SOURCE: Bennett, Charles A. “Symbolical Theories: Feuerbach.” In The Dilemma of Religious Knowledge, edited by William Ernest Hocking, pp. 27-48. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931.

[In the following excerpt, Bennett explicates Feuerbach's interpretation of religion, particularly his contention that the infinite should be associated with humanity as opposed to God, and comments on the modernity of this view as well as its limitations.]

Let me resume in a few words the statement of our problem as we have now reached it. Religion deals with the supernatural, which is claimed to be an objective reality; the supernatural, however, is mysterious,—it constitutes a sort of surd, a nonrational factor in experience. The human intellect seems beaten back in its effort to construe the meaning of divine things. Religion does not lack certainty: it is sure of God, sure of salvation, sure of immortality; yet when it tries to give a coherent interpretation of these things it has to confess failure. It lacks perfect expression or adequate proof. Faith goes beyond the evidence: it is prophecy or divination; it is a laying hold of truth in advance of demonstration. Yet, as “believing what you can't prove” seems an irrational procedure, faith is constantly seeking for rational support, and failing to find it. Thus the life of faith tends to oscillate between a dumb intuition and an articulate expression in neither of which the mind can rest.

Whichever way we look at the situation, a doubt arises. Here is religion, claiming insight, yet unable to put that insight into words—assured of some truth, yet of truth that turns out to be ineffable. Perhaps, then, religion is the victim of an illusion: perhaps “there is nothing there, after all.” Religion esteems its truth to be all-important, and we are reluctant to discard that estimate. But is there any valuable difference between ineffable truth and no truth? The issue becomes clear: Is the so-called knowledge of religion really entitled to the name?

There is one fairly promising way out of the difficulty. It has long had its advocates, and it commands in recent years a widening attention. For we have become increasingly alive to the problems of language as we pass from one sphere of experience to another. Religion is forced to employ the speech of common day; and if this language fails to fit, a stiff literalism in judging it must be fatal to understanding. If we cannot substantiate the statements of religion, perhaps that is because we take them in the wrong sense. If religion denies that it means what it says, that may be because it does not succeed in saying what it means. This intimates the policy of the type of theory I have in mind. It contends that the utterances of religion are to be taken, not as literal statements, but as figurative or poetic renderings of some underlying philosophical truth. Religious knowledge, in a word, is symbolical.

In advance of any detailed examination, this theory sounds persuasive. Even to a superficial regard it is clear that there is much metaphor and poetry mixed in with religious doctrine. One can hardly maintain that the story of the Garden of Eden, for example, is intended as sober historical fact, or that the doctrines of Heaven and Hell are meant to embody contributions to cosmic geography. The whole Christian story of the Fall and Salvation of Man is to be taken less as historical narrative than as a dramatic account of the soul and its destiny. I do not wish to suggest for a moment that religion can dispense with the historical; but clearly the historical element is valued not so much for itself as for what it signifies. Not the story, but the meaning of the story, is what counts.

There are always those who think that when they have shown—as can so easily be shown—that religion is poor science or poor history, they have somehow discredited religion. And to take all the language of religion literally would force us to agree with them. But if we realize that the symbol is transitory while the thing symbolized is permanent, we shall avoid the mistake of thinking that religion is refuted, or so much as touched, by such facile criticism. We cannot reach the position of religion, much less attack it, until we understand the use of the symbols it employs. We can be sure, therefore, that a theory which would explain religious language as through-and-through symbolic would lead us, for a distance, at least, in the right direction. If such a theory proves to be in error, it will be erring on the right side.

