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 The Essence of Feuerbach's Essence of Religion
First, it should be noted that this work is not the complete Essence of Religion written by Feuerbach in 1845, but a selection of three essays from that work as translated by Alexander Loos in 1873. However, one will get the main thrust of what Feuerbach was arguing if one takes the time to read this short digest whose original subtitle was "God the Image of Man: Man's Dependence uon Nature the Last and Only Source of Religion".
Feuerbach says very little that is new in this book; one can find many of its main ideas in Friedrich Schleiermacher's work On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, particularly the notion that religion is fundamentally the feeling of dependence within man. In defining the religious impulse as "intuition of the universe", Schleiermacher very much set the stage for the materialistic interpretations of Feuerbach that were to come a generation later.
In fact, Feuerbach seems to want to set Schleiermacher on his head, inverting the notion of dependence and intuition of the universe into dependence upon Nature (which has now been deified). Thus, not only is there a projection of humanity's feeling of dependence onto Nature called "God", but a further step in that projection where God (ie, man's projection) is now said to create humanity in His own image. Religion, then, is based on a type of vicious hermeneutical circle - until Feuerbach, of course.
Feuerbach stands at the tail end of the Enlightenment's disenchantment of the world. As he himself puts it, "man disappears by the side of a God; only where the earth is depopulated of Gods, where the Gods ascend into heaven and change from real beings into imagined ones; only there men have space and room for themselves, only there can they show themselves without any restraint as men and put themselves forward as such" (41 - 2).
One of the most interesting things about this brief compendia is how often Feuerbach turns to Protestantism's founding theologian, Martin Luther. While Luther undoubtedly would have been horrified at the emptying of Protestantism into secularism, the question of anthropocentrism as being the heart of Protestant theology - even in its secular parodying - is raised in Feuerbach rather starkly.
Karl Barth, the greatest Protestant theologian of the 20th century, one wrote that in Feuerbach we have an "anti-theologian" and in this he was certainly correct. Next to no one reads Feuerbach any more, and this is probably due to the fact that his arguments against religion as supernatural are largely trapped within a mid-19th century hermeneutical horizon where Reason and Science still permeated the then-modern social imaginary in ways that we ourselves are now skeptical of. Nietzsche, however, would argue at the end of the 19th century that the "death of [the Christian] God" meant that humans also had to abandon Christian morality. This does not seem to have occured to Feuerbach, but the flight of the Gods that he describes certainly places a considerable level of context behind persons such as Nietzsche and, after him, Heidegger. The question is whether or not the flight of the Gods has really benefitted us or simply left us devoid of grace?
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