354 - Lectures on the Essence of Religion & The Essence of Faith According to Luther

Lectures on the Essence of Religion
By Ludwig Feuerbach, translated by Ralph Manheim
359 pp. New York, Evanston, and London, Harper and Row, 1967. $9.50.

The Essence of Faith According to Luther
By Ludwig Feuerbach, translated by Melvin Cherno
127 pp. New York, Evanston, and London, Harper and Row, 1967. $4.50.

The Essence of Christianity never was a source sufficient for understanding Ludwig Feuerbach's thinking about religion, even though too many theologians (among others) seem to have settled for that. Now that he may be gaining more readers than at any time since that book furthered the pre-revolutionary ferment of the 1840's, Harper and Row has given us two more statements in English. Neither duplicates the earlier book. The one that Feuerbach often called his Luther centers upon Christian faith according to one man, while the Lectures takes a synoptic view that also embraces pre-Christian religions of nature. Each presents a ponderably different interpretation of the "essence" of religion.

The Essence of Faith According to Luther is the only book that Feuerbach ever devoted to interpreting a particular theologian. Written shortly after The Essence of Christianity, it can be read as an elucidation of one theme in the second edition of that work: a claim that the piety and theology of the foremost protestant reformer confirm insights of Feuerbach's own. Thus, quotations from Luther bear witness that God is not only radically for man, but, in Christ, he is human; indeed, he is an expression of the deepest, unbridled wishes of Christian men-a creature of their self-love. There is more to this than an exercise in proo-texting. The argument displays the decisive role that this view of faith assigns to the imagination. Like the Lectures, this book reflects Feuerbach's development by being more thoroughly empiricist than was The Essence of Christianity. Writing it may even have furthered that very change. The translator, Melvin Cherno, has provided a helpful introduction, and to the text he has added "Comments upon Some Remarkable Statements by Luther," which Feuerbach appended to the original text when he republished it in his collected works.

355 - Lectures on the Essence of Religion & The Essence of Faith According to Luther

The Lectures on the Essence of Religion is now the most ample, rewarding book by Feuerbach in English. He delivered these lectures in the year of the revolutions in 1848, at the invitation of an association of democratic students. He published them just a decade after The Essence of Christianity, and they reflect his further thinking in several ways. Instead of considering religion as it centers in our own humanity, which he had done in that earlier work and in his Luther, this book dwells upon religion as an expression of our sense of dependence-a dependence whose object he finds not in God but in nature. Here he is thinking less about Christian tradition and more about pre-Christian religions of nature. He suggests how the humanism of his earlier religious studies coheres with the naturalism of this. He also evinces more sensitivity to the pitfalls of simplistic analysis of the phenomena: "To gain understanding of religion, we must not account for it by any single cause, or rather, we must assign each cause its proper place." Finally, the Lectures contains a major review of his own authorship by Feuerbach. This affords perspective on his various works, on changes in his mind, and on his way of life. The translation by Ralph Manheim is admirable.

Even after a century, one achievement of Ludwig Feuerbach has yet to be matched. That is the extent to which he showed how men of faith confirm, by their own statements, an anti-theistic, humanist analysis of religion and, indeed, of Christianity. Whether or not those involved in doing theology today will find it as interesting as some other things in Feuerbach's oeuvre, this claim is one that both these books make present among us.

John Glasse
Vassar College
Poughkeepsie, New York