pilgrim people

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, is the realm of the sensible world, that is, the world we know as it appears through our senses. We do not know reality as it is in itself, but we know things as they are conditioned by our minds with all its limitations. So, for example, mathematics and science are established on a sure foundation, but are restricted to the scope of mere appearances.

The irony of this position is that, although we have no access to it, the noumenal realm must be presupposed in order for morality to exist, which for Kant was the essence of religion. Man is a moral being who experiences a universal sense of duty; a principle Kant labeled the “categorical imperative.” Seeing this moral experience as requiring every human to act in accordance with whatever motivating consideration he or she as a rational being would will to be universally followed, Kant emphasized that religion is based on morality; it is not the other way around. In his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), his main theological work, Kant asserted, “religion is the recognition of all duties as divine commands” (142). For this reason, belief in the ideas of God and an afterlife must be presupposed. Morality demands that we take as an ultimate end the highest good that is possible in the world, which we can do only if we believe there is a God who wills such an end and can render whatever divine assistance may be necessary in our effort. “Morality thus leads ineluctably to religion,” said Kant, “through which it extends itself to the idea of a powerful moral Lawgiver outside of mankind, for Whose will that is the final end (of creation) which at the same time can and ought to be man’s final end” (5-6).

This is not to say, however, that belief in God and the afterlife are absolutely necessary; rather, one must believe only in the notion of God and the afterlife. Kant pointed out:

This faith needs merely the idea of God, to which all morally earnest (and therefore confident) endeavor for the good must inevitably lead; it need not presume that it can certify the objective reality of this idea through theoretical apprehension. Indeed, the minimum of knowledge (it is possible that there may be a God) must suffice, subjectively, for whatever can be made the duty of every man.(142)

While Kant seemed to think that faith in the actual existence of God is in greater conformity with one’s moral disposition than this sort of minimal agnosticism, he nevertheless allowed room for the latter, displaying a tolerant stance to those who, according to the established church, held heretical beliefs. All that matters is that one believes in the possibility of God and is capable of regarding his duties as something God (if he exists) commands. This has the practical benefit of safeguarding the moral agent from living in an irrational paradox.

Furthermore, Kant was ardent that “there are no special duties to God in a universal religion.” To believe in such is an “erroneous representation of religion” (142) since we cannot access the noumenal realm to which God belongs. To be more precise, pure religion requires no duties beyond those we owe to our fellow human beings. Therefore, the pursuit of morality and ethics is not simply a private matter, in which each individual is on their own trajectory to do their duty and leave others to do the same. The pursuit of morality, rather, is a collective and social enterprise. Says Kant:

The highest moral good cannot be achieved merely by the exertions of the single individual toward his own moral perfection, but instead requires a union of such individuals into a whole working toward the same end – a system of well-disposed human beings, in which and through whose unity alone the highest moral good can come to pass. (89)

Thus, people are united in a community of pure religion not by a particular creed or confession, but by a common commitment to the moral advance of mankind. Pure religion, therefore, is universal and can manifest itself in a wide variety of personal faiths, provided they all seek the highest good possible on earth.

The Particular: Ecclesiastical Faith

Given Kant’s understanding of pure religion as morality, it should come as no surprise that, for him, universal religion always takes precedence over the particular doctrines of ecclesiastical faith, namely, the creeds, confessions, rituals and order of the historic visible church. While ecclesiastical faith may function as the “vehicle” for pure religion, it is also the “shell” in which pure religion is encased and must be freed. Eternal truths are discovered in one’s own moral consciousness – “the basis and interpreter of all religion,” (112) not in the creeds, confessions, and traditions of ecclesiastical faith. Thus, Kant sought to smooth out the particulars in ecclesiastical faith in order to make it more compatible with a genuine moral religion of reason. Among the places (or particulars!) where this is evidenced is Kant’s treatment of the doctrines of Christ and the church, which we will look at in the next post.

Until then, I am interested to know what you think: to what degree has not only our culture but American Christianity been affected by Kant’s thinking in this regard? Is there a tendency among Christians to pit a “pure religion” against an “ecclesiastical faith,” or have we managed to steer clear of such dichotomies?