Let me recapitulate the fundamental thoughts of Kant’s Moral Philosophy.¹ Its object is the Good. Good is to be understood only as an attribute of Will. That will is good which suffers itself to be determined only by duty laid down in the moral law, and not by its inclinations; which performs duty purely for duty’s sake, not from any inclination thereto, but from reverence for the law. Duty, as the expression of the universal validity of the law, is the measure of the Good; accordingly, objective duty is apprehended in the subjective maxim of action when the latter takes such a shape that it also can pass as universal law. So act as if the maxim of thy action were through thy will to become universal law. This result is gained simply by giving clearness and precision to the usual moral way of thinking, which ascribes moral value strictly and exclusively to a disposition purely regulated by duty. Thus scientific ethic begins with the question how morality so defined is possible. This question again cannot be answered from experience, which almost never offers a case in which a sense of duty operates without any admixture of inclination or self-love. Hence the scientific problem finds its solution only in a knowledge a priori of the peculiarity of the will, which does not simply, like everything in nature, work according to its own law, but as practical reason works according to the representative conception of its own law. The first point, however, in the “ Foundation of the Metaphysic of Ethics ” is to complete the purely formal statement of the maxim of morality already given, in accordance with its contents and fundamental conditions. “ If reason absolutely determines the will, the actions of such a being, which are recognised as objectively necessary, have also subjective necessity, i.e. the will is the faculty of choosing that only which reason apart from inclination recognises as good.” “ The conception of an objective principle, in so far as it lays necessity upon the will, is called a command of reason, and the formula of the command is called imperative.” The imperative of duty is not hypothetical but categorical. Commands of the former kind refer always to special relative ends, lying outside of the actions enjoined, and so in relation to these special ends have an analytical character. On the other hand, the categorical imperative of duty is always synthetic, expressing the fact that morality, which is to be realized in accordance with the imperative, is an end in itself, an absolute end. “ Suppose, then, that there is something the existence of which has in itself an absolute value, which as an end in itself might form the basis of definite laws; in this something, and in it alone, will lie the ground of a possible categorical imperative.” As such an end, which can never without offence against its essential nature be viewed simply as a means to be used as one pleases, we are to regard man, or in general every rational being, who in this view must never be estimated as a thing, but always as a person. The maxim of action will therefore reach the value of a universal law in this form of the categorical imperative. So act as to use humanity, whether in thine own person or that of another, never merely as means but always also as end. The universal validity and objectivity of this formula show that is not derived from experience. It is a rule that springs from pure practical reason, viz., from the reason of the being which in apprehending the rule exerts itself as an end to itself. Hence, as the third practical principle of the will appears the following law, that the will of every rational being is moral only inasmuch as it lays down general laws, that is, in its autonomy. “ Thus the will is not simply subject to the law, but is so in the sense that at the same time it legislates for itself, and in this way first comes to be subject to the law.” Hereby all particular interests are excluded which might perhaps mingle with and disturb the act of willing from duty, and thus at length the distinction between the categorical and hypothetical imperative is completed. But hereby also it becomes possible to carry out the final end of moral action to a concrete universal determination. Suppose rational beings to be united by common laws, under the condition that each of them in its general legislative capacity abstracts from all that distinguishes and makes up his own private ends. This supposition contains the notion of a realm of ends, of which each one is a member, in so far as he becomes in virtue of his autonomy subject to the law. The law that each individual shall treat himself and all others never merely as means, but always also as an end of independent value, is, however, the index to man’s dignity, his elevation above every material equivalent. In the last resort then the practical necessity of duty rests on the idea of the dignity of men united by the moral law; and to this it corresponds that humanity is obedient to no law save one, which is at the same time self-imposed.

The notion of the moral law being completed in the character of universal validity, the dignity of all rational creatures as end, and obligatoriness through autonomy, we are led by the question as to the possibility of this categorical imperative to consider the freedom of the will as its real basis. This notion, however, which is not given in experience, and so lies also beyond the limits of metaphysical explanation, is proved by the “ Critique of the practical Reason ” to be thinkable, valid, and necessary.² Freedom in the negative notion of unconditioned causality is not cognisable by experience. The latter relates only to phenomena in time, which are all linked together by natural necessity, in whose sphere each cause is conditioned by that immediately preceding. If, then, freedom is to be conceivable as the predicate of a being which as member of the phenomenal world cannot escape from natural necessity, it must be to the said being as a thing in itself, as a member of the intelligible world, that this freedom is ascribed. Only as a transcendental notion is freedom conceivable, not as a psychical function which would imply that it enters into combination with the natural necessity of the series of representative conceptions. Freedom denotes the will as unconditioned causality out of time, in distinction from the phenomena of will that run on in time and are subject to natural necessity. The question whether all our actions are not determined by God as supreme Cause, is answered by this distinction. In so far as God is our Creator, He and His creation lie as much out of time as our freedom does. And if God does not act in time, our actions considered as phenomena are not to be referred to His causality. If, then, our freedom can be conceived as unconditioned causality, by distinguishing ourselves as members of the intelligible world from the temporal course of our actions and representative conceptions, then it follows that this is really a valid point of view for self-contemplation. We do, as a matter of fact, act under the idea of freedom when we contemplate ourselves not under the temporal conditions of our actions, but as capable of being determined by laws which by our reason we prescribe to ourselves. In the character of intelligible beings, we posit nothing as antecedent to the determination of our will; but every action, in general every determination of our existence that varies according to the internal sense, even the whole sequence of our being as sensitive creatures, has in the consciousness of our intelligible being always the value of a consequence—never that of a determining ground of our causality. Kant summons as witness to this truth the “ wondrous faculty ” of conscience which refuses to allow an action contrary to law to be excused on the plea of unintentional oversight, criticising and condemning the act and habit of carelessness from which such an oversight springs, not in accordance with the natural necessity that pertains to its empirical character as phenomenon, but in accordance with the absolute spontaneity of freedom. So, too, the reason why every recollection of an act committed long ago calls forth sorrow, is that reason, in all that pertains to the law of our intelligible existence, recognises no distinctions of time, but asks only if the action was really mine. And it is no mere contingent validity that belongs to the idea of freedom. We cannot withdraw ourselves from it without doing violence to our essential nature, in short, it is necessary. We must conceive this faculty as really ours. For freedom or autonomy of the will is the indispensable basis of the moral law; the law would lose its absolute stringency were the idea of freedom less than necessary. Nor can we abstract from the categorical imperative; from it (as ground of knowledge) the freedom of the will follows of necessity, just as from the legislative function of the latter (as ground of fact) proceeds the moral law.

It is no accident that the essential peculiarity of man—the fact that he judges himself under the idea of freedom—is demonstrated by reference to repentance and the condemnatory sentence of conscience. For, though men are involved in sin, the consciousness of guilt is the most luminous proof that they have still not utterly fallen a prey to natural necessity. And conversely the practical certainty of freedom is the indispensable and fundamental condition of our making ourselves responsible for the transgressions of a past time, or for the whole chain of our empirical character. That which led the men of the Illumination to limit the imputation of an action as sin to intentional transgressions, was Leibnitz’s conception of the will as a power moved by representative notions. Kant rightly affirms that this expression does not in any essential rise above the idea of a machine, and that it gives no more than a relative freedom. There is nothing thought of in this freedom—defined as it is by merely psychological determinations—that is opposed to natural necessity; and so it is no wonder that it excludes responsibility for undesigned transgressions. Hence the sharply-marked and continuous consciousness of guilt, without which the whole Christian idea of reconciliation is unintelligible, becomes methodically possible only when we judge ourselves after the idea of transcendental freedom. But, moreover, guilt as an objective thing hanging over us can be comprehended only because and in so far as the subjective consciousness of guilt can be generated by the idea of freedom. He who has not learned to judge himself in this way, regards his sin either as his right or as a weakness which it does not fall to him to answer for. But whoever has carried out the opposite view in his own case, is in a position to recognise guilt in others too, and in men otherwise minded, and to find in others the confirmation of its operation in intensifying sin. And as the idea of freedom establishes its objective reality in its action and reaction with the moral law, that is in the practical aspect, which has a longer range than speculative theoretical knowledge,—so also the objective place claimed by guilt in the course of the life of the individual, as well as in the union of men one to another, is proved in a way to which the orthodox treatment of the notion (p. 365) does not attain. That which the tradition of the Church desires to express in the notion of original sin cannot be apprehended as guilt by any one who does not draw a distinction between himself (himself as he should be under the idea of freedom, and under the obligation of the moral law), and the empirical course of his own life in itself, and along with the life of the race. If original sin brings down the knowledge of the moral law to the well-known “faint spark” of the formula concordiæ, it cannot be known as guilt. If, on the contrary, the latter is necessary in relation to the truth of reconciliation, then freedom in the Kantian sense must be conceded—i.e. the power to produce autonomously the moral law, which in form and content is universal and absolutely binding. What are the empirical conditions under which this resort can become practically effective is a point to be determined later. But let no man object that this assertion is Pelagian and so unsound; for he who cannot distinguish the Pelagian from the Kantian notion of freedom is in no position to pronounce a judgment in this matter.

A characteristic mark of the moral standpoint of the Illumination, which operated directly towards the breaking up of the idea of reconciliation, was the general reference of the notion of punishment to the end of reformation (p. 361). Or if others, having regard to the nature of legally constituted society, opposed this individually eudemonistic distortion of the idea of punishment, and urged that punishment aims rather at deterring others from crime, yet this view also was dependent on the eudemonistic principle in morals, with the single difference that the welfare of human society, and not merely that of the individual, was set forth as the ultimate object sought. The similarity of standpoint between Michaelis and Eberhard is accordingly manifest, not merely in the fact that the former was able to admit reformation as an end secondary to that of deterring, but insomuch as both are agreed in regarding the physical evil which follows a given course of action as the only criterion for its immorality (pp. 362, 378). To this Kant objects³ that the essence of punishment is requital. From the idea of our practical reason, which sets the transgression of moral law in the light of guilt, it follows also that transgression deserves punishment. “Now the notion of punishment as such is by no means connected with participation in felicity. For though he who punishes may at the same time have the gracious purpose of directing the punishment to this end also, yet the infliction must first be justified by itself as punishment—i.e. as pure evil. In every punishment as such there must first be justice, and this constitutes what is essential to the notion. Kindness may be combined herewith, but that is a thing on which the man who deserves punishment has from his conduct not the slightest right to reckon. Punishment then is a physical evil, which though it were not attached to moral badness by natural sequence, would yet necessarily be so attached according to the principles of a moral legislation. If then all trespass is in itself punishable—i.e. merits loss of happiness, it would plainly be absurd to say that that which constituted the trespass was the drawing down on one’s-self of a punishment, by making a breach in one’s own happiness. In this way punishment would be the ground on which any action is called a trespass,⁴ and righteousness could consist in nothing else than the remission of artificial punishment, and the counteracting of that which is natural. For then nothing bad would remain in the action, since the evils which would otherwise have followed from it, and which alone gave to the action the name of bad, would now be averted.”

