SOURCE: Masterson, Patrick. “Feuerbach and the Apotheosis of Man.” In Atheism and Alienation: A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism, pp. 63-78. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971.

[In the following excerpt, Masterson discusses the means by which Feuerbach, in his critique of religion, laid the groundwork for a contemporary, atheistic worldview.]

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) commenced his academic career as a student of Protestant theology at the University of Heidelberg. Subsequently he transferred to the University of Berlin where he became an enthusiastic disciple of Hegel whose lectures he regularly attended. Eventually, however, his personal reflections led him to discard both theology and Hegel's philosophy and to elaborate an explicitly atheistic philosophy of man involving a conscious transformation of the Hegelian viewpoint. As Karl Barth, whose own theological views developed in large measure as a reply to Feuerbach's philosophy, remarks: ‘having proceeded far beyond Hegel as well as Kant, Feuerbach belongs to the Berlin master's disciples who scented the theological residue in his teaching and stripped it off.’¹ He seeks to provide an anti-theological interpretation of religion which will establish, as the truth behind the appearance, that fundamentally religion believes in and worships not God but human nature conceived as in itself the divine or supreme perfection. Thus his chief work, The Essence of Christianity (1841), which immediately established his reputation as the most celebrated and discussed German philosopher of the decade, is divided into two parts. The first is a positive one exhibiting the true essence of religion, the second a negative one discrediting the claims of all theology. He conceived his task as one of showing that ‘the antithesis of divine and human is altogether illusory, that it is nothing else than the antithesis between the human nature in general and the human individual; that, consequently, the object and contents of the Christian religion are altogether human.’²

According to Feuerbach, the basis of religion must be sought in the essential difference between man and brute animals, for the latter have no religion. This difference is man's consciousness of himself not just as an individual but in his essential nature or as pertaining to a species. It is because his own specific nature can be an object of thought for man that he is in general capable of science, which is knowledge of species. Moreover, because his species or essential nature is an object of thought for man he can be said to transcend his individual limitations and thus attain to a consciousness of the infinite. The basis of religion in man's distinctive characteristic now becomes evident. In effect, religion, which is described generally as consciousness of the infinite, is to be understood as the consciousness which man has of his own infinite nature. Further, by implication, this consciousness of the infinite is ‘nothing else than the consciousness of the infinity of consciousness’.³ For it is in virtue of the unrestricted nature of his consciousness that man transcends the limitations and particularity of merely brute animal existence and can live in relation to his species, to his general, as distinguished from his individual, nature.

The proper constituent elements of the essential nature of man are the absolute self-authenticating attributes of reason, will and love. ‘That alone is true, perfect, divine, which exists for its own sake. But such is love, such is reason, such is will. Reason, Will, Love are not powers which man possesses, for he is nothing without them, he is what he is only by them; they are the constituent elements of his nature, which he neither has nor makes, the animating, determining, governing powers—divine absolute powers—to which he can oppose no resistance.’⁴ Whatever our individual shortcomings and limitations, we recognise reason, will and love as in themselves infinite unqualified perfections. They are characteristics which are ends in themselves. We think, will and love simply for the sake of reason, freedom of will, and love.

Each person as an individual human being recognises himself to be limited and recognises his dependence upon Nature. But in also recognising the infinity of the human species, as characterised by perfections which transcend man simply as an individual—namely, reason, will and love—he attains an object of absolute worth. ‘The absolute to man is his own nature.’⁵

However, a proper understanding of this infinity of his species is not directly attained by man. In fact he is prone to ascribe his own individual limitations to the species as such and to project the infinite perfection of his essence into an external object. In this way he comes to the ‘religious’ affirmation of God as infinite knowledge, will and love. Religion, in its pejorative sense, is man's earliest and indirect form of self-knowledge in which he contemplates his own nature as though extrinsic to himself and pertaining rather to a transcendent deity. Religion represents the naive childlike condition of humanity which must be transmuted by philosophy into an integral humanism.

