Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

The son of the jurist Anselm von Feuerbach

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was born on 28 July 1804 at Landshut, in Bavaria, the fourth of the five sons of Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach (1775–1833) and Eva Wilhelmine Tröster (1774–1852)^[2]. His father, one of the greatest German jurists of his time, was the reformer behind the Bavarian Penal Code of 1813 and the inventor of the principle nullum crimen, nulla poena sine lege ("no crime, no punishment without a law" (Ignispedia translation)), the cornerstone of modern criminal law; he secured the abolition of judicial torture in Bavaria and became, at the end of his life, the most famous investigator of the enigmatic Kaspar Hauser affair^[3]. This rationalist father, steeped in the German Enlightenment, instilled in all his children a taste for intellectual rigour: among Ludwig's brothers were the archaeologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach and the philologist Friedrich Feuerbach^[4].

The family atmosphere, enlightened and liberal but dominated by the intellectual authority of a stern and seldom-present father, has been studied by the historian of philosophy Van A. Harvey as one of the possible psychological seedbeds of the son's later religious revolt^[5]. This biographical hypothesis, which must be careful not to turn into a reductive explanation, deserves to be stated with the same methodological caution that Feuerbach himself applied to believers: a psychological origin, even a plausible one, proves nothing about the truth or falsity of a thesis — an argument that will hold, as will be seen, against Feuerbach as much as against his opponents.

From theology at Heidelberg to Hegel's philosophy at Berlin

In 1823, at nineteen, Feuerbach enrolled in the Protestant theology faculty of the University of Heidelberg^[6]. There he attended the lectures of the rationalist theologian Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus, which he judged empty and arid, but became absorbed by the more speculative teaching of Karl Daub, who introduced him to Hegelian philosophy and completed the diversion of his interests away from positive theology^[7]. By 1824, irresistibly drawn to the system of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, he moved to the University of Berlin to follow Hegel's teaching directly for two years^[8]. At first he fully embraced a Spinoza-like pantheist speculative idealism, defending the idea that "reason is one and universal" and that human thought is only the activity of the Species acting through the individual^[9].

In 1826, he left Berlin for the University of Erlangen, where in 1828 he defended his doctoral dissertation De ratione, una, universali, infinita ("On reason, one, universal, infinite" (Ignispedia translation)), then obtained a post as Privatdozent (unsalaried lecturer) which he held from the same year^[10]. This precarious position, with neither chair nor fixed salary, would be the only university post Feuerbach ever held.

Thoughts on Death and Immortality, 1830: a career cut short

In 1830, Feuerbach published anonymously at Nuremberg his Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit (Thoughts on Death and Immortality), a work that frontally attacked belief in the personal immortality of the soul in the name of a speculative pantheism in which only the human Species, not the individual, subsists in the infinite^[11]. The scandal was immediate: the anonymity was quickly pierced, and the attack on so central a dogma as personal immortality cost its author the end of any prospect of a paid university career in Prussia as in Bavaria^[12]. Feuerbach never formally recanted, tried once more without success to obtain a post in 1836, but remained, all his life, a philosopher without a chair^[13].

He then turned to the history of modern philosophy, publishing between 1833 and 1838 three scholarly monographs — a history of modern philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza (1833), a study on Leibniz (1837), then a study on Pierre Bayle (1838)^[14]. It was in the latter study, on Bayle (1838), that Feuerbach began openly to distance himself from Hegel, calling for a "return to nature" and demanding an explanation of religion grounded in the concrete observation of man rather than in the pure speculation of absolute Spirit^[15]. In 1839, he published in Arnold Ruge's Hallische Jahrbücher — the journal that then gathered Hegel's young critical disciples — his Contribution to the Critique of Hegelian Philosophy, the text that sealed the break^[16].

Bruckberg, the studious exile of a philosopher without a chair

In 1837, Feuerbach married Bertha Löw, co-owner of a porcelain factory at Bruckberg, a small Bavarian village^[17]. The marriage secured him relative financial independence: it was this income that allowed him, for more than twenty years, to live as a reclusive scholar, cut off from the university circles that remained closed to him, and to devote all his time to writing^[18]. It was at Bruckberg that he wrote the work that would bring him worldwide fame.

