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Philosophy & Love

Feuerbach: Love & Atheism

Van Harvey considers an unusual critique of Christian love.

There have been many atheist critics of Christianity who have argued that its doctrines are intellectually untenable or based on illusion, but few have argued that the Christian notion of love enshrines the highest human virtue, and that this requires those who embrace it to renounce Christianity. Few atheist critics could write or even find intelligible this sentence: “As God has renounced himself out of love, so we, out of love, should renounce God; for if we do not sacrifice God to love, we sacrifice love to God, and in spite of the predicate of love, we have the God – the evil being – of religious fanaticism.” What I shall attempt to do in what follows is make this imperative at least intelligible.

The sentence occurs in Ludwig Feuerbach’s best-known book, The Essence of Christianity (1841), which created a sensation when published in Europe, and which was quickly translated into English by no less than the novelist George Eliot. Although the sensationalism was in large part due to Feuerbach’s clever inversion of the ruling philosophy of his time, Hegelian Idealism, Feuerbach’s basic thesis that gods are psychological projections of human nature still finds its contemporary intellectual admirers.

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