Thus, for Feuerbach, the religious man is by definition the alienated man. The crowning perfections of his essential nature he mistakenly ascribes to God and, by contrast with this extrapolation, defines himself in terms of the merely individual, the incidental, the imperfect. Since the religious projection is essentially a transference of human properties to an illusory God, the richer the notion of God elaborated, the more man is impoverished and reduced to a miserable and servile condition. ‘Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. God is not what man is—man is not what God is. God is the infinite, man the finite being; God is perfect, man imperfect; God eternal, man temporal; God almighty, man weak; God holy, man sinful. God and man are extremes: God is the absolutely positive, the sum of all realities; man the absolutely negative, comprehending all negations.’⁶ This false antithesis must be resolved, not in the illusory way of Hegel's philosophy of spirit, but in a manner which will genuinely liberate man and reconcile him with his true reality.

The fundamental weakness of Hegel's philosophical approach is that he sought to eliminate human alienation and achieve a reconciliation of man and God through a theory which on reflection can be seen to be biased in favour of God at the expense of man. He thereby merely compounded the alienation under the appearance of resolving it. He advanced a theory which inverts the true relationship of subject and predicate by affirming a divine subject of certain perfections rather than predicating divinity of the perfections themselves. Thus he provides merely a speculative idealistic solution to a problem which, in fidelity to the human context, should be tackled concretely and empirically. He assimilates human consciousness to divine consciousness in such a way that man's consciousness of God is interpreted in terms of God's consciousness of Himself. This is simply a prolongation of and total capitulation to the religious illusion whereas what is required is its reversal and radical overthrow in a theory which interprets man's consciousness of God in terms of man's consciousness of himself. ‘Why then dost thou alienate man's consciousness from him, and make it the self-consciousness of a being distinct from man, of that which is an object to him? … Man's knowledge of God is God's knowledge of himself? What a divorcing and contradiction! The true statement is this: man's knowledge of God is man's knowledge of himself, of his own nature.’⁷

According to Feuerbach the key to the ultimate truth about man is a rigorous application of the principle that the real object and adequate basis of any meaning and value disclosed to human consciousness is human nature itself. It is because the nature of human consciousness is such as it is that objects appear to us, and affect us, as they do. An object of any form of human consciousness, e.g. feeling, sensibility, understanding, will, is always in its inner significance an objectification of human nature. ‘Thus the power of the object of feeling is the power of feeling itself; the power of the object of the intellect is the power of the intellect itself; the power of the object of the will is the power of the will itself.’⁸ We live in an irreducibly human milieu. Any concrete attempt to envisage an absolute order of meaning and value transcending our human context and resources is in its very exercise a fantasy and a self-defeating project.

Feuerbach's principle that the significance of an object of consciousness is to be understood in terms of its psychogenesis from human nature itself is extensively applied to achieve his aim of explaining the essence of religion and reducing all theology to anthropology. This programme of secularisation signalises the triumph of an uncompromising humanism of liberty which has haunted philosophical reflection like an unfulfilled promise ever since Descartes' fateful explorations into human subjectivity for the roots of meaning and value. To illustrate the form in which it eventually came to realisation in the philosophy of Feuerbach let us consider briefly some salient features of his critical analysis of religion and its correlative conception of man.

According to Feuerbach the object of religious consciousness is of central importance for disclosing the ultimate significance of human nature. For in religion consciousness intends the divine, that which is to be worshipped as the supreme perfection, and thus discloses, admittedly in an alienated form of awareness, the innermost core of the human reality. In the notion of God as object of religious consciousness we find a fantasy expression of man's ideal of human excellence. Through a progressive refinement and spiritual enrichment of the notion of God, the historical evolution of religion has worked towards the eventual disclosure of a truly fundamental conception of man. The evolution from the mere personification of natural forces in nature religions to a deity characterised by spiritual and ethical properties reflects the movement of human development from a state of savagery and wildness to one of culture. However, even the most developed form of religion remains subject to the inevitable illusion of religious consciousness in general, namely, that it supposes its object to be a superhuman reality. Only when religion as such is itself made an object of philosophical reflection can a true understanding of its essence be achieved.

