Reviews. Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion* H. Frederick Reisz, Jr. / University of Chicago

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1 Reviews Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion* H. Frederick Reisz, Jr. / University of Chicago I One might assume that the neglect of Feuerbach in the teaching of nineteenthcentury thought reflects a lack of time or diligence. However, one suspects that, in fact, the "Feuerbachian" roots of modern thought have been cut short, sheared with "Barthian" quips, or have been found too strong to contest. The recent appearance of two translations of Feuerbach's mature thoughts, The Essence of Faith according to Luther (1844) and Lectures on the Essence of Religion (delivered at Heidelberg), presents us with an opportunity to resume our inquiry into the "modernity" of his thought. These translations provide the English-reading student with a mature statement of Feuerbach's position not available in The Essence of Christianity (1841). In these works, Feuerbach probes the grounding of religion. He moves from a concern for the integrity of humanity (Christianity) to a concern for the inferiority of the individual concrete man (faith) and finally, in summary lectures, articulates his realization of the grounding of religion in Nature and man. Thus, Feuerbach validates his thesis concerning religion by attempting to encompass eidetically the whole of religious history. It is clear that his argument is not concerned merely with one style of Protestant liberal Christianity. For Feuerbach, the twin foci, when one formulates a theology, actually are Nature and man. This reveals the imaginative nature of theistic theology and liberates man for the reality of religion, that is, for his finitude and dependency as they are actually experienced. Feuerbach's thought is intended to liberate as well as to throw one upon reality, to open one up as well as to concretize, to affirm the vitality of Nature as well as to purify self-love. The realization of Feuerbach's insight into the dependency of man upon Nature destroys any simplistic criticism of his thought which claims that he was merely dealing with subjective desires. Feuerbach partakes of his age in its realization of Nature as a unified whole exhibiting a structure definable in terms of laws. Nature is therefore a self-sufficient entity. Nature assumes an ontological primacy in the sense that it is the horizon of all meanings. Both * Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Faith according to Luther, trans. Melvin Cherno (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). 27 pages. Ludwig Feuerbach, Lectures on the Essence of Religion, trans. Ralph Manheim (New York: Harper & Row, 1967). xv pages. 180

2 Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion the existence and the essence of man can be totally conceived of only within the boundaries of Nature. The move through the sciences to the realization of the physicality of Nature (as sufficient for defining reality) is complemented by Feuerbach's descriptive history of religions, which moves from the primitive physical God to the Christian moral God. The spiritual God of Christianity is the last refuge of the imagination of religious man come of age. This religious concept tends toward evident abstraction as it loses its metaphors drawn from personal referents and becomes the reason of the rationalists. As Nature becomes a felt reality and is increasingly capable of being defined, that is, delimited, theistic theology becomes evidently superfluous. This historical argument is supplemented by a contemporary plea for reality, that is, in Feuerbach's view, a plea for the natural, the human, the evidently sensual. Feuerbach's concern is anthropological and logical in the broad sense. He experiences a contradiction between modern man's knowledge of his reality and the object of his religious imagination. He understands that the basis of symbol in spoken language, as well as the empathic basis of many emotions, drives toward expressions which are objectifications and personifications of a man's self. However, he protests that the object of religion must not be incompatible with known reality as science articulates it. Feuerbach is denying the object of theistic religion as an unproductive and ultimately dehumanizing imaginative abstraction from the reality of the world. He is calling for a congruity between man's total response to the world (philosophical, poetic, and religious) and the known actualities of Nature. A critique of Feuerbach would have to be mounted primarily in an ontological focus based upon anthropological and epistemological presuppositions. Feuerbach's thought reflects modernity in its recognition of subjectivity, its rational, but not narrow, humanism, and in its recognition of the rise of critical philosophy. To a large extent, Feuerbach concentrates on Luther not only for cultural reasons but also because he interprets Luther as articulating clearly and