Ludwig Feuerbach, author of Das Wesen des Christenthums, was born, the son of a lawyer, at Landshut in Bavaria in 1804, receiving his university education first at Heidelberg and then, after 1824, at Berlin, where he became a pupil of Hegel's. In 1828 he was appointed Privatdozent in philosophy at Erlangen, but later gave up academic teaching altogether for the retired life of a private scholar. From i860 until his death in 1872 he made his home on the Rechenberg, near Nuremberg; an uneventful existence, dedicated only to the traffic of ideas, although of mere ideas he was always contemptuous: Der Mensch, he said, in a famous phrase, ist was er isst—‘Man is what he eats’. Indeed in Feuerbach's writings there is more of the prophet and reformer than of the pure thinker or scholar. His ceuvre includes, besides Das Wesen des Christenthums (1841)—translated into English by George Eliot in 1854—a critique of the philosophy of Hegel (1839), Grundsdtze der Philosophie der Zukunft (1843), and Das Wesen der Religion (1851), a series of lectures delivered by him at Heidelberg in 1848. Whatever Feuerbach's place may be in the general course of modern philosophy, his contribution to the philosophy of religion and in particular to the philosophical interpretation of Christianity, emerges, in the light both of Marxism and of recent existentialism, as worthy of serious study. This ‘philosophically grounded negation to all theology’ was, as Karl Barth states, ‘essentially a summons, an appeal, a proclamation’, and its message, more than a century since, has lost nothing of its interest.