A vital step in attaining this understanding is a realisation that in religion what is really revered is not the alleged subject of divine attributes but rather the divinity of the attributes themselves. It is what a man judges to be the supreme perfection that he holds to be divine. Thus, for example, if the pagan gods were conceived in terms of sensual appetites, physical prowess, or heroic qualities, it was because these were the attributes which were held in the highest esteem as worthy of veneration. The viewpoint which pretends to exalt God's existence by asserting the inadequacy of any of our inevitably human predicates to represent Him as He is in Himself is equivalent to a subtle form of atheism. For all practical purposes a being devoid of qualities is effectively non-existent—a mere empty thought. ‘The denial of determinate, positive predicates concerning the divine nature is nothing else than a denial of religion, with, however, an appearance of religion in its favour, so that it is not recognised as a denial; it is simply a subtle, disguised atheism.’⁹

Moreover, the distinction between God as He is in Himself and God as He is for me is untenable. I can assert nothing whatsoever about God other than as He is for me. So far as I am concerned, what God is for me is all that God is in Himself. The distinction between an object as it is in itself and as it is for me has some point only when the object can really appear otherwise to me than it does. It is illusory transcendentalism to speak of a distinction between an object such as it must appear to me and such as it is in itself in a way which I could never know.

Further, what God is for me is totally conveyed in the predicates through which I conceive Him as supreme perfection. There is no valid basis for the supposition that the affirmation of the existence of a divine subject is somehow more certain and less anthropomorphic than the predicates which describe Him. If one doubts the objective validity of the predicates attributed to a divine subject one must also doubt the objectivity of the subject of these predicates. If the predicates in question such as love, goodness, personality, etc., are anthropomorphisms, merely human ways of envisaging the divine, so also is the affirmation of the existence of their divine subject merely an anthropomorphic way of envisaging reality. Thus, for example, how could one be sure that the affirmation of the existence of God is not simply a limitation or perversion of the human mode of conception which would be eliminated in a more enlightened form of consciousness?¹⁰

Hence, in our consideration of religion and its divine object we should be guided by the principle that ‘what the subject is lies only in the predicate; the predicate is the truth of the subject—the subject only the personified, existing predicate, the predicate conceived as existing.’¹¹ This principle enables us to achieve a proper understanding of religion and a clearer insight into the fact that the divine attributes have their basis exclusively in human nature. The God of religion will then be seen to be an extrapolation of the essential attributes of human nature regarded as absolute truth. We will, moreover, rid ourselves effectively of all the deceptions and mystifications of theology. For, whereas religion embodies merely a pre-reflective projection of human attributes onto an illusory divine being, theology compounds this alienation by taking the transcendent divine subject onto whom the human attributes have been projected as the absolute and veridical starting point of its reflections.¹² Such theological illusion and its consequences will be avoided when we appreciate that the divine subject is reducible to its defining attributes and that these are projections of specifically human qualities.

The mystery of religion is that man projects his innermost subjectivity into objectivity and converts the resulting image into a transcendent subject or God. In the more developed forms of religion, and notably in Christianity, this God is portrayed in richly personal and ethical categories. The detached metaphysical conception of the divine being as supreme intelligence provides merely the speculative underpinning for the essentially affective attributes of the God of religion such as moral Lawgiver and loving Father. It is to the affective exigencies of concrete human subjectivity for moral rectitude and salvific reconciliation, rather than to the demands of disinterested rational reflection, that God as an object of religious consciousness properly corresponds. Hence, notwithstanding the efforts of speculative theology to obscure the issue, the God of religion is necessarily anthropomorphic. For only as strictly correlative to these existential dimensions of human subjectivity is God genuinely relevant to religious consciousness. Only a specifically human God, a God not wholly other than man but rather sharing with him a common nature and common properties, could be of interest to specifically human concerns. ‘In religion man seeks contentment; religion is his highest good. But how could he find consolation and peace in God if God were an essentially different being? … If his nature is different from mine, his peace is essentially different,—it is no peace for me.’¹³

According to Feuerbach, Christianity, as distinct from misleading theological versions of it, portrays God through specifically human predicates. Moreover, it can be transformed into a true philosophy of man once it has been purified of a) the religious illusion of ascribing divinity primarily to a supposed subject rather than to the predicated perfections, and b) the closely related error of affirming the infinity of the species only in the alienated form of a divine infinite individual because of a false identification of species and individual.

