Why Kant’s Moral–Religious Project Was Bound to Unravel

Abstract

After criticizing the three traditional proofs of divine existence in the first Critique, Kant fills this void with an apologetic argument based on his practical philosophy. However, this moral–religious project has long been charged with various inconsistencies, particularly regarding the tension between the demand for moral perfection and human limitation. There is even some indication that he becomes aware of these issues, as he later moves away from the vision of endless moral progress that holds his original project together. However, this revision does not resolve all the tensions, as the question of how imperfect humans can be well-pleasing to God remains. I argue that this predicament is a difficult-to-avoid feature of his project given how it interacts with his religious context of Lutheran Christianity. This is because he incorporates some of its elements (particularly its uncompromising moral standard) virtually intact while radically altering others (such as vicarious atonement and imputation of alien righteousness). However, this procedure undermines the coherence of the tradition he inherits because the elements he fully incorporates are meant to lead to the traditional doctrines he leaves behind. I conclude by reflecting on how theists who are sympathetic to Kant should lead his moral–religious project out of its current precarious predicament.

1. Introduction

Kant (CPR, A583–642/B611–70) is well-known for his refutation of the three traditional arguments for divine existence—the ontological, the cosmological, and the teleological arguments—in Critique of Pure Reason (the first Critique). In this part, he can come across as an enemy of religion, so to speak, but the story is much more complicated. Rather, as he dethrones the cherished tradition of natural theology, he tries to fill this void with what is now known as the moral argument—an apologetic approach worked out in his practical philosophy, based on his distinctive concept of the highest good. But his religious vision based on this novel argument has long attracted criticism. In this paper, rather than focusing on rehashing the commonly mentioned problems, I provide a theological assessment of the fundamental features of his project that give rise to these issues. My main contention is the following: his project involves an attempt to move away from the Lutheran tradition of imputed righteousness and vicarious atonement, at least in their classic form, but the other features of this tradition he retains make this departure problematic. The issues that have been identified are symptoms of this fundamental tension, and the theological framework of Lutheran Christianity illuminates the nature of these issues that persist within Kant’s practical philosophy.

In Section 2, I describe Kant’s moral–religious project that emerges in Critique of Practical Reason (the second Critique), where our moral life is understood as the endless pursuit of the highest good, even into the afterlife. In Section 3, I point out that he moves away from this understanding of our moral life in his later works, even though the endless moral pursuit seems to be demanded by his understanding of morality. What ensues is his puzzling view that God, the holy lawgiver and judge, can be satisfied with us in our state of clear moral imperfection, which stands in tension with his repeated warnings against lowering the bar of morality. In Section 4, I explain that this puzzling result stems from his selective treatment of various elements of Lutheran orthodoxy Kant was dealing with—that is, incorporating its rigorous moral standard into his rational system of religion while radically reinterpreting the doctrines of original sin and vicarious atonement so that they no longer necessitate our reliance on the historical person of Jesus. In Section 5, I argue that it is questionable at best whether the appeal to divine grace or assistance can resolve the issues that arise from his departure from the second Critique view of our moral life. In Section 6, I conclude by proposing that Kantians consider the following option: explicitly moving away from regarding moral perfection as humans’ condition for being acceptable to God.

2. How Morality Leads to Religion in Kant

Kant’s moral argument, which is advanced in many different works,1 tends to get going by designating the concept of the highest good as our ultimate end of morality—the overarching goal or result that is to be produced through our moral strivings collectively. This goal is repeatedly presented by Kant as what the moral law holds before our eyes in our practical use of reason. For instance, in the second Critique, he calls the highest good “a practically necessary end of a pure rational will, which does not here choose; instead, it obeys an inflexible command of reason that has its ground objectively in the character of things as they must be appraised universally by pure reason” (CPrR, 5:143).2 As far as Kant is concerned, reason on its own, without appeals to faith or revelation of divine commands, carries the sufficient weight for demanding us to pursue the highest good. Interestingly, he clearly regards this position as consistent with the understanding of moral obligations as divine commands, which he explicitly affirms in numerous works.3 It is just that God’s command does not need to do the work of generating moral obligations so that we are beholden to them.4 Rather, reason is supposed to be sufficient for imposing obligations on us,5 even though Kant arguably does not offer a satisfactory explanation of how.6 But it is still the case that God wills us to promote the highest good, because God reigns as the sovereign in the moral world.

In terms of content, the highest good refers to the state of affairs in which everyone’s level of happiness necessarily corresponds to that of moral virtue,7 and there is textual evidence for interpreting this state as representing the perfect realization of the ideal of distributive justice as understood by Kant.8 He seems to regard this position as having an intuitive appeal since it aligns with the basic principle of justice that everyone should receive what one deserves; by proposing that everyone’s happiness should be proportionate to virtue, Kant is just formalizing this sense of justice. Moreover, it is plausible to regard justice as what we are ultimately trying to effect through our moral endeavors. These intuitions about justice and morality lead Kant to designate the highest good as the ultimate end of morality.

