His only course of lectures was delivered in 1848, at Heidelberg, but not at the university; there he was dreaded and shunned. In 1842 his friends had tried to get him appointed professor at Heidelberg; he at first took kindly to their plan, but afterwards frantically opposed it. "To try to make me a professor and that, too, in the ordinary way, the way in which any blockhead can be made one ... is to place me on a level with the fools that are posing as professors now, is to insult, to disgrace me.... The professor's desk is no place for a man with a head like mine. Do you know the proper place for my head? Guess! The block: for my brain is as keen and as peremptory as the executioner's sword, and I have no desire, no courage to do any deeds but those for which men risk the loss of their heads."[15] His friend had been advising him rather to call his work Wesen der Théologie than Wesen des Christenthums. He answers: "I take no interest whatever in the overturning of theology. I concern myself only with great world-entities (welthistorische Wesen).... One must deal a mortal blow, must deny on principle. To act means to take life—with the determination, if necessary, to give one's own life in return."
This is more resolute language than the poets used; these views are very different from theirs. Saint-René Taillandier animadverted on the fact that Feuerbach, holding such views, did not take part in the revolutionary movement of 1848. Feuerbach answered: "M. Taillandier! When another revolution breaks out and I take part in it, know, to the dismay of your godly soul, that that revolution will be victorious; the last day of the monarchy and the hierarchy will have come. Alas! I shall not live to take part in that revolution. But I am playing an active part in another great and victorious one, the results of which will not be evident till centuries have come and gone. For, according to my philosophy—which you know nothing about and presume to judge without having studied—according to my philosophy, which ignores gods, and, consequently, miracles wrought by means of political measures, space and time are necessary conditions of all being, all thought, and all action. It was not, as has been asserted in the Bavarian Reichsrathskammer, because the Parliament of Frankfort consisted of unbelievers that it was such a complete and shameful failure; as a matter of fact the majority of its members were believers—and surely God, too, respects a majority; it was a failure because it was destitute of the sense of place and time."[16]
Notwithstanding the number of different stages through which Feuerbach passed in his progress towards realism, notwithstanding all that can with justice be said of the diversity of the positions he took up, his ground-thought, the key-stone of the vaulting upon which the whole rests, is as simple as it is great. It is this: Man cannot be conscious of a being that is higher than himself. If it were possible for man to be conscious of himself—that is, his being or nature—as finite, compared with another being apprehended as infinite, he would by this consciousness limit his own being, i.e. deny it. His consciousness would extend beyond the limits of his being, which is impossible, for consciousness is simply the self-affirmation of being.
Instead, therefore, of saying with Hegel: Man's consciousness of God is God's self-consciousness, we are compelled to say: Man's consciousness of God is man's self-consciousness; religion is man's first and indirect self-knowledge.
It is universally acknowledged that the idea, God, can only be formulated by the aid of human predicates—God is love, God is goodness, knowledge, power, &c. The subject here is nothing but the personified predicate. The predicate is the original. What religion really means is this: Love is divine, i.e. of absolute worth, deserving of adoration; goodness, knowledge, power are divine.
Hence belief in a God is belief in man as the essential being.
The apparent axiom of religion is: I am nothing, measured with God; its real axiom is: Everything else is nothing measured with me; everything serves my purposes. By means of prayers and miracles, with God as intermediary, I have everything at my disposal. God is the creation of man's desire. The main desire of Christianity being unlimited happiness, bliss, God is the means whereby bliss is attained, or, more correctly, bliss and God are one.
In a word; theology is anthropology, the theological problem is a psychological problem—which Feuerbach has solved in all essentials for all time.
Viewed thus, his life-work is seen in its unity. Though it is not possible to express the whole in a few words, yet it is easy to feel that it is one single great thought, for which humanity is his debtor.
When a young man stands in the Pantheon in Rome, lost in admiration of its dome, the most beautiful in the world, his most natural thought is: O, like the builder of this temple, to have, were it but once in one's life, an idea, simple and great as that which produced this cupola—to conceive some single fundamental principle, some simple and yet composite formula, capable of expansion to a whole scheme, of dimensions as grand as this firmament in miniature! One such thought, simple in its beginning, stupendous in its development, would give greatness enough to any human life.