Great Throughts Treasury

"Theology is Anthropology."

"Can any good come out of Nazareth?"—This is always the question of the wiseacres and knowing ones.—But the good, the new, comes from exactly that quarter whence it is not looked for, and is always something different from what is expected.—Everything new is received with contempt, for it begins in obscurity. It becomes a power unobserved."

"The object of the senses is in itself indifferent-independent of the disposition or of the judgment; but the object of religion is a selected object; the most excellent, the first, the supreme being; it essentially presupposes a critical judgment, a discrimination between the divine and the non-divine, between that which is worthy of adoration and that which is not worthy. And here may be applied, without and limitation, the proposition: the object of any subject is nothing else than the subject's own nature taken objectively. Such as are a man's thoughts and dispositions, such is his God. "

"If therefore my work is negative, irreligious, atheistic, let it be remembered that atheism -- at least in the sense of this work -- is the secret of religion itself; that religion itself, not indeed on the surface, but fundamentally, not in intention or according to its own supposition, but in its heart, in its essence, believes in nothing else than the truth and divinity of human nature."

"I would rather be a devil in alliance with truth, than an angel in alliance with falsehood."

"The doctrine of foods is of great ethical and political significance. Food becomes blood, blood becomes heart and brain, thoughts and mind stuff. Human fare is the foundation of human culture and thought. Would you improve a nation? Give it, instead of declamations against sin, better food. Man is what he eats."

"Man is what he eats."

"Religion is the dream of the human mind. But even in dreams we do not find ourselves in emptiness or in heaven, but on earth, in the realm of reality; we only see real things in the entrancing splendor of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity."

"The present age... prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence... for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane."

"Theology is Anthropology... The distinction which is made, or rather supposed to be made, between the theological and anthropological predicates resolves itself into an absurdity."

"The present age prefers the sign to the thing signified, the copy to the original, fancy to reality, the appearance to the essence for in these days illusion only is sacred, truth profane."

"We have busied ourselves and contented ourselves long enough with speaking and writing; now at last we demand that the word become flesh, the spirit matter; we are as sick of political as we are of philosophical idealism; we are determined to become political materialists."

"The first and highest law must be the love of man to man. Homo homini Deus est - this is the supreme practical maxim, this is the turning point of the world's History."