However, Kant finds it obvious that this ideal of distributive justice is not perfectly realized in the present world; too often, those whom we judge as righteous suffer a terrible fate in terms of their happiness, while the seemingly evil prosper, at least on the surface. And there is a clear limit on how much this situation can be rectified by us, for at least a couple of reasons. First, given our lack of complete control over happiness, we on our own cannot distribute happiness with sufficient precision to meet the demand of perfect distributive justice, even if everyone is completely united in willing the highest good. This is why, in the second Critique, he describes happiness as the component of the highest good “not in our power”, while moral virtue is supposedly “immediately within our power” (CPrR, 5:119). Second, because we cannot perfectly ascertain whether everyone’s maxims that undergird the visible actions, including our own, are in line with the moral law, we cannot precisely determine how much happiness anyone deserves.9

Thus, to preserve the possibility of fully attaining the highest good, Kant postulates the existence of someone who can serve as the ground of the necessary connection between happiness and virtue—namely, God.10 This is the God demanded by practical reason as we follow the duty of pursuing justice. As briefly noted above, reason is the ultimate authority in Kant’s morality, and the same goes for his understanding of religion and theology. As he declares in the essay What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking, when trying to determine what God is like and whether this being exists, the only necessary guide is “reason—not any alleged sense of truth, not any transcendent intuition under the name of faith, on which tradition and revelation can be grafted without reason’s consent” (O, 8:134).

By following this guide of practical reason, Kant arrives at the concept of God who, as a personal agent with intelligence and a will,11 participates in our project of bringing about the highest good as the sovereign moral ruler. Without this divine involvement that preserves the possibility of attaining the highest good, morality threatens to devolve into a nonsensical project. Hence, Kant (CPrR, 5:114) declares the following in the second Critique: “if… the highest good is impossible…, then the moral law, which commands us to promote it, must be… directed to empty imaginary ends and must therefore in itself be false”. In this way, Kant’s concept of the highest good gives rise to an apologetic argument for believing in the existence of this being. This is why his moral project turns out to be moral-religious.

In response to Kant’s moral argument, some wonder why our moral practice should aim at the perfect realization of the highest good rather than our best approximation toward this goal (e.g., Wood 1970, pp. 96–99; Adams 1987, pp. 150–51). Can we not try to improve the world’s level of justice as much as possible without worrying about attaining this ideal completely? And if we can be content with this approximation, we should question whether Kant’s project needs to make room for the postulate of God. Even with no assistance from the divine, presumably we can make some progress toward advancing the world in terms of distributive justice. Should this not suffice? That is, should Kant not have refrained from taking a further step of demanding perfect realization of the highest good from humans?

However, Kant’s seemingly unrealistic demand is in line with his consistent warnings against the temptation to lower the bar of morality. For instance, he emphasizes the need to uphold “the purity of morals” against the “slackness” of admitting empirical elements, which mislead us by making the absolute standard of morality appear questionable (G, 4:426). Along the same lines, he opposes “degrad[ing] the moral law from its holiness by making it out to be lenient (indulgent) and thus conformed to our convenience” (CPrR, 5:122).12 If so, he would not readily allow us to settle for anything less than producing the complete highest good through our moral strivings.

In the second Critique, Kant’s opposition to moral indulgence leads him to postulate the immortality of the soul. Our production of the highest good includes individuals’ pursuit of moral perfection, the requisite condition for deservedly enjoying the blessing of divine presence in the afterlife. However, Kant also holds that we can never completely attain this perfection in time, as we are never free from the temptation to transgress the moral law. As he puts it, our “proper moral condition… is virtue, that is, moral disposition in conflict, and not holiness in the supposed possession of a complete purity of dispositions of the will” (CPrR, 5:84). And while this virtue can be strengthened in terms of resisting the temptations, it, “at least as a naturally acquired ability, can never be completed” (CPrR, 5:33). If so, being realistic about our moral capacity in the present world while maintaining the holiness of the moral law leads to the postulate of immortality, as the condition of possibility for fulfilling our duty of moral perfection. All this means that this goal is “not attainable by any creature but is yet the archetype which we should strive to approach and resemble in an uninterrupted but endless progress” (CpR, 5:83).

If our moral life is supposed to consist of endless strivings to keep strengthening the virtuous disposition, I think it does not make much sense for us to settle for something less than the complete highest good, as we will presumably keep pushing toward a greater realization of this ideal. Thus, in the second Critique account of our moral vocation, we are to direct our efforts continuously toward individual moral perfection and perfect justice of the world, with moral faith in God who culminates these efforts in the afterlife.

