Some notes on Book 3 of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone .
Having established that there is an evil principle at work in humanity as well as a predisposition to good, Kant begins book 3 with the claim that morals is always a matter of warfare and battle. Freedom from the dominion of evil can only come by fighting the evil principle.
As free beings, we are bound to the evil principle through our own fault, but Kant also says that the “causes and circumstances that draw him into this danger and keep him there . . . do not come his way from his own raw nature, so far as he exists in isolation, but rather from the human beings to whom he stands in relation or association.” By ourselves, our needs are limited and we can live in moderation and tranquility. As soon as we are surrounded by others, “envy, addiction to power, avarice, and the malignant inclinations associated with these, assail his nature.” Thus, we “mutually corrupt each other’s moral disposition and make one another evil.” Kant is very close to Rousseau here, whose work he deeply admired.
If this is true, then the moral life cannot be lived in isolation either. We need a society that operates by the principles of virtue and reason. Reason is not only the legislator for human beings but “a banner of virtue” that provides a “rallying point for all those who love the good.” What Kant has in mind is an “ethical community” distinct from the juridico-civil society. The latter operates by “public juridical laws” that are necessarily coercive; the former under non-coercive “laws of virtue.” As his description of this community develops, it becomes evident that he conceives it as a kind of church.
There is, Kant says, an “ethical state of nature” that corresponds to the juridical state of nature, and in each “each individual prescribes the law to himself.” This is a Hobbesian state of nature, “in which the good principle, which resides in each human being, is incessantly attacked by the evil which is found in him and in every other as well.” We corrupt one another, and because of our lack of consensus about the good, we deviate from the good as though we were “instruments of evil.”
Once humanity has emerged from the political state of nature, they may still exist in an ethical state of nature – each doing what’s right in his own eyes – and it is anti-ethical for the political order to attempt to coerce the formation of an ethical society. When an ethical community is formed, the political power can exert authority only to the extent that it requires the members of the ethical society to fulfill their duties as citizens. This community must be formed on rational – ie, universal – principle of virtue, and once it is formed it is the duty of every human being to associated with it. This ethical community unites in the promotion of the highest good as good persons unite in a common moral outlook to form a good system.
In the political state, the people are legislators. This must be so, since legislation limits freedom and only the people can alienate their own freedom. In the ethical society, the people is not the legislator, since “in such a community all the laws are exclusively designed to promote the morality of actions.” The ethical community is concerned with “something internal” while the political community is concerned with external legality. Only God, therefore, can be the legislator of the ethical community, which takes the form of a church, a people of God. The people of God might be considered as a juridical community ruled by “statutory laws” interpreted by priests, but this would be a theocracy and would qualify as a form of politico-civil community rather than as a form of the ethical community. In short, even if God legislates, so long as the legislation is “external” we are still dealing with an civil and juridical reality.
In actual sensuous experience, no combination of human beings ever attains to the “sublime, never fully attainable idea of an ethical community.” It is “at best capable of representing with purity only the form of such a community.” This formation of this community depends on God, but each member of the community must strive as if everything depended on his own efforts, and as that happens, the Kingdom of God comes to earth.
Kant translates ecclesiological terms into the new key of this ethical community. He distinguishes, for instance, between a visible and invisible church, the latter being the “mere idea of the union of all upright human beings under direct yet moral divine world-governance,” which “serves for the archetype of any such governance” and the former being “the actual union of human beings into a whole that accords with this ideal. He lays out four marks of this ethical church: “universality, purity, freedom, and unchangeability. In its life it more resembles a family than a state.
According to Kant only the “plain rational faith” that has universal extent can be taken as “pure religious faith.” Because of the weakness of humanity, however, we cannot really be pure in faith, and so we lean on “ecclesiastical faiths” of various sorts as a kind of moral crutch. The weakness of man is evident in the tendency to treat moral action as service to God that makes the actor pleasing, thus treating duty as a transaction with God. Pure religion is to obey commands, and do one’s duty, as the will of God.
Ecclesiastical faiths, which involve a belief in revelation as a supplement to reason, are unavoidable, but even within these revelatory ecclesiastical faiths the moral legislation that is written on the heart is the condition of the ecclesiastical faith. God can be honored only by a faith that is universal, and this excludes all historical/statutory/revelatory/ ecclesiastical faiths. Because ecclesiastical faiths are qualified and conditioned by the universal pure faith of reason and duty, their statutes, however necessary, cannot be treated as divine commandments. At the same time, it would be arrogant to dismiss such statutes as such, since they may well be in accord with pure morality. Kant does see a temporary value to cultic religion: The observances of cultic religion are morally indifferent, but “precisely for this reason, they are deemed to be all the more pleasing to God, since they are supposed to be carried out just for his sake.” Through this process, communities are formed through cultic participation into a pure ethical community that does what is right for duty’s sake only. There is a kind of old-to-new-covenant structure operating here.
A pure religion can only arise from a community that is devoted to the principle of sola scriptura. Tradition is insufficient to evoke the respect that is necessary “to be certain of the duty to divine service.” Besides, when the support of political authorities is removed, tradition-based religions tend to collapse while scripturally-based religions stand firm. The Bible is thus the proper basis for ecclesiastical faith, since it not only has statutes that are in accord with the basic principles of rational morality but also contains those principles in a pure form.
