SOURCE: Galloway, Allan D. “The Meaning of Feuerbach.” British Journal of Sociology 25, no. 2 (June 1974): 135-49.

[In the following lecture, Galloway questions some of the more reductive assessments of Feuerbach's philosophy and emphasizes Feuerbach's efforts to locate a continuity between the human and natural sciences in his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future.]

May I first of all thank the Hobhouse Memorial Trust Committee for the honour they have done me in inviting me to give this lecture. It is an invitation which beckons a mere theologian towards the boundaries of his own subject in honour of a scholar whose interest in the human scene knew almost no boundaries. In these circumstances, Ludwig Feuerbach came to mind as a point of contact. It was he who made the first crucial move in a game which has brought theology into direct confrontation with sociology, anthropology and the human sciences generally. This is a confrontation the outcome of which is not yet determined. It is a confrontation of fateful importance for the spirit and culture of Europe—and ultimately for the world.

Feuerbach himself was no sociologist. He was, in fact, remarkably blind to the role of social structures and institutions in that humanizing process—the genesis of our humanity—which was the all-engrossing subject of almost his entire philosophical output.

Ludwig Feuerbach and L. T. Hobhouse were very different in their philosophical styles. They were, however, in many respects kindred spirits. Both were deeply concerned with the fundamental problems of the human spirit. Both believed that the way towards a solution of these problems was through the observation and interpretation of man as he concretely exists rather than through the direct contemplation of those metaphysical infinities towards which his heart so incorrigibly aspires. Both were convinced that the crux of the human problem and the key to its solution concerned the relationship between the individual and collective man.

They had at least one more thing in common. The one lived at the beginning, the other at the end of a quite remarkable period of human history. It could be called the age of hope.

At the time of Feuerbach's birth, an age was coming to an end. This was the age of faith which had lasted from the time of St Augustine through the Reformation into the eighteenth century. It was succeeded by the age of the liberal—the age of hope—an age of unwavering optimism about the future of man and of profound doubt about the theological beliefs upon which that hope was ultimately founded. That spirit of hope has come to an end for us. It could, if one were to put a precise date upon its demise, be said to have ended in 1929, the year of L. T. Hobhouse's death. That was the year in which the onset of the great depression snuffed out the last flickering remnants of European optimism that had survived the trauma of the First World War. If Feuerbach was one of the outstanding and inspired apostles of that era, L. T. Hobhouse was one of its outstanding latter day sages.

Under the title The Meaning of Feuerbach, I raise three questions:

1. What did Feuerbach really mean (in his own intention, that is to say)?
2. What are the implications of his work for theology and its relation to the human sciences?
3. What is his significance for us and for our time?

These three questions are interwoven in a way which makes it impossible to treat them seriatim. They must be taken up together.

Ludwig Feuerbach has seldom been allowed to speak for himself. He has usually been interpreted through his relation to others—as the stepping stone between Hegel and Marx, as the father of modern existentialism, of modern humanism, of modern scientific empiricism. The fact that he has been said to be all of these very diverse things and more suggests that he was perhaps none of them.

Feuerbach began his academic career as a theological student in 1823. Within a year he had gone to Berlin and transferred to the study of philosophy under Hegel. For some ten to fifteen years thereafter he remained identifiably a Hegelian, though he moved progressively away from the Hegelian school. He differed from the Hegelians in two main respects—(a) in his rejection of Christian theology; and (b) in his progressive transition from idealism to a brand of empiricism peculiarly his own.

