Sárospataki Füzetek 16. (2012)
2012 / 2. szám - TANULMÁNYOK - Frank Sawyer: Immanuel Kant and Theology
Frank Sawyer and the idea of revelation to reason. But how can reason be the last court of appeal if reasonable people disagree on things? Religion for Kant is essentially morality, and Jesus is for him the great moral teacher. Kant criticizes religious superstition, fanaticism, and what he calls the ‘pseudo-service of God’.8 When we want God to satisfy all our wishes, we have only a fetish-faith.9 He says that there are three kinds of illusory faith: i) the impossible faith in miracles; ii) faith without sound concepts, as when we accept mysteries; and iii) faith as an influence upon God, i.e. as a means of grace.10 11 All in all, we can say that ‘pure reasoning’ takes much of the content out of theology and leaves us with religion as morality. For Kant, moral duty is the essence of religion. V) Kant seems to have (almost) taken a fifth step, from deism toward pantheism. The first half of Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone talks about the radical evil which tries to dominate human lives. It is almost as if Kant might abandon his purely rational morality and begin to talk about sin and grace. Then he would have to admit more room for theology. But as a philosopher he thought he could not do that. So he soon goes back again to the sufficiency of reason. Kant’s perspective is deistic. However, in his later writing he mentions ‘the God within us’, and seems to be talcing a turn toward panthesism. In fact, in his last writings at the end of his life (Der Streit der Facultäten), he seemed to find his own deism and his sterile God too removed, and wrote “God is not a being outside of me but purely a thought within me. God is the moral-practical, self-legislative reason - hence only a God within me, for me, and over me.” The following says much: “The idea that there is a God is a postulate based upon the principle of moral-practical reason because without it human reason cannot be restrained by man.” (This point was emphasized by Dostoevsky.) Kant’s problem entered when he said that God as a moral proposition has a subjective base, not an objective base. He could say: “God, therefore, is not a substance outside of me but merely a moral relationship within me. ...God is not something existing outside of me but my own idea. It is absurd to ask whether a God exists.”11 Of course, we must be careful not to turn these last ideas into a finished product, for they come from a set of notes he did not publish. Kant may not have wanted to end by reducing God to a human product and may have rounded this study off somewhat differendy, if he had lived longer. He evidently was searching for a more immediate contact between the (moral) consciousness and God. He was not satisfied with pure deism. But he always shrinks from personal contact with God. By appearing to reduce God to our subjective thoughts, Kant approaches the crossroad where philosophy after him thought it had to make a choice: eitherfor pantheism or for atheism. It is not hard to see how Kant created his own dilemma in this: his own destruction of the proofs of God eventually persuaded him that a God founded on intuition, faith or even as a moral postulate, is merely a product 8 Immanuel Kant, 'Religion Within the Ldmits of Reason Alone, trans. Theodore Greene and Hoyt Hudson (New York: Harper & Row, 1960), p.158. 9 Ibid., p.181. 10 Ibid., p.182. 11 Berkof, Two Hundred Years, p.17 80 Sáros pataki fűz ete k 2012/2
