The Leipzig Council

• • Preface
  • I. Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks
  • The Leipzig Council
  • II. Saint Bruno
  • III. Saint Max
  • Close of the Leipzig Council

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The Leipzig Council — this is an allusion to the fact that the works of Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, the two “church fathers” criticised in this section, were published in Leipzig.

In the third volume of the Wigand’sche Vierteljahrsschrift for 1845 the battle of the Huns, prophetically portrayed by Kaulbach, actually takes place. The spirits of the slain, whose fury is not appeased even in death, raise a hue and cry, which sounds like the thunder of battles and war-cries, the clatter of swords, shields and iron waggons. But it is not a battle over earthly things. The holy war is being waged not over protective tariffs, the constitution, potato blight, banking affairs and railways, but in the name of the most sacred interests of the spirit, in the name of “substance”, “self-consciousness”, “criticism;’, the “unique” and the “true man”. We are attending a council of church fathers. As these church fathers are the last specimens of their kind, and as here, it is to be hoped, the cause of the Most High, alias the Absolute, is being pleaded for the last time, it is worth while taking a verbatim report of the proceedings.

Here, first of all, is Saint Bruno, who is easily recognised by his stick (“become sensuousness, become a stick”, Wigand, p. 130).’ His head is crowned with a halo of “pure criticism” and, full of contempt for the world, he wraps himself in his “self-consciousness”. He has ‘,smashed religion in its entirety and the state in its manifestations” (p. 138), by violating the concept of “substance” in the name of the most high self-consciousness. The ruins of the church and “debris” of the state lie at his feet, while his glance “strikes clown” the “masses into the dust. He is like God, he has neither father nor mother, he is “his own creation, his own product” (p. 136). In short, he is the “Napoleon” of the spirit, in spirit he is “Napoleon”. His spiritual exercises consist in constantly “examining himself, and in this self-examination he finds the impulse to self-determination” (p. 136); as a result of such wearisome self-recording he has obviously become emaciated. Besides “examining” himself — from time to time he “examines” also, as we shall see, the Westphälische Dampfboot.

Opposite him stands Saint Max, whose services to the Kingdom of God consist in asserting that he has established and proved — on approximately 600 printed pages [Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] — his identity, that he is not just anyone, not some “Tom, Dick or Harry”, but precisely Saint Max and no other. About his halo and other marks of distinction only one thing can be said: that they are “his object and thereby his property”, that they are “unique” and “incomparable” and that they are “inexpressible” (p. 148).c He is simultaneously the “phrase” and the “owner of the phrase”, simultaneously Sancho Panza and Don Quixote. His ascetic exercises consist of sour thoughts about thoughtlessness, of considerations throughout many pages about inconsiderateness and of the sanctification of unholiness. Incidentally, there is no need for us to elaborate on his virtues, for concerning all the qualities ascribed to him — even if there were more of them than the. names of God among the Muslims — he is in the habit of saying: I am all this and something more, 1 am the all of this nothing and the nothing of this all. He is favourably distinguished from his gloomy rival in possessing a certain solemn “light-heartedness” and from time to time he interrupts his serious ponderings with a “critical hurrah”.

These two grand masters of the Holy Inquisition summon the heretic Feuerbach, who has to defend himself against the grave charge of gnosticism. The heretic Feuerbach, “thunders” Saint Bruno, is in possession of hyle, substance, and refuses to hand it over lest my infinite self-consciousness be reflected in it. Self-consciousness has to wander like a ghost until it has taken back into itself all things which arise from it and flow into it. It has already swallowed the whole world, except for this hyle, substance, which the gnostic Feuerbach keeps under lock and key and refuses to hand over.

Saint Max accuses the gnostic of doubting the dogma revealed by the mouth of Saint Max himself, the dogma that “every goose, every dog, every horse” is “the perfect, or, if one prefers the superlative degree, the most perfect, man”. (Wigand, p. 187: “The aforesaid does not lack a tittle of what makes man a man. Indeed, the same applies also to every goose, every dog, every, horse.”)

Besides the hearing of these important indictments, sentence is also pronounced in the case brought by the two saints against Moses Hess and in the case brought by Saint Bruno against the authors of Die Heilige Familie. But as these accused have been busying themselves with “worldly affairs” and, therefore, have failed to appear before the Santa Casa, they are sentenced in their absence to eternal banishment from the realm of the spirit for the term of their natural life.

Finally, the two grand masters are again starting some strange intrigues among themselves and against each other.