The transformative method: inverting subject and predicate

In 1841 there appeared at Leipzig Das Wesen des Christentums (The Essence of Christianity), translated into French as early as 1864 by Joseph Roy^[19], then republished in a critical edition by Jean-Pierre Osier with Maspero in 1968^[20]. The book became, in Friedrich Engels's phrase, a book that "broke the spell" of the Hegelian system and made everyone who read it, "at one stroke, Feuerbachians"^[21].

The book's central strategy, which commentators call the "transformative method", consists in dialectically inverting theological propositions by reading them as misunderstood anthropological propositions. Where theology says "God is love", Feuerbach replies: it is human love, real and verifiable, that has been raised to the rank of a divine subject; the true subject — loving man — has been turned into the mere predicate of a fictitious subject — God. His most famous formula sums up the entire programme of the work: "theology is anthropology" — theology is nothing but an anthropology unaware of itself^[22].

Religion, man's indirect consciousness of himself

From the very introduction of the work, Feuerbach states his central thesis in programmatically clear terms:

"Man's consciousness of God is man's consciousness of himself; knowledge of the supreme being is knowledge of his own being." — Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Introduction, ch. II^[23]

"Religion is the first, but indirect, consciousness of man of himself." — Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Introduction, ch. II^[24]

"The divine being is nothing other than the being of man freed from the bonds and limits of the individual [...], objectified, that is, contemplated and worshipped as a separate being." — Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Introduction, ch. II^[25]

For Feuerbach, religious man does not know that he is contemplating himself in the mirror he calls God: religion is an unconscious alienation, a doubling of human consciousness that projects its own perfections outward before worshipping them as if they were alien to it^[26]. This alienation is not, for Feuerbach, a pure lie: it constitutes a necessary, almost pedagogical stage in the history of human consciousness — man had first to see himself in God before he could, one day, recognise himself^[27].

From this thesis, Feuerbach draws a practical consequence which he presents as the supreme principle of his philosophy:

"Homo homini Deus est — this is the supreme practical principle, this is the turning point of world history." — Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. J.-P. Osier, Paris, Maspero, 1982^[28]

If man's essence is, for him, the supreme essence, then the first and last law can no longer be love of God: it must become love of man for man^[29]. It is this practical conclusion — replacing the religion of God with a religion of humanity — that would give its political meaning to Feuerbach's entire Marxist posterity.

Divine attributes as objectified human perfections

In the first part of the work — which he calls the "true essence", that is, the anthropological essence, of Christianity — Feuerbach reviews seventeen chapters devoted each to a central dogma: God as reason, God as love, the Incarnation, the Trinity, Providence, prayer, faith, miracles, the resurrection^[30]. His method is identical each time: to show that the divine attribute in question is only the projection, carried to infinity, of an authentically human need or aspiration. Divine omnipotence answers man's desire not to be limited; providence answers man's need to be loved and protected; the Incarnation itself, for Feuerbach, expresses nothing other than the implicit affirmation that "God is already in man" even before the dogma formally states it^[31].

In the second part — the "false", theological essence — Feuerbach sets out to show the internal contradictions of orthodox theology as soon as it claims to treat God as a reality distinct from man, rather than as man's own objectified essence^[32]. This second part, more polemical and less often discussed than the first, directly prepares the materialist turn of the following years.

The Principles of the Philosophy of the Future, 1843

In 1843, Feuerbach published the Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (Principles of the Philosophy of the Future), in which he formulated his break with Hegel in the most explicit terms:

"In complete opposition to Hegelian philosophy I now regard myself as a realist and a materialist." — Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843)^[33]

There he develops the idea that "being precedes thought, but thought does not precede being": against Hegelian idealism, in which Spirit generates nature, Feuerbach affirms that it is sensible, corporeal nature that is primary, and that all thought derives from it^[34]. He radicalises this thesis by affirming that "the body in its totality is my self, my essence", rejecting any substantial separation between soul and body^[35].

