God as Illusion: Sigmund Freud
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THE INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATIONS: FEUERBACH, MARX, AND FREUD
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION attempted to bring about by force a permanent change in ways of human thinking. What had once been thought to be self-evident and unchangeable was suddenly declared to be untrue and open to change. The domination of France by king and church was not a matter of necessity; both could be swept away by Revolutionary enthusiasm, where necessary augmented by the judicious application of terror. Dr. Guillotin’s excellent new invention proved a remarkably effective means of concentrating people’s minds on this matter. Yet decapitating people is never the best way of proving a new idea. As Blaise Pascal (1623–62) argued, the best way of advancing any idea is to make people wish it were true, and then show them that it is indeed so.
But how could the predominantly Christian culture of the West be permanently altered? As the nineteenth century dawned, the French Revolution was already being spoken of in the past tense—an inconvenient interruption to European life, which had given way to the more predictable nationalist agenda of Napoleon Bonaparte. What was necessary for the advancement of atheism was a revolution within the collective Western mind, in which the presumption of God by Christians was displaced by an intellectual skepticism directed against their ideas, rather than a physical assault directed against their members and institutions.
A SECULAR PRIESTHOOD: THE RISE OF THE INTELLECTUAL
Atheism needed to take root at two distinct, though related, levels: the popular and the intellectual. Although many social historians have stressed the importance of grassroots movements in the shaping of nineteenth-century culture, there is no doubt that a “trickle-down” mechanism was of decisive importance in the shaping of Western atheism. Ideas originally limited to a small elite gradually percolated downward and outward into society as a whole. Eventually, they became so accepted and familiar that it was difficult to imagine that it was ever otherwise. Popular culture was led by intellectuals, who increasingly became the shapers and movers of Western thought. As clerical power began to decline in the eighteenth century, Western society began to look to others for moral vision and intellectual inspiration. It found such leaders in the growing community of intellectuals.
The emergence of the intellectual as a recognized social type is one of the most remarkable developments of recent centuries. Intellectuals became a secular priesthood, unfettered by the dogmas of the religious past, addressing a growing audience who were becoming increasingly impatient with the moral failures and cultural unsophistication of their clergy. At some point, perhaps one that can never be determined with historical accuracy, Western society came to believe that it should look elsewhere than to its clergy for guidance. Instead, they turned to the intellectuals, who were able to portray their clerical opponents as lazy fools who could do no more than unthinkingly repeat the slogans and nostrums of an increasingly distant past. A new future lay ahead, and society needed brave new thinkers to lead them to its lush Promethean pastures.
For some, the intellectual leaders of society were poets—the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” as Percy Bysshe Shelley called them. The poet bore the heavy weight of articulating a moral vision for humanity, grounded in reason and nature, and inspiring a community to yearn for a new and better order—and by doing so, to reach out and embrace such a world. For Tennyson, the poet was one whose words shook the world, tousling its settled patterns and habits of thought. Others argued for the special place of the novelist in challenging the prevailing consensus and generating a desire for an alternative vision of reality, offering fictional depictions of what such a new world might look like and critiquing the world they saw around them. George Eliot’s novels were of particular importance in creating a climate of suspicion toward faith in Victorian culture.
Many saw the serious writer of major treatises as the creator of new political and social orders. Had not Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract launched a thousand revolutionaries? Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88), while making some conventional comments on the benefits of religion, nevertheless portrays the early successes of Christianity in terms of a rather unattractive psychology of violence, fanaticism, and intolerance. Richard Knight’s sensational Discourse on the Worship of Priapus (1786) shocked polite English society as much by its Lucretian suggestion that religion was a human invention to explain otherwise puzzling aspects of nature, as by its explicit depiction of certain aspects of nature not normally mentioned in polite conversation. Its lurid prose descriptions and illustrations of phallic cults left little to the imagination.
The idea that the gods were a human invention was a not always welcome commonplace of late classical antiquity. Lucretius’s works had enjoyed a renaissance in the Restoration England of the 1660s, no doubt due to the popular revolt against the religious excesses of the Puritan period. Yet the idea that humanity invented its gods was still seen as little more than an interesting suggestion, without rigorous proof. We must now turn to see how a German intellectual managed to persuade a generation that the idea that humanity invented its gods was not just an entertaining rumor, it was the best available explanation of the evidence. The intellectual in question was Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72).
GOD AS AN INVENTION: LUDWIG FEUERBACH
Revolutionary sentiment simmered in early-nineteenth-century Germany. The French Revolution had heightened a sense of injustice within many levels of German society and created an appetite for radical change. Might the German states now finally throw off their outmoded princes and dukes, and replace them with something more democratic? When the news of the French Revolution reached the universities of Germany, a sense of standing on the threshold of a new era appears to have dawned. Europe had come of age. The ideas of the Enlightenment seemed about to be transformed into social and political action.
The war between Revolutionary France and the reactionary German princes of 1792 raised hopes of social transformation to unprecedented levels. No longer were children obliged to resign themselves to the weary authority structures and outlooks of their parents’ generation. The age-old theme of son rebelling against father (cf. Luke 15: 11–24) assumed a new significance: in the 1790s, sons did not merely rebel against their fathers, but against the world order that their fathers’ generations represented. The defeat of imperial Germany by Napoleon Bonaparte in 1806 caused expectations of change to soar.
Class barriers were beginning to break down, and major social reforms were being introduced. All around them, the Germans could see evidence of radical change. The French Revolution had overthrown the Bourbons, the Greeks were in the process of revolting against Turkish oppression, and major uprisings were taking place in Poland against the authority of the Russian czar. With the establishment of people’s assemblies, liberal German politicians like Karl von Rötteck and Karl Theodor Welcker were pressing home popular demands for freedom of the press and other democratic rights. The central demand was for a liberal, unified Germany, in the place of the Deutscher Bund (German Federation), formed by thirty-five sovereign monarchs and four independent free cities at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15).