3. Some Signs of Trouble

In the second Critique, Kant (CPrR, 5:122) touts the postulate of immortality as being “of the greatest usefulness” because it helps us avoid degrading the moral law while also being clear-eyed about our inability to achieve moral perfection in time; otherwise, we might get lost in the hopeless dream of “full acquisition of holiness of will”. However, Kant does not repeat this practical argument for personal immortality in his later works published in the 1790s, when he seems to move away from the second Critique account of our moral vocation.13 In Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (the Religion), he goes so far as to suggest that practical reason inclines us to adopt the following mentality: “at the end of life our account must be completely closed, and nobody may hope somehow to make up there for what was neglected here” (RBR, 6:71n). This is not what we would have expected from the earlier Kant, who envisions our life as making up for our moral deficiency ad infinitum, even into the afterlife.

The holiness of the moral law is taken by the earlier Kant to imply that a human “cannot hope, either here or in any foreseeable future moment of his existence, to be fully adequate to God’s will”; in this predicament, only “the endless of his duration (which God alone can survey)” is the way to fulfill the moral law (CPrR, 5:123–24). However, the following statement in the Religion seems to stand in tension with this view: “notwithstanding his permanent deficiency, a human being can still expect to be generally well-pleasing to God, at whatever point in time his existence be cut short” (RBR, 6:67). Again, the contrast in attitudes toward moral perfection between the two works is unmistakable.

The second Critique is characterized by Kant’s emphasis on the unending nature of our moral exertions, which means that humans are supposed to continue advancing toward an improved moral state. While this element of progress does not go missing, a different emphasis can be detected in his later works, particularly in the Religion that integrates his account of radical evil into his system of practical philosophy. The basic premise of this account is that every human faces a choice between adopting either a good or an evil disposition, which represents our fundamental attitude toward the moral law. Having a good disposition means unconditionally prioritizing the moral demand over any temptation of self-love, but, according to Kant, no human starts out like this. Rather, every human adopts an evil disposition in one’s primordial exercise of freedom—“an intelligible deed, cognizable through reason apart from any temporal condition”—which takes place beyond the sensible or phenomenal world (RBR, 6:31). This universality of moral evil testifies to his debt to the Augustinian tradition, which treats sin as an inescapable feature of human nature.

So, every human begins life with the evil disposition that refuses to grant unconditional authority to the moral law. However, moral virtue remains a duty, which implies that this must be achievable for us given Kant’s famous ought-implies-can principle.14 According to him, we fulfill this duty “through a revolution in the disposition” (RBR, 6:47). So, he supposes that our moral efforts can culminate with this revolution, even though he struggles to explain how positive contributions can arise when our fundamental disposition is evil.15 And even if we grant that humans can somehow contribute to this transformation, it is not entirely clear how these contributions made in time can effect a change in our noumenal dispositions. I suspect this is why Kant appeals to the possibility of divine assistance at this point, although he makes sure to claim that we must make ourselves worthy of receiving this assistance on our own.16

In this way, Kant makes room for the possibility of moral conversion. And it is this moral conversion—the binary movement from the evil to the good disposition—that receives the bulk of attention in the Religion, whereas the second Critique focuses on the need for endlessness of our moral practice given the holiness of the moral law.

To be fair, the Religion still has moments where Kant seems intent on maintaining the moral law’s uncompromising nature. For instance, when discussing how we might imagine standing before the divine judge in the afterlife, he suggests we would likely attribute “the greatest severity” to this judge (RBR, 6:70n).17 And he takes this judge’s holiness to imply the following: “the distance between the goodness which we ought to effect in ourselves and the evil from which we start is… infinite” (RBR, 6:66). It is this infinite distance that requires the infinite duration of moral conduct in the second Critique. But then how can he credibly consider ourselves as closing this distance without endless moral strivings? That is, how are we generally well-pleasing to this God as long as there is a good disposition, despite its permanent deficiency? Kant’s position here naturally invites this question.18

Kant tries to resolve this puzzle with the following explanation: “the disposition, which takes the place of the totality of the series of approximations carried on in infinitum, makes up only for the deficiency which is in principle inseparable from the existence of a temporal being, [namely] never to be able to become quite fully what he has in mind”. The good disposition [Gesinnung] then represents a resolution [Vorsatz] to prioritize the moral law before self-love,19 and this resolution is allegedly sufficient to satisfy God’s demand, even though we do not always act on this resolution. However, this answer is still puzzling because morality should be more than just about making a resolution. Yes, according to Kant, the deficiency in our observable conduct is not completely eliminable for rational beings who also have temporal existence in the sensible world. However, presumably, this deficiency is still what finite rational beings are supposed to address through moral exertions, by coming closer to actually fulfilling the resolution. So, regarding the resolution on its own as capable of making its bearers well-pleasing to God seems inconsistent with the holiness of the moral law.

