Kant scholars have taken two approaches to Kant’s religious thought. The first approach, which Chris L. Firestone, one of the editors of Kant and the Question of Theology (KQT), calls the ‘traditional’ approach, has been to interpret Kant as robustly secular. On this view, in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant shows that our knowledge is limited to the phenomenal world of experience. Since knowledge of God transcends those limits, we cannot have knowledge of God. Thus, it is an easy step from the Critique of Pure Reason to agnosticism.
But there has also been a second, ‘theologically affirmative’, approach (p. 2) that reads Kant as more than a mere agnostic. While it is true that even on this reading Kant thinks theoretical reason cannot establish much about God, practical reason can show a whole lot, demonstrating not only that we must believe in God as a condition of maintaining belief in morality, but also many more specific claims about the human condition and how we should try to relate to God in light of that condition.
In the introduction to KQT, Firestone goes over this history and explains the two rationales behind the book. The first rationale is to continue the trend of theologically affirmative interpretation. The second is to put this theologically affirmative Kant in dialogue with contemporary philosophers of religion. KQT succeeds in both of those aims, by my lights having four essays (by James J. DiCenso, Pablo Muchnik, Lawrence Pasternack and Jacqueline Mariña) devoted primarily to advancing the theologically affirmative agenda, and offering eight (by James H. Joiner, David Bradshaw, Leslie Stevenson, William J. Abraham, Nathan A. Jacobs, Keith Yandell, Thomas H. McCall, and Firestone) that are mainly engagements between Kant and contemporary philosophy of religion.
The book is divided into three parts: ‘Kant and God’, ‘Kant and Religion’ and ‘Kant and Redemption’. Part I begins with James J. DiCenso’s ‘Practical Cognition of God’, where DiCenso discusses how reason moves us to a rich conception of God. The movement works like this: theoretical reason cannot prove God’s extra-sensory existence, but it can formulate a regulative idea of God that helps to guide and inspire our inquiries. On the other side, practical reason pushes the moral law onto us as a fact of reason, and we know that this moral law requires us to pursue the highest good. However, we cannot bring about the highest good without help from God, so practical reason borrows theoretical reason’s regulative idea of God and postulates it to help us in this project. What is novel in this chapter is DiCenso’s exploration of where, precisely, practical reason gets its concept of God.
The next chapter is my favourite essay in the collection: Pablo Muchnik’s rich, nuanced and provocative ‘The Birth of God and the Problem of History’. Muchnik’s main point is this: while many scholars see Kant’s Idea for a Universal History as being primarily about securing a way to make history intelligible to theoretical reason (via the device of seeing history as providentially ordered), its primary aim is, in fact, therapeutic: Kant is looking for a story to tell to make history’s path bearable for its subjects, namely by showing how history’s progress benefits everyone. History benefits the earliest people, who are significantly less autonomous, by giving them an end – to contribute to historical progress. And it benefits later people by situating them in cultural conditions that allow them the autonomy to choose to make history’s end (the eventual inauguration of the highest good) their own. People in more sophisticated societies do this by coming up with the idea that history is governed by a providential God (which moment Muchnik calls ‘the birth of God’, p. 36), which ipso facto encourages them to identify their own ends with that of history. Much of Muchnik’s essay seems to go beyond (but not clearly against) what the texts support. In addition, it is not clear whether Muchnik is claiming that Kant is a fictionalist about God. Regardless, grappling with the paper was highly stimulating.
In his ‘The Kantian Summum Bonum and the Requirements of Reason’, James H. Joiner argues that Kant’s moral argument for belief in God is in tension with the epistemic strictures Kant defends in the first Critique. The argument goes like this: Kant thinks morality requires each individual to do as much as she can to bring about the highest good. But the only reason to think the highest good is even possible in the first place is if Kant is a (non-naturalistic) moral realist. However, we cannot know the truth of such realism without violating Kant’s critical strictures. Therefore, Kant faces a dilemma: either admit moral realism but ditch the epistemic modesty of the Critique, or keep the critical strictures but give up on the highest good, God and immortality. Rather than defending this argument against criticisms, Joiner devotes the rest of his article to arguing that Kant’s doctrine of radical evil is incompatible with the postulate of immortality. The idea is that because radical evil renders acting from duty impossible – a reading I am confident is wrong – even infinite time to improve is not enough.