The social realities of Germany at this time were such that radical change could not be brought about by political action. The best means of securing irreversible changes in the long term was to change the way in which people thought. The battleground for reform was thus not the courts, but the universities of Germany. If the ideas on which traditional social structures were based could be overthrown or shown to be hopelessly outmoded, the collapse of those structures could not be far away. And one of the most important social institutions of the era, playing a pivotal role in underpinning the old order, was the Lutheran church.
The Lutheran church in Germany now found itself the target of a twofold critique. Given that political action against existing forms of government was a virtual impossibility, reformers directed their attention to neutralizing the privileges and influence of an institution that was widely associated with the political establishment—namely, the church itself. Yet the focus on intellectual radicalism also led to a second aspect of this critique, a concerted criticism of the ideas upon which the church was ultimately grounded. The intellectual energies and enthusiasm that British radicals directed into the political sphere was diverted, in the German context, to the sphere of the church, with the universities acting as the spearhead of the demands for radical change.
The church was thus widely seen as an agent of reaction, just as the universities were seen as agents of radical change. Student revolts broke out at several leading universities. In 1817, some five hundred students celebrated the three hundredth anniversary of the Reformation by marching to the Wartburg in Thuringia to demand constitutional changes and a united fatherland. Demands for political reform, often driven by a strongly nationalist agenda, became widespread. Instability was linked with economic difficulties, even affecting the church.
The situation was especially problematic for theological students. Having completed their education, they were finding it more and more difficult to find employment. Of the total graduate output of German universities in the 1830s, two in every five were theologians. Ecclesiastical positions of any kind became increasingly difficult to secure: despite a sharp increase in population, the number of church posts available actually decreased over the period 1815–40. Perhaps three or four theological graduates in every ten might hope to find employment of this nature.
The situation in the universities was even more bleak, with contractions, moratoria, and salary cuts becoming a regular feature of academic life. Simultaneously, however, establishment figures (such as the landed aristocracy) were given preference in obtaining positions in the civil and ecclesiastical administration, causing intense resentment among those outside this privileged section of the community. As a result, there were many disaffected and unemployed graduates who saw themselves as members of the new “intellectual proletariat,” prepared to assault the civil and religious establishment. The emergence of a socially alienated, theologically literate, antiestablishment lay intelligentsia is one of the more significant phenomena of the social history of Germany in the 1830s.
Ludwig Feuerbach was born into this revolutionary cauldron in 1804. His family was politically liberal and sympathetic to the demands for modernization that were sweeping Germany at this time. Feuerbach chose to study theology at the University of Heidelberg in 1823; however, he soon moved to the great Prussian University of Berlin, which had recently gained a reputation as one of Europe’s finest academic institutions. Here he was able to attend the lectures of the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian F. D. E. Schleiermacher. Financial pressures obliged him to move his studies to the University of Erlangen, where he went on to lecture on the history of modern philosophy. His academic career ran into the sands after the publication of Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830), which was seen as irreverent and potentially seditious.
The book lampooned Christianity as “some kind of insurance company.” Feuerbach argued that far from correcting modern culture’s propensity to ignore or deny death, Christianity colluded with this evasion of death. Its belief in individual immortality in another world, in addition to being internally inconsistent, trivializes death by diverting believers from their actual relations with other persons and with the natural world around them. The Christian belief in heaven, Feuerbach argued, thus impoverishes the one and only life we have by distracting us from its joys and concerns. The illusion of individual immortality must be abandoned if the situation is to be improved. Authentic human existence is thus godless and limited to this life. To think otherwise is delusory.
Like so many other graduates of the time, Feuerbach was unable to obtain a university teaching position. Instead, he settled down to the life of an independent scholar and writer. This luxury was made possible by his marriage in 1837 to Berta Löw, whose family owned a porcelain factory. The factory had been established in 1762 by Alexander von Ansbach and taken over in 1803 by Berta’s father, Christian Friedrich Löw from Bayreuth, and the Nuremberg banker Georg Adam Späth. The good news was that the porcelain factory made money, allowing Feuerbach to forget about financial worries and live in comfort in the Löw family castle; the bad news was that it was located at Bruckberg, in the middle of nowhere. An 1856 survey records forty-eight households in the village, with a population of 490. Feuerbach thus spent many years in splendid rustic isolation, away from the intellectual and political cultural life he hoped to influence. His problems returned in 1860, when the factory went bankrupt, forcing his family to move.
During his Bruckberg period, Feuerbach developed a formidable reputation as a revolutionary thinker. This reputation was based particularly on his definitive work The Essence of Christianity (1841), which many regarded as the manifesto of the revolutionary movement. But why should a book which argued that Christianity was essentially a delusion have such a major political impact? The answer lies in the major political role played by most of the German churches during the revolutionary 1840s. Feuerbach grasped that the political power and religious credibility of the churches could be fatally undermined by demonstrating that their basic ideas were mistaken. If Christianity could be shown to rest on errors, its social authority would be severely reduced. There is no doubt that the church of this period was too much a prisoner of existing social structures, and that it often colluded with the belief that these structures were definitively grounded on Christian dogmas. It was a convenient belief, in that it safeguarded the social privileges of the churches. Yet one of the most obvious lessons of history is that atheism thrives when the church is seen to be privileged, out of touch with the people, and powerful—precisely the situation that emerged in Germany during the revolutionary years of the 1840s.