radically the distinction between God and man, thus, paradoxically, raising the question of the reality of full humanity. With the modern articulation of the unity of Nature and the contingency of the historical and the individual, Feuerbach thinks that the absoluteness of God's otherness becomes superfluous for the articulation of a man's humanity. For nineteenth-century man, the religious need of Luther is seen to be created by his ontological-theological presuppositions and therefore is only satisfied by that given theism, a traditional imaginative creation. Modernity has reformulated the ontological structure and thus set finite bounds for the need. For Feuerbach, religion is an expression of a bond between finite man and his projection of an object that will fulfil his "needs." But the needs are defined, in this context, by one's image of man, by his anthropology. Feuerbach's revolution involves the positing of an ontological horizon bounded by Nature within 181

3 The Journal of Religion which man is a finite creature. The question of the needs of a man then receives more of an experiential than an ontological or dogmatic focus. Attributes of God, envisioned as objects of thought, are to be similarly converted into realities of actual human sensual possessions. This refocus redefines the contextual field of human needs and thus abolishes any needs requiring the presuppositions of a theistic object which demands or fulfils. Feuerbach is clear that the "facts" of religion are not historical facts. Scientific history cannot in itself disprove religious assertions. However, Feuerbach posits that religious "facts" are the products of man's "feeling" and imagination. These faculties, in his anthropology, are less reflective of reality than the senses. Feuerbach's anthropology is not predicated on a simple individualistic subjectivism, as some of his theological critics have implied, but rather upon the point of contact between a man and natural objects and social-historical contexts which are affective sensually. The truth in religion is the recognition of dependency. The error in religion is the imaginative creation of the theistic object rather than the sensual recognition of that upon which a man is really dependent, Nature and man. Religion is not to be equated with theism. The feeling of dependency is innate in man. The problem for Feuerbach is that man has lost reality in his imaginative projection of an object for that feeling, a God. Feuerbach wants man to see himself as an "inseparable part of nature or the world." Feuerbach had great insight into the complexity of the object of religious veneration. It was both the loved and the hated, life and death, the giver of grace and the judge in personified terms. Dependency is not only a subservience to the object, but also a domination of the object since man's needs compel him to appropriate the object for fulfilment. The religious object is both that which performs fulfilment and that which one enjoys. Hence, there is no distinction to be made between a God-in-Himself (essence) and a God for us (meaning). That which has meaning for us, that which fulfils our needs, that upon which we depend, is God for us. For Feuerbach the meaning of God is always so linked to anthropology that the necessity of God can never be argued on just a classically modeled ontological basis. The intellectual necessity for a God is always predicated, in his view, on an emotional-sensual need. Feuerbach's interpretation of Luther, who radicalized the dichotomy between God and man, serves as the focus for the recognition of the superfluous nature of theism in the modern age. In a way, Feuerbach inverts the meaning of the "Protestant principle" to assert both the primacy and the ultimacy of the natural in the context of meaning for man. That which is unnatural is subversive to the integrity of the human bounded by the natural. In the Lectures on the Essence of Religion, Feuerbach sought to probe not only Christianity but also primitive religions to show that the object of religion was always the personified natural. By remaining on the level of man, Feuerbach discovered that he in effect retained the possibility of the designer 182

4 Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion image in the object of religion. Hence, his critics used the seeming structural integrity of Nature to argue for the necessity of a Maker. Feuerbach wished to make evident the error of the pathetic fallacy as it appeared in religion. His investigations into primitive religions displayed empirically, he felt, that in fact the religious object at its base was natural. One does not assume as primary the maker image (designing), a human metaphor, but rather the image of power (enabling), a natural metaphor. Hence, the form of existence, the structure of nature, is as it is simply because it can only be that way. The power enabling that existence is the self-enclosed power of Nature. Feuerbach felt that primitive religions tended to express the