Feuerbach [German]: The Essence of Religion, translated by Wang Taiqing, The Commercial Press, July 1999
2: pp. 1–2
Human trust is the basis of religion; and the object of this sense of dependence—that is, that on which human beings rely, and on which they also feel themselves to rely—is originally nothing other than nature. Nature is religion’s original primordial object; this is fully demonstrated by the history of all religions and all peoples.
////—This section states the central idea of the whole book: that the sense of dependence is the basis of religion, and that nature is religion’s original object. I agree with this.
3: p. 2
To say that religion is something human beings naturally possess from birth is false, if by religion we mean the ideas that are generally regarded as theistic, that is, the ideas of truly believing in God. But if we regard religion as nothing more than a sense of dependence, nothing more than a human feeling or consciousness: the feeling that if one does not have something other than oneself to rely on, one will not exist and cannot exist; the feeling that one’s existence does not come from oneself—then the statement is completely true. Religion in this sense stands in a relation to human beings much like light to the eye, air to the lungs, food to the stomach. Religion is a reflection upon and acknowledgment (Beherzigung und Bekennung) of what I am by virtue of being myself.
////—Saying that religion is a reflection upon and acknowledgment of what I am by virtue of being myself is very interesting, and I agree with that too. The claim that the ideas of believing in God are not naturally given, but are elevated out of dependence on nature, is also quite correct. However, this does not amount to a refutation of religious belief. Let us examine the case of mathematics and physics: the ideas of mathematics and the concepts of physics are likewise not something a person naturally possesses from birth; people first simply begin by counting and by recognizing the things at hand. But the method of mathematics is abstraction, and the method of physics is reduction; when physics has advanced enough to tell us that matter is composed of atoms and electrons, that is an elevation and transcendence of human intelligence. Likewise, the elevation of the object of religious trust from the concrete to the abstract, from the finite to the infinite, can also be said to be a process of human self-transcendence. And to say that God is the product of the self-elevation and transcendence of human thought does not prove that God is destined to be an empty and illusory concept—just as concepts such as atoms, electrons, and quarks were likewise concepts that could only be invented when science had advanced to a sufficiently high level, and this does not prove that electrons and quarks are merely fabricated terms.
5: pp. 3–4
There is a fanciful view that human beings can only rise above the animal condition by means of the Way of Heaven, by means of “superhuman” beings such as gods, spirits, ghosts, angels, and the like. Human beings, of course, do not become what they are simply by themselves in isolation; they must have the support of other beings in order to become what they are. But these beings are not supernatural or imaginary products; they are real, natural things, not things above human beings, but below them. For all that supports what is regarded as conscious, beneficial, and usually singled out as human action—all excellent endowments—does not come down from above, but springs up from below; it does not descend from heaven, but comes from the depths of nature. These things that help human beings, these guardian spirits, are chiefly animals. Only by means of animals can human beings rise above animals; only with the help of animals can the seeds of human culture grow.
////—There is nothing wrong with saying that the earliest growth of human culture required the help of animals. But can human civilization’s self-transcendence really be accomplished merely by means of animals? By means of animals, human beings may perhaps rise above animals, but that is not enough to accomplish the leap from barbarism to civilization. Feuerbach ought to have seen that, from the history of the peoples and civilizations of the world, no people that remains at primitive fetishism can create any truly great culture. Any civilization that has emerged from barbarism and created a splendid culture must have religious beliefs that have transcended the worship of real natural things and turned toward some transcendent object such as the Way of Heaven, gods, spirits, or the like.
6: p. 6
Why should I not remain at the stage of worshipping created things? Am I not myself a created thing? For me, who am not speaking of something distant but of myself, of me, of this definite and individual being, is not the nearest cause—the equally definite and individual cause—the final cause? Is not this personality of mine, inseparable and indistinguishable from myself and from my existence, dependent on the personality of my parents? If I continue tracing things back, will I not finally lose every trace of my existence? Is there not here a necessary stopping point in this regress?…………Since my life is undeniably a unique life, should not my beginning also be the beginning of a unique individual? Then should I extend filial piety all the way back to Adam? No! I have ample reason to abide by that substance nearest to me, to abide by my parents, to regard them as the cause of my existence, and to offer them religious reverence.