At this time, Germany seemed ripe for revolution, with the churches being one of the most important conservative social forces. In the 1840s Germany went through a series of crises, partly through the growing social deprivation caused by industrialization, which, when combined with rapid population growth, led to the formation of an urbanized working class that lived in utter poverty and misery. Many families failed to rise above the subsistence level. During an uprising in June 1844, weavers in Silesia demanded that their “starvation wages” be increased. They were bluntly told “to eat grass,” and their revolt was put down harshly by the Prussian army. In 1847 widespread crop failures led to famines. Unemployment rose, and hunger riots by desperate workers demanding food were suppressed by the army. In March 1848, the French king fell and the Second Republic was proclaimed. This time the revolution spilled over into Germany, with widespread demands for constitutional government, a bill of rights, and national unification. By April 1849, however, it was clear that the revolution had failed.
Although Feuerbach was called to Heidelberg by radical student groups to give public lectures in the city from December 1848 to March 1849, he never seems to have appreciated the importance of direct political action. His contribution would be made primarily at the intellectual level, through a radical undermining of the intellectual foundations of the old order, of which the church was perhaps the most visible symbol.
Where the French Revolution aimed to replace the traditional “religion of deity” with a new “religion of humanity” by political means, Feuerbach rightly saw that something far more deep-rooted was required. A political development could be overthrown at the whim of a foreign monarch or a fickle crowd. What was required was an intellectual earthquake, comparable to the Copernican revolution of the late sixteenth century. So successful were Copernicus’s arguments that no thinking person now believed that the sun orbited the earth. No king or mob could sway this judgment, which was held to be grounded in the reality of the world.
For Feuerbach, Hegel’s philosophy opened up a new possibility: demonstrating—not merely asserting!—that humanity invented the idea of God as a consolation and distraction from the sorrow of the world. God was a human creation, over which humanity had authority and control. Where traditional religion held that the entire religious system orbited around God, Feuerbach believed that its orbit centered on humanity—and that he could prove it. In The Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach set out to prove that humanity was oppressed by its own invention—something that it had created, and could now in turn destroy. There was no God to whom craven human obedience was due. Humanity, which existed alone, had brought the notion of God into being as a misguided means of comforting itself during life’s dark and shadowy journey. God was not someone that humanity discovered or encountered, but “a dream of the human soul,” a pure invention, the product of a mind that could reject God with equal ease.
The basic idea that Feuerbach develops with such consummate skill is that of the “projection” or “objectification” of human emotions, feelings, and longings. The human mind, without being aware of what it is doing, projects its longing for immortality and meaning onto an imaginary transcendent screen, and gives the name “God” to its own creation.
Consciousness of God is human self-consciousness; knowledge of God is human self-knowledge. By the God you know the human, and conversely, by the human you know the God. The two are one. What God is to a person, that too is the spirit, the soul; and what the spirit, the soul, are to a person, that is the God. God is the revealed and explicit inner self of a human being. Religion is the ceremonial unveiling of the hidden treasures of humanity, the confession of its innermost thoughts and the open recognition of its secrets of love.
Yet religious people are blissfully unaware of this fact. They mistakenly believe that what they have created somehow exists independently of them. As Feuerbach puts it:
This does not mean that religious people are themselves immediately aware of the fact that their consciousness of God is simply their own self-consciousness. In fact, the absence of such an awareness is the distinctive mark of religion . . . Initially, people mistakenly locate their essential nature as if it were outside of themselves, before finally realizing that it is actually within them . . . What religion earlier took to be objective, is later recognized to be subjective; what formerly was taken to be God, and worshipped as such, is now recognized to be something human. What was earlier religion is later taken to be idolatry: humans are seen to have adored their own nature. Humans objectified themselves but failed to recognize themselves as this object.
Feuerbach thus lays the foundations for the criticism of religion by arguing that it is now possible to recognize religion for what it really is: not a God-given set of ideas but a human construction. Religion tells us nothing about God and everything about ourselves—our hopes, fears, and deepest longings.
God is the revealed and explicit inner self of a human being. Religion is the ceremonial unveiling of the hidden treasures of humanity, the confession of its innermost thoughts, and the open recognition of its secrets of love.
God, far from being our master, should be our servant. But did we really need such a servant in the first place? Can we not dispense with such an outmoded belief altogether, and realize that we ourselves are the only gods?
This dismissal of God was as slick as it was sweeping. The longings of the human heart needed no objective foundation in any external being. Homo homini Deus est! Man is a god to himself. To study human conceptions of God is therefore to understand more about humanity itself. Feuerbach thus laid the foundations of the discipline of religious studies as a means of deepening our knowledge of human nature. Religious beliefs and practices are like windows into the human soul, illuminating the darkest secrets and mysteries locked within. And what humanity created can subsequently be refashioned. “God” thus becomes a redefinable concept, capable of being shaped and reshaped to meet the changing context of human existence.
There were problems with Feuerbach’s approach, as his critics were not slow to point out. The circularity of the argument was a particular concern: Feuerbach postulates that there is no God, then turns to the question of why anyone would want to believe in God. Atheism having duly been presupposed, it is not unduly demanding to make it the argument’s conclusion. It was also pointed out that if belief in God was a response to a human longing for security, might it not also be argued that atheism was a response to the human desire for autonomy? Not all individuals might long for the same things, after all.
Important though these objections might be, they were swept to one side as a generation read Feuerbach assiduously and enthusiastically. The Essence of Christianity went through three editions in record time, and was the sensational topic of conversation in revolutionary circles throughout Germany. To his avid readers, Feuerbach had robbed religion of any external basis and refuted its claims to authority, power, and influence. The idea of God was a dream, and the church the perpetuator of this delusion. Claims to power based on an appeal to God were simply covert appeals to human self-interest. It was not God who mandated humans to behave in certain ways; it was merely certain humans who did so, improperly claiming a false divine mandate for their personal advancement.
