On the Opposing of Oppositions: “Projection” Revisited. By Dr Tromans

On the Opposing of Oppositions: “Projection” Revisited By Dr Tromans

Essential to my argument in this article are the following principles: first, a “non-competitive” relation between divine and human activity, and, second, a return to the classical doctrine of divine transcendence. The latter is a precondition for the former. In the teachings of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Vedantic and Bhaktic Hinduism, Sikhism, and so forth, God is both ultimate and intimate. On this view, one should neither “set God apart” from creatures, so that transcendence becomes a divine economy of domination; nor should we collapse God into the creation (as has been the case in certain feminist approaches), becoming a kind of pantheism. Rather, the being of God is both transcendent and immanent. God is not “a” being among beings, but rather belongs to a different ontological plane.

As I explain below, the above principles allow us to talk of “projection” in theology so as to avoid the “Feuerbachian problem”. Without them, our theology is never able to rise above the level of anthropology. We are no longer talking about God, but “merely” about ourselves. In this way, one could say that I move away from an approach that is either/or (one or the other), to one of both/and (both together). This is what I call the strategy of opposing oppositions between God and the world. In truth, this article is simply an attempt to think

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through, in a “concentrated form”, so to speak, the implications of the classical insight that the difference of God from the world is a difference which differs from any mere difference among creatures.

The Barth-Feuerbach Confrontation: God and the Dialectical Way

Throughout Western philosophy, there have been many suspicious, if not hostile, hermeneuts of religion – many attempts to “explain it all away”, so to speak – but, famously, Paul Ricoeur offers an argument for the fundamental importance of the three great “masters of suspicion”: Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. Laying the cornerstones of so-called “secular philosophy”, each of these thinkers developed a science of meaning, which claimed to lay bare the falsity of religion by systematically connecting its symbols with powerful, unconscious forces of which the believers themselves are ignorant. And, while Ricoeur himself virtually overlooks the fact, underlying these three attempts to explain religion on secular terms is the striking metaphor, which originates in Feuerbach, of “projection” (as George Eliot, Feuerbach’s translator, rendered the term Vergegenständlichung).

In Feuerbach’s best-known work, The Essence of Christianity, the overarching pattern is to say that the ultimate derivation of religious beliefs is an objectification of human attributes onto a perfect divine being (“God is the mirror of man”), but that the realisation of the

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Supreme Being as humanity’s own being will culminate in the dissolution of belief in God. All theological statements are spontaneous projections of the best aspects of human nature, which “man” must internalise and realise. “Man”, then, must get rid of God. God, for “Man”, must no longer be God, but “Man” . “Homo homini Deus est [Man is God for Man]” (Feuerbach, 1957, p. 159).

Broadly an empiricist, Feuerbach holds that “God” cannot signify anything “supernatural” , in the sense of an object existing outside empirical reality. He seems to think that this is what theologians understand God to be when they attribute human predicates to the non-empirical divine subject. The word “God”, Feuerbach sees, cannot refer to a metaphysical entity, a thing of some particular kind, but he does not see how God can be anything else. The divine subject is thus found to be human. Theology is nothing but anthropology. We say that “God is love”, but actually “love is divine”; for “God is wise”, we must say “wisdom is divine”. The attributes projected onto God are those human attributes we take to be divine, because we regard them as being beyond ourselves and higher than ourselves, as worthy of our devotion and worship. “The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine” (ibid., p. 21). Religion, rather than acknowledge the greatness and dignity of “Man”, takes these good human properties and (mistakenly) attributes them to an alien being having independent existence outside the human, something set over-against the world. It is thus a cause of human self-

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alienation. For what one casts into the heavens, one takes away from the human person at the same time: “To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing” (ibid., p. 26). According to Feuerbach, religion must always present the question of God in opposition to the question of the human: “Religion is the disuniting of man from himself; he sets God before him as the antithesis of himself. God is not what man is –man is not what God is” (ibid., p. 33). In this disjunction, God is transformed into the perfected, inauthentic, and (in the fullest sense) fictitious essence of the human person, transplanted into the beyond and leaving the human being corrupt, impoverished, and “incapable of good”, in direct proportion to God’s own enrichment.

