PALMQUIST - Tree.31. The Numinous and Its Symbols

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31. The Numinous and