In the English-speaking world, Feuerbach’s radical approach was propagated through George Eliot’s translation of The Essence of Christianity, published in July 1854. Yet by 1850, Feuerbach’s influence was waning. The translation was neither a critical nor a commercial success. In both Britain and North America the work was regarded as philosophically allied to trends peculiar to Germany, and hence seriously out of place in England. Its explicit atheism was regarded as “freakish” and “exotic” by many. Those who found atheism a rare and refreshing philosophy preferred to read Auguste Comte (1798–1857), whose Cours de philosophie positive appeared in a condensed English translation in 1853.
Even writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson were surprisingly lukewarm toward Feuerbach’s ideas. Emerson’s “Divinity School Address,” given at Harvard University in 1838, had led some, including Theophilus Parsons, professor at Harvard Law School, to suggest that Emerson “preached a doctrine which leads man to worship his own nature and himself.” This might suggest that Emerson would be broadly supportive of Feuerbach’s ideas. In fact, Emerson seems to have regarded Feuerbach’s “philosophical atheism” as inferior to the “scientific atheism” of Auguste Comte.
Comte had argued, through a brilliant yet highly eclectic account of intellectual history, that the development of human thought passes through three distinct stages: the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. In the first phase, humanity believed that it was legitimate to seek the ultimate causes of events, and located those causes in superhuman personal beings known as gods. A clear progression from animism through polytheism to monotheism can be discerned within this phase of thought. In the second stage, personal deities are transformed into metaphysical abstractions, leading to the notion of God being displaced by essentially natural categories. In the third, scientific (or “positivist”) phase, a more mature outlook develops, in which the human mind comes to concern itself purely with observed facts and not with the unobservable inner essences of things. According to Comte’s account, Western culture had passed the threshold between the second and third phases, and was about to enter a purely scientific mode of thinking. There was no way back to earlier ways of thinking. History had passed its verdict, and there was no appeal. Who could resist the laws of inexorable historical progress?
Precisely such an idea lay behind a more radical development of Feuerbach’s thought, which proved far more influential upon the shaping of the modern atheist mind. Such was Karl Marx’s status in the Soviet pantheon of the 1950s that he was venerated as a secular Zeus, with Lenin and Stalin as only slightly lesser Olympians. We must therefore turn to consider Karl Marx’s critique of religion.
GOD AS AN OPIATE: KARL MARX
Like all who are unwise or unfortunate enough to rise to fame, Karl Marx (1818–83) has been misrepresented by both friend and foe. In part, this arises from the historically interesting fact that Marx’s ideas only became actualizable in the twentieth century, in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. There was thus a substantial historical and cultural distance placed between the founder of communism and those who implemented his ideas, often in ways that might well have caused him to turn in his grave had not worshipful supporters placed such a massive headstone above him, which presumably would prevent such maneuvering. A further point of importance is that Marx envisaged revolution breaking out in the industrialized nations of Western Europe, having entertained particularly high hopes at the time of the French and German revolutionary movements around 1847–48. Yet history dealt Marx’s successors a quite different set of cards, forcing them to put their revolutionary agendas and policies into practice in socially backward, agrarian czarist Russia.
Why is Marx so important? To gain something of an insight into his genius, we may join the little group of eleven mourners who gathered on March 17, 1883, at Highgate Cemetery, London, to pay their last respects to their master. Friedrich Engels delivered the funeral oration (in English, although only German translations now survive):
Just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history: the simple fact, hitherto concealed by an overgrowth of ideology, that mankind must first of all eat, drink, have shelter and clothing, before it can pursue politics, science, art, religion, etc.; that therefore the production of the immediate material means, and consequently the degree of economic development attained by a given people or during a given epoch, form the foundation upon which the state institutions, the legal conceptions, art, and even the ideas on religion, of the people concerned have been evolved, and in the light of which they must, therefore, be explained, instead of vice versa, as had hitherto been the case.
This dense forest of prose, compressed into a single sentence, would have made perfect sense to those gathered to mourn Marx. What Engels described in the arcane language of the initiated was the principle of historical materialism—an intellectually rigorous account of the development of history, leading to an explicit understanding of what the goal of that historical process might be.
Karl Marx was born into a reasonably comfortable middle-class home in the conservative town of Trier. His father had converted from Judaism to Protestantism as a career move. He persuaded Karl to study law at the University of Bonn, where he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen. After moving to study at the University of Berlin, young Marx fell under the influence of Hegel and joined the “Young Hegelians.” This brought him into contact with radical theologians such as Bruno Bauer and David Friedrich Strauss. Unable to find an academic position, Marx settled in Paris, where he worked as a journalist and developed his emerging ideas on social alienation under a capitalist economy. These writings are now generally known as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), which were not published until the 1930s.
Having been expelled from Paris on account of his political activities, Marx and his new friend Friedrich Engels moved to Brussels. Here, Marx devoted himself, with Engels, to a major study and defense of a materialist approach to history, which was published posthumously as A German Ideology. The outcome of these reflections can be seen in their Communist Manifesto of 1848, published on the eve of a wave of revolutions in France and Germany. While the Manifesto reflected rather than precipitated the revolutionary fervor of its time, there is no doubt that its ideas resonated with the mood of the day, even if a little opaquely.
Marx’s political views made continued life on the Continent somewhat hazardous, and led him to begin his “long, sleepless night of exile” in London. He appears to have believed that the exile would not be long; revolutionary progress could be expected to be as rapid as it was inevitable. Eking out a living as a journalist, Marx began a large-scale work on political economy. Completed in 1857, this vast and sprawling work of eight hundred pages was not published until 1941, under the title of the Grundrisse (“Outlines”). Thereafter he was able to focus on Das Kapital, the first volume of which appeared in 1867. The remainder would be published after his death. Although Marx was obliged to witness some of the dramatic events in Europe—such as the Paris Commune of 1871—from his exile in London, he was active in organizing the First International (the International Working Men’s Association). He died on March 14, 1883.