Feuerbach’s knowledge and understanding of theology is not only exiguous, but also twisted by his characteristically modern preconceptions. A number of contemporary philosophical theologians have attempted to elaborate the utterly unique philosophic-linguistic apparatus indispensable to the proper articulation of (what one might call) a “non-contrastive” (or noncompetitive) relation of creatures to creator. Now, at this point, it seems we get somewhere near the heart of the problem. For what has never fully been discovered in the Feuerbachian tradition is the “ontological difference” . Feuerbach’s religious origins in Lutheranism are crucial. Here, everything comes down to the theological disjunction: either God or the human but not both.

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Denys Turner suggests that the “opposition between Barthian theism and Feuerbachian atheism” resembles “that between an object and its image in a mirror: all the connections of thought are identical, but their relations are, as it were, horizontally reversed from left to right” (Turner, 2004, p. 230). The revelationism of Barth simply reverses the direction of Feuerbach’s humanism, leaving the Feuerbachian account of the competition between God and creatures intact. “God is in heaven, thou art on earth”, as Barth famously said. The Barth-Feuerbach confrontation leads to a “bad dialectic”: a predicament that forces us to choose between the equally bad alternatives of “pure projection” and “positivism of revelation”. We are presented with a kind of Kierkegaardian either/or: either God or the human but not both. My argument here is that theology needs to reject the false opposition between God and the human, and to recognise that both Barth and Feuerbach are in some sense correct: the first emphasises that language comes from God; the second emphasises that language is of human origin.

Theology does not have its own specialist subject matter, so it must always speak about God by speaking about something else, attempting to say something about everything in relation to God. In fact, if theology did have a proper subject matter of its own, it would be idolatrous, for theology concerns not a partial sphere of reality, but the ground of all beings, and all in relation to this source. Theology is a science which attempts to speak truthfully

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of God. However, since God is not any kind of thing, and is not immediately available in our experience, theology must also speak about the creation in this attempt, using what is natural to creatures – being, desire, society, senses, language, culture, and so forth – all the while assuming that these creaturely sources also extend to that which exceeds the natural – namely, the “supernatural”. We can never “see” God, from which it follows that any notion of divinity that can communicate anything must use ‘natural’ materials: language, culture, desire, and so on. The alternative between projection and revelation, “invention” and “discovery”, is never just a straightforward dichotomy. Even revelation must involve the process of human experience and understanding; otherwise, it will have no meaning, as Feuerbach understood.

Projection and the Principle of Non-Competition

In commenting on Aquinas’s observation that the word “god” is not a “proper name”, Nicholas Lash helpfully reminds us that, for most of our history, the word “God” (with or without a capital G) was the common name for whatever people worshipped: whatever it was, in practice, that people did, in fact, worship as of ultimate reality and significance in their lives (Lash, 1986, p. 162–163). On this account, the word “god” works rather like the word “treasure”. A treasure is what someone treasures, what he or she holds in high regard. There is no class of objects known as “treasures”. The question,

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then, says Lash, is not: “What can we predicate of ‘God’?” But, rather, “What do we take to be ‘divine’ attributes?” To ask what attributes we take to be divine is to ask what we “take to be of ultimate value and significance”; it is to ask where we ultimately put our trust, on what our “hearts and hopes are set” (ibid., p. 163).

Something is divine if someone worships it. This argument should remind us of Feuerbach. According to Feuerbach, the attributes of deity reflect the deepest longings of the human heart. In Feuerbach’s own words, “The fact is not that a quality is divine because God has it, but that God has it because it is in itself divine” (Feuerbach, 1957, p. 21). The word “god”, then, is concerned, it seems, not so much with entities or individuals, but rather with events and activities, occurrences and patterns of behaviour – not so much with objects or things, but rather with the deepest and best of human desires, which is to say, those things we take to be “divine” .

