Justified True Belief

(●) The philosopher who told the nineteenth century that God is a portrait of man, and left behind the charge every believer since has had to answer. + Almost everyone who has ever argued about religion has heard some version of his idea, usually without knowing whose it is. You have heard it from a friend over coffee: people invent God because they are afraid of dying. You have heard it from a lecturer: every culture makes its gods look like itself. That thought has a father, and his name was Ludwig Feuerbach. He was a Bavarian lawyer’s son who trained for the pulpit, abandoned it for philosophy, lost his university career at twenty-six over one anonymous book, and then wrote from a village beside a porcelain factory the work that made him famous for about a decade. The Essence of Christianity appeared in 1841 and argued a single thesis with enormous patience: the properties Christians assign to God, love, wisdom, justice, mercy, are human properties, scrubbed of their limits and set up outside us as a separate being. Theology, he said, is anthropology, the study of man, and has never been anything else. He matters to Christian readers for a reason that has nothing to do with agreeing with him. Marx took his argument and turned it on society. Freud took it and turned it into a diagnosis. Karl Barth, one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, judged that a whole school of Christian thought had no answer to him at all, and the essay in which he said so was later placed at the front of the English edition of the book. The projection charge, as it is usually called, the claim that God is a picture of ourselves thrown outward and then knelt to, is the ancestor of most popular unbelief in the modern West, and it came from a man who had once meant to be a preacher.

(●) 1804 AD: Born in Landshut, the fourth son of the lawyer who wrote Bavaria’s criminal code. + Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was born on 28 July 1804 in Landshut, a Bavarian town on the river Isar, into a household where achievement was simply expected. His father, Paul Johann Anselm von Feuerbach, was the most celebrated criminal lawyer in Germany, the author of the Bavarian penal code of 1813 and of the principle every law student still learns, that there is no punishment without a law that named the crime first. The children lived up to him and then some. One brother, Karl, became a mathematician, and anyone who has ever sat through a geometry class has met his name without being told whose it was: the textbooks still speak of the Feuerbach circle and the Feuerbach point. Another brother, Eduard, went into the law like their father. A third, Friedrich, became an orientalist, a scholar of the languages and histories of the Near East. Even the next generation kept it up, since a nephew, Anselm, grew into one of the finest German painters of the century. Ludwig was the fourth son, and he was the one who announced at eighteen that what he wanted to study was theology.

(●) 1823 AD: He went to Heidelberg to become a pastor and left within a year for Hegel’s lecture room in Berlin. + At Heidelberg he studied under Karl Daub, a theologian who taught Christian doctrine through the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, then the most powerful mind in Germany. Daub meant to show a student that faith and the new philosophy agreed. What the student took away was that the philosophy was the more interesting of the two. In 1824 Feuerbach went to Berlin to hear Hegel himself, and in 1825 he moved formally out of the theology faculty and into philosophy. Over roughly two years he attended every course Hegel gave except the lectures on aesthetics, and he sat through the logic twice. His father was not pleased. Neither, in the end, was Feuerbach: he came to believe that his teacher had built a magnificent system in which the real, breathing, hungry human being never actually appeared, and half of his later work is an argument with the man whose lectures he never missed.

(●) 1830 AD: An anonymous book denying that the soul survives death ended his hopes of a university chair at twenty-six. + He had done everything right. In 1828 he defended a Latin dissertation at Erlangen, De ratione una, universali, infinita, arguing that reason is one and universal rather than the private possession of each thinker, and he sent a copy to Hegel with a covering letter. He was appointed a Privatdozent, an unsalaried lecturer paid directly by the students who chose to attend, which was the ordinary first rung of a German academic career. Then, in 1830, he published Thoughts on Death and Immortality without his name on it. The book denies personal immortality: what survives a person, it argues, is the reason and the love that were never merely his in the first place, and these are taken back into the life of the whole. Bound in with the argument were satirical verses mocking the pious. The book was confiscated, the author’s identity came out, and his prospects went with it. He lectured on at Erlangen for several more years, and every application for a chair failed. He was twenty-six when the book appeared, and he never held a professorship in his life. Every book he wrote afterward was written by a man the universities had shown the door.

