Ludwig Feuerbach

“ Faith condemns, anathematizes; all the actions, all the dispositions, which contradict love, humanity, reason, accord with faith. All the horrors of Christian religious history, which our believers aver not to be due to Christianity, have truly arisen out of Christianity, because they have arisen out of faith. This repudiation of them is indeed a necessary consequence of faith; for faith claims for itself only what is good, everything bad it casts on the shoulders of unbelief, or of misbelief, or of men in general. ”

“ Are we to love each other because Christ loved us? Such love would be an affected, imitative love. Can we truly love each other only if we love Christ? Is Christ the cause of love? Is he not rather the apostle of love? Is not the ground of his love the unity of human nature? Shall I love Christ more than mankind? Is not such love a chimerical love? Can I step beyond the idea of the species? Can I love anything higher than humanity? ”

“ The distinction is founded only on climate or on natural temperament. A warlike or ardently sensuous people will naturally attest its distinctive religious character by deeds, by force of arms. But the nature of faith as such is everywhere the same. It is essential to faith to condemn, to anathematize. All blessings, all good it accumulates on itself, on its God, as the lover on his beloved; all curses, all hardship and evil it casts on unbelief. The believer is blessed, well-pleasing to God, a partaker of everlasting felicity ”

“ Love can only be founded on the unity of the species, the unity of intelligence—on the nature of mankind; then only is it a well-grounded love, safe in its principle, guaranteed, free, for it is fed by the original source of love, out of which the love of Christ himself arose. The love of Christ was itself a derived love. He loved us not out of himself, by virtue of his own authority, but by virtue of our common human nature. ”

“ So long as Christian love does not renounce its qualification of Christian, does not make love, simply, its highest law, so long is it a love which is injurious to the sense of truth, for the very office of love is to abolish the distinction between Christianity and so-called heathenism;—so long is it a love which by its particularity is in contradiction with the nature of love, an abnormal, loveless love, which has therefore long been justly an object of sarcasm. True love is sufficient to itself ”

“ But while Self is being sunk in the depths of love, the idea of the Person rises up again and disturbs the harmony of the divine and human nature which had been established by love. Faith advances with its pretensions, and allows only just so much to Love as belongs to a predicate in the ordinary sense. It does not permit love freely to unfold itself; it makes love the abstract, and itself the concrete, the fact, the basis. The love of faith is only a rhetorical figure, a poetical fiction of faith,—faith in ecstasy. If Faith comes to itself, Love is fled. ”

“ God is the human being; but he presents himself to the religious consciousness as a distinct being. Now, that which reveals the basis, the hidden essence of religion, is Love; that which constitutes its conscious form is Faith. Love identifies man with God and God with man, consequently it identifies man with man; faith separates God from man, consequently it separates man from man, for God is nothing else than the idea of the species invested with a mystical form,—the separation of God from man is therefore the separation of man from man, the unloosing of the social bond. ”

“ Faith is the opposite of love. Love recognises virtue even in sin, truth in error. It is only since the power of faith has been supplanted by the power of the natural unity of mankind, the power of reason, of humanity, that truth has been seen even in polytheism, in idolatry generally,—or at least that there has been any attempt to explain on positive grounds what faith, in its bigotry, derives only from the devil. Hence love is reconcilable with reason alone, not with faith; for as reason, so also love is free, universal, in its nature; whereas faith is narrow-hearted, limited. ”

“ To faith, the man is merged in the believer; to it, the essential difference between man and the brute rests only on religious belief. Faith alone comprehends in itself all virtues which can make man pleasing to God; and God is the absolute measure, his pleasure the highest law: the believer is thus alone the legitimate, normal man, man as he ought to be, man as he is recognised by God. Wherever we find Christians making a distinction between the man and the believer, there the human mind has already severed itself from faith; there man has value in himself, independently of faith. ”

“ Only where reason rules, does universal love rule; reason is itself nothing else than universal love. It was faith, not love, not reason, which invented Hell. To love, Hell is a horror; to reason, an absurdity. It would be a pitiable mistake to regard Hell as a mere aberration of faith, a false faith. Hell stands already in the Bible. Faith is everywhere like itself ”