Thus, for example, the Christian mystery of the Incarnation speaks to man of God as unselfish love for man. Its basic elements are God and love. What is truly worshipful in this mystery is not a divine subject who loves but rather the absolute ‘divine’ perfection of unselfish love itself. ‘What then is the true unfalsified import of the Incarnation but absolute, pure love, without adjunct, without a distinction between divine and human love? For though there is also a self-interested love among men, still the true human love, which is alone worthy of this name, is that which impels sacrifice of self to another. Who then is our Saviour and Redeemer? God or Love? Love; for God as God has not saved us, but Love, which transcends the difference between the divine and human personality.’¹⁴

Feuerbach provides a similar reductive transformation of other features of Christian belief. For example, he describes the mystery of the Trinity as revealing in an alienated religious way the absolute or divine character of self-consciousness. It is also seen as illustrating the truth that adequate self-consciousness is mediated only through the I-Thou relationship of community life. ‘Participated life is alone true, self-satisfying, divine life:—this simple thought, this truth, natural, immanent in man, is the secret, the supernatural mystery of the Trinity.’¹⁵

Likewise he argues that the divine power of language as a fundamental principle of human perfection and liberation is intimated in the theme of the Word of God. The worship of the Word of God is an indirect acknowledgement of the divine power of human language as it becomes an object to man in the sphere of religion.¹⁶ In a similar manner he claims that the doctrine of the creation of the world through the second Person depicts in a religious way the truth that man enters into a meaningful ‘world-building’ relationship with his natural environment only through the cultural mediation of his fellow-man. It depicts the supreme significance of inter-subjectivity as a source of human perfection. ‘The ego then, attains to consciousness of the world through consciousness of the thou. Thus man is the God of man. … In isolation human power is limited, in combination it is infinite.’¹⁷

It is unnecessary to dwell upon the details of Feuerbach's analysis of these and other features of Christian belief. The central theme which pervades the entire analysis is sufficiently clear, namely, that religion is essentially an alienated form of self-awareness, an illusion which must be overcome by tracing it back to its true source and object—the absolute nature of man. God is merely the objectification of human subjectivity released from incidental individual limitations. Religion acknowledges the species properties of man, his essential humanity, but mistakenly converts them into a divine being distinct from man. The inner truth of faith in God is man's faith in the infinitude and absolute freedom of his own nature. The anthropological reduction of religion brings this truth to the forefront of human consciousness and rescues man from his religious self-alienation. Thus in a concluding appraisal of his achievement Feuerbach observes: ‘We have reduced the supermundane, supernatural, and superhuman nature of God to the elements of human nature as its fundamental elements. Our process of analysis has brought us again to the position with which we set out. The beginning, middle and end of religion is MAN.’¹⁸

Let us now consider in broad outline the conception of man which emerges from this transformation of religion and theology into anthropology. According to Feuerbach, having dispelled belief in God as the divine subject of infinite self-authenticating perfections, we are able to bring these perfections ‘down to earth’ into their basic human setting. The true human reality is the species, the human race, collective man—not idealised and projected as a divine individual—but in its concrete life as a historically evolving ensemble, of which each individual man, as individual, is but a transitory moment.

The true reconciliation of finite and infinite is not an abstract reconciliation of man with the merely thought perfection of an absolute divine subject. It is rather a social, lived reconciliation of individual limited man with the absolute perfection of the human species. The individual attains an absolute and guaranteed significance through participation in the collective perfection of the species whose unlimited virtuality transcends the resources of the mere individual.

All divine attributes, all the attributes which make God God, are attributes of the species—attributes which in the individual are limited, but the limits of which are abolished in the essence of the species, and even in its existence, in so far as it has its complete existence only in all men taken together. My knowledge, my will, is limited; but my limit is not the limit of another man, to say nothing of mankind; what is difficult to me is easy to another; what is impossible, inconceivable, to one age, is to the coming age conceivable and possible. My life is bound to a limited time; not so the life of humanity.¹⁹

Thus, in conscious opposition to the idealist tradition, Feuerbach proposes what he calls a ‘materialist’ or ‘realist’ resolution of the problem of human alienation. He tells us that he is an idealist only in the ethical and practical sense that he firmly believes we participate in the assured eventual reality of the triumph and reign of absolute values such as truth, freedom, justice and love. But as regards the form in which, and the means whereby, the absolute reconciliation of man with his true reality is to be accomplished he is unequivocally and exclusively committed to a ‘this worldly’ naturalistic humanism. The reconciliation takes the form of each man's participation in the progressive constitution of the infinite perfection of humanity as a concrete and complex totality. This goal is achieved through the communal historical development of material, biological, ethical and cultural relationships.

