Ludwig Feuerbach

“ In order to recognise the above developed significance of the creation as the true one, it is only necessary seriously to consider the fact, that the chief point in the creation is not the production of earth and water, plants and animals, for which indeed there is no God, but the production of personal beings—of spirits, according to the ordinary phrase. God is the idea of personality as itself a person, subjectivity existing in itself apart from the world, existing for self alone, without wants, posited as absolute existence, the me without a thee. ”

“ Thus, subjectively, thou annihilatest the world; thou thinkest God by himself, i.e., absolutely unlimited subjectivity, the subjectivity or soul which enjoys itself alone, which needs not the world, which knows nothing of the painful bonds of matter. In the inmost depths of thy soul thou wouldest rather there were no world, for where the world is, there is matter, and where there is matter there is weight and resistance, space and time, limitation and necessity. Nevertheless, there is a world, there is matter. ”

“ Where there is no reality or possibility of an existence external to me, there can be no question of making or creating. God is eternal, but the world had a commencement; God was, when as yet the world was not; God is invisible, not cognizable by the senses, but the world is visible, palpable, material, and therefore outside of God; for how can the material as such, body, matter, be in God? The world exists outside of God, in the same sense in which a tree, an animal, the world in general, exists outside of my conception, outside of myself, is an existence distinct from subjectivity. ”

“ But there is no higher happiness than to make another happy, bliss lies in the act of imparting. And only joy, only love imparts. Hence man conceives imparting love as the principle of existence. “Extasis boni non sinit ipsum manere in se ipso.” (Dionysius A.) Everything positive establishes, attests itself, only by itself. The divine love is the joy of life, establishing itself, affirming itself. But the highest self-consciousness of life, the supreme joy of life is the love which confers happiness. God is the bliss of existence. ”

“ While they in truth speculate only concerning themselves, only in the interest of their own instinct of self-preservation; they yet will not allow that they are splitting their brains only about themselves; they speculate under the delusion that they are searching out the mysteries of another being. Pantheism identifies man with Nature, whether with its visible appearance, or its abstract essence. Personalism isolates, separates him from Nature; converts him from a part into the whole, into an absolute essence by himself. ”

“ But if man is the end of creation, he is also the true cause of creation, for the end is the principle of action. The distinction between man as the end of creation, and man as its cause, is only that the cause is the latent, inner man, the essential man, whereas the end is the self-evident, empirical, individual man,—that man recognises himself as the end of creation, but not as the cause, because he distinguishes the cause, the essence from himself as another personal being. ”

“ Providence is a privilege of man. It expresses the value of man, in distinction from other natural beings and things; it exempts him from the connexion of the universe. Providence is the conviction of man of the infinite value of his existence,—a conviction in which he renounces faith in the reality of external things; it is the idealism of religion. Faith in Providence is therefore identical with faith in personal immortality; save only, that in the latter the infinite value of existence is expressed in relation to time, as infinite duration. ”

“ The proof of Providence is miracle. [3] 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. Providence cancels the laws of Nature; it interrupts the course of necessity, the iron bond which inevitably binds effects to causes; in short, it is the same unlimited, all-powerful will, that called the world into existence out of nothing. Miracle is a creatio ex nihilo. He who turns water into wine, makes wine out of nothing, for the constituents of wine are not found in water ”

“ But it is by no means the characteristic, the Christian tendency of the Christian religion. The Christian, the religious Providence, is quite another than that which clothes the lilies and feeds the ravens. The natural Providence lets a man sink in the water, if he has not learned to swim; but the Christian, the religious Providence, leads him with the hand of omnipotence over the water unharmed. ”

“ All positive grounds of the creation reduce themselves only to the conditions, to the grounds, which urge upon the me the consciousness of the necessity of another personal being. Speculate as much as you will, you will never derive your personality from God, if you have not beforehand introduced it, if God himself be not already the idea of your personality, your own subjective nature. ”

“ Apart from instinct, the brute has no other guardian spirit, no other Providence, than its senses or its organs in general. A bird which loses its eyes has lost its guardian angel; it necessarily goes to destruction if no miracle happens. ”