To say that religion speaks darkly, through figures or symbols, does not of itself afford much relief to the dilemma of religious knowledge. One must be endowed with the “ear to hear”; that is, he must have the key to the interpretation of the myth or parable. The symbolical theories we are about to consider profess to supply such a key, and thereby to bring religious assertions within the region of verifiable or testable statement. As our first representative exponent of this theory, it will be of advantage in many ways to choose a writer somewhat removed in time from the field of present controversy. I choose for this purpose the German philosopher, Feuerbach, who is not often referred to in this connection. I do this partly because his ideas have an intrinsic importance of their own, partly because, although the work on which my account is based, his Das Wesen des Christenthums, appeared as long ago as 1841, he anticipates in an interesting way many tendencies in contemporary thought about religion.

In any general classification Feuerbach's teaching would be described as positivist or humanist. We must therefore begin with his account of human nature. The defining characteristic of man is self-consciousness. Man differs from the animals in that he distinguishes himself from nature and from other animal species. He knows himself as man. We might express this by saying that man is the only species, so far as we know, that has produced sciences—biology, anthropology, and so forth—which have the nature of the species as their subject matter. Birds, presumably, do not have a system of ornithology, and dogs are innocent of cynology.

This self-consciousness means that any given man is a twofold being: he is at once this particular man and man universal. He is limited by his special position in place and time, and by his individual peculiarities, but he is unlimited in that he is aware of, and can express, his humanity. The capacity for self-transcendence appears conspicuously in the ideal of disinterested knowledge (or science) on the one hand, and in the ideal of disinterested conduct (or morality) on the other. The aim of science is the dispassionate, impersonal acknowledgment of fact. The seeker after truth must try to divest himself of his personal desires and emotions; he must discount the influence of whatever is peculiar to his private perspective. To say, “This is true,” is to say, “Any other mind in my position would give the same report”; it is to claim to represent the ideal human observer. In the same way, the moral man is he who renounces all selfish pursuits and narrow ends, and is moved to action by the sheer claim of the ideal—justice or truthfulness, or whatever it may be. He is the man of principle, the impartial man. He surveys the issues of conduct not merely through his own eyes, but through the eyes of all humanity.

So far we are on ground that Kant and Hegel have made familiar. But now Feuerbach introduces a doctrine peculiar to himself. We have said that the individual man is aware of his finite limits. He must therefore be more than finite, for, according to the Hegelian principle, accepted by Feuerbach, he who recognizes a limit is already in reflection beyond it. What does this imply? The Hegelian answers: It implies that man is part of an Infinite Being. Feuerbach will have none of this. He says it implies that man is part of Humanity, that the stirrings of the so-called Infinite in him are the stirrings of Humanity. The idea that beyond Humanity there is anything is an illusion. What theology and philosophy mistake for the Infinite or the Absolute is nothing but man's “latent nature.”

His reasons for this conclusion are what concerns us here, for it is on this that his entire doctrine rests. In brief, his position depends on what has always been the stronghold of subjective idealism.

Man [he writes] cannot get beyond his true nature. He may indeed by means of the imagination conceive individuals of a so-called higher kind, but he can never get loose from his species, his nature. … A being's understanding is its sphere of vision. As far as thou seest, so far extends thy nature; and conversely.¹

This idea can be illustrated on every hand. We perceive in any object only what interest and education enable us to discern there. To the geologist the rock masses tell a story; to others they are merely nature's débris. The callous man is blind to suffering, and, while we may deplore his lack of sensibility, we can hardly blame him for it, for it is unreasonable to expect him to transcend his own insight, feeble though that may be. From a naturally dull or untrained ear are concealed those beauties of music that are evident to a cultivated musical taste. In general we may say that the mind can know only what its own nature reveals. The unknown must be reduced to terms of the known before it can be assimilated. The mind could never know anything that was incommensurate with its native powers. We know what we are.