Another element of Kant’s practical philosophy that corroborates this problem is how he models the good disposition as admitting a range of strength. This is why the continuous moral improvement after the revolution involves “strengthen[ing]” our resistance to “the attack of the inclinations” (RBR, 6:198n).20 If so, it seems that the absolute holiness of the moral law would require from us more than a good disposition; rather, only an infinitely strong good disposition would satisfy this demand. But then how can Kant present a good disposition on its own as morally sufficient? Should we not also be endlessly strengthening the good disposition’s resistance to various temptations?

Given how the Religion readily gives rise to these questions, Kant’s second Critique account of endless moral progress seems like a better fit with the idea of a maximally demanding moral law.21 Then, why does he not just stick with this account? The best explanation is found in his essay The End of All Things, published a year after the first edition of the Religion. In this relatively underappreciated work, Kant retracts his earlier eschatology in the following striking passage:

Even assuming a person’s moral-physical state here in life at its best—namely as a constant progression and approach to the highest good (marked out for him as a goal)—, he still… cannot combine it with the prospect of satisfaction in an eternally enduring alteration of his state (the moral as well as the physical). For the state in which he now is will always remain an ill compared with a better one which he always stands ready to enter; and the representation of an infinite progression toward the final end is nevertheless at the same time a prospect on an infinite series of ills which, even though they may be outweighed by a greater good, do not allow for the possibility of contentment; for he can think that only by supposing that the final end will at sometime be attained (EAT, 8:335).

Admittedly, there is something dispiriting about the moral vision laid out in the second Critique, which demands us to strive for the highest good endlessly even though we can never completely attain this goal. And by the time of publishing the Religion, it seems that his worry about the bleakness of this second Critique vision got the best of him, as he explores whether a merely good disposition might be sufficient to make its bearers well-pleasing to God, even if it is always lacking in terms of strength.

However, this attempt is bound to leave the readers wondering how the all-knowing judge can rightfully count what clearly falls short of moral perfection as “a perfected whole” (RBR, 6:67). This part of the Religion leaves many critics confused (e.g., Michalson 1990, pp. 89–106; Adams 2018, pp. xiii–xxvi), while his defenders scramble to find some coherent interpretation on his behalf (e.g., Sussman 2005, pp. 93–102; Palmquist 2010, pp. 540–53).

4. Kant’s Selective Appropriation of Lutheran Tradition

Why does Kant find himself in such a precarious position in the Religion, trying to make sense of how the holy lawgiver can be well-pleased with us despite our undeniable moral imperfection? To see this, it is helpful to understand how he incorporates various elements of the Christian tradition into his moral–religious project.

In the Religion’s second-edition preface, Kant explains the relation between Christianity of his time and his own philosophical system in the following way:

Since… revelation can at least comprise also the pure religion of reason, whereas, conversely, the latter cannot do the same for what is historical in revelation, I shall be able to consider the first as a wider sphere of faith that includes the other, a narrower one, within itself (not as two circles external to one another but as concentric circles); the philosopher… must keep within the inner circle…. From this standpoint I can also… start from some alleged revelation or other and… to hold fragments of this revelation, as a historical system, up to moral concepts, and see whether it does not lead back to the same pure rational system of religion…. If this is the case, then we shall be able to say that between reason and Scripture there is, not only compatibility but also unity, so that whoever follows the one (under the guidance of moral concepts) will not fail to come across the other as well (RBR, 6:12–13).

According to Kant, Christianity based on alleged historical revelation represents a wider circle than a pure religion of reason, because the former contains tenets available solely through historical transmission.22 But the former can still be made up of elements that lead us back to the inner circle, which would mean that this historical religion, despite its particularity and contingency, can attach “itself to pure religion as its vehicle” (RBR, 6:115). Then, the Religion represents an investigation of whether this kind of unity obtains between reason on the one hand and revelation or scripture on the other hand, which essentially refers to the form of Christianity he is familiar with.

