 In an essay published in 1835 Heinrich Heine observed that pantheism had by this time become “the secret religion of Germany”.[5] That Feuerbach is generally remembered as an atheist and a materialist has tended to obscure the fact that he began his philosophical career as an enthusiastic adherent of this philosophical religion, one early expression of which can be found in the Greek words “Hen kai Pan” (One and All) inscribed in 1791 by Hölderlin in Hegel’s student album from Tübingen (cf. Pinkard 2000: 32).[6] This inscription is an allusion to words uttered by Lessing after reading Goethe’s poem-fragment, “Prometheus”, and responding enthusiastically by declaring himself a Spinozist, according to the account contained in Jacobi’s famous Letters on the Doctrine of Spinoza (1785; cf. Jacobi [MPW]: 187). It was the publication of these letters that set off the original Pantheism Controversy, and had the unintended effect of leading more than one generation of young German poets and thinkers to regard Spinoza no longer as a “dead dog” and a godless atheist, but rather as the God-intoxicated sage of a pantheistic creed in which those who, like Lessing, could no longer “stomach” orthodox conceptions of the divinity that make a strict distinction between creator and creation, could seek to satisfy their spiritual aspirations. Feuerbach included several verses of the Prometheus-fragment as an epigram to his first book, in which he used the tools of Hegelian logic to develop a view of the divinity as One and All along lines laid out by Spinoza, Giordano Bruno and Jacob Boehme. These three he hailed as ‘pious God-inspired sages’ (GTU 241/48) who prepared the ‘feast reconciliation’ (GTU 463/214) between nature and spirit that it is that task of the modern age to celebrate.