(1854)
LUDWIG FEUERBACH was born in 1804 and died in 1872. He was a student of Hegel in Berlin from 1824 to 1828 and taught philosophy at Erlangen, but retired to a life of scholarship. His philosophical works have had a wide and powerful influence on Western culture: his materialism was crucially important for Marx, his theories of sexuality for Freud and D. H. Lawrence. Among his important writings are Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity, 1841), Die Philosophe der Zukunft (The Philosophy of the Future, 1843) and Des Wesen der Religion (The Essence of Religion, 1851).
Eliot translated Das Wesen des Christentums in 1854, and inserted her own name, Marian Evans, on the final proof of the title-page; this was the only time it appeared in print. I have said something of how much the book meant to her in my Introduction (p. xxvii). She wrote to Sarah Hennell that Feuerbach’s work was ‘considered the book of the age there [in Germany]; but Germany and England are two countries’ (Letters, Vol. II, p. 137). Her translation reads powerfully and is still considered definitive. It was reissued in a Harper Torchbook in 1957, with an introductory essay by Karl Barth; I am indebted to this edition for the quotations from Feuerbach that follow.
Barth said that Feuerbach summarized his teaching at the beginning of his third Heidelberg lecture, which became The Essence of Religion. ‘Theology is anthropology, that is, in the object of religion which we call Theos in Greek and Gott in German, nothing but the essence of man is expressed’ (The Essence of Religion, p. 10). But he also said, ‘While I do reduce theology to anthropology, I exalt anthropology to theology; very much as Christianity, while lowering God into man, made man into God’ (The Essence of Christianity, p. 40).
Feuerbach’s philosophy, Barth wrote, begins with the sentence, ‘I am a real, a sensuous, a material being; yes, the body in its totality is my Ego, my being itself.’ His teaching aimed to be ‘a frankly sensuous philosophy’. For ‘only where sensuousness begins do all doubt and conflict cease. The secret of immediate knowledge is sensuousness’ (The Philosophy of the Future, pp. 43, 72–3). And man, the essential being of man, exists ‘only in community, it is found only in the unity of man with man – a unity that is supported only by the reality of the difference between I and Thou’. ‘Man with man – the unity of I and Thou – is God’ (The Philosophy of the Future, p.41).
The passages we have selected from Feuerbach are from Chapter 8, ‘The Mystery of the Cosmogonical Principle in God’, Chapter 9, ‘The Mystery of Mysticism, or of Nature in God’ and Chapter16, ‘The Distinction between Christianity and Heathenism’. The first illustrates Feuerbach’s idea of Christ as the Imagination, the second his discussion of sexual difference, and the third his idea of the species as the perfect being. The phrase ‘my fellow-man is my objective conscience’ from the last of these sections is central to Eliot’s thought.