From this Feuerbach draws the astounding conclusion that we know only what we are: that the so-called objective world is merely the mind externalized. In his own words, “The object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively.”² I say astounding, because the inference runs thus: We know with idea, therefore we can know only idea. This is a plain non sequitur. The facts might be exactly as Feuerbach describes them, yet it might still be true that ideas reach reality and that we can have valid knowledge of that which is other than idea. If he fails to see this, it is, I believe, because he entertains an erroneous notion of the function of an idea: he is haunted by a ghost which philosophy has not yet succeeded in laying. Ideas, he seems to think, interpose a limiting medium between the mind and its object: they are, as it were, colored glasses which prevent us from seeing the object as it is in itself. Yet, on the other hand, we cannot know without ideas; the mind, in terms of our figure, cannot remove its colored glasses. Hence, from Feuerbach's point of view, the ambition to know the object “as it really is in itself” implies mental suicide—the self-contradictory ideal of knowing the object by destroying the means of knowing. But if we assume, as we must assume, that the mind from the outset of its career is in direct contact with reality, we can avoid Feuerbach's subjectivism.

This is a subjectivism of Humanity, of man universal, of the species, and not of the individual man. The limits of the individual are not final: he can and does transcend them, as we have seen, in science, in philosophy, and in the moral and aesthetic judgments. He can do this because he belongs to Humanity, and the powers of Human Nature are his. But Humanity cannot transcend itself. Beyond Humanity we cannot go. Humanity is the Absolute. To talk of God, the Infinite, the Most Perfect, is not to refer to some superhuman being, but merely to exhibit man's farthest reach, his idea of Humanity's best.

That which is to man the self-existent, the highest being, to which he can conceive nothing higher—that is to him the Divine Being. … If God were an object to the bird, he would be a winged being: the bird knows nothing higher, nothing more blissful, than the winged condition. … Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God; so much worth as a man has, so much and no more has his God. Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. … There is no other essence which man can think, dream of, imagine, feel, believe in, wish for, love and adore as the absolute, than the essence of human nature itself.³

We are thus introduced to Feuerbach's interpretation of religion and of the objects with which religion deals. Let me first quote a few passages to present the theory in general terms, and then go on to some of the ways in which he works it out in detail.

The essence of religion is the immediate, involuntary, unconscious contemplation of the human nature as another, a distinct nature. … Religion is the relation of man to his own nature, … but to his nature not recognized as his own, but regarded as another nature, separate, nay contradistinguished from his own. … The contemplation of the human nature, a separately existent nature, is, however, in the original conception of religion an involuntary, childlike, simple act of the mind. … Religion is a dream, in which our own conceptions and emotions appear to us as separate existences, beings out of ourselves. The religious mind does not distinguish between subjective and objective—it has no doubts: it has the faculty not of discerning other things than itself, but of seeing its own conceptions out of itself as distinct beings.⁴

Feuerbach's undertaking, then, is to reduce “the supermundane, supernatural, and superhuman nature of God to the elements of human nature as its fundamental elements.”⁵ It will be sufficient for our purpose if we show how he deals with a group of problems which involve the conception of divine omnipotence. These are Prayer, Providence, and Creation.

Prayer is usually thought to be the confident appeal to the omnipotent will of God. But look closer, says Feuerbach. To pray is to be so absorbed in a passionate intensity of aspiration that all thought of the external world of man and nature is excluded. Prayer does not look for its objects to be attained by reliance on natural causes, nor is it aware of possible frustration. The deepest wishes of the heart are to succeed by their own unconditional affirmation. The man who prays is dominated by the

certainty that the power of the heart is greater than the power of Nature, that the heart's need is absolute necessity, the fate of the world. … The omnipotence to which man turns in prayer is nothing but the Omnipotence of Goodness, which, for the sake of the salvation of man, makes the impossible possible;—is, in truth nothing but the omnipotence of feeling which … wills that there be nothing else but feeling, nothing that contradicts the heart. … Omnipotence is the power before which no law, no external condition avails or subsists; but this power is the emotional nature, which feels every determination, every law, to be a limit, a restraint, and for that reason dismisses it. … In prayer man turns to the Omnipotence of Goodness;—which simply means, that in prayer man adores his own heart, regards his own feelings as absolute.⁶

“Belief in Providence is belief in a power to which all things stand at command to be used according to its pleasure, in opposition to which all the power of reality is nothing.”⁷ The proof of Providence is miracle. In miracle the operation of natural law is suspended or abolished: an event is brought about by the mere exercise of the divine will. But the acts we attribute to Providence are, says Feuerbach, acts performed exclusively for the sake of man. “We nowhere read that God, for the sake of brutes, became a brute, … or that God ever performed a miracle for the sake of animals or plants.” Yet what is this but to assert the absolute efficacy of human ideals, the supreme power of human values?

