Ludwig Feuerbach - Contradiction Between Love & Faith

[I Wear White Socks]

Is anyone is familiar with Ludwig Feuerbach's criticism of Christian theism? As he points out, Christian theism derives its metaphysical predicates from objectification of the human attribute of reason while the personal predicates of god arise from the projection of love, thus producing a psychological contradiction between the virtues of faith which is essentially partisan & love which by its nature is universal and inclusive.

For the interested reader, perhaps an ex-Christian like myself who once struggled to reconcile their faith with schizophrenic doctrine, I want to share a few paragraphs from an article by the Boston Collaborative Encyclopedia of Western Theology discussing Feuerbach's book, "The Essence of Christianity".

The Contradiction of Faith and Love (chapter 26)

Feuerbach picks out faith and love as two central aspects of Christian religion and attempts to reveal a contradiction between them. Faith, he tells us, discriminates between ‘genuine’ and ‘false’ belief, anathematizing the ‘false’ and exalting the ‘genuine’ (248). In this way faith inspires partisanship and arrogance in its possessors and so divides human beings from themselves and from each other (255). Love, on the other hand, is the opposite of faith. Love finds the loveable even in error and untruth (257). It overcomes differences to unite. For this reason faith and love exclude each other. “A love which is limited by faith is an untrue love� (264).

Once again, Feuerbach believes that the contradiction between faith and love establishes the inappropriateness of the theological habit that tries to turn the projections of religion into fixed and certain objects for belief. This effort is inappropriate, first, because it results in contradiction, second, because its results are loveless and ugly.

The loveless and unlovely dogmatism of theology renders “palpable� the conclusion, as Feuerbach sees it, “that we should raise ourselves above Christianity, above the peculiar standpoint of all religion� (270). And so, in the concluding section of The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach urges his readers to embrace the fact that:

The necessary turning-point of history is therefore the open confession, that the consciousness of God is nothing else than the consciousness of the species; that man can and should raise himself only above the limits of his individuality, and not above the laws, the positive essential conditions of his species; that there is no other essence which man can think, dream of, imagine, feel, believe in, wish for, love and adore as the absolute, than the essence of human nature itself (270).

[I Wear White Socks]

I need to make a disclaimer regarding the last paragraph quoted in my post. Although I agree with Feuerbach about the contradiction of love and faith, I also agree with Max Stirner's criticism of Feuerbach in that Feuerbach ended up merely exchanging the concepts of God and Divinity with man and humanity, thus allowing the essence of human nature to become a fixed idea that alienates the individual from himself. Perhaps he is right that the consciousness of the species is mistaken for the consciousness of an externally projected God, but his ideas become just as alienating as religion when he mentions man raising himself above the limits of individuality, which allows the ideological abstraction of humanity (against which one must measure worth and identity) to be just as oppressive as the Christian God of objectivity. As Stirner would say; Something is human because an individual human does it, not because "humanity" does it.