a genetic fallacy. 

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1. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 33.

2. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 34.

3. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 35.

4. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 35.

5. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 38.

6. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 35.

7. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 35.

8. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 36.

9. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 36.

10. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 36.

11. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 37.

12. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 38.

13. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 40.

14. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 40.

15. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 41.

16. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, 42.