The notion of materialism is fundamental to Marxism. Some eighteenth-century writers—such as Baron d’Holbach—used this term to designate the view that the world consists only of matter, without any spiritual dimensions. Marx and his followers developed this idea further, arguing that every aspect of human life and thought is determined by social and economic factors. Material needs determine the way in which people live and think. This leads Marx to one of his most fundamental assertions: ideas and values are determined by the material realities of life. In a famous analogy, he argued that material reality was the foundation on which the superstructure of ideas was erected. People’s social and economic conditions determine what they think. This doctrine has highly significant implications for Marx’s understanding of the origin of religious ideas. The idea of God is a human attempt to cope with the harshness of material life and the pain resulting from social and economic deprivation.
Marx now took a step of decisive importance, affirming Feuerbach’s analysis of the origins of the religious notion of God and moving far beyond this. Feuerbach had argued that religion was the projection of human needs, an expression of the “uttered sorrow of the soul.” Marx agreed with this interpretation, as far as it went. But his point was more radical. Religion comes into being on account of sorrow and injustice—yet these themselves arise through the social situation of the individual. Feuerbach, Marx argued, failed to take this social dimension of the individual seriously, tending to see individuals as detached from social structures. If social conditions determine the world of ideas, it follows that changing those conditions will have a critical effect upon the resulting ideologies. It is this insight that underlies his often quoted (yet unpublished during his lifetime) comment on Feuerbach: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.”
Religion has no real independent existence, but is merely an epiphenomenon, a symptom of something more real and substantial that lies underneath it—namely, the material world. “The religious world is but the reflex of the real world.” Thus Marx argues that “religion is just the imaginary sun which seems to man to revolve around him, until he realizes that he himself is the centre of his own revolution.” In other words, God is simply a projection of human concerns. Human beings “look for a superhuman being in the fantasy reality of heaven, and find nothing there but their own reflection.”
Having argued that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are direct outcomes of unjust social conditions, Marx declares that religion is so thoroughly determined by economic factors that it is pointless to consider any of its doctrines or beliefs on their own terms. Their origins are socioeconomic, not intellectual. Whereas earlier generations of atheist writers had attempted to demonstrate the intellectual incoherence of some basic religious teachings, such as the divinity of Christ or the existence of God, Marx undermines them totally by insisting that they are nothing more than the creation of purely social forces. Marx’s socioeconomic explanation of the origins of religion makes a detailed engagement with its specific ideas unnecessary. Religion is a human creation in response to the alienation experienced through the process of production; its specific teachings are not of particular relevance, and need not trouble the busy critic of religion.
But why should religion exist at all? If Marx is right, why should people continue to believe in such a crude illusion? Marx’s answer picks up on the notion of alienation. “Humans make religion; religion does not make humans. Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of people who either have not found themselves or who have already lost themselves again.” Religion is the product of social and economic alienation. It is a specific consequence of that alienation, and at the same time encourages that alienation by intoxicating the masses and rendering them incapable of recognizing their situation and doing something about it. Religion is a comfort that enables people to tolerate their economic alienation. If there were no such alienation, there would be no need for religion. The division of labor and the existence of private property introduce alienation and estrangement into the economic and social orders.
Materialism affirms that events in the material world bring about corresponding changes in the intellectual world. Religion is thus the result of a certain set of social and economic conditions. Change those conditions, so that economic alienation is eliminated, and religion will cease to exist. It will no longer serve any useful function. Unjust social conditions produce religion and are in turn supported by religion. “The struggle against religion is therefore indirectly a struggle against the world of which religion is the spiritual fragrance.” Marx thus argues that religion will continue to exist as long as it meets a need in the life of alienated people. “The religious reflex of the real world can . . . only then vanish when the practical relations of everyday life offer to man none but perfectly intelligible and reasonable relations with regard to his fellow men and to nature.” In other words, a shake-up in the real world is needed to get rid of religion. Marx thus argues that when a nonalienating economic and social environment is brought about through communism, the needs that gave rise to religion will vanish. And with the elimination of those material needs, spiritual hunger will also vanish.
At this point, we may focus on one of Marx’s most quoted phrases. In his Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (1843–44), Marx drew the following conclusion: “Religious distress is at the same time an expression of real distress and a protest against real distress. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people” (Marx’s emphasis).
Religion thus dulls the pain of an unjust world, enabling the downtrodden people to cope with its sorrow and distress, and indirectly encouraging them to collude with the existing order. By numbing their pain, it blinds them to the need and possibility of radical social change, which they are in a position to bring about by revolutionary mass action. “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is required for their real happiness. The demand to give up the illusion about its condition is the demand to give up a condition which needs illusions” (Marx’s emphasis).
Religion thus eases pain by creating a dream world, especially “the fantasy of a supernatural world where all sorrows cease”—a clear reference to the biblical vision of the New Jerusalem, in which there will be no pain, suffering, or weeping (Revelation 21:4). Feuerbach had already argued that religion was a consoling illusion; Marx now argues that the abolition of a social condition that condemns people to live by illusions will remove the causes of religious belief in the first place. A communist revolution will thus eliminate the social basis of religion, so that belief in God will wither away. Atheism is the natural ideology of a communist society.
Marx thus concludes that the historical function of religion has been to offer a divine justification for the status quo—that is, to lend the establishment a spurious religious authority that lies beyond challenge. Christianity, he argues, taught the necessity of a ruling and an oppressed class, and declared all acts of the oppressors against the oppressed to be the just punishment of original sin and other sins. In its place, Marx proposes a society in which alienation is abolished by a radical reshaping of the process of production, which leads to the natural death of religion (which no longer has any social function) and the cultivation of more humanist forms of pursuit. Marx’s depiction of this in The German Ideology offers an intriguing vision of the paradise that may be expected to result from this social upheaval: “Where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing to-day and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic.”