57. The critical process in the recognition of the conditions of the practical reason means that the principles so disclosed accompany the experienced course of action as the conditions and marks of its real morality. A certain stage of development in the empirical character must be reached before we can venture to seek for a consciousness of the responsibility that a man has for the whole course of his action, before we can expect action to possess its value in regard for the law and in all-sided respect for man’s dignity; and only under these conditions can that consciousness of moral autonomy be engendered which submits itself to the law as to a law produced by itself in the process of constructing correct conceptions of duty to guide action. Now, be it correct or not to say that morality is realized only in opposition to all instincts and natural appetites, and that a right respect for the law excludes all admixture of moral inclination with the idea of duty, it is at least certain that the Subject of phenomenal moral action is that Self, (free in the intelligible sense, but at the same time influenced through the senses and marked by individual peculiarities) which distinguishes itself from every other being. From this regard the Critique of Practical Reason determines the notion of the highest Good, not as virtue, but as the union of virtue and felicity, so that the former is viewed as the supreme condition of the latter, and the union of the two as the most perfect state for man that can be conceived. Now the causal relation between felicity and virtue cannot mean that the effort after felicity is the motive of virtue, and reciprocally no necessary connexion between felicity and virtue can be demonstrated within the world of sense. Thus the relation of the two must be apprehended to be that virtue as the intelligible magnitude (as Noumenon) is the cause of the felicity which falls to be realized in the world of sense. Kant enables himself to think of this sense of the highest good as practically possible, by postulating (in virtue of the practical Reason) the immortality of the soul and the existence of God as conditions of the union of moral worth and felicity. In this way, guided by the idea of the highest Good, we arrive at religion; that is, at the recognition of a divine command in all duties. This conception does not involve a surrender of moral autonomy, but flows from the consideration to which the idea of God corresponds, that the moral law which binds to the pursuit of the highest Good must be brought into connexion with the indispensable objective conditions of that Good.

Since now the Religion innerhalb der Gränzen der blossen Vernunft⁵ is guided by this connexion of thought, the question arises whether that connexion is equally convincing with the critical expiscation of the essential principles of moral action. In positing the unity of virtue and felicity as the substance of the highest Good, or as the final aim of the pure practical reason, Kant yet repeatedly reminds us that this must not be viewed as the motive that determines the pure will, but that the moral law is our sole motive for taking as our object the highest good and all that produces or facilitates it. Not only then must the manner of our action towards that final aim have regard for duty for its motive power; the very idea of the highest Good itself is to be regarded primarily as duty, and as subordinated to the moral law. For, says Kant, heteronomy and a falsification of the moral principle is the inevitable result if, without regard had to the law, any object is chosen under the name of good and allowed to determine the will, so that from it the highest principle of practice is deduced. But now the highest Good in that compass of the idea which Kant himself admits, is not conceivable by deduction from his notion of duty. If the thought of duty is pure only when it excludes all sensual and individual impulses, nay even moral inclination towards duty, then the only corresponding expression of the highest Good is the virtue which is indifferent to felicity. If, on the contrary, the notion of the highest Good includes felicity along with virtue, it cannot be morally dependent for its apprehension on the point of view of duty. The inconsistency of which Kant is guilty, is discernible also in the fact that the subject of the highest Good is conceived as the intelligible being which at the same time is a creature of sense, while the subject of the legislation of duty is conceived as intelligible being though at the same time a creature of sense. If now, notwithstanding this the highest Good in the full sense which Kant gives to it, and in accordance herewith the truth of the idea of God, is claimed as a postulate of the practical reason, this doctrine at once passes beyond the critique of practical reason, and falls under the empirical doctrine of ethics.⁶ But the latter of course can assert the critical principles of morality only by calling in the aid of other rules and conditions. So far, therefore, as the critical principles of Kant are asserted by him to be also the sufficient grounds of the doctrine of the highest Good, he commits an error, and really treats them as dogmatic principles.

That the critical principles of morals which go back to intelligible freedom do not exhaust the circle of conditions under which man exerts himself as a moral being, is evinced also in the following discussion in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, which treats of the springs that move the practical reason.⁷ The free will is determined purely by the law, to the exclusion of all impulses of sense and all inclinations, in so far as these might be contrary to the law. But since these inclinations and instincts become operative through feeling, the law counteracts them by itself producing a feeling, to wit the sense of respect for the law. Now, all inclinations taken collectively are called self-seeking, but the law takes up a varying attitude towards this last, according as it takes the shape of self-love or self-conceit. The latter stands in pure contradiction to the law, which accordingly absolutely excludes it; while self-love, on the other hand, which naturally stirs within us before the moral law, is only limited by that law. Supreme complacency in one’s-self is wholly smitten down by the law; but supreme benevolence towards one’s-self is a quality in every man which is moral, provided only that the condition of harmony with the law is fulfilled. In this case it is reasonable self-love. The distinction prepares us for the fact that regard for the law, while casting down the self-conceit which is inconsistent with it, enters into a relation with reasonable self-love, so that each conditions or includes the other. For feeling—even such feeling as springs from the purely intellectual ground of the moral law,—can be conceived only as existing in the concrete individual subject, who is at once a creature of sense and of intelligible freedom. Moreover, the value of no object and no thought, not even that of the moral law, can be felt apart from self-respect, which belongs to the category of feeling. In admitting, therefore, that this feeling of respect for the law is not merely the spring that urges us to morality, but is morality itself, Kant seems to indicate the point at which ethical doctrine in order to attain completeness and demonstrate that the critical principles are those effective in human life, must pass over to the empirical development. But this is not what he really does. He manipulates the problem so as to lose sight of the synthesis of rational self-love and the feeling of respect for the law. The reason of this is that he cannot free himself from the schema of contradictory opposition between reason and the functions of the senses, even on this point, where the moral feeling of respect for the law is absolutely incomprehensible unless it is recognised that the empirical Ego is not merely the self-conserving centre of the instincts of sense, but as such is at the same time the organ of intelligible freedom. Instead of this the schema of antithesis between the instincts of sense and moral legislation—a schema which is rightly used in criticising the faculty of will—is applied as a dogmatic canon to the scientific interpretation of moral feeling. We are not to use moral feeling in the criticism of actions, much less in establishing the objective moral law itself; it must serve purely as a motive impelling us to take the law in itself as our maxim. Now this sentence draws a dogmatic distinction between things which, by Kant’s critical process, should have been thought of as united. The subjective maxim is just the form in which the objective law is recognised and applied as universally valid. If now moral feeling is the faculty to discover maxims of universal validity, it is the subjective empirical organ in which intelligible freedom evinces itself as legislative, that is, as the objective ground of objective law. The same result may be reached by a different course. The second maxim of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten—that which looks to the substance of the law—runs thus: So act as to use humanity whether in thine own person or that of another, never merely as means, but always also as end. But this cannot be accomplished save on the assumption of a developed feeling for the worth of mankind, which again is impossible apart from a sense of one’s own worth. And such a sense is rational self-love, in which the individual equipped with sensitive functions no longer allows his animal life to roll on against the law or independently of it, because he finds his vocation by taking a place in the fellowship of spirit. It is characteristic that the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft does not repeat this formulation of the law that rests on its substance. For in proportion as the notion of law is determined only formally, Kant abstains from observing the conditions under which the doctrine of Ethics would necessarily become empirical. But in the same ratio he overstrained the critical point of view, and applied its schema to that problem in which he should have recognised the empirically operative root of the principles of morality which his criticism had detected.

Now the fact that the critical principles of morality are dogmatically handled and used as exhaustive conditions of moral consciousness and action, is also the reason why Kant has presented religion as a kind of appendix to morals. If respect for duty, and the autonomous recognition thereof in the application of its maxims in their widest possible scope, come to exist without more ado, then through the idea of the highest Good which the moral law prescribes we are led up to religion, i.e., to the recognition of a Divine command in every duty. Kant makes the express reservation that even on this view everything remains unselfish and based on duty alone, that neither hope nor fear can be suffered to operate as motives, since the moral law is still the ground that determines the will which is directed to further the highest Good. Thus the thought of God adds nothing to the conception of the law, and if this is so one can imagine that the highest Good might also be sought purely from respect for the law, without any conscious postulation of the existence of God. While these considerations may serve to suggest to us what expectations we are to form of the “Religion within the limits of pure Reason,” it is manifest, on the other hand, what position is to be assigned to the thought of God or religion if the Kantian conception of the highest Good and the moral feeling of respect for the law be recognised as functions of the empirical moral subject. As the respect paid by the individual to a law universally valid presupposes moral fellowship with all its manifoldly linked elements, so the effort after a harmony between worthiness and felicity presupposes a relation of human morality to the world of nature. Both alike can be recognised as practically valid, and so proper moral autonomy can be assured, only by the postulation of the idea of God as of the Being necessarily presupposed in this practical situation of man in the world, and of the moral subject in the moral community.

These remarks become operative in the hands of Kant himself, when in the 3d part of the Religion innerhalb der Gränzen der blossen Vernunft (1793), he treats of the victory of the good over the evil principle, and of the founding of a kingdom of God on earth. For what is evil in the individual gains strength by his position in the fellowship of men; but in like manner the advance and final victory of what is good can be procured by no surer means than by the founding and spread of a society constituted by laws of virtue; which by reason is enjoined as the task and the duty of the whole human race. Now the idea of this Whole is distinct from all moral laws; the duty of working for a Whole, of which we cannot know whether as a Whole it is subject to our powers, is diverse from all other duties in kind and in principle. For this duty demands that we presuppose the idea of a higher moral being, by whose ordinance the powers of individuals, inadequate by themselves, are united to a general result. For if an ethical commonwealth is to be instituted, all individuals must be subjected to a public legislation, and all the laws by which they are bound must be capable of being viewed as commands of a common lawgiver. Now in a merely legal (juristic) society, the Many must themselves be the lawgiver, because the point to be legislated for is the restriction of each man’s freedom. But in an ethical commonwealth the people cannot give the law, because all laws are directed to morality, i.e., to the inner character of actions. And so this legislation must proceed from some other than the people, viz., from that Being as whose command we can view all the duties (including moral duties); who knows the heart and can estimate the value of every moral action. Now this is the notion of God, as moral ruler of the universe. Therefore an ethical commonwealth can be thought of only as a People of God, ruled by laws of virtue; or, being the kingdom of God, such a commonwealth can be taken in hand among men only by means of religion—and that it may be a public society, only in the form of a visible Church.⁸

If these considerations are sound, they furnish a test whereby we may judge that the attempt to comprehend religion without passing beyond the limits of mere reason (as Kant drew these limits) was from the first doomed to failure. Subjectively, religion always arises from the necessity felt to secure that spiritual freedom from the constraint of nature, of which man is conscious a priori, in relation to his no less undeniable dependence on nature (in all its gradations up to human society). This security is sought by postulating the idea of a spiritual Being to whom spirit and nature alike owe their origin, and by whom the connexion between these is regulated. But mere (practical) reason, in the sense in which that faculty was interpreted by Kant’s criticism, points to the unconditioned causality of freedom, and the independence with which its law is produced. In the circle of these notions Religion finds not even a subjective necessity, since the dependence of man—in which lies the other and subjective premiss of a possible religion—is wholly left out of sight. And so from Kant’s mere reason no necessary inference for the validity of religion can be drawn, but only an inference of an arbitrary kind. Therefore in relation to the intelligible notion of freedom, and the autonomous production of the law, a merely accidental addition to the scientific principles of morals is made, when the law is regarded as the law of God. Or if a necessary conclusion as to the importance of religion is to be drawn from practical reason, then we must mean the practical reason of the empirical subject, who is in part free, in part unfree, who, as member of the world of sense, aims at felicity conditioned by virtue, and who, as member of the ethical and yet terrestrial kingdom of God, postulates the idea of God, and that as the necessary presupposition of his moral position in the present, and of his cosmical position in the future. And this confirms our conclusion, that the postulate of the idea of God made by Kant in the Kritik der praktischen Vernunft is either not convincing in the sense in which he means it—for the idea of the highest Good is no longer supported by critical but by empirical arguments—or else that the postulate must react on and so limit the notions of freedom and autonomy of the practical reason, if once it is found to have a hold in the field of empirical Ethic. Though Kant then expressly assures us that the idea of God grows out of ethic, and so cannot be at its root,⁹ yet the fact is that the idea of God either is not the necessary issue of (the critical series of notions in) Ethic, or if necessarily postulated by Ethic (in the totality of its conditions) must be regarded as the foundation of the validity of human freedom in the world of sense.

