The essence of Christianity Book

Hegel is easy to understand once you realize that he would agree with Peter O’Toole’s character from the 1972 movie The Ruling Class when his character is asked: ‘How do you know you're God?’, and he responds: ‘Simple. When I pray to Him, I find I am talking to myself’. Yes, there is a God but he is always and only within us and created by us and for us. That is how Hegel resolves his immanent critic between stoicism and skepticism with the aid of his dialectic of idealism and resolves it with the unhappy consciousness also known as Christianity while knowing that it is an illusion (not everyone thinks of Hegel in those terms, of course, see “Hegel’s Idea of Philosophy” by the Jesuit brother Lauer for someone who thinks Hegel believed in God, conversely listen to the Bernstein tapes on ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ for how I knew about that quote from that movie). Feuerbach knows exactly what and where God is in this devastatingly effective critique while considering the anthropology of religion and its theology, and this book is just as relevant to today as it was in 1842. People create God for people, and our self-feelings for nature become God because of our essence in being human at least Feuerbach will assert persuasively in this book.

Feuerbach understands Freud better than Freud will 80 years later. We process our world with our senses and create our emotions and then project our feelings on to ourselves from what we believe is the essence of nature outside of us. We get this sense of the self, the ego, and relate that to how we see our own selves in relation to the other and nature as a whole and make our projections part of us. (There’s a lot of Schopenhauer within Feuerbach and though Freud claimed he didn’t read Schopenhauer until after he developed his psychoanalysis one can see there is a lot of overlap between Schopenhauer, Freud and Feuerbach).

Perhaps, as cited in this book, the difference between humans and the brute is that humans have created a religion and brutes have not. The author will further elaborate and say that we have a consciousness beyond the experience and we as individuals see beyond ourselves and understand ourselves as part of a species. The author quoted St. Aquinas frequently but never mentioned St. Bonaventure. I found that odd. Because, a big difference between Aquinas and Bonaventure is that Aquinas would think each angel is of a species and Bonaventure would think each angel is sui generis (one of a kind). This is relevant to when Feuerbach gives humans the desire to create beyond ourselves and create dogmatic religions based on faith contradictory to reason and absent of understanding, because we know that we are more than just individuals and we know that we are part of humanity (a species).

I think the prologue was one of the best I’ve ever read. I read it twice. Oddly, if one were to skip the prologue and omit about 10 or so other paragraphs from this book, one would conclude that this was one of the greatest pro-religious books ever written. Though, the prologue and the book as a whole with those 10 or so other paragraphs destroys religion and theology better than any modern book I’ve seen by the way he presents his arguments. Of the standard arguments for God and Christianity (or any theistic religion) such as ontological, objective morality, life having no meaning, all the standard incoherent proofs are systematically picked apart with the only one not considered being the ‘argument by design’ after all this book was written before ‘Origin of Species’, and design by itself only shows a designer, a designer that might be no more interesting than Bob the super computer of All who has no feelings and no interest beyond computing for the sake of computing and is not deserving of worship or my consideration.

Christianity alienates the individual from themselves by outsourcing our true nature to the infinite, Feuerbach will say that in this book and 50 years later Nietzsche will say it too (I can’t help but think Nietzsche was influenced by this book. Clearly, Marx was too). The historical development from the Pagan (heathen), to the Jew and then to the Christian is laid out with the framework Feuerbach wants to show. The author gives the reason for the Devil, who only cares about his self, and for a more traditional God who cares about his creatures and is a reflection of ourselves and gets perverted by the lens of Luther (and Augustine), all of that is in this book and more. The Trinity and why it makes sense from a subjective perspective (that’s why I mentioned St. Bonaventure above. The author really seemed to be following Bonaventure line of reasoning regarding the Trinity, because the author didn’t want an easy misleading straw man to demolish. He wanted the best that was available).

The principles of Kant and Hegel are bantered about in this book. But, by no means would I say that this book is a difficult read. I would say it is an important book and somewhat easily digestible. It influenced others for sure. But, even with that aside, this book is an important and powerful book in its own right. It’s freely available online and I would suggest the prologue as mandatory because a careful reading of that would make any one a tiny bit wiser. I only wish modern day writers would assume that their readers really want to know and want to be awoken from their dogmatic slumber!