Religion told in pictures what philosophy told in concepts. On that formula the Berlin professor and the Prussian churchman could agree, and through the 1820s a generation of students learned to call the agreement progress: faith had not been refuted by Hegel's system, it had been promoted. Someone had to notice that the settlement cost the church nothing.
The man who did had sat through nearly all of Hegel's lectures in Berlin, missing only the aesthetics and taking the logic twice. He took his doctorate at Erlangen in 1828, habilitated there the same year, and began teaching the history of modern philosophy. Two years later he published his first book anonymously. Thoughts on Death and Immortality denied that persons survive their deaths and appended satirical verses at the expense of the Pietists, the strict devotional wing of Lutheranism. The anonymity failed, and once the authorship was known, no German university would appoint him — not then, not ever. He was twenty-six, and the career was over before the work had begun.
What replaced it was a porcelain factory. In 1837 he married Bertha Löw, part-owner of a works at Bruckberg in Middle Franconia, and for the next two decades a village kiln and a small pension paid for one of the most consequential arguments of the century.
He made it in 1841, on ground he had cleared two years before in a critique that turned Hegel over: being does not come from thought, thought comes from being — from a body, in a place, that eats and dies. The Essence of Christianity argues that religion is not a mistake but a misreading, and what it misreads is us. Believers first found in human beings every quality they assign to God: love, knowledge, will, the capacity to make and to forgive. Humanity takes its own best powers, enlarges them past any individual, sets the result outside itself, and then kneels. Theology is anthropology conducted in the dark. The consequence is the part that unsettled people: the more we credit to God, the less we leave to ourselves, and worship becomes a way of being poor on purpose. His aim was to give religion back its subject rather than to abolish it.
The book did not persuade the theologians; it emptied the room. Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator, described its effect on the Young Hegelians, Hegel's radical followers, as a liberation. Marx took the argument — humanity handing its own powers to something outside itself — applied it to labour rather than to God, and by 1845 was writing the Theses on Feuerbach against the man who had taught it to him, charging that contemplating the world was not the same as changing it. Max Stirner, the philosopher of the sovereign ego, had already attacked from the other side, calling humanity itself one more idol. The novelist George Eliot's translation of 1854 carried the argument into English, where it did quiet damage to Victorian belief for fifty years.
Feuerbach's own end was small: the factory failed, and at fifty-six he moved to Rechenberg outside Nuremberg and lived poorly. He read Capital in 1868, joined the Social Democrats, the new workers' party, in 1870, and died on 13 September 1872. Red banners were carried at his funeral.
The claim itself has never quite settled: scholars still disagree about whether his later account of religion — as a feeling of dependence on nature — is the argument of 1841 in other words or a different theory altogether. Karl Barth, the twentieth century's leading Protestant theologian, conceded its force and turned it around, arguing that Feuerbach had merely said aloud what liberal Protestant theology already implied.