THE CASE OF LUDWIG FEUERBACH

by Lyn Marcus

THE INTELLECTUAL RENAISSANCE

[ Extracts with the associated source notes ]

Pages 29 - 30

The essential feature of Christian doctrine, as we have previously identified this, treats the subject of the “religious experience” and its psychoanalytical implications. The “religious experience” itself is simply a naive, ignorant self-consciousness’s joyful encounter with an upsurge of the fundamental emotion, an elation occasioned by an outpouring of the “oceanic” feeling. In general, this experience is identical to the experiencing of the actual emotion of “non-erotic” loving in its intense form — a point we have illustrated by repeated references to the famous Liebestod duet from Tristan and Isolde.

The elaboration of Christian doctrine on the religious experience begins with the recognition that individual man is divided against himself, that he has two alternate “I”s within his mind. One of these “I”s, the self-conscious self, is agreeable to the outpouring of the fundamental emotion. However, in the normal state of man outside that experience, the self-conscious self is generally condemned to watch in passive, impotent horror as the person is compelled to think and act according to the control of the person by the infantile Ego.[71] The essential object of the fundamental aspect of Christian doctrine is to enable man to purge himself of control of the infantile Ego and to thus live permanently as an alienated form of self-conscious “I” acting through the force of the fundamental emotion.

Thus far, essential Christian doctrine and revolutionary-socialist outlooks might not appear to differ significantly. A distinction emerges most clearly the moment we emphasize that the morality appropriate to self-consciousness is Spinozan[72], and locate the objective requirements of the self-conscious individual’s thought and action in the context of the world-wide development of today’s productive forces created through previous capitalist development. The distinction between the religious man and the socialist is this. The religious man is a naive individual, who conceives of morality as Feuerbach does, in terms of a mass of autonomous individuals. He does not know the Necessity of Freedom, that the only action properly giving self-conscious identity to the individual is a universal act for the positive development (and realization) of universal labor.[73] To the religious man, the laws of the “outside world” are fixed by God, and hence he must not aspire to be more than an Apollonian “explorer of nature.”[74] Socialist man is fundamentally distinguishable from religious man; socialist man’s location of his identity in universal labor, in the willful changing of law, in taking upon himself the potent responsibility for positive reordering of nature, defines his world-outlook as Promethean.

This distinction is not strained. Essential religious doctrine proscribes the Promethean outlook itself as the most heinous of all offenses against Jehovah; it is the crime for which Lucifer was condemned, the crime of (Promethean) hubris. The Promethean Lucifer (there are two distinct and opposite Satans) is a potency, with the power to struggle for hegemony against God, a Prometheus who schemes to win men to his cause by offering to change the laws of nature in conformity with mortal man’s material needs. This Promethean Lucifer is a God more powerful than Zeus-Jehovah, who partakes of the essence of the Deity (the fundamental emotion).

Lucifer is the Christian doctrine’s horror-stricken prescience of the ultimate appearance of Karl Marx.

Since the Christian doctrine proscribes man’s use of the creative potential of the fundamental emotion to reorder the laws of nature, the doctrine thus alienates religious man from the essential human power over the universe. It sets the lawful ordering of nature apart from man, as something opposed to him. Hence, as Feuerbach properly observes to that point, God the Law-Giver is estranged from man’s direct knowledge; God the Law-Giver is made to have a nature which is in significant part denied to man. Since man is therefore denied the act of finding such hubristic qualities in himself, he is denied the act of seeking within himself the quality which compares with that attributed to God the Law-Giver; man therefore cannot directly know God the Law-Giver of his own personal knowledge. (Moses cannot see the face of God.)

This alienation of the Law-Giver from the personal religious experience immediately divides the essential Deity into two parts. The essential Deity is the Logos, which religious man directly experiences (knows) as the “oceanic” feeling of elated self-consciousness, God the Law-Giver has been to that degree alienated from this essential Deity in respect to man, although he remains connected to it as the subject of his own essential nature. Hence, “In the beginning, was the Word,” and the Word was God and was also with God.

The estrangement of God the Law-Giver from man requires that religion provide man-become-God, a man-become-a-God who experiences all the qualities of the self-conscious “I” in its religious experience (“In a state of Pentecost”), and who is also defined as God lacking the distinctive qualities of the Law-Giver. Since this man-become-God is directly connected to God the Law-Giver through the shared essence, the Logos, we have the Trinity, in which Christ (man-become-God) acts as mediator between man and God.[75] Christ is a personal God for alienated man, for the reasons previously identified.