Faith in Providence is faith in one's own worth, the faith of man in himself. … God concerns himself about me; he has in view my happiness, my salvation; he wills that I shall be blest, but that is my will also. … Thus God's love for me is nothing else than my self-love deified. When I believe in Providence, in what do I believe but in the divine reality and significance of my own being?⁸

In dealing with the problem of Creation you can say either that God created the world out of something or that he created it out of nothing. If he created it out of something, then he was limited by that something, as the artist by the medium he works in, and is not omnipotent. Religion, then, prefers to say he created it out of nothing. If we take that as a literal account of how the world came to be, then we have a mystery and not an explanation. Our experience contains no analogies to such a process. We may, however, read a different meaning into this doctrine of Creation. If the world was created by divine fiat, then there was a time when the world was not, and there may come a time when the world will pass away. On this showing, the world would have no necessary existence: it would depend on God's will: its ultimate power could be denied.

When thou sayest the world was made out of nothing, thou conceivest the world itself as nothing, thou clearest away from thy head all the limits to thy imagination, to thy feelings, to thy will. … In the inmost depths of thy soul thou wouldst rather there were no world, for where the world is there is matter, … limitation, and necessity. Nevertheless there is a world, there is matter. How dost thou escape from the dilemma of this contradiction? How dost thou expel the world from thy consciousness, that it may not disturb thee in the beatitude of thy unlimited soul? Only by making the world itself a product of will, by giving it an arbitrary existence always hovering between existence and nonexistence, always awaiting its annihilation.⁹

Once again we reach the position that divine omnipotence is simply the omnipotence of the human will. Following the same line of thought Feuerbach concludes that the God of religion is nothing but human nature objectified and deified.

He attempts to reinforce this conclusion by showing that the persistent problems about God's nature arise from a failure to perceive the identity of the divine with the human. If the supernatural is intractable to reason, as we maintained in our first chapter, that is because theology and philosophy have attributed to God a distinct and separate existence from man.¹⁰

If it seems absurd to suggest that religion can dispense with the belief in an independent god, Feuerbach asks us to examine what we mean by independence. The term, he thinks, necessarily carries with it the idea of separate existence in space and time. “Real, sensational existence is that which is not dependent on my own mental spontaneity or activity, but by which I am involuntarily affected, which is when I am not, when I do not think of it or feel it. The existence of God must therefore be in space. …”¹¹ Theology may choose between two ways of meeting this problem. It may say that God exists spiritually. This means that he is not perceived by the senses, but is to be spiritually discerned. But spiritual discernment is not a universal endowment, and it is intermittent in operation. To assign to God a spiritual existence is merely an ambiguous way of saying that he exists only in the feelings and aspirations of the human mind. On the other hand, theology may attribute to God

a sensational existence, to which however all the conditions of sensational existence are wanting:—consequently an existence at once sensational and not sensational, an existence which contradicts the idea of the sensational, or only a vague existence in general, which is fundamentally a sensational one, but which, in order that this may not become evident, is divested of all the predicates of a real sensational existence. But such an “existence in general” is self-contradictory.¹²