“ As the believer already here below anticipates the joys of heaven, so the flames of the abyss must be seen to flash here as a foretaste of the awaiting hell,—at least in the moments when faith attains its highest enthusiasm. [9] It is true that Christianity ordains no persecution of heretics, still less conversion by force of arms. But so far as faith anathematizes, it necessarily generates hostile dispositions,—the dispositions out of which the persecution of heretics arises. To love the man who does not believe in Christ, is a sin against Christ, is to love the enemy of Christ. ”

“ Political unity is a unity of force. The despotism of Rome must turn in upon itself, destroy itself. But it was precisely through this catastrophe of political existence that man released himself entirely from the heart-stifling toils of politics. In the place of Rome, appeared the idea of humanity; to the idea of dominion succeeded the idea of love. Even the Jews, by imbibing the principle of humanity contained in Greek culture, had by this time mollified their malignant religious separatism. Philo celebrates love as the highest virtue. ”

“ Faith left to itself necessarily exalts itself above the laws of natural morality. The doctrine of faith is the doctrine of duty towards God,—the highest duty of faith. By how much God is higher than man, by so much higher are duties to God than duties towards man; and duties towards God necessarily come into collision with common human duties. God is not only believed in, conceived as the universal being, the Father of men, as Love:—such faith is the faith of love;—he is also represented as a personal being, a being by himself. ”

“ Faith is in its nature exclusive. One thing alone is truth, one alone is God, one alone has the monopoly of being the Son of God; all else is nothing, error, delusion. Jehovah alone is the true God; all other gods are vain idols.
Faith has in its mind something peculiar to itself ”

“ Faith destitute of love, or indifferent to love, contradicts the reason, the natural sense of right in man, moral feeling, on which love immediately urges itself as a law. Hence faith, in contradiction with its intrinsic character, has limits imposed on it by morality: a faith which effects nothing good, which does not attest itself by love, comes to be held as not a true and living faith. But this limitation does not arise out of faith itself. It is the power of love, a power independent of faith, which gives laws to it ”

“ He does not make himself the end of his own activity, but the end, the object of God.
Faith is essentially determinate, specific. God according to the specific view taken of him by faith, is alone the true God. This Jesus, such as I conceive him, is the Christ, the true, sole prophet, the only begotten Son of God. And this particular conception thou must believe, if thou wouldst not forfeit thy salvation. Faith is imperative. It is therefore necessary—it lies in the nature of faith—that it be fixed as dogma. Dogma only gives a formula to what faith had already on its tongue or in its mind. ”

“ But in him good works do not proceed from essentially virtuous dispositions. It is not love, not the object of love, man, the basis of all morality, which is the motive of his good works. No! he does good not for the sake of goodness itself, not for the sake of man, but for the sake of God;—out of gratitude to God, who has done all for him, and for whom therefore he must on his side do all that lies in his power. He forsakes sin, because it wounds God, his Saviour, his Benefactor. [25] The idea of virtue is here the idea of compensatory sacrifice. God has sacrificed himself for man ”

“ That which God, which Christ does not love, man must not love; his love would be a contradiction of the divine will, consequently a sin. God, it is true, loves all men; but only when and because they are Christians, or at least may be and desire to be such. To be a Christian is to be beloved by God; not to be a Christian is to be hated by God, an object of the divine anger. [11] The Christian must therefore love only Christians—others only as possible Christians; he must only love what faith hallows and blesses. Faith is the baptism of love. Love to man as man is only natural love. ”

“ Faith makes belief in its God a law: love is freedom,—it condemns not even the atheist, because it is itself atheistic, itself denies, if not theoretically, at least practically, the existence of a particular, individual God, opposed to man. Love has God in itself: faith has God out of itself; it estranges God from man, it makes him an external object.
Faith, being inherently external, proceeds even to the adoption of outward fact as its object, and becomes historical faith. ”

“ Love to God himself, since it is love to a personal being, is not a moral but a personal love. Innumerable devout hymns breathe nothing but love to the Lord; but in this love there appears no spark of an exalted moral idea or disposition.
Faith is the highest to itself, because its object is a divine personality. Hence it makes salvation dependent on itself, not on the fulfilment of common human duties. But that which has eternal salvation as its consequence, necessarily becomes in the mind of man the chief thing. ”