58. The religious point of view, in accordance with which Kant, in the third part of his philosophical doctrine of religion, accounts for the possibility of the moral commonwealth, has no influence on the preceding discussions on the “Indwelling of the evil principle along with the good; or the radical moral evil of human nature,” and on “the struggle of the good principle with the evil for the mastery over man.” Although the first of these themes necessarily relates to empirical humanity, and although in his treatment of radical moral evil the influence of human fellowship upon the individual is considered; in the discussion of the second point, on the other hand, the individual subject is brought before us in complete independence of all his neighbours, and the conditions of the struggle against moral evil are judged exclusively in accordance with the points of view from which the critical philosophy contemplates Ethic. Moral evil, moreover, is not brought into any specific relation to God whatever; the doctrine of it accordingly bears only the character of an empirical doctrine of Ethics. The Christian thought of reconciliation comes in for the first time in connexion with the doctrine of the struggle of the good principle with the evil; and only this presentation can fitly claim to exhibit religion as it is within the limits of mere reason. In this discussion Kant accordingly confirms his assurance that the idea of religion proceeds from Ethic (as its real foundation), and does not constitute its basis (so as to make Ethic to be the ground on which the validity of the religious idea might be known). That is, he here elaborates the doctrine that the Christian idea of reconciliation is only the unreal reflection of a purely individual process of the moral will, or the incidental circumstance attaching to that which actually exists only in the independent development of the moral subject. It is indeed very significant, when we compare the case of the Illumination, that the traditional doctrines of the satisfaction of Christ, and of justification for His sake, made such an impression upon Kant that in them he recognised precisely that idea which, by the standard of unaided reason, exhibited itself as the kernel of religion; and after all it does not in the end come to the same thing whether these doctrines be accepted merely as play of the fancy of the subject, who is judged in accordance with the critique of the practical reason, or whether their truth in the religious sense be made to disappear by the theoretical criticism of the illuminantists. But still the idea of radical moral evil gives to Kant’s maintenance of the idea of reconciliation at most the significance of a prophecy; and it is just his recognition of radical moral evil in men that makes an epoch in opposition to the Illumination. On this account it is indispensably necessary for the business we have in hand to take into consideration also this substitute for the doctrine of original sin,—the doctrine the theoretical difficulties of which led the Illumination to hold itself justified in surrendering its tendency also as worthless.

Kant acknowledges that the propensity to moral evil displays itself in man just as soon as the use of freedom makes its appearance in him. When he calls that propensity natural or innate guilt, he certainly in doing so makes the reservation that it consists not in any impulse of nature but in a maxim. For if it were the former, the use of freedom would be referred entirely to determination by natural causes. But this is inconsistent with freedom. Accordingly, when man is said to be evil by nature, this means only a principle in him, prior to all experience, which leads to the adoption of maxims that are contrary to the law, and that too to such an extent that herein is expressed what, as matter of fact, is a generic character of man. That principle cannot be looked for in an inheritance from the first parents, because that would assign to it a natural cause, viz., generation, and so all imputation of the evil propensity would have to be excluded. Nor can the principle consist in the instincts of sense, for the natural inclinations have not in themselves any direct connexion with moral evil, at all events none more direct than they have with virtue, for in their nature they supply the material of the latter also. Neither does the bad maxim which constitutes the form of the propensity include in itself any rebellious repudiation of the moral law as a whole. For this last irresistibly forces itself upon the attention even of the worst of men, in virtue of their ethical constitution. If then this is so, and if, on the other hand, the impulses of sense are active in the evil maxim in accordance with the subjective principle of self-love, Kant concludes that the evil maxim originates in the subordination of moral order to the inclinations. That is, while the moral law ought to pass as the highest condition of the gratification of self-love, the evil maxim proceeds upon the rule that the impulses of self-love and its inclinations assert themselves as conditioning the observance of the moral law. The opposition between this treatment of radical moral evil and the doctrine of original sin, whatever their analogy may be, extends both to the formal and the material side of the matter. According to Kant, moral evil is not naturally inherited, and it is not absolute rebellion against the moral law; it is not wickedness in the formal sense; it is not disposition to evil as such; it is not the tendency to contravene the law as a whole, as original sin is represented to be. Rather does Kant, in accordance with experience, find that perverseness of heart can also co-exist with a tendency to conformity with the law, and that wickedness in many men does not exceed the grades of infirmity and impurity, and only on a third and higher grade exhibits itself as intentional guilt. But then the usual manner in which egoism treats with the law, where an egoistic legality alternates with unintentional transgressions, is not regarded by him as guiltless weakness; on the contrary, he recognises in it already the radical perversity which, in the maxim of the supremacy of egoism over the law, displays opposition to the law, i.e., moral evil. If now we inquire into the origin of radical moral evil, it cannot be conceived as an origin in time, for man’s action in time does not appear as free; rather is every manifestation of evil imputed in such a way as if one had immediately passed out of the state of innocence into transgression of the law. The rational origin of the evil propensity is undiscoverable, because the quest would involve an endless regress from evil to evil. If accordingly nothing is left to us but to represent the maxim of evil as an act of spontaneous arbitrariness, the intelligible idea of freedom still contributes nothing to its explanation, because this last is rather at the root of our recognition of the law, and accordingly, as ground of the opposite also, would be contradictory to itself. The Bible narrative also of the fall from the state of innocence experienced by our first parents, has only the allegorical meaning that the propensity to evil which is always present with us, must be represented as free and arbitrary. But if the imputation of actual sin confirms the intelligible idea of freedom, we should yet greatly misinterpret Kant’s express declaration of the inscrutability of the origin of sin, if in the intelligible freedom of man we should also seek to discern the ground of the possibility of moral evil.¹⁰

For the thought of freedom rather establishes the possibility of restoration to its old strength of the original disposition to the good. However hard it is to think that a naturally bad man should make himself into a good one, it is yet possible, because respect for the moral law abides even in the evil propensity. While this respect expresses the subjective certainty and objective necessity that we ought now to be better men, it follows inevitably that we must be able also to be so. While freedom, in the noetic sense, is the ground of the consciousness of our moral destiny, it is also the power of realizing that, the power which, in spite of the corruption of the empirical character, calls forth that revolution in man’s disposition, which is comparable to a new birth or new creation. The susceptibility for the good which is herein attained, needs of course to be continually confirmed in the way of improvement. But to God who sees through the intelligible motives of the heart, for Whom the endlessness of moral progress is a unity, the regenerate person is as good as actually a good man. It is with this declaration that Kant first transfers to the religious sphere the discussion which up to this point has been purely ethical; and it is not difficult to see the reason of this. It is the necessity for placing securely in comparison with the complexus of all phenomena, i.e., with nature—the value of human freedom which expresses the peculiar destiny of man, but phenomenally is never fully manifested. Accordingly the struggle of the good principle with the evil had to be brought under the religious point of view, because in the empirical mode of contemplating its appearances, the struggle would not be recognised at all in its true character.

For if it is a universal duty of man to raise himself to the ideal of moral perfection, i.e., to the pattern of moral disposition in all its purity, Kant concedes further that we are not the authors of this idea, that rather it has assumed its place in man without our being able to understand how human nature could ever even have been capable of receiving it. And, therefore, it is truer to say that that pattern of moral perfection in which God is eternally assured of the purpose of the world, has come down to us from heaven, and that it has laid hold of humanity. If, now, God judges the man who has converted himself to be well-pleasing and good, in spite of the fact that his prestations always fall short of the ideal of the good, this takes place under the type of the personified idea of the humanity that is well-pleasing to God. In that personified idea, not merely the highest possible dutifulness of action, as well as example and teaching towards the spread of dutiful activity, are embodied; it contains also readiness to undertake for the good of the world all suffering, even to the most shameful death; for our notion of the degree of strength in the moral disposition includes this test by obstacles. “In practical faith in this Son of God, in so far as He is conceived as having assumed human nature, man can now hope to be well-pleasing to God, and thereby to enjoy felicity also.”

Thus far has Kant appropriated the train of Christian ideas; and if we leave out of account the fragmentary manner in which his meaning is conveyed, as well as many reservations, it corresponds in some measure to Arminianism, i.e., to the dogmatic type which, with unimportant differences, was also adhered to by the rationalism of the school of Semler, as well as by the contemporary supra-naturalism. But if Kant had seriously dealt with the religious idea, even though only in this way, he would have been compelled to abandon the standpoint of unaided reason, and to pass over to historical empiricism. This, however, is not his intention. On this account his concessions to the fact of Christian revelation alternate, in his brief presentation of the above train of thought, with various reservations. Not only does he teach that the moral ideal of reason is only represented as personified; the proposition cited above, with which the section closes, is also carried out and interpreted in a sense quite different from that which seemed to be meant. For that practical faith in the incarnate Son of God, in which man becomes acceptable to God, does not mean religious faith, or subjection to an ordinance which must necessarily be regarded as Divine. On the contrary, the subject of this practical faith is declared to be the man “who is conscious within himself of such a moral disposition that he can believe and repose firm confidence in himself, that under like temptations and sufferings (as they are made to be touchstones of that idea) he would remain immoveably attached to the pattern of humanity, and with faithful imitation follow His example; such a man, and such a man alone, is entitled to regard himself as one who is a not unworthy object of God’s complacency.” Here Kant again passes over to the point of view which regards the religious idea as springing indeed out of morality, but not as constituting its basis. When he had developed the idea of regeneration and of acceptance with God, as against radical moral evil, the impression was produced that the regenerate man, in that merely relative improvement which he experiences in himself, has to found his moral self-confidence realiter upon the Divine judgment on the transcendental depths of his heart; and what was needed was to indicate the actual and necessary mode of obtaining this postulate. But now, instead of taking this in hand, Kant affirms that the regenerate man, in spite of his empirical imperfection, has the ground of his self-confidence in himself, and only reflects the sureness of that confidence in his inferential representation of the Divine complacency. If this is so, then the judgment is again confirmed that religion within the limits of mere reason has only a contingent validity, and that the subject of the practical reason can just as well omit as complete the reflexion of his worth in the thought of God. In contradiction of a statement previously made, Kant declares that no example in experience is needed to make the idea of a man morally well-pleasing to God become a pattern for us, but, on the contrary, that this idea is offered to us as an example by the reason itself. As we ought to be conform to it, so also of necessity we can be. Were it imperative to deduce the necessity for being a man well-pleasing to God from anything else than the absolute validity of the law, and from freedom, the dignity of the law, as the unconditioned and sufficient determining cause of action, would be lowered. This reflection again implies that the critical principles of morality are directly made use of as the dogmatic principles of the empirical doctrine of ethics; and so serves to confirm the judgment already expressed, that in this confusion Kant’s fundamental error in his interpretation of religion consists.

For while the complete change of the radically evil man is possible (potentia) from his noetic freedom, because man’s destiny to the good which is therein expressed is inalienable; by Kant’s own remarks¹¹ this moral obligation does not imply that the capability (actus) of conversion flows from noetic freedom in itself considered. None the less does Kant afterwards assume this capability as effectual towards that end. This assertion (in contradiction with his own premisses) of the unconditioned power of the lawgiving freedom in the man who empirically is bad, next leads to his altering the constitutive significance of the ideas of religion into what is mere subjective reflection. In conformity herewith, Kant also changes the thought (which at first had been recognised as a necessary one) of the Divine justification of the man who has been converted by himself into the thought that this same man, in his self-reliance based upon his freedom, justifies himself, although there can be attributed to no man that insight into himself which belongs to the “Searcher of hearts.”¹² But he also explains away in the same direction the idea of penal satisfaction which the Church-doctrine refers to Christ. For, since the man who began with evil cannot make up for the infinite transgressions he has been guilty of even by subsequent dutifulness, there attaches to him a guilt which would bring with it infinite punishment and banishment from the kingdom of God. This guilt cannot be wiped away by another, for it is not transferable like a money-debt, but is personal in the highest degree, and can only be borne by the culprit himself. But when the culprit is regarded as regenerate, he is indeed the same, and yet at the same time another than he was before. While thus his having forsaken his depraved ways already in itself involves self-sacrifice, and the entry on a long series of ills which the regenerate man submits himself to simply for the sake of the good, in this very thing he endures what was due to him as punishment in his previous state. This, according to Kant, is the cogitable truth of that which is represented as having been a death endured once for all by Christ, the representative of humanity.

