Abstract
Christopher Insole’s The Intolerable God: Kant’s Theological Journey is in many ways a very good book. I agree with so many of the basic premises of the book that it is painful to have to disagree with the conclusion. The book is also well written, though it is occasionally patronizing to its audience. For example, it is anachronistic and comic in an unhelpful way to try to imagine Leibniz, Wolff and Baumgarten with Kant around a campfire on Mount Purgatory. Did they toast marshmallows?
My agreement on premises extends to the basic account of Kant’s epistemology as ‘noumenal affection and ignorance’ (p. 99). On this reading, Kant thinks we are affected by things in themselves as they appear to us, but we cannot know them as they are in themselves. I agree also that Kant was a theist, except probably right at the end of his life, in the period when he was writing the Opus Postumum. I agree, finally, about the different roles of reason in its theoretical and its practical employments, and that Kant thinks the practical employment has priority in just the way Insole says he does.
I disagree, however, with the conclusion Insole draws from these premises, and it will be easiest to sum up this disagreement by commenting on three of Kant’s texts. The first is one that Insole does not discuss, but which is highly relevant to his overall thesis. This thesis, repeated many times (e.g. p. 134), is that even before Opus Postumum Kant is a ‘Christianized Platonist’ but not a ‘Christian Platonist’. The justification for this thesis is supposed to be that Kant does not accept a number of doctrines from ‘traditional Christian theology’ about divine concurrence, God’s grace, incarnation, and so on. The first passage I want to look at is the General Remark at the end of the first part of Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kant there discusses what he calls ‘parerga’, literally ‘works by the side’, a word which refers back to Kant’s distinction in the preface to the second edition between the two concentric circles of revelation, biblical or historical revelation on the outside and the revelation to reason on the inside. It is a crucial question of interpretation whether Kant means to eliminate the outer circle. My view is that he does not, and in fact he explicitly denies that he does, saying that philosophical theology (his own project) has no wish ‘to carry [its] propositions over into biblical theology or to modify its public doctrines, which is the privilege of divines’ (Religion 6: 9). Kant’s project is, on my view, one of translation not elimination, and we do not, when we translate, eliminate the translated language. Insole himself uses the image of translation several times (e.g. p. 51). The parerga (in the outer circle but immediately adjacent to the inner) include what Kant calls ‘works of grace’, or ‘supernatural cooperation [which] is also needed to [a person’s] becoming good or better, whether this cooperation only consist in the diminution of obstacles or be also a positive assistance’ (Religion 6: 44). The need for supernatural cooperation derives from the fact that human evil is radical, and ‘it is … not to be extirpated through human forces, for this could only happen through good maxims—something that cannot take place if the subjective supreme ground of all maxims is presupposed to be corrupted’ (Religion 6: 37, italics original). The description of the supernatural cooperation as having both negative and positive sides is a staple of pietist accounts of conversion (e.g. in August Hermann Francke). My present point is that Kant ends this General Remark by saying that effects of grace, though they cannot be used by reason in its theoretical employment (because they are supersensible) or its practical employment (because they are things God does, not things we do), nonetheless can be ‘admitted as something incomprehensible’ (Religion 6: 53).
The second passage is one Insole does discuss. It comes from Kant’s discussion of heteronomy in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Insole urges that Kant regards any external object for morality, including the uncreated good that is God, as making morality heteronomous (p. 150). But Kant’s argument is that deriving morality from God’s will is only heteronomous if we do not make morality already internal to that will. He is objecting to a circular argument he finds in Crusius (see John E. Hare, God and Morality, Wiley-Blackwell, 2009, pp. 151–56). But he is not objecting to the view that we should recognize our duties as God’s commands, a view he endorses throughout the critical period (e.g. Critique of Practical Reason 5: 129). God is not, contrary to Insole, seen by Kant as a ‘first among equals’ (p. 147). Rather, God is the head or king of the kingdom of ends, of which God and we are members. The head of this kingdom, says Kant, is ‘a completely independent being, without needs and with unlimited resources adequate to his will’ (Groundwork 4: 434).
The third passage is about divine concurrence. Insole thinks Kant’s failure to endorse this traditional Christian doctrine is the main source of his failure to be a ‘Christian Platonist’. He adduces various passages from Kant’s Reflections and his lectures, but the only passage from a critical published work is from Perpetual Peace, and it says the opposite of what Insole claims that it says. We should expect Kant to accept concurrence from a practical point of view (though not as a maxim of practical reason), given the first passage I discussed about supernatural cooperation. Insole is correct to say that Kant thinks we cannot use concurrence, or ‘collaboration [between God and humans] towards an effect in the sensible world’ from a theoretical point of view (Perpetual Peace 8: 362n.). But Kant goes on, ‘from an ethico-practical point of view which looks entirely to the transcendental side of things, the idea of a divine concurrence is quite proper and even necessary: for example, in the faith that God will make good the imperfection of our human justice, if only our feelings and intentions are sincere; and that He will do this by means beyond our comprehension, and therefore we should not slacken our efforts after what is good’ (ibid.). Kant’s point is that we should not use concurrence as an explanation of a good action, for that would be to pretend a theoretical knowledge of the supersensible, which is absurd. Insole’s account of the relation between the roles of reason in its theoretical employment and its practical employment is, in general, a good one, and he needs to apply it here in this important passage. I take it that Kant’s view of divine concurrence (also in the other passages that Insole cites, but I do not have space to elaborate this) is that if we claimed understanding or knowledge, this would be what he calls ‘subreption’ and would end up with self-contradiction; but we should equally avoid saying that we have understanding or knowledge that supernatural cooperation does not occur, and in the absence of this, practical reason is trumps.
