31. The Numinous and its Symbols
by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)
Philosophy begins in wonder. This was the view Plato expressed in his Theaetetus (CDP 155d) and echoed by many other philosophers down through the ages. Wonder in this sense is not merely idle curiosity, but a passion for the unknown that drives us to seek an underlying meaning behind the diversity of our life, impelling us to ever new depths of insight and heights of understanding. I have chosen to introduce philosophy to you in this course by starting not with wonder, but with its opposite, ignorance. This is because the logical progression of the parts of the tree of philosophy is opposite to the normal chronological progression in our experience of doing philosophy. In these lectures I am attempting to explain philosophy in such a way that, having completed the course, you will be able to set out on a philosophical journey of your own. That means that, although the best way to learn philosophy may be to move from metaphysics through logic and science to ontology, the best way to do philosophy will be to move from wonder through wisdom and understanding to a fuller recognition of your own ignorance.
Wonder relates primarily to our amazement at the great diversity of human experience, especially experiences giving rise to questions that cannot be answered merely by logical reasoning, but only by living through the experience itself. The most basic kind of philosophical wonder is wonder about the meaning of life. We cannot satisfy that wonder merely by developing metaphysical theories, sharpening our logical thinking skills, or expanding the depth and range of our knowledge. Rather, the meaning of life gradually emerges out of our willingness to be open to the kinds of "wonderful" experiences we are discussing here in Part Four. Even though our discussion of these experiences depends on words just as much as in the previous lectures, we must keep in mind that we experience wonder most profoundly in silence. All the theories we are examining as possible "answers" to the various problems raised here in Part Four pale in insignificance compared to the real answer we receive whenever we experience the wonder of silence. For silent wonder, more than any number of words, can impress us with a true sense of our own reality, and can urge us on to a level of wholeness that words alone can never express, giving the diversity of our words their ultimate meaning.
As you have been learning to do philosophy, I hope you have already experienced this philosophical kind of wonder. Indeed, another reason for starting this course with lectures on ignorance is that I have found this is one of the best ways to awaken wonder in those whose modern, scientific world view tends to isolate them from the many experiences that used to be a natural part of everyone's life, prior to the domination of technology over human society. I have considered teaching this course in the reverse order, starting with a lecture on death and ending with a lecture on myth. Although this would probably have made the course more interesting at the beginning, and thus attracted you more quickly to a serious study of philosophy, there would have been a danger of interpreting the kinds of experience discussed here too scientifically, without recognizing the wondrous mystery they point us toward. These days, when beauty is so often locked within the confines of a museum's walls, when religious experience is so often identified with doing "churchy" things, when death so often happens in the anonymity of a hospital ward, it has become all too easy to think we have really experienced the mysteries of life, when in fact all we have done is isolate ourselves from the real thing through the trappings of technology. Recognizing our ignorance of ultimate reality has, I hope, shocked you out of the common complacency that kills our instinct to wonder.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is one of the best examples of a philosopher who appreciated the shock value of recognizing human ignorance, as well as the connection between such a recognition and philosophical wonder. His collection of insights, called Pensées, is filled with passages expressing the tensions in human existence, as in the following:
What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!
... Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God....
Whence it seems that God, willing to render the difficulty of our existence unintelligible to ourselves, has concealed the knot so high, or better speaking, so low, that we are quite incapable of reaching it; so that it is not by the proud exertions of our reason, but by the simple submissions of reason, that we can truly know ourselves. (PP 434)
Pascal's paradoxes point us beyond our ordinary way of looking at the world, and confront us with a transcendent reality whose mystery stirs up silent wonder in the depths of our heart.
Today I shall introduce one of the most common and yet profound ways of experiencing the wonder of silence: namely, the discipline that has as its object the ultimate reality most people call "God". As we saw last week, one of the names traditionally given to the philosophical task of understanding this and other ways of experiencing the "unity in diversity" of existing things is "ontology"-i.e., the "study of being". Ontology, the study of what is, is one of the methods philosophers have used to resolve the various tensions created by our philosophical reasoning. For example, Kant not only recognized the tension between freedom and fate, as we saw in Lecture 22, but also argued that man has a "practical need" to resolve it in order to appreciate the "totality" of human knowledge and experience. We saw in Lecture 29 how he initially attempted to resolve this tension by adopting something like an ontological point of view in his account of the role of beauty and purpose in nature. In Lectures 32 and 33 this week we shall examine Kant's most significant example of how the tension between theory and practice is resolved in experience.
The ontological study of human experiences of the transcendent (i.e., of God) has often been regarded as one of the tasks of the branch of applied philosophy known as "philosophy of religion". However, the scope of this discipline ought to be limited to issues related more directly to our knowledge, such as the arguments for the existence of God, the nature and reliability of religious language and beliefs, and the problem of evil. The task of understanding what is typically called "religious experience" belongs to the branches of the tree of philosophy only insofar as we are asking whether or not such experiences can give us knowledge of God. The examination of the experiences as such belongs more properly to the leaves of the tree. The common term "religious experience" can be misleading, though, since it could be taken to imply that such experience can occur only in people who belong to some established religion. But in fact, many people who are not religious in any traditional sense do have experiences of this type at some point in their life. This suggests that we need a new name to refer to such experiences when studying their ontological character.
Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was a German theologian who adopted a Kantian framework in attempting to construct a thoroughgoing interpretation of religion and religious experience. His stress on discovering the essence of the empirical manifestation of religious experiences was quite different from Kant's stress on their rational foundation. Nevertheless, Otto believed his ideas could serve as a helpful complement to Kant's. After investigating the similarities between the religious experiences of people in many different traditions, especially those normally regarded as "mystical", Otto wrote a book, called The Idea of the Holy (1917), offering a now famous description of the fundamental characteristics of such experiences. Let's look today at just a few of his main ideas.
