The Early Days of a Better Nation

Posted 8:35 pm by Ken

Has Karen Armstrong ever read Feurbach?

In her best-selling and widely praised The Case for God Karen Armstrong contrasts the recent New Atheists with the good old atheists who at least understood theology:

In the past, theologians have found it useful to have an exchange of views with atheists. The ideas of the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 - 1968) were enhanced by the writings of Feuerbach ... But it is difficult to see how theologians could dialogue fruitfully with Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens, because their theology is so rudimentary.

Feuerbach's best-known and most influential work, The Essence of Christianity, is a somewhat forbidding book at first glance (and at second glance, when you find that the standard paperback has as its introduction a lecture on Feuerbach by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth (1886 - 1968)). That was probably why I put the copy I'd picked up and glanced through back on the returns trolley of Brunel University Library in 1976, thus missing out on 34 years of enlightenment. (I really kick myself because the University's Anglican chaplain materialised beside me as I was looking at it, and enthusiastically recommended it as a thorough demolition of orthodox Christian theology, particularly the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. You don't believe any of that? I asked, incredulously. Of course not, he said. What do you say to your colleagues who do believe it? Oh, he replied, they don't believe it either.)

Anyway, a month or so ago I eventually got around to reading Feuerbach, and you know, Frederick Engels and the vicar were right! 'The spell was broken; the ‘system’ was exploded and cast aside, and the contradiction, shown to exist only in our imagination, was dissolved. One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect of this book to get an idea of it.' If I'd read it back then I'd have been spared a lot of puzzlement about Anglicans, and also about Marxists. At the time I thought I was one myself, but what I didn't understand was all the other Marxists I knew. Why were they so confident? And why were they so fucking busy? Obviously I had missed the meeting where everyone had read Feuerbach:

The atheism that fears the light is an unworthy and hollow atheism. Such atheists have nothing to say, and that is why they are afraid to speak out. The cryptoatheist says only in private that there is no God; his atheism is summed up in this one negative statement, which stands all alone, so that his atheism changes nothing. And it is perfectly true that if atheism were a mere negation, a denial without content, it would be unfit for the people, that is, for man or for public life; but only because such atheism is worthless. True atheism, the atheism that does not shun the light, is also an affirmation; it negates the being abstracted from man, who is and bears the name of God, but only in order to replace him by man’s true being.

[...]

Let us then leave the dead in peace and concern ourselves with the living. If we no longer believe in a better life but decide to achieve one, not each man by himself but with our united powers, we will create a better life, we will at least do away with the most glaring, outrageous, heartbreaking injustices and evils from which man has hitherto suffered. But in order to make such a decision and carry it through, we must replace the love of God by the love of man as the only true religion, the belief in God by the belief in man and his powers – by the belief that the fate of mankind depends not on a being outside it and above it, but on mankind itself, that man’s only Devil is man, the barbarous, superstitious, self-seeking, evil man, but that man’s only God is also man himself.

But to return to Karen Armstrong: the real irony of her recommendation of Feuerbach is that Feuerbach's argument (meticulously reasoned and documented, as Barth admits through his teeth) that 'God' is nothing other than human consciousness unaware that it is describing itself is above all applicable to the mysterious, ineffable, indescribable, elusive, ungraspable 'God' for which Karen Armstrong makes her case.

We see nothing of the mind's working
except what comes on screen
and goes on keyboard. What's between
the two, behind the one -
the self that knows the self we know
and
all the self knows -
we don't know.

Labels: atheism, Marxism

15 Comments:

I owned the book but lost it when I moved to the Netherlands in 1972. I read part of it and approved, although at that time I had no patience for all the Biblical detail. The notion of a God image as some sort of ideal projection of the human appealed to me and still does. I remember almost nothing of what I read, so I'll put it on my list of books to be re-read. The author of "Middlemarch" did us a fine service by translating Feuerbach's book.

Quite off-topic Ken, I liked your remark about the good old days when writers could leave Latin texts untranslated. I shall add that the American edition of Feuerbach was part of the Harper Torchbook series, which had scholarly books in low-priced paperback format. The series is defunct, to the disadvantage of a generation of students who don't know how intellectually exciting the 60s and early 70s were and now malign them. Cheap books were our bread and butter.

By George Berger, at Friday, September 17, 2010 11:14:00 am

mysterious, ineffable, indescribable, elusive, ungraspable ... a contemporary of Feuerbach went even further, and noted that "Man", too, was not a creature actually capable of holding an idea, but was itself an idea. The holder of ideas was and is the individual person, so first and foremost, the characteristics believed of God, that Feuerbach felt he pulled to its source by making them characteristics of "Man", are but self-idealizations of individual little men. Self-idealizations by which they afterwards feel compelled to judge themselves. But the judge, again, is the same individual man.

So who came upon this progressive realization? None other than Max Stirner, the target of 500 pages of vitriol from Marx in "The German Ideology", vitriol that really never make it further than to Marx' own lips.

By Solan, at Friday, October 01, 2010 9:02:00 am