“ That which wounds faith, wounds God, that which denies faith, denies God himself.
Faith knows no other distinction than that between the service of God and the service of idols. Faith alone gives honour to God; unbelief withdraws from God that which is due to him. Unbelief is an injury to God, religious high treason. The heathens worship demons; their gods are devils. “I say that the things which the Gentiles sacrifice, they sacrifice to devils, and not to God: and I would not that ye should have fellowship with devils.” [15] But the devil is the negation of God ”

“ But theoretic limitation, however fettered, short-sighted and narrow-hearted it may be, has still a freer character than faith, because the domain of theory is in itself a free one, because here the ground of decision is the nature of things, argument, reason. But faith refers the decision to conscience and interest, to the instinctive desire of happiness; for its object is a special, personal Being, urging himself on recognition, and making salvation dependent on that recognition.
Faith gives man a peculiar sense of his own dignity and importance. ”

“ In the predicate I affirm love, in the subject faith. Love does not alone fill my soul: I leave a place open for my uncharitableness by thinking of God as a subject in distinction from the predicate. It is therefore inevitable that at one moment I lose the thought of love, at another the thought of God, that at one moment I sacrifice the personality of God to the divinity of love, at another the divinity of love to the personality of God. The history of Christianity has given sufficient proof of this contradiction. ”

“ The greater the sacrifice the better the deed. The more anything contradicts man and Nature, the greater the abnegation, the greater is the virtue. This merely negative idea of goodness has been especially realized and developed by Catholicism. Its highest moral idea is that of sacrifice; hence the high significance attached to the denial of sexual love,—to virginity. Chastity, or rather virginity, is the characteristic virtue of the Catholic faith,—for this reason, that it has no basis in Nature. ”

“ What a being is in special, is the being itself; he alone knows me, who knows me in specie. Thus the special God, God as he is an object to the Christians, the personal God, is alone God. And this God is unknown to heathens, and to unbelievers in general; he does not exist for them. He is, indeed, said to exist for the heathens; but mediately, on condition that they cease to be heathens, and become Christians. Faith makes man partial and narrow; it deprives him of the freedom and ability to estimate duly what is different from himself. Faith is imprisoned within itself. ”

“ Faith necessarily passes into hatred, hatred into persecution, where the power of faith meets with no contradiction, where it does not find itself in collision with a power foreign to faith, the power of love, of humanity, of the sense of justice. ”

“ If it ameliorate man, if it have moral dispositions as its consequence, this proceeds solely from the inward conviction of the irreversible reality of morals:—a conviction independent of religious faith. It is morality alone, and by no means faith, that cries out in the conscience of the believer: thy faith is nothing, if it does not make thee good. It is not to be denied that the assurance of eternal salvation, the forgiveness of sins, the sense of favour and release from all punishment, inclines man to do good. The man who has this confidence possesses all things ”

“ Faith is thus expressly distinguished from good works; faith alone avails before God, not good works; faith alone is the cause of salvation, not virtue: thus faith alone has substantial significance, virtue only accidental; i.e., faith alone has religious significance, divine authority—and not morality. It is well known that many have gone so far as to maintain that good works are not necessary, but are even “injurious, obstructive to salvation.” ”

“ By faith religion places itself in contradiction with morality, with reason, with the unsophisticated sense of truth in man; by love, it opposes itself again to this contradiction. Faith isolates God, it makes him a particular, distinct being: love universalizes; it makes God a common being, the love of whom is one with the love of man. Faith produces in man an inward disunion, a disunion with himself, and by consequence an outward disunion also; but love heals the wounds which are made by faith in the heart of man. ”

“ It is only religious indifference under the appearance of religion that makes the Bible, which in its nature and origin is indefinite, a standard of faith, and under the pretext of believing only the essential, retains nothing which deserves the name of faith;—for example, substituting for the distinctly characterized Son of God, held up by the Church, the vague negative definition of a Sinless Man, who can claim to be the Son of God in a sense applicable to no other being,—in a word, of a man, whom one may not trust oneself to call either a man or a God. ”