Feuerbach's account of man as a species being is advanced as a corrective to philosophical individualism generally and to the individualism of religion in particular. For he claims that in religion, particularly the Christian religion, each man supposes himself to attain his essential perfection by himself alone through his personal contemplative relationship with a divine individual who is invested with all the universal perfection of the species. Because of this identification of the perfection of the human species with a divine individual, historical humanity is sacrificed to a transcendental illusion and the individual is estranged from his only effective context of fulfilment. Feuerbach's doctrine that essentially each man is not an individual but a species being—a being who enters into his humanity only in virtue of his mutually sustaining relationships with other men—is intended to point the way towards a practical accomplishment of human fulfilment, as distinct from the illusory salvation of religious individualism.²⁰

According to Feuerbach this absolute reality of man as inter-subjectivity, as coming to his truth in the community of the species, is mediated primarily, not through the abstract domain of thought, but through the lived biological domain of sexuality. The estrangement and limitation of the individual as such vis-à-vis the species is most clearly experienced through the awareness of sexual differentiation. Man and woman are reciprocally dependent upon their mutual complementarity for the achievement of their specific reality. Only man and woman together first constitute the true man. Taken together they are the prototype of humanity. For their union is the source of multiplicity, the source of other men, the primary embodiment of humanity.

From within this difference of sex evolves the self-sufficient infinite perfection of love which transcends the limitations of individuals and branches out in different dimensions to bring about the self-consciousness of the species as a complex community of hierarchically ordered interpersonal relationships.²¹ Through this structured articulation of love we come to a developed awareness that our humanity is grounded in our lived historical relationships with our fellow men. ‘In another I first have the consciousness of humanity; through him I first learn, I first feel, that I am a man: in my love for him it is first clear to me that he belongs to me and I to him, that we two cannot be without each other, that only community constitutes humanity.’²² Hence, the reconciliation of man with the absolute, i.e. with the sacred reality of his species, is achieved not through interior communion with a religious projection of the species in the form of a divine infinite individual but through the loving solidarity of men in their secular life. Thus ‘there is a natural reconciliation. My fellow-man is per se the mediator between me and the sacred reality of the species. Homo homini Deus est.’²³

If one refuses to characterise as atheism any view which affirms the reality of an absolute in any form whatsoever, and if one is prepared to count as religion reverential commitment to an absolute howsoever conceived, then there are grounds for asserting that Feuerbach's philosophy involves neither atheism nor a rejection of religion. For he affirms the infinite perfection of the human species as an absolute worthy of unqualified reverence. Further, there are various texts which suggest that he is willing to be understood as retaining the affirmation of God and religion in this special sense. For example, he observes that even eating and drinking are to be conceived as religious activities which should put us gratefully in mind of man the divine reality who satisfies our needs.²⁴

However, this somewhat elastic conception of divine reality and religion tends to obscure rather than clarify the discussion of the problem of God. Moreover, to lend any special significance to this feature of Feuerbach's thought might deflect attention from his main thesis, namely, an explicit and total rejection of God and religion as usually understood, and an unqualified denial of any trans-human absolute principle of meaning and value such as Hegel's absolute spirit.

Perhaps the most significant feature of Feuerbach's philosophy is that, after the various attempts of Descartes, Kant and Hegel to combine the immanentism of the epistemological tradition deriving from the cogito with an affirmation of supra-natural Being, it clearly maintains that the natural world of empirical reality is the limiting horizon of human consciousness and existence. Thus the atheism potential in this tradition is brought explicitly to light.²⁵

In his own way Feuerbach is faithful to the perspective of the cogito tradition according to which the world is constituted as a world of meaning and value only through the activity of human consciousness. He maintains that the object of consciousness is always an objectification of man's subjective nature. However, he combines this view with explicit doctrines of materialism and realism which accord an irreducible primacy to sense experience and confine the resources of human nature, including its field of consciousness, to the context of spatio-temporal existence. The result, as we have seen, is a thoroughgoing naturalistic humanism in which the absolute is identified with human nature which in turn is interpreted in exclusively socio-historical terms.

