Believing after Feuerbach

Religious sentiment belongs to human nature, is part of it, and generally refers to God as man’s friend – every religion tends to establish a relationship of friendship with God. Atheists, on the contrary, deny that religious sentiment is innate to human beings and tend to see God as man’s enemy, an obstacle to his self-realization, growth and progress.

There have been cultures and civilizations without science and technology, but there has never been one without religious sentiment, without religion. This is because self-awareness, which emerges in human life around the age of 6 or 7, is contemporary with the certainty that one day we will die.

Because of cogito ergo sum, I think therefore I am, I know that one day I will cease to exist. The three questions that every human being asks of himself or herself – where I come from, where am I going, and what is the meaning of life – surface in the consciousness on the day he or she becomes self-aware. Religion is the answer to these three questions.

Biography of Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)
Born in Rechenberg in 1804, Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was a German philosopher known for his study of humanist theology. He was a student of the philosopher Hegel, but abandoned his Hegelian studies to take up studies in the natural sciences in 1828.

His most important work is called “The Essence of Christianity”, in which he discusses the true essence or anthropology of religion and concludes that all religion is a form of alienation in which people project their concept of the “human ideal” onto a higher being. Feuerbach makes the transition from German idealism to the historical materialism of Karl Marx and the scientific materialism of the second half of the 19th century.

Religion as Man's Projection
Homo homini Deus est – Christianity set itself the goal of satisfying man’s unattainable desires, but for this very reason, ignored his attainable desires. By promising man eternal life, it deprived him of temporal life, by teaching him to trust in God’s help, it took away his trust in his own powers; by giving him faith in a better life in Heaven, it destroyed his faith in a better life on earth and the effort to achieve it. Christianity gave man what his imagination desires, but for that very reason, did not give him what he truly wants.

For Feuerbach, theology is pure anthropology, for it was not God who created man in his image and likeness, but on the contrary, it was man who created God in his image and likeness. Everything that is said about God belongs to man; the images of God and everything we know about him is anthropomorphic. Man, projects all his aspirations, desires and ideals outside of himself, onto an abstract being he calls God. “God is nothing more than the human spirit projected towards the infinity”.

“My first thought was God, my second thought was reason, my third and last thought was man”. This brilliant philosopher began his career as a student of theology, later abandoning it to become a disciple of Hegel. Feuerbach was the first great atheist of modern times. A real blaze of fire, which is what his name means. In truth, I believe that all those who came after him said little or nothing truly new, merely repeating his basic ideas with other words.

For this reason, Feuerbach is the great inspirer and precursor of Karl Marx, in the sense that he is the first to proclaim and fight for man’s emancipation from the tutelage of religion, which weakens him and deprives him of his own power. For Feuerbach, “Morality that does not aim at happiness is a word devoid of meaning”. And he warns us that “whenever morality is based on theology, whenever what is right becomes dependent on divine authority, the most immoral, unjust, and infamous things can be justified and imposed”.

As brilliant as it may seem, Feuerbach’s criticism of faith and religion is nothing more than sophistry. Man’s projection outside himself says nothing about the existence or non-existence of God: God can exist with or without projection.

Human projection, precisely because it is human, has more to do with human nature than with God’s nature. Thus, human projection can explain why the thought of God has always existed in the minds of all men at all times; but it has nothing to say about the hypothetical existence of God. On the contrary, the persistence of the very thought of God in our minds is more proof of God’s existence than of His non-existence.

If a person is thirsty or has a desire to drink water, it is because there must be water to quench his thirst; it is more logical to think that water creates the desire than to think that the desire creates water; especially since, chronologically in the history of the Universe, long before the appearance of man, there was already water; therefore, water pre-exists the desire to drink it. I believe that if water did not exist, neither would thirst.

Returning to the sequence of Feuerbach’s thoughts from God to Man, unfortunately, Feuerbach did not stop at the third thought, God – Reason – Man. After having lowered and degraded God to the category of pure human conjecture, he did not stop there but continued with his fourth thought which was the sensible, with the fifth which was nature, and with the sixth which was matter, going so far as to foolishly state that “man is what he eats”.

In other words, when you degrade God, you end up degrading the creature He created in His image and likeness as well. According to the book of Genesis, God took us from matter (clay) and made us as persons in His own image and likeness. If we deny God’s existence as a person, we also deny our existence as persons, because we owe it to Him.