Now, ascertaining the exact form of historical Christianity Kant has in mind here is no straightforward matter, as there were many kinds of Christianity exerting their influence in his context. Pietism had shaped his early life, due to the education from his parents and his time at the Pietist-oriented Collegium Fridericianum. While this strand mostly maintained the original Lutheran doctrines, it did question the forensic understanding of justification that construes this state as resulting from God’s legal declaration of righteousness; instead, it stressed the importance of individuals’ actual holiness based on personal religious experience.23 There was also the rational religion of enlightenment that went even further in deviating from traditional doctrines, going so far as to question the necessity of Jesus’ salvific works.24 Yet Lutheran orthodoxy, with its emphasis on humans’ complete sinfulness that makes us absolutely reliant on the historical redeemer for our salvation, still maintained its say in theological debates of Kant’s time.25

It will soon become clear that the Religion incorporates all three strands of Christianity. But the outer circle of the above experiment primarily consists of orthodox Lutheran interpretations of scripture, while the Pietist and enlightenment departures align more closely with his inner circle of pure rational religion. This means that his text closely engages with the Lutheran doctrines in their traditional formulations, even though this is not the same as affirming them. This engagement was unavoidable, as even the other two strands defined themselves through their critique of Lutheran orthodoxy. Also, as noted in the first-edition preface, the purpose of this text was to introduce “the pure philosophical doctrine of religion” to those who have received “the academic instruction in biblical theology”, which would have been heavily influenced by the traditional framework (RBR, 6:10). Thus, throughout the text, Kant explains how various stories or doctrines cherished in this tradition can be reinterpreted as supporting his practical philosophy. This suggests that he is ultimately arguing for an affirmative answer to the question of whether there is unity between reason and scripture; this view becomes explicit in his later work Conflict of the Faculties, where he claims that Christianity’s “best and most lasting eulogy is its harmony… with the purest moral belief of religion” (CF, 7:9).

So, Kant’s pure religion of reason—which is supposed to derive the affirmations about God strictly from moral considerations without relying on experience—nevertheless exhibits a harmonious unity with the contingent historical elements of Lutheran Christianity. In fact, the parallels between the two systems are so striking that I cannot help but suspect that his rational system of religion is, at least in part, formed by adding important pieces of this tradition to the foundation of his moral argument.26 Of course, the extent of this process in his rational religion remains open to interpretation, but some of its elements evidently harken back to key doctrines in the Lutheran or, more broadly, Augustinian story of fall and redemption.

A clear example in the Religion is what Kant (RBR, 6:67) calls “moral happiness”, which refers to some level of confidence about one’s possession of a good disposition after moral conversion. This feeling, which he considers necessary for our perseverance in morality, is described as “the assurance of the reality and constancy of a disposition that always advances in goodness (and never falters from it)” (RBR, 6:67). So, it becomes clear that here he is importing the doctrine of the assurance of salvation, albeit in a significantly altered form. In his rational religion where humans’ enjoyment of beatitude depends on the level of virtue, every individual’s salvation depends on moral conduct. So the assurance is now concerned with whether we are making the kind of moral progress that testifies to the underlying good disposition, rather than whether we confess our faith in the historical person of Jesus or whether we have been tabbed by God to be part of the elect.27

The account of radical evil discussed in Section 3, which posits the universality of moral evil in all humans, is then Kant’s adaptation of the Augustinian story of the fall, although the specific shape it takes in the pure religion of reason is again rather different from Augustine’s original. The defining characteristic of the latter is the transmission of sin through procreation so that a human’s first sin is passed on to their descendants. However, Kant (RBR, 6:40) deliberately departs from this view, going so far as to condemn it as “the most inappropriate” way of representing the spread of moral evil to all members of the human species.28 Because he objects to regarding moral evil as “a transmissible liability” that can be passed on to someone else, he cannot make room for Augustine’s interpretation of original sin. But he still wants to retain another key aspect of this Augustinian heritage—that sin or moral evil is an inescapable feature of human nature—even though he struggles to account for this feature without appealing to the spread of sin through procreation.

Kant’s view that moral evil is not transmissible because it is “the most personal of all liabilities” also leads him to reject the theory of vicarious atonement that portrays the God-man as rightfully getting punished because he has taken over our sin (RBR, 6:72). However, perhaps because this theory was such a central part of the Christianity of his time, Kant does not drop the concept of vicarious atonement completely. Rather, this language is retained, but it now refers to the interaction between ‘the old man,’ the person before the revolution in the disposition, and ‘the new man’ post-revolution (RBR, 6:72–74). The latter takes the place of the historical savior in traditional Christianity, who cannot have the function of wiping out our sin and guilt. All he can do is serve as an object of moral imitation that our sensible nature can latch onto, which is, strictly speaking, not even necessary because we can figure out what we ought to do based on the pure practical use of reason. This is why Kant (RBR, 6:61–63) stresses that “the prototype of moral disposition in its entire purity… always resides only in reason, since outer experience yields no example adequate to the idea”. In his pure rational religion that makes salvation universally available to anyone who makes oneself worthy of it through moral conduct, he can go only so far in granting significance to a particular historical moment like the alleged appearance of the God-man.