(●) 1837 AD: He married Bertha Löw, and a village porcelain factory paid for twenty-five years of philosophy. + Bertha Löw held a share in a porcelain factory at Bruckberg, a village in the Franconian countryside. They married in 1837 and lived there for about twenty-five years, on her income from the factory, a small Bavarian pension, and what his books brought in. It is a strange picture, and worth holding on to. The most radical critic of religion in Germany spent his most productive years in a rural village where the sound outside the study window was a kiln being loaded, seeing almost no one, keeping up with the intellectual world almost entirely by letter and by occasional visits to his friend Christian Kapp in Heidelberg. He liked to say that a philosopher should live among ordinary things. He did, and the arrangement lasted until the ordinary things gave out.

(●) 1841 AD: The Essence of Christianity told Germany that theology was really anthropology, and a generation of young men agreed at once. + The book that came out of Bruckberg in 1841 is not a pamphlet and not a sneer. It is a long, careful, almost devotional reading of Christian doctrine, doctrine by doctrine, in which the author keeps saying that the believer is right about everything except who the subject of the sentence is. God’s love is real love; it is human love, made infinite. The Trinity is real; it is the human need for fellowship, made eternal. Providence is real; it is the conviction that a person matters, projected onto the universe. He wrote it, he said, not to destroy religion but to translate it out of what he called the language of imagery into plain speech. The young intellectuals around the wreckage of Hegel’s system, the group later called the Young Hegelians, read it as a deliverance. One of them, Friedrich Engels, remembered the moment for the rest of his life. In England the book found a translator in Marian Evans, better known by the name she wrote novels under, George Eliot.

(●) 1848 AD: Students brought him to Heidelberg to lecture, the university refused him a room, and he spoke in the town hall. + In the revolutionary year of 1848 Feuerbach came out of his village. He went to Frankfurt to watch the national assembly try to build a German constitution, hopeful at first and then, as the weeks went on, steadily less so. He went as a spectator, and he declined to stand for anything himself. Students at Heidelberg, who wanted him appointed to their philosophy faculty, invited him to give a public course on religion. The university would not have him and would not lend him a lecture hall, so the lectures were held in the town hall of Heidelberg instead, before an audience of students and townspeople. They were published in 1851 as Lectures on the Essence of Religion, and they mark a shift: where the 1841 book had traced religion to human nature, the lectures trace it further back, to the feeling of dependence on nature itself, on the weather and the harvest and the sea. The revolution failed, the assembly dissolved, and Feuerbach went home to Bruckberg convinced that Germany was not going to be changed by lectures.

(●) 1860 AD: The factory failed, and he spent his last twelve years on the charity of friends, buried in 1872 with workmen at the graveside. + The porcelain works went under at the end of the 1850s, and in 1860 the family had to leave Bruckberg. They moved to Rechenberg, then on the outskirts of Nuremberg, where the money ran out in earnest. Friends and admirers raised a subscription to keep him; a man who had spent his life arguing that human beings should look to each other rather than to heaven ended up living on exactly that. His health broke down in his last years, and a severe stroke in the summer of 1870 left him unable to work. He had been reading, though. The first volume of Karl Marx’s Capital had reached him by then, and in that same year, 1870, he joined the Social Democratic Workers’ Party, the party of the German workers’ movement. He died on 13 September 1872 and was buried in the Johannisfriedhof in Nuremberg. The procession is said to have been large, and to have carried red banners: the philosopher of humanity was claimed at the end by the working men who had read him.

What He Taught

(T1) God is human nature, cleaned of its limits and set outside us as a separate being. + Ask a group of people to describe the best person they can imagine. They will say things like patient, fair, generous, someone who forgives, someone who would not leave you. Now take those answers and remove every limit: not patient for a while but always patient, not fair on his good days but fair without exception, not generous within his means but generous without any means at all to run out. Feuerbach’s claim is that what you have written down is the Christian doctrine of God, and that you got there without leaving the room. The technical word for what he says religion does is projection: taking something that belongs to you and experiencing it as though it stood outside you, the way a film that exists on a reel appears to be happening on the far wall. Man, he wrote, projects his own being outward, and then makes himself an object to that projected image of himself. Religion is not a lie and not a trick. It is self-knowledge that has not yet recognised itself, which is why he called it the childhood of the human race: a child sees his own nature first in somebody else. Notice how much this concedes. Feuerbach does not say the attributes are worthless; he says they are magnificent, and that they are ours. But everything then turns on one small piece of grammar, so it is worth slowing down for a moment. In a sentence like "the grass is green," the subject is the thing being talked about, the grass, and the predicate is what gets said about it, green. Religion reads "God is love" the same way: God is the subject, the one who is really there, and love is the description hung on him. Feuerbach’s claim is that the sentence has been read from the wrong end. The predicate is the real thing, love as human beings actually give it and need it, and the subject is the invention. Read it the other way round, he thought, and every statement a believer makes about God turns out to be true, and to be a statement about us.