Because the word "God" is not used in all religious traditions, and because traditions that do refer to God inevitably employ different names and/or descriptions of God, Otto decided to avoid using the word "God" as much as possible. Moreover, in examining the bare phenomena of our experiences (i.e., when we focus only on what we can observe), we do not actually find God as such. What we find is various types of experience. Therefore, Otto coined the words "numen" and "numinous" to refer to whatever object gives rise to the deep, religious experiences sometimes referred to as the "presence" of God. (Remember, Kant had distinguished between the "phenomenal" and "noumenal" in a similar way (see Figure III.5).) Of course, most people would call this object "God". But Otto's goal was not to propose a theory about the object causing such experiences (i.e., whether it is really God, or nature, or just something we ate for lunch); instead, he only wanted to give a phenomenological description of what happens. This is, by the way, the typical method employed in doing ontology. For that reason ontology and "phenomenology"-i.e., describing the essential character of the phenomena we experience-always tend to be closely related disciplines.
According to Otto, the feeling of being in the presence of a numen,a transcendent reality that is "wholly other" than my own self, is a basic human experience, and should therefore serve as the starting point for any ontology of religious experience. The result of experiencing this numinous presence is to feel deeply impressed with my own dependence on it. This gives rise to what Otto called a "creature-feeling". He warned against the temptation to regard this "feeling of dependence" (as Schleiermacher had called it) as the primary reality, and to think we infer from it the belief in some underlying object. On the contrary, Otto claimed, the object mysteriously presents itself to us first, and the mystical feeling follows only as a consequence. No matter what we believe about God, this numinous presence will appear to us as something that can be described by appealing to the idea of the "holy".
Otto devoted a great deal of effort to the task of explaining the nature of our experience of the numinous. The "holy" object, he argued, will be both "nonrational" and "nonmoral". This does not mean it will be irrational and immoral, but only that questions of rationality and morality will be irrelevant when it comes to the feeling aroused by such a deep experience. Otto further named this feeling "mysterium tremendum" and argued that it involves five distinct "elements": awe, majesty, urgency, mystery (or "otherness"), and fascination. The feeling of awe refers to a special kind of fear or dread (a tremor) in the presence of something mysterious. (We shall look more closely at this feeling in Lecture 34.) The recognition of the majesty of the numinous object then gives rise to a sense of humble self-abasement (or "creaturehood") in us. The fact that this is a real experience of a living object, and not just an abstract philosophical theory, is expressed in the "energy" or urgency we feel whenever we have such an experience. This urgency can sometimes intensify our
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dread, as when it comes in the form of "the wrath of God", but it also leads to the recognition that this object is "wholly other" (i.e., mysterious). These feelings are all rather negative so far, and might on their own cause us to flee from the numinous object; but they are balanced by a sense of fascination that keeps us intensely interested in the experience and in its unknown object. With this brief description of Otto's theory in mind, we can summarize it by combining the two maps in Figure X.1, as in Figure XI.1. It is worth mentioning that |
Figure XI.1: TheNuminous Breakthroughandthe Idea of theHoly
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Kant himself had a profound awareness of this kind of numinous experience. For example, the passage concluding the second Critique (quoted above, at the very end of Lecture 22) refers to the "starry heavens above me" and the "moral law within me" as basic experiences ("I see them before me"), giving rise to the feelings of "admiration and awe", as well as to a sense of mysterious urgency and dependence ("I associate them directly with the consciousness of my own existence"): one could hardly cite a better example of Otto's ontological description of religious experience! Moreover, Kant elsewhere described these same experiences in terms of the "hand of God" in nature and the "voice of God" in our hearts. These two ways reason has of manifesting itself to human beings were, for Kant, self-validating, for they represent the very source of our scientific knowledge and moral goodness, respectively. As such, they unify the endless diversity that always characterizes our actual experiences of truth and goodness. This, in fact, is why the source of logical reasoning cannot itself be logical; nor can the source of the moral law itself be moral. Kant recognized (though he unfortunately did not emphasize the fact) that the "starry heavens" (nature) and the "moral law" (freedom) are like boundaries that we bump our heads against if we try to pass beyond them. For, just as Otto claimed, the source of these boundaries must itself be nonrational and nonmoral in order to be capable of unifying the diversity of our rational and moral experiences.
Anyone who has had such experiences of the numinous will have an immediate response to Nietzsche, or to anyone else who wishes to argue that God is dead. The death of God as Nietzsche proclaimed it was real enough; but it was the death of a false God, a God invented by human rationality more than by divine revelation. Those who have experienced God will know we cannot force God to live within the boundaries of any human system. Just as Nietzsche rightly claimed, to attempt to do so is to kill God; and the only proper response is to break out of that mold in order to regain the possibility of experiencing the life-giving reality itself. But this raises a crucial question: Once we have experienced the numinous, how can we describe it or understand it without forcing it into an unnatural mold?
Many scholars in the twentieth century addressed this question by referring to the power of symbols. In the remainder of today's lecture I shall discuss the views of an existentialist thinker we already met in Weeks VI and X and will meet again next week. Of Paul Tillich's many interesting insights, his account of the nature of faith and its relation to symbols is one of the most important. According to Tillich everyone has faith, because everyone has some "ultimate concern", even those who are not aware of it. Our ultimate concern is the thing or person or goal that all our energies in life are directed toward; it is the final determining factor in all our decisions. For many students, "doing well in university" is their ultimate concern-the issue determining what they do and when they do it most of the time. However, Tillich claimed that some things do not deserve this honor, for "the surrender to a concern which is not really ultimate" is "idolatrous" and hence "destructive" (DF 16,35): "Our ultimate concern can destroy us as it can heal us. But we never can be without it." An improper object of ultimate concern is dangerous because faith is more than mere trust or rational belief. As Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be (CB 168):
Faith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience. Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state of being grasped by the power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything that is participates. He who is grasped by this power is able to affirm himself because he knows that he is affirmed by the power of being-itself. In this point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In both of them faith is the basis of the courage to be.