It cannot be doubted that Kant discovered for himself this solution of the problem of the doctrine of satisfaction, corresponding as it does to his own point of view. And yet it is far from new. For the Anabaptist John Denk (p. 291) before him had reconciled the ethical autonomy of the individual subject with the thought of the penal satisfaction rendered necessary by past sins. by the assumption that the regenerate person, in acquiescing in his original condemnation and mortifying the flesh, establishes the validity of the law that demands the punishment of his previous sins. This coincidence, moreover, is quite explicable. The one as well as the other places the active ethical subject in atomistic independence, and so finds the endurance of punishment by a representative to be unthinkable; they both accordingly make the dialectic between punishment and reformation end in the change of the subjective circumstances. Both, however, at the same time express a characteristic Christian truth. The endurance of merited ill has for the regenerate the value of retributive punishment, but no longer that of reprobative punishment which it has for the sinner. Herein Kant’s opposition to the Illuminantist treatment of the idea of punishment (p. 396) holds firm ground; and in itself the thought before us is one of indubitable truth. Only it is not evident how those conflicts and troubles, which the regenerate man takes to himself for the sake of the good principle, are to be recognised as punishments of his sinful past. In this particular application of the principle, Kant undoubtedly has gone wrong, just as Denk did, who groundlessly includes in one the ascetic side of the moral conflict in the regenerate with his acquiescence in his original condemnation. The question, moreover, presents itself whether the doctrine of Christ’s penal satisfaction can actually be interpreted, as Kant at the close asserts, to be the personified presentation of that idea, or whether it is not a truth which offers the key to that view of salutary endurance of punishment.

At least Kant in the third part of his philosophical doctrine of religion (the victory of the evil principle and the founding of a kingdom of God upon earth) has succeeded in gaining from the doctrine of reconciliation a further-reaching significance. It has already been indicated (p. 402) that in this connexion Kant has been unable to avoid entering upon the specifically religious explanation of the association of men by laws of virtue. This, of course, does not prevent his calling to his aid for this purpose at the same time the self-activity of men. By this instrumentality the moral kingdom of God is realized as Church. Now, though the kingdom of God is to be grounded only on the pure reasonable faith of religion that we have to fulfil all duties as being at the same time commands of God, yet in this it is only the goal of association in the Church that can be contemplated. For the weakness of human nature is responsible for the fact that such pure faith can never be counted on,—not at least from the beginning. Rather therefore does the existence of the Church rest on statutory laws, which being represented as Divine point back to revelation, and are comprehended in a historical faith. If, accordingly, this historical Church-faith in moulding men to an ethical commonwealth naturally precedes the pure moral faith of religion, the place of the latter as being the goal to be aimed at must be upheld in the preparatory stage, and confirmed by the moral interpretation of the records and institutes of religion, in order that the Church may gradually be transferred into the complete realization of the kingdom of God. The relation is illustrated by Kant precisely in his criticism of the traditional doctrine of reconciliation. The hope of blessedness, he admits, connects itself with two conditions, namely, that transgressions become in the eyes of the Judge as if they had not been committed, and that we walk in a new life conformably to duty. The two conditions of necessity go together; and the attempt is made to prove this by deducing the one from the other. But the two possible combinations of the thoughts lead to antinomies of the reason. For, assuming first that a satisfaction for sins has been made, it is not easy to see how a reasonable man, who knows himself to be deserving of punishment, can apply to himself the penal satisfaction intended by another, and believe that a good life (in which he has not formerly busied himself) will follow from this view. Rather in the reverse way will he deduce the validity of that satisfaction for himself only from his life which he has reformed as well as he can. Thus that last-named element of the faith of the Church will only hold good when the currency of the pure moral faith is presupposed. But assuming, secondly, that man is by nature depraved, and finds in himself no ability to amend in the future, he then needs faith to be reconciled with God through the satisfaction of another, and may in this faith regard himself, so to speak, as born again, in order then to enter upon the new course of life. Thus this faith must precede all effort after good works,—which contradicts the previous proposition. Now this contradiction, according to Kant, does not admit of being theoretically resolved, for we can recognise no causes of freedom’s determination either to the good or to the evil. Practically, on the other hand, the decision is made in favour of the soundness of the first train of thought, as we must always begin with that which we ought to do in order to become worthy of that which God may have done for us. For, even if the historical Church-faith begins with the latter truth, that faith is yet only a vehicle for the pure faith of religion. Since, then, this last is the proper aim to be pursued, we must make a beginning with the corresponding maxim of action, and use the maxim of theoretical faith as the means of confirming and completing the first until such support is no longer needed.—Kant presents the antinomy also in the following form. Living faith in the pattern of the humanity that is acceptable to God (the Son of God) in itself relates to a moral idea of the reason, in so far as the latter serves us not merely as a rule, but as a stimulus, and it is therefore all one whether I begin with it as rational faith or with the principle of a good course of life. On the other hand, faith in that same pattern in its phenomenal manifestation as historical faith in the God-man, is not interchangeable with the principle of a good course of life, which must be wholly rational. But yet in the manifestation of the God-man it is after all the pattern which has its place in our reason, and which we think of under the historical figure, that properly speaking is the object of saving faith; and such a faith is identical with the principle of a course of life that is well-pleasing to God. Thus the antinomy of the two standpoints is only seeming; because the same practical idea, only viewed in different aspects, is by a misunderstanding taken for two diverse principles. But were it sought to make historical belief in the actual manifestation of the God-man a condition of saving faith, in that case, of course, two conflicting standpoints would be indicated.

Undeniably Kant concedes to the idea of Christ’s satisfaction a more specific meaning than that it exhibits the type of the proper appreciation of punishment on the part of every regenerate person. And in fact his recognition of its necessity stands in immediate relation to the stress he lays on the deep depravity of every man. When, however, he disregards its constitutive influence on the moral life, when he estimates it as a contingent instrumentality only in the solution of this practical task, when he finds it superfluous just in the measure in which this task admits of being discharged in accordance with pure critical principles of morality,—all this only evinces his general tendency, to which he adheres in spite of all the concessions that are wrung from him by the impression of religion. The immediate ground of the issue reached by him is given, however, in the attitude towards one another which he gives to the ideas of the Church and of the kingdom of God. For it is a mistake to identify these ideas in substance, and distinguish them only as steps in the realization of the same thing. In this mistake Kant follows the tradition, which on all other points he withstands—the churchly, to wit—whether mediæval and Catholic, or orthodox and Protestant. Only he modifies the simple identity of the two factors (which is taught in the earlier development of Christianity) by the assertion that the Church is the immature stage of the moral kingdom of God; and on this condition he gains that attitude of opposition to Church-Christianity which outweighs all seeming approximations thereto on his part. If we regard Kant’s rationalism from this point of view, the observation (which has already been made with reference to the Illumination) holds good in his case also, that the most incisive attacks made upon Church-Christianity are due to the fact that the criticism of tradition is not gone into with thoroughgoing earnestness, and that tradition is faithfully adhered to in isolated points in an uncritical way. The Church and the kingdom of God denote the association of men that Christ founded, in diverse aspects which hold good contemporaneously without the one ever passing over into the other, although they act and react upon each other. The association of those who believe in Christ is conceived as the kingdom of God, in so far as they pursue the common task of love towards all men—i.e., the moral task of forming them into an association intensively and extensively most perfect. These same believers are conceived as church or religious community, in so far as they show forth their faith in thanks and praise to God, in the recognition of His general and special guidance. The task of the kingdom of God cannot be undertaken as a common one if there be not formed a fellowship for God’s worship. And this last again requires, in order to its maintenance and extension, a multitude of activities of an ethical kind, which in having love for their motive at the same time are connected with the realization of the kingdom of God. But as the functions which essentially belong to the Church have their direction towards God, while the functions which essentially belong to the kingdom of God are directed towards men, these two forms of human fellowship cannot stand related to one another as lower and higher grades. If, moreover, the idea of reconciliation means that to the man who is led astray in sin the way to God is rendered possible; then the validity of this thought can never become superfluous even if he who has to contemplate himself under this point of view is at the same time called to activity in the kingdom of God. Kant therefore retrogrades into the path of the Illumination, when he disregards the import of the evil of our nature, and shares with the Illuminantists the conclusion that we must strive with all our powers after a walk acceptable to God, in order to be able to believe that God’s love to humanity (of which our reason already assures us), taking into account our honest intention, will make up the deficiency of our action, wheresoever that may be.

This aimless struggle between the impressions of the religious ideas of Christianity and the desire to gain for morality an unconditioned dependence, which Kant’s philosophical doctrine of religion displays, arrives at no conclusion of scientific certainty. Particularly, for the doctrines of reconciliation and justification there is brought about neither their advancement nor a restoration to their former position. He who is accustomed to view the doctrines of Christianity in the form of a determinate formulated law, will even recognise in their treatment by Kant nothing but the continued influence of the apostasy into which the Illumination fell. Irrespective of this appearance, it must still be maintained that Kant gave the Illumination an insuperable check, and that his never-ending vacillation in determining the relation between morality and religion, shows that the specific ideas of Christianity had an attraction for Kant which they had not for the Illuminantists, and by which Kant is completely contrasted with them. Nor can the fact that the sympathy has borne no more solid fruit for Kant’s philosophical doctrine of religion be explained from “unbelief” on his part, for that very sympathy for Christian ideas which he shows is faith; his failure can be explained only from a scientific mistake—viz., the premature dogmatizing of the critical principles of his doctrine of ethics.

59. The authority which Kant wielded over a certain group of theologians is not yet fully explained by the trains of thought of an ethical and religious-philosophical nature which we have been presenting. Besides these, his concession of the possibility of revelation contributed partly to the result; and also the morally teleological view of the universe developed in his Kritik der Urtheilskraft (1790), in connexion with the moral proof of the existence of God, who must be conceived not merely as Intelligence, and as giving laws to the natural world, but also as legislative supreme Head in a moral realm of ends. That a revelation, as a means towards the introduction of the true religion, should proceed from God, is declared by Kant, speaking from his philosophical standpoint, to be a matter against the possibility of which reason can no more decide than it can dispute its necessity. If, accordingly, we should become convinced by the worth of the moral principles of Jesus, and by the ideal impression of His personality, that His claim to reveal God is well founded, such a judgment would lie beyond the competence of philosophy. But as the conviction of Christ’s historical significance was dominated by the consideration that His doctrines mirrored back the philosophical truth of the absolute worth of the law, and of its fulfilment in human action, belief in revelation, while admitted on this ground, was subjected to the limitation that revelation ought to maintain precisely the truths of the practical reason which, by its means, should be made more easily accessible to the world of men than they would be by philosophical investigation.