Feuerbach's thought is scarcely a model of rigorous and conclusive philosophical analysis. In general its mode of expression is literary rather than strictly philosophical, relying often on the illuminating aphorism instead of detailed critical argument. For example, the compatibility of his sense materialism with his view of the field of consciousness as an objectification of human subjectivity is not convincingly worked out. As one commentator observes: ‘Feuerbach does believe with Protagoras that man is the measure of all things—though he also believes that things exist independently of man and that we cannot consider one without the other. Here, of course, is a source of much unexamined difficulty, reflected in the imprecision of Feuerbach's discussion of the relation between “man” and “nature”, just as it was reflected in the imprecision of his discussion of the relation between thought and body, and of the relation between understanding and sense-experience.’²⁶

Likewise there is a certain ambiguity in his reduction of the qualitative ‘infinity’ of such absolute perfections as truth, freedom, justice and love, to the quantitative ‘infinity’ of their varied empirical realisations throughout the collective history of the species.²⁷ If these perfections are thus reducible merely to their combined de facto exemplifications throughout human history it is not evident how Feuerbach can justify his further and related contention that these perfections are intrinsically such that they must eventually transcend the vicissitudes of their present limited condition and come to prevail in a perfect form as the assured fulfilment of human striving for a reign of truth and virtue.

In a somewhat analogous manner his theory of the psychogenesis of the idea of God is not really adequate to its aim of disposing of theism. In seeking to resolve a metaphysical problem in psychological terms it strikes one as merely presenting a polemical account of how we might have come by the idea of a God who is assumed not to exist, rather than as disclosing objective grounds for the denial of his existence. The whole nature and existence of religious worship of God is thought to be adequately understood in terms of a theory of the necessary psychological conditions of its possibility. The falsity of belief in God is supposedly established by an account of how we might have come to have such a belief.

Nevertheless, notwithstanding its shortcomings, Feuerbach's philosophy undoubtedly constitutes an important chapter in the formation of contemporary atheism. It marks the definite arrival of a fully consciously formulated atheism. It does not simply propose a theory of the ultimate meaning of reality which on reflection is seen to be atheistic. Rather it deliberately advocates an explicit atheism as a necessary prolegomenon to a true appraisal of reality in general and human existence in particular. It eliminates any reference to God as always and intrinsically a source of alienation and mystification which must be dispelled if human integrity is to be achieved.

Furthermore, by eliminating the context of the supranatural, this philosophy is enabled to direct the quest for ultimate meaning and value exclusively within the limits of the natural, the human and the social. Thus these categories take on a heightened importance and interest as constituting the only relevant domain in which man can seek for a principle of absolute significance and authenticity. As new insights and possibilities are disclosed by concentration of attention within this new confined area of interest, the problem of God will become one of increasingly marginal concern. Atheism will appear more and more as in no way remarkable but rather the natural presupposition of civilised man.

In effect, the philosophy of Feuerbach can be regarded as one which attuned human consciousness to a strictly and explicitly atheistic world-view, even though it may also be considered as only laying down the main lines of such a viewpoint in a somewhat rudimentary form.

Notes

1. L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, E. tr. George Eliot (Marian Evans), Introd. K. Barth, Foreword H. R. Niebuhr (Harper Torchbook), New York 1957, xii.

2. Ibid., 131-14.

3. Ibid., 3.

4. Ibid., 5.

5. Ibid., 5.

6. Ibid., 33.

7. Ibid., 230.

8. Ibid., 5.

9. Ibid., 15.

10. Cf. ibid., 17-19.

11. Ibid., 19.

12. ‘The essence of religion is the immediate, involuntary, unconscious contemplation of the human nature as another, a distinct nature. But when this projected image of human nature is made an object of reflection, of theology, it becomes an inexhaustible mine of falsehoods, illusions, contradictions, and sophisms.’ Ibid., 213-14.

13. Ibid., 45.

14. Ibid., 53.

15. Ibid., 67.

16. Ibid., 79.

17. Ibid., 83.

18. Ibid., 184.

19. Ibid., 152.

20. Cf. ibid., 150-59. Needless to say this doctrine of man as a species being has been one of the most influential features of Feuerbach's thought. In particular it has exercised a profound influence on the development of Marx's conception of man as a social being.

21. Cf. ibid., 156.

22. Ibid., 158.

23. Ibid., 159.

24. Cf. Ibid., 277.

25. This point is well developed by C. Fabro—cf. God in Exile, 650-71.

26. E. Kamenka, The Philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach, London 1970, 109.

27. ‘The mystery of the inexhaustible fullness of the divine predicates is therefore nothing else than the mystery of human nature considered as an infinitely varied, infinitely modifiable, but, consequently, phenomenal being.’ The Essence of Christianity, 23.