////—If one could consciously bring this process of “regression” to a stop, that would indeed be a commendable attitude. But the problem is that such regression is not something one can simply stop at will; this sort of questioning is inevitable once human intelligence has developed to a certain stage. It is like the tracing of matter’s origin in science: of course, if one wants to study a table, it is at most enough to trace it back to the wood that composes it. But the scientific spirit of inquiry is often not satisfied with that; it must trace further back to molecules, atoms, protons, quarks, and so on. If one is merely fixated on reduction and forgets the table itself, which is equally real, then obviously one has become too obsessive. But neither can one say that such relentless tracing is meaningless. Moreover, religious tracing differs from scientific tracing: it is not only a tracing of causes, but also a tracing of “meaning,” especially an inquiry into the meaning of life and the value of life.
19: p. 24
To live is indeed shameful; to die is indeed painful. But if one does not want life and death, then one is abandoning the state of being a living creature. Eternity excludes life; life excludes eternity. Although an individual thing presupposes something else that produces it, that producer does not thereby stand above what is produced; rather, it stands below it.…………The infant takes nourishment from its mother’s body, drawing on its mother’s blood and flesh to nourish itself, using its mother’s blood to redden its cheeks. And yet the infant is the mother’s pride; she places it above herself, placing the happiness of her own existence and of existing beneath the happiness of the infant. Even a female animal sacrifices her life to the life of her offspring.
////—In any case, human beings are living creatures, but they always have a longing to transcend their own animality; human beings always yearn for eternity, and only human beings truly fear death. It is not as though one can simply decide not to yearn for eternity and thereby cease to do so. Religion is precisely one way of comforting and fulfilling this transcendent human longing. The reason many mothers place their infants above themselves is not only, like female animals, out of instinct, but also as an expression of the inner demand of human beings to seek transcendence. In any case, human beings always hope to find something higher than their own life, because their own life is always limited; only by finding a value higher than one’s own life can one possibly face death calmly. Making one’s descendants the bearer of a higher value is a good choice, but even this choice is ultimately not transcendence; it is still finite and unreliable. For animals, there is no issue of value: to survive and reproduce is their meaning. But human beings have pursuits beyond mere survival. Even if a mother entrusts her aspirations to her child, she still has to face a difficult question: what does it mean to do what is “good” for the child? Merely keeping the child alive, giving the child food and shelter, and then reproducing again when grown up—this kind of “good” is not enough. The child will not be satisfied with that, nor will the mother. Their reason still cannot help but ask: What am I living for? Only for my descendants? Then what is the purpose of having descendants? Is it simply to hand this difficulty of asking after meaning over to the next generation, so that they, generation after generation, fall into confusion in endless repetition?
20: p. 26
The source of many different waters is not one primordial water; the source of many different mountains is not one primordial mountain; the origin of many different things is not one fundamental thing. “One” cannot produce things; only duality, opposition, and difference can produce things.
////—This dialectical worldview is very good. However, if one stops at “different things have different origins,” that is intellectual laziness. Whether in the spirit of religion or the spirit of science, there is some quest to seek the unchanging and the eternal amid change and multiplicity. Whether one is seeking fundamental particles, scientific laws, ultimate purposes, or fundamental meaning, it is all the same. If one always remains at explaining multiplicity by multiplicity and goes no further, not only will there be no religion, there will also be no science.
27: pp. 35–36
The fact that nature changes, especially that those phenomena which most arouse human dependence also change, is the main reason why human beings feel that nature is an entity with humanity and will, and thus worship it devoutly. If the sun simply stayed at the zenith as a teacher, it (anc. note: perhaps “simply”) would not kindle the flame of religious fervor in people’s hearts. Only when the sun disappears from human sight, bringing the terror of night down upon people, and then appears again in the sky, do people kneel before it, rejoicing at its unexpected return and conquered by that joy.