essence of Nature, although personified, and spirit religions express the essence of man. This perspective had to be articulated historically. The above "empirical" analysis of religion is expressed historically and progressivistically in Feuerbach's later work. The history of religions advances from an early patriarchal or polytheistic stage, where God loses himself in Nature, to a theistic or monotheistic stage, where God's absoluteness is affirmed, depriving Nature of its spontaneity and independence, its power. This is the stage of the assertion of miracles and the ontological dualities of power. This stage is criticized but not overcome in rationalism where Nature is seen as autonomous and God becomes more and more remote. Finally, only the intellectual idea "reason" is left which makes evident the superfluous nature of the spiritualized God. In this stage, God's actions are more and more predetermined by the laws of Nature. This is a reversal of the Reformation tendency to radically separate the power of God and man and, by implication, Nature. In that context, God was articulated first of all as the negation of man, or the power of man. Luther shattered the Roman Catholic edifice of the good works of man with the Protestant focus on the absoluteness of God, both ontologically and psychologically. This was the ultimate extension of the reality of theistic theology. Feuerbach articulates this theological type using the model of political tyranny. Such a model of reality is dualistic rather than dialectical. However, Feuerbach apprehends an ambiguity in Luther's thought which clearly leads toward the liberation of the human. The actual historical outcome of Luther's Protestant reform was the Enlightenment and finally the radical interpretation of reality in Feuerbach's insights. Hence, the "end" of Luther's thought, according to Feuerbach, breaks with the "either/or" of its presuppositions. He sees Luther's thought and the personal reality of the man Luther as both the fulcrum between the times and the historical lever that moves man toward insight. In a manner, this view of Luther enables Feuerbach, as a philosopher, to neglect the presuppositions of Luther's thought and to use Luther's thoughts to incarnate Feuerbach's intentionalities. It is clear that Feuerbach is not acting as a historical theologian, in our sense of that term, in his The Essence of Faith According to Luther. 183

5 The Journal of Religion In this analysis of Feuerbach's thought in these books, we have seen that he is concerned with "meanings" for man. It is our conviction that many past critiques of Feuerbach's thought published in English have been written self-consciously from the perspective of the Christian faith. Many times these critiques have been explicitly apologetic. Our analysis of Feuerbach's orientation appears to indicate that his thought is considered more adequately from the perspective of "religion." Hence, we have pointed out the logical and anthropological foci in his arguments as they bear upon the question of "meaning." Only within this religious perspective can one adequately evaluate his views concerning the Christian faith. In this process, he has illustrated his approach to the religious object as it functions within a structure of human needs. Feuerbach's hope for an audience for his arguments comes from his historical evaluation of the process of man's thought and his cultural activities. He feels that man has now come to realize the actualities of his intentions in venerating the religious object. Historically, man has come of age. Realizing these basic orientations in Feuerbach's thought, we can consider other aspects of its content. The competing tendencies in Luther's thought and the liberating thrust of the Renaissance tend toward loosing man from bondage to theistic powers. These historical influences have enabled the centrality of subjectivity in epistemology to become evident as expressed variously through Descartes and Kant. The philosophical appearance of God in the context of pure practical reason with the element of risking belief puts such theistic belief (not definition) into an ethical rather than an ontological context. Feuerbach might see himself as pursuing the radicality implied but not pursued in the Kantian critical philosophy. This philosophical movement is prefigured for Feuerbach in his reading of a theologicalmovement in Luther's thought which moves toward the radicality of the incarnation. Luther's Christology is indeed the sign of the death of the inhuman God and the realization of man and love. God must be man in and for himself in Christ. This is the only adequate expression of love for Feuerbach. Feuerbach's mature definition of God in his Lectures on the Essence of Religion equates the essence and attributes of God and the essence and attributes of the world. For Feuerbach only the sensual referent of any concept has "reality," and that reality is the world, Nature, and man: " The world as object of the senses... is the world that we actually call the world, while the world as object of thought, of the thinking which abstracts the universal from the things of sense perception, is God." In the context of Luther's thought, God is seen as only filled out by robbing powers from man. This transfer of powers by imagination is only legitimated by an escalation of the potentialities of the powers. Hence, the imagination overwhelms the reason of the senses through a surrender to desires. This produces a structure of needs which is illusory, given sensual reality. Feuerbach sees this whole process as essentially inhumane. He reverses the field by asking I84

