 Feuerbach, whose understanding of Seligkeit or blessedness seems to have been heavily influenced by Augustine’s account of felicitas in The City of God, defines blessedness at one point as freedom from sin, sensual drives, “the oppression of matter”, death, and the limitations of nature in general (WGL 403/103). Whereas the God of Christianity had previously been identified by Feuerbach as an alienated projection of the human species-essence, here God is defined instead as the realized drive-to-happiness of the Christian believer. To say that belief in God is motivated or caused by the human drive-to-happiness is not necessarily to deny that attributes ascribed to God are attributes derived from human nature, but it is in any case to affirm that the ascription to God of the perfections of the human species-essence serves an underlying psychological need that is itself determined by the dependence of human beings upon nature, and their awareness of this dependence in the form of powerful hopes and fears that give rise to belief in supernatural agencies.