Entries in Enlightenment (1)
Manny's Moralism (part 1)
Michael Brown
in Ecclessiology, Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant
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A popular notion in our day is that organized religion must be pitted against spirituality. The former is disparaged as passé at best and hatefully intolerant at worst, while the latter is readily embraced as chic and healthy. Organized religion is particular and manifests itself in narrow doctrines, liturgical customs and exclusive tradition. Spirituality, on the other hand, is universal and can express itself in a wide variety of personal faiths and individual practices that generally seek one common goal, namely, self-improvement.
Roughly corresponding to this contrast of religion v. spirituality is the contrast of “ecclesiastical faith” and “pure religion” by the eighteenth century philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Displaying creative interaction between the pietism in which he was raised and the rationalism in which he was influenced, Kant sought to structure a universal theology that would emphasize the moral or practical side of the religious life, while remaining free from the archaic and ignorant particulars of an ecclesiastical tradition that superstitiously get handed down over the course of history. For Kant, particular “ecclesiastical faith” is unnecessary and encumbering to universal “pure religion” because the latter is better practiced without the former.
The Universal: “Pure Religion”
In order to understand Kant’s position on “pure religion,” one must first have a basic idea of his epistemology (theory of knowledge), which was revolutionary to the eighteenth century philosophical world. First a Cartesian rationalist, Kant said he was awakened from his “dogmatic slumber” by reading the Scottish philosopher David Hume. He found Hume’s radical skepticism challenging. But unlike Hume, Kant believed that this limitation did not demand a skeptical rejection of all metaphysical concepts. Wanting to rescue religion out of the hands of the rationalism of his day and offer a new balance between transcendence and imminence, Kant attempted to reconcile rationalism and empiricism by categorizing all of existence into two realms, viz., the noumenal and the phenomenal. In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Kant argued that the noumenal realm is the metaphysical, which contains objects as they exist apart from any relation to a knowing subject (i.e. the “thing-in-itself”) or objects for which we simply lack the needed equipment to perceive. Kant placed God, the self and substances in the noumenal realm and, therefore, inaccessible to our knowledge.
The phenomenal realm, on the other hand,