SOURCE: Masterson, Patrick. “Feuerbach and the Apotheosis of Man.” In Atheism and Alienation: A Study of the Philosophical Sources of Contemporary Atheism, pp. 63-78. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1971.

In the following excerpt, Masterson discusses the means by which Feuerbach, in his critique of religion, laid the groundwork for a contemporary, atheistic worldview.

Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872) commenced his academic career as a student of Protestant theology at the University of Heidelberg. Subsequently he transferred to the University of Berlin where he became an enthusiastic disciple of Hegel whose lectures he regularly attended. Eventually, however, his personal reflections led him to discard both theology and Hegel's philosophy and to elaborate an explicitly atheistic philosophy of man involving a conscious transformation of the Hegelian viewpoint. As Karl Barth, whose own theological views developed in large measure as a reply to Feuerbach's philosophy, remarks: ‘having proceeded far beyond Hegel as well as...