This last line of reflection leads us on to the connection made by feminists between human values and the concept of God. For, if something like Feuerbach’s account is accepted, the following question needs to be considered: If “God” represents those qualities “we” take to be of ultimate value and significance, whose values does the symbol of God reflect? The notion of God has come under heavy criticism by feminist thinkers. In theorising about religion, many have adopted

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Feuerbach’s projectionist theory, which understands theology to be, at bottom, anthropology. Religious beliefs are, in fact, the means by which our deepest desires are objectified. Feuerbach’s projectionist theory represents an attempt to explain theological predication in terms of the “realised wishes of the heart” (ibid., p. 140). “God” –man’s projection of himself – can then mirror back to the masculine subject a reflection of his own masculine desires. Hence, for men, God is a form of self-completion.

What, more precisely, is “projection”? I suggest five answers, or uses, for the term. First, projection is a term of opprobrium designating the illusory objectification of human desire beyond the world (Projection 1). Projection 1 can be found in both Barth and Feuerbach. Second, projection is a feminist invective used against the privileging of male desires/values in traditional representations of the divine “attributes” (Projection 2). Feminists argue that traditional male theology is an ideological construct. Theology is anthropology; God is the “mirror of man” (as Feuerbach says). Third, projection is the conscious creation of a “divine horizon” which furthers the aim of the gendered becoming of women (Projection 3). Grace Jantzen’s positive interpretation of projection from a feminist perspective is an example of Projection 3. In her still important work, Becoming Divine (1998), Jantzen built upon the work of Feuerbach (and Nietzsche) for the creation of a new feminine imaginary. The loss of God’s existence – as an event to be celebrated! – opens the way for a deliberate projection of

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the divine, not as a form a male self-completion, but as a necessary means to the flourishing of women. Fourth, projection is the invention of new metaphors for God, for the sake of certain pragmatist goals (Projection 4). Here, theological predications are no longer predications about God, but predications about our own being. Consequently, we are permitted to invent theological metaphors on the basis of their pragmatic effects (McFague, 1987). Finally, projection is a term innocent of any pernicious connotations, indicating merely the naming of God from human desire, enabled in us by the divine reality (Projection 5). My own positive reading of projection is a version of projection 5 – as I shall now explain.

These five answers or uses share similar premises. First, in every case, the use of the term indicates a certain anthropomorphism when we speak of God. Our language about God is language about ourselves. It begins with what is natural to us, with our experience. Second, projection entails the expression of human aspiration. Theology is a form of anthropology. As such, it reflects the deepest desires of creatures. Third, projection is the action of throwing out or ahead. As the expression of human desire, our language about God helps to “draw us forwards”. Finally, the word carries a creative, active sense. Projection is a form of human making, and thus involves (either consciously or unconsciously) the exercise of the imagination.

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What is the ontological status of the divine in each of these answers? In Projection 1, projection is regarded as an error or illusion. Here, projection and truth (or projection and discovery) act as opposites. Projection 1 supposes that once a theological predication is drawn from the human being, it is rendered false. Because it is human, it cannot be genuinely theological. All the modern proponents of projectionism – Feuerbach’s objectification theory, Marx’s opium theory, and Freud’s illusion theory – understood it as entailing an error or delusion. Theology is anthropology – and nothing more. It is my suspicion that we are being presented with a pseudo-dichotomy here – simplistic either/ors like this are rarely helpful – and one of my aims in this article is to call certain taken-forgranted “truths” into question.

