I’ve been reading Ludwig Feuerbach and thinking alongside his premise: all theology is anthropology. That is all religion, in the tradition of Friedrich Schleiermacher, begins with feeling, and hence feeling is the subjective and adolescent beginnings of religion. Thus, reality, is composed of sensible existence, including the inner senses: namely thinking, willing, and loving. Before I continue let me clarify what I mean by subject and predicate. Recall back to the days of basic grammar. Every sentence needs a subject and a predicate. The subject is what receives the action of the sentence–generally the direct object–and usually consists of a noun. The predicate communicates the action of the sentence and usually descriptive words. I.e. The student went to school. In my last example “The student” is the subject, “went to school” is the predicate.
When we talk of God as existent, that is an existence as an object external to my reality, we speak of a subject that is capable of being without predicates or predication. This understanding of existence is a farce, the understandable reality of a subject is tied up with its predicate. In this manner Feuerbach’s God is not available without being predicated, generally the predicates we give to God are love, mercy, etc.
To try and conceive of a subject without a predicate is impossible. Imagine if I walked up to you and just said, “it.” Imagine that was all I said. It would make no sense, you would be likely to ask: “It, what?”
One more point before we continue, when I use the word sensibility, I mean it quite literally in terms of being able to be sensed. There are the five external senses, taste, touch, sight, smell, and hearing. There is also, for Feuerbach, the essence of human existence, which are the inner senses of: thinking, willing, and loving.
For Feuerbach we don’t give God the predicate ‘love’ because ‘God is divine’, but we give God the predicate ‘love’ because ‘love is divine.’ God doesn’t have a reality outside of God’s predicates–God doesn’t exist as a being–these predicates are human predicates. That is these are predicates that come from human experience, that are not intelligible without human experience. Thus the predicate ‘love’ can be assigned to God, only in as much as love is understood as a part of human experience. Thus ‘love’ as a part of human experience is divine. Thus when we worship God as love, we worship something humanly understandable–that is we worship human love. Love between mother and son, father and daughter, husband and wife, etc. and so on.
Feuerbach’s major premise reduces theology to anthropology and exalts anthroplogy to theology. It moves from pure feeling and subjectivity, to unbiased understanding. Thus God doesn’t exist. God is real in as much as a divine predicate is real, that is to say sensible.
What occurs when one both feels religion and begins to reflect on it with the understanding (though not fully), is that one bastardizes religion by concocting a theology of an existent God. That is, the feeling confirms the need for God, the sensible reality of God, while the understanding turns God into a subject capable of existing without predicates, though it will still assign to God predicates. Thus begins a confused understanding of reality, one in which the notion of God loses all meaning and sensibility. What good is a God without predicates, one that is humanly unsensible and without meaning? What is gained by this notion?
For Feuerbach, predicates are fire, they are light, they are the salt of existence. Anything that exists, exists with human predicates, if there were anything outside of existence and human predication we would not know of it anyway.
Now that we understand that God as subject needs predicates, and that all predicates are human, created by humans, relative to human experience, God is then a human. For Feuerbach, the significance of the incarnation of Jesus Christ is not that God magically became human and magically erased sin in the process, or even that God miraculously raised Jesus from the dead. No, for Feuerbach that is superstition and nonsense. The significance of the incarnation is that God became man, and thus man is God.
That is, we find in ourselves an infinite nature. Here the predicate infinite is determined by how we percieve the infinitude of our thought, how we feel the infinitude of our feeling. We cannot imagine life without thinking or feeling, and we cannot imagine life without our thinking and our feelings changing. Thus when we think about the infinite, our experience of infinity is the infinitude of our thought. When we experience the infinite, we feel the infinity of our feelings. That is, our feelings and thoughts will always change. They are also self-contained, I think for the sake of thinking, I feel for the sake of feeling, I don’t think a feeling or feel a thought. I can think about a feeling, I can think a thought, I can feel about a thought, and I can feel a feeling. The distinction hinges around the word ‘about.’ When one thinks about a feeling, a feeling becomes objectified thought. So that one thinks the thought of an objectified emotion. One does not think the feeling, one thinks the objectifed feeling which is actually a thought. One cannot feel a thought, one can only feel about a thought, to feel about a thought is for a thought to become an object of feeling. Thus to feel about a thought is to feel the objectified thought as a feeling.
This self-containment is the infinitude of thought for itself, and the infinitude of feeling for itself. This self-containment is its perfection, its completion. Thus when we religiously feel that God is infinite, we actually perceive the predicate infinite as we understand it humanly, in accordance with our thought and feeling—basically we perceive in the predicate our own nature.
That is a second main point for Feuerbach: God is our human nature objectified. To reinterpret religion, as it has been lost in the confusion of its bastardized form: theology. The object of religion is human nature–God. What hangs on the cross is a human, Jesus as human nature objectified.
All kinds of implications trickle down from this point. The emphases of communion is not sacrifice or that the bread and wine become flesh and blood, but rather that human person’s require sustenance.
For Feuerbach, sin is the disagreement of our individuality with our nature, that is our personality with our humanity. Thus, that I perceive myself to be limited, is in disagreement with what is essentially human: thinking, feeling, loving. To think myself limited, is to sin against my human nature, the possibility of my reality.
Often times, classical Christianity, messes religion up, by creating a theology of an external God with non-human predicates. Thus anthroplogically they sacrifice their own human traits to this inhuman God. “God’s nature is good, humanities corrupt.” But the only way they can conceive of God’s nature is through their own understanding of human experience. What they perceive to be God’s good nature is really their own good nature, what they perceive to be corruption in their nature is really their own individual deviation from their nature.
Feuerbach contends that the goal of religion, is the reunion of the individual with their own essential nature. This reunion is supreme happiness–becoming fully human.