In ‘Kant and the Experience of God’, David Bradshaw lays out Kant’s arguments against the possibility of knowingly experiencing God and gives his own response to them. The arguments generally work like this: even if God manifested Himself in experience to us, we could never know that the experience was of God, because God is an infinite being, and we cannot experience infinity. Bradshaw points out that Kant operates with the premise that, since we are finite, God is limited in how He can communicate to us. But we can begin with the alternative idea that, since God is infinite, God could figure out a way even for finite beings like us to have an experience that we know to be of Him. And Bradshaw thinks that God could do this by expanding our concept of the infinite and teaching us about Himself through our having interactions with him. Bradshaw’s article is clear and, if one holds certain theistic premises, plausible.
Part II (‘Kant and Religion’) kicks off with Lawrence Pasternack’s excellent ‘Religious Assent and the Question of Theology: Making Room for Historical Faith’. Pasternack provides a clear definition of faith: faith is when you do not have objectively sufficient grounds for your belief (i.e. you do not have maximum epistemic warrant for it), but you do have subjectively sufficient grounds for it (i.e. you are psychologically certain of its truth) grounded in a universal need of practical reason (namely, to bring about the highest good). As Pasternack reads him, Kant thinks faith is better than knowledge. This is because faith, unlike knowledge, engages the will by requiring you to align yourself with morality and subordinate those inclinations that impede your contributing to the highest good. In aligning yourself with morality, you see yourself and others as contributors to the highest good. Believing in the highest good, in turn, means seeing God as active in history. But seeing God as active in history means being open to the possibility of miracles and, more importantly, viewing the non-corrupted parts of particular historical religious traditions, as well as their attendant rituals, as ways of sacralizing the mundane. Thus, historical religion is not just a useful way of inspiring us to live up to our moral obligations, but also moves us to see the world as infused with providence.
Leslie Stevenson’s ‘Kant versus Christianity’ attempts to find out how much Kantianism and Christianity have in common, and how much they are opposed. He takes an unusual methodological approach: he goes back and forth between initially hardline, and then gradually more concessive versions of Kantianism and Christianity to arrive at the most accommodating versions of each. By the end, Stevenson sees Kantianism and Christianity as not entirely compatible: Kant does not have much use for metaphysically extravagant Christian doctrines like the Fall, the Incarnation and the Resurrection, except insofar as believing in suitably modified versions of them is practically useful. Even fairly liberal Christians still want to retain literal understandings of the Incarnation and the Resurrection, so Kant and Christianity will not meet in the middle.
In ‘Divine Agency and Divine Action in Immanuel Kant’, William J. Abraham wants to see whether Kant helps or hinders renewing Christian faith in the contemporary world (p. 138). To figure this out, he focuses on what Kant has to say about divine action, particularly regarding grace, the Incarnation and the Atonement. Because Kant hews to the epistemological restrictions of the first Critique, he cannot take us all the way to ‘industrial-strength’ (p. 138) Christianity. That said, in Abraham’s view, he shows just how far practical reason can go in making certain Christian concepts useful for our moral purposes, as well as how far they resonate in explaining our moral situation.
Following Abraham’s essay is Nathan A. Jacobs’ ‘Kant and the Problem of Divine Revelation: An Assessment and Reply in Light of the Eastern Church Fathers’. Jacobs’ essay is quite similar to Bradshaw’s in that it offers a Christian response to Kant’s arguments against the possibility of knowing that one has an experience of God. Moreover, its reply to Kant’s arguments is similar to Bradshaw’s: given that God is omnipotent, God can alter us such that we could knowingly have an experience of Him. Its main difference from Bradshaw’s essay is in providing detail about how we could know that an experience was an experience of God. Jacobs invokes the Eastern Church Fathers’ notion of deification, where God gives us certain powers that we would otherwise not naturally have, such as allowing us to participate in His knowledge. If this happened, we could not only come to know things that only God could know, but could also know that we knew them.
