Ludwig Feuerbach

“ But he who speaks thus, has already driven the future world out of his head; he still holds it fast, either because he does not think at all about such matters, or because it is still a want of his heart; but, preoccupied with real things, he thrusts it as far as possible out of his sight; he denies with his head what he affirms with his heart; for it is to deny the future life, to deprive it of the qualities, by which alone it is a real and effective object for man. Quality is not distinct from existence; quality is nothing but real existence. ”

“ God is the existence corresponding to my wishes and feelings: he is the just one, the good, who fulfils my wishes. Nature, this world, is an existence which contradicts my wishes, my feelings. Here it is not as it ought to be; this world passes away: but God is existence as it ought to be. ”

“ Our own future existence, which, while we are in this world, in this body, is a separate, objective existence,—is God: God is the idea of the species, which will be first realized, individualized in the other world. God is the heavenly, pure, free essence, which exists there as heavenly pure beings, the bliss which there unfolds itself in a plenitude of blissful individuals. Thus God is nothing else than the idea or the essence of the absolute, blessed, heavenly life, here comprised in an ideal personality. This is clearly enough expressed in the belief that the blessed life is unity with God. ”

“ To find fault with Indian art, with Indian religion and philosophy, is to find fault with Indian Nature. You complain of the reviewer who tears a passage in your works from the context that he may hand it over to ridicule. Why are you yourself guilty of that which you blame in others? Why do you tear the Indian religion from its connexion, in which it is just as reasonable as your absolute religion?
Faith in a future world, in a life after death, is therefore with “savage” tribes essentially nothing more than direct faith in the present life—immediate unbroken faith in this life. ”

“ It is true that here below, the other world is only an image, a conception; still it is not the image of a remote, unknown thing, but a portrait of that which man loves and prefers before all else. What man loves is his soul. The heathens enclosed the ashes of the beloved dead in an urn; with the Christian the heavenly future is the mausoleum in which he enshrines his Soul.
In order to comprehend a particular faith, or religion in general, it is necessary to consider religion in its rudimentary stages, in its lowest, rudest condition. ”

“ He who is skilful in his profession, in his art, he who fills his post well, and is entirely devoted to his calling, thinks that calling the highest and best. How can he deny in thought, what he emphatically declares in act by the joyful devotion of all his powers? If I despise a thing, how can I dedicate to it my time and faculties? ”

“ An unknown, unimagined future is a ridiculous chimera: the other world is nothing more than the reality of a known idea, the satisfaction of a conscious desire, the fulfilment of a wish; [5] it is only the removal of limits which here oppose themselves to the realization of the idea. Where would be the consolation, where the significance of a future life, if it were midnight darkness to me? ”

“ Thus to the Christian, only his own paradise, the paradise which has Christian qualities, is a certainty, not the paradise of the Mahometan or the Elysium of the Greeks. The primary certainty is everywhere quality; existence follows of course, when once quality is certain. In the New Testament we find no proofs, or general propositions such as: there is a God, there is a heavenly life; we find only qualities of the heavenly life adduced;—“in heaven they marry not.” ”

“ Where it is once doubted that the images of immortality are real, that it is possible to exist as faith conceives, for example, without a material, real body, and without difference of sex; there the future existence in general, is soon a matter of doubt. With the image falls the thing, simply because the image is the thing itself.
The belief in heaven, or in a future life in general, rests on a mental judgment. ”

“ The future world has no other significance, no other basis of its existence, than the separation of the metal from the admixture of foreign elements, the separation of the good from the bad, of the pleasant from the unpleasant, of the praiseworthy from the blamable. The future world is the bridal in which man concludes his union with his beloved. ”

“ God is the implicit heaven; heaven is the explicit God. In the present, God is the kingdom of heaven; in the future, heaven is God. God is the pledge, the as yet abstract presence and existence of heaven ”

“ It was among the Christians that personal immortality first found that principle, whence it follows as a necessary and obvious consequence. The contemplation of the world, of Nature, of the race, was always coming athwart the ancients; they distinguished between the principle of life and the living subject, between the soul, the mind, and self: whereas the Christian abolished the distinction between soul and person, species and individual, and therefore placed immediately in self what belongs only to the totality of the species. ”