In these ways, Kant presents central ideas of Lutheran orthodoxy as leading to the pure religion of reason, but they often have to be significantly modified to make this translation work. However, there is one central element that makes its way into the inner circle more or less intact. This is precisely what I have been stressing in Section 2 and Section 3, namely, the uncompromisingly high standard of morality. In the Religion, Kant (RBR, 6:66) lets us know that this is his way of appropriating the following idea found in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament: “‘be ye holy (in the conduct of your lives) as your Father in Heaven is holy.’”29 This echoes the second Critique, where he commends Christianity for presenting the moral law “so purely and inflexibly (as must be done), depriv[ing] the human being of confidence that he can be fully adequate to it, at least in this life” (CPrR, 5:127n). This is why he concludes with the following statement: “with respect to the holiness that the Christian law demands, nothing remains for a creature but endless progress, though for that very reason he is justified in hoping for his endless duration” (CPrR, 5:128). Thus, there is an intimate connection between the inflexible moral standard of Christianity and the second Critique argument for the immortality of the soul. And the former does not change in the Religion, where Kant (RBR, 6:66) emphasizes “the holiness of the Lawgiver” who demands the same holiness from us.

However, Kant’s intention to retain the uncompromising nature of the moral law makes his decision to move away from the vision of our moral life as endless progress all the more questionable, although this move is certainly understandable given his explanation in The End of All Things. So, we can say that the tensions I pointed out in Section 3 are the results of his steadfast allegiance to the part of Christianity that holds the moral law beyond our attainment.

To better understand why these issues arise from this element in Kant’s philosophical system, it is helpful to step away from our concentration on him so far and reflect on the significance of this element in the kind of Christianity that can be labeled Lutheran. In Luther, the main goal of upholding the holiness of law is not to ensure that we unceasingly keep trying to meet this demand. Rather, the function of this doctrine is to bang home the point that we can never fulfill this demand so that we give up on this project. And it is this resignation that should help us turn to the alleged redeemer in history, whose perfect righteousness we are supposed to partake in through faith. As seen in The Freedom of a Christian, which reflects on the Pauline metaphor of the marriage between Jesus the bride–groom and the believing soul, Luther (2008, pp. 62–64) proclaims that Jesus bestows on the bride “all that is his”, implying that “she has her righteousness in Christ, her husband, which she now can boast is her very own”. Presenting someone else’s “alien righteousness… instilled in us without our works by grace alone” is the only way for mere humans to stand righteous and well-pleasing before God (Luther 2012, p. 120).

Thus, according to Luther (1963, p. 4), whose theological framework provides a crucial reference point for evaluating Kant’s practical philosophy, the lofty moral requirement should teach us to abandon the futile hope of self-salvation through works. Instead, we must learn to depend entirely on “a merely passive righteousness”, to use his trademark expression in Lectures on Galatians. The following passage in this text powerfully illustrates this point:

Therefore the proper use and aim of the Law is to make guilty those who are smug and at peace, so that they may be terrified and despairing…. For the Law requires perfect obedience toward God, and it damns those who do not yield such obedience. Now it is certain that no one yields this obedience or even can; nevertheless, this is what God wants.

(Luther 1963, p. 148)

So, the primary intended effect of the absolute holiness of the moral law in Luther is to convince people of their inability to achieve righteousness on their own. However, the same cannot be said for Kant, who has kicked out any serious commitment to the historical savior from his pure rational religion.30 Given this maneuver, his understanding of the moral law naturally leads him down a different trajectory—a path of endless moral progress. However, in The End of All Things, he reveals his anguish over the implications of this view. Traditional Lutheran Christians might say that this is exactly the moment when Kant should have realized his mistake and taken seriously the necessity of the historical redeemer. However, what he opts for instead is to consider whether the good disposition might be sufficient to meet the loftiest moral demand, but this direction leads to all the issues we have seen in Section 3.

In essence, my contention is that the puzzling moments in the Religion are an understandable result of the following two moves by Kant—retaining the uncompromising moral standard of Lutheran Christianity while rejecting the historical savior, the alleged God-man with perfect righteousness. And the inescapable downside of this combination is that Kant’s pure rational religion fails to inherit the internal coherence of the traditional framework.

5. Divine Assistance Coming to the Rescue?

At this point, defenders of Kant might chime in by arguing that he can deal with the tension between moral perfection and human limitation by calling on divine grace or assistance. As noted in Section 3, he is open to this recourse when making sense of the possibility of moral conversion, but other roles can be assigned to this divine agency. After all, in the Religion, he consistently emphasizes that we cannot have an adequate understanding of what this cooperation from the divine exactly entails.31 Perhaps this implies that supernatural assistance can take any form necessary to fill the gap between the performance of moral converts and the inflexible requirement. In fact, despite its emphasis on our need to make moral progress endlessly, the second Critique also includes the appeal to divine assistance, as Kant (CPrR, 5:127n) argues that the Christian gospel, in addition to upholding the holiness of the moral law, lets us “hope that if we act as well as is within our power, then what is not within our power will come to our aid from another source, whether or not we know in what way”.32 If so, when the commitment to endless moral progress is dropped, presumably divine assistance can take on a bigger role, but this is no problem for this concept that is designed to fill in whatever gap there is between human moral performance and divine requirements. Thus, humans have no trouble fulfilling the inflexible law with this supplement, Kantians might argue.

