- Length
- 400 pagesGeorge Eliot's 1854 translation, reprinted by Prometheus, 1989
- Reading
- OpenWritten for a general reader and readable without preparation
- Availability
- Free onlineA usable out-of-copyright text is freely available
The Essence of Christianity
The book that told a generation of German philosophers that they had been studying human beings all along without noticing. Feuerbach argued that God is the human species with its limits removed, and that what religion costs is exactly what it offers.
- Date
- 1841
- Author
- Ludwig Feuerbach
- Region
- Bavaria
- Language
- German
- 1854 English, Marian Evans The only book published under her own name before she wrote as George Eliot; public domain and still standard Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Exchange — Both: answers an earlier work and drew a later one
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Analytic — Clarification of language and logical form
- Transmission
- Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
- Standing
- Absorbed — Its argument became assumption and stopped being cited
- Years to the reply
- 5 years
- Years back to what it answers
- 34 years
The book that turned a generation of Hegelians into materialists, and whose argument was absorbed so completely that it is now made by people who have never heard of him.
What the book says
An argument that theology is anthropology misread. Feuerbach's claim is not that religion is a fraud or an error to be swept away, but that it is true in a way its believers do not recognise: every predicate attributed to God is a human capacity, taken from the species, purified of its limits, enlarged to infinity and then set over against the people it came from. God's knowledge is human understanding without ignorance; God's love is human love without exhaustion; God's will is human will without weakness. What religion therefore contains is an accurate inventory of what human beings are and could be, presented as a description of somebody else. The cost of the arrangement is exact and it is the book's central charge: everything ascribed to God is subtracted from us. The more perfect God becomes, the poorer humanity is, until people regard their own best qualities as alien and worship what they have given away. The second half works through the specific doctrines - the incarnation, the Trinity, prayer, providence, immortality - showing in each case which human relation is being described.
What it argues
That religion is a true account with the subject and predicate reversed. Human beings are distinguished from animals, on Feuerbach's view, by being conscious of themselves as a species rather than only as individuals - so a person can measure their own capacities against what humanity as a whole is capable of, and find themselves wanting. Religion is what happens next: the species-capacities are gathered, freed of every individual limitation, and projected outward as a being. This explains why theology is so accurate about human nature and so unproductive about anything else. The remedy is not to abolish religion but to reclaim it - to recognise the inventory as our own, which converts worship into ethics and the love of God into the love of human beings, whom Feuerbach thinks it was always about.
What it answered
The Phenomenology of Spirit 1807G. W. F. Hegel
Hegel, and the theological settlement the Hegelian school had been defending. The left Hegelians had been arguing about whether the system supported Christianity or dissolved it; Feuerbach's move ended the argument by relocating the question. He is also answering Christian theology on its own ground, which is why the second half is a doctrine-by-doctrine reading rather than a general critique - the argument only works if it can show what each specific belief is a description of.
What answered it
The German Ideology written 1845-46Marx and Engels
Marx, within five years and twice - in the eleven Theses on Feuerbach written in 1845 and in The German Ideology. Stirner attacked from the other direction, arguing that Feuerbach had merely swapped one abstraction for another and that humanity was as much a spook as God. Later theology answered by absorbing the challenge: twentieth-century writers from Barth to Bonhoeffer treat the projection argument as something that has to be met rather than dismissed.
How it argues
By systematic inversion, applied case by case. The method is simple enough to state and relentless in application: take a theological proposition, reverse subject and predicate, and see whether the result is a truth about human beings. The prose is direct, unacademic and often moving, and Feuerbach is careful throughout to write as someone describing what religion genuinely contains rather than as a debunker. That tone is why the book persuaded believers rather than only confirming unbelievers, and why the young Hegelians experienced it as a release.
The moment
Germany in the 1840s, with the Hegelian school splitting and censorship tight enough that theology was where political arguments were conducted. Feuerbach had ruined his career at twenty-six with an anonymous book denying personal immortality, lived in a village on his wife's income from a porcelain factory, and wrote outside the university entirely. Engels later described the liberating effect of this book on his generation in terms that no other philosophical work of the period attracted.
How it travelled
Fast, and into three traditions. Its immediate effect was on the Hegelian left and through them on Marx and Engels. Its second was on the study of religion, where projection accounts became standard and reappear in Freud and Durkheim without needing attribution. Its third was literary: Marian Evans translated it in 1854, the only book published under her own name, and its account of religion as displaced human feeling runs visibly through the novels she wrote afterwards as George Eliot.
The strongest objection
Marx's, because it accepts the analysis and shows it stops too soon. Establishing that God is a projection of human capacities explains what religion is made of and not why it is made - and if the answer is that people find their own limits unbearable, the next question is what makes those limits what they are, which is a question about work, scarcity and social arrangement rather than about consciousness. Feuerbach's human essence is a fixed abstraction with no history, so his account cannot explain why religion takes different forms in different societies or why it would ever change. Stirner's version is sharper still: the species is no less an abstraction to which individuals are subordinated than God was.
Why read it
The introduction and the first six chapters, which contain the whole argument and are among the clearest philosophical prose of the century. Marian Evans' translation is excellent and freely available. Read it before the Theses on Feuerbach, which are four pages and unintelligible without it.
- First printed
- 1841
- First in English
- 1854
- Digitised
- Yes
The 1843 second edition softens some formulations and is the basis of most later texts. Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843) states the position more compactly and is often read alongside.
The 1854 English translation is by Marian Evans, the only book she published under her own name before she became George Eliot. It is public domain and is still the standard English text.
Where it stands
Absorbed rather than live. Feuerbach is little read, and the projection thesis is the common property of anyone arguing about religion, usually in Freud's version or in no attributed version at all. Recent scholarship has revived interest in the species-being material for reasons that have more to do with Marx than with Feuerbach.
The passage
the secret of theology is anthropology
The Essence of Christianity, in Marian Evans' translation of 1854. Public domain, and the phrase in which the book's argument is usually summarised.
Contested
Whether Feuerbach's later turn toward a more materialist and sensuous account supersedes this book or develops it is argued. Whether the projection thesis is a philosophical argument or an empirical hypothesis about religious psychology, and what would count as testing it, is unresolved. How much Marx took from him and how much he had to discard is a permanent question in Marx scholarship. And whether the book is anti-religious at all is genuinely open: Feuerbach insisted he was showing religion's true content rather than destroying it, and some theologians have taken him at his word.