“ He who denies that there is a Providence, denies that there is a God, or—what is the same thing—that God is God; for a God who is not the Providence of man, is a contemptible God, a God who is wanting in the divinest, most adorable attribute. ”

“ Yet more decidedly, however, has Christian mysticism declared the human nature to be the creative principle, the ground of the world. “Man, who, before time was, existed in eternity, works with God all the works that God wrought a thousand years ago, and now, after a thousand years, still works.” ”

“ He who, like the pious Christian naturalists, pronounces this to be pride, declares Christianity itself to be pride; for to say that the material world exists for the sake of man, implies infinitely less than to say that God—or at least, if we follow Paul, a being who is almost God, scarcely to be distinguished from God—becomes man for the sake of men. ”

“ The admiration of Providence in Nature, especially in the animal kingdom, is nothing else than an admiration of Nature, and therefore belongs merely to naturalism, though to a religious naturalism; [4] for in Nature is revealed only natural, not divine Providence—not Providence as it is an object to religion. Religious Providence reveals itself only in miracles—especially in the miracle of the Incarnation, the central point of religion. ”

“ If the person is conceived physically, as a real man, in which form he is a being with wants, he appears first at the end of the physical world, when the conditions of his existence are present,—as the goal of creation. If, on the other hand, man is conceived abstractly as a person, as is the case in religious speculation, this circuit is dispensed with, and the task is the direct deduction of the person, i.e., the self-demonstration, the ultimate self-verification of the human personality. ”

“ But this other being, this creative principle, is in fact nothing else than his subjective nature separated from the limits of individuality and materiality, i.e., of objectivity, unlimited will, personality posited out of all connexion with the world,—which by creation, i.e., the positing of the world, of objectivity, of another, as a dependent, finite, non-essential existence, gives itself the certainty of its exclusive reality. ”

“ But as absolute existence for self alone contradicts the idea of true life, the idea of love; as self-consciousness is essentially united with the consciousness of a thee, as solitude cannot, at least in perpetuity, preserve itself from tedium and uniformity; thought immediately proceeds from the divine Being to other conscious beings, and expands the idea of personality which was at first condensed in one being to a plurality of persons. ”

“ What is it to make, to create, to produce, but to make that which in the first instance is only subjective, and so far invisible, non-existent, into something objective, perceptible, so that other beings besides me may know and enjoy it, and thus to put something out of myself, to make it distinct from myself? ”

“ Admit that your personal God is nothing else than your own personal nature, that while you believe in and construct your supra- and extra-natural God, you believe in and construct nothing else than the supra- and extranaturalism of your own self. ”

“ It is true that the divine personality is distinguished in every possible way from the human in order to veil their identity; but these distinctions are either purely fantastic, or they are mere assertions, devices which exhibit the invalidity of the attempted deduction. ”

“ How does the Bible contradict Nature! The God of Nature reveals himself by giving to the lion strength and appropriate organs in order that, for the preservation of his life, he may in case of necessity kill and devour even a human being ”

“ In all creatures there is something of God; but in the soul God exists completely, for it is his resting-place.”—Predigten etzlicher Lehrer, &c., p. 19. And the existence of things in God, especially where it has no pantheistic significance, and any such is here excluded, is equally an idea without reality, and does not express the special sentiments of religion. ↑ Here is also the point where the Creation represents to us not only the Divine power, but also the Divine love. ”

“ For this reason the doctrine of creation out of nothing has been pronounced a supernatural one, to which reason of itself could not have attained; and in proof of this, appeal has been made to the fact that the Pagan philosophers represented the world to have been formed by the Divine Reason out of already existing matter. ”

“ Namely, because they are fundamentally false, from being made in ignorance of the idea on which the Creation really turns. ↑ It is not admissible to urge against this the omnipresence of God, the existence of God in all things, or the existence of things in God. For, apart from the consideration that the future destruction of the world expresses clearly enough its existence outside of God, i.e., its non-divineness, God is in a special manner only in man; but I am at home only where I am specially at home. “Nowhere is God properly God, but in the soul. ”