Ludwig Feuerbach

“ I extend the horizon of my senses by the imagination; I form to myself a confused conception of the whole of things; and this conception, which exalts me above the limited stand-point of the senses, and therefore affects me agreeably, I posit as a divine reality. I feel the fact that my knowledge is tied to a local stand-point, to sensational experience, as a limitation; what I feel as a limitation I do away with in my imagination, which furnishes free space for the play of my feelings. This negativing of limits by the imagination is the positing of omniscience as a divine power and reality. ”

“ Dost thou desire beauty—He is the supremely beautiful. Dost thou desire riches—all riches are in Him. Dost thou desire power—He is supremely powerful. Or whatever thy heart desires, it is found a thousandfold in Him, in the best, the single good, which is God.” [4] But how can he who has all in God, who already enjoys heavenly bliss in the imagination, experience that want, that sense of poverty, which is the impulse to all culture? ”

“ The highest degree of resemblance is that where there is no further distinction between two individuals or beings than that they are two. The essential qualities, those by which we distinguish things from each other, are the same in both. Hence I cannot distinguish them in thought, by the Reason,—for this all data are wanting;—I can only distinguish them by figuring them as visible in my imagination or by actually seeing them. If my eyes do not say—there are really two separately existent beings, my reason will take both for one and the same being. ”

“ This distinction between the divine and human activity is “nothing.” God makes,—he makes something external to himself, as man does. Making is a genuine human idea. Nature gives birth to, brings forth; man makes. Making is an act which I can omit, a designed, premeditated, external act;—an act in which my inmost being is not immediately concerned, in which, while active, I am not at the same time passive, carried away by an internal impulse. ”

“ Resemblance is here the external guise of identity;—the identity which reason, the sense of truth, affirms, but which the imagination denies; the identity which allows an appearance of distinction to remain,—a mere phantasm, which says neither directly yes, nor directly no. ”

“ In the truly religious sense, incomprehensibility is not the dead full stop which reflection places wherever understanding deserts it, but a pathetic note of exclamation marking the impression which the imagination makes on the feelings. The imagination is the original organ of religion. Between God and man, in the primitive sense of religion, there is on the one hand only a distinction in relation to existence, according to which God as a self-subsistent being is the antithesis of man as a dependent being ”

“ In activity, man feels himself free, unlimited, happy; in passivity, limited, oppressed, unhappy. Activity is the positive sense of one’s personality. That is positive which in man is accompanied with joy; hence God is, as we have already said, the idea of pure, unlimited joy. We succeed only in what we do willingly; joyful effort conquers all things. But that is joyful activity which is in accordance with our nature, which we do not feel as a limitation, and consequently not as a constraint. And the happiest, the most blissful activity is that which is productive. ”

“ God is a being conceived under the forms of the senses, but freed from the limits of sense,—a being at once unlimited and sensational. But what is the imagination?—limitless activity of the senses. God is eternal, i.e., he exists at all times; God is omnipresent, i.e., he exists in all places; God is the omniscient being, i.e., the being to whom every individual thing, every sensible existence, is an object without distinction, without limitation of time and place. ”

“ Moreover, the only-begotten Son himself is nothing else than the idea of humanity, than man preoccupied with himself, man hiding from himself and the world in God,—the heavenly man. The Logos is latent, tacit man; man is the revealed, expressed Logos. The Logos is only the prelude of man. ”

“ Essential identity with us is the chief condition of deity; the idea of deity is made dependent on the idea of personality, of consciousness, quo nihil majus cogitari potest. But, it is said in the same breath, a God who is not essentially distinguished from us is no God.
The essence of religion is the immediate, involuntary, unconscious contemplation of the human nature as another, a distinct nature. But when this projected image of human nature is made an object of reflection, of theology, it becomes an inexhaustible mine of falsehoods, illusions, contradictions, and sophisms. ”

“ But culture is dependent on external things; it has many and various wants, for it overcomes the limits of sensational consciousness and life by real activity, not by the magical power of the religious imagination. Hence the Christian religion also, as has been often mentioned already, has in its essence no principle of culture, for it triumphs over the limitations and difficulties of earthly life only through the imagination, only in God, in heaven. God is all that the heart needs and desires—all good things, all blessings. ”

“ To read is delightful, reading is passive activity; but to produce what is worthy to be read is more delightful still. It is more blessed to give than to receive. Hence this attribute of the species—productive activity—is assigned to God; that is, realized and made objective as divine activity. But every special determination, every mode of activity is abstracted, and only the fundamental determination, which however is essentially human, namely, production of what is external to self, is retained. ”

“ The more limited a man’s sphere of vision, the less he knows of history, Nature, philosophy—the more ardently does he cling to his religion.
For this reason the religious man feels no need of culture. Why had the Hebrews no art, no science, as the Greeks had? Because they felt no need of it. To them this need was supplied by Jehovah. In the divine omniscience man raises himself above the limits of his own knowledge; [3] in the divine omnipresence, above the limits of his local stand-point; in the divine eternity, above the limits of his time. The religious man is happy in his imagination ”

