 Feuerbach’s conviction that Christian faith is inimical to reason and philosophy was strengthened by his own studies of the history of modern philosophy, especially his studies of Leibniz and Bayle. His monographs on these figures were written during the period of controversy following the appearance of Strauss’s Life of Jesus. Toward the end of the 1830s the Young Hegelians were increasingly opposed on two fronts, by right-wing Hegelians such as Friedrich Göschel, who insisted upon the compatibility of Hegelianism and Protestant orthodoxy, and by representatives of the so-called “Positive Philosophy”, who, taking their inspiration from the late Schelling, emphasized the personality of God as disclosed in the Christian revelation as the supreme metaphysical principle (cf. Breckman 1999 and Gooch 2011). It is in light of these developments that, beginning in the Leibniz monograph, Feuerbach sought increasingly to distinguish from one another, and to demonstrate the incompatibility of, what he refers to there as “the philosophical standpoint” and “the theological standpoint”, respectively. Feuerbach regards the theological standpoint as “practical” because it imagines God as a being separate from the world, upon which he acts according to purposes similar to those that guide the actions of human beings, rather than conceiving the world as a necessary, and hence rationally intelligible, consequence of the divine nature. To be sure, for Leibniz, there is nothing arbitrary about the divine will. God’s will is determined by his infinite wisdom and goodness, which compel him to choose to create the best possible world. But this attempt to synthesize rational necessity and divine sovereignty remains in Feuerbach’s view an unacceptable compromise. Like Tycho Brahe, who sought to combine the Ptolemaic and Copernican astronomies, Leibniz sought to reconcile the irreconcilable. In general, Feuerbach regarded Leibniz’s theory of monads as an original philosophical position that offers a genuinely novel conception of substance, and an alternative to the mechanistic-mathematical Cartesian account of motion, and thus constitutes an organic link in the developmental sequence of historical philosophical systems. Feuerbach criticized Leibniz, however, for not having derived the unity or harmony of the monads from the nature of the monads themselves, and for appealing instead to a theological representation of God as an alien, external power who achieves this harmonization miraculously, and hence, inexplicably. 