Man is what he eats: the materialist turn

In November 1850, in an essay entitled Die Naturwissenschaft und die Revolution ("Natural science and revolution" (Ignispedia translation)), published in the Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung on the occasion of a review of the treatise Lehre der Nahrungsmittel by the chemist Jacob Moleschott, Feuerbach coined the formula that would remain the most famous of his late philosophy: "Der Mensch ist, was er ißt" — "man is what he eats"^[36]. In 1862 he made it the title of an entire essay, Das Geheimnis des Opfers oder Der Mensch ist, was er ißt ("The secret of sacrifice, or man is what he eats" (Ignispedia translation))^[37]. This formula, often reduced to a materialist quip, in reality sums up the whole programme of the late Feuerbach: to anchor man's consciousness, thought and even morality in his most concrete biological and sensible condition.

The Theogony, 1857, and the feeling of dependence on nature

From the mid-1840s onwards, Feuerbach refined his explanation of religion. In The Essence of Faith According to Luther (1844) and then in The Essence of Religion (1846), he introduced a second model, complementary to the first: religion no longer arises only from a projection of idealised human essence, but from a feeling of dependence (Abhängigkeitsgefühl) of man on nature, from which he draws his subsistence and before which he feels vulnerable^[38]. To this feeling of dependence is added, according to Feuerbach, a fundamental psychological drive which he calls the Glückseligkeitstrieb ("drive towards happiness"): man divinises whatever his survival and happiness depend on, whether it be the sun, the life-giving river or, later, a personal God supposed to guarantee his eternal salvation^[39].

This "bipolar" theory of religion — projection of idealised human essence on the one hand, anxious dependence on nature on the other — finds its scholarly crowning in the Theogonie nach den Quellen des klassischen, hebräischen und christlichen Altertums (Theogony, according to the sources of classical, Hebrew and Christian antiquity (Ignispedia translation), 1857), a vast philological inquiry in which Feuerbach traces the genealogy of the ancient and biblical gods as so many answers to human anguish in the face of natural necessity^[40].

During the German revolution of 1848, students at Heidelberg, eager to see him appointed to the philosophy faculty, invited Feuerbach to give a series of public lectures; the university having refused him the use of its premises, the sessions were held twice a week, from December 1848 to March 1849, in the town-hall assembly room at Heidelberg, before a large and varied audience in which the physiologist Jacob Moleschott could be noticed^[41]. These lectures were published in 1851 under the title Vorlesungen über das Wesen der Religion (Lectures on the Essence of Religion (Ignispedia translation))^[42].

The following table summarises the complete trajectory of Feuerbach's written work, from the anonymous book that broke his academic career to his last great essay:

Marx and the Theses on Feuerbach, 1845: going beyond the contemplator

In the spring of 1845, the young Karl Marx, still deeply marked by his reading of The Essence of Christianity, wrote eleven short notes in a private notebook, known as the Theses on Feuerbach. They were only published after his death, by Engels, in 1888, as an appendix to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy^[43]. There Marx pays tribute to Feuerbach's achievement while reproaching him for remaining a mere observer of the world rather than an agent of its transformation:

"Feuerbach starts out from the fact that religion makes man estranged from himself and splits the world into a religious world [...] and a temporal world." — Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, fourth thesis, 1845^[44]

"Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In its reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." — Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, sixth thesis, 1845^[45]

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." — Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach, eleventh thesis, 1845^[46]

The sixth thesis is decisive for understanding the internal limit of Feuerbachian thought, as Marx himself perceives it: by reducing God to the "essence of man", Feuerbach goes on handling an abstraction — the human Species, man in general — which has no more concrete reality than the God he claims to dissolve. Marx historicises what Feuerbach had only anthropologised^[47].

Engels: the spell was broken

In his 1888 pamphlet, Engels recounts with enthusiasm the liberating effect of the 1841 book on a whole generation of Young Hegelians:

"The enthusiasm was general: we all became Feuerbachians for a moment." — Friedrich Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, 1888^[48]

Engels stresses that The Essence of Christianity had established, against Hegel's absolute idealism, that "human consciousness is the only consciousness that exists" and that it depends ontologically on man's physical existence^[49]. It is this materialism, still fragile and unhistoricised in Feuerbach, that Marx and Engels would then incorporate into their own system of historical materialism.

Freud and The Future of an Illusion: projection reinterpreted as neurosis

Nearly eighty years later, Sigmund Freud takes up and radicalises the Feuerbachian framework in The Future of an Illusion (Die Zukunft einer Illusion, 1927): belief in God is there no longer merely a projection of idealised human essence, but a childhood illusion, the projection of the idealised earthly father, destined to calm man's anguish in the face of his own powerlessness before nature and death^[50]. Freud thus radicalises Feuerbach's second intuition — the feeling of dependence on nature — by shifting it from the philosophical register to the psychoanalytic register of the unconscious and the father figure. The Feuerbachian concept of the Glückseligkeitstrieb (drive towards happiness) anticipates, on this precise point, Freud's later formulations on the unconscious drives that motivate religious behaviour^[51].

Nietzsche and the death of God: an atheism more radical still

Friedrich Nietzsche pushes the movement further still. Where Feuerbach wanted to explain God by man in order to restore to the latter his own alienated greatness, Nietzsche proclaims, through the mouth of the madman in The Gay Science (1882), that "God is dead", and that this death — far from being a mere anthropological clarification — leaves humanity orphaned of all transcendent value, compelled to invent new tables of values for itself. The passage from Feuerbach to Nietzsche thus marks the passage from a humanist atheism, still carrying a positive moral project (the love of man for man), to an atheism that questions the very possibility of founding a morality once God has been set aside.

The following table summarises the four great variations on the theme of religious projection, from Feuerbach to Nietzsche:

The Genetic Fallacy: A Psychological Origin Proves Nothing

The Feuerbachian thesis, whatever its posterity, suffers from a logical defect that Catholic philosophy identified long ago under the name of the genetic fallacy: even if the psychological origin of a belief were established with certainty, it would say strictly nothing about its truth or falsity^[52]. That a man desires a protective father proves neither that such a father exists nor that he does not exist; the question of God's existence must be settled by other means — metaphysical, cosmological, historical — than by analyzing the psychological motives behind belief. The Ignispedia article devoted to the existence of God develops this point systematically, in response to the full set of the seven classic objections against theism, including those of Feuerbach and Freud: The Existence of God — Seven Objections and Catholic Answers.

The Symmetrical Reversal: Atheism, Too, Can Be Explained Psychologically

The Feuerbachian argument is, moreover, perfectly reversible. If religious aspiration can be explained by a desire for consolation or paternal protection, atheist aspiration can likewise be explained by symmetrical psychological motives: the desire for absolute autonomy, the refusal of any transcendent authority, revolt against a paternal figure judged too demanding or too absent^[53]. Van A. Harvey showed, in his thorough study Feuerbach and the Interpretation of Religion (Cambridge University Press, 1995), that Feuerbach's own biographical trajectory — his early break with a stern, rationalist father, an academic career cut short by the religious authorities of his day — offers material at least as rich for a symmetrical psychobiographical reading as the one he applied to Christian belief^[54]. This observation does not claim to refute Feuerbach through his biography — that would in turn commit the genetic fallacy — but it illustrates, by way of absurdity, that the psychological weapon turns just as easily against the one who wields it.

A New Idol: Cornelio Fabro and the Cartesian Genealogy of Atheism

The Italian Thomist philosopher Cornelio Fabro, in his monumental study Introduzione all'ateismo moderno (Rome, Editrice Studium, 1964), places Feuerbach at the end of a precise genealogy that does not begin with him but with the Cartesian cogito: the principle of immanence, by making the consciousness of the thinking subject the ultimate criterion of reality, condemns God, sooner or later, to becoming a mere production of that same consciousness^[55]. Fabro traces this thread from Descartes to Spinoza, then to Hegel's absolute idealism, whose materialist aftermath is accomplished precisely in Feuerbach and Marx, for whom God is no more than a projection of man^[56].

The subtlest point of Fabro's critique is not to deny that Feuerbach is right to denounce certain idolatries or certain infantile images of God; it is to show that Feuerbach never really escapes the metaphysics he believes he is abolishing. By shifting the Absolute from God to man — by making the human Species the new infinite, eternal subject worthy of adoration — Feuerbach does not destroy the idol, he displaces it. Abstract man, the idealized Species of which Feuerbach speaks, becomes in turn an absolute without any concrete referent — which is exactly what Marx himself would reproach him for in the Sixth Thesis quoted above^[57].

The Drama of Atheist Humanism According to Henri de Lubac

The Jesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, in Le Drame de l'humanisme athée (Paris, Éditions Spes, 1944), devotes a thorough study to what he calls the "prophetic atheism" of the nineteenth century — that of Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Auguste Comte — as opposed to the lazy, inconsequential atheism of the ordinary skeptic^[58]. For these four thinkers, De Lubac stresses, the denial of God is never a mere absence: it always presents itself as the necessary condition for man's flourishing, as though humanity had first to rid itself of God in order to grow^[59]. That is precisely Feuerbach's explicit program: Homo homini Deus est — man must become a god to man.

De Lubac answers this program with a thesis that would become one of the most famous in twentieth-century Catholic theology, later taken up by Paul VI in the encyclical Populorum progressio (1967):

"It is not true that man, as is sometimes said, cannot organize the world without God. What is true is that, without God, he can in the end only organize it against man. Exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism." (Ignispedia translation) — Henri de Lubac, Le Drame de l'humanisme athée, Éditions Spes, 1944, p. 12^[60]

The history of the twentieth century — whose full scope neither Feuerbach nor even De Lubac in 1944 could yet measure — gave this sentence a dramatic resonance: the political systems that explicitly claimed the materialism stemming from Feuerbach and Marx, promising man's total emancipation through the mere abolition of religious dependence, produced some of the most destructive regimes of human dignity in modern history. The Second Vatican Council itself, examining Marxist atheism, would note that once in power its partisans "violently attack religion [...] using [...] every means of pressure at the disposal of public authority"^[61].

Reversing the Analogy: Why Divine Perfections Resemble Human Perfections

Beyond the logical refutation of the genetic fallacy, Catholic theology has a positive answer, far older than Feuerbach, to the central intuition of his book — the strange resemblance between the perfections attributed to God and idealized human perfections. There is nothing scandalous to conceal in this resemblance: it is explicitly taught by Scripture itself, from the very first chapter of Genesis:

"And he said: Let us make man to our image and likeness. [...] And God created man to his own image: to the image of God he created him: male and female he created them." — Genesis 1:26–27^[62]

Feuerbach observes a real resemblance between man and the idea theology forms of God — on this point of observation, he is not mistaken. His error lies in believing that this resemblance can be explained in only one direction, that of a projection from man toward God. The Catholic doctrine of the analogy of being, formalized by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 13), teaches exactly the reverse: it is not God who is an enlarged man; rather, human perfections — goodness, intelligence, love, power — are finite, limited participations in perfections that pre-exist, infinitely and without composition, in God himself^[63]. The Catechism of the Catholic Church sums up this fundamental principle of natural theology: all creatures bear a certain resemblance to God — most especially man, created in his image — and it is from the perfections of creatures that we can name God, knowing their Author by analogy (cf. Wis 13:5)^[64].

In other words: if there exists a Creator God who made man in his image, it would be shocking if human language about God did not resemble, at least by analogy, language about man himself. The resemblance Feuerbach takes for proof of illusion is, read from the Catholic doctrine of creation and of the divine image, exactly what one should have expected to find if Christianity is true. The direction of the projective relation — from man toward God, or from God toward man — cannot be settled by observing the resemblance alone: it requires examining the independent proofs of God's existence, developed in the dedicated article.

The Judgment of the Second Vatican Council and of the Catechism

The ecumenical council Vatican II, in the pastoral constitution Gaudium et Spes (7 December 1965), devotes three entire paragraphs (§§ 19–21) to examining the causes of contemporary atheism^[65]. The conciliar text begins with an uncommon gesture of honesty: it acknowledges that believers themselves bear a share of responsibility for the spread of atheism, when neglect of religious education, misleading presentations of doctrine, or failures in their moral and social lives veil the true face of God rather than revealing it^[66]. Then, in paragraph 20, it directly examines the systematic form of atheism of which Feuerbach is one of the philosophical sources most studied by twentieth-century theology:

"Modern atheism often also takes a systematic form which, leaving other causes aside, drives the desire for human autonomy to such a point that it stands in the way of any dependence on God." — Second Vatican Council, constitution Gaudium et Spes, § 20^[67]

