2. Interpreting the Religion

Towards the opening of its Second Preface, Kant remarks that ‘doubts have been expressed’ (Rel, 6: 12) about the title of the Religion, and offers in response his now familiar image of two concentric circles or spheres.Footnote ² The title, Religion within [innerhalb] the Boundaries [Grenzen] of Mere Reason, he there explains, is meant to suggest an embedding relationship between the wider sphere of traditional religion (i.e. the doctrines of ‘historical faith’) and the more narrow sphere of natural or rational religion.Footnote ³ The project of the Religion is thus to determine the ‘boundary’ (Grenze) between historical faith and natural/rational religion, and more fully, to engage in the ‘experiment’ (Versuch) (6: 10, 12)Footnote ⁴ of comparing these two domains so as to determine how much ‘unity’ or at least ‘compatibility’ (6: 13) there is between them.

Such a project is, of course, hardly unique to Kant. Philosophers and theologians have long debated the relationship between natural and revealed religion, their respective contents and level of overlap. Kant, likewise, in his three Critiques, Prolegomena, lectures on metaphysics and religion, and in various shorter works, touches upon this relationship, either commenting on the standard division between natural and revealed religion (e.g. ‘Only Possible Argument’, 2: 111; A631/B659; ‘Orientation in Thinking’, 8: 142; L-Th, 28: 1117–18),Footnote ⁵ criticizing various theoretical approaches to natural or rational religion (e.g. A583–4/B661–2, Prol, 4: 355–6, ‘Orientation’, 8: 133–4, ‘Philosophical Trials’, 8: 253–4, L-TH, 28: 1013–14), or developing aspects of his own moral approach to religion (i.e. PRSR).

Overwhelmingly, however, the latter discussions focus on issues usually associated with natural/rational religion (proofs for God’s existence and an afterlife, religious epistemology, rational grounds for belief, etc.) rather than the more distinctive doctrines of revealed religion (the Fall, grace, providence, atonement, the incarnation, etc.) or what relationships may exist between them.Footnote ⁶ It is thus in the Religion where Kant finally turns to the issues of revealed religion in detail, reviewing its core doctrines and exploring how much ‘compatibility’ or ‘unity’ may exist between them and PRSR.

This is very much how Kant describes the project of the Religion in the Second Preface, subsequent to its account of the text’s title. Though the ‘experiment’ to assess the question of ‘unity’ between natural and revealed religion is mentioned in the First Preface (Rel, 6: 10), it is there somewhat buried amidst other issues of concern. However, in the Second Preface, Kant more directly explains the text’s overall aim or ‘experiment’ as one of comparison: ‘starting from some alleged revelation’, holding some fragment of a ‘historical system’ ‘up to moral concepts’ so as to see whether it ‘lead[s] back’ to the ‘pure rational system of religion’ (6: 12).Footnote ⁷ That is, as noted above, through the Religion, Kant seeks to determine how much ‘compatibility’ or ‘unity’ exists between the two spheres of revealed/historical and natural/rational religion.

However, as the Second Preface moves forward in its account of this ‘experiment’, the project of comparison gains an evaluative import. Kant presents the ‘pure rational system of religion’ as ‘sufficient to genuine religion’ (Rel, 6: 12). He then distinguishes between ‘religion’ and ‘cult’ (6: 13), and suggests that the extent to which a historical faith falls outside the boundaries of mere reason, the more it is ‘cult’ than ‘religion’. This is then followed by an analogy, as Kant describes his inquiry into the scope of ‘compatibility’ or ‘unity’ as a way of separating out the layers of a historical religion, so that like ‘oil and water’ the ‘purely moral religion (the religion of reason) [can] float to the top’ (ibid.).

One can thus read each of the Religion’s four parts as a stage in this ‘experiment’. A religious tradition contains numerous doctrines, only some of which cohere with rational religion. Kant’s aim is to identify these doctrines, the overall ‘unity’ or at least ‘compatibility’ a historical religion has with rational religion, and thus the extent to which its doctrines (a) serve as ‘vehicles’ for genuine religion, or (b), as Kant finds for the virgin birth (Rel, 6: 80n.), are of little consequence, or finally (c) endanger genuine religion, promoting instead a ‘religion of rogation’ (Gunstbewerbung) or ‘mere cult’ (6: 51).Footnote ⁸

Part One, accordingly, serves as Kant’s inquiry into the ‘compatibility’ or ‘unity’ between the Christian doctrine of original sin (especially as rendered through the prevailing Lutheran and Lutheran Pietist theology with which Kant was most familiar) and its rational corollary. Part Two then moves on to the Christian doctrine of atonement and its rational corollary. Part Three, ‘The victory of the good principle over evil, and the founding of a kingdom of God on earth’ (Rel, 6: 93) considers the social and historical dimension of religion, specifically the need for a church and its role in promoting the highest good. Part Four then focuses on ‘service and counterfeit service’ (6: 151), i.e. ecclesiastical rituals and practices. Of the Religion’s four parts, it is the most polemical, as rules of piety often come to supplant morality as the means through which one becomes ‘well-pleasing to God’ (6: 170).

With this brief – and hopefully clear – explanation of the Religion’s overall project, we have now a way to read each part of the text. In the case of the present inquiry, while we may find various Augustinian tenets within Part One, the challenge is to determine how each tenet is assessed by Kant. When he holds them ‘up to moral concepts’ (Rel, 6: 12) does he find them to have ‘unity’ or at least ‘compatibility’ with PRSR? Do they cohere with genuine religion? Or are they in the end more in the service of ‘cult’? To answer this, we must, however, get past the general claim about Part One’s Augustinianism and consider instead its particular tenets, how they are portrayed by Kant in the Religion, and his findings with regards to their compatibility with rational religion. It is to this that I now turn.

3. Kant contra Augustine: Moral Depravity and Original Sin

One finds time and again reference to the supposed Augustinianism of the Religion’s treatment of moral evil. Part One is said to be ‘firmly ensconced within the Augustinian tradition’ (Quinn Reference Quinn1988: 91), replete with ‘Augustinian echoes’ (Mariña Reference Mariña1997: 379), ‘accommodating’ (Wood Reference Wood1970: 246) or built around tenets ‘fundamental to Augustine’ (Beiser Reference Beiser and Guyer2006: 594), or resting upon an ‘Augustinian metaphysic’ (Firestone and Jacobs Reference Firestone and Jacobs2008: 136). Its account of evil is supposedly ‘closer to that of the later Augustine’ than either ‘the standard views of the Enlightenment’ or the ‘intuitions of present day philosophers, including numerous Kantians’ (Allison Reference Allison2002: 338).

To see, however, how far from being the case this really is, let us begin by gaining some clarity as to what Augustine and his Reformation proponents actually claim. In particular, let us consider the following core Augustinian tenets:

1. 1. Our common progenitor, Adam, disobeyed God, committing the ‘primal sin’ whose consequences we have inherited.

2. 2. These consequences include both a corruption of our cognitive powers such that we can no longer know the good and a corruption of our volitional powers such that we can no longer will it.

3. 3. Although we are naturally oriented towards the good, due to the corruption of our faculties, we (a) mistake the ‘lesser’ goods of self-interest for the good, and (b) are volitionally incapable of willing other than in accordance with self-interest.

4. 4. Due to (2) and (3), neither can we recognize our moral depravity, nor were we able to recognize it, would we want to overcome it. Hence, neither would we seek divine aid nor choose to accept it if offered.Footnote ⁹

Although many interpreters have used Kant’s claim that humanity as a whole is morally corrupt as their basis for linking the Religion to the Augustinian tradition, this is not a claim that Kant sees as specific to either Augustinianism or even to Christianity. Instead, he begins Part One by stating first ‘[t]hat “the world lieth in evil” is a complaint as old as history’ (Rel, 6: 19), and then continues through the remainder of the paragraph to reference quite disparate traditions, as varied as Hinduism and Hellenistic mythology, each reflecting the idea that the world and humanity is ‘fallen’.

While at this level of generality there is certainly a point of agreement between Kant and Augustine, each of the above four tenets are nonetheless considered and rejected. To see this, let us begin with the first, particularly its claim that evil can be ‘inherited’. Contemporary readers will likely find this challenge to Augustinian Christianity the least disconcerting, for the notion that procreation can transfer a moral liability is anathema to our scientific worldview.Footnote ¹⁰ Accordingly, it should be apparent that for Kant the causal order of nature cannot serve as the mechanism through which we acquire our moral status. He thus writes: ‘[w]hatever the nature … of the origin of moral evil in the human being, of all the ways of representing [it] … the most inappropriate is surely to imagine it as having come to us by way of inheritance from our first parents’ (Rel, 6: 40).

Where the Augustinian has humanity sharing a common liability because of Adam’s primal sin, one that is then forgiven or repaid through the crucifixion, it is axiomatic for Kant that the acquisition of one’s moral status must ‘always be a deed of freedom’ (Rel, 6: 21). Hence, where the Augustinian allows us to be either good or evil through no act of our own, Kant is quite clear that there is no ‘transmissible liability’, either as a liability inherited from our Progenitor or through our being ‘relieved’ (entschlagen) of it through a ‘foreign satisfying merit’ (6: 118).

This, of course, has great bearing on the ‘Christian Story’, since original sin and redemption through the Cross are partner doctrines (the former tendered in service to the latter). So, where the dominant Augustinian version of this story does not consider the exercise of free will as necessary for our moral status, Kant is unambiguous on the matter. As such, neither can we have our moral condition transmitted to us, nor can we be relieved of it through its transmission to another.

The second and third of the above tenets can be understood as capturing the essential mechanics of the Augustinian conception of moral evil. Although there are some differences between how Augustine himself and his followers in the Reformation describe the consequences of the Fall, they all nonetheless subscribe to a privation account of evil, where as a result of Adam’s primal sin, human nature is now such that we can neither know the good nor be moved to act on its basis. Where Adam had, according to Augustine’s roughly Platonic worldview, a noetic grasp of the Form of the Good, his violation of God’s will compromised this capacity both for himself and his progeny. Hence, we are now left having to rely upon our senses for more than what they are capable of offering to us, grasping as a result only distortions or shadows of the true good, most notably the ‘lesser’ goods of corporeal need and subjective interest.

Similarly, the Fall is taken to have affected our volitional powers, for where Adam, in his original state, was moved to act by the good, we are now driven only by self-interest. Bodily desire, the ambitions of our ego, lust, pride and what Kant refers to as our ‘malignant inclinations’ (Rel, 6: 94) are all that now move us. Hence we have among Luther’s best known works The Bondage of the Will, where he argues against Erasmus, very much as Augustine argued against Pelagius, that our fallen wills are without the capacity to choose the good. We are thus, according to this tradition, out and out ‘slaves to sin’, existing, moreover, in a state of ‘total depravity’. For not only are we without any interest in doing the good for its own sake, but we are moved to act solely by the ‘lesser’ goods that drive our fallen nature. That is, this tradition would (in Kantian terms) hold that while we may out of self-interest still act in conformity with duty, there is no acting from duty.

Readers of the Religion who believe that Kant adopts an Augustinian conception of moral evil have, quite understandably, dismissed the text as in tension with, if not a departure from, the rest of the Critical corpus. For while Kant likewise recognizes that moral depravity has both cognitive and volitional characteristics, he by no means thinks that we are either incapable of knowing the good nor unmoved by it.

With regards to our cognition, Kant recognizes that our innate propensity to evil disposes us to ‘[t]hrow dust in our own eyes’ (Rel, 6: 38) so that we can, through one ‘inner lie’ or another rationalize away what morality commands. Yet rather than having here a privation thesis, that our immorality is due to a lack of the cognitive powers needed to know the good, Kant is quite clear that there is no ‘corruption of the morally legislative reason’ (6: 35), no ‘lost incentive for the good’, for ‘were we ever to lose it, we would also never be able to regain it’ (6: 46).

Likewise, instead of our wills being reduced to an arbitrium brutum, such that we are moved by nothing other than desire, Part One of the Religion (esp. 6: 24) offers one of the clearest statements of what Henry Allison calls Kant’s ‘Incorporation Thesis’, i.e. that ‘an incentive can determine the will to an action only insofar as the individual has incorporated it into his maxim’ (Allison Reference Allison1990: 40). Hence, while Kant depicts our propensity to evil as innate, whether or not we accede to it still depends upon an original ‘deed’ of freedom.Footnote ¹¹ In fact, where the Augustinian follows a privation account, Kant presents our Propensity to Evil as a ‘positive principle’ (6: 59), an ‘active and opposing cause’ (6: 57) which draws us away from the moral law and towards our giving priority to self-interest in our ‘supreme maxim’.

Perhaps even more to the point, Kant does not think that once we have given in to this propensity that we lose or suspend our free will. Although we choose as our ‘supreme maxim’ one which gives priority to self-interest over morality, Kant nonetheless maintains that this priority endures only so long as we continue to reaffirm it. On this he writes: ‘whatever his previous behavior may have been, whatever the natural causes influencing him, whether they are inside or outside them, his action is yet free and not determined’ (Rel, 6: 41). Likewise, he maintains that ‘it must equally be possible to overcome this evil, for it is found in the human being as acting freely’ (6: 37).

Accordingly, quite unlike the Augustinian, not only does Kant explain our moral condition in terms of a ‘positive principle’, but neither is evil understood in terms of a lost cognitive or volitional capacity. We do not become ‘slaves to sin’ and are not left without the cognitive and volitional powers necessary for choosing the good.Footnote ¹² Part One of the Religion, thus, rather than offering a position even compatible with Augustinianism,Footnote ¹³ instead advances an account of moral evil fundamentally at odds with it. Kant does not here ‘wobble’ or ‘capitulate’, but rather discusses the Augustinian account of moral evil and rejects it.

4. Kant contra Augustine: Divine Aid and the Change of Heart

According to the Augustinian tradition, there is nothing whatsoever we can do to morally better ourselves. We cannot overcome our fallen condition. We can do nothing to merit divine aid. Nor can we even choose to accept it if offered.Footnote ¹⁴ Although other soteriologies allow for such possibilities, that is not so with Augustine, Calvin or Luther. What technically marks out a position as semi-Pelagian is that it claims that we are capable of having a role in our moral restoration, even though divine aid is still necessary for the process. Hence, in contrast to the original Reformers, many further Protestant movements, including Arminianism, Methodism, Lutheran Pietism, Moravianism and Baptism (as well as contemporary American Evangelicalism), are all technically semi-Pelagian in that they maintain some form of concursus or ‘syncretism’ whereby we must in one manner or another do our part in order to receive grace and/or allow it to do its work.Footnote ¹⁵ The unmitigated Augustinian, however, proffers a ‘monergism’ until our powers are restored, and only thereafter a concursus as we work with God to persevere in our transformed state. In accord with this monergism, Augustine, Luther and Calvin maintained a set of further doctrines which, as we shall see, are not merely rejected by Kant, but are treated with contempt.

The first and most essential of these doctrines is typically called the ‘passive reception of grace’. As we are ‘slaves to sin’, lacking both the cognitive and volitional powers to choose the good, there is nothing we can do in support of our moral transformation. Hence, as the term indicates, we are completely passive beneficiaries of God’s reshaping of our natures, restoring our lost capacities. Second, we are, in our fallen condition, oriented towards self-interest alone, for not only do we lack the powers to cooperate with grace, but we actively resist it. Accordingly, grace is described as ‘efficacious’, as it is sufficient to override our resistance. Lastly, the Augustinian tradition maintains the ‘Mystery of Grace’, for since we have no positive role to play, whether or not we are made to be among the ‘elect’ is solely a matter of God’s will.Footnote ¹⁶

As should be expected, Kant does not find much in the above compatible with PRSR. Although he employs the preferred Pietist term ‘Change of Heart’ to represent the inner transformation by which we become ‘well-pleasing to God’, it is repurposed to represent the ‘revolution in the disposition of the human being’ (Rel, 6: 47) as opposed to the restoration of capacities lost to us in original sin. Likewise, rather than being passive recipients of a transformative grace, Kant describes the Change of Heart as the restoration of ‘the purity of the law, as the supreme ground of all our maxims’ (6: 46). This restoration, moreover, is not brought about through a ‘foreign influence’ that does the work for us, but rather demands the ‘exertion’ of our own powers (6: 51).

I will say more about this shortly, but before moving on, let us briefly look at Part One’s closing comments on Augustinianism, for we find there not just a philosophical critique, but an outright invective against its account of grace. While the passive reception of grace and its underlying privation account of evil is promoted by Augustinian Christianity under the guise of our need to be humble before God, it is rather, for Kant, illustrative of the ‘moral frailty’ that earlier in Part One was characterized as one of the three fundamental manifestations of our propensity to evil. Pulling no punches, Kant denounces the Augustinian picture as itself a delusion promoted by those who ‘find moral labor vexing’. It replaces ‘moral religion’ with a ‘religion of rogation (of mere cult)’, for if we are incapable of being moral, our relationship to God becomes one of just empty ritual. Hence, to Kant, Augustinianism is driven by our desire to relieve humanity from the ‘expectation of self-improvement’, for ‘under the pretext of a natural impotence’, it ‘conjures up … all sorts of impure religious ideas’ (Rel, 6: 51).Footnote ¹⁷

5. Moral Hope and the Limits of Kant’s Philosophical Theology

In the second edition of the Religion, Kant adds a brief discussion of the function of the ‘General Remarks’ or parerga found at the end of each of its four parts. Where the main body of each attends to specific doctrinal issues (original sin, atonement, providence, church rituals) so as to assess the extent to which there is ‘unity’ between PRSR and Christianity, their closing parerga consider matters of interest to rational religion that nonetheless exceed what can be adduced from its guiding principles.

Hence, we have in Part One an account of moral evil shaped by Kant’s familiar principles; and yet, in light of this account, we are led to a question for which he does not have an answer: whether or not, given our moral corruption, we can through our own powers bring about a Change of Heart, or whether divine aid is needed. For rather than defaulting into a Pelagian or semi-Pelagian view, or coming in the end to accept the Augustinian account of divine aid, Kant acknowledges that the guiding moral and epistemic principles which shape PRSR are on their own insufficient to yield an answer.

Unfortunately, this critical point of agnosticism has not been appreciated. For according to most Anglophone interpreters, Kant does advance a specific view – for some it is Augustinian, for others Pelagian, and for many, an unstable combination of the two. It has often been claimed that Kant’s attempt in the Religion ultimately leaves him with the ‘conundrum’ that, on the one hand, he seems to follow the Augustinian account of moral evil while at the same time he subscribes to the ‘Stoic Maxim’ that ‘a person’s moral worth is determined entirely by that person himself’.Footnote ¹⁸ Hence, through much of the past century, starting with Karl Barth and then repeated by a number of Christian philosophers, the Religion’s soteriology is vitiated by a fundamental ‘internal contradiction’.Footnote ¹⁹

Of course, we have already seen that half of the above critique is quite off-base, for Kant does not accept the Augustinian account of moral evil. Moreover, as I will discuss below, what we may call the ‘conundrumists’ are also wrong about what they claim as Kant’s ‘Stoic Maxim’. But first, let us look at a key passage frequently quoted to establish Kant’s allegedly inconsistent views on the need for divine aid. In German, ‘Gesetzt, zum Gut- oder Besserwerden sei noch eine übernatürliche Mitwirkung nöthig’ (Rel, 6: 44). Following the earlier Greene/Hudson translation, di Giovanni (Kant Reference Kant1996) translates this as ‘Granted that some supernatural cooperation is also needed’. What is missed here is the subjunctive form of the statement, for rather than a ‘granting’ of divine aid, Kant is offering it – as the issue of this parergon – as a conjecture to be pondered. It is thus more aptly translated by Pluhar (Kant Reference Kant2009) as ‘Supposing that, for him to become good or better, a supranatural cooperation were also needed’.Footnote ²⁰

As discussed, Kant’s account of moral evil does not eliminate the capacities needed to undergo a Change of Heart, and yet because we have given priority to self-interest over morality, there is a question as to whether or not we still might need God’s help to get ourselves out of this commitment. For as he states, even though our powers remain intact, there is still the question of ‘how can an evil tree bear good fruit?’ (Rel, 6: 45).

Kant’s response to this question, however, will only take us so far. Following the project of the Religion described in its Second Preface, Kant holds this question ‘up to moral concepts’ (Rel, 6: 12), but unlike the Augustinian, semi-Pelagian or Pelagian, he does not commit to a determinate answer.Footnote ²¹ To see this fully, let us look at the three key moral principles which inform this parergon.

The first and most obvious is ought implies can: for since we ought to undergo the Change of Heart, it must be possible. What is less obvious, however, is what is implied by this possibility. According to the conundrumists, Kant is committed to the maxim that ‘a person’s moral worth is determined entirely by that person himself’. Hence, even if we follow the above correctives to how Part One is to be read, as neither supporting the Augustinian privation account nor as ‘granting’ the necessity of divine aid, Kant’s alleged Stoic Maxim would still force upon him another dogma, this time, of Pelagianism.

While a charge of Pelagianism may be devastating to a Christian theologian, it is without philosophical teeth, for hardly would the philosopher be so impacted by the thought that they might be taken as a moral optimist. Accordingly, when the conundrumists sought to take Kant down, they could not simply accuse him of Pelagianism, but rather set it within what would be a philosophical objection: namely that of self-contradiction. Hence, they claimed that Kant both ‘grants’ the need for divine aid but at the same time maintains the ‘Stoic Maxim’ which would seem to bar it.

We have already addressed the first half of this alleged conundrum and shown that it is not only based upon an error of translation, but also a misunderstanding of Kant’s views on the nature of moral evil. As such, we have already seen that our moral restoration may not need divine aid, for unlike the Augustinian we are not without those powers necessary to bring it about. Nevertheless, if they were correct about the maxim in question, it still offers a basis for concern, as it does seem to require that our Change of Heart must be accomplished unaided. However, as we shall see, Kant does not subscribe to that maxim, at least as portrayed by the conundrumists, and so is not forced to deny God a role in our moral restoration.

Although it quite aptly follows from ought implies can that if we have a duty, we must have the powers necessary to act upon it, it does not follow from this that the receipt of any aid whatsoever is incompatible with our observance of the duty. Likewise, although we earn moral merit through the use of our powers, again it does not follow that we cannot still earn merit even if our powers are aided. This can be seen quite easily through the following examples.

Consider Kant’s use of ought implies can in connection with the highest good. There, ought implies can leads us to posit God, for the can, rather than referencing our powers, instead recognizes that without God’s ability to judge our worthiness and secure our moral deserts, the highest good would not be possible. Hence, in this familiar use of ought implies can, there is a shared effort between God and humanity with our role specifically being to earn moral merit.Footnote ²²

Or consider what is perhaps an even more apt example, namely, our duty to further our talents. Imagine a young violinist who, in order to pursue this duty, takes lessons, obtains scholarships and attends the local symphony. She thus receives aid from teachers, arts organizations or wealthy patrons, and likewise finds inspiration watching accomplished musicians perform. All these aid her in her efforts, and yet despite that she still would be deserving of praise, including moral praise, for her dedication, her sacrifices and her growing prowess. There is, in short, nothing here to suggest that the receipt of aid prevents one from earning moral merit.

While in one sense it is correct that ‘a person’s moral worth is determined entirely by that person himself’, for what moral worth they gain must be due to the employment of their own powers, because there are numerous ways in which aid may facilitate the use of these powers rather than replace them, there is no reason to claim that divine aid is necessarily incompatible with moral merit. Kant, in fact, brought out this point directly in both the Religion and the Conflict of the Faculties.

As characterized in the Religion, the Change of Heart, as the means by which we become ‘well-pleasing to God’,Footnote ²³ ‘must be the effect of our own work’ rather than something produced through ‘a foreign influence to which we remain passive’ (Rel, 6: 118). Similarly, Kant writes, ‘what is to be accredited to us as morally good conduct must take place not through foreign influence but only through the use of our own powers’ (6: 191). Likewise, in the Conflict of the Faculties, there are two lengthy discussions of this topic where Kant maintains that the Change of Heart ‘must be represented as issuing from the human being’s own use of his moral powers, not as an effect [resulting] from the influence of an external, higher cause by whose activity the human being is passively healed’ (7: 42). He then directly rejects both the Lutheran Pietist and Moravian accounts of grace because ‘on their view the effect of this power would not be our deed and could not be imputed to us’ (7: 59).

Yet none of this should be understood as a denial of divine aid überhaupt. What is rejected is specifically the representations of divine aid found in Augustinian and semi-Pelagian soteriologies. Insofar as both hold (though to different degrees) that we are incapacitated due to original sin, they both find need to posit a ‘foreign influence’ responsible for our Change of Heart. However, as Kant maintains that our powers remain intact, divine aid is given a different form, one that, instead of doing the moral work for us, rather supports the use of our own powers, be it through (as described at the opening of this parergon) a ‘diminution of obstacles’ (Rel, 6: 44), the ‘moral prototype’ of Jesus, who serves to inspire us by example (6: 48, 63), or some form of ‘positive assistance’ (6: 44). God’s aid for Kant is thus likened to that of a protector, teacher or patron, rather than, as the Augustinian would have it, a physician restoring the function of failed organs.

Finally, a third key principle which shapes this parergon, one that has been taken for granted through the above, is that our salvation depends upon earning moral merit. Not only is such merit made impossible by the Augustinian, but for additional theological reasons as well, they maintain that grace is an unmerited gift of God. Kant’s rejection of this should be apparent enough from the above quotations, as well as from his rejection of vicarious atonement. Moreover, in numerous passages, Kant rejects the idea of divine forgiveness or mercy (Rel, 6: 73, 74, 76, 141, 145n., 146n.), for whatever it is that may be given to us in grace must always be ‘fully in accord with eternal justice’ (6: 76).

This is not a minor concern for Kant, nor an ad hoc principle. As the highest good is the basis upon which ‘morality inevitably leads to religion’ (Rel, 6: 6, 8n.), both the broader themes as well as the particular details of PRSR flow out of this doctrine. Because the highest good reflects our need for an ultimate distribution of happiness in accordance with moral worth, rational religion in turn offers a soteriology whereby we can, in contrast to Augustinianism, each earn such worth. Hence, whether or not we become ‘well-pleasing to God’, whether or not we ultimately are rewarded or punished, cannot be determined through an unmerited dispensation, but, as Kant repeatedly states, must fully accord with divine justice.Footnote ²⁴

Where this leaves us when facing the question of this parergon can be understood as follows. First, given ought implies can, the Change of Heart must be possible. Second, Kant does not consider divine aid incompatible with moral merit. Third, it is in light of the highest good that Kant’s soteriology is invested in the importance of earned merit. Yet these together still do not for Kant give us the answer, for while we have the cognitive and volitional powers necessary for restoring morality to its rightful priority over self-interest, and while it is through the exercise of these powers that we are to earn moral merit, it remains an unknown as to whether our powers, although necessary, may nonetheless not be sufficient for the Change of Heart. Hence, Kant recognizes that we might need divine aid, not because we lack the powers to bring it about, but rather because, having committed ourselves to the priority of self-interest over morality, we would not in light of this priority ever choose otherwise.

The problem of the Change of Heart is thus, for Kant, not one engendered by the absence of our cognitive or volitional moral capacities, but rather a problem based upon the logic of what we have chosen for our supreme maxim: since we have chosen to give priority to self-interest over morality, we would not, in light of this commitment, ever choose the Change of Heart. Yet, as Kant makes quite clear, we continue to recognize, even under the reign of self-interest, that we ought to undergo this change. Likewise, we remain free to will it: for Kant holds that our supreme maxim goes unchanged only so long as we continue to reaffirm it.Footnote ²⁵ The mystery, then, is what brings us to make this change? ‘How can an evil tree bear good fruit?’

This is the parergon of Part One of the Religion, the limit of what can be offered by PRSR. Instead of either affirming or rejecting divine aid, he responds to the worry over what occasions the Change of Heart not by forsaking either his moral or epistemic principles, deferring to one dogmatic solution or another, but through the far more modest proposal that, given ought implies can, if our powers in the end are not sufficient, then be it through the ‘diminution of obstacles’ or a ‘positive assistance’ (Rel, 6: 44), God will aid us in the employment of our own powers to bring about the Change of Heart.

Only recently, such as in Andrew Chignell’s (Reference Chignell and Michalson2014) ‘Rational Hope, Possibility, and Divine Action’, is Kant’s actual attitude towards divine aid starting to be carefully examined. For while it is through one’s own ‘decision [that] a human being reverses the supreme ground of his maxims by which he was an evil human being’ (Rel, 6: 48), we are nonetheless unable to determine whether or not we can, unaided, come to make this decision. What Kant then proposes in light of this circumstance is not a ‘foreign influence’ that does the work on our behalf, nor the Pelagianism that would deny any need for divine aid whatsoever, nor even the semi-Pelagianism that too assertorically holds that divine aid is necessary. Instead, we are led to a hope, or more precisely, a conditional hope ‘that what does not lie in his powers will be compensated for by cooperation from above’ (6: 52; my translation).Footnote ²⁶ For in light of what would otherwise become a ‘hindrance to moral resolve’ (6: 5), Kant recognizes a moral need for this quantum of solace.