We shall look more closely at Tillich's concept of "courage" in Lecture 34. The problem at this point is that the proper object of faith is what Otto called the "numinous"-in other words, it is the mysterious object of certain deep but inexplicable experiences we have. So how can faith exist if its object is a mystery? Tillich's answer was that objects that are not mysterious can lead us to the mysterious object. The former objects are called "symbols". Thus Tillich defined the special, religious form of faith as "the acceptance of symbols that express our ultimate concern in terms of divine actions" (DF 48).
Tillich carefully distinguished between "symbols" and "signs". A sign is a knowable object that merely points beyond itself to some other knowable object, whereas a symbol is a knowable object that points beyond itself to a hidden reality, while at the same time participating in the mystery to which it points. A road sign directs us to the place we are going, but when we reach our destination we see that it has nothing to do with the sign(s) we followed along the way. Like Wittgenstein's "ladder" (see Figure V.1), we can discard a sign once it has done its job. A symbol, by contrast, is intimately connected with our ability to experience the reality in question. Without symbols, we would be unable to experience
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the thing symbolized. As such, Tillich argued, "symbolic language alone is able to express the ultimate.... The language of faith is the language of symbols" (DF 41,45). The difference between signs and symbols is, in fact, parallel to the difference between analytic and synthetic logic. We can depict this difference by using the map in Figure XI.2, where the double-headed arrow (being a combination of the two types of arrow given in Figure X.1) represents participation. This correlation between the sign-symbol relationship and the analytic-synthetic relationship is not accidental. |
Figure XI.2: The Logic of Signs and Symbols
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For symbolic language is based on synthetic logic, while our ordinary, literal use of words (as signs) is based on analytic logic. Thus, just as the former, according to Tillich, relates to the language of faith, so also the latter relates to the language of knowledge. As we saw in Part Two, our literal use of words requires any "A" to remain "A" and hence always to be opposed to "-A". As a result, any "B" that is not identical to "A" must be included as part of "-A". (This, by the way, is often regarded as the third law of analytic logic, called the "law of the excluded middle": "B = either A or -A".) Signs always direct us in this way around the world of the known and the knowable. But whenever we use words in a symbolic way, the original symbol ("A") itself presents to us a hidden reality ("-A") that we can actually experience, because this A participates in the -A, and vice versa. (Obviously, synthetic logic therefore rejects the law of the excluded middle.) Symbols enable objects, paradoxically, to be for us something they are not, so we should not be surprised to find some philosophers basing symbolic language on the "law of paradox" or "law of participation" (see Lecture 12).
Let's take my wedding ring as a simple example. If I were to regard this object merely as a sign of my status as a married person, then the ring itself, as an object, would not be very important to me. I would be more concerned with how it looks on me than with what it means to me. If I were to lose it, I would be sad mainly because of its monetary value, being made out of gold. But the loss would not have any effect on my marriage, since I could buy a new one that would point to my married status just as effectively. However, because I regard my ring as a symbol of my commitment to love my wife as long as we are alive, the ring itself actually participates in my marriage. To lose it or even to decide not to wear it would be a tragedy, since part of my marriage would thereby be lost. I could, of course, buy another ring to replace it; but it would take a long time for that new object to become as profound a symbol of the mystery of love as my original ring is. For love, as we saw last week, is one of the most common types of experiences that require us to interpret objects as symbols.
Since this week's lectures deal mainly with "religious experience", let's use the Christian ritual of the Eucharist as another example to help clarify just how symbols operate. When Christians partake of the Lord's Supper, each participant usually eats a small piece of bread and drinks a small amount of wine or grape juice. The significance of this ritual varies greatly, depending on whether the person regards these common, "knowable" objects as signs or as symbols. Regarded as signs, the bread and wine point the person to some other knowable reality, such as the actual body and blood of the historical man named Jesus Christ (in the case of the Catholic who believes in the doctrine of "transubstantiation"), or to the memory of this same person and what he did (as in the typical Protestant interpretation). In both cases the original objects lose their importance as bread and wine once we apprehend the object to which they point. Regarded as symbols, however, these same objects no longer have anything to do with magic or memory; instead, they are recognized for what they are (namely, bread and wine), but they are believed to participate in the mystery of the Incarnation of God in human flesh. Eating them is therefore a profound expression of one's own willingness to participate in this mystery. By experiencing this ritual symbolically, the person is transported by these ordinary objects into a deep communion with a mysterious reality that can never be comprehended, except perhaps in the incomprehensible wonder of silence.
To conclude our brief look at Tillich's position, let's use his definition of faith to distinguish between metaphysics and ontology-two disciplines that are easily confused, even by philosophers. Whereas metaphysics is the search for knowledge of an ultimate reality, ontology is a search for experience of an ultimate concern. So as we study various forms of ontology here in Part Four, we must keep in mind that the "ultimate", toward which our attention is pointed by the various symbols we meet in our experience, is an ultimate attitude or way of life much more than an ultimate object or set of dogmas. Such symbols should all be regarded not as giving us metaphysical knowledge of ultimate reality, but only as kindling within us the silent fire of concern for the ultimate direction and meaning of our life. In the remaining two lectures this week, we will go back to Kant, in the hope that his Critical philosophy may be able to provide us with some even deeper insights into what it means to be religious in this way.
32. Evil and the Paradox of Grace
Ever since Lecture 8 I have been putting more emphasis on the ideas of Immanuel Kant than on any other philosopher-indeed, far more than would normally be thought appropriate for an introductory-level course such as this. Kant's terminology is so complex, his theories so deep, and his arguments so controversial, that most teachers of beginning students dare not mention anything more than the essential features of Kant's moral theory, with perhaps some passing references to his epistemology. But in this course, we have covered not only these areas (in Lectures 22 and 8), but also his view of metaphysics proper (Lecture 9), his basic logical distinctions (Lecture 11), his defense of the principle of causality for science (Lecture 21), his political theory (Lecture 27), and his theory of beauty (Lecture 29). I have two reasons for focusing so much attention on this one philosopher. First, I am far more familiar with his theories than with those of any other philosopher, so I am more confident in offering interpretations that are both accurate and meaningful. Indeed, much of my research and nearly all of my publications have focused on this one figure. The second reason, however, is far more significant: I believe Kant comes closer to a balanced and systematic treatment of the whole range of philosophical issues than any other philosopher. Moreover, his treatment is nearly always insightful and usually right as well!
The one exception to my generally positive impression of Kant's approach to philosophical issues came when I first read his book, Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793). At that time, I was still in the early stages of developing my own interpretation of the other areas of Kant's philosophy. As someone who hopes to qualify as a Christian, though without sacrificing my freedom to question, doubt, and/or reinterpret some of the traditional dogmas, I had welcomed Kant's metaphysical humility: his persuasive demonstrations that God's existence cannot be proved theoretically (arguments whose details we have not had time to examine in this course) seemed to be a profound philosophical confirmation of the biblical warnings against trying to storm heaven with human knowledge. His moral theory had seemed even more obviously compatible with Christian thinking: the dual principles of freedom and the moral law struck me as a beautiful restatement of Jesus' internalization of ethics; and Kant's moral argument seemed like an appropriate way of expressing the moral person's conviction that God must exist, even though we cannot prove it. Even in his account of beauty and natural purpose in the third Critique, Kant had seemed intent on developing a theocentric philosophy-one that points the reader to an ever-deepening awareness that God is "all in all" (1 Corinthians 15:28). But when I first read Kant's Religion, my heart sank: he seemed to be reducing the riches of religious experience to nothing but morality in disguise!
Fortunately, I decided to reread Religion a few years later, when my perspectival interpretation of Kant's System was more thoroughly developed. In so doing, I felt as if interpretive scales were falling from my eyes: an entirely new understanding of what Kant was attempting to accomplish became clear to me. When I first read the book, I had allowed myself to fall for the traditional interpretation, whereby Kant is not really seriously attempting to defend religion at all, much less Christianity, but is merely hoping to convert religiously-minded people to a Kantian substitute for religion. What I realized the second time around is that Religion is not a book about the "philosophy of religion" in the sense we ordinarily think of it nowadays; rather, it is a book about the being of religion, an interpretation of what it means to be religious. Moreover, I realized that Kant was not reducing religion to mere morality, but was raising morality (which is a hopeless ideal on its own) to the higher (and more realistic) level of religion! For this reason, and because I have studied this book more carefully than any of Kant's other works, I shall devote most of two lectures to explaining its contents.
What does it mean to be religious? Is "being religious" something all human beings necessarily experience, or is it just an optional choice some people make-e.g., when they are afraid of what will happen to them after they die? And which religion, if any, is the best one to follow? Kant's Religion is a systematic attempt to answer these and many other questions, based on the foundations laid in his preceding systematic works. He divided the book, somewhat predictably, into four parts, each representing a stage in the process of explaining what makes religion what it is. Here we shall examine the first two stages, leaving the other two for the following lecture. But first, an overview of these four stages (see Figure XI.3) should help you to keep track of where we are going. Book One asks whether human beings are good or evil by nature, and defends both an interesting two-sided answer, in terms of the "radical evil" that lies at the very root of our nature. Book Two considers how we are able to overcome the problems created by the presence of such evil in the world, arguing that some inscrutable assistance from a benev-
FigureXI.3:TheFourStagesinKant'sSystemofReligion
olent God must be presupposed. Books Three and Four then deal with the new problems that arise when good-hearted people come together in social groups. Book Three argues that the final "victory" over evil can take place only when human beings join together in a religious community (i.e., a "church"). And Book Four distinguishes between true and false ways of serving God in a church.
According to Kant evil is the basic limiting condition that gives rise to the need for religion. That there is evil in the world is not an issue he believes is open to doubt. The philosophical tasks are to identify what evil is, why it is here, and where it comes from (i.e., how it arises). In the process of discussing these issues, he totally ignored the so-called "problem of evil" that is now regarded as one of the major areas of concern for philosophers of religion-i.e., the problem of explaining how a good and all-powerful God could permit undeserved suffering and evil to exist. Such an attempt to justify God in the face of evil is called a "theodicy". Kant's total neglect of this issue in Religion may be due in part to the fact that he had written a separate essay on this subject shortly before starting to write this book. That essay, entitled "On the failure of all the philosophical essays in the theodicy" (1791), had argued that the attempt to defend God in this way is bound to fail. Appealing directly to the biblical story of Job (the Old Testament character whom God allowed to suffer horrendously, merely as a test of his faith), Kant had examined nine different types of theodicy, demonstrating why each one must fail. Any attempt to concoct rational excuses for God's decision to allow evil to exist is misdirected, because knowledge of such mysteries is beyond the limits of human understanding. Instead, the very insolubility of the problem serves to heighten the existential significance of evil by forcing each individual to accept or reject God on the basis of faith.
Book One of Religion begins by asking whether human beings are good or evil by nature. First, Kant rejected the possibility that we might be both good and evil; this can be true of our empirical character (because actions can be partly good and partly bad in their outcome), but the motive behind an action must be either good or evil. Kant then distinguished between a "predisposition" (the universal tendency all human beings have at birth, before any moral actions have been performed), a "disposition" (the fundamental subjective basis, in the depths of our character, that determines how we choose to act at any given point in time), and a "propensity" (the likely tendency of a person, or indeed, of the whole human race). Kant proceeded to argue that our predisposition is good, because our animality, our humanity, and our personality all contain features that are clearly intended for good; our disposition may be good or bad at any given time, because it cannot be both; and our propensity is always towards evil, because our predisposition has somehow been corrupted. Just how this corruption occurred is a question Kant claimed human reason is powerless to answer. But as a reminder that it has occurred, he adopted the term "radical evil", thus indicating that the human will (or disposition) has been corrupted at the very outset ("radical" means "at the root") by an unexplainable evil force that does not belong to our original nature (our predisposition).
What exactly is this evil? Kant defined evil as a reversal in "the moral order of the incentives" that determine our maxims (RBBR 31). You may recall from Lecture 22 that for Kant a choice is morally good whenever we obey the voice of the moral law in our hearts, and that a person who makes such a choice deserves praise if he or she has had to sacrifice some personal happiness (or "self-love") in order to do the right thing. Evil is therefore a person's decision to let matters of self-love be more important than the commands of conscience. Kant argued that empirical evidence alone is enough to demonstrate that human beings everywhere begin their moral lives with choices based on self-love rather than on the moral law. He also tried to develop a transcendental argument, though its details remain obscure in the text. I have reconstructed this argument as follows: a person cannot make a truly moral choice until he or she knows what evil involves as well as good; since our predisposition is good, we instinctively know what is good by listening to our conscience; but until we actually make an evil choice, we cannot be said to have attained genuine freedom, inasmuch as we will not have a true understanding of what is at stake; the first genuinely free (i.e., moral) act of every person must therefore be a choice to do evil.
Why begin a book about "rational religion" with the claim that we all start out by ruining our chances of living a morally spotless life? Doesn't this call into question the rationality of our effort to obey the moral law-an effort whose importance Kant had emphasized so firmly in the second Critique? Indeed it does! And this point baffled most of Kant's philosophical peers, who accepted the Enlightenment's absolute faith in the powers of human reason, and thought Kant did too. Goethe, for example, exclaimed that Kant had "slobbered on his philosopher's cloak" with the doctrine of radical evil (see KCR 129n). But Kant himself was not put off; for he knew what he was doing. Our experience of evil and our inability to explain its rational origin except by merely confirming its mystery ("it's radical!") serve to fill us with an existential wonder that impels us to be religious. Indeed, Kant's intention in Book One was to present us with the transcendental conditions for the possibility of religion: religion is possible only in a world where rational beings are meant to be good, but are unable to fulfill that existential goal. And this is the world we find ourselves living in.
Book Two takes a somewhat surprising turn. Having argued that human beings inevitably start out with an evil disposition as a result of the negative influences of radical evil, Kant went on to claim that the presence of our good predisposition gives us a grain of hope that there may be a way of transforming our evil disposition into a good one. But how can this happen? First, Kant suggested, the only hope for anyone who believes morality is a worthwhile goal to pursue is to believe in a God who in some way provides us with the assistance we need to overcome our evil disposition. In traditional Christian theology, such assistance is referred to as "grace". The main question for Book Two is: on what basis does a person have rational grounds for hoping that God will provide such assistance? In particular, is there something we must do to merit divine grace, or is it a free and unmerited gift from above? Kant's solution to this problem is often criticized for being paradoxical and, as a result, unclear. But I believe the paradox is intentional: for in the context of Kant's Critical philosophy, any attempt to explain how God (the transcendent reality) could assist human beings (living as we do in the phenomenal world) is bound to be paradoxical. Kant would defend his explanation as merely an accurate reflection of a paradoxical situation.
Book Two begins by introducing what Kant called the "archetype" of perfect humanity (RBBR 54), then uses familiar biblical imagery to describe its nature. This archetype has a divine origin; yet it "has come down to us from heaven" to reside within each person (54-55). It empowers us to do what would otherwise be impossible: to turn away from the evil disposition (or evil "heart", as Kant also called it) and begin living by a new principle. In order for this change to a "good heart" to be effective, however, we must have "practical faith" in this archetype. By this Kant meant that we must believe that if we do everything in our power to obey the moral law, then God will supply what is lacking. On this basis, many interpreters have accused Kant of defending a form of "righteousness by works", whereby we must earn our own salvation. Yet this is not the way Kant himself portrayed his position. Rather, he insisted such divine assistance is entirely undeserved and, in any case, cannot be controlled or determined by anything we do or fail to do. Indeed, he even warned that we are unable to see anyone's disposition (even our own!) clearly enough to know for certain whether it is good or evil. God, he claimed, judges us by this disposition, but because we are ignorant of its true nature at any given point in time, the only basis we have for judging our current status is to assess the morality of our actions. If we see evidence of moral progress, this is a sign that our disposition may be good. Nevertheless, because we all started with an evil disposition, our situation is hopeless unless we believe God will make up for our shortcomings. In order for religion to be rational, though, God must use some basis for deciding who to assist and who not to assist. Kant's point, then, was not that we can make ourselves worthy to be accepted by God (who demands perfection), but rather, that we can make ourselves worthy to be made worthy by God.
Because the archetype has the same function in Kant's system of rational religion that Jesus has in Christianity, Book Two deals with a number of theological issues relating to Jesus' nature and status. The issues include Jesus' divine nature, his human nature, his virgin birth, his resurrection from the dead, his status as a moral example, and various broader doctrines such as sanctification, eternal security, and justification by grace. Many interpreters have claimed that Kant's intention was to deny any real value to most if not all of these traditional doctrines. However, such interpretations are based on a careless reading of the text. For what Kant's actual strategy in each case was to argue that such doctrines can have a legitimate rational meaning provided they serve the practical goal of helping the religious believer to follow the moral law more consistently. In each case he warned against any interpretation that is likely to produce a morally lazy individual. What many interpreters overlook is that he also warned against the opposite danger: dogmatically asserting that certain doctrines cannot be true, simply because they cannot be proved theoretically. Even a doctrine such as the virgin birth, Kant warned, cannot be absolutely denied, inasmuch as the possibility of miracles is an issue that lies beyond the bounds of human reason. As explained in great detail in my recent book, Kant's Critical Religion (2000), the true intention of Kant's arguments is to show us how those who wish to believe that, for example, Jesus was God in human form, must interpret this doctrine in order for it to support rather than hinder the genuinely religious core of a person's beliefs. Kant himself certainly did not recommend that we adopt such doctrines as philosophers; he did not claim that we must believe them in order to be accepted by God. But he did demonstrate that we can believe them without sacrificing our rationality, and that doing so can sometimes greatly strengthen our religious faith.
One of the main reasons so many interpreters have misunderstood Kant's intentions in Religion is that the standard English version of this book for most of the twentieth century utilized a very misleading translation of the title. Greene and Hudson translated Kant's title (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft) as Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Yet Kant elsewhere clarified that the term Grenzen refers to the boundaries that separate an area from the surrounding territory, not as absolute limits that cannot be surpassed. (For the latter, Kant used the term Schranken.) Moreover, the term "blossen" does not mean "alone"; it means "naked" or "bare". The effect of these two mistranslations has been to give readers the initial impression that Kant's book will be an attempt to force religion entirely within the strict limits of reason. But as we have already seen, this is not what he did. Rather, his strategy in each Book is to distinguish between what reason can and cannot tell us about our religious impulses.
In Book One we learned that reason can tell us what evil is, and that we are all inevitably ensnared by evil desires; but it cannot tell us the source of this mysterious phenomenon, except to say that it is not rooted in the very definition of what it means to be human. In Book Two we learned that reason can tell us how conversion works and what we must do in order to have rational grounds for hoping God will save us; but it cannot tell us who really is good, nor can it give us definite knowledge of who will receive God's grace. In the next lecture we shall see how important it is to keep in mind that Kant was not promoting a one-sided view of religion as nothing but moral reason in disguise, but was describing the two sides of all genuine religion: the rational (and therefore universal) core along with the historical (and therefore inevitably non-universal) shell. As we shall see, both aspects of religion must work together in order our religious experience to be genuine.
Taken together, evil and grace represent a twofold basis for wonder as we ponder the human situation. Grace in particular is not something we can ever hope to understand through reason alone-unless we have actually experienced it. Good philosophy is superior to traditional theology precisely to the extent that it does not claim to understand what is by its very nature incomprehensible. It merely hopes and provides rational grounds for hope. But in so doing, its function is not to undermine religion, but rather to prepare us to experience the fruit of such hopes. Lecture 33 will examine how Kant himself regarded the first two stages of his theory as giving rise to the experience of religion through the forming of communities devoted to serving God.
33. Community and the Mystery of Worship
You probably noticed in the previous lecture that Kant's account of what it means to be religious bears a striking resemblance to the biblical stories of the fall of Adam in Genesis 1-3 and the saving work of Jesus in the Gospels. So close are the parallels that some commentators have actually accused Kant of simply translating Christian ideas into a rational terminology. Before continuing with our study of Religion, we must therefore consider how best to interpret these parallels. They are, in fact, a crucial part of Kant's strategy. For in the Preface to the second edition, he explained that the book carries out two experiments: the first is to see how far philosophy can go in disclosing the rational elements of all genuine religion; the second is to see how well the beliefs and practices of one specific "historical faith" correspond to this rational ideal. For the latter, Kant chose Christianity, the tradition "already at hand" (RBBR 11, 123). With this in mind, we should not interpret the presence of parallels as a weakness in Kant's theory; rather, the closer the parallels, the more successfully Kant has demonstrated that Christianity has a high degree of compatibility with rational religion. For he always justified the elements of the latter with arguments that do not depend on Christian tradition.
In Books One and Two Kant has established the rational elements that make religion a necessary concern for all human beings. Every person starts out with a potential to be good (based on their predisposition), yet inevitably allows this original innocence to be corrupted with evil choices. Each individual is thereby presented with the challenge of how to transform their evil heart into a good heart-a change that is possible only for those who have faith in the assistance of a divine power present within them, in the form of the "archetype" of perfection. Books Three and Four shift from a focus on individual salvation to an examination of how individuals who have experienced such an inner transformation can form communities of good-hearted people in order to please God through their actions. This conception of the whole human race pleasing God is the ultimate goal of all genuine religion. The problem, as Kant noted at the outset of Book Three, is that individuals-even good-hearted ones-inevitably corrupt each other whenever they relate together in groups:
Envy, the lust for power, greed, and the malignant inclinations bound up with these, besiege his nature, contented within itself, as soon as he is among men. And it is not even necessary to assume that these are men sunk in evil and examples to lead him astray; it suffices that they are at hand, that they surround him, and that they are men, for them mutually to corrupt each other's predispositions and make one another evil. (RBBR 85)
The solution to this problem is to form a community for the purpose of encouraging each other to do good. Kant called such a community the "ethical commonwealth". It differs from a "political commonwealth" insofar as the latter unites people together by means of external laws ("laws of coercion"), whereas the former must use only internal laws ("laws of virtue"). Some Christian readers have complained that a genuinely religious community must be far more than merely a group of people who meet together to do good deeds: social organizations such as the Rotary Club meet that criterion without needing to be religious at all! But Kant actually recognized this problem. For the second step in the argument of Book Three is that an ethical commonwealth is bound to fail in its attempt to encourage moral goodness if it does not conceive of itself as a "People of God" under divine guidance. For without viewing the community from this perspective, there would be no hope that our differing views of what constitutes a "virtuous life" (see Lecture 24) could work together for the common good without applying any external force.
The argument Kant used to support this crucial step is brief and has been overlooked by virtually all past interpreters. So let us take a closer look. The argument presented in the simple paragraph at RBBR 89 can be expressed in a more logically precise form as follows:
1. The highest good: The true end of human life on earth is to realize the highest good, by seeking to be worthy of happiness through obedience to the moral law. Working towards this goal is a human duty.
2. Radical evil: Human beings on their own seem to be incapable of achieving the highest good, because of the radical corruption in the heart of each individual. At best, all we can say is that "we do not know whether ... it lies in our power or not."
3. Ethical commonwealth: No organization based on externally legislated rules (i.e., no "political commonwealth") can achieve this goal, because the moral law can be legislated only internally-i.e., through an "ethical commonwealth".
4. "Ought" implies "can": Anything reason calls us to do (i.e., any human duty) must be possible; if it seems impossible, we are justified in making assumptions that will enable us to conceive of its possibility.
5. Divine assistance: The only way to conceive of a human organization that could succeed in becoming an ethical commonwealth (i.e., in promoting the highest good as "a social goal") is to presuppose the assistance of "a higher moral Being through whose universal dispensation the forces of separate individuals, insufficient in themselves, are united for a common end." This Being legislates the moral law internally to all individuals, thus insuring the harmony of their diverse actions.
6. God exists. In order to work towards the fulfilment of the highest good, we must therefore presuppose that God exists as a gracious moral lawgiver, and that to obey the moral law is to please God. That is, the ethical commonwealth can succeed only if it takes a religious form. (KCR 167-168)
I call this Kant's "religious argument" for the existence of God. In a nutshell, it states that trusting in a moral God provides the only rational basis for believing that our human duties can be fulfilled.
The technical term used in Book Three for this "People of God" is church. What is crucial in Kant's view is to regard the church not as a purely physical, humanly-organized entity, but to see it as an invisible spiritual reality, based on rationally-justifiable principles. Indeed, following the pattern of the four main categories (see Figure III.9), Kant suggested four basic principles for the organization of any "true church" (RBBR 92-93): (1) its quantity is "Universality, and hence its numerical oneness ... with respect to its fundamental intention"; (2) its "quality" is "purity, union under no motivating forces other than moral ones"; (3) its "relation", both "of its members to one another, and ... of the church to political power", is determined by "the principle of freedom"; and (4) its "modality" is "the unchangeableness of its constitution", i.e., of certain "settled principles" that are "laid down, as it were, out of a book of laws, for guidance". The form of the true (universal) church, then, can be mapped onto the cross as follows:
Figure XI.4:
The Archetypal Characteristics of the Invisible Church
The two 1LARs that give rise to this 2LAR can be identified as distinguishing between characteristics concerned with laws (+) or freedom (-) on the one hand, and between their external (+) or internal (-) manifestations on the other.
The goal of Book Three is to show how an ethical commonwealth, under God's guidance and based on these principles, can make the "kingdom of God" real on earth. Much of Book Three is therefore devoted to discussing how the church can meet this goal more effectively. First and foremost, the participants in a church must distinguish between their specific historical/ecclesiastical traditions (called their "faith" by Kant) and the principles of rational morality that lie at its core (called the "religion" proper). Kant had this distinction in mind when he claimed (RBBR 98): "There is only one (true) religion; but there can be faiths of several kinds." The problem is that religious people tend to regard their faith as a unique source of salvation, sometimes even denying that moral goodness (the core of "pure religion" in Kant's view) has any relevance at all. This tendency often leads them to regard their scripture as a set of absolute truths telling them what to believe and what to do, regardless of the content. Kant actually agreed that all faiths need a revelation, as best preserved in a holy scripture such as the Bible, because reason alone (as we have seen) cannot answer all our questions. However, he argued that those who interpret scripture for the church ought to use morality as their principal guideline. To illustrate how this can be done, he suggested symbolic interpretations of numerous Christian doctrines and practices, showing how interpretations that point beyond the literal story to an underlying moral meaning preserve what is most essential to the Christian message, while protecting it from being perverted into cultic propaganda.
The key question here is: "How does God wish to be honored?" (RBBR 95). Religious believers tend to answer in one of two ways: either God wants us to be good and regards worship as an optional extra, or God wants us to worship and regards moral goodness as unimportant or even impossible. Kant argued that a true religion will adopt the former standpoint, while a false religion adopts the latter. The latter is false because it requires as a duty belief in dogmas that cannot be known to be true by bare reason, claiming that those who blindly believe will be given the gift of moral goodness without actually needing to do good deeds at all. True religion, by contrast, correctly recognizes that doing good is the universal duty of all human beings (the only way to please God), adding that our inevitable moral shortcomings can be overcome through faith that God's grace will provide a supplementary gift to make up for the duties we are unable to fulfill. Book Four develops this theme in considerable detail, in terms of the distinction between "true service" and "pseudo-service" of God.
To illustrate the difference between true and false service, we can imagine ourselves ordering a meal at our favorite restaurant. Waiter A fills the order with the food that was requested, but never smiles or engages in friendly conversation. Waiter B is all smiles and chats at length about everything under the sun, but ends up letting the food go cold and bringing someone else's order to the table. A friendly attitude would obviously be a welcomed supplement to good service, but on its own it is insufficient. In this example waiter A performs 'true service', despite being unfriendly, whereas waiter B performs 'pseudo-service' by allowing the supplement (friendliness) to stand in the way of performing good service (delivering hot food to the correct table). Kant seemed to have such situations in mind when he defined pseudo-service as
the persuasion that some one can be served by deeds which in fact frustrate the very ends of him who is being served. This occurs ... when that which is of value only indirectly, as a means of complying with the will of a superior, is proclaimed to be, and is substituted for, what would make us directly well-pleasing to him. (RBBR 141)
Does Kant's conception of the service of God in a true religion leave any legitimate role for worship, prayer, and other attempts to experience God in our daily life? The traditional interpretation claims that he totally rejected all such practices as illusions that lead to pseudo-service. But this ignores one of the most important distinctions in Book Four, between "direct" and "indirect" ways of serving God. We serve God directly and immediately whenever we do our moral duty; we serve God indirectly whenever we do something that heightens our awareness of what this duty is, or encourage us to obey it. Along these lines, Kant explicitly allowed that religious practices such as prayer, church-going, baptism, and communion can play a significant role in a genuinely religious life: they stir up our moral sense and make us more keenly aware of what we ought to do. Kant's negative words about such practices apply only to false interpretations of their significance, as when someone interprets praying for a neighbor's financial problems as fulfilling a religious duty without ever considering helping the neighbor, or thinks attending church pleases God even if we learn nothing about how to live a better life, or regards baptism as a way of forcing God to accept people into the heavenly kingdom, or treats the communion ritual as a magical way of making a bad person good. The correct interpretation in each case must be symbolic: such practices belong to genuine religion only when they point beyond themselves to a moral meaning.
Some of you may be inclined to conclude up to this point that the traditional interpretation is right, that Kant did attempt to reduce religion to morality. We can settle this issue once and for all by examining Kant's definition of religion. The first main section of Book Four begins by defining religion as "the recognition of all duties as divine commands" (RBBR 142). The reductionist interpretation reads this as meaning "to be religious is to act morally". But this is not what Kant wrote! Rather, his whole point is that religion goes a step beyond self-sufficient morality by calling on God for assistance in what is recognized as an otherwise impossible task. The text goes on to distinguish between "natural religion" (religion that can be universally known through bare reason) and "revealed religion" (religion that requires access to some specific historical faith). For the philosopher, natural religion must have priority, because it is grounded in what we can know (namely, our human duties); but in order to realize the final goal of religion and actually please God, natural religion must be supplemented with revealed religion. The test of whether a faith's alleged revelation is genuine is whether or not it encourages the believers to do their duties. But this is not reductionism; rather, it is a reasoned attempt to ensure that religious faith is rooted in a rational core than can be shared by all human beings.
Although I have not emphasized the architectonic pattern in Kant's religious system up to now, you may have noticed that each of its four stages can be expressed in terms of a three-step argument. Accordingly, his system of religion can be summarized by mapping all the steps onto a 12CR (cf. Figure III.9), as follows:
Figure XI.5: The Twelve Steps in Kant's Religious System
This map summarizes Kant's solution to the first of his two experiments. He regarded these twelve elements as describing what it means to be religious, regardless of what tradition a person belongs to. The remaining question, then, is to what extent Christianity conforms to this model.
In the Preface to the first edition of Religion, Kant distinguished between the standpoints of the philosophical theologian and the biblical theologian: the former take reason alone as their guide, while the latter regard scripture as the primary authority. In this way, he left room for Christians (or any other religious believers) to defend those aspects of their faith that might not have a directly moral content. As we have seen, all he required is that the believer's faith must not contradict morality. Kant never denied the legitimacy of a unique Christian standpoint (nor that of any other religious faith); he merely showed us how to be sure our faith maintains a genuinely religious character, without degenerating into mere superstition or fanaticism. Kant's own conclusion regarding his second experiment was surprisingly positive: he repeatedly referred to Christianity as the only truly moral faith, even suggesting at one point that it may be destined to become "the universal religion of mankind" (RBBR 143, 145-151).
I hope I have made clear in this and the previous lecture that Kant's theory of religion is not so much a "philosophy of religion" that covers the topics we now tend to expect from books on that subject, as a philosophical theology that aims first and foremost to clarify what it means to be religious, and secondly argues that the Christian faith has the highest potential of all such faiths to promote the universal religion that has a pure moral core. That Kant (despite commentators' tendency to believe otherwise) was writing a book about religious experience can perhaps best be seen by examining the evidence that his entire philosophy was an attempt to develop what I call a "Critical mysticism"-i.e., a way of understanding how we can experience transcendent reality (e.g., God) without interpreting that experience in a way that will transgress the boundaries of Critical philosophy.
The last book Kant published before starting to develop his Critical philosophy was called Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766). In this work he examined and interpreted the mystical experiences of the Swedish visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772). After giving both positive and negative assessments of the nature of such experiences, Kant settled on a moderate position: metaphysical speculations about ultimate reality are to thought what mystical visions are to sensation; in both cases, we must first determine the limits of what we can know, and beyond that, we should affirm only those mysteries that promote moral goodness. That Kant himself had a deep experience of transcendent reality is evident from numerous hints he gave throughout his writings. But we have no time to consider such claims here; instead, we shall begin next week with a lecture on an openly Christian philosopher who was deeply affected by Kant's philosophy in general and his philosophy of religion in particular.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE
1. A. Would it be possible to experience the wonder of noise?
B. What is the relationship between wonder and ignorance?
2. A. What is the opposite of "ontology"?
B. Would it be possible to experience an unholy symbol?
3. A. Could a person's nature be "partly" good and "partly" evil?
B. Must a person be morally good before being accepted by God?
4. A. Could there be more than one "invisible church"?
B. Can a person really hear the voice of God?
RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational2, tr. J.W. Harvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977[1923]), Chs. III-VI, pp.8-40.
2. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith , Ch.3, "Symbols of Faith" (DF 41-54).
3. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Houndmills, Hampshire: Macmillan Press, 1989), Ch.10, "Religious Meaning and Experience", pp.153-171.
4. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Book One and "General Observation" to Book Four (RBBR 15-39,179-190).
5. Stephen Palmquist, "Immanuel Kant: A Christian Philosopher?", Faith and Philosophy 6:1 (January 1989), pp.65-75.
6. Stephen Palmquist, Kant's System of Perspectives, Ch. X, "Religion and God in Perspective" (KSP 313-323).
7. Christopher L. Firestone, "Kant and Religion: Conflict or Compromise?", Religious Studies 35 (1999), pp.151-171.
8. Adina Davidovich, Religion as a Province of Meaning: The Kantian foundations of modern theology (Minneapolis, Mn.: Fortress Press, 1993).
Send comments to the author: StevePq@hkbu.edu.hk
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