Many commentators on the Religion see a contradiction between Kant’s claims that everyone is morally responsible for her radical evil (the moral responsibility thesis) and that everyone is radically evil (the universality thesis) (p. 183). According to Jacqueline Mariña, in ‘What Perfection Demands: An Irenaean Account of Kant on Radical Evil’, the first essay of Part III (‘Kant and Redemption’), this is because they adopt Augustinian rather than Irenaean assumptions about evil. Augustinian assumptions make evil inexplicable (we choose the evil over the good disposition for no intelligible reason) and very serious (this choice is responsible for everyone’s immorality). But she thinks this is not Kant’s view: on her reading, Kant, like Irenaeus, sees our fall as neither inexplicable nor serious. As Kant views things (primarily in the Lectures on Theology), primitive humans acted wrongly because they did not know enough about the good to choose it. This makes immorality explicable. However, their choosing evil was necessary for their being able to appreciate the good. This makes initial immorality not so serious.
The way this story unifies the moral responsibility and universality theses is by construing the universality thesis as a thesis about frailty (everyone has a propensity to evil) and the moral responsibility thesis as a thesis about advancing from frailty to impurity and then wickedness (anyone who regresses in this way is morally responsible for it). While I appreciate the solution, I am sceptical that there is as much continuity between the Lectures on Theology and the Religion as Mariña thinks, and I do not think we need to invoke it anyway to make the moral responsibility and universality theses consistent.
Keith Yandell, in his ‘Atonement and Grace in Kant: Some Reflections’, claims that he wants to figure out how best to translate Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft. To do this, he takes his readers on a sprawling, but austere, tour of the first two Critiques and the Religion. His basic question is this: is there a conflict between God’s justice and mercy, given how Kant understands those two terms? Yandell thinks so: if God is just, then He would not grant grace, and if He granted grace, then He would not be just. Yandell says that the only way to avoid this dilemma is to say that God can somehow square this circle noumenally, in ways beyond and against our understanding. Consequently, the only way to rescue Kant is to heavily invoke transcendentalism. From this, Yandell concludes that the best way to translate the title of Religion is as Religion within the Limits of Mere Reason rather than within the Limits of Reason Alone; the ‘mere’ does a better job of conveying how small Kant thinks the reach of our reason is in the grand scheme of things.
Thomas H. McCall’s ‘Christology … within the Limits of Reason Alone? Kant on Fittingness for Atonement’ is the best example in the collection of a philosopher using contemporary analytic theology to interact with Kant. Kant has what looks like a powerful argument against the usefulness of the doctrine of the Incarnation: if Jesus were holy, then he would not be able to inspire us to atone (because one cannot relate to a holy person); but if Jesus is supposed to inspire us to atone, then he must not be holy. Thus, if we take the Incarnation literally, then we cannot have the Atonement.
McCall elegantly responds to Kant’s argument. He gives us three reasons to think it fails. First, having LeBron James on our basketball team could inspire us to play better; by analogy, seeing a holy person’s example could inspire us to be better. Second, Kant assumes that if Jesus is holy, then he is necessarily holy; but if Jesus were only contingently holy, then there would be a sense in which Jesus, like us, could sin. Finally, what McCall calls ‘modified kenotic Christology’ (MKC) (p. 222) could be true: on MKC, Jesus is God, but he does not know he is holy. Thus, although he cannot sin, he does not know he cannot sin, so he actually struggles like we do, and, consequently, can inspire us. How can Jesus be God but not know that he is holy? Because omniscience is not one of God’s essential attributes; instead, his essential attribute is ‘omniscient-except-when-incarnated-in-Jesus’.
The collection concludes with Firestone’s ‘Rational Religious Faith in a Bodily Resurrection’. Firestone, building on the work of Aaron Bunch (Reference Bunch2010), argues that Kant should have believed in bodily resurrection to supplement the postulate of immortality, largely for the reasons that Bunch himself gave. What is interesting about Firestone’s essay is his argument that such a view is in keeping with methodological considerations that Kant himself supported. In Conflict of the Faculties, Kant argued that, while philosophy’s job was to criticize theology, theology’s job was to inspire philosophy. This suggests that the role of theology might be to encourage philosophy to expand the contents of rational religion. Thus, a belief in bodily resurrection might be something Kant would have come to support after all.
All told, this is a good book, and worthy of Kant scholars’ time, especially those who have an interest in the Religion. Philosophers of religion will find most of Kant’s criticisms of religious doctrines unpersuasive, for reasons of the sort that Bradshaw, Jacobs and McCall offer. But they may find his positive views, especially as propounded by Muchnik, Pasternack and Firestone, worthy of development.