But now from this there arose the possibility of a twofold procedure in appreciating the positive religious dress of the truths of the practical reason. On one side they were regarded, as by Kant in his philosophical doctrine of religion, merely as symbols of the necessary course of the practical reason. It cannot be doubted that Kant has framed the “personified idea of the good principle” by abstraction from the manifestation of Christ; and that too under the impression of His value as a revelation of God.¹³ That he nevertheless assigns in the sequel no decisive value to the empirical individual actuality of this Person is explained by the circumstance that he regards this occasion for the contemplation of the statutory truths of religion, as compared with the purely rational and independent apprehension of the laws of morals, as a vanishing transition-point, corresponding to the schema in which he recognises the Church as an intermediate step towards the realisation of the kingdom of God. But on another side, the single empirical fact with which the historical founding of the community was connected could, while it offered itself as the peculiar embodiment of the truths of religion in general, be looked upon as causing an extension of religious knowledge beyond the limits of the science which is attainable by the unaided reason. For this it was of course necessary to include this fact, i.e., the manifestation of Christ, definitively within the sphere of the Divine wisdom, and so within the teleological reflexion on the connexion of the universe with God, as a fact of God’s designing, the necessary interpretation of which is immediately connected with its occurrence. Undoubtedly these “symbols,” the doctrines of Christ, must prove their religious value herein that they fit in with the theoretical and practical ideas that find place in the reason; but the alliance of their universally rational meaning with the individual manifestation of Christ evinces its origin in revelation, and offers a knowledge that surpasses the powers of the reason. This is the properly theological standpoint which J. H. Tieftrunk of Halle assumes.¹⁴ It is particularly characteristic of his position that the doctrines of the Logos incarnate and of reconciliation are regarded as in conformity with reason, and the assertion of an opponent, that the contents of these doctrines are altogether supra-rational, is rebutted.

Tieftrunk¹⁵ holds forth, as the general idea of the Logos, the truth that God creates, legislates, sustains, and rules by ideas of wisdom; and, as the general idea of the Logos incarnate, the idea of the humanity that is acceptable to God, which results as a determining purpose from the moral consciousness of the law. But this idea denotes at the same time also the eternal and divine final purpose of the universe; and therefore not only was everything made by it, but also it realizes itself just in proportion as men’s consciousness is determined by the moral law to the effort after acceptance with God. “Accordingly we may say that the primordial wisdom became flesh by the union of the Idea of itself with Being in a fleshly shell.” But this general rational train of thought is transcended by the fact that in Jesus the Logos and the fulness of the Godhead dwelt bodily, in that He, so far as history allows us to judge, exhibited the character of acceptability with God in an ideally perfect manner.¹⁶ As now He exercised His activity in such circumstances, that He founded a religious community which received from Himself the rule and the impulse for their moral development, this complexus of special and peculiar circumstances is the distinguishing feature of revelation: the doctrine connected with them is, however, in itself no universal truth of the reason, but intelligible only in its connexion with the truths of the reason which it indicates. In this general sense, then, the Christian doctrine of reconciliation also is shown to be conformable to reason, or deduced a priori from the demands of the moral law. It signifies “the supplying of a self-caused deficiency of our own righteousness before the divine Judge, in so far as this last requires to be thought and believed as a condition of the realization of the final purpose of the world.” For while we find in ourselves a guilt which we have brought upon ourselves, the law whereby we know that guilt works in us a consciousness of our worthlessness, a loathing of ourselves, and a fear and a shame in the presence of the lawgiver which cannot be taken away by moral reformation, which, when it takes place, is no more than our duty. Rather is pardon by the judge the uppermost need of the guilty one, on the satisfying of which need the further advancement of the morality of the penitent subject rests. For the ideal of a moral way of thinking consists in love to the law, so that the law is observed with joy of heart and with good cheer. This attitude towards the law and the lawgiver is, however, possible only on the condition of a bestowal of grace; this is the ground from which reason a priori, as the principle of the unity of the reason with itself, demands an abolition of guilt. That this bestowal of grace is connected with the person of Christ, expresses the fact of revelation; but this fact has its peculiar value, not as an empirical datum—for as such it would be merely contingent— but in its relation to the aforesaid postulate of the practical reason.

Therefore it is also possible to recognise the means and the conditions of the postulated bestowal of grace as logically resulting from the fundamental principles of the practical reason.¹⁷ The imperative command of the practical reason points to the final purpose of the realization of the kingdom of God, of the commonwealth in which the moral law alone has authority, and the natural state of the citizens appears merely as a consequence of their moral behaviour. In order that this goal of one’s own action may be conceived as possible, the practical reason demands the existence of God, who, by moral ideas, is Creator and Lawgiver, Sustainer and Ruler, Judge and Executor of laws. Now, our realization of the kingdom of God is always thwarted by our original sinfulness, which also constantly hampers the prestations of the amended man. If then the moral final purpose of the world is nevertheless to be maintained, it follows from the guarantee contained in the thought of God, that the reason is justified in thinking of God as the efficient cause of all that which man himself cannot give, and which is yet necessary to make the attainment of the moral final purpose possible. Consequently the reason must conceive of God as supplying our deficiency in our inability to pass from the bad to the good, to wipe out the guilt we have incurred, to persevere in good maxims, and to attain full blessedness. Now, as is reasoned out in the dissertation already cited,¹⁸ it is essential that the removal by God of the criminality we ourselves have incurred towards the law be brought about not merely for the sake of the law, but also by means of the law. The first requisite is fulfilled if the realization of the universal moral final purpose, and particularly if love to the law is made impossible where forgiveness has not preceded. The second requisite implies that forgiveness is not to be understood as the expression of a divine arbitrariness opposed to the law,—that rather in its analogy with that placableness which is incumbent as a duty between man and man, it signifies nothing else than the directing of God’s working in accordance with law towards the realization of the kingdom of God. For implacability, regarded as the universal law of a moral kingdom, would be self-contradictory. If then, God is a lawgiver only with reference to the moral commonwealth, He can maintain this last and also the validity of His law only by the opposite of implacability, that is, by forgiveness as a procedure that is in accordance with law.

If, then, God must be thought of as author of the forgiveness of sins, to this on man’s part corresponds faith, not as a dead holding-for-true, but as a living trust. Such a faith must proceed from the observance of duty. “In doing what our duty requires, we may also believe that God will do His part in showing us grace.” This proposition, repeatedly stated by Tieftrunk, does not require to be so understood as if the forgiveness of sins were made objectively to depend upon reformation, as the Socinians and Illuminantists think. For the sense in which the Kantian understands the connexion is, in the first instance, not objective and dogmatic, but subjective and critical. In the dissertation already cited Tieftrunk clearly declares that reformation is the indispensable condition, but not the producing cause, of the forgiveness of sins. These words may denote a relation identical with the position of justifying faith as held by the Reformers, viz., that it is grasped by him who is active in the regenerate state.¹⁹ Tieftrunk does not, however, come up to the Reformers’ apprehension of justification by faith; but, following Kant’s example, also expresses himself to the effect that faith is only a real result of the observance of duty, just as religion is an appendix of morality. On this account the absence of merit in man, in the act of justification, does not with him mean that man’s prestations are altogether disregarded, but only that the observance of duty is no merit but a due, and yet that it is taken into account while the forgiveness of sins comes in to supplement it. The difference therefore is, that justification is not conceived as the principle of amelioration, but as God’s completion of the independent conversion of the man. Now, although Tieftrunk, in the further development of the conditions of the doctrine of the forgiveness of sins,²⁰ appears to seek to measure God’s doing therein by the contrast of His justice and grace, he does not for all that enter upon the path of the traditional doctrine of satisfaction. He again obliterates the peculiar significance of God’s justice, which he had recognised, by insisting upon the harmony of the Divine attributes with one another. He thus obtains from Christ’s prestation of obedience, which ended in death for the good of men, only the meaning that, as representative of God’s loving disposition, He procured the non-imputation of sins and the restoration of peace. Tieftrunk certainly gives casual expression also to the thought that in Christ’s obedience unto death humanity also is presented to God as justified (p. 346). But this formula conveys, so far as he is concerned, only the truth that he who follows the example set in Christ’s death, and trusts in the disposition of God that it betokens, may hold himself assured of peace with God. Thus Tieftrunk’s view of reconciliation by Christ’s death, like that of Töllner (p. 354), essentially agrees with Abelard’s interpretation.

In this result a truth discloses itself which had not received currency in the orthodox Protestant doctrine of reconciliation,—while at the same time a one-sidedness of view is displayed which does not treat fairly the converse thought of the representation of humanity by Christ. Tieftrunk’s indifference to the thought of penal satisfaction is, however, based upon yet another special ground. For with him what has to be considered in the problem of reconciliation is not the removal of outward penal evils, but the abolition of consciousness of guilt regarded as the cause of man’s inward loss of self-respect in presence of the law, and of dispeace and mistrust towards God. He gives full force to Töllner’s hint (p. 356), in order to define the problem of the doctrine of reconciliation in a new and characteristic way. For although he recognises consciousness of guilt and external penal evils to be both of them consequences of sin, he yet maintains, and lays it down as a rule of common moral knowledge, that in reconciliation the removal of the first is so preponderant or even so exclusively in question, that if an injured benefactor were to remit the outward penalties to the ingrate, and yet always spurn him from himself with unaltered contempt, that sort of forgiveness would be absolutely worthless.²¹ I do not at all doubt that this knowledge owes its origin only to a judgment rendered keener by Kant, even though Tieftrunk rightly adduces the common practice of education as showing the validity of the principle. When I compare the facts that, while Tieftrunk publicly expressed himself in this sense, Knapp at the same time in the same university was able to teach that in reconciliation by Christ there can be absolutely no thought of the removal of men’s consciousness of guilt towards God (p. 383), I conclude that Kant’s special impulse contributed to make that fact of “common moral knowledge” as such valid in its universal significance even for our relation to God. And it is obvious that it was Kant’s discovery of the value and weight of the consciousness of guilt that drew after it the conclusion that in reconciliation the first thing aimed at is the removal of this obstacle to peace with God. Now, under this condition no direct liberation from merited punishments is counted on by Tieftrunk. Rather does he infer²² from the congruence of nature with the moral world that all evils ought to be conceived as punishments, as results of guilt personally incurred, while the necessary congruence between happiness and worth supplies the impulse to amendment in the sense that we become free from evils only in proportion as by our amendment we fit ourselves for being so freed. The object of this idea, however, is conceived as attainable in an eternity only, and so withdraws itself from our penetration. Now, although no use is made of the idea of reconciliation in this last problem, yet this exposition of it has some analogy to that idea in so far as the view of evils inculcated by Tieftrunk can and must be conjoined with cheerfulness, because a joyful frame of spirit is an evidence that we have come to love the law. Thus love to the law, which is possible only in the consciousness of reconciliation with God, awakens also that appreciation of evils which is the opposite of the feelings they naturally produce. More clearly is it laid down in the dissertation cited (pp. 154, 187) that the amended subject who obtains forgiveness will gladly, if he only can obtain that, bear the punishments which he has deserved. This hint refers to a more comprehensive view of evils than that which Kant regarded in the solution of the same problem (p. 411). But Tieftrunk himself was not distinctly conscious of this divergence, for he (p. 174) again adopts the Kantian theory which limits punishment to those sufferings which the amended subject experiences in his struggle with the inward results of previous sinfulness. So difficult is it in scientific knowledge to apply a newly discovered thought to such inferences as are seemingly unavoidable.²³