In this essential doctrine, Christianity retains the root-form of an ideology-in-general for a universalizing form of society, e.g., the Papal feudal system of Charlemagne, the semi-feudal mercantile-capitalist system of the 13th through 16th centuries of Western Europe, and capitalism proper. It has the essential quality of an ideology because it has alienated man in the most fundamental way, as Apollonian man: it defines the religious experience as the joyful encounter with the “oceanic” feeling by an ignorant, alienated self-conscious “I,” and alienates man by denying him the discovery of his essential human, i.e., Promethean self-consciousness.*

* Judaism, which developed as a by-product of the emergence of early Christianity, and was molded in its further evolution as an appendage of Christianity, is also in its general form a truncated reflection of the Christian type of ideology in general. It has also been transformed through specifically feudal, semi-feudal mercantile-capitalist, and capitalist forms. It is not necessary to give special treatment to Judaism here, since it never existed except in myth, but as a by-product of Christianity, and could not exist except as a special predicate of a Christian or Muslim culture, principally Christian. There is no autonomous “Jewish culture,” but only a special variety of (especially) Christian culture.[76]

As we noted before, organized Christianity, Catholic or Protestant, shamefacedly but nonetheless effectively distinguishes two categories of communicants, each characterized by a different emphasis in doctrine. On the one side, there is the smaller community of “apostles and mystics,” those whose relationship to the church is principally identified by a cultivation of the “religious experience.” The larger numbers of communicants is made up in its smaller portion by those church officials who are occupied with the practical and administrative side of church life, and in the larger portion by the mass of communicants whose minimal or virtually non-existent adult “religious experience” is overwhelmingly outweighed by superstition.

To the latter, but for extraordinary occasions and circumstances, the “religious experience” of the adult is not only limited to a few occasions in their lives, but generally it is tolerantly assumed by both church and laity that such special feeling-knowledge, such “imitation of Christ” is more or less beyond the reach of the ordinary mortal religious person. Small, extremely-diluted, occasional senses of the “religious feeling” serve as a mere hint of spice for a religious life predominantly characterized by witch-ridden superstition.

The superstitious side of religious doctrine and activities, centered in Catholic doctrines on the cult of the Arch-Witch, the Virgin Mary, and other idolatries, is based on a substitute for the “religious experience” in the banal passion of mother-love. The moral side of this part of doctrine is based on a kind of churchly jiu-jitsu. The very mechanisms of the Devil herself, are employed to regulate the conduct of the communicant through mother’s superstitious fears. Negation of the negation! The church makes a compact with the Devil, in respect of which the Satan delivers the credulous to the morality of the church through the medium of the superstitious fears transmitted through the mother, and also delivers to the church the right to act to exert further control of those believers through appeals to the sentiment of mother-love.

In this way, the Church incorporates into its doctrine the lusts of gluttony and Oedipal sexual orgies, the way of the infantile Ego. It makes a sacrament of each lust, thereby subverting the lustful activity (and its celebration through ritual intervals of “negation”) to the church’s benefit. (Like waiting for Christmas morning, the previous day’s prohibitions make the opening of the gifts more exciting. The object of fasting is gluttonous feasting.)

By incorporating the witches and their superstitions into the body of churchly doctrine and practices, Christianity assimilates and strengthens the essential qualities of the specific ideology of that society’s witches. The church becomes the Universal Mother-Church, the official institution of the collectivity of superstitious mothers, and the most agreeable habitat for the pathetic woman left with little but her superstition to console her.

Having incorporated the Madonna-Whore of Babylon into its liturgy as the religious doctrine for the common credulous man and woman, how does the Church conceal the ugly fact of this compact? How does it dispose of the canonical preoccupation with the archenemy, with the doctrine it has inherited from its own essential beliefs? It solves this problem in a certain sense, by delegating solution of this thorny theological problem to the Devil herself. It permits a disguised, smiling Satan, the Virgin Mary to determine who shall be the “enemy.” Characteristically, being such a sort of witch, the Virgin Mother locates the enemy in the category of “outsider,” in the essence of the person from the other country, the other neighborhood, the other religion, the person who speaks a different language, etc. Hence, Catholicism makes a travesty of itself, and becomes entirely a mere herd of antagonistic parochialisms. Universality becomes an empty word delivered to the entertainment of pervasive heteronomy!