6 Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion first of all the question of meaning, not first of all the soteriological or ontological question. That which is meaningful for man is that which is for man. The in-himselfness of God is not meaningful for Feuerbach. The good in this anthropological focus is meaningful for man, that which affirms his manness, which is finite, contingent, and centered in the sensual. Theologically, Christ is the "sensual essence of God." Feuerbach feels that the ends of Luther's thought point to a transfer of all the attributes of God to Christ as a man. This is the sign of the coming reality. The superfluousness of God is declared in this theological movement. Feuerbach says that in this theological symbol man is deified, and this actually symbolizes the return of man to his humanness. In coming of age, man regains the human essence as the focus of self-activity and the will. Man is not then other-directed in the theological sense, but self-related. For Feuerbach, God is the imaginative projection of the promise of man. The blessedness which Feuerbach posits as the goal of the Christian faith is only the essence of self-love in the best sense. Feuerbach urges man to turn from the religious wishes for blessedness which are only capable of fulfilment in imagination. He calls man to focus on culture, reason, and science-on the earth-because man now has power with and ovei the natural. The feeling of dependence should no longer be overwhelming. It is a fact and its object is Nature. Feuerbach proclaims the project of man as now possible within the natural. The unlimited desires of man are now capable of rational evaluation. Nature is defined, that is, delimited. Religion, in Feuerbach's thought, comes from the rule of the imagination, caused by a feeling of dependence which eventuates in a desire, a striving for happiness, that is, satisfaction. The horizon of that striving varies with the disciplining of man's reason as it gains control of the focusing of his attention. For Feuerbach, reason has set those limits at the boundaries of law-abiding Nature. Finitude is factual. The senses assume a defining role which limits the affective reality of objects of the imagination. Feuerbach moved from a position which saw God expressing generic humanity to a position centered in the wishes of the individual in Nature and community. The wish for omnipotence expressed in the absolute God was undercut for Feuerbach through acts of reason making evident the reality of historical contingency. Such acts of reason were initiated and vitalized by sensual perception. Feuerbach's assumption is that man defines his wishes. They are intentional. His existential concern fixes the priorities and boundaries of wishes seeking fulfilment. This gives the character of necessity to objects capable of fulfilling wishes. The rational and existential realization of the finitude of man should limit the horizon of his desire-objects because of his concern for the possibility of fulfilment. For Feuerbach, man in his age had been naturalized and "humanized." The reality of God is what He is for us. In this leveled view of reality, meaning is real only when focused in the powers of Nature and man. 185

7 The Journal of Religion Man lost not only the ontologically absolute God but also the psychologically absolute blessedness, but Feuerbach proclaims that now man is redirected to the reality of his natural self and the tasks of the world. Luther also serves as a sign for Feuerbach of the break with the concentration on ontological proofs of God's existence and ontological derivations of His attributes. Luther's thought moves toward a concentration upon faith or man's appropriation of a God for himself. That which is meaningful then shifts its field of backings and warrants. As we have seen, Feuerbach interprets meaning for us as intelligible only within the bounds of the human, the natural. The movement within his works is from God our God, to the Godfor us, and finally to the statement "God is a word the sole meaning of which is 'man."' Thus we move from the ontological to the existential, from the God over against to the God for us. Feuerbach sees this as the movement of intentionality in Luther's thought. Feuerbach moves beyond his explication of Luther's thought to assert the superfluous nature of God by means of focusing on God