If we are not a person, then we return to what we were before God created us, that is, matter. In conclusion, what Feuerbach is doing to the human being is a Darwinian involution…

Conclusion – For Feuerbach, it was man who created God in his own image, projecting his aspirations and ideals onto God, and not the other way around. However, the human desire for something transcendent can be proof of God’s existence. There is no thirst without water and no water without thirst.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Spiritualist Worldview

When we speak of the Christian worldview, we are referring more to the contribution of Christianity to humanity and how humanity is indebted to it in many respects as a global religion. As we have spoken about the biblical worldview, referring to the Hebrew people, and therefore to the Old Testament; in speaking of the Christian worldview, we focus more on the content of the Christian narrative or, if you will, on Judeo-Christianity. The spiritualist worldview is a Christian worldview, but with a strong Greek influence.

During the time of Christ nothing was written down, in any language; the New Testament writings report in Greek the events that happened in Hebrew and Aramaic. That is, the authors of the New Testament were at the same time writing and translating. “Traductor, traditor” says the wise Latin proverb meaning the translator is a traitor.  The historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth occurred in a purely and exclusively Hebrew context; however, those who reported them to the world did so in a foreign language: Greek, knowing that they were doing so for Christian communities in the diaspora and that the new faith had little future in Israel.

From the Italian Peninsula to the west, the Romans imposed their language on the populations they conquered, because these peoples were primitive and did not know writing; but to the east of the Italian Peninsula, Greek prevailed, because it was the language of the soul of the rich Hellenic culture, which in many ways was superior to the Roman’s. For this reason, and because all the authors of the New Testament beginning with St. Paul knew Greek, it was in this language that they poured out the Word of God made Man.

Unbiblical Christian Worldview
‘…because he has fixed a day on which he will have the world judged in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead.’ When they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some scoffed, but others said, ‘We will hear you again about this.’ At that point Paul left them. Acts of the Apostles 17:31–33

Paul's discourse in the aeropagus is a clash of two different cultures, based on two different anthropologies or the human being’s ways of perceiving: the Greek dualistic one of mortal body and immortal soul, and the holistic biblical one of both the body and the soul can be mortal and immortal, depending on whether or not they adhere to the God of life.

The spiritualist worldview is not from biblical revelation, but rather an adaptation or enculturation of Christianity to the Hellenic culture, dominant in that time and place. This unrevealed worldview was imposed on the Church and governed it throughout the Middle Ages. It still rules many consciences today. As often happens in life, you go to others with the intention of converting them and they end up converting you. This is what happened when the new faith began to walk in the paths of ancient Greece.

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day. Genesis 1:31

In both the Old and the New Testaments, creation is a work of love. God liked what he made, never giving up on his work, especially the creation of human beings who, unlike other creatures, were created in his image and likeness.

In the second century, a new worldview emerged that challenged this Judeo-Christian belief that creation was basically good. In this new worldview, creation is not good, but evil. It represents the fall when the spirit or soul that lived with God was exiled into the body, into matter. The soul or spirit is intrinsically good, the matter is intrinsically evil. The world is a prison and as such, a "valley of tears”.

If the human being is composed of two opposing elements, then he lives a schizophrenic life as if he had two personalities. If this is so, how can we look positively on the incarnation of the Word of God, Jesus Christ?

Having become trapped in mortal bodies, the spirits became subject to the warped and ignorant powers that govern the world of matter. Consequently, sex and earthly life in general were considered evil. The task of religion was to rescue the spirit from the flesh, to recover the spiritual heaven from which the soul had fallen.

Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and the sexual attitudes associated with Puritanism, continue to be powerful factors in spiritualism today, in addition to sexual disorders, eating disorders, negative self-images, and the rejection of one's own body that led to the self-flagellation widely practiced by saints and non-saints, by friars, monks, and nuns, as well as by lay people.

This spiritualistic and negativistic view is reflected in the spirituality of many to this day, in placing much emphasis on gaining and not losing Heaven. As the catechism taught, the enemies of the soul come from three sources: the world, the devil, and the flesh, referring of course to the body, especially the sexualized body.

Spiritualism in the Bible
This negative worldview of the body and the world, of matter in general, infected the later writings of the New Testament, since they were already written at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second. Admittedly, we do not find this tendency in the earlier writings when Hellenism was not yet dominant in the Church.