(Q) "Consciousness of God is self-consciousness, knowledge of God is self-knowledge. By his God thou knowest the man, and by the man his God; the two are identical." + Source: Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Introduction §2, "The Essence of Religion Considered Generally" (George Eliot translation, 1854). The sentence sits in the opening pages, where he lays down the rule the rest of the book applies to one doctrine after another: whatever a man takes to be God is his own inmost self held up where he can look at it. A few lines later he adds that religion is "the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures" (T1).

(T2) What man gives to God he takes away from himself, so religion makes its worshippers poor. + This is the part of the argument with feeling in it, and it is where Feuerbach stops being a describer and starts being a critic. If everything good in the human being has been handed over to a being outside us, then the more perfect God becomes, the smaller man is left. Wisdom belongs to God, so man is a fool. Goodness belongs to God, so man is a worm. The ledger has two columns, and every entry on one side is a subtraction from the other. The word later writers used for this is alienation: possessing something, losing hold of it, and meeting it again as a stranger, the way a man might sign over a house and then have to knock at his own front door. Feuerbach’s own example is the monastery. The monks vowed away marriage, he says, and then had in heaven, in the Virgin, an image of woman to love; whatever they denied themselves came back to them in a form they could worship. He thought that was the mechanism of religion in miniature. Christians have always had an answer ready, and it is worth stating plainly rather than letting it be assumed. Scripture does not describe God’s glory as competing with human dignity. Man is made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27), the God who needs nothing from human hands is the one who gives life and breath to everyone (Acts 17:25), and the New Testament calls believers heirs rather than debtors. Whether the ledger really has two columns is the argument. Feuerbach was certain it did, and he had watched enough preaching to have his reasons.

(Q) "To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing." + Source: Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Introduction §2 (George Eliot translation, 1854). He goes straight on to say why a believer would accept such a bargain: what a man takes from himself is not lost, since it is preserved in God, and he enjoys it there in fuller measure than he ever could in himself (T2).

(T3) The central doctrines of Christianity are the heart’s wishes, granted. + Here is the argument most people have met without knowing the name attached to it. Feuerbach goes through the doctrines and matches each one to a wish. You do not want to die: there is life everlasting. You want your life to have been noticed and to have mattered: there is providence, and a Father who counts the hairs of your head. You want to be loved without having earned it: there is grace. You want the distance between yourself and God closed from the other side: there is the Incarnation, God become a man you could sit down with. His word for the method is that the dogmas are wishes realised, that is, made real, or at least treated as real. And he presses it with an argument from what is pleasant. It is pleasanter, he writes, to be redeemed by another than to free yourself, pleasanter to be given an object of love than an object of effort, pleasanter to be told you are beloved than to make your own way. Religion, on this account, is the shape a human heart takes when nothing stands in the way of its wanting. Two things are worth saying before moving on. The first is that Feuerbach is describing something real: much bad religion is exactly this, and Scripture itself says so of the gods people carve for themselves. The second is that a wish and a truth are not opposites. That a starving man wants bread is not evidence that bread does not exist, and the argument between Feuerbach and the church has largely been fought over that sentence ever since.

(Q) "The fundamental dogmas of Christianity are realised wishes of the heart." + Source: Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, chapter 15, "The Mystery of the Christian Christ, or the Personal God" (George Eliot translation, 1854). The sentence opens the chapter, and its second half completes the thought: the essence of Christianity is the essence of human feeling. What follows is his list of the things it is pleasanter to receive than to achieve (T3).

