Prof. Mark Tunick tunick@fau.edu

Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, tr. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957) (1841)

a) "Religion is the dream of the human mind"(xxxix).

b) "I accept the Christ of religion, but I show that this superhuman being is nothing else than a product and reflex of the supernatural human mind"(xli).

c) "God as God...is only an object of thought"(35).

d) "Man in religion-- in his relation to God-- is in relation to his own nature"(25).

e) "In the religious systole man propels his own nature from himself, he throws himself outward; in the religious diastole he receives the rejected nature into his heart again"(31).

f) "The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine...Justice, wisdom, in general every quality which constitutes the divinity of God, is determined and known by itself independently, but the idea of God is determined by the qualities which have thus been previously judged to be worthy of the divine nature."

g) "If God were an object to the bird, he would be a winged being: the bird knows nothing higher, nothing more blissful, than the winged condition. How ludicrous would it be if this bird pronounced: to me God appears as a bird, but what he is in himself I know not..To ask whether God is in himself what he is for me, is to ask whether God is God, is to lift oneself above one's god, to rise up against him"(17).

h) "Property did not become sacred because it was regarded as a divine institution, but it was regarded as a divine institution because it was felt to be in itself sacred. Love is not holy because it is a predicate of God, but it is a predicate of god because it is in itself divine"(273).

i) "Only a being to whom his own species, his own nature, is an object of thought, can make the essential nature of other things or beings an object of thought"(2).

j) "Man can perform the functions of thought and speech...apart from another individual. Man is himself at once I and thou; he can put himself in the place of another, for this reason, that to him his species, his essential nature, and not merely his individuality, is an object of thought"(2).

k) "The yearning of man after something above himself is nothing else than the longing after the perfect type of his nature, the yearning to be free from himself, i.e., from the limits and defects of his individuality. Individuality is the self-conditioning, the self-limitation of the species. Thus man has cognisance of nothing above himself, of nothing beyond the nature of humanity; but to the individual man this nature presents itself under the form of an individual"(281).

l) "Sensations man has in isolation; feelings only in community...Feeling is aesthetic, human sensation...In feeling man is related to his fellow-man as to himself; he is alive to the sorrows, the joys of another as his own. thus only by communication does man rise above merely egoistic sensation into feeling; --participated sensation is feeling"(283).

m) "The monks made a vow of chastity to god; they mortified the sexual passion in themselves, but therefore they had in heaven, in the Virgin Mary, the image of woman-- an image of love. They could the more easily dispense with real woman in proportion as an ideal woman was an object of love to them...The more the sensual tendencies are renounced, the more sensual is the God to whom they are sacrificed"(26).