PALMQUIST.tree.31. the Numinous and Its Symbols

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31. The Numinous and its Symbols

by Stephen Palmquist ([email protected])

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 newdepths 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, youwill 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

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"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 lockedwithin the confines of a museum's walls, when religious

experience is so often identifiedwith 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 filledwith passages expressing the


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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 profoundways

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.


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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 interpre-

tation 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


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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 impressedwith 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


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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 "thewrath of God", but it also leads to therecognition that this object is "wholly other"(i.e., mysterious). These feelings are all rathernegative so far, and might on their own causeus to flee from the numinous object; but theyare balanced by a sense of fascination thatkeeps us intensely interested in the experi-ence and in its unknown object. With thisbrief description of Otto's theory in mind, wecan summarize it by combining the two mapsin Figure X.1, as in Figure XI.1. It is worth mentioning that

Figure XI.1: TheNuminousBreakthroughandtheIdea of theHoly

Kant himself had a profound awareness of this kind of numinous experi-

ence. 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 lawwithin 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


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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

Godwill knowwe 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 andwill 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 andwhen 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


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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

connectedwith 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, Tillichargued, "symbolic language alone is able toexpress the ultimate.... The language offaith is the language of symbols" (DF41,45). The difference between signs andsymbols is, in fact, parallel to thedifference between analytic and syntheticlogic. We can depict this difference byusing the map in Figure XI.2, where thedouble-headed arrow (being a com-bination of the two types of arrow given inFigure X.1) represents participation. This correlation between thesign-symbol relationship and the analytic-synthetic relationship is not accidental.

FigureXI.2:TheLogicof SignsandSymbols

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,


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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 andwine 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 andwhat he did (as in the typical Protestant interpretation).

In both cases the original objects lose their importance as bread andwine

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


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our attention is pointed by the various symbols we meet in our experience,

is an ultimate attitude orway 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


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sacrificing my freedom to question, doubt, and/or reinterpret some of the

traditional dogmas, I hadwelcomed 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 newunderstanding 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


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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? Andwhich 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 howwe 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


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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, andwhere 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 hadwritten 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 howwe 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


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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 goodwhenever 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 knowswhat 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


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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 worldwhere rational beings are meant to be good, but are unable to

fulfill that existential goal. And this is the worldwe 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 Godwho 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 Godwill 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


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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 startedwith an evil disposition, our

situation is hopeless unless we believe Godwill make up for our

shortcomings. In order for religion to be rational, though, God must use

some basis for deciding who to assist andwho 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


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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 showus 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 trans-

lation of the title. Greene andHudson 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 andwhat we must do in order to

have rational grounds for hoping Godwill 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


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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 forwonder 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 understandwhat 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 33will 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 howwell 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


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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 corruptedwith evil choices.

Each individual is thereby presentedwith 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, contentedwithin 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


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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) couldwork 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 knowwhether ... 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,


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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:


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Figure XI.4:

The Archetypal Characteristics of the Invisible Church

The two 1LARs that give rise to this 2LAR can be identified as distin-

guishing between characteristics concernedwith 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 "king-

dom 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 mindwhen 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 andwhat 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: "Howdoes Godwish to be honored?" (RBBR

95). Religious believers tend to answer in one of two ways: either Godwants

us to be good and regards worship as an optional extra, or Godwants 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


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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


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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

supplementedwith 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


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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


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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


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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.


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8. Adina Davidovich, Religion as a Province of Meaning: The Kantian

foundations of modern theology (Minneapolis, Mn.: Fortress Press, 1993).

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