The peculiar attitude assumed by Tieftrunk in his doctrine of reconciliation by Christ expresses itself yet again in the assertion that the death of Christ is symbolical. He starts the question whether this be the case or whether the death of Christ as a fact have a really atoning power, so that men by it and for its sake are freed from sin.²⁴ By a symbol in religion he understands a representation which rests upon an analogy, in which, accordingly, is expressed either a similarity of the things, or at least a similarity of relation between the things. A symbol, therefore, as being an intuition of the object of thought, would be the opposite of merely discursive knowledge. Now, it is in this sense that he recognises the atoning death of Jesus to be a symbol of God’s relation to men. As God’s disposition towards us can never be directly shown, we have to think of the disposition which Jesus evinced by His suffering and dying, as existing also in God in so far as we hope for forgiveness of sins from Him, and that too by the same rule which holds good for the symbol. By this view Tieftrunk excludes the other alternative,—that the death of Jesus is the intuition corresponding to the Divine act of absolution itself, that it is the schema of a course of Divine action that can be recognised in accordance with reason. This judgment is opposed to the whole dogmatic course of the doctrine of reconciliation, and thus far flows in direct succession from Kant’s principles of knowledge. The rational calculation of the relation between grace and justice in God, on which the dogmatic doctrine of reconciliation rested, entangles itself in antinomies, just as the entire dogmatic treatment of the idea of God does. However certainly, then, those attributes of God are drawn by necessary consequence from our practical teleological knowledge, their relation in God and their bearing upon the occurrence in time of the death of Jesus are theoretically unintelligible. So that we must satisfy ourselves with contemplating in that symbol the undoubted harmony of the Divine wisdom in itself, with God’s benevolent disposition towards man.²⁵ The Christian doctrine of reconciliation in Christ is thus a revelation, in so far as the universally reasonable connexion between the forgiveness of sins and our obligation to the law is connected with the intuition of the individual empirical person; but it is none the less a mystery in so far as the ground of the unity of the efficient and final causes, which by God are united in that person, continues to be inscrutable to us.²⁶ Or, as Tieftrunk puts it in the course of the dissertation already cited,²⁷ it is practically necessary that from the same law reprobation and grace proceed; but how this is possible we do not understand. For without any doubt the maxim of implacability, when regard is had to the purpose of the kingdom of God, would be contrary to law (see above, p. 421); but in this cognition, which is to be applied to God’s mode of dealing with men, i.e., in the enunciation of the general lawfulness of forgiveness, there is expressed no principle whereby the latter may be reconciled with the absolute obligation of the law; in other words, the relation between the justice and the grace of God remains quite undetermined, even when the problem is treated thus.²⁸

60. Tieftrunk’s express distinction between forgiveness of sins and remission of punishments was contemporaneously supported by other theologians, partly by interpretation of Scripture and partly by philosophical ratiocination. Amongst them J. Aug. Nösselt²⁹ indeed takes up the standpoint of illuminated supra-naturalism, setting forth that punishments in part have for their object to reform and deter, and thus can be remitted only when these objects have been gained; and in part (as the feeling of guilt or an unlooked-for misfortune) have the value of retribution, and can only be modified by the awakening of opposite feelings in the converted person. He makes use of the aimless dogmatic mode of treatment which Töllner had devoted to this question (p. 358); and thus it is possible that he may have been led by him also to the distinction which is expressed in the title of his program. For although he concedes (what still held its ground in exegetical tradition), that the Scriptural usus loquendi presents both formulæ with the same meaning, he nevertheless raises a doubt whether an identical definition of the two ideas is thereby intended. For in the Bible the part is often enough put for the whole; the conclusion for the premisses; attributes for the thing itself. That in like manner remission of punishment is put for forgiveness of sins appears to be possible from the consideration that men are more afraid of punishment than of guiltiness. But Nösselt concludes, from Rom. viii. 32-39 and Heb. v. 16, that what is of importance before everything else in Christianity is that we should be acceptable to God, and be in a position to expect what is best from Him; and he recognises in the expectation of exemption from punishment only a result from this state of forgiveness of sins, which is made to depend upon the converted man’s faith in the promise of God, and not upon his change of mind, i.e., upon his good deeds.

By this Nösselt has only hinted at the theme, but not solved the problem. At the same time he found hearty concurrence in theologians of the Kantian school, such as J. W. Schmid in Jena, C. F. Stäudlin in Göttingen, C. Chr. Flatt in Tübingen.³⁰ Stäudlin, in his dissertation (which was published in parts), begins by maintaining that there is no difference between the utterances of Jesus respecting His death and those of the Apostles, and that brief and vague though the words of Jesus are, they yet are to be understood more probably in the sense of vicarious endurance of punishment than as meaning that He establishes deliverance from sin, and thereby also deliverance from punishments. Subsequently, however, he confesses, appealing to Nösselt, that the forgiveness of sins which is promised in Christianity, does not mean the removal of punishment and presuppose a proper transference of that to Christ, but rather betokens the goodness and blessing of God upon sinners who amend themselves, whom otherwise He cannot allow to go unpunished for their sins. The death of Christ, he maintains, is an actual proof of God’s love and ratification of forgiveness of sins in that sense, being, as it was, a sacrifice on behalf of the doctrine which was to raise men’s happiness, and a finishing of that virtue by the imitation of which they were designed to enter upon the way of blessedness. At the same time, however, the death of Christ is a symbol of God’s penal justice, not as meaning the transference to Him of the sinner’s punishment,—for his sufferings have only a certain general resemblance to the punishments which ought to overtake sinners,—but only in the sense that every sin on the part of men ought to be visited with punishment as surely as God gave Jesus over to suffering and to death. With this reminiscence of Storr’s assertion of the penal example in the death of Christ,—a reminiscence clothed in Kantian forms,—Stäudlin further conjoins Kant’s supposition that Christ symbolically represents what the regenerate man suffers as penal satisfaction for his past sins. For the punishments of sin, which are properly Divine, cannot be taken away.

The more extensive researches of Flatt in their first (philosophical) part first turn upon the demonstration that forgiveness of sins in the sense of removal of punishments is impossible by the principles of the practical reason. Upon this, reconciliation is represented as being God’s approval of the change of the sinner’s maxims. This view of it is held to be demanded by the practical reason and also contained in the Christian revelation. The exegetical proof of this last statement is gone about in the second part. The negative assertion is based upon the principle, that either the law is not unconditioned and of universal validity or that the case can never occur in which the execution of punishment could lay obstacles in the way of morality. Particularly the thought is wrought out against Eberhard, that if the happiness-principle holds good, if therefore it had to be assumed that man is made better in order to enjoy so much the more happiness, the remission of punishments would be better suited to this end than their execution; if, on the other hand, the moral principle holds good, then the removal of punishments would weaken the inseparable connexion betweeu morality and happiness. This elucidation, however, as well as the opposite proof which Süskind has adduced,³¹ for the “ possibility of the removal of punishments or forgiveness of sins according to the principles of practical reason ” sails in as shallow a channel as does the corresponding ratiocination of the Illuminantists. I do not think fit to follow it further, but appeal to the true remark of Baur (as above, p. 584), that just as sin is the joint deed of the human race, so also evil, depending as it does on sin, can only be explained from the joint guilt. Only I would add that this Schleiermacherian way of regarding the question transcends the Kantians’ sphere of vision. But in proportion as they do not rise to it, they revert to the aimless reflections of the Illuminantists, for the problem of punishment and guilt cannot be resolved when only the individual life is considered.

In the second (exegetical) part of his work Flatt finds the purpose of Jesus in taking death upon Himself to have been to destroy earthly expectations of His kingdom, and to give an impulse to the moral meaning of his doctrine. He leaves it uncertain whether the words of Jesus treat His coming death as a tangible guarantee of the grace of God. But according to him this last is the view of the apostles who under definite conditions by the guidance of God derived that view from the impression of the death of Christ. The presentation of Christ as an offering is very significantly brought into connexion with admission into the number of the new people, into God’s community founded by Christ, and with abiding membership therein, just as the sacrifices of the Old Testament were the condition of continuity of membership in the covenant nation. Flatt has undertaken with some good grounds to show that the idea of transference of punishment is not expressed in the ancient sin offerings; but his exegetic procedure upon this point as well as in his treatment of the majority of passages in the New Testament is too fragmentary; so that Süskind, his countryman, who contemporaneously with him came forward with weighty exegetical arguments in favour of the assumed penal value of sacrifices,³² was able to counteract the impression produced by Flatt. For the thought of reconciliation by Christ is not made clear by Flatt when he interprets Christ’s sacrifice as an act of assumption into the Christian community. Instead of recognising in the religious fellowship of Christ the previous ground of all valuable moral self-activity, he understands by the people of God only the number of those who are destined to enjoy happiness in the everlasting kingdom of the Messias. He then carries out his deductions to the effect that the uneducated men who entered the Christian Church lay under contradictory impressions of the Divine goodness and the Divine penal justice, that in their purpose of amendment they found themselves hampered by the fear of Divine punishments, particularly of exclusion from the kingdom of Messias, that against this the sacrificial value of the death of Christ was maintained by the apostles with the intention of maintaining in Christians the memory of their penal deserts (penal example again!), and securing to them in a sensible way the assurance of God’s love. Of course, the realization of these prospects really depended upon Christians’ own amendment of themselves; and the evils of withdrawal of God’s love and of exclusion from the kingdom of the Messias were either punishments, the warding off of which depended upon each individual himself, or were such as never could happen, and thus were imaginary. Flatt thus carries back the representation of Christ’s death as a sacrifice to an accommodation, in spite of which the irreversible dependence of happiness upon amendment ought rather to be insisted upon. In the progress of the latter, he expects it to ensue as an experience that sufferings as results of former offences are compensated for by growing self-satisfaction, and the certainty of the inseparable connexion between virtue and happiness.

From this aspect of his view it is now explained wherefore Flatt, in spite of his seeming approximation to Tieftrunk, opposes his theory. With the latter that assurance of the removal of guilt, and of its separating influence upon the religious relation of man to God, which precedes all amendment, is a postulate of the universal practical reason, and is the decisive kernel of truth contained in Christianity. Flatt sees in this development of thought by the apostles only a device for their converts, who were too uneducated to realize to themselves in a sufficiently lively and powerful way the idea of a gradual and never-ending process of moral perfection and happiness. Tieftrunk’s view has its root in those expressions of Kant which most definitely point to the founding of all morality in the ideas of religion. Flatt, on the other hand, takes his stand upon the independence of the moral power of the will (which at other times is maintained by Kant), to which the religious manner of contemplation is only a statutory clothing which is destined to give way to the moral self-consciousness whenever that shall have become so mature as to be able to dispense with accommodations. When, accordingly, Flatt asserts that self-loathing in the presence of the law and the consciousness of having displeased God, which accompany the purpose of amendment, form no necessary obstacle in the beginning and in the course of amendment, but that rather the firm determination of a change of mind, and the consciousness of freedom possess the power to lessen in continuous progression the feeling of remorse; such an assertion cannot be gainsaid if we either confine, or at least principally assign, the moral task to the moral self-perfecting of the individual, i.e., if we take up our standpoint on the doctrine of virtue which Kant has not carried beyond what Wolf had reached.³³ But, if with Tieftrunk we take as our guiding star the idea of Kant that the humanity which is acceptable to God as a kingdom ruled by laws of virtue is the final purpose of the world, and that the Church founded by Christ is called to the fulfilment of this task, it will then be capable of proof that active participation therein does not rest merely upon endless perfectibility in the consciousness of moral freedom and of the purpose of amendment.