The Catechism of the Catholic Church takes up and extends this conciliar teaching in the paragraphs devoted to the First Commandment, specifying that atheism, in several of its contemporary forms, "is grounded in a false conception of human autonomy, pushed to the point of refusing any dependence on God"^[68], and that atheistic humanism wrongly holds that man "is for himself his own end, the sole artisan and demiurge of his own history"^[69]. That is exactly the program Feuerbach had formulated a century earlier in his formula Homo homini Deus est. Without naming him, the Magisterium answers his central thesis directly: man has no need to dethrone God in order to become fully himself, for he is never greater than when he lives in filial relationship with Him in whose image he was created^[70].

The Bankruptcy of the Bruckberg Factory

In 1859–1860, the porcelain factory at Bruckberg, on which the entire material security of the Feuerbach household depended, went bankrupt^[71]. At fifty-six, Feuerbach found himself without resources and had to leave Bruckberg to settle in Rechenberg, a modest hamlet near Nuremberg, where he would live until his death in a poverty his own admirers described as alarming^[72]. In 1866, he published one last major essay on the relations between theology and anthropology, in which he deepened his moral psychology of religion through the concept of the Glückseligkeitstrieb^[73].

In 1868, Feuerbach read with enthusiasm the first volume of Marx's Capital, published the previous year^[74]. In 1870, despite his advanced age and declining health, he formally joined the Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP), founded the previous year at Eisenach by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht^[75]. That same Social-Democratic movement organized, in those same years, a public subscription to relieve the poverty of the author of The Essence of Christianity, who had by force of circumstance become one of its spiritual fathers^[76].

Death at Rechenberg, 1872

Weakened by a series of successive strokes over his last two years, Ludwig Feuerbach died at Rechenberg on 13 September 1872, at the age of sixty-eight^[77]. He is buried in St. John's Cemetery (Johannisfriedhof) in Nuremberg, where his funeral gathered, alongside his family, workers' delegations come to honor the philosopher who had made man, and no longer God, the measure of all things^[78].

From Liberation Theology to Freudo-Marxism

The Feuerbachian schema of religion as alienation to be overcome enjoyed, in the twentieth century, a posterity far beyond orthodox Marxist circles. Certain critical readings of religion in terms of class ideology, developed notably in the Latin American theological debates of the 1960s–1970s, owe part of their vocabulary — the idea of religion as an authority to be "unmasked" rather than interpreted at face value — to the matrix opened up by Feuerbach and then taken over by Marx^[79]. Likewise, the attempts to synthesize Marxism and psychoanalysis in mid-twentieth-century Europe borrow, often without explicitly citing it, the dual Feuerbachian schema of idealized projection and the feeling of dependence.

What Feuerbach Never Explained

The American philosopher Karl Löwith, in his classic study From Hegel to Nietzsche (1941), showed that Feuerbach occupies an irreplaceable hinge position in the history of nineteenth-century German philosophy: without him, the passage from Hegel's absolute idealism to Marx's historical materialism, and then to the Nietzschean critique of values, would be quite unintelligible^[80]. But this historical centrality does not exempt his thesis itself from scrutiny.

A century and a half after his death, Feuerbach's central thesis remains what it already was for his most demanding early readers: a fruitful psychological observation coupled with an invalid metaphysical inference. That human language about God necessarily borrows human categories — fatherhood, love, power, justice — was never disputed by Catholic theology, which made it, long before Feuerbach, the object of an explicit doctrine, that of the analogy of being and of man created in the image of God. What Feuerbach, by contrast, never demonstrated, nor even seriously attempted to demonstrate, is that this necessary resemblance proves the non-existence of its object. On this precise point — the only one that matters philosophically — his argument remains, to this day, a genetic fallacy dressed up as a system.

• Existence of God — seven objections and Catholic answers, for the systematic development of the answer to the psychological-projection objection (Feuerbach and Freud).
• Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), for the complete study of the four figures of "prophetic atheism" — Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, Comte.
• Cornelio Fabro (1911-1995), for the complete Cartesian genealogy of modern atheism up to Feuerbach and Marx.
• The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965), for the complete doctrinal context of Gaudium et Spes on atheism and dialogue with the contemporary world.