Although Marx’s extensive correspondence suggests that he thoroughly detested life in small-town rural Germany, his vision of a communist paradise seems to idealize predominantly rural pursuits.
Marx’s critique of religion is the most radical that the nineteenth century would produce, and was destined to exercise a major influence on the development of atheism in the twentieth century. Yet the advancement of atheism in that century was not merely the outcome of a political and military process that led to something like one-half of the world’s population living under atheist regimes from about 1950 to 1990. Although the origins of that development lay in the West, its actualization lay in Eastern Europe and Asia, supremely China. But in the West, a new criticism of theistic belief arose, destined to shape the perceptions of a rising generation and raise new questions about the origins and cultural viability of the notion of God.
GOD AS ILLUSION: SIGMUND FREUD
Sigismund Schlomo Freud was born on May 6, 1856, in the little town of Freiberg (now Príbor, Czech Republic). He grew up in a Jewish household in which religion was taken very seriously. In 1860 the family moved to Vienna. The city of Vienna had long been noted as one of Europe’s great centers of creativity, experiencing a cultural golden age between about 1750 and the outbreak of the First World War. It was home to some of the world’s most brilliant composers—such as Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, and Mahler—not to mention its many novelists, architects, and playwrights. Freud arrived in the city at the height of its cultural influence, and in turn would add further to its reputation. He entered the University of Vienna in 1873, taking the opportunity to change his somewhat cumbersome forename to Sigmund.
Although his primary concern was the study of medicine, Freud demonstrated a deep interest in religious and philosophical matters. Initially, he found himself intrigued by the Catholic philosopher Franz Brentano, even allowing himself the speculation that “the science of all things seems to demand the existence of God.” Yet such positive comments concerning theism are rare; Freud’s correspondence of this period shows him to be a confirmed atheist throughout his university years. For Freud, it is natural for humanity not to believe in God. If this is so, it is religion that requires an explanation, not atheism, in that religion marks a departure from the natural state of belief of humanity. But what explanation might be offered for this irrational and unnecessary belief? In 1875 he finally discovered the philosopher who would place his atheism on a more rigorous intellectual foundation. In a letter to Eduard Silberstein of 1875, Freud wrote: “Feuerbach is the one whom I revere and admire above all other philosophers.”
Earlier we explored Ludwig Feuerbach’s radical idea that the concept of God was fundamentally a human construction, based on the “projection” of fundamental human longings and desires. Although these ideas achieved wide currency in the 1840s, they were rapidly displaced by alternatives, including Auguste Comte’s positivism and Karl Marx’s sociological account of the origins of religion. Feuerbach’s basic ideas were now taken over and given a new sense of direction in Freud’s writings. “All I have done—and this is the only thing that is new in my exposition—is to add some psychological foundation to the criticisms of my great predecessors.” In fact, it is probably fair to say that Feuerbach’s projection or wish-fulfillment theory is best known today in its Freudian form rather than in Feuerbach’s original version. “Religion is an illusion and it derives its strength from the fact that it falls in with our instinctual desires.”
The most powerful statement of Freud’s approach can be found in The Future of an Illusion (1927), which develops a strongly reductionist approach to religion. For Freud, religious ideas are “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind.” “We shall tell ourselves that it would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent Providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an afterlife; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be. And it would be more remarkable still if our wretched, ignorant, and downtrodden ancestors had succeeded in solving all these difficult riddles of the universe.”
The parallels with Feuerbach are evident; yet Freud went on to develop a radical and original explanation of religion, grounded in the insights of the newly emerging discipline of psychoanalysis, which took Feuerbach’s critique of religion to new heights. Illusions are not deliberate deceptions; they are simply ideas that arise from within the human unconscious, as it seeks to fulfill its deepest yearnings and longings. For Marx, those longings were the tragic outcome of social alienation, requiring social transformation for their elimination. For Freud, their origins lie not in society but in the human unconscious.
It was the widely reported clinical success of Freud’s psychoanalysis that established his credentials as the supreme interpreter of the human unconscious. In 1902 Freud was finally appointed to a professorship in Vienna, despite a disturbing amount of academic anti-Semitism. He gradually began to gather disciples at home and abroad, especially in North America. Out of this grew the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society (1908) and the International Psychoanalytic Association (1910), which included Alfred Adler and Carl Jung. A series of spectacular therapeutic triumphs clinched his reputation as a healer of the troubled human mind. “Anna O.” (Bertha Pappenheim), whom Josef Breuer treated for hysteria in 1882–84, demonstrated to Freud that hysterical symptoms are the consequence of buried memories that must be retrieved through a “cathartic” program. The case histories of the Rat Man, Wolf Man, Dora, and Little Hans created a surge of interest throughout the West, especially in North America. Although Freud only visited the United States once—he lectured at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1909—the impact of that visit was enormous, leading to an exponential growth of interest in his ideas in America.
Before turning to explore the complex, shifting amalgam of ideas that constitutes Freud’s massive critique of religion, it is important to note that Freud’s atheism was the presupposition, not the outcome, of his theories. Freud’s theory of the psychogenesis of religion predates his study of religions. He had, in effect, already decided on his theory before beginning to engage with the literature relating to the field. His writings use religious texts and ideas in a haphazard and highly selective manner, as best suited to the needs of his theories. Ernest Jones, one of Freud’s most distinguished and perceptive biographers, draws attention to a letter in which Freud grumbles about having to read his way through a great many tedious tomes relating to religion. It is rather pointless, he comments, as he already instinctively knows the answer to his question about the origin of religion.