as an end. God is that object which fulfils a need at a certain level. With the loss of the ontological dimension, in the classical sense, the psychological dimension of the need structure assumes a definitive role. Then God presupposes man, and God is necessary only for those men who have that need. Feuerbach proclaims the end of the theistic need. Finite man awake to Nature is realistically content within its bounds, even though they be finite. Feuerbach's argument moves from faith as seen in Luther toward love. He feels that faith indicates certainty of its object even when that object is absent. The distance of faith tends to contradict the immediacy of love. Faith in a God for us also tends to move toward a more immediate affirmation of humanity. God is said to be good. But He is good for us, not for His own sake. God and man are linked in Luther's thought. This goodness is most evident in the love of God. Feuerbach feels that the primary emphasis upon love and grace, with its original orientation of distance, must be reversed to be originally oriented from the sensual, the immediate impact of which is the root experience for all meaning in Feuerbach. Hence, Feuerbach feels that there is a contradiction in Luther's thought. The emphasis on the love, mercy, and grace of God tends not just to combat the opposition of God and man but finally to destroy it. This destruction is accomplished in fact in Luther's Christology. The wholeness of the human structure-mandemands an overcoming of the thought-sensing split. Love overcomes the opposition implicit in the act of faith. Since that which loves us in the most profound sense is that which supports and enables our existence, the experience of being loved brings man to himself and not away from his existence and power. Love elevates the self-esteem of the loved. In the whole man, thinking and sensing are not opposed. In Christian theology, Christ is the sensual being upon which all hope is focused. Christ appears, for 186

8 Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion Feuerbach, as the certainty of that which was only thought in God. " Christ is the sensual certainty of God's love to man." The certainty of the object of faith is achieved in the sensual; and in that process, faith is refocused in love for us. There remains the object external to an individual man and thus the feeling of dependence. However, there is the unity not only of the whole man-thought and sensing-but indeed there is the unity of reality as a whole, Nature-man. Feuerbach's whole argument has been to move to a realization of this unity of matter and spirit, which is conceived by him under the epistemological primacy of sensing, that is, immediate perception. The sensuous world is always there for him. It is that which is self-subsisting, and thus it is the whole of truth as reality. It is not derived from Spirit. The world exists, and thus it is the primary focus of philosophy. This primacy of the natural in the thought of Feuerbach determines the "good," but this ethical determination stands under the context of that which can be meaningful for man. Anthropology is central. Hence, what is good for man is by definition good for all of Nature. He sees Nature both as such an integrated whole and as having a type of hierarchical organization of effective use and shaping of power; man stands at the top of this schema. However, man is not narrowly conceived or abstractly defined. This is evident in Feuerbach's interpretation of the problems in method in history and philosophy. He formulates the hermeneutical principle that the past or what is, is interpreted in terms of that which is meaningful for us. A man brings his particular contextual field to all quests for meaning. With regard to theology, Feuerbach has argued that the contextual field has shifted. The absolutes of faith are thus reinterpreted within the context of the "for you" of meaning. This "for you" becomes centered radically in man himself. All meaning has this focus on the ego. Hence, Feuerbach can say that egoism is the ground and essence of religion. The feeling of dependence is focused upon the natural. However, Feuerbach fights against both an unnatural, inflated egoism and egoism that is contemptuous toward Nature. Theology is anthropology in the sense that man comes to his self and seeks the integrity, the wholeness, of the natural, the human. Therefore, religion based on needs is correspondingly "humanized." II In this century, criticism of Feuerbach's thought that has appeared in English has largely been content to derive its impetus from Barth's critical essays on Feuerbach. In some cases, such critiques have not emulated the rigor of Barth's scholarship. This procedure has led to some simplistic judgments of Feuerbach's thought which claim that it is wholly negative and individualistic. Barth himself has countered these judgments to a certain extent. Many of the neo-orthodox critics of Feuerbach failed to apprehend the centrality of I87