“ The belief in personal immortality has at its foundation the belief that difference of sex is only an external adjunct of individuality, that in himself the individual is a sexless, independently complete, absolute being. But he who belongs to no sex, belongs to no species; sex is the cord which connects the individuality with the species, and he who belongs to no species, belongs only to himself, is an altogether independent, divine, absolute being. Hence only when the species vanishes from the consciousness is the heavenly life a certainty. ”

“ It is certainly possible to do away with what is apparently or really objectionable in the popular argumentation, by avoiding the inferential form; but this can only be done by making immortality an analytic instead of a synthetic truth, so as to show that the very idea of God as absolute personality or subjectivity, is per se the idea of immortality. God is the guarantee of my future existence, because he is already the certainty and reality of my present existence, my salvation, my trust, my shield from the forces of the external world ”

“ But in truth there is no distinction between the absolute life which is conceived as God and the absolute life which is conceived as heaven, save that in heaven we have stretched into length and breadth what in God is concentrated in one point. The belief in the immortality of man is the belief in the divinity of man, and the belief in God is the belief in pure personality, released from all limits, and consequently eo ipso immortal. ”

“ The more extra- and suprahuman God appears at the commencement, the more human does he show himself to be in the subsequent course of things, or at the close: and just so, the more supernatural the heavenly life looks in the beginning or at a distance, the more clearly does it, in the end or when viewed closely, exhibit its identity with the natural life,—an identity which at last extends even to the flesh, even to the body. ”

“ Doubtless the existence is presupposed, but only because the quality is itself existence, because the inviolate religious feeling lives only in the quality, just as to the natural man, the real existence, the thing in itself, lies only in the quality which he perceives. ”

“ Heaven is therefore the key to the deepest mysteries of religion. As heaven is objectively the displayed nature of God, so subjectively it is the most candid declaration of the inmost thoughts and dispositions of religion. For this reason, religions are as various as are the kingdoms of heaven, and there are as many different kingdoms of heaven as there are characteristic differences among men. ”

“ Only when the belief in immortality becomes a critical belief, when a distinction is made between what is to be left behind here, and what is in reserve there, between what here passes away, and what there is to abide, does the belief in life after death form itself into the belief in another life ”

“ The “savage,” whose consciousness does not extend beyond his own country, whose entire being is a growth of its soil, takes his country with him into the other world, either leaving Nature as it is, or improving it, and so overcoming in the idea of the other life the difficulties he experiences in this. ”

“ The distinctions made between the immortal soul and God are either sophistical or imaginative; as when, for example, the bliss of the inhabitants of heaven is again circumscribed by limits, and distributed into degrees, in order to establish a distinction between God and the dwellers in heaven. ”

“ That which irreligious-religious reflection converts into a known image of an unknown yet certain thing, is originally, in the primitive, true sense of religion, not an image, but the thing itself. Unbelief, in the garb of belief, doubts the existence of the thing, but it is too shallow or cowardly directly to call it in question; it only expresses doubt of the image or conception, i.e., declares the image to be only an image. ”

“ Hence this life is, for the Christian, a life of torment and pain, because he is here still beset by a hostile power, and has to struggle with the lusts of the flesh and the assaults of the devil.
The faith of cultured nations is therefore distinguished from that of the uncultured in the same way that culture in general is distinguished from inculture: namely, that the faith of culture is a discriminating, critical, abstract faith. A distinction implies a judgment; but where there is a judgment there arises the distinction between positive and negative. ”

“ When the wedding takes place, his beloved one does not become a different being; else how could he so ardently long for her? She only becomes his own; from an object of yearning and affectionate desire she becomes an object of actual possession. ”

“ Thus in the passage above cited from the New Testament, the virgin or rather sexless life is presupposed as the true life, which, however, necessarily becomes a future one, because the actual life contradicts the ideal of the true life. But the certainty of this future life lies only in the certainty of its qualities as those of the true, highest life, adequate to the ideal. ”

“ But that is impossible to me: as surely as there is a God, so surely is there an immortality. God is the certainty of my future felicity. The interest I have in knowing that God is, is one with the interest I have in knowing that I am, that I am immortal. God is my hidden, my assured existence; he is the subjectivity of subjects, the personality of persons. How then should that not belong to persons which belongs to personality? In God I make my future into a present, or rather a verb into a substantive ”