Negative view of the world in St. John's writings
We know that we are God’s children, and that the whole world lies under the power of the evil one. 1 John 5:19

The word "world" appears 185 times in the New Testament, 78 in the Gospel of John, 8 in Matthew, 3 in Mark, and 3 in Luke. In the three letters of St. John, it appears 24 times. Compared to the other gospels and other New Testament’s writings, John uses and abuses the word "Cosmos" or world, why?

To the Greeks the world is not a divine creation. In this, John differs from them, since in the prologue of John’s Gospel, it is clear that the world is from God. However, John's description of the fallen world has many connotations to the Hellenistic conception of the world as completely opposed to God. The dualism in John is ethical rather than philosophical, that is, the struggle between the good of God and the evil of this world.

The world mostly appears in a negative light, as being the habitat of sin. Christians are in the world, but not of the world – this reminds us of Plato's cave and how in this world we live as exiles. The world was good in its essence because it was created by God, but once fallen, it is existentially evil. As St. John often repeats, this world, or the prince of this world, is a synthesis of all the forces inimical to God.

We conclude that the exaggerated use of the term "world," as well as the negativity associated with it, in comparison with other biblical authors, denotes an approximation of St. John to the Hellenic conception of the world as something fallen. In contrast, he then says that God wants to save the world, which represents a Christian thought, because for the Greeks the world has no salvation because it was neither created nor willed by God. He then turns around and says that the disciples, although they are in this world, are not of this world, a thought which is very dear to the Greeks.

Negative view of the body in St. Paul’s writings
Live by the Spirit, I say, and do not gratify the desires of the flesh. For what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh… Now the works of the flesh are obvious: fornication, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmities, strife, jealousy, anger, quarrels, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and things like these. I am warning you, as I warned you before: those who do such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.

By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against such things. And those who belong to Christ Jesus have crucified the flesh with its passions and desires. If we live by the Spirit, let us also be guided by the Spirit. Galatians 5:16-25

This classic text of St. Paul, written in his own handwriting, foreshadows a fundamentally Greek and unbiblical belief that the soul or spirit is essential and intrinsically good and, to paraphrase the gospel, is known by its fruits graphically described above. The body, or the flesh as Paul calls it, unlike the soul, is existentially and intrinsically evil. That is, neither the body can do good works nor the soul can do evil works.  

In biblical understanding and according to biblical anthropology, both body and soul can be evil, either one or the other can be good; there is no body without a soul and no soul without a body, many of the deeds listed above do not originate in the body, but in a perverted spirit, such envy for example, have little or nothing to do with the body.

Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile. Matthew 15:17-20

St. Paul's text on the works of the flesh is diametrically opposed to Jesus’ way of thinking in the gospel. Evil does not come from the world outside, but when it enters the body, the soul is already infected and corrupted; in other words, evil resides in the soul, it comes from within, it does not come from outside. Contrary to what St. Paul has said, evil does not originate in matter or in the flesh and then influences and corrupts the spirit, but the other way around, evil comes from the spirit which corrupts matter or flesh.

When we see an apple with a small hole on its skin, the hole was not made by a larvae trying to get into the apple, but by a larvae trying to get out of the apple. We are apples with a bug inside of us. Just as the apple was conceived with a worm, that is, when the plant was flowering, an insect deposited its egg which then hatched into a larvae, so we were conceived with the original sin, so that evil resides in us in our spirit, not in matter or body which is intrinsically evil according to Greek philosophy and anthropology.

Hebrew Anthropology
May the God of peace himself sanctify you entirely; and may your spirit and soul and body be kept sound and blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. 1 Thessalonians 5:23

Hebrew anthropology, underlying biblical anthropology, is fundamentally unitary. This means that it intends to contemplate the entire personal reality from a certain perspective. Firstly, the human person is all of him "basal," that is, flesh. Secondly, the human person is "nefes", that is, he possesses a personality that we can approach from a psychological point of view (the psyche). And lastly, the human person is also all of him, "ruah", that is, spirit, insofar as we understand ourselves as beings open to the transcendent. We find clear testimony of this Old Testament anthropology in 1 Thess. 5:23, which is ultimately unitary because it looks at the whole of human reality from a certain perspective.