Most of us, I think, must have felt the sting of the problem which Feuerbach is attacking. On the one hand, a god who is a merely spiritual being is not wholly convincing: he lacks that quality of literalness, known to us in sense experience, which seems necessary to reality in its full meaning. It would be much easier to believe in a god who heard or spoke or saw, and skepticism would be rarer if the heavens were not always silent. There are times when we crave an idol to worship. Yet an idol, after all, is only an idol. A god with a body, who existed in space and time, would be subject to all the limitations of finitude, and would satisfy as little as the purely spiritual being. Thus we are caught upon the horns of a dilemma. God must be such that his existence can be empirically verified, yet, paradoxically, such a god, if we found him, would not be the God we seek. Feuerbach's escape from the dilemma is perhaps too facile. Dismiss the idea of the transcendent deity, he says, as illusory; realize that God is wholly immanent, and your problem will disappear. You will cease to talk of man's relation to an independent divinity: you will be content to recognize the divinity of man.

We need not follow Feuerbach in his elaboration of the contradictions in religious thought. He gives an extraordinarily searching account of these traditional perplexities, but we have gone far enough to perceive the general outlines of his interpretation of religion. His answer to our original question now becomes clear. Religion conveys no insight into an invisible supernatural reality, for there is no such reality. What we may learn from it is not truth about God, but truth about man. In religion the feelings, the secret desires and aspirations, the latent energies of men, are exposed to view. God, Creation, Miracle, Salvation, Immortality, are imaginative projections of human longings and human self-confidence. Religion is a kind of earnest poetry. Its metaphors and symbols are not to be taken literally. So to take them is the error of theology. A sound philosophy will avoid this mistake and will disengage the element of truth in religious doctrine from the symbolical form in which it is presented.

Our first thought, I suppose, as we survey this theory, is that religion will repudiate any such account of its meaning. For it is thus reduced to illusion—beneficent illusion in many respects, if you like, but still illusion. We thought we were worshiping God; it turns out that we were really worshiping man. We thought that we had found a way out into the divine; it seems that we had only been exploring the depths of the soul. It is idle for Feuerbach to repeat that religion is naïve and does not make the distinction between symbol and thing symbolized which later reflection imposes. Now that Feuerbach has written his work and exposed the illusion, religion cannot return to the stage of intellectual innocence. His, in short, is one of those unfortunate theories which are in danger of being falsified as soon as they become public property. The Hedonist doctrine that pleasure is the only object of desire is an example of what I mean. Hedonism may have been true as an account of human motive until it was formulated, but, after that, anyone who is told that the law of his being is to seek pleasure may falsify the law and assert his freedom by choosing something other than pleasure as his goal. The chief value of Hedonism is that it gives us an opportunity to avoid being pleasure seekers. Schopenhauer's doctrine that men are the deluded victims of a blind Cosmic Will is another example. Schopenhauer, at least, has seen through Nature's trickery and need no longer be deceived. And in letting the cat out of the bag he has enlightened the rest of us. We can now take steps to free ourselves from the tyranny of this monstrous Will. And so with Feuerbach. After reading him, we shall not again surrender to the illusion of religion. Yet that surely is an unsatisfactory explanation of religion which explains religion away, an unimpressive science which ends by annihilating its own subject matter.

If this objection seems unconvincing because it does not deal with Feuerbach's analysis on its own merits, let us essay a slightly different line of attack. His account of religion suffers from the fact that it is the account of one who is observing, not of one who is experiencing. If instead of trying to report what it looks like to be religious, we try to report what it feels like, we shall find confirmation of our original assertion that religion cannot dispense with the claim to be in touch with a divine reality other than man. Let me briefly illustrate what I mean. Prayer, says Feuerbach, is the unrestrained expression of human desire, the articulate utterance of the deepest longings of a soul forgetful of anything that might impede or frustrate them. Prayer, that is, is purely exclamatory. This seems to me to omit what is essential. For I can distinguish between a sigh, let us say, and a prayer, and the difference is this, that prayer, whether as worship or petition, expects to be heard. It is directed to another intelligence. Cancel that external reference and what you have left is not prayer. It is mere lyricism seeking and finding automatically its own relief.