While there is only one religion, there are many faiths. It is a mistake, then, to characterize post-Reformation struggles as religious wars; they are faith-wars, bloody struggles between different ecclesiastical forms that are claiming more than they should – claiming to represent in their statutory and cultic form the very will of God. At best, these faiths approximate the one true and universal religion of reason. Faith wars arise from ̶ 0;catholic” faith or “orthodoxy,” which “claims that its ecclesiastical faith is universally binding.” Kant is not indulging anti-Catholic sentiments (or not overtly), because he immediately goes on to remark that there are many “arch-catholic protestants.” The protestant principle, however, protests catholic claims to universal validity.
The chief mark of the true people of God is universality, and this is inevitable compromised in faiths that are based on revelation or historical fact. Yet, we want and need something sensuous; if for no other reason, atheism is far more socially destruction than popular superstition. The only way to combine this necessity with genuine pure faith is to interpret all ecclesiastical faiths in the light of reason. In fact, Kant argues, all reasonable interpreters of revelation have done this, interpreting texts offensive to reason in accord with reason.
Clerics and biblical scholars have their place. They certify the validity of Scripture by their researches and also exposit the Scriptures. They should be freed from all public coercion in this task, for that would subject the clergy to the dictates of the laity. But the exposition must be done in accord with reason, lest everyone interpret in accord with his own feelings and enthusiasm overwhelm religion. The norm of ecclesiastical faith is Scripture – as interpreted by reason and scholarship. This is the only authentic exposition of the Scriptures.
For Kant, the coming of the kingdom lies precisely in the process by which the particular ecclesiastical faith yields to the universality of reason. Ecclesiastical faith is true insofar as it moves toward universal rational faith, shedding its particular claims and its notion of divine service.
Kant focuses attention on two “conditions” of the hope of blessedness – satisfaction for wrongs done in the past, and becoming well-pleasing in our lives. It is nonsense, he says, to believe that we can be delivered from the need for satisfaction by believing in a vicarious satisfaction already made for us. It is incomprehensible how sin can be removed by a foreign satisfaction – by, say, a cross. For rational faith, the only satisfaction is to become good. And according to rational faith, we are not to wait around for God to begin to make us good, but set about the task of making us worthy of whatever assistance God might offer. Rationally, we can see that faith in the Son of God is identical to the amendment of life; that is satisfaction and amendment correspond without remainder. This is because the Son of God is the ideal of a humanity well-pleasing to God, and living faith in this Son means living according to that ideal. In ecclesiastical religions, faith and works are distinct; for rational faith, they are identical. If historical faith is a condition of rational faith, there is a real antinomy of faith and works; in rational faith there is not. It is true that we never entirely live by the ideal of rational faith, but we have to hope that God somehow makes up for the deficiency. We don’t know how.
The shift from ecclesiastical to rational faith is not revolutionary. It happens over time, and as a result “the degrading distinction between laity and clergy cease, and equality springs from true freedom, yet without anarchy, for each obeys the law (not the statutory one) which he has prescribed for himself, yet must regard it at the same time as the will of the world ruler as revealed to him through reason.
Kant then embarks on a historical review of the progress of the true internal religion of reason in history. He finds the principle for unifying this history in the religion where the rational principle has matured most – that is, in the Christian religion. Christianity succeeded Judaism, but there is no real continuity between them. Judaism was “only a collection of merely statutory laws supporting a political state; for whatever moral additions were appended to it, whether originally or only later, do not in any way belong to Judaism as such. Judaism was meant to be secular. Its commands are political, external; the consequences of disobedience are dispensed by human beings. Judaism contains no reference to the future life, and since this is a rational belief, it can only be that God deliberately excluded this from Judaism. Judaism did not aim at any universal church, but was exclusivist and hostile to the whole human race outside. Jehovah was not a moral God, but demanded obedience without any accompanying demand for moral progress. Christianity is completely differently, a universal faith that emphasizes truly religious ethical principles. The first Christians stressed their continuity with Judaism only to avoid offense. There was a bit of preparation for Christianity within Judaism, but only after Jews began to catch the liberating spirit of Hellenism. (This is a remarkable tissue of misrepresentations: Abraham has no place in Kant’s Judaism, and Kant is kin to Macion throughout.)
The history of Christianity, however, is an unhappy one. The pure faith was quickly undermined by enthusiasm, superstition, and priestcraft. Yet, despite all the efforts of popes and others, the first purpose of Christianity has not been entirely erased. Yet, Kant has to admit that Christianity really hasn’t come into its maturity until the 18th century. Kant’s era is the best of Christianity, since it is moderate in its views of revelation, and teaches the Bible in the interests of morals.
In his general remark that closes this section, Kant deals with the subject of mystery. Mysteries surpass all our concepts, yet penetrate practical reason and may be understood in that sphere; that is, mysteries are (in this, not the Pauline sense) hidden and then revealed. He enumerates three mysteries: The call, which is a mystery because it is “totally incomprehensible to our reason how beings can be created to use their powers freely,” since being created appears to mean that we are determined by some outside causality; yet we are free; Satisfaction, which is mysterious because our inadequate obedience must somehow be compensated, but this violates the principle that every morally good act must arise from man’s spontaneous freedom; and Election, the problem of how one can embark on a morally good path to begin with, since this already presupposes a good nature that hasn’t yet been achieved.