While it is a historical truism that Freud was a confirmed atheist long before he became a psychoanalyst, it is important to note that he became a psychoanalyst precisely because he was an atheist. His indefatigable harrying of religion reflects his fundamental belief that religion is dangerous, not least because it constitutes a threat to the advance of the Enlightenment and the natural sciences. Freud’s approach to religion rests upon the perceived need to explain why anyone would wish to take the extraordinary step of believing in God, when there is obviously no God to believe in. At the logical level, Freud thus proceeds relentlessly from his preconceived starting point to his predetermined conclusion. What he proposes in between these milestones is of considerable interest, however, and merits close attention.
The first major statement of Freud’s views on the origin, or “psychogenesis,” of religion can be found in Totem and Taboo (1913). Developing his earlier observation that religious rites are similar to the obsessive actions of his neurotic patients, Freud declared that religion was basically a distorted form of an obsessional neurosis. The key elements in all religions, he argues, are the veneration of a father figure (such as God or Jesus Christ), faith in the power of spirits, and a concern for proper rituals. These can be explained at both the historical and the psychological levels. Although Freud’s account of the historical origins of religion is now generally regarded as totally unreliable, it merits close attention before we pass on to his more influential views on its psychological roots.
In Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism (1938), Freud traces the historical origins of religion to a series of specific, identifiable historical events that have left “ineradicable traces in the history of humanity.” Freud was decisively influenced in his thinking by writings such as W. Robertson Smith’s Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1898), which argued that the essence of religion was not so much beliefs or doctrines but sacred acts, rites, or cults. It must be remembered that Freud was writing at a time when the ethnographic explanation of religion was taken very seriously, and seemed to possess impeccable scientific credentials. The situation, however, has radically changed since then, with such simplistic and reductionist theories being generally abandoned as unworkable. But in Freud’s day, they seemed to point the way ahead. In effect, Freud had aligned himself with a scholarly theory which, though significant in its own time, is no longer taken with any great seriousness.
Religion, according to Freud’s historical account, arises through inner psychological pressures, which reflect the complex evolutionary history of humanity.
While the different religions wrangle with one another as to which of them is in possession of the truth, in our view the truth of religion may be altogether disregarded. Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. But it cannot achieve its end. Its doctrines carry with them the stamp of the times in which they originated, the ignorant childhood days of the human race.
Freud thus makes an appeal to the evolution of humanity from its immature religious days of childhood to its mature atheistic state. “If one attempts to assign to religion its place in man’s evolution, it seems not so much to be a lasting acquisition, as a parallel to the neurosis which the civilized individual must pass through on his way from childhood to maturity.”
Yet the theory of evolution that guides Freud’s thinking at this point and others throughout both Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism is Lamarckian rather than Darwinian. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) had developed a theory of evolution which held that living things contain within themselves an urge to become better adapted. If an animal happens to acquire some useful adaptation during its lifetime—such as a giraffe stretching its neck to reach high tree branches—this acquired characteristic could be passed on to its offspring. Living creatures are understood to have a built-in desire to perfect themselves. Freud thus tends to treat religion as an acquired characteristic in response to certain specific events—above all, his wildly speculative ideas concerning the place of the Oedipus complex in the psychogenesis of religion.
At some point in the history of the human race, Freud argues, the father figure had exclusive sexual rights over females in his tribe. The sons, unhappy at this state of affairs, overthrew the father figure and killed him. Thereafter they were haunted by this secret and its guilt. Religion has its origins in this prehistorical event, has guilt as its major motivating force, and attempts to expiate this guilt through various rituals. Moses was thus murdered by his Jewish followers as a reenactment of the primal murder of the father. In his Autobiography, Freud set out this notion in terms of the murder and ritual devouring of the father figure:
The father of the primal horde, since he was an unlimited despot, had seized all the women for himself; his sons, being dangerous to him as rivals, had been killed or driven away. One day, however, the sons came together and united to overwhelm, kill and devour their father, who had been their enemy but also their ideal. After the deed they were unable to take over their heritage since they stood in one another’s way. Under the influence of failure and regret they learned to come to an agreement among themselves, they banded into a clan of brothers . . . and they jointly undertook to forgo the possession of the women on whose account they had killed their father. They were then driven to finding strange women.
Many of Freud’s supporters have found such historical overstatements and simplistic generalizations embarrassing and irritating, not least on account of their erosion of Freud’s reputation as a serious scholar and scientist. Freud, it must be remembered, was not concerned to develop a theory of the origins of religion on the basis of a rigorous analysis of history. He already knew how religion came into being; all that he required was a convenient (if largely fictional) historical framework to illustrate the theory in action.
In fairness to Freud, we shall pass over the overwhelming historical objections that make his account of the origins of religion of interest only to his more unreflective admirers. Professional anthropologists and sociologists of religion have generally passed over his historical accounts of the origins of religion, regarding them as amateurish conjectures not worth taking seriously. His genius is generally regarded as lying in the psychological explanation he offered for the origins of religion, to which we now turn. In his essay Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910), Freud sets out his explanation of individual religion. “Psychoanalysis has made us familiar with the intimate connection between the father-complex and belief in God; it has shown us that a personal God is, psychologically, nothing other than an exalted father, and it brings us evidence every day of how young people lose their religious beliefs as soon as their father’s authority breaks down. Thus we recognize that the roots of the need for religion are in the parental complex.” The veneration of the father figure has its origins in childhood. When going through its oedipal phase, Freud argues, the child has to deal with anxiety over the possibility of being punished by the father. The child’s response to this threat is to venerate the father, to identify with him, and to project what it knows of the father’s will in the form of the superego.