Again, religion inspires loyalty, devotion, love toward the ideal. I do not see how one can entertain these sentiments toward an abstract ideal—which is all that Feuerbach will grant. I can make nothing of the notion of the expression of loyalty or love for its own sake. That is mere animal behavior. The essence of loyalty and love is the conviction that their tributes are accepted and valued by another being.

Finally, consider Feuerbach's statement that faith in divine omnipotence is nothing but faith in the power of man. Surely that misses completely the quality of religious optimism; for that power with which religion claims to be able to overcome the world is derivative, not original; its confidence and its victory are vicarious, made possible by reliance on a Supreme Power whose strength is made perfect in man's weakness. If Feuerbach were right, religion would be no more than a sublime and ridiculous attempt to sustain our courage by raising our voice.

The force of this criticism is perhaps concealed from Feuerbach by his use of certain conveniently ambiguous terms. I refer to expressions like, The divine nature is the human nature externalized, projected, taken objectively. They are ambiguous because they do not make clear whether the operation referred to is supposed to be done consciously or unconsciously; they are convenient because you can choose the meaning which suits the context of the moment. In any event, we are asked to believe that what takes place in religion is this: certain states of mind, such as joy, peace, confidence, ecstasy, by virtue of their quality and effects, come to be called divine. “Feeling is pronounced to be religious simply because it is feeling. … But is not feeling thereby declared to be itself the absolute, the divine? If feeling in itself is good, religious, i.e. holy, divine, has not feeling its God in itself?”¹³ The state of mind is then referred to a divine being as its object of cause. It is externalized and deified. Whether the process is conscious or unconscious need not here concern us. Our difficulty turns on the conception of a mere state of mind, that is, of a mental event which in the first instance has no reference to anything beyond itself. Frankly, there is no such thing. Surely we have listened to the teaching of philosophical idealism to little purpose if we have not learned that the mind is not a thing, but rather a way of referring to or dealing with things. Every state of mind points beyond itself: an idea is an idea of something, an attitude is an attitude toward something, a feeling is a feeling about something. A simple illustration may help to make this clear. Suppose you want to feel cheerful, how do you go about it? Surely not by trying to induce that feeling by any of the now popular methods of autosuggestion. Those will not bring you the real thing. If you recover cheerfulness through drink or drugs or companionship or books, that is because these things open up to you features of the world which you had ignored or forgotten. You regain cheerfulness by discovering something to be cheerful about. And there is no other way. If it should turn out that there is nothing whatever in life to be cheerful about, then cheerfulness will be ever beyond us. Apply this to the feelings called religious; to the states of mind which Feuerbach says we label divine. It then becomes clear that there can be no religious feeling unless there is something to feel religious about: if there is a God then certain feelings may be called divine—not otherwise. Thus I believe that Feuerbach has exactly reversed the true order. He says we begin with feeling, find it divine, and call in God to explain it. I hold that we begin with the experience of God and then find the experience divine.

A little while ago I said that the religious man would naturally repudiate any suggestion that his belief rested on mistaking the human for the divine. No one likes to be told that his most cherished convictions are illusory. Yet there is something more at stake here than offended vanity, and I wish to consider some of the consequences that follow from confronting religion with Feuerbach's interpretation of its meaning. His position is essentially the same as that of Positivism. Religion is the childhood of the human mind. The child lives in a world of imagination; so does religion. The child thinks that all its desires will be gratified; so does religion. In matters of belief and conduct the child is dependent on external aid and support; so is religion. Growth in maturity means learning to distinguish between pictures and realities, between fancies and facts; it means also learning the difficult art of self-reliance. It is this enlightenment of maturity which systems like those of Feuerbach offer to religion. Guided by philosophy, religion is to discover its true nature. My question is, What becomes of religion in the process?

