Pantheism, Personalism, and Popular Sovereignty: The Politico-Theological Significance of The Essence of Christianity

This paper seeks to elucidate the politico-theological significance of the anthropotheistic position taken by Ludwig Feuerbach in his magnum opus, The Essence of Christianity (1841). This epochal work, conceived during the period of his collaboration with Arnold Ruge, launched Feuerbach’s career as a public intellectual during the German Vormärz period. This role culminated in his delivery of a series of public lectures in Heidelberg during the revolutionary events of 1848 (subsequently published as the Lectures on the Essence of Religion).

Despite Feuerbach’s public identification with the aspirations of the doomed revolution, which sought German unification under a constitution, there is not to be found in the corpus of his writings an explicit political philosophy. Furthermore, when asked directly by Ruge in November of 1839 to provide the Halle Annals with a critique of the conservative Swiss jurist, Carl Ludwig von Haller, and those whom Ruge regarded as Haller’s disciples, including F.W.J. Schelling, Adam Müller, Friedrich von Schlegel, and Heinrich Leo, Feuerbach demurred. In doing so, however, he informed Ruge that he had recently begun work on a book that would be directly relevant to the most pressing concerns of the day.

Feuerbach then posed to Ruge the question, “What is the ultimate source of our spiritual and political bondage?”, before proposing as the answer: “The illusions of theology.” After mentioning a number of patristic and medieval authors whose works he had been studying in preparation for writing what would become The Essence of Christianity, he continued: “It is unbelievable what illusions have dominated, and continue to dominate, humanity, and how the speculative philosophy in its last manifestation rather than freeing us from these illusions, has only strengthened them.” In a letter to his publisher, Otto Wigand, Feuerbach suggested as the title for his book, Know Thyself! This indicates that his “practical-therapeutic” purpose in writing it was to free his contemporaries from certain theological illusions that he had come to regard as the primary underlying cause of their intellectual and political servitude.

This exchange between Ruge and Feuerbach raises the following question, to which this paper will suggest an answer: How exactly did Feuerbach understand the relevance of his argument in The Essence of Christianity to the “spiritual and political bondage” with which he identified prevailing social conditions during this period? The path followed here in answering this question is a circuitous one. It begins by considering remarks contained in a letter sent by Feuerbach to Hegel, along with a copy of his dissertation, in 1828. What is most striking in this letter is Feuerbach’s explicit repudiation of Hegel’s identification of Christianity as “the complete and absolute religion” and his designation of it instead as “the religion of the pure self, of the person as the only kind of spirit that there is.” Equally striking in the present context is Feuerbach’s identification of the historical task at hand as the establishment of the Alleinherrschaft or “sole sovereignty” of reason in a “kingdom of the actuality of the Idea and of existent reason” (das Reich der Wirklichkeit der Idee und der daseienden Vernunft).

The elucidation of this claim will require examination of the role played by the Idea in Feuerbach’s thinking during the 1830s, which was undertaken from what he himself later referred to as “the standpoint of pantheisic idealism.” It is from this standpoint, which he later abandoned, that Feuerbach delivered lectures on logic and metaphysics, and on the history of modern philosophy, at the university of Erlangen, while also contributing articles to Hegelian journals defending Hegel’s speculative philosophical method against its critics. Among these critics was Friedrich Julius Stahl (1802-1861), who had also begun his academic career as a lecturer at the University of Erlangen before going on to become a leading German theorist of political conservatism.

In 1840, Stahl was appointed by Friedrich Wilhelm IV to the chair of jurisprudence at the University of Berlin previously occupied, until his untimely death in 1839, by the relatively liberal Hegelian, Eduard Gans. Stahl’s doctrine of the state, notable for its unqualified repudiation of the principle of popular sovereignty (in the name of which the revolution was waged), was first spelled out in 1845 in a work entitled The Monarchical Principle. This was followed by in 1847 by The Christian State and in 1848 by Revolution and Popular Sovereignty. On July 20, 1848, an abridged version of The Monarchical Principle, revised in light of current events, was published under the title, “The Banner of the Conservatives.” Stahl’s pamphlet, What is Revolution?, appeared in 1849, followed in 1852 by Protestantism as Political Principle (3rd ed., 1853). During the same period, Stahl was active in Prussian ecclesiastical politics.

The following description of Stahl’s philosophical and juridical position appears in the article on him found in the New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge:

“Of the fundamental problems of human life, he considered two solutions as possible, both philosophically and juridically,--one on the basis of pantheism, and one on the basis of faith in a personal God who has revealed himself to man; one giving the absolute power to the mass of the people, the majority, and one organizing the State after the idea of the highest personality, as a sphere of ethical action. What lay between those two extremes he despised as destitute of character.”  

Consideration of the personalistic arguments employed by Stahl in his repudiation of popular sovereignty, as well as his defense of the monarchical principle, enables us to appreciate the political theological-significance of Feuerbach’s argument in The Essence of Christianity. This is the case insofar as one of Feuerbach’s stated intentions in that work was to “place the so-called Positive Philosophy [of which he regarded Stahl as a leading representative] in a most fatal light by showing that the original of its idolatrous image of God [Götzenbild] is man, that flesh and blood belong to personality essentially.”