Feuerbach exemplifies the point in a certain fashion. Nowhere in his The Essence of Christianity do we find an account for the name of Satan. Imagine, Christianity without Satan! Luther would wallop his ears soundly! Yet, Satan reveals herself in that book despite the author’s whim; only Satan’s name is changed, to that of the Virgin Mary. More exactly, Satan is portrayed by her real name, her Arch-Witch’s canonical name of “Holy Mother.”

source notes

70. “The Sexual Impotence of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party,” pp. 38-39.

71. Ibid., pp. 37-38.

72. “Beyond Psychoanalysis,” pp. 48-49, 71-74.

73. Ibid. (pp. 71-74).

74. Essence ... , p. IV.

75. Ibid., Chap. IV.

76. Cf. Karl Kautsky, The Foundations of Christianity; Abraham Leon, The Jewish Question. Kautsky’s one truly important contribution, reminding us of Rosa Luxemburg’s penetrating observation, that his perception improves in direct proportion to number of past centuries intervening between him and his subject-matter of the moment. Despite some jarring notes of orthodox mechanistic “Marxist-Leninist” economic theory, the work of 26-year old Leon is a remarkable masterpiece, which no defender of “Jewish cultural nationalism” has even attempted to rebut by any other means than invective. This writer’s own analysis of the evolution from Egyptian-Mesopotamian “hydraulic” into Hellenic cultures, and Hellenic cultures’ super-session by feudalism and then capitalism provide the “political economic” context in which Leon’s situation of the “Jewish Question” becomes the only rational view.

Although A.D. Judaism is an outgrowth of the development of Christianity (e.g., the first such rabbi, Philo of Alexandria), there was a preceding Hebrew faith of sorts, elements of which were syncretically assimilated in the successive phases of manufacture of post-Philo Judaism. The earlier, Hebrew doctrine is itself a syncretic hodge-podge of chiefly Mesopotamian legends. Rabbi Ezra, the author of the fictional personality of Moses, is exemplary of the circumstances and content of Hebrew doctrine — a creation of Achaemenid protection and edict. Ezra’s Persian version of Hebrewism was, in turn, significantly influenced by an earlier, pre-Pentateuch version created in conformity with Babylonian edicts. In general, as Leon adequately develops the case, the doctrine of secular Zionism is entirely a Twentieth Century fabrication, owing more to the Russian Czar and (later) Hitler and to U.S.S.R. and U.S.A. political support than Ezra, Philo, et al. From Ezra onwards, and even before, Hebrewism was an assimilationist doctrine developed to provide special juridical status (and ideological self-image) for a caste of merchant-usurers within a pre-capitalist society.

However, despite the hysterical imbecility of the Zionist “pihpul” claim to an historic, pre 20th century, God-given title to Palestine, there is a 20th century Jewish Palestinian state, whose formal real estate title dates (with Soviet “title insurance” included) from the immediate post-war period. (Juridically, the Jews had a far more substantial claim to Poland and Lithuania, which puts an ironical aspect on Stalin’s endorsement of their title to Palestine!) The existence of a Jewish population in Palestine is not justified by anything but the 20th century actual origins of that fact.

Such considerations are only necessary context for our working point here: Since Christianity and Judaism are, phenomenally, the characteristic religious expressions of capitalist ideology, do the differentia of Judaism therefore invalidate the comprehensiveness of a Christianity-based clinical study of capitalist ideology? Although a systematic anthropological study of specifically Jewish delusions has unquestioned merit and even some urgency — for other reasons, it is unnecessary to regard such a study as essential to the theses of this paper. For reasons already implicit in Leon’s book, Judaism is not a true religion, but only a half-religion, a curious appendage and sub-species of Christianity. In this sense, as Charlemagne keeps his herd of protected Jews as “slaves of the treasury,” Christianity has regarded the Jewish religion as the imperfect, special form of Christianity — e.g., a kind of theological “cultural relativism” for one’s slaves — and secular Christianity has always regarded the Jew as “our Jews,” a principle continued in U.S.A. and Israeli policy respecting the fief-State of Israel! This relationship does more than express Christian prejudice; it is the secret of Judaism itself. Judaism is ideological abstraction of the secular life of Christianity’s Jew, the Roman merchant-usurer who had not yet evolved to the state of Papal enlightenment, a half-Christian, who had not developed a Christian conscience, etc. Judaism is the religion of a caste of subjects of Christianity, entirely molded by ingenious rabbis to fit into the ideological and secular life of Christianity. In short, a self-subsisting Judaism never existed and never could exist. As for “Jewish culture” otherwise, it is merely the residue left to the Jewish home after everything saleable has been marketed to the Goyim.

[Contrary systematic views on this special subject will be entertained for review by the editors.]