Kant’s willingness to entertain the difference divine grace or assistance makes in our moral life should be taken seriously in any analysis of his moral–religious project. However, I am skeptical of whether it can be a panacea that resolves the issues I have brought up. At least three questions can be raised regarding this solution. First, Kant warns against letting the indeterminacy of this concept relax our efforts. This is why, in the second Critique line above, he holds that doing all we can within our power is the condition for receiving divine assistance. Similarly, in the Religion, he claims that each individual “must… so conduct himself as if everything depended on him” when we consider God’s supernatural cooperation (RBR, 6:101).33 If so, this mindset seems to fit better with the endless moral progress of the second Critique than his wavering from this position afterward. Can we count on God’s grace to come in and save the day when we settle for merely a good but imperfect disposition at the end of our present existence?34

Second, there is a more fundamental issue of whether Kant’s practical philosophy actually has room for grace or assistance from outside. Of course, he does bring up this concept as if there is such room, but this can be questioned, and he invites this questioning himself when he admits his inability “to associate gracefulness with the concept of duty” (RBR, 6:23n). As we saw in Section 4, he characterizes the moral debt as the most personal kind of liability. If so, presumably the merit we accrue in morality is similarly personal, but then can God make a difference in this domain? Perhaps God needs to intervene to consummate all our actions toward the highest good eventually, but is God allowed to alter an individual’s moral standing? This seems to go against Kant’s own insistence on our “spontaneity… according to which the required goodness must stem from a human being himself, not from someone else, if it is to be imputable to him” (RBR, 6:143). In Opus postumum, the collection of Kant’s notes published posthumously, we even see him mention that “it is not even in the divine power to make a morally good man (to make him morally good): He must do it himself” (OP, 21:83).35 If so, it seems that God should be similarly prevented from judging a morally good but imperfect human as morally perfect. But is this not what we are attributing to God when we think of God’s assistance as filling the gap between the moral law and our conduct, no questions asked?36

Third, despite his emphasis on the mysteriousness of God’s grace, Kant does not always refrain from specifying what this is supposed to accomplish, as should be clear from Section 3.37 For instance, in the Religion, he suggests that divine grace involves having “what in our earthly life (and perhaps even in all future times and in all worlds) is always only in mere becoming (namely, our being a human being well-pleasing to God)… imputed to us as if we already possessed it here in full” (RBR, 6:75). Given the relationship between historical Christianity and Kant’s rational religion I explained in Section 4, this line should be recognized as his idiosyncratic attempt to incorporate the Lutheran doctrine of the imputation of alien righteousness,38 but, again, without relying on the divine incarnation in history. Kant goes so far as to grant that we have “no rightful claim” to this righteousness “so far as we know ourselves”, given the manifestations of moral imperfection we observe (RBR, 6:75). “This decree of grace” is nevertheless still supposed to be “fully in accord with eternal justice (because based on a satisfaction that for us consists only in the idea of an improve disposition of which, however, God alone has cognition)” (RBR, 6:76). However, this explanation evades the question I raised in Section 3—that is, how a good disposition, even if improved in the sense of having gone through a revolution, can count as moral perfection. If, as Kant (RBR, 6:60) states in the Religion, “humanity… in its full perfection [is] alone pleasing to God”, how can an imperfect disposition be considered sufficient? Would this kind of divine assistance not effectively degrade the moral law in the way he warned against in his earlier texts?

Therefore, it is unclear at best whether Kant can make room for the concept of divine assistance or grace in his practical philosophy and, even if this is granted, whether it can fill the void left when he ditches the second Critique vision of endless moral progress. His emphasis on the intensely personal nature of moral liability and merit makes the incorporation of divine grace into his system particularly challenging, despite being necessary for at least two reasons—both to maintain duty as something we can plausibly fulfill and to present his pure religion of reason as harmonious with Lutheran Christianity, where divine grace is a non-negotiable element. Consequently, in my judgment, the appeal to divine grace to address the inherent tensions within his moral–religious project is like trading one set of problems for another, inviting the question of how his practical philosophy can permit the kind of divine grace that fulfills these roles.39

6. Conclusions

Kant’s moral–religious project in the second Critique was in a precarious predicament because it applied to mere humans the moral standard that really has someone else in mind—namely, the perfectly righteous God-man in history. And this project later unraveled when Kant, out of disquiet at the thought of endless moral strivings without true fulfillment, moved away from the immortality of the soul, as this move led him to treat what clearly falls short of the moral demand as somehow equivalent to the required moral perfection in God’s eyes.40 This perplexing result ultimately stems from the near-impossibility of the task he takes on in the Religion—namely, constructing a rational system of religion that can be recognized as Lutheran, at least in its broad outlines, while eliminating their core doctrines about Jesus’ salvific roles.