The philosophical harmony of these Kantians with Tieftrunk is thus only seeming, and the exegetical means they use do not serve to establish their distinction between forgiveness of sins and remission of punishment. It is therefore easy to understand why these attempts soon died out, and have exercised no subsequent influence. Tieftrunk altogether assumes a very isolated attitude, for the other Kantians move in the direction which has just been illustrated in the doctrines advanced by Flatt, and which is pointed to by Kant himself, in so far as he has treated the autonomy of law-regulated action as an attribute of the individual empirical subject. In this direction, for example, J. W. Schmid of Jena³⁴ declares it to be the doctrine of reason and of Christianity that man receives pardon of God when he seriously amends himself, and now lives all the more virtuously as he previously had been wicked, that sorrow over past sins cannot be taken away, and can be lessened only by persevering progress in good, that merited punishment is not taken away, and least of all transferred to Christ, but that God who judges according to the totality of the life will count as punishment the unpleasant feelings of sorrow and shame over past sins; that He will not overlook the extenuating circumstances of sin; that He will reward the good that a man does according to the measure of the disposition lying at the bottom of it. Inasmuch as man has no legal claim hereto, this procedure is called forgiveness of sins and bestowal of grace. The apostolical doctrine of forgiveness of sins by the death of Christ is represented to be an accommodation in order to save the recently converted from discouragement in pursuing the path of virtue, since the proper purpose of the death of Christ is the promotion of virtue. Wherefore also trust in the death of Christ and justification by faith are only warranted in so far as the practice of good actions is strictly connected with them, and receives from them the strongest impulse. And the formula of the Reformers which is otherwise framed is absolved from blame only because it was directed against self-complacency in self-appointed ascetic prestations.³⁵ The establishment of the foregoing theory of the goodness of God may be supplemented by what another theologian of Jena, C. Chr. Erh. Schmid had laid down regarding imputation on God’s part.³⁶ “ If all immorality of a finite being ultimately has its ground in limiting conditions operating upon the self-activity of the reason that knows the Godhead, which are transcendental and lie outside of experience, and the consequences of which the Godhead in no way imputes to the rational being that has not itself produced them, there is accordingly in the judgment of the Infinite no such thing as guilt, but only higher and lower merit. The idea of guilt rests in its reality upon the thought of a possibility of an activity of the reason without its actuality; this thought rests upon the ignorance of a finite being with regard to the super-sensuous limitations which take away that possibility. But the Godhead sees no possibility where there is no actuality; here accordingly the ground of imputation of guilt falls quite away.” Now I do not assert that this argumentation is consciously assumed by the Kantians in their illuminantist treatment of the doctrine of reconciliation, but it affords the clearest expression for the divergence of his thoughtless followers from Kant’s critical self-judgment of the moral subject. The mistake of Erh. Schmid lies in the definition of guilt as proceeding from the thought of the possibility of an operation of the reason without its actuality. In Kant’s sense it must be asserted that guilt arises from the thought of the morally binding necessity of an action without its actuality. If, accordingly, this idea of guilt is given up, with which Kant opposed himself to the Illumination (p. 394), it is easy to understand that the treatment of the subject again lost itself in the doctrine that God demands of men only so much as they are able to give in accordance with the individual conditions of their moral strength (p. 375); and hereby also is the problem of reconciliation again trifled away.

It was a significant fact for the Church history of the nineteenth century that the old Church-doctrine of reconciliation was, in a well-known Fast-day sermon of the year 1800, opposed by Reinhard to the Illumination that had only been intensified by the Kantian school. By it Krug was led anew to bring forward the antinomy in the idea of reconciliation (p. 413) that had been put forward in the third part of the Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, and to solve it in Kant’s sense.³⁷ This Kantian then was still conscious of the problem. That problem presents itself to him in the contradiction of the propositions: Man by his own instrumentality comes to find acceptance with God; and Man by his own instrumentality cannot find acceptance with God, and must therefore become acceptable through another. The meaning of the propositions according to him is, that man, on the one hand, must do what is his part; but on the other hand, cannot do all that is necessary in order to gain acceptance with God. The propositions, therefore, do not actually exclude one another, but agree in the rule: Work with all thy might towards thy moral perfecting with firm confidence that God, notwithstanding the imperfections that still attach to thee, will, for the sake of another’s merit, have no displeasure with thee. But the merit of Christ denotes the ideal of human perfection as that which man can always become, if he practically believes in it, i.e., independently strives after it. Thus there results the solution, which is in harmony with Kant, that the consciousness of reconciliation with God, of forgiveness of sins, and of gracious judgment really rests hereupon, that one strives according to his powers after the moral ideal without regarding whether consciousness of sin admits of this. And that is always again the thesis of the Illumination. For, as Kant in the course of this procedure leaves out of view his own assertion of radical moral evil which guarantees its full weight to the antithesis, so neither has Krug perfectly reproduced that assertion, but has weakened its meaning by saying that man cannot do all that is necessary to gain acceptance with God. He ought to have said that man can do nothing to that end. But this proposition has been adjusted with its opposite neither by Krug nor by Kant.

61. De Wette’s religious philosophy also³⁸ has its root in Kant’s principles. That philosophy markedly separates itself from the rationalism of the Illumination inasmuch as at the same time it attaches through Fries to hints taken from Jacobi. He shows that to discern the mechanical concatenation of things and of ourselves is an insufficient grade of knowledge, because the consciousness of our own freedom and of our imperishable value is not covered by that discernment. The idea of freedom, under which we act, thus leads to a way of contemplating things that reaches much deeper—the contemplation of them from ideas which find their connexion in the idea of God. Ideas are not objects of knowledge, for they are not accompanied by sense perception, and have not their origin therein, nor can the connexion of things in time be explained from them; but they are objects of faith and of feeling which apprehend the true being and everlasting purpose of things in the beauty and sublimity of nature and of the spiritual life of man. The ideas, which are discovered to be valid by the analytical processes of the speculative reason, are originally operative in religious faith. We ourselves live as citizens of the kingdom of God, with our immortal souls in the objective eternal Being, not merely apprehending the true being of things in the idea of God, but at the same time also gaining from the idea of freedom and of moral dignity the practical idea of man’s destiny, as the idea which expresses the absolute eternal purpose of the world. De Wette goes on to divide religious feeling into three Genera, or “into three æsthetic ideas.” The idea of man’s destiny is apprehended by the religious feeling as elevation of spirit, as the cheering view of the universe which enables us to divine in temporal phenomena their direction towards an everlasting purpose, namely, a kingdom of God upon earth. The antithesis between the idea of Good and of Evil finds its solution in the feeling of resignation, in the belief of the existence of a spiritual connexion of things which cannot be doubted in spite of the contradiction that is constantly asserting itself in the moral world. The feeling of devotion takes away the contrast between the sublimity of the ideas in the phenomenal world on the one hand, and our littleness on the other. The religious feelings, however, do not constitute a religious life of the individual until by the reflection of the understanding they are brought into a permanently connected system, and that too in such a way that the understanding symbolizes the various attitudes of the feelings by analogous intuitions or actions. Religion thus gains the social and historical form which it is impossible to apprehend without recognising in the individual’s dependence on the community the divine influence of historical revelation. And although by the communication of the symbols of religion that are addressed to the understanding, superstition may be elicited in so far as the properly corresponding feelings are not awakened in the individual, yet the existence of social religion is always connected with the propagation of one doctrine of religion or another. Those who in this region call into life new truths, manners and laws that make epochs in the history of religion, are the founders of religions. “Whence they come is a mystery.” For even though it is assumed that their appearance and their activity follow certain laws, these last remain undiscoverable to us. On the other hand, as it is precisely by the founders of religions that the training of the human race by God is maintained, these personalities must appear as God-inspired, as bearers of His revelation. But that founder of religion who brings into actuality the possible destiny of men as the divine purpose of the whole world, who establishes God’s kingdom upon earth, will have to be reverenced and honoured as the manifestation of the Divine understanding itself, as God in human shape, after whom no new grade of revelation is to be expected.

In what the idea of reconciliation postulates, i.e., in his apprehension of guilt, De Wette repeats Kant’s view; but this is done with a very questionable modification upon the relation between radical moral evil and freedom. The latter is recognised by Kant only as the critical principle of imputation—as the ground on which we believe that in the causal connexion of our actions we do not come under the law of nature but under the moral law. De Wette on the other hand admits, on the one side, that conscience traces, in the preponderance of sensuous impulse over the law, voluntary fault springing from an original propensity to evil, but maintains on the other side that that circumstance is only the result of finite existence in nature. And therefore he repudiates the excuse for sinning which might be obtained from this position, by the proposition that this our finitude is our own voluntary fault. He indeed admonishes himself to push this view no further, lest he should be betrayed into mythological dreams of an apostasy of souls and of their banishment into a world of matter; but he has already fallen into the error of this hypothesis, and that because he has dogmatically misapplied what Kant critically insists upon. But as we usually prove nothing where we try to prove too much, the idea of moral evil, properly speaking, loses its sharpness in being referred to the ingress of infinite freedom into finitude. Therefore De Wette does not scruple to connect the removal of the consciousness of guilt with that consciousness of infinite ideal freedom which accompanies the foregoing judgment upon the finitude of human existence. The same consciousness of freedom which displays our finitude in the light of inculpation serves also as the ground and the key of speculative knowledge to conduct us to the highest unity in the world of ideas. For if we determine the idea of God by the idea of purpose, we find the Almighty good Will to be the unity of will and of power, and thus think within ourselves of the good as absolutely realized by His omnipotence. This is the optimistic faith, or faith in the Divine government of the world, whereby the former contradiction is made to disappear and the guilt of sins taken away.³⁹

This train of thoughts finds its complement and, relatively speaking, its correction, in the interpretation which De Wette gives to reconciliation by Christ. In place of the customary rationalistic explanation which he had given earlier in life,⁴⁰ De Wette declares that Christ not only taught the love of God and His kingdom, but that what He taught He also lived and acted and in a living way communicated. In highest love toward men and highest obedience toward God, He showed Himself to be the Son in whom God was well pleased, and united men with the bonds of love into one family of God, of which He became the Head. As their pattern, He at the same time bestowed the power of striving after His example. And though He could not entirely free them from the burden of sinfulness, He yet filled them with trust, whereby the struggle with sin can always be more and more successful. Having taken them up into His own fellowship, He at least allowed them to share, by faith and hope, in His perfection and God’s complacent regard. In this faith fear of God’s wrath vanished; He established reconciliation between God and men, and this He consummated by His death, in which He manifested the highest moral sublimity, highest love and highest obedience, and sealed the covenant which He had made between Himself, God, and men. Himself, accordingly, His manifestation, His life, and His death, were symbols, i.e., visible representations of the eternal, unseen world of God; a symbolism in which idea and expression mutually interpenetrate one another, and, therefore, in a purely æsthetic way, take irresistible hold of the feelings; and in which is involved the impulse to activity in the moral fellowship of the kingdom of God.⁴¹

In order properly to understand this view, we must secure against misapprehensions the æsthetic character of religious faith, as De Wette understands it. He regards faith as an æsthetic function, inasmuch as God’s intelligible world, when by symbols it makes its appearance in the world of phenomena, presents that harmony which experience fails to find in the causally-connected world of sense, and which yet the reason must perceive if it is to be sure of itself. Let it not be objected to this: “Ein Schauspiel, aber ach! ein Schauspiel nur!”⁴² For in the first place, the need of harmony between ourselves and the universe, in other words, a wholly æsthetic motive, is the one trustworthy subjective argument we possess for the idea of God; but, moreover, ethical exertion and the struggle against opposing subjective impulses are not excluded. They are not excluded by De Wette himself. For if, in the beginning, he seemed to wish to set aside the certainty of guilt by speculative exaltation into the ideal world, he yet lays it down as a condition on which alone the life and death of Christ can exercise their reconciling power, that we must crucify ourselves with Him and withdraw ourselves from the dominion of the flesh, in order to rise again with Him to new life.⁴³ Undoubtedly his treatment of this subject, which is rhetorical rather than dialectical, gives occasion for supposing that with him as with Kant (p. 410), what is really meant is only a symbolical transference to Christ of what, properly speaking, man himself does. “Christ on the cross,” says he, “is the image of humanity purified by self-sacrifice.” But such expressions are overruled by the whole course of Divine revelation with which De Wette incorporates the life of Christ, while in Kant this background is wanting. There remains indeed the question whether the exhortation given by Paul in the sixth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, by which Dippel (p. 339) and Gruner (p. 373) had already interpreted the idea of reconciliation through Christ, corresponds to the full significance of Christ and to Paul’s own view. But it is beyond all doubt that in this combination are operative at once a sincere religious recognition of reconciliation by the death of Christ and also a regard to the due ethical use of that event. For so far as De Wette is concerned, he has censured the theology of the Illumination, and its fundamental position that we can merit God’s complacent regard, for its want of faith or its want of ideality. In this sense he has acknowledged the orthodox form of the doctrine of justification to be the foundation of the whole Christian faith, and the true antidote to the moral theology of the new school.⁴⁴ Thus he shares that enthusiasm for the strengthening and awakening power of the Christian faith which arose after the wars of liberation. At the same time indeed he bears witness to the theological shiftlessness and dissipation which manifested itself at that period of “awakening;” and this he had a right to censure, for the treatise which we have just been using to show his standpoint is to this day not superseded,⁴⁵ but very vigorously maintains the problem which lies before the religious science of our century.

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Footnotes

1. Chiefly from the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785). ↩

2. The hints in the third section of the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten are based upon the solution of the third antinomy of pure reason given in the Critique of pure Reason (1781), and are carried out in accordance herewith in the part of the Critique of the practical Reason (1788) entitled Critical illustration of the analytic of pure practical Reason. ↩

3. Kritik der praktischen Vernunft. 1ster Th. 1stes Buch, 1 Hptst. sec. 8 (vol. v. p. 40 of the new edition of Kant’s works by Hartenstein). ↩

4. This was precisely what Eberhard’s opinion came to (above, p. 362). ↩

5. “Religion within the limits of mere reason.” ↩

6. This last point is conceded by the Kantian C. Chr. Erhard Schmid in his Versuch einer Moralphilosophie (1790); for he states (p. 148) his doctrine of the highest Good under the title “Absolute union of pure and empirical practical reason.” Yet he reckons the doctrine as part of the critique of practical reason, and so does not attain to the distinction expressed above. ↩

7. Erster Theil, erstes Buch, drittes Hauptstück, vol. v. p. 76 seq. ↩

8. Cf. in the above-cited edition of Kant’s Works, vol. vi. pp. 175-177, 249. ↩

9. As above, p. 99. ↩

10. Kant’s words are the following (as above, vi. p. 137): “The rational origin of this propensity to evil remains undiscoverable to us, because it also must itself be imputed to us; consequently that highest ground of all maxims would again demand the assumption of an evil maxim. Evil can only have arisen out of moral evil; and yet the original disposition is a disposition to the good. For us accordingly there is no conceivable explanation whence moral evil can first have come upon us.” Thus I do not find that it is Kant’s thought that is expressed by Dorner (Lehre von der Person Christi, 2ter Theil, p. 974): “This propensity must have its ground in freedom; but as it lies in no act in time, it points away to an intelligible free, original act, by which the highest maxim was perverted;” and by Gass (Gesch. der protest. Dogmatik, Bd. 4, p. 290): “Conceived as original sin (?) sin resembles an intelligible act which comprehends in one the aggregate sum of human offences.” These misinterpretations are doubtless produced by the confusing impression of a mythologizing travesty of Kant’s doctrine. Kant’s meaning is exceeded when the actual derivation of evil from intelligible freedom by one act is asserted. For hereby freedom also is made to be a cause in time, which in its idea it ought not to be. ↩

11. P. 139. “How now it is possible that a man who by nature is wicked should make himself good is a thing that transcends all our conception; for how can an evil tree bear good fruit?” But still as we ought to become better men, “we must also be able to become such, even though what we are able to do should in itself be insufficient, and only serve to make us capable of receiving a higher aid inscrutable to us.” ↩

12. Therefore Kant, after this change of opinion at p. 156, returns in p. 162 to the religious thought. ↩

13. Werke, vi. p. 155: “As we are not the authors of this idea, it on the contrary having taken its place in men without our being able to comprehend how human nature could ever have been so much as able to receive it, we may rather say that that pattern has come down to us from heaven—that it has laid hold of humanity.” ↩

14. Censur des christlichen protestantischen Lehrbegriffs. Drei Theile, 1791-93. The first part in a second edition, 1796 (thus having been prepared subsequent to the appearance of Kant’s “Religion within the limits of mere reason.”) It is this second edition that I use. With reference to what is said in the text, compare p. 146 sq. ↩

15. As above, p. 149 sqq. See also a dissertation, “Is the forgiveness of sins a Postulate of the Practical Reason?” in Stäudlin’s Beiträge zur Philosophie und Geschichte der Religion u. Sittenlehre (1797), pp. 112-201. ↩

16. This is not the place specially to elucidate Tieftrunk’s Christology; yet I allow myself the remark that the neglect of it in Dorner’s Lehre von der Person Christi is not justified; while the ironical notice of Tieftrunk’s work, “Then came the time of critiques of all revelation, or of the religion of Christianity, and of Judgment on the Protestant doctrinal ideas,“—as well as the wrong dates, 1790, 1791 (ib. p. 973), betray Dorner’s want of acquaintance with it. ↩

17. Compare the second part of the Censur des protestantischen Lehrbegriffs, pp. 210-229. ↩

18. Pp. 120, 157, 172. ↩

19. The same thought gets characteristic expression cognate to the Kantian view from E. R. Stier (in his biography, vol. i. p. 216): “For all that is yet in the future [we ought] to live only strictly according to the law as if only by the fulfilment thereof we were to be saved,—then for the past only to comfort ourselves with grace, and for God’s sake presuppose no forgiving grace for the future.” ↩

20. Censur des prot. Lehrbegriffs, ii. p. 276 sqq. ↩

21. Censur des prot. Lehrbegriffs, i. p. 169. Also the dissertation in Stäudlin’s Beiträge, iii. p. 153. ↩

22. Censur des prot. Lehrbegriffs, iii. p. 127. ↩

23. It is no less remarkable that Baur (as above, pp. 568, 570) assigns to Tieftrunk’s line of thought in the Censur des prot. Lehrbegriffs the purpose of deducing from Kant’s principle the necessity of the remission of punishments. Baur therefore finds in Tieftrunk’s essay in Stäudlin’s Beiträge a “new application of his deduction,” but in respect to this finds at the same time that “it is not said wherein forgiveness consists” (p. 574). It has entirely escaped the notice of the historian of the doctrine of reconciliation that Tieftrunk has made the great advance of postulating in reconciliation with God nothing but the removal of guilt and of the consciousness of guilt, and leaving aside that of punishment. A fellow-countryman of Baur had indeed before him overlooked this peculiarity of Tieftrunk’s doctrine. In Süskind’s essay Ueber die Möglichkeit der Strafaufhebung oder der Sündenvergebung nach Principien der praktischen Vernunft (in Flatt’s Magazin für Dogmatik und Moral, 1st part, 1796), an abstract of Tieftrunk’s view taken from the 2d part of the Censur des prot. Lehrbegriffs is to be found which does not reproduce his characteristic tendency. Süskind deserves a certain measure of indulgence in this, not being acquainted with Tieftrunk’s first part in its 2d ed. (1796), where the dominating point of view is stated in an unmistakable way. In fact he inadvertently assumes the eudæmonistic point of view and loses himself in aimless talk (compare the notice in Baur). In spite of this Baur has reposed such confidence in Süskind as to reproduce almost word for word (pp. 568-570) his abstract of Tieftrunk’s view (as above, pp. 23-25), citing the very numbers of the pages in Tieftrunk’s work which Süskind has referred to. From that theological local patriotism, which is customary with others also of his countrymen, Baur has thus altogether neglected to look at the North German theologian’s chief work, of which he treats. ↩

24. Censur, ii. p. 348 sq. ↩

25. Censur, ii. p. 328 sqq.; 357 sqq. ↩

26. Ib., p. 201 sqq. ↩

27. Stäudlin, Beiträge, iii. p. 186. ↩

28. In Dorner’s Geschichte der protest. Theologie, pp. 750, 751, there is to be found a notice of the controversy (touched upon by Baur also) between Tieftrunk and Süskind, which is quite unintelligible to me so far as I am acquainted with the original documents. In particular, I do not understand upon what basis Dorner’s remark against Tieftrunk rests: “ he failed to perceive, that if sin be forgiven spontaneously, and that too previous to amendment (for forgiveness of sins must establish the possibility of the latter), then in place of God’s righteousness an indifference to the distinction between God and evil must come in.” For I have nowhere read in Tieftrunk the premisses that are here given as his. Just as little do I find in him the assertion attributed to him by Dorner, that “ instead of the promulgation of forgiveness of sins by revelation, there is needed only the knowledge of it as an eternal truth of the reason.” And in fact Tieftrunk could not at all have expressed himself so. ↩

29. Disputatio de eo quid sit Deum condonare hominibus peccata pœnasque remittere? Halæ, 1792. ↩

30. J. W. Schmid: Commentationis in qua remissionis peccatorum notio biblica indagatur Partes i. et ii., Jena, 1796. C. F. Stäudlin: Ueber den Zweck u. die Wirkungen des Todes Jesu in the Göttingen Bibliothek der neuesten theolog. Literatur, Erster Band, 1795. C. Chr. Flatt: Philosophisch-exegetische Untersuchungen über die Lehre von der Versöhnung der Menschen mit Gott. Two Parts, 1797-98. ↩

31. In Flatt’s Magazin für christl. Dogmatik u. Moral, 1stes Stück, 1796. ↩

32. Ist unter der Sündenvergebung, welche das neue Testament verspricht, Aufhebung der Strafe zu verstehen? In Flatt’s Magazin, parts iii. and iv., 1797. ↩

33. Metaphysik der Sitten, Zweiter Theil, 1797, in the sämmtl. Werke vii. p. 195. The duties of virtue are the perfection of one’s-self and the happiness of others. ↩

34. Ueber christliche Religion als Volkslehre und Wissenschaft (1797), pp. 197, 303-311, 315. ↩

35. These trains of thought had already occurred in Stäudlin and Flatt. I refrain from citing proofs at large of their presence in the writings of other theologians, and simply refer to the accordant teachings of C. Chr. Erh. Schmid: Philosophische Dogmatik (1796), p. 177; Stäudlin: Dogmatik und Dogmengeschichte (1800), 2ter Theil, pp. 758-785; Lehrbuch der Dogmatik und Dogmengeschichte (1801), pp. 485-494; Chr. F. Ammon: Inbegriff der evangelischen Glaubenslehre (1805), pp. 220-238; J. A. Ludw. Wegscheider: Institutiones theol. Christ. dogm. (ed. v., 1826) §§ 140-142; Tzschirner: Vorlesungen über die christliche Glaubenslehre (1829), p. 414 sq. ↩

36. Versuch einer Moralphilosophie, 1790, p. 295. ↩

37. Der Widerstreit der Vernunft mit sich selbst in der Versöhnungslehre (1802); in Krug’s Gesammelte Schriften, vol. i. pp. 295-352. Baur (p. 589) remarks with reference to this that no mention is made of one antinomy of the practical reason that affects this doctrine by Kant himself. He has read very imperfectly the philosophical doctrine of religion of the latter. ↩

38. Ueber Religion u. Theologie (1815), 2nd ed., 1821. ↩

39. Ueber Religion u. Theologie, p. 50-55. ↩

40. De Morte Jesu Christi expiatoria (1813), p. 89: Nihil aliud dicere voluit Jesus, nisi mortem suam saluti fore generi humano, ea quidem ratione, ut doctrina sua, per mortem confirmata, homines a peccatorum miseria liberaret. ↩

41. Ueber Rel. u. Theol., 117-119. ↩

42. A show, but, alas! only a show. ↩

43. Ueber Religion u. Theologie, pp. 192, 256. ↩

44. Ueber Religion u. Theologie, p. 258. ↩

45. Ibid., pp. 148-152. In this last opinion I am at one with Hagenbach in his article on De Wette, in Herzog’s Realencyclopädie, xviii. p. 65. On the other hand, De Wette’s Wesen des christlichen Glaubens (1846) is a work without style and without importance. ↩