My own positive version of projection (Projection 5) challenges our propensity (learned from Barth and Feuerbach) to associate projection with falsehood. In this respect, my argument is in agreement with feminism’s positive interpretation of projection (Projection 3). Projection 3, Projection 4, and Projection 5 overlap in complex ways. The constructivism of Projection 3 shares a similar form to the pragmatism of Projection 4. In both cases, projection is driven by human desire and guided by certain practical motivations. In Projection 3, the issue of the actual existence of God is largely put aside. For, if we suspend questions of metaphysical truth – so the argument goes – we are free to focus on the adequacy of our projections for nourishing the becoming of women.

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Projection 4 postulates a transcendent divine reality of which we can speak only metaphorically. On this view, our language refers properly only to our existence, not the existence of God. Since theologians are, “as it were, painting a picture”, every theological predication has the same truth-value. And since “theology is mostly fiction” (McFague, 1987, p. ix; her emphasis), it should be free to say, concerning God, more or less whatever takes its fancy. Whereas Projection 4 posits a transcendent divine reality of which we can speak only metaphorically, Projection 3 brushes aside the issue of God’s actual existence, suggesting – as in the case of Jantzen – that it would be better to overcome the binary between realism and non-realism altogether. Ultimately, however, Projection 4 shares a similar form to Projection 3. In both cases, projection is the conscious creation of a divine role model, for the sake of certain pragmatist goals.

In Projection 5, projection is driven by human desire and enabled in us by the power of God. Here, by God is meant the beginning and end of all things, both “in us” and “above us”. Moreover, in this case, our speaking about God can be rightly regarded as a speaking about God, and not merely a speaking about human beings. Oddly, what I mean by projection (Projection 5) is very much what Barth and Feuerbach mean by projection (Projection 1): the naming of God from human desire. The difference between Projection 1 and my own positive reading of projection (Projection 5) depends entirely on whether the divine and the human are considered as

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mutually inclusive, or mutually exclusive. Under the “rule” of non-competition, there is no dichotomy between the divine and the human. Our human names can be names of God.

Projection 5 is quite similar to Projection 3 and Projection 4, insofar as projection is driven by human desire, the desire for the Good. In each case, moreover, our Godtalk (as a form of human making) helps to “draw us forwards”. In Projection 5, however, projection is also “enabled in us by the divine reality”. Is this not a case of wanting to have one’s cake and eating it too? How can one affirm that language comes from God without denying the proposed projection? The principle of noncompetition guarantees that God’s being is simultaneously transcendent and immanent. God is not simply the end of our desire, but is our desire.

Conclusion

Our speaking of God is, inevitably, a speaking about ourselves. Theology is a form of anthropology, as Feuerbach reminds us. Yet this is what makes God-talk so difficult and so suspect in the eyes of very many thinkers. Theology, it is claimed, is a projection and nothing more. In response to this dilemma, one gets the doubtful piety of a Barthian Offenbarungspositivismus, in which the “soleness” of revelation bespeaks the delivery of non-worldly truth to human beings as a bolt from the blue. The result is “positivism”, the “purely passive

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occurrence and diffusion of the self-revelation of Deity in man” (Przywara, 1935, p. 23). As suggested above, Barth repeats (rather than critiques) Feuerbach’s ontotheology, leaving the basic dialectical framework of the opposition between God and humanity intact. However, Barth’s response to Feuerbach has an interesting element within it. To be a creature, one might say, means to exist in a relation “given hitherward from God”, and not “constructed thitherward” from creatures (ibid, p. 95). Theological discourse is grounded in worship, in the response to a gift that is freely given. However, the “givenness” of theology does not absolve it from the human act of reception. This way of putting things leads us in the direction of a “synergic drama between God and humanity” (Milbank, 2011, p. 151), rather than to the questionable piety of a revelatory actualism, wherein the (utterly depraved) creature is but the passive receptor of God’s revelation “from above” .

