After the annihilation of faith Feuerbach thinks to put in to the
supposedly safe harbor of _love_. "The first and highest law must be the
love of man to man. _Homo homini Deus est_--this is the supreme
practical maxim, this the turning point of the world's history."[37]
But, properly speaking, only the god is changed,--the _deus_; love has
remained: there love to the superhuman God, here love to the human God,
to _homo_ as _Deus_. Therefore man is to me--sacred. And everything
"truly human" is to me--sacred! "Marriage is sacred of itself. And so it
is with all moral relations. Friendship is and must be _sacred_ for you,
and property, and marriage, and the good of every man, but sacred _in
and of itself_."[38] Haven't we the priest again there? Who is his God?
Man with a great M! What is the divine? The human! Then the predicate
has indeed only been changed into the subject, and, instead of the
sentence "God is love," they say "love is divine"; instead of "God has
become man," "Man has become God," etc. It is nothing more or less than
a new--_religion_. "All moral relations are ethical, are cultivated with
a moral mind, only where of themselves (without religious consecration
by the priest's blessing) they are counted _religious_." Feuerbach's
proposition, "Theology is anthropology," means only "religion must be
ethics, ethics alone is religion."
Altogether Feuerbach accomplishes only a transposition of subject and
predicate, a giving of preference to the latter. But, since he himself
says, "Love is not (and has never been considered by men) sacred through
being a predicate of God, but it is a predicate of God because it is
divine in and of itself," he might judge that the fight against the
predicates themselves, against love and all sanctities, must be
commenced. How could he hope to turn men away from God when he left them
the divine? And if, as Feuerbach says, God himself has never been the
main thing to them, but only his predicates, then he might have gone on
leaving them the tinsel longer yet, since the doll, the real kernel, was
left at any rate. He recognizes, too, that with him it is "only a matter
of annihilating an illusion";[39] he thinks, however, that the effect of
the illusion on men is "downright ruinous, since even love, in itself
the truest, most inward sentiment, becomes an obscure, illusory one
through religiousness, since religious love loves man[40] only for God's
sake, therefore loves man only apparently, but in truth God only." Is
this different with moral love? Does it love the man, _this_ man for
_this_ man's sake, or for morality's sake, for _Man's_ sake, and so--for
_homo homini Deus_--for God's sake?
* * * * *
The wheels in the head have a number of other formal aspects, some of
which it may be useful to indicate here.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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