Greek Dualism
The Greeks are dualists in the purest of sense; for them there are two kingdoms, that of this world, which is existential, visible, transient, sensual, sensible, and deceptive, and that of God’s Kingdom, which is the essential, eternal, and unchanging. The human being has one foot in this world and one foot in the other world. His soul belongs to the realm of the essential, unchanging, and eternal, to God, and his body belongs to the realm of this world, of existence.

The body is not evil in itself, but it is a hindrance to the soul, a heavy burden. The body is the prison of the soul. Salvation, for Plato, lies in reason, which enlightened can come to dominate the passions of the body, governing life itself. With death, the soul is freed once and for all from the prison of the body to finally enjoy the immortality that is reserved for it, precisely because it is immortal in nature.

The French philosopher Descartes (1596–1650), an exponent of this kind of dualism, goes so far as to say, about the relationship between the soul and the body, that it is like that of the horse and rider; the soul is the rider, and the body is the horse that must be spurred on and guided by the rider. They are of a different nature and the connection between the two is very slight.

Theological Problems Raised by Greek Dualism
"This is all very confusing, please explain to me, Father," asked an Irish parishioner, "when we die our body goes to earth, our soul goes to Heaven and we, where do we go?"

According to Jewish anthropology, the human being is wholly saved or wholly condemned. We resurrect with a spiritual body that is the image of our physical body and composed of everything that the physical body has done well. We cannot do good without the body, without the head that thinks and projects, the heart that feels, and the hands that do work; therefore, the spiritual body is the glorification of our thinking head, our loving heart, and our working hands.

If the soul is immortal, if it is not biodegradable, then hell is eternal torture; however, if the soul is mortal, as biblical anthropology affirms, hell is eternal death, because eternal life is not contrary to eternal torture, but eternal death. Some Catholic theologians go so far as to say that hell is a nothingness, not a postmodern nihilistic nothing however, but something like an analgesic that would spare us the suffering of not having lived the life that God had reserved for us; it will be a nothingness, but a nothingness that hurts like fire. I find this position little different from the classical Catholic one: nothingness cannot hurt, and if it hurts, then it is not nothing, but eternal suffering.  

In Jewish anthropology, man does not have a mortal body and an immortal soul; man is all mortal if he is outside the Grace of God and all immortal if he is with God. Jesus tells us not to fear those who can only kill the body and can do nothing to the soul. What we should fear is the One who can kill both the body and the soul, (Matthew 10:28).

Hell, understood as eternal death, preserves both the goodness of God and the freedom of man. But what is eternal death? It is to return to the nothingness from which everything was created. He freely goes back to nothingness who answers "Nothing" to the 3 fundamental questions that every human being asks himself when he reaches the age of self-awareness: Where did I come from? Where am I going? What is the meaning of my life?

As stated above, the spiritualist worldview manifests itself in sub-worldviews, such as Gnosticism, Manichaeism, Puritanism, and what I call disintegrated schizophrenic dualism. Let us see what each of these mini worldviews is.

Gnosticism and Docetism
It is an ideology that predates Christianity that infiltrated Christianity when it first emerged. Fundamentally, Gnosticism repeats the Greek idea that what is human in us is our soul which is eternal and of divine origin, while the physical body, the prison of the soul, and its habitat, everything that surrounds it, the cosmos, that is, the world, were created not by God but by a demiurge, an imperfect spirit.

The final and definitive liberation only comes with death, but until this occurs, we can obtain a relative freedom through the acquisition of "gnosis", or knowledge, to be able to overpower the body and its base instincts and desires. Since Christianity is liberation from sin, and Gnosticism is liberation from ignorance, some Gnostics have assimilated Christianity, just as some Christians have allowed themselves to be carried away by Gnosticism. However, there is a radical difference between the two. Christianity is public, it is for everyone and not just for an occult elite of initiates, while Gnosticism is private and elitist, it is only for a few enlightened ones.

Docetism, a legitimate child of Gnosticism, comes from the Greek word "dokesis," meaning appearance. In the first and second centuries A.D., the Docetists claimed that Jesus Christ only appeared to be human. They considered the material world, including the human body, as to be so evil and corrupt that God, who is all good, could not have taken a true human body and human nature. Jesus' human nature is therefore feigned.

The Gnostic antagonism between the spiritual and material worlds led the Docetists to deny that Jesus was a true man. The Docetists had no problem with Jesus' divinity, they just did not believe in his true humanity. If Jesus' humanity is an illusion, then his passion and death on the cross with the suffering that this involved were also an illusion, they did not really happen.