In its emphasis on perfection terms, or those attributes humans “consider the best of themselves” (Jantzen, 1998, p. 90), my argument has important similarities to Jantzen’s positive interpretation of projection (Projection 3). Theology and anthropology always walk hand in hand, as Feuerbach recognised. However, if theology is anthropology, correlatively, anthropology is theology. Put concisely: theology is both “projection” and “discovery”. I am speaking here of God’s total ontological transcendence – the assertion of which allows God to be simultaneously “other” than creation (superior summo

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meo) or “above” it, and yet also “in” the world, within its very being, revealing himself as closer to each of us than we are to ourselves (interior intimo meo). God is the non aliud, as Nicholas of Cusa puts it, precisely “not other” . The “logic” of “creation” is one of no contrast. In a word, God’s true transcendence – God’s non-objective “objectivity”, as it were – transcends even the traditional “Western” opposition between the transcendent and the immanent.

Reflecting on the ways creatures use perfection terms can remind us of that to which we strive as finite beings. For how could one ever aspire to create a more just society if “just”, in its normal use, functioned as a merely descriptive predicate? Being human, which is not just a matter of being but also of becoming, is to be orientated beyond the boundaries of what we now know, to be open to endless transformation. This natural desire for the Good is a desire for divinity. Or, as Jantzen puts it, “The attributes valorized as divine are those humans consider the best of themselves, which they partly have and partly long to become” (ibid., p. 90). Since our language, in this domain, will always fail to determine its object directly, that language will be more fitting as a vehicle for seeking a truth which it cannot exhaustively grasp. Yet what saves such a stance of humility from the spectre of hopelessness which haunts much current discourse regarding any such quest for truth, is the belief that the universe occurs in and through God, and that those enquiring have their origins in eternity, able to seek

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vestiges of the Wisdom of God, the “Woman clothed with the sun” (Revelation 21:1), so that the “beginning” of all things becomes at once the “end” of creatures whose “dwelling is in the heavens” .

In short, a non-competitive relation between God and creatures is indispensable to an articulation of theology as a theandric or divine-human activity. Using the term projection in a way that is, perhaps, less than common has the advantage of allowing a dialogue with feminism to go ahead. We can dispense with Projection 1. If the theological teachings of the great world religions are correct, then God’s light is seen everywhere, and the mark of the divine is impressed upon our nature. The important theological question, then, is: Where, why, and how does sexual/gender difference make a difference?

Our speaking about God begins with what is natural to us, with our experience. There is little original or new about this suggestion, to be sure; but what has been missed in the past has been attention to the different ways in which human beings experience the divine. Feminism, I have attempted to show, makes Feuerbach relevant. The problem is not with projection, but with the exclusion of the projections and goals of all marginalised and repressed groups: women, transgender people, blacks, disabled people, lesbians and gay men, and many others. From this point of view, theology is regarded as a discourse intended to work against what is held to be oppression. The idea that religious language is

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derived from human projection must be engaged in feminist thought, where Feuerbach has been read creatively and “against the grain”. Religion, as Feuerbach said, is too important a subject to leave to the theologians. For feminist theologians, if it is men to whom the subject of religion is left, it is the attributes or perfections of “man” that religious communities will take to be “divine” . Feuerbach’s radical critique of theology has been understandably embraced by feminist thinkers as a means of reclaiming the significance of God for women.

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Select Bibliography

Feuerbach, L., 1957, The Essence of Christianity. New York: Harper Torch Books. Jantzen, G., 1998, Becoming Divine: Towards a Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Manchester University Press. Lash, N. 1986, Theology on the Way to Emmaus. London: SCM Press McFague, S., 1987, Models of God: Theology for an Ecological Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Milbank, J., 2011, “On ‘Thomistic Kabbalah’”, Modern Theology 27/1. Przywara, E., 1935, Polarity: A German Catholic’s Interpretation of Religion, trans. A. C. Bouquet. London: Oxford University Press.

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Staff Editor: Dr Tromans

Student Editors: Charlie Ballaro Eden Halperin

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