Ludwig Feuerbach

“ Thus, love to God as a personal being is a literal, strict, personal, exclusive love. How then can I at once love God and a mortal wife? Do I not thereby place God on the same footing with my wife? No! to a soul which truly loves God, the love of woman is an impossibility, is adultery. “He that is unmarried,” says the apostle Paul, “careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord; but he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife.” ”

“ External freedom is alone the full truth of spiritual freedom. A man who has really lost spiritual interest in earthly treasures, soon throws them out at window, that his heart may be thoroughly at liberty. What I no longer possess by inclination is a burden to me; so away with it! What affection has let go, the hand no longer holds fast. Only affection gives force to the grasp; only affection makes possession sacred. He who having a wife is as though he had her not, will do better to have no wife at all. ”

“ And even activity for others has only a religious significance, has reference only to God, as its motive and end, is essentially only an activity for God,—for the glorifying of his name, the spreading abroad of his praise. But God is absolute subjectivity,—subjectivity separated from the world, above the world, set free from matter, severed from the life of the species, and therefore from the distinction of sex. Separation from the world, from matter, from the life of the species, is therefore the essential aim of Christianity. ”

“ The Christian certainly experienced the need of sexual love, but only as a need in contradiction with his heavenly destination, and merely natural, in the depreciatory, contemptuous sense which this word had in Christianity,—not as a moral, inward need, not, if I may so express myself, as a metaphysical, i.e., an essential need, which man can experience only where he does not separate difference of sex from himself, but on the contrary regards it as belonging to his inmost nature. Hence marriage is not holy in Christianity ”

“ God fills to me the place of the species, of my fellow-men; yes, when I turn away from the world, when I am in isolation, I first truly feel my need of God, I first have a lively sense of his presence, I first feel what God is, and what he ought to be to me. It is true that the religious man has need also of fellowship, of edification in common; but this need of others is always in itself something extremely subordinate. The salvation of the soul is the fundamental idea, the main point in Christianity ”

“ Marriage is already proscribed from my mind, my heart, since it is expelled from heaven, the essential object of my faith, hope, and life. How can an earthly wife have a place in my heaven-filled heart? How can I divide my heart between God and man? [11] The Christian’s love to God is not an abstract or general love such as the love of truth, of justice, of science; it is a love to a subjective, personal God, and is therefore a subjective, personal love. ”

“ Monachism must rather be derived directly from Christianity itself: it was a necessary consequence of the belief in heaven, promised to mankind by Christianity. Where the heavenly life is a truth, the earthly life is a lie; where imagination is all, reality is nothing. To him who believes in an eternal heavenly life, the present life loses its value,—or rather, it has already lost its value: belief in the heavenly life is belief in the worthlessness and nothingness of this life. ”

“ Death, the separation of the soul from the body, at least from this gross, material, sinful body, is the entrance into heaven. But if death is the condition of blessedness and moral perfection, then necessarily mortification is the one law of morality. ”

“ But watch for him when he throws off his incognito, and shows himself in his true dignity, his heavenly state. In heaven he speaks as he thinks; there thou hearest his true opinion. Where his heaven is, there is his heart,—heaven is his heart laid open. ”

“ The individual man attains his end by himself alone; he attains it in God,—God is himself the attained goal, the realized highest aim of humanity: but God is present to each individual separately. God only is the want of the Christian; others, the human race, the world, are not necessary to him; he has not the inward need of others. ”

“ The true Christian not only feels no need of culture, because this is a worldly principle and opposed to feeling; he has also no need of (natural) love. God supplies to him the want of culture, and in like manner God supplies to him the want of love, of a wife, of a family. The Christian immediately identifies the species with the individual; hence he strips off the difference of sex as a burdensome, accidental adjunct. ”

“ Thus in heaven there is no marriage; the principle of sexual love is excluded from heaven as an earthly, worldly principle. But the heavenly life is the true, perfected, eternal life of the Christian. ”

“ It is an essential attribute of this love that it is an exclusive, jealous love, for its object is a personal and at the same time the highest being, to whom no other can be compared. “Keep close to Jesus [Jesus Christ is the Christian’s God] , in life and in death; trust his faithfulness: he alone can help thee, when all else leaves thee. Thy beloved has this quality, that he will suffer no rival; he alone will have thy heart, will rule alone in thy soul as a king on his throne.”—“What can the world profit thee without Jesus? To be without Christ is the pain of hell ”

“ Man and woman together first constitute the true man, man and woman together are the existence of the race;—for their union is the source of multiplicity, the source of other men. Hence the man who does not deny his manhood, is conscious that he is only a part of a being, which needs another part for the making up of the whole, of true humanity. ”

“ I long only for Thee.”—“Thou canst not serve God and at the same time have thy joys in earthly things: thou must wean thyself from all acquaintances and friends, and sever thy soul from all temporal consolation. Believers in Christ should regard themselves, according to the admonition of the Apostle Peter, only as strangers and pilgrims on the earth.” ”

“ Such freedom, such truth, is certainly in contradiction with the Christianity of the present day, according to which the Lord has required only a spiritual freedom, i.e., a freedom which demands no sacrifice, no energy, an illusory, self-deceptive freedom;—a freedom from earthly good, which consists in its possession and enjoyment! ”

“ Thy will, thy determination, frees thee only from conscious limitations and impressions, not from the unconscious ones which lie in the nature of the case. Thus we do not feel at home, we are under constraint, so long as we are not locally, physically separated from one with whom we have inwardly broken. ”

“ But that which man excludes from heaven, he excludes from his true nature. Heaven is his treasure-casket. Believe not in what he establishes on earth, what he permits and sanctions here: here he must accommodate himself ”

“ In short, marriage is hallowed only in the Old Testament, but not in the New. The New Testament knows a higher, a supernatural principle, the mystery of unspotted virginity. [9] “He who can receive it let him receive it.” “The children of this world marry, and are given in marriage: but they which shall be accounted worthy to obtain that world, and the resurrection from the dead, neither marry nor are given in marriage: neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels ”

“ It is a self-delusion to attempt to derive monachism from the east. At least, if this derivation is to be accepted, they who maintain it should be consistent enough to derive the opposite tendency of Christendom, not from Christianity, but from the spirit of the western nations, the occidental nature in general. ”

“ To have as though one had not, is to have without the disposition to have, is in truth not to have. And therefore he who says, that one ought to have a thing as though one had it not, merely says in a subtle, covert, cautious way, that one ought not to have it at all. ”

“ Among the Hindoos no regenerate man could assume the rank of a Sanyassi, that is, of an anchorite absorbed in God, if he had not previously paid three debts, one of which was that he had had a legitimate son. ”

“ Amongst the Christians on the contrary, at least the Catholics, it was a true festival of religious rejoicing when betrothed or even married persons—supposing that it happened with mutual consent—renounced the married state and sacrificed conjugal to religious love. ↑ Inasmuch as the religious consciousness restores everything which it begins by abolishing, and the future life is ultimately nothing else than the present life re-established, it follows that sex must be re-established. ”