Immanuel Kant: the religion of reason, the religion of the Church, and false religion

 There was no question then (as there was in the following century) of furthering the cause of atheism, but of conceiving of religion as wholly understandable through reason, without recourse to a special revelation such as the Bible. Enlightenment religion was above all deism, the doctrine that a Creator exists who does not intervene in the natural order.

In this atmosphere, Christianity had to redefine its place in the scheme of things. In between the most ferocious anti-Church polemicists (like Voltaire, for whom all dogma was groundless prejudice) and ultra-conservative theologians, arose a series of thinkers, amongst them Jean-Jacques Rousseau and above all Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who tried to bring about a compromise between the spirit of Enlightenment and Christian faith. It was they who were at the origin of 19th century liberal theology. Kant’s position is especially interesting, because in parallel to his critique of religion, he was engaged in a self-critique of reason – in this way closing and moving beyond the century of Enlightenment. For Kant, reason is hoisted by its own petard when it is seen as incapable of coming to a logical conclusion on the existence or non-existence of God – which therefore becomes a question for faith alone. But according to Kant the idea of God still plays an indispensable practical role, because humankind’s moral efforts, always imperfect in this life, only acquire sense if there exists a summum bonum, an external, objective God who guarantees the fruition of these human efforts in a future life.

In Kant’s eyes – and according to the pure Enlightenment heritage, this ethical religion surpasses all revelation, all established religion and all customary forms of communal worship. It is grounded in the innate awareness of Good hard-wired into every human being. The religion of reason is the universal conviction of having a free will oriented towards the Good, which liberates humanity from its base instincts and founds its true humanity.

This being the case, what purpose is then served by the Church’s religion, Christianity? Kant says that its purpose is pedagogical: the religion of the Church should reinforce the religion of reason. In a key passage of his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793), Kant explains that we need a human example to represent to ourselves “the human ideal acceptable to God”, and that such a person would necessarily spread the good around him at the same time as being ready to accept the worst sufferings and the most ignoble death. Such a “Son of God” would become for us a model to emulate.

Kant also specifies the dangers to which the religion of the Church gives rise – a form of religion which should never become an end in itself, but always remain the means of realising the religion of reason. When the Church’s worship, prayers and confessions of faith are seen as an obligation done to give pleasure to God, this false religion becomes diametrically opposed to ethical religion, which is, as the practice of good, the sole legitimate means of pleasing God. It follows that faith in divine grace, central to Protestantism, is hardly acceptable in Kant’s scheme, which sees in it the risk of an easy way out.

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