There are many smaller matters of Kant interpretation where I disagree with Insole, but I cannot here give a more elaborate discussion. There is one point, however, that I cannot let go: he gets me wrong. He thinks that I think that Kant is a divine command theorist. But I have never said that Kant is a divine command theorist in the ordinary sense (though I concede that the title of an article in 2000 was misleading in this respect). Indeed, Insole refers to a work, God and Morality (op. cit. p. 266) in which I explicitly deny this. Kant is only a divine command theorist in the attenuated sense that he says we have to recognize our duties as God’s commands. But he does not think, as most divine command theorists do, that God creates the moral law; for he thinks this law is necessary, just as the triangle necessarily has three angles.
I will end with a more general point. I think Insole is trying to take Kant too close to Aquinas. Kant shows little direct knowledge of any of the scholastics, and his knowledge is mediated through secondary sources. My claim is that the indirect influence of Scotus is at least as great as that of Thomas, and is mediated through Luther and the theological tradition that follows Luther (especially Crusius, from whom Kant learnt the categorical imperative). Insole is curiously deaf to the Lutheran resonances of Kant’s translation of Christian doctrine. The doctrine Kant learned as a youth was heavily Lutheran in a pietist inflection, and we should look for the untranslated version of his views on supernatural cooperation in Luther’s simul justus et peccator rather than in a Thomist account of infused virtues. Scotus is also the best scholastic source for two Kantian themes Insole emphasizes and one theme he does not. The themes Insole emphasizes are that humans have a kind of freedom that is not determined, and that the practical has priority to the theoretical. The theme he does not emphasize is Kant’s rejection of eudaemonism. First, freedom. Kant is, in my view, a compatibilist, and while Insole denies this, the difference is merely terminological. Insole thinks the term ‘compatibilist’ misleading, because it suggests a reductive compatibilism; but we agree that Kant thinks phenomenal determinism is compatible with a noumenal indeterminism, which holds (as does Scotus) that we can only be properly held accountable for wrongdoing that we are able to avoid. I do not pretend that Kant is easy to follow here, but I suspect this is because the tension is internal to the Christianity he is trying to translate. More about this at the end.
The second Kantian theme where Scotus is closer than Thomas is the priority of the practical. Scotus claims, against Thomas, that theology is a practical science, since theo-logy has as its object ‘God as one who should be loved … according to rules from which action can be chosen’ (Lectura prologue, 4, qq 1-2). Theology is an intellectual habit whose main function is to direct the will to love correctly. We can love fully even what we do not fully understand.
Finally, Kant is opposed to eudaemonism, the view that every human being acts for some one end, and formally considered, this end is the same for all—namely the individual’s own perfection or happiness (see Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II 1.5). Kant invents the term ‘eudaemonism’ to describe the view he rejects, that the dutiful person is dutiful in order to be happy: ‘Now a eudaemonist says: this delight, this happiness is really his motive for acting virtuously. The concept of duty does not determine his will directly; he is moved to do his duty only by means of the happiness he anticipates’ (Metaphysics of Morals 6: 377–78, italics original). I am not here trying to adjudicate this issue, but just to point to a Scotist (and Lutheran) background in the teaching about the two affections of the will (the affection for advantage and the affection for justice) and the need to rank them. Kant and Scotus have a double-source account of motivation.
What should we conclude about Kant’s relationship to Christianity if I have been right so far in this review? Not, I think, that Kant is straightforwardly a Christian. There are various places where, on my view, there is tension, certainly at the end of his life, but also, I would argue, before this. But we need to distinguish cases where there is a tension internal to Christian doctrine, where Kant recapitulates this tension in his own translation, and cases on the other hand where there is a tension between Kant’s teaching and Christian doctrine. Because the case is often the first kind rather than the second, I resist Insole’s frequent use of monist phrases like ‘the traditional theologian’ (e.g. p. 127). But there are important cases also of the second kind of tension, though it is not the purpose of the present review to describe them. My point is just that Kant’s views on divine concurrence and divine kingship are not among them, despite the claim of Insole’s otherwise excellent book.