The only possible answer would seem to be this: that religion dies of disillusionment. Every advance in science, in philosophy, in general culture, means so much ground lost for religion. A progressively vanishing factor in human affairs, its destiny is that it shall be superseded by a condition of life in which man, assured of self-knowledge and relying on his own powers, will move confidently in a world that has been cleared of illusion. If it survive, it will be only as a wistful memory of lost innocence and lost joys; its function will be that of a dream which invests the sober landscape of experience with an ancient glamor and to whose influence we shall surrender only in hours of forgetfulness or fatigue.

Yet it is conceivable that we might continue to think of religion as the stage of childhood in the life of the mind and still assign to it something more than a temporary value. Feuerbach, I think, is hardly willing to admit that it will ever wholly outlive its usefulness, and certainly those writers today whose thought has a close affinity with his dwell insistently on the moral and spiritual values of religion even after its metaphysical pretensions have been exposed. Christianity has made us familiar with the idea of the likeness between religion and the mind of the child. Candor and simplicity are characteristic of the child's manner of regard, and these are counted as virtues, for if his world lacks complexity it also lacks the confusion of the more developed outlook. Religion too is naïve: its vision is relatively untroubled and its speech unrhetorical. This is as it should be. When man faces the ultimate in any form—be it danger or death or some moving revelation of truth or beauty—he is forced back on simple thought and simple language. And in the presence of God learning and nice discrimination and an elegant style are out of place. Now to become as a little child in this sense is generally held to be an injunction that it is both possible and desirable to carry out. The contemplation of nature, the enjoyment of art, the cultivation of mystical religion all make for a certain childlike simplification of vision, and they are all regarded as recurrent needs in the economy of the good life. The question that here concerns us is, How, in the case of religion, can one justify this retreat into immaturity, this apparent surrender of reason? Now if religion is the thing that Feuerbach says it is—a region of illusion and dream—then justification is impossible. Once we have outgrown dream and toys it is as discreditable to go back to them as it is to seek solace in drugs. If through enlightenment we have outgrown religion, then we should put it behind us for good.

Feuerbach says that the distinction between the child and the adult is this: the former sees figuratively what the latter sees literally. Let us draw the distinction in a different way. Let us say that the child sees something that the adult forgets or covers up with his accumulated knowledge. Then the attempt to recapture the child's vision would not be a cult of dreams for dreams' sake; it would be the search to recover truth which only the child's insight reveals. From this point of view, you could justify religion as a permanent and not merely a vanishing factor in human life. But you would then be regarding it as a source of genuine insight not otherwise attainable: it would be more than the vision of immaturity: it would have its own unique view of the world. But this function is just what Feuerbach denies to religion.

His theory then has to confront these alternatives: either you say that the destiny of religion is to pass away as human enlightenment advances—in which event we should talk not of the future of religion but of “the irreligion of the future”; or you say that religion is to remain with us as a perpetual source of moral and spiritual inspiration—and then you are forced to admit that religion possesses knowledge peculiar to itself.

This brief account of Feuerbach's teaching may serve to exhibit a fairly typical expression of the symbolical theory of religious knowledge. I say typical, because although Feuerbach is often inadequate or obscure,—particularly in his concept of Humanity,—yet he permits us to see both the characteristic design and the characteristic strength and weakness of the theory. Moreover, one cannot fail to notice how modern are many of the ideas which dominate his work. His humanism, his emphasis on divine immanence, his subjectivism, his conception of religion as allied to poetry rather than to science or philosophy, his contention that religion is preoccupied with value and not with existence—all these represent tendencies which powerfully affect our thinking today.

Notes

1. The Meaning of Christianity, trans. Marian Evans, pp. 11, 8.

2. Ibid., p. 12.

3. Ibid., pp. 17, 12, 270.

4. Ibid., pp. 213, 197, 204.

5. Ibid., p. 184.

6. Ibid., pp. 123, 125.

7. Ibid., p. 103.

8. Ibid., pp. 104, 105.

9. Ibid., pp. 109, 110.

10. Ibid., p. 214.

11. Ibid., p. 200.

12. Ibid., p. 200.

13. Ibid., p. 10.