28, 29: pp. 37–39
For the sense of dependence on nature, together with the idea of regarding nature as a personal entity that can act arbitrarily, is the basis of piety, the basis of that fundamental act of natural religion. It is especially in the demand made upon nature that I feel my dependence on nature. This demand is the feeling and expression that “if I do not have nature, I do not exist”; but inseparable from need is enjoyment, and enjoyment is a feeling opposed to need: the feeling that I myself exist, the feeling of my independence from nature. Thus need is God-fearing, humble, pious, whereas enjoyment is arrogant, forgetful of God, irreverent, and presumptuous. This lawlessness of enjoyment, or at least its irreverence, is for human beings a practical necessity, a necessity on which human existence itself is founded; but this necessity directly contradicts that theoretical reverence human beings bear toward nature, treating nature as something alive, something for me, something endowed with feeling under the meaning of the human, and regarding it as something, like human beings themselves, that does not tolerate, and will not accommodate, anything. Thus to possess nature or use nature seems to human beings like a criminal act, like seizing another’s property, like a crime. Therefore, in order to soothe their conscience, in order to soothe the object that, in their imagination, has suffered injury, in order to tell this object that they have plundered it only under compulsion and not out of arrogance, they cut back on their own enjoyment and return a little of the stolen goods to the object. So the Greeks believed that when a tree was cut down, the soul of the tree—the tree deity—would grieve and would cry out to the god of fate for revenge against the violent offender. The Romans, if they did not offer a little pig to the tree deity as an expiatory sacrifice, dared not cut down a tree on their own land. When the Ostyaks killed a bear, they would hang its skin on a tree and perform all kinds of reverent gestures toward it, indicating how deeply sorry they were to have killed it. “They believed that in this way they politely warded off the calamities the ghost of this animal might otherwise bring upon them.” Some tribes of North America also used similar rites to propitiate the ghosts of the animals they had killed. So when our ancestors had to cut down an alder tree, they treated it as a sacred tree and often first prayed to it: “Lady Alder, please grant me some of your timber! I too am willing to give you some of mine, when it grows out in the woods.” When the Filipinos had to cross plains and mountains, they asked the permission of the plains and mountains, and regarded the felling of any ancient tree as a crime. Brahmins do not dare to drink water carelessly, nor dare to tread on the earth carelessly, because this treading, this drinking, causes pain to those sentient things, those plants and animals, and kills them; therefore they must perform a kind of repentance “to propitiate the death of the living beings he has unintentionally slain by day or by night.”
The whole essence of religion manifests and concentrates itself in sacrifice. The root of sacrifice is the sense of dependence—fear, doubt, uncertainty as to consequences, ignorance of the future, conscience-stricken guilt over the crimes one has committed—and the result, the aim of sacrifice, is the sense of self—the confidence, satisfaction, certainty of consequences, freedom, and happiness. When one goes to make a sacrifice, one is the servant of nature; but when one returns from sacrifice, one is the master of nature. Thus the sense of dependence on nature is indeed the origin of religion, but the extinguishing of this dependence, liberation from the hands of nature, is the aim of religion. In other words, the divinity of nature is indeed the basis of religion, and of all religions as well as Christianity, but the divinity of man is the ultimate aim of religion.
////—Isn’t this humility before nature and God, this repentance for acts that damage nature, and this spontaneous restraint, a good attitude? What does it become once this piety fades? The “disenchantment” of nature leaves people unprecedentedly arrogant and presumptuous. Of course, we cannot prove the rationality of religious faith from its effects on human society, but at least it shows that the existence of religion is not necessarily a bad thing.
32: p. 43
If a person has no hope, he also has no gods. Why did the Greeks stress so strongly the immortality and blessedness of the gods? Because they themselves did not wish to die, did not wish to be unblessed. Wherever you do not hear people lamenting the mutability and misery of human life, there you also do not hear people extolling the immortal and blessed heavenly gods.
////—Then where is it that one does not hear people lamenting the mutability and misery of human life? Such a place does not exist. In fact, the more human culture advances, the more developed technology becomes, the more abundant material life grows, and the more fulfilling life seems, the stronger people’s longing for transcendent things becomes. For in any case, at least the longing for eternal life can never be realized, just as Fei’erbach says: “Immortality is ultimately an unlimited and unrealizable religious wish.” (34: p. 47). When material resources are scarce, people’s craving for immediate bread and milk often allows them to set aside those abstract, detached pursuits; yet precisely when material abundance arrives, transcendent pursuits instead become the most important topic. Fei’erbach’s words can be reversed: if a person has hope, he will have a craving for gods; wherever you hear people lamenting the mutability and misery of human life, there you also hear people extolling the immortal and blessed heavenly gods.
43: p. 60
The emergence of true theism or monotheism is due only to man’s linking nature to himself and making this link the essence of nature, thereby making himself nature’s ultimate end, its center point and point of unity.
////—Basically agree, with reservations about the “only.”