9 The Journal of Religion Feuerbach's emphasis upon God for us, and thus upon the issue of meaning. The question was not primarily one of the reality or unreality of God, although that was a secondary concern, but it was a question of whether theism as such was superfluous for modern man. Barth brought a perspective to the analysis of Feuerbach which spoke out of the context of a type of history of theological ideas. He saw Feuerbach's thought as the statement of the intentionalities of much of nineteenthcentury "liberal" theology. Barth centers this perspective in a type of subjectivism which he sees in Schleiermacher, who, Barth says, relates God and "pious excitement" (certainly an unfortunate phrasing). For Barth this nineteenth-century perspective is centered in the individual as measure of all things and all values. Religion was defined through the determinations of the human self-consciousness. For Barth, this naturally led to the measure of religion and theology as predicates of man. Barth saw this as the rise of an overly confident humanity ignoring "realities" such as evil and death. Feuerbach is seen as the "natural" outcome of this process extended theologically to its end point. Certainly such a perspective misreads Schleiermacher, as modern historical theology has amply illustrated. It should also be clear at this point that, with regard to Feuerbach, this perspective from Barth's thought subtly shifts the ground out from under Feuerbach's concentration upon meaning. Criticism of Feuerbach's thought in this mode presupposes an anthropology which derives from a type of Reformation theology, and it asks not of the meaning of God but of the sufficiency of man. All of classical theology's ontological presuppositions are latent in this mode of thought, and thus the "needs" of man are predetermined by the ontological reality of God. Soteriologically, these critics begin with and center in sin and judgment as evident. Feuerbach is calling this whole perspective into question, and not merely explicating a trend of thought in his century. Feuerbach starts more from the perspective of asking the question of meaning for man. He immediately calls into question the validity and primacy of the assumption of the radical distinction between God and man. He claims to do this on the basis of an empirical study of the actualities of meaning within religion. He starts with the question of intentionalities and meanings and works toward a judgment of the meaningfulness of theism. The neo-orthodox criticism of Feuerbach tends to sublimate this aspect of the intention of his work in order to argue for a specific, theologically determined anthropology in which man cannot ultimately ask questions of meaning but, rather, must accept insights of revelation. Feuerbach, in this respect, stands closer to the critical philosophy of the modern age, which must ask the question of meaning out of the context of natural human experience. Feuerbach's critique of religion is made primarily on the basis of religion's giving up of the human for God. He calls for the realization of meaning for man. The external objects-the other 188

10 Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion and Nature-are still there for man. The individual is not the whole. Nature and man remain as alive and interesting to man. Indeed, man is now responsible for them through a responsibility to himself. Feuerbach is not selfenclosed, but the world is always there, and, through Nature and man, the individual is realized and affirmed. III Finally, we can bring some contemporary perspectives to Feuerbach's thought. It is evident that we can suggest a number of contemporary concerns and perspectives which are partially rooted in the thought of Feuerbach. It is sufficient simply to list them here, as they are evident: I. Feuerbach reflects the post-kantian breakup of theology and the ontological proofs of God's existence as explanations of reality. His perspective moves to an understanding of meanings at the same time as within the thought of his era Nature comes to assume its own integrity. 2. In this move toward the appropriation of meanings, Feuerbach leads toward the current concerns in phenomenology of religion for understanding rather than explanation. 3. Feuerbach has the further insight that the object of religion is not wholly venerated for itself but for that which is manifested in it. He carries this to an extreme, which tends toward a type of reductionism from the perspective of the phenomenology of religion. However, in some sense, Feuerbach participates in the search for the archetype in religion. In Feuerbach this appears as a type of non-historical morphology of symbols (not highly elaborated) that converge their focus upon a naturalistic-humanistic structure of existence. 4. Feuerbach articulates the problem of the critical hermeneutical circle in which the contextual field of our concerns and the horizons of our understanding, our principles of intelligibility, dictate both the questions which we ask and the structures of the answers which we are able to articulate concerning any symbol, act, or historical-cultural event. 