If my interpretative analysis of Kant is on point, what are its lessons? That is, how should we respond to the issues in his moral–religious system I laid out? For those who do not accept his understanding of absolute moral demand, which would presumably mean that the complete realization of the highest good is no longer necessary, the postulate of divine existence on Kantian grounds would become questionable, as they might be content with the advances in distributive justice we can make on our own. Those who retain his uncompromising moral standard but disagree with his rejection of the transmission of moral liability and merit can go back to Lutheran orthodoxy, relying on the historical redeemer for vicarious atonement and imputation of perfect righteousness.

A more interesting question is for Kantians who agree with their master on these two counts—those holding the bar of morality as high as possible because, as Kant (LE_C, 27:294) allegedly proclaimed in his lecture, “the moral law is the archetype, the yardstick and the pattern of our actions [which] must be exact and precise”, while also refusing to rely on the historical Jesus to fulfill this demand on their behalf.41 If these Kantians also reject his late-career attempt to present a merely good disposition as sufficient for fulfilling God’s demand (as I argued in this paper), this means that they will bear the full blow of the anguish Kant recognized but ultimately evaded in The End of All Things—the dreaded prospect of never being able to close this gap.42 What should be their response to this existential predicament?

My proposal is that, if they remain theists who hope for the eventual realization of the highest good with God’s involvement, these Kantians consider explicitly regarding God as accepting and being in a relationship with all sinners, or at least those who have gone through moral revolution discussed in Section 3. Perhaps the label ‘well-pleasing’ [wohlgefällig], which is the term used by God the father to describe Jesus in New Testament passages on Jesus’ baptism and the transfiguration, cannot be our possession, because no mere human fully satisfies God’s moral demand.43 But this should not necessarily mean that morally imperfect humans are irredeemable outcasts—some abominations in God’s sight that should be kept far away to avoid tainting the holiness of God. Rather, perhaps God can still take delight in our meager, incremental, and never fully complete moral progress toward the ideals of individual moral perfection and collective distributive justice. At least there is conceptual room for this approach, and I think it is an option worth exploring, especially for those who regard divine love as willing to reach out to those who are sincerely striving as well as the morally perfect.

Traditional Lutheran Christianity has been reluctant to make this affirmation because it appears to marginalize the role of Jesus as the savior who must drag us out of the sinful state of separation from God. Given this intention, it makes more sense to emphasize our inability to approach God on our own so that the need for Jesus’ mediating role becomes more pressing. This is why, for instance, Luther (1957, p. 275) declares in The Bondage of the Will that “even in the most excellent men…, ‘free will’, their most excellent part, is nonetheless ungodly, and unrighteous, and merits God’s wrath”. This is based on his view that “with God there remains nothing intermediate between righteousness and sin that is, as it were, neutral”, implying that there is absolutely no possibility of standing before God without being clothed with Jesus’ alien righteousness (Luther 1957, p. 290). And Kant (RBR, 6:22) actually applies this rigorism to morality, holding that “it is of great consequence to ethics in general… to preclude, so far as possible, anything morally intermediate, either in actions (adiaphora) or in human character”.

However, the Kantians I have in mind here may choose not to retain his moral rigorism, especially if they suspect that his talk of the variable range of strength of a good disposition or virtue noted in Section 3 betrays that this position, rather than being an indispensable feature of his practical philosophy, in fact has more to do with appeasing his Lutheran audience. If they are like him in no longer being all that interested in upholding Jesus as our indispensable savior, then they do not need to rely on moral rigorism to preserve his necessity. Alternatively, if there are Kantians who are still attracted to the idea of a God-man in history, they can consider assigning some other salvific roles to this person that neither violates Kant’s intuition about the non-transmissibility of moral desert nor appeals to his moral rigorism—for instance, awakening humanity’s moral consciousness through divine love, transforming human nature through mystical union, removing the existential or psychological barrier separating us from God, etc.

To conclude, I submit that this way of conceptualizing God should be helpful to at least some Kantians in terms of addressing their inevitable moral discontent in light of the unbridgeable gap between our moral capacity and the moral ideal. It seems that we mere humans will never become well-pleasing to God on our own, but we can still hope that God turns out to be the kind of person who would embrace us and appreciate our moral efforts despite their perpetual imperfection.44