(T4) Hegel’s Absolute is theology in a new coat, and philosophy must begin instead with flesh and blood. + Hegel had taught that history is the story of Spirit, an absolute Mind coming to know itself through the world and through us. Feuerbach, who had sat through those lectures twice over, decided that this was the God of the theologians wearing philosophical clothes: still an infinite mind standing outside us, still a being of which we are the passing episodes. His correction is the same rule about sentences that he had already used on God (T1). Speculative philosophy, the term for system-building that starts from pure thought rather than from what can be seen and touched, always makes thinking the subject of the sentence and the thinker merely something said about it, so that a living man ends up as one of the things that happen to Thought. Turn the sentence around, Feuerbach said in the Principles of the Philosophy of the Future of 1843: being is the subject and thought is the predicate. Start with the human being who has a body, gets hungry, feels the cold and needs other people, and then see what philosophy looks like from there. Seven years later he put the point in a slogan that made him notorious, dropped into a review of a book on nutrition: man is what he eats. Christian readers should notice what this does and does not settle. Against a philosophy that had turned God into an idea developing through history, Feuerbach insisted on the concrete human being, and he was right that Hegel’s Absolute is not the God of Abraham. But a materialism that begins with eating and ends with eating has trouble accounting for the one thing Feuerbach cared about most, that human beings are worth loving.

(Q) "Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality." + Source: Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Preface to the second edition, 1843 (George Eliot translation, 1854). The sentence continues: we see real things in the splendour of imagination instead of in the daylight of reality, and so his whole work does nothing to religion but turn its gaze from the inward image to the outward thing. He is defending himself here against reviewers who had called the book an attack on faith (T4).

(Q) "Love to man must be no derivative love; it must be original. If human nature is the highest nature to man, then practically also the highest and first law must be the love of man to man." + Source: Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Concluding Application (George Eliot translation, 1854). The next words are the Latin tag he is remembered for, Homo homini Deus est, man is a god to man, which he calls the great practical principle and the axis on which the history of the world turns. It is the positive half of his project, and the sentence that carried him out of philosophy and into politics: he wanted the love the church aimed at heaven turned back on the neighbour, and within four years a younger reader had taken him at his word.

What Came of His Argument

(†) The Young Hegelians read him as deliverance, and Marx carried the argument out of heaven and into politics. + Engels, writing more than forty years later, described what the book did to his circle: the spell was broken, and one had to have felt the liberating effect of it to understand. "Enthusiasm was general," he wrote; "we all became at once Feuerbachians." Karl Marx was one of them, and he did two things with the inheritance. He accepted the projection thesis as settled, writing in 1844 that for Germany the criticism of religion was essentially finished, and that man makes religion rather than religion making man. Then he complained that Feuerbach had stopped too soon. It was not enough to say that the holy family is a projection of the earthly one; you then have to ask what is wrong with the earthly family that it needs to project. So the criticism of heaven became the criticism of earth, and religion became a symptom of a society to be changed rather than an error to be corrected. The eleventh of his Theses on Feuerbach, scribbled in a notebook in 1845, is the most quoted sentence of the whole quarrel: the philosophers have only interpreted the world, and the point is to change it. Feuerbach himself was not a revolutionary, and the Frankfurt assembly of 1848 left him disillusioned. He nonetheless ended his life inside the movement his own argument had helped to arm.

(†) A future novelist put him into English, and Freud turned the wish into a diagnosis. + The English translation of 1854 was made by Marian Evans, three years before her first fiction appeared and she became George Eliot. It is the only book that ever appeared under her own name, and its argument runs quietly under her novels, where the sympathy people owe each other keeps doing the work that religion used to do. Through her, Feuerbach reached readers who had never opened a German philosopher. Sigmund Freud read him as a student in Vienna and called him, in a letter of 1875 to his friend Eduard Silberstein, the man he revered and admired most among all philosophers. Half a century later Freud said he could not remember any lasting influence, which may be true and is certainly convenient, because The Future of an Illusion of 1927 is Feuerbach with a clinical vocabulary. Religion, Freud argued, is an illusion in the technical sense: a belief held because we wish it were true, in this case the wish of a frightened child for a father who is stronger than the world. The wish argument had found the audience it needed, and it is now the version most people meet first.