The Christianity of Alexandria, which abandoned the Church with the council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. later called Coptic, as well as that of Ethiopia, are Monophysite Docetists, believing only in the divine nature of Christ. It is no coincidence that Docetism arose in Egypt, precisely where years before Christianity Gnosticism had emerged. When I was in Ethiopia, I remember hearing a Coptic Christian hymn in which it said that Jesus did not suffer on the cross, he was content and happy.

Manichaeism
It was a very ancient religion of the Fertile Crescent, which disappeared with the rise of the great religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. What we know of Manichaeism is presented to us by some who were Manichaeans before they were Christians, such as St. Augustine (430 A.D.). Mani (277 A.D.), the founder, belonged to a Judeo-Christian group before founding his own religion. He felt he was the heir of the great prophets Buddha, Jesus, Zarathustra, and Mohammed, and sought to make a synthesis of their teachings. He proclaimed himself an apostle of Jesus, because of all the religions, he found himself closest to Christianity.

Manichaeism is a form of Christian Gnosticism, so dualistic that the very word Manichaeism has historically become synonymous with absolute dualism. In the world there are two forces that oppose each other: light/good and darkness/evil. The soul, of course, belongs to light and the body to darkness, so the goal of human life is for light to prevail over darkness. Mani advised his faithful to lead an ascetic life, not to kill any living thing, not to eat meat, not to drink alcohol, and to live a celibate life.

Puritanism
Historically, Puritanism was a 16th and 17th century movement that sought to "cleanse" the Church of England from the remnants of Catholicism.

It was not entirely successful in England, but in the New World of America, the movement flourished and became a way of life, very evident even in their way of dressing.

Today’s modern usage of the word puritan has nothing to do with its historical root, but more to do with a negative view of sex and the pleasure associated with it. Sex was restricted to marriage, which in this sense was seen as a remedy for concupiscence, and as a means for procreation. It is better to marry than to be aflame with passion, as St. Paul said (1 Corinthians 7:8-9).

The excessive value placed on virginity, especially that of female physical virginity, that is, an intact hymen, has led to the declaration that Mary was a virgin before, during, and after childbirth. I can understand that she was a virgin before childbirth and after childbirth, and I accept and believe that she was, but I do not see why she has to be a virgin during childbirth, something that is unnatural and unnecessary which I can only understand in the context of a negative view of sex and an extrapolated valuation of physical virginity at the expense of motherhood.

Virginity has no value in itself, but is oriented towards motherhood, whether it is a physical motherhood of a woman who is the mother of a baby, whom she nurtures and nourishes to make it an authentic human being, or of a woman who puts marriage aside to be the mother of more children in a spiritual and educational sense, like Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Virginity understood in this way has nothing to do with whether or not the hymen is ruptured, because it is a human value for both men and women.

Disintegrated Schizophrenic Dualism
In this sub-worldview, we find many intellectuals and men of science, arts, politics, high finance who are, at the same time, profoundly Christian, that is, they do not follow the materialistic worldview that is dominant in these circles.  

These skilled professionals in their field – scientists, doctors, university professors, politicians, and journalists – in failing to reconcile their faith with science, made within themselves a gentlemen's agreement, that is, they have placed these two dimensions in separate rooms of the same house that is their mind. These are closed rooms that do not communicate with each other, that is, they live simultaneously in their minds a dualism and a mental and existential schizophrenia.

They are at the same time men of science and men of faith; however, since they have not found the formula to reconcile the two, and since they somehow think they are irreconcilable, they live the two dimensions separately, as if it were a modern state where religion does not meddle in politics and politics does not meddle in religion. To such State-Church separation, give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.

By way of example, such scientists and professionals during the week are evolutionists, that is, they believe in the theory of the evolution of the species, and on Sunday, the Lord's Day, they are creationists, that is, they believe in the book of Genesis as if it were a history book; as long as they never put the two positions in dialogue, there is no problem.

What happens inside these scientists and good professionals in their field is what happens in society in general: science lives with its back turned on religion and considers it the stuff of ignorance, while defensive religion takes refuge in its churches and demonizes science.

Conclusion: The materialist worldview ignores the spiritual dimension of human life, just as the spiritualist worldview demonizes the corporeal dimension. Truth requires that the two dimensions integrate and harmonize: no spirit without matter, no matter without spirit. 

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC