481 - Thoughts on Death and Immortality

Thoughts on Death and Immortality
By Ludwig Feuerbach
Translated, with Introduction and Notes, by James A. Massey
Berkeley, University of California Press, 1980. 261 pp. $12.95; $6.95 (paper).

Here is the Feuerbach hardly anyone knows: not a materialistic atheist but an idealistic pantheist, not one who ignored death (as Barth claimed) but one who dwelt on it in this, his first book, published eleven years before his Essence of Christianity. He contends that, far from correcting modern culture's propensity to deny death, modern Christianity abets evasion of death. Its belief in individual immortality in another world contradicts itself and trivializes death. By diverting believers from their actual relations with other persons and with the natural world, it impoverishes the one life we have. He argues that, in order to take death with the seriousness it deserves, and thus to heighten the meaning of life, one must abandon the illusion of individual immortality. He shows how a philosophy of Spirit enables one to accept death as integral to being alive, as no less God-given than life itself, and as the culmination of the self-giving love that is central to being human.

No other work by the author offers reflections as rich on death, love, time, eternity, and history. The translation, introduction, and notes are exemplary.

John Glasse
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, N.Y.