52: pp. 83–84
On the pretext that miracles are incompatible with God’s dignity and wisdom—through which dignity and wisdom God, from the very beginning, once and for all, eternally determined and predestined the most perfect state of all things—the denial of miracles is tantamount to sacrificing humanity for nature, sacrificing religion for reason, tantamount to preaching atheism in the name of God. If the human needs and wishes that God satisfies are needs and wishes that could also be satisfied without God, satisfied within the limits and conditions of natural causes, and thus God helps human beings only when technology and nature can help them, but when medicine is ineffective he stops helping, then such a God is nothing other than personalized natural necessity hidden behind the name of God.
////—Indeed, the meaning of religion does not lie in satisfying human worldly needs; if one wants to cure illness, one should of course rely first on medicine rather than magic. The meaning of religion lies in satisfying human transcendent requirements and wishes.
54: pp. 90
In short, whether you worship a sensuous entity or a spiritual one—it makes no difference; the object of religion is nothing more than some thing, so long as that thing is an object of imagination, an object of feeling, an object of belief. Precisely because the object of religion, insofar as it is a religious object, does not exist in actuality, but rather stands in contradiction to actuality, it is only an object of belief. For example, human immortality, or man as an immortal entity, is a religious object, but precisely for that reason it is only an object of belief, because what reality shows is exactly the opposite: that all humans die. Belief is to imagine what is not as what is—for example, to imagine that this image is a living thing, this bread is flesh, this wine is blood; that is to say, to imagine it as something it is not. Therefore, if you hope to find God with a telescope in the heavens of astronomy, or with a magnifying glass in a botanical garden, or with a mineralogical hammer in the mines of geology, or with a scalpel and microscope in the viscera of animals and human beings, then you reveal the greatest ignorance of religion—you can find him only in faith, only in imagination, only in the human heart; for God himself is nothing other than the entity of fantasy or imagination, nothing other than the entity of the human heart.
////—Indeed, the object of religion cannot be the object of science. What makes faith faith is that it is always supra-rational. Believing that “water will freeze” does not require the aid of religious faith. If it is an empirically ascertainable fact or something reachable through logical argument, then it is no longer called faith. However, I also do not maintain that faith is in contradiction with reason; to say, “Because it is absurd, I believe,” is somewhat too fanatical. Faith should be pious trust in something that does not contradict reason yet still lies beyond the territory of reason—that is to say, the object of faith should be something that is difficult to verify, yet has not been disproved.
In this sense, religion does not exclude science either; on the contrary, religion always needs science. To use science to prove the object of faith (for example, to argue for God’s existence) is inadvisable, and once an object is provable it is no longer a religious object. What religion needs science to argue for and support is the “reasonableness” of its object of faith—that is to say, to use science to show that religion does not violate science—for example, the efforts of process theology, the efforts to use quantum mechanics to argue for the “possibility” of the soul, and so on. The aim of such arguments is merely to say that in the cracks and crevices of modern technology, “God may still exist,” “the immortality of the soul may still be realizable,” and the rest is “believe it or not”; whether you ultimately convert to religion is not something that can be persuaded by reason and experiment. And while science itself continually pursues what it can reach, it also continually clarifies its own limits—for example, as with Gödel’s theorem and the uncertainty principle—thereby always leaving corresponding space for religion to open up.
55: pp. 93–94 (footnote 2)
Moreover, will—notably the will in the eyes of moralists—does not belong to the essence peculiar to religion; for what I can attain by my will, I do not need God to attain. To take morality as the theme of religion is to preserve the name of religion while abandoning its substance. We can have morality without God, but we cannot have blessedness—blessedness in the supra-naturalist, Christian sense—without God, because in that sense heavenly blessedness lies beyond the boundaries and beyond the power of nature and humanity, and therefore one must posit a supra-naturalist entity to realize it, an entity whose properties and actions are impossible for nature and humanity. Thus when Kant regarded morality as the essence of religion, his relation to Christianity was the same as, or similar to, Aristotle’s relation to Greek religion when Aristotle regarded theory as the essence of God. A God that is merely a speculative entity, merely an entity of intellect, is no longer a God; a God that is merely a moral entity or a God “personified moral law” is likewise no longer a God.
////—As for Kant’s moral religion, I have already written about it in a paper. Indeed, morality does not need religion to be attained; what guarantees morality is practical reason. However, Kant was not reducing Jesus to a moral teacher; on the contrary, he was elevating morality into religion. As Fei’erbach says, what religion seeks to attain is “blessedness”; the question religion must answer is not “What ought I to do?”—the question of morality—but rather, once I have done what I ought to do, “What may I hope for?”
February 6, 2006
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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