“ This question illegitimately foists in between the subject or producing activity, and the object or thing produced, an irrelevant, nay, an excluded intermediate idea, namely, the idea of particular, individual existence. The activity in question has relation only to the collective—the All, the world; God created all things, not some particular thing; the indefinite whole, the All, as it is embraced by the imagination,—not the determinate, the particular, as, in its particularity, it presents itself to the senses, and as, in its totality as the universe, it presents itself to the reason. ”

“ The fundamentally human character of the divine activity is by the idea of arbitrariness degraded into a human manifestation of a low kind; God, from a mirror of human nature is converted into a mirror of human vanity and self-complacency. ”

“ If I disperse this vapour, I come to naked identity. The more similar beings are, the less are they to be distinguished; if I know the one, I know the other. It is true that resemblance has its degrees. But also the resemblance between God and man has its degrees. The good, pious man is more like God than the man whose resemblance to Him is founded only on the nature of man in general. And even with the pious man there is a highest degree of resemblance to be supposed, though this may not be obtained here below, but only in the future life. ”

“ A God who does not trouble himself about us, who does not hear our prayers, who does not see us and love us, is no God; thus humanity is made an essential predicate of God;—but at the same time it is said: a God who does not exist in and by himself, out of men, above men, as another being, is a phantom; and thus it is made an essential predicate of God that he is non-human and extra-human. ”

“ Thus there is here the same relation between God and man as in pantheism, save that in the one it is represented as a personal, patriarchal relation, in the other as an impersonal, general one,—save that pantheism expresses logically and therefore definitely, directly, what religion invests with the imagination. ”

“ God is Love, but not human love; Understanding, but not human understanding,—no! an essentially different understanding. But wherein consists this difference? I cannot conceive an understanding which acts under other forms than those of our own understanding ”

“ On the contrary, an activity which is identical with my being is not indifferent, is necessary to me, as for example intellectual production, which is an inward necessity to me; and for that reason lays a deep hold on me, affects me pathologically. Intellectual works are not made,—making is only the external activity applied to them;—they arise in us. To make is an indifferent, therefore a free, i.e., optional activity. Thus far then—that He makes—God is entirely at one with man, not at all distinguished from him ”

“ Eternity and omnipresence are sensational qualities, for in them there is no negation of existence in time and space, but only of exclusive limitation to a particular time, to a particular place. In like manner omniscience is a sensational quality, a sensational knowledge. Religion has no hesitation in attributing to God himself the nobler senses: God sees and hears all things. But the divine omniscience is a power of knowing through the senses while yet the necessary quality, the essential determination of actual knowledge through the senses is denied to it. ”

“ The correlation or rather the identity of God and man is veiled in religion by representing both as persons or individuals, and God as a self-subsistent, independent being apart from his paternity:—an independence which however is only apparent, for he who, like the God of religion, is a father from the depths of the heart, has his very life and being in his child. ”

“ God is the human being, and yet he must be regarded as another, a superhuman being. God is universal, abstract Being, simply the idea of Being; and yet he must be conceived as a personal, individual being;—or God is a person, and yet he must be regarded as God, as universal, i.e., not as a personal being. God is; his existence is certain, more certain than ours; he has an existence distinct from us and from things in general, i.e., an individual existence; and yet his existence must be held a spiritual one, i.e., an existence not perceptible as a special one. ”

“ The infinity of God in religion is quantitative infinity; God is and has all that man has, but in an infinitely greater measure. The nature of God is the nature of the imagination unfolded, made objective. ”

“ God has not, like man, produced something in particular, this or that, but all things; his activity is absolutely universal, unlimited. Hence it is self-evident, it is a necessary consequence, that the mode in which God has produced the All is incomprehensible, because this activity is no mode of activity, because the question concerning the how is here an absurdity, a question which is excluded by the fundamental idea of unlimited activity. Every special activity produces its effects in a special manner, because there the activity itself is a determinate mode of activity ”

“ Religion has no physical conception of the world; it has no interest in a natural explanation, which can never be given but with a mode of origin. Origin is a theoretical, natural-philosophical idea. The heathen philosophers busied themselves with the origin of things. But the Christian religious consciousness abhorred this idea as heathen, irreligious, and substituted the practical or subjective idea of Creation, which is nothing else than a prohibition to conceive things as having arisen in a natural way, an interdict on all physical science. ”

“ Imagination does away only with the limit of quantity, not of quality. The proposition that our knowledge is limited, means: we know only some things, a few things, not all.
The beneficial influence of religion rests on this extension of the sensational consciousness. In religion man is in the open air, sub deo; in the sensational consciousness he is in his narrow confined dwelling-house. Religion has relation essentially, originally—and only in its origin is it something holy, true, pure, and good—to the immediate sensational consciousness alone ”

“ Nevertheless this distinction is only an appearance. The father is not a father without the child; both together form a correlated being. In love man renounces his independence, and reduces himself to a part:—a self-humiliation which is only compensated by the fact that the one whom he loves at the same time voluntarily becomes a part also; that they both submit to a higher power, the power of the spirit of family, the power of love. ”