(†) Karl Barth granted that the charge lands, and said it lands only on a theology that starts from the human side. + The most serious Christian engagement with Feuerbach came from the theologian who agreed with him about a great deal. Karl Barth wrote an essay on him in the 1920s, published in English in the collection Theology and Church, and that same essay was reprinted in 1957 as the introduction to the English edition of The Essence of Christianity. His verdict was blunt. A theology that grounds itself in religious experience, in the feeling of the believer, has no defence against Feuerbach at all, because on those terms religion really is a report about the human heart. Barth thought that nineteenth-century liberal Protestantism, the movement that had tried to keep the faith credible for modern people by resting it on religious feeling and moral seriousness rather than on revelation, had walked into the trap with its eyes open, and that Feuerbach had simply drawn the conclusion out loud. His answer was not to rescue that theology but to abandon its starting point. Christian faith, as Barth read it, does not begin with the human being reaching upward; it begins with God speaking, which is precisely what a projection cannot do. And he pressed two facts against Feuerbach’s cheerful account of the human species: that human beings die, one by one, and that human beings are evil. A humanity worth worshipping was not the humanity Barth had watched go to war in 1914. Later Christian philosophers have added a narrower reply. Alvin Plantinga treats the Feuerbach line, in the form Freud and Marx gave it, as a complaint about the origin of belief that never quite gets around to showing the belief false. C. S. Lewis ran the argument in reverse: a creature born with a desire that nothing in this world satisfies is more likely made for another world than merely mistaken about this one. Neither reply denies that the projection charge has real work to do. Both ask what follows from it.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: a belief’s origin is not its truth, and the God of Scripture is not the God anyone would have wished for. + Feuerbach deserves the strongest answer, not the easiest one, and there are four places where the Christian claim and his simply cannot both stand. - Where a belief came from is not whether it is true. Logicians call this the genetic fallacy: judging a claim by its origin rather than by its evidence. A man may believe his wife is faithful partly because he badly wants her to be, and she may be faithful. Feuerbach’s account, even if every word of it were right about how religion arises, would leave the question of whether God exists exactly where it found it. The point is not a debating trick, and it cuts both ways: Marx turned the same reduction on Feuerbach, explaining his humanism by the class he came from, and there is no obvious reason the machine should stop before it reaches the man who built it. - Scripture makes his charge first, and calls it idolatry. Long before Bruckberg, Israel’s prophets were saying that the gods people carve resemble the people who carve them. "Their idols are silver and gold, the work of human hands" (Psalm 115:4), and those who make them, the psalm adds, become like them. Isaiah watches a man burn half a log for warmth and bow down to the other half (Isaiah 44:16–17). Paul says the human race exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man (Romans 1:22–23). Feuerbach thought he had discovered the mechanism of all religion. On the Bible’s account he had described false religion accurately, which is the beginning of the argument rather than the end of it. - A projection would not have looked like this. Wish-fulfilment predicts a comfortable God, and the God of the Bible is repeatedly the opposite. "These things you have done, and I have been silent; you thought that I was one like yourself. But now I rebuke you and lay the charge before you" (Psalm 50:21). His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8–9). And at the centre of the faith stands a crucified Messiah, which Paul cheerfully admits was "a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23). A religion invented to please the heart would not have chosen an executed carpenter, a command to love enemies, and a day of judgment. - The claim is about an event, not a feeling. Feuerbach analysed Christianity as the essence of human feeling. But the apostles staked everything on something they said had happened in a particular place on a particular morning. "And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (1 Corinthians 15:14). A feeling can be explained by a wish. A tomb has to be explained by history, and no analysis of the human heart settles what did or did not happen to a body outside Jerusalem. There is something else to say, and Christians say it too rarely. Feuerbach’s critique is a permanently useful warning. A God who always agrees with us, who blesses what we already wanted, who never says anything we did not expect, probably is a picture of ourselves. The test Scripture invites is the one Feuerbach never applied: not whether the God we describe resembles us, but whether the God who has spoken contradicts us. "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10). A propitiation is the offering that turns aside a rightful anger, which is not the sort of gift a wish would have thought to ask for. That sentence runs the other way from everything Feuerbach wrote, and the whole question is which direction is real.