5. He affirms the modern perspective of the unity and boundaries of the natural, although, as we shall see, he conceives this within an older model of levels of existence. 6. Feuerbach calls man to responsibility for his being. He announces man come of age. In this manner, he carries on in a radical way the concern for the dignity and respect of man which was evident in Kantian thought. 7. Certainly, Feuerbach introduces us to the problems in symbol creation and image making. Freud and Jung were to dramatize this issue further. All religious symbols carry images with personal referents which ultimately are demonic in the Feuerbachian or Tillichian context. The intensity of Feuerbach's posing of this reality has contributed greatly to the modern inclusion 189

11 The Journal of Religion of the consideration of and the existential awareness of doubt in all acts of faith. This has further existentialized the risk element in belief which was largely undeveloped in Kantian thought, although its roots lie there. This aspect of Feuerbach's thought further posed the problem of levels of signification in symbols, and thus echos for us in our age the contemporary problem of hermeneutics. 8. With the rise of subjectivism through Descartes and Kant, Feuerbach acknowledges the epistemological concern, but he places it in an anthropological context such that he does not fall into either a pure subjectivism or into a type of epistemological dualism. As I shall mention again later, this might be because of a lack of rigor in his thought concerning epistemological matters. Feuerbach's anthropology is not completely worked out, but he does contribute to the contemporary focus upon faithfulness to the immediacies of man's experience in the world. Some of the inattention to Feuerbach's thought in our century reflects a basic uneasiness with his exposition. It is clear from our summary that Feuerbach's nineteenth-century perspective upon reality and upon religion is not wholly adequate to our contemporary experience. It is evident that he was reacting primarily in terms of a model of Christianity which was narrowly Protestant and rationalistically moral. It is to be hoped that the ecumenical scholarship of our age will provide us with more accurate evaluations of that model. However, our age has moved beyond the formulations of Feuerbach in other areas, which should be indicated here. Feuerbach's thought retains latently a classical model of ontology which speaks and thinks in terms of levels of existence rather than in terms of dimensions. This is a static type of ontology, where fluidity and interrelation between the levels are minimal. Hence, meaning proceeds upon one level, the human-natural, and does not partake of wider resonances. Meaning and knowledge are correspondingly conceived within a mechanistic model of immediate impact in sensual perception. Thus, if God acts on one level, this means that on the other level of man, man's power becomes that much less effectual. Therefore, Feuerbach is not able to appropriate the fact that Hegel speaks of the Absolute or Spirit as active in, indeed, realizing its Self, coming to consciousness, through the finite. Feuerbach appears to consider Hegel's use of Spirit as a mere abstraction, a judgment that largely assumes defined levels of existence. Thus, Feuerbach has no basis upon which to raise the question of Being as ground or power of existence. This point of view does provide him with some problems which are evident in the ambiguities implied in his articulation of his use of the term " Nature." This leveled view of reality dominates Feuerbach's view of dependence. He says that there are only particular feelings of dependence, not a feeling of dependence as such. He interprets this within his simplistic model of sensual perception, so that questions of "ultimacy" are not meaningful. There is another stream of 190o

12 Feuerbach on the Essence of Religion thought in the modern West which presents another side of this issue, and that stream is variously articulated philosophically by Heidegger and Harthshorne and theologically by Tillich and Ogden, among others. The Kantian critiques raised the issue of types of pure reason and varying types or dimensions of reason. This implied a split between science and ethics in terms of the causalities implied in each. Feuerbach tended toward using a single view of causality based on sense perception, which was considered sufficient for both realms, in terms both of drawing conclusions and of motivation toward willed action. Kant's insight into radical evil raises problems with this segment of Feuerbach's argument and at least calls for further clarification in this area. Feuerbach carries his one-dimensional view of reality through in his latent view of temporality. The present assumes primacy. It is difficult to see exactly what the weight of the past or of tradition