The Essence of Christianity Book

Another in the surprisingly large group of books, 'things that, although incomprehensible to people who don't understand Hegel, are read with great relish by people who don't understand Hegel because they can be used to re-affirm preexisting prejudices' (see also Marx, Kojeve, all the 'end of history' types, various aesthetic theories, etc etc).
Feuerbach's argument is, roughly, that Christianity is exactly what Hegel said it is, except that 'Geist' is the human species (which is probably what Hegel meant, too). He's far more intelligent and well read than any contemporary atheistical controversialist, and his argument is far better, inasmuch as he doesn't want to destroy religion; he just wants everyone to understand it properly. If we understand it properly, he says, we'll recognize that all the attributes of God (goodness, creativity, intelligence etc) are actually attributes of the human species as a whole, even though individuals quite often lack those attributes. Christianity is the 'highest' religion, since Christ is a really good, backdoor way of admitting that divine attributes are really human: Christ = the human species. In short, for Feuerbach Christianity is pretty much right, provided that you focus on the predicates of religious statements ('God is good,' 'God is love,' etc...) and not their subject. The predicates are 'true,' the subject is imaginary.

That's a great argument. This book, though, is tiresome for a twenty-first century reader: you really only need the opening chapters (and a good knowledge of the Ph. of Geist and Science of Logic) to get the point. Much of the rest is elaboration. The whole second part is a tour de force, in which Ludwig shows how his view of religion can explain various theological controversies: can we prove the existence of God? What is the status of revelation vs reason? What kind of thing is God, if he is a thing? What is the status of philosophical theology? How can we put the Trinity into words? What happens during baptism/eucharist? Why do Christians, who profess the gospel of love, hate so many people? None of this is at all interesting, inasmuch as his explanations are pretty mediocre, and many of the issues are dead.

It does show, though, that he knows something about the religion he's writing about (cf: Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris etc...) Ludwig's also much better at being a person than those writers. He doesn't use his attack on religion to drag humanity down; he doesn't want to say we're just animals or we're just matter or any such thing. He wants to say we're a part of nature, but that that means we have to understand nature much more widely than we usually do. Human activities, social activities, etc., are all 'natural,' on the right definition of nature. On the definition of nature most people operate under, though, they're supernatural: they can't be explained by natural science. This is not, for Ludwig, a reason to declare them non-existent or aberrant. It's a reason to re-examine religion, *and* the limits of empiricist thought.