Freud further explored the origins of this projection of an ideal father figure in The Future of an Illusion. Religion represents the perpetuation of a piece of infantile behavior in adult life. Religion is an immature response to the awareness of helplessness, involving regression to childhood experiences of paternal care: “My father will protect me; he is in control.” Belief in a personal God is thus little more than an infantile delusion. Religion is wishful thinking, an illusion. The psychological origins of human belief in God are thus to be found in a projection of the intense, unconscious desires of humanity. God is to be seen as a wish fulfillment, arising from repressed, unconscious infantile longings for protection and security. “Religious ideas have arisen from the same needs as have all the other achievements of civilization: from the necessity of defending oneself against the crushing superior force of nature.” Therefore, religious beliefs owe their origins to a childlike feeling of helplessness, which arises in response to external dangers, internal impulses, and a fear of death. Just as children look to their parents to protect them from danger, so this infantile pattern is transferred to adulthood, in that adults create gods for themselves precisely because they had similar “gods” in their homes while they were growing up. Religious beliefs are thus to be recognized as “illusions, fulfillments of the oldest, strongest and most urgent wishes of mankind . . . As we already know, the terrifying impression of helplessness in childhood aroused the need for protection—for protection through love—which was provided by the father . . . Thus the benevolent rule of a divine Providence allays our fear of the danger of life.”
The role of the father in developing religious belief has some important implications. One curious and slightly disturbing feature of Freud’s critique of religion is the way in which it is interlocked with his thoroughly misogynist theory of gender, not least his notion of women as hommes manqués. Thus Freud’s criticism of religion in The Future of an Illusion (in which religion is unfavorably compared with science) and his criticism of Christianity in Moses and Monotheism (in which Christianity is seen as regressive and for that reason inferior to Judaism) are both animated by his theory of gender. Christianity is Freud’s feminine, and therefore inferior, form of religion; Judaism is Freud’s masculine, and therefore superior, form; and the postreligious, atheistic, scientific spirit is Freud’s “ideal masculinity,” the mental attitude of the genuinely healthy human being. Wish fulfillment, narcissism, illusion, sensuality, femininity, and Christianity are linked together as deficient; they are opposed by the renunciation of narcissism and illusion, abstract thought, masculinity, and science, which are held up as ideals to be pursued with enthusiasm.
There is another aspect of Freud’s emphasis on the role of the father that merits close attention. In Totem and Taboo, Freud argues that the individual’s concept of God is determined by his relationship with his own father: “Psychoanalysis of individual human beings . . . teaches us with quite special insistence that the god of each of them is formed in the likeness of his father, that his personal relation to God depends on the relation to his father in the flesh and oscillates and changes along with that relation, and that at bottom God is nothing other than an exalted father.” So what of Freud’s relationship with his own father? Was the concept of God that Sigmund Freud so vigorously rejected in some way determined by his relation to Jacob Freud? And thus his atheism determined by the specifics of that relationship, rather than the alleged universalities of human nature?
The cultural impact of Freud’s approach has been immense, especially in North America. It is fair to say that, from about 1920, Freud’s account of religion gained the ascendancy within the American intelligentsia, attracting a following exceeding that of any other modernist or postmodernist thinker. Freud set the cultural agenda of his day and for a generation beyond in a way that justifies W. H. Auden’s description of him as “not a person, but a whole climate of opinion.” Freudian concepts such as the ego, id, superego, and Oedipus complex began to permeate Western culture, causing many cultural analysts to nominate him as “the central imagination of our age” (Harold Bloom). The 1956 movie Forbidden Planet can be seen as a Freudian adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, with Freud’s id replacing Caliban. Countless writers—such as Graham Greene and William Golding—have incorporated Freudian themes into their novels. Freud was regarded as having scientifically unlocked the hidden, repressed secrets of the human mind, thus enabling humanity to face its future with confidence and hope—and without religion.
The powerful criticism of religious belief initiated by Feuerbach and developed by Marx and Freud has had a formative impact on twentieth-century Western culture. The credibility of these criticisms rested on the widespread belief that they were fundamentally scientific in character—in other words, that the origins of religious belief could be explained in terms of socioeconomic factors or human psychology in just the same way as physics explained the movement of the planets or the optics of the rainbow. There were regional variations within Western culture over the merits of the approaches; Americans might adopt Freud where Europeans preferred Marx. Yet the cumulative impact of these critiques was decisive. Belief in God was widely seen as a construct of the consolation-seeking human mind, which would evaporate with further scientific advance. And there was no shortage of such scientific advance, as we shall see presently.
The cumulative impact of the criticism of religion was immense. Earlier generations had regarded the existence of God as one of the most natural and fundamental beliefs of humanity, and took the view that atheism was puzzling. Why would anyone want to deny what was self-evidently true? Many now took the diametrically opposed view. Atheism was the natural philosophy of humanity. It was the beliefs of religious people that required rational explanation. God was the product of social and psychological factors, which led humanity to yearn for a supernatural being. It was but a small step to turn a wistful longing into a view of reality. The idea of God was an entirely understandable invention, which might even be useful in consoling weaker and foolish souls who were naive enough to believe in it. Yet it was nothing more than an illusion, created by fearful human minds to console themselves in the face of the immensity and meaninglessness of the universe.
The rational challenge to belief in God mounted by the Enlightenment was now complete. The self-confidence of faith had been broken. Philosophical and scientific progress had conclusively eliminated God from the world, with any vestiges of faith in God being seen as little more than the remnants of old superstitions or psychological defense mechanisms to cope with a perplexing world. Feuerbach, Marx, and Freud all offered “scientific” explanations of the origins of religious belief that subverted any idea that they were to be regarded as privileged or authoritative pronouncements on the nature of things. A major cultural shift began, in which Western culture decisively moved its trust from the dogmas of religion to the theories of science. The transition is neatly summarized in the words that Sir Richard Gregory (1864–1952), one of Britain’s leading scientists, proposed as his epitaph:
My grandfather preached the gospel of Christ;
My father preached the gospel of socialism;
I preach the gospel of science.
In what follows, we shall explore the impact of this transition on the fortunes of atheism.