is in Feuerbach's view of man. Does the call to responsibility imply that man is a project? Is futurity a basic orientation of man? Feuerbach's concentration upon calling men into reality as evident in the present requires elaboration in terms of the temporal realities of living. The whole question of the compelling nature of his call to responsibility raises these same issues. What in the structure of man would make him respond to this call? Feuerbach assumes an ethical integrity rooted in reason but does not elaborate the dimensions of this in living man. Man has fled from this resolve in the past; apparently, Feuerbach feels that the rise of the sciences, the awareness of contingency, and the dawn of humanistic concerns are elements of a contextual situation which naturally will realize this resolve. It is seen; it will be done! Twentieth-century thought has deep reservations at this point. Feuerbach's notions of psychology are not well articulated and tend toward the simplistic. Indeed, the myths and deep-rooted images might be broken, as he wishes, but are they ever really lost or effectively destroyed? The whole complexity of man's social-psychological constitution largely escapes Feuerbach, as Marx and Freud have amply illustrated. The pervasive nature of the feeling of guilt, the awareness of being thrown into existence, the constant consciousness of fallen existence are all components of man's feeling of dependence which are not fully realized in Feuerbach's thought. He misses the profundity of the angst of being human. Hence, for him the problem of the reunion of the separated or the question of empowering, of the power of Being, are only raised in a mild manner. The dimensions of this perspective upon man are only tangentially touched in his insistence upon the selfsufficient powers of Nature by which what is is. Feuerbach's examination of religious symbols is reductive in the sense that his anthropology-ontology determines the interpretation of the "real" meaning of the symbols. His aesthetic model is one of the artist who makes a product. Religious symbols are objects of "thought" and are therefore 191

13 The Journal of Religion products of man's own creation, expressions of his own power. The complexity of the formation of meaning is missed in this individualized model. Meaning is constituted between beings. There is a centrifugal-centripetal pattern which has elaborate complexities of operation. The intention of the symbol is not wholly individualistic. It is both a given and a received. Feuerbach moves toward this insight at points, insofar as there is the other and Nature. However, because of his one-dimensional model for thinking, Feuerbach largely misses the horizons of meanings of acts and symbols. He follows the symbols only partway. The question is if the meaning of the sacred overflows the anthropological images and derivatives. The phenomenology of religion has shown us that symbols cannot be simply translated into human terms and equivalents. There is a More. Feuerbach does not perceive, or he quickly rejects, the authentic nature of this thrust of man's being. Perhaps even the wishes for breaking the categorical schemata of existence which Feuerbach rejects are the authentic signs of man's Being. That is a crucial question for philosophy and theology, and Feuerbach is largely responsible for posing it in all its dramatic clarity. The angst of modern existence runs deeper and is much more determinative than Feuerbach could have conceived it to be. The phenomenology of religion in our age has moved to let the sacred be, and that is a mode of thinking fundamentally different from Feuerbach's. But in some measure, in breaking the tyrannical sacrality of religion, Feuerbach contributed to an openness and a modern hermeneutic which paradoxically allowed such a discipline as the study of religion to arise within the secularized university. Wolfhart Pannenberg's "Jesus: God and Man"* John B. Cobb, Jr. / School of Theology at Claremont, ) Claremont, California Pannenberg's first major book, Griindzuge der Christologie, appeared in German in 1964, and now four years later is available to the English-speaking public under the title, Jesus: God and Man. Despite its modest title in German, it is a major scholarly treatment of the whole range of christological problems. It displays rich familiarity with the history of dogmatics as well as with philosophy and the historian's quest of Jesus. There are books which present the history of christological thought, and there are others which formulate a doctrine of Christ in the quite different context of the twentieth-century problematic. But this book is virtually alone in working out precise, fresh solutions of traditional issues in detailed interaction with the whole history of Christian thought. *Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus: God and Man, translated by Duane Priebe and Lewis L. Wilkins (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1968). 415 pages. $ io.oo. 192