The break with Hegel was already complete in 1841 when he published the work which brought him suddenly to the peak of his short-lived fame—The Essence of Christianity. It was welcomed by the liberal left and scandalized the theological right. Its vogue lasted until the failure and suppression of the liberal revolt of 1848 in Germany. None of Feuerbach's later works had a similar immediate impact. He fell into relative obscurity and, until very recently, his philosophy lived on only at second hand (and in a very one-sided interpretation) as an element within Marxism. Feuerbach's period of eclipse is succinctly described by Eugene Kamenka. ‘Feuerbach's naturalism and empiricism were absorbed in and replaced by the medical materialism of Moleschott and Büchner, not to speak of Darwin, J. S. Mill and Spencer; Feuerbach's critique of religion gave way to Renan's; Feuerbach's concern with political liberation as a philosophical (and political) act had to bow to Lassalle's “iron law of wages” and to the economic, historical and revolutionary concerns of the Marxian system.’¹

The recent revival of interest in Feuerbach for his own sake comes from two sources; (a) self-critical Marxists, who are disturbed by the apparently inhuman character of some of the institutions of developed socialism, have been casting about for a richer concept of humanity which would complement the ethical values inherent in their concept of class; (b) many theologians, having been startled by the remarkable degree of confirmation which Feuerbach's account of religion appears to have received in the progressive secularization of Europe, have developed a new and intense interest in what John Robinson has called ‘the human face of God’.

Feuerbach's basic thesis on this subject is well known. Homo homini deus est—man is the god of man. The Essence of Christianity begins with what now sounds a rather curious argument. Man is distinguished from the animals in that he has consciousness of the species. Animals are conscious only of immediate environment and of concrete particulars within that environment. It is consciousness of the species which gives man the capacity to engage in the two distinctive activities of his humanity—science and religion.

Why this emphasis on the species?—Firstly because Feuerbach was still looking for a science-based philosophy of man and of nature. Secondly because the biological sciences were still in an essentially descriptive phase. The biological sciences were still under the domination of Linnaeus. The species were the ultimate facts of nature. One could not ask why they were. One could only observe that they were. They were static, fixed, given. This limitation on the science available to Feuerbach was, as we shall see, a serious handicap to the fulfilment of his philosophical intention. Darwin's Origin of the Species was not published until 1858—just too late to influence Feuerbach's main philosophical effort.

Feuerbach goes on to argue: Religion is identical with the consciousness which man has of his own nature, that is, of his own species. In the concept of species man is aware of his own essence, not as finite, limited and imperfect, as it is in the individual, but as perfect, complete and infinite. Thus man becomes an object to himself; but he does not at first recognize this identity. He sees his essential nature as something outside himself. His aspiration to realize the full and true essence of his humanity becomes a relation of worship and devotion to that other self which is the species. ‘Religion is the child-like condition of humanity; but the child sees his nature—man-out of himself; in childhood a man is an object to himself under the form of another man.’ Therefore ‘the divine being is nothing else than the human being, or, rather, the human purified, freed from the limits of the individual man, made objective—i.e. contemplated and revered as another, a distinct being. All the attributes of the divine nature are, therefore, attributes of the human nature.’²

This he proceeds to illustrate with a thoroughness which is apt to become tediously repetitious.

But then, surprisingly, it is in the very fullness of his humanity that God sets man in estrangement from himself. ‘In proportion as the divine subject is in reality human, the greater is the apparent difference between God and man … that God may be all man must be nothing.’³

This is why he saw Christianity as at once the best and the worst of all religions. In the incarnation it arrived at the full and final expression of the true humanity of God. In this respect it is the final and absolute religion. But for that very reason it also estranges man absolutely from himself—even to the extent that the man Jesus must sacrifice his real humanity to the divinity who is revealed in him. So for Christianity man can achieve no good in himself. He himself is totally depraved. (The only Christian tradition which Feuerbach recognizes as genuine is in the succession from Paul through Augustine to Luther.) All man's positive achievements are the action of the grace of God in him.

But religious man gladly accepts this. He ‘desires to be nothing in himself, because what he takes from himself is not lost to him, since it is preserved in God. Man has his being in God. … What man withdraws from himself, what he renounces in himself, he only enjoys in an incomparably higher and fuller measure in God.’⁴ But so long as this happens only within the context of religion, it happens only in imagination. Heaven is the world of the happy imagination. The monk renounces the actual love of real women in favour of the image of perfect womanly love in heaven.

