To define the essence of something means to distill it down to its most basic properties. Ludwig Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity is, like most serious works of philosophy, densely written and complex in its arguments and theses. It is a hefty tome that has been analyzed and interpreted since 1841 and it is certainly not what most would consider light reading. Nevertheless, unlike a great many works falling within the generic classification of the philosophy of religion, the essence of its argument is, once distilled down to the basic properties, amazing accessible and easily understood.
The fundamental nature of the contribution to The Essence of Christianity within the argument of religion boils down to one singularly simple question with absolutely no simple answer: Did God create man or did man create God? That this is a simple question without a simple answer is demonstrated by number of words Feuerbach expends on the subject. Not to mention the infinitely greater number of words which have been composed in reply. Nevertheless, Feuerbach makes it plainly obvious where his opinion lies and does so in language which need not be parsed or translated. He is no Kant, hiding truths beneath impenetrable layers of abstruse reasoning and logic. Feuerbach’s essence of the nature of Christianity is the very definition of the process of distillation. In fact, his theory is one which involves the process of distillation.
“God is the manifested inward nature, the expressed self of a man,—religion the solemn unveiling of a man’s hidden treasures, the revelation of his intimate thoughts, the open confession of his love-secrets.”
What the philosopher is describing here has a name within the realm of Freudian psychology: wish-fulfillment. Man wished for a supreme being—a creator-god who stuck around as overseer and protecter—and that wish came true. The wish came true because how could it not? God is all wishes and desires borne of the divine aspect which man sees within himself.
Consider for a moment if you had the power to create the God of your choice in whom would be handed all the supreme powers of such a being. Would you wish for a lazy, distracted God that created man and then took a powder or or a merciful, loving and forgiving God who is not just awesome but always there to be awesome? Now do the math and extrapolate all the other attributes given to God that mankind in its moment of least self-critical self-analysis views as its own defining traits. That God is almost never viewed as a spoiled child who created mankind as a plaything to while away epochal moments of boredom says something very deep about the relationship between the man and his supreme creator. The evidence in support of Feuerbach’s theories do not require complex scholarship. It is simple anthropology. The history of God is written in the history of mankind. What man has always desired in a God is exactly what it has always gotten. The underlying promise of Feuerbach’s vision is that if God is an invention of man, then the nature of His being is fluid, flexible, and subject to changes and alterations as required.
Witness the transformation of the more judgmental and wrathful God of the Old Testament into the soft and more forgiving God of the New Testament. What has changed over the course of that combination text? Not God, but His human biographers.