The final step is the return from heavenly to earthly reality—to the recognition of the divine perfections of humanity in the species—to the recognition of the identity of God and man. In the course of religious development man takes back progressively what he has given to God. ‘Thus man, while he is apparently humiliated to the lowest degree, is in truth exalted to the highest. … In the religious systole, man propels his own nature from himself … in the religious diastole, he receives the rejected nature into his heart again.’⁵ This in the end means an exodus from religion, at least from religion as the worship of a transcendent being. Thus ‘what yesterday was still religion is no longer such today’. Feuerbach can illustrate this from the fact that there were religious laws in Judaism which today are now matters of common hygiene and decency. But he also says ‘what today is atheism, tomorrow will be religion’⁶—a remarkably prophetic statement to be made in 1841.

In later writings, Feuerbach's treatment of religion developed further, but never with the same brilliance, originality and facility of expression as in The Essence of Christianity. What is of special interest to the theologian (and I should think also to those interested in the human sciences) is the sensitivity and penetrating insight of his account of the positive role of religion in the humanising process. This is the side of his thought which has been almost totally neglected within Marxism, and so has only recently begun to receive attention.

It is clear in the first instance that Feuerbach, despite his disclaimers, plays a positive role as a hermeneutical theologian in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. He brought into the open an element within that tradition which had not till then (not even in Hegel) received the recognition due to it; namely, that there is no valid relation to God which is not also a relation to man.

The double commandment in the summary of the law, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and thy neighbour as thyself’, does not formulate two separate commandments which can be fulfilled separately. Thus the penitent who brings his gift to the altar is told in the teaching of Jesus: ‘If you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift.’⁷

It is also clear that Feuerbach is not talking of a merely illusory projection of individual subjectivity (as in Sigmund Freud, for example). It is a real relation to the species—to society.

Religion is no mere mistake or aberration or neurosis of the human race. It is, in Feuerbach's own words, ‘involuntary, necessary—necessary as art, as speech.’⁸ The one aspect of Hegelian dialectic Feuerbach retained was its psychological and social application. As a logical and epistemological scheme he totally rejected it. Thus Feuerbach took up the formal ‘I-thou’ dialectic in Hegel and put real psychological body into it. With intuitive genius (for at that time he had little in the way of empirical, psychological evidence to go on) he perceived that we do not have our humanity within ourselves as isolated, self-contained individuals. Humanity is a relational property. We receive our humanity from the other who addresses us as ‘thou’ and whom we address as ‘thou’. Our capacity to relate to the other is prior to and a condition of our capacity to relate to ourselves. Both are prior to and a condition of our capacity to relate significantly to our world.

Thus, for example, Feuerbach says, ‘the ego first steels its glance in the eye of a “thou”.’ ‘Only through his fellow man does man become clear to himself and self-conscious; but only when I am clear to myself does the world become clear to me.’ ‘Without other men, the world would be for me not only dead and empty, but meaningless.’ ‘The ego attains consciousness of the world through consciousness of the “thou”.’⁹

This remarkably penetrating, intuitive grasp of the growth-conditions of our humanity has been largely confirmed by subsequent, more empirical studies in psychology, anthropology and sociology to a degree which, if not conclusive, is at least the basis of some of our best respected schools of thought in those fields.

If for species we read ‘society’ (for by ‘species’ Feuerbach did not mean the abstract idea but the species as it concretely exists) then, stated in more contemporary jargon, what Feuerbach is saying is that man perceives his world only within a cultural context. He enters that cultural context only by entering into personal relation—by finding that society answers to his own humanity. He can be at one with himself in his own humanity only in so far as he successfully attains to these relationships with the world and with society.

The attainment of this end is the positive role of religion in society. But this does not alter the fact that, by the same token, the completion of this process is the end of religion.

At the time of publication, two main objections were raised against Feuerbach's interpretation of religion. An examination of these objections throws some light on his real intention. The first accused him of concentrating on the outmoded anthropomorphic elements in religion—the primitive talk of a God who loved, sorrowed, was angry, suffered, felt compassion—in a word who, in all too literal a sense, became man. Philosophical theology—particularly in idealist philosophy—had reinterpreted these symbols in a manner which transcended their anthropomorphism. This argument received short shrift from Feuerbach.

If you deny the anthropomorphic predicates of God, he contended, there is nothing left but the bare subject. There is no difference between his existence and his non-existence.¹⁰

Thus Feuerbach distinguishes two kinds of atheism: (a) there is his own, which denies the absolute transcendent subject—i.e. denies the ontological status of God as a separate being—but continues to affirm and reverence the predicates of divinity—holiness, love, compassion, goodness, mercy, wisdom, power and so on. But divinity, he insists, consists in these qualities not in the bare subject. So, in his own way, Feuerbach remains a man of faith. He believes in and continues to reverence divinity; but in another subject, namely man; (b) the second type of atheism is not generally recognized as such. It is the theology of the absolute idealists, the post-enlightenment philosophers, and of all who like them so attenuate the concept of God that it no longer retains any meaning for religion, but only for the intellect. In denying the attributes of God they have denied the very substance of divinity. They, he contends, are the real sceptics and the real atheists. They are the real destroyers of faith.

It must indeed have been galling for Feuerbach, who had lost all prospect of academic employment and had suffered considerable social ostracism because of his atheism, to see those whom he regarded as the real atheists accepted as apologists for the Christian faith.

This is the kind of theism, empty and abstract, persisting as a survival after its religious and social function has been exhausted, which Feuerbach regarded as truly alienating, negative and anti-human. His own atheism, he could claim, bore a more positive relation to religion than this attenuated theism. His atheism was a completion of the positive social role of religion. It could, he believed, yield that rich and satisfying reciprocity of man and society which was the end and fulfilment of the religious process.

The attenuated theism of the philosophers, on the other hand, is a crypto-atheism.

This raises the question—can we really claim Feuerbach as the father of our twentieth-century atheism? I think not.

Part of the meaning of Feuerbach as a sign-event in the spiritual and cultural history of Europe, is the perceptiveness of his appreciation that even in the early 1800's Europe was already atheist at heart. He remarks that ‘on the ground that God is unknowable, man excuses himself to what is yet remaining of his religious conscience for his forgetfulness of God, his absorption in the world; he denies God practically by his conduct—the world has possession of all his thoughts and inclinations—but he does not deny him theoretically, he does not attack his existence; he lets that rest. But this existence does not affect or incommode him. It is a merely negative existence, an existence without existence.’¹¹ Of this situation he comments: ‘We often find that, having been freed long ago in actuality from a matter, a doctrine or an idea, we are at the same time not freed from it in the mind. It is no longer a truth in our existence—perhaps it never was that—but it is still a theoretical truth, a limit on our mind. Mind, because it takes things most thoroughly is also the last to be freed. Theoretical freedom, at least in many things, is the last freedom.’¹²

Feuerbach sensed that this abstract, inhuman crypto-atheism, so different from his own, not only possessed the heart if not the mind of the sophisticated salons of Europe but also underlay the pervasive spirit of the new age of commerce. This was the age of scientific and technological promise, of universal expectation of national expansion and economic growth, of preoccupation with a rising standard of living—rather than an improvement in the human quality of life. I fear that it is this atheism, which is ultimately a negation of the humanizing role of religion in society, rather than the atheism of Feuerbach, that we have inherited.

The atheism of the twentieth century is coincident with as severe a disruption of the relation between the individual and the collectivity of man as has ever appeared in human history. It has involved as severe a loss of meaning, as severe a loss of reciprocity, as severe an alienation, as total a denial of humanity in the name of the collectivity as we have ever known before.

This is equally true whether we refer to the democratic capitalist countries where the forces of the free market threaten a total eclipse of our humanity, or the socialist, communist countries where the forces required for a bureaucratic control of the market appear to have the same effect. Feuerbach is the spiritual father neither of eastern nor of western atheism as we know it, neither of dialectical materialist nor of capitalist materialist atheism. When we have realised this we have made the first step towards allowing Feuerbach to speak for himself.

The idea that there are different kinds of atheism, just as there are different kinds of theism, and that each has its own spirituality, its own ethos, has not been sufficiently studied either by theologians or by sociologists.

The second main criticism which was levelled against Feuerbach during his lifetime came from the theologians proper. They questioned whether the human species as such was a plausible object of worship. Feuerbach had put a finite, conditioned, imperfect species in place of the absolute, unconditioned, perfect God.

Schleiermacher was much in vogue at the time and his definition of religion as ‘the feeling of absolute dependence’ was widely accepted. So the form in which this objection was usually couched was that Feuerbach had tried to derive man's feeling of absolute dependence from his consciousness of a finite, conditioned species. It was partly in response to this criticism that Feuerbach wrote his Essence of Religion some five years after the publication of The Essence of Christianity. He says that in his Essence of Christianity he concentrated on spiritual religion (Geistesreligion), that is, religion which has undergone the prophetic transformation dissociating it from nature divinities and concentrating it on the moral and personal characteristics of God. In The Essence of Religion he deals mainly with nature religion (Naturreligion). He accepts Schleiermacher's definition of religion as the feeling of absolute dependence. But, he contends, the feeling of dependence upon God, rightly understood, is really a feeling of dependence upon nature. So there are now two fundamental factors in his concept of divinity—Nature and Man.

In an important passage in the still later Lectures on the Essence of Religion, he makes great play in this connection with the German word Wesen. This word not only carries the ambiguity of the English word ‘essence’ (which can bear either a neutral, descriptive meaning or a value-laden, normative meaning), but can also mean an individual existent being. In this passage he says: ‘My teaching or point of view is summed up in two words—nature and humanity together. The being or essence (Wesen) which is presupposed in relation to humanity, which is the origin or ground of humanity, to which man owes his coming to be and his existence—that is something which I call not God but nature. God is a mystical, indefinite, ambiguous word; but nature is a clear, significant, unambiguous word and essence (Wesen). But the being (Wesen) in whom nature becomes a personal, conscious, intelligent being (Wesen) I call man. The unconscious essence (Wesen) of nature is for me the eternal unoriginate being (Wesen), the first being (Wesen)—first in time but not in status—the first being (Wesen) physically but not morally. Conscious, human being (Wesen) comes second in order of time, but in status is the first being (Wesen)”.’¹³ He then goes on to say that he deals with nature and man not as abstract ideas as do the theologians and to varying degrees all his predecessors in philosophy. He deals with them concretely and scientifically and empirically. What does Feuerbach mean by ‘scientifically and empirically’? If he means ‘scientifically and empirically’ in the sense of modern positivist science, then he has done nothing to answer the criticism levelled against him by the theologians.

Positivist science as we know it deals with brute facts. It is value-free.

How can an object—be it in nature in general or the human species in particular—which is conceived as brute-fact in a value-free science be understood as the object and occasion of worship, devotion and reverence? Religion requires an object which lays claim to our reverence. Was Feuerbach simply perpetrating a crass form of the naturalistic fallacy and covering up his misdemeanour with the convenient ambiguities with the concept of Wesen or essence? Let me make two points about this:

1. Feuerbach used the terms ‘nature’ and ‘humanity’ as he had received them in his cultural inheritance. Not only had they been newly enriched with highly mystical and value-laden overtones in the Romantic Movement, they carried deposits of meaning derived from a history as long as that of man himself (Middle East creation mythologies, stoicism, etc.).

The positivist science of the nineteenth century progressively stripped both these concepts—especially that of nature—of all these overtones. This brought considerable gains to natural science—at least in the short term. It abstracted the measurable and the calculable from ‘the rest’.

But in the long term it split ‘natural’ science from Geisteswissenschaft—from the human sciences—in a way which has impoverished both.

Ludwig Feuerbach was one of the last representatives of the age of scientific innocence. He was still looking for, and expected to find, a systematic unity between the natural sciences and the human sciences—some inherent correlation between the truth about the world and human values.

In his Principles of the Philosophy of the Future he attempted to set out a philosophy of science and a scientific philosophy in which the human sciences and the natural sciences formed an unbroken continuum of knowledge. This is normally interpreted as though what he was proposing was mere reductionism.

In place of the philosophy of Idealism or Rationalism he proposed a philosophy of Sinnlichkeit. Most commentators have taken this to mean a philosophy of sense-experience after the manner of David Hume. The term Sinnlichkeit could bear such an interpretation. But if that is what Feuerbach meant, he made an unbelievably muddled job of presenting and elaborating it. He had, it appears, interwoven a substantial element of romanticism into this otherwise astringent, empirical, positivist philosophy. The two will not mix either logically or psychologically.

He says, for example, that love is the key to a true knowledge and understanding of the world¹⁴—that we must think not merely as a rational mind, but as a ‘whole man’ to know the truth.¹⁵ This is one of the sayings that got him the reputation of being an existentialist born out of due time as well as a romantic and a sensationalist empiricist.

It is little wonder that such an apparent muddle-head was never taken seriously by other philosophers.

But has Feuerbach been properly understood? The German word Sinn has a very wide range of meanings—even wider than our English word ‘sense’—which covers a spectrum between meaning, intention, feeling, sensation.

The word Sinnlichkeit has a range of meanings comparable with no word in the English language. It covers the whole area of aesthesia from crude sensation to sensitivity, perceptiveness, etc. It must be understood in a sense that fits the context.

To illustrate that when Feuerbach purposes an empiricism based on Sinnlichkeit—sentience—he is not proposing an analytic empiricism like that of Hume based on sense data, I refer to a passage in The Essence of Christianity. In this passage he puts forward the view that the mercy of God cannot be derived from his moral will. The moral law yields no principle of mercy. He then says that mercy is the Rechtsgefühl der Sinnlichkeit.—I do not know how one should translate this. George Eliot, in her otherwise elegant translation of the Essence of Christianity resorts to a more or less literal translation as ‘the justice of sensuous life’¹⁶ (which makes no sense at all). But despite the difficulties of translation, one can see what Feuerbach was driving at. He was referring to the capacity of a human being to respond to a situation as a sentient, emotional and rational whole. He was suggesting that this is the kind of response that is involved when we override strict moral justice in the exercise of mercy.

I do not wish on the present occasion to go out of my way to defend Feuerbach's analysis of judgments of mercy. I merely use the instance to make it clear that, whatever he meant in his rather obscure proposals for an empiricism based on Sinnlichkeit, it was nothing like the empiricism which we have inherited, based on sensation conceived as discrete sense data.

He did not mean fastidious and subjective sensitivity either. In his essay Against the Dualism of Soul and Body, Flesh and Spirit, he makes the suggestion that intelligence and the capacity for intelligent response to the world is not confined to the cerebellum, but pervades the whole nervous system—a suggestion remarkably in advance of the physiology of his time.

This is what he has in mind when he says in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future that the way to full knowledge of the world in experience—i.e. empirically—as it really is, is to think not merely as reasoning beings, but as men.

Feuerbach was looking for, and making the first steps towards, an empiricism which would retain the facility of the Hegelian dialectic in dealing with living wholes, while at the same time giving primacy to the objectivity of the world.

This was not a value-free empiricism. It was an empiricism in which knowing the truth about man and nature involved knowing their integrity as sacred, as claiming our reverence and respect. Nature is sacred in its capacity to evoke and minister to that wholeness of human response which is happiness. Thus, even when Feuerbach has, at least to his own satisfaction, reduced theology to anthropology, he still retains the category of the sacred.

Thus for him the bread of the altar is sacred, not because it is on the altar but because it is bread. It is the staff of life. Marriage is sacred, not because it is ecclesiastically sanctioned, but because it is the natural, wholesome and healing relation between man and woman. The water of baptism is sacred, not because it is blessed, but because of the cleansing, healing and sustaining role which water plays in the life of man.

This is the whole point of his insistence that though he has denied the transcendent subject of the divine attributes, he has retained the attributes themselves.

Now you may regard this as schmolz—as a hangover from romanticism. I think it is more than that.

But unless you take his philosophy of Sinnlichkeit seriously, as something more than a value-free, positivist empiricism, you make nonsense of his reduction of theology to anthropology.

His programme can only be achieved in an empiricism which maintains the unity of Geisteswissenschaft and Naturwissenschaft, of the human science and the natural sciences, without reducing the former to the latter.

The present tension in our culture, threatening it to the point of destruction, between the economic management of the world and society on the one hand, and the enjoyment of them in terms of human values on the other is a reflection of our inability to integrate truly humane, human sciences with natural science.

Finally, suppose we were able to carry out Feuerbach's programme to our own satisfaction. Suppose we recognize that religion has played a positive role in bringing man to the full enjoyment of his humanity in reciprocity with the species (society) and the world. Suppose that having learned at last to be at home with ourselves in our own humanity, that alienation is no more, that God has done his work and that we can now see him as a device of our creative imagination and can finally recognize that homo homini deus est—Man is the God of man—what has the theologian to say on seeing his discipline finally reduced to anthropology?

Two things chiefly:

(1) The theologian—at least of the Judaeo-Christian tradition—need not be so entirely averse to this suggestion as might at first appear. The controlling vision of this tradition is that of the kingdom of God. It is the vision of a human condition in which the Leviathan of society and the state will give place to one who is ‘like unto a son of man’. In a passage which was seminal for later apocalyptic writings, the writer of Daniel describes how he saw the vision of four great and terrible beasts. Each beast represents one of the four great empires under which the whole of the then known world had suffered. (We still retain the symbolism of the fascist beast!) Then he had the vision of a new kind of society, no longer symbolized by a beast but by a figure ‘in the likeness of a son of man’. This implies that the end product of religion, where its process is fulfilled, is a society with a truly human face. It is a society in which there is an exact correlation between God and the human meaning which a man finds in his social and cultural environment. The final expression of religion is a state of affairs in which the reconciliation of man with God is coincident with a reconciliation of man with man and with his world.

Feuerbach brought this neglected aspect of the Judaeo-Christian tradition into just prominence. But while acknowledging this, let us be quite clear that the deeply alienated kind of secular humanism which is the pervasive spirit of the present time bears little resemblance to the kind of reverent humanism that Feuerbach is talking about. He is as little the father of contemporary secularism as he is the father of contemporary atheism. He is of altogether a different spirit.

(2) The second, and more important thing which the theologian must say is this: Granted that by the symbolism of relating in a human and personal way to his gods man enters into personal relation with his society, interiorizes its mores and makes the world his familiar territory, there are good grounds for the view that this is not all that religion does. It cannot even achieve this unless it does something more.

In coming to terms with himself man relates not only to his world, but also to the ‘beyond’ of his world. I do not in the present context wish to burden this concept of the ‘beyond’ of the world with a heavy load of metaphysical significance. I use the word as the most neutral term available to refer to that infinite area of potentiality beyond the actuality of the given world which, whatever its ontological status, is real for the imagination. Man relates to it either in anxiety or in hope and trust. It is the objective correlate of man's openness beyond the given world and so of his freedom and cultural creativity.

If you eliminate from religion the reference to a transcendent subject of the divine attributes, you may, by transferring these attributes to man, preserve something of the human and cultural role of religion. But the humanity which in the infancy of the race was nurtured through religion, once attained, is not a permanent and stable possession. This was where Feuerbach was seriously misled by his view of the species as fixed and given facts of nature. To achieve human values is a task laid upon every generation and every society. This calls for cultural creativity. The survival capacity of any theology is dependent on its ability to play a creative role in providing for each new generation of men a frame of reference within which they can understand the human meaning of their world and their society. This is a process in which nothing stands still for very long.

The capacity of a theology to engender such cultural creativity is directly dependent on its capacity to represent the ‘beyond’ of the world as judgment and grace. It is judgment in that it invites and occasions the rejection of the old. It is grace in that it invites and occasions the creation of the new.

Whenever a theology, such as that of Feuerbach, wholly and unambiguously identifies the referent of religion with the immanent structures which it undergirds and interprets—be they ecclesiastical and cultic or social and cultural—it absolutizes the given world and inhibits new growth. It is the transcendent reference in religion which is the ground of its capacity for perpetual reform.

It was, for example, by a renewed and intensive appeal to the transcendent sovereignty of their God that the Israelites were able to reinterpret the traditions which they had inherited from the tribal amphictyony in a way which enabled them to find a new and uniquely human meaning within the life of a nation state (the Deuteronomic revision). In an even more striking way, it was a new vision of the transcendence of God which enabled the early prophets of Israel to reinterpret the cultic traditions of an agricultural nation to create a human ethos for the new commercial economy which arose after Solomon.

The same factor was at work in the theology of the Reformation. The socially dominant structures of the Roman Catholic Church were criticized on the basis of a new emphasis on the transcendence of God. But there were differences in the degree of this. The slogan of Lutheran Christology was finitum capax infiniti—the finite can contain the infinite. That is to say, the whole transcendent divine nature is wholly present within the humanity of Jesus. Calvinism, on the other hand, was more cautious on this point. Without wishing to qualify the divinity of the Christ, Calvin did maintain that there is a sense in which the divine logos remained transcendent in relation to the man Jesus. This is what was disparagingly referred to as illud extra calvinisticum.

We need not concern ourselves with the technical details of this controversy. The broad point is that the more whole-hearted and unqualified affirmation of the transcendence of God in Calvinism enabled it to sustain a social and cultural revolution in a way that Lutherism could not.

In more recent times, it was the renewed, uncompromising emphasis on the transcendence of God in the theology of Karl Barth which provided the Christian element in the political left of Europe with some kind of ideological alternative to the dreary dogmatics of dialectical materialism.

Ludwig Feuerbach was not only ill-served by the inadequate science he had inherited, with its doctrine of the species as the given ultimates of nature. He was also ill-served by the inadequate theology which he inherited. Atheist though he was, he remained in a curious way an orthodox Lutheran all his life. He regarded Lutheran theology as the only really faithful interpretation of the Christian tradition. The seeds of his unqualified identification of divinity and humanity were already contained in Lutheran Christology.

In his elimination of the transcendent reference in religion, he did not, as he thought to do, liberate man to become himself. Instead, he absolutized human self-understanding at a particular stage in its development. This has been the tragedy of subsequent humanism.

The tendency of these considerations (one could hardly claim that they amount to a conclusive argument) is to suggest that man realizes his humanity in free cultural creativity not only in the manner in which he relates to nature and society, but even more in the way he relates to the ‘beyond’ of his world. Theology is the study of how man relates to this ‘beyond’.

I do not think that Feuerbach has succeeded in reducing theology to anthropology. He has shown, however, that neither discipline can any longer be pursued without the other.

Notes

1. Eugene Kamenka The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, p. viii.

2. The Essence of Christianity, tr. Marian Evans, John Chapman, 1854, pp. 13-14.

3. Op. cit., p. 25.

4. Loc. cit.

5. Op. cit., pp. 29-30.

6. Op. cit., p. 31.

7. Matthew 5, 23-4.

8. Op. cit., p. 29, n.

9. Op. cit., p. 81.

10. His argument at this point anticipates to a remarkable degree the well-known Wisdom/Flew argument about the God who dies the death of a thousand qualifications. See, for example, New Essays in Philosophical Theology, ed. A. Flew and A. MacIntyre, S. C. M., 1955, p. 96ff.

11. Op. cit., p. 15.

12. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, tr. Manfred H. Vogel, Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis, 1966, p. 29.

13. Sämtliche Werke, ed. W. Bolin u. Friedrich Jodl, Frommann Verlag Gunther Holzboog 1903-1911, Second Edition (1960) Vol. 8, p. 26.

14. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, p. 53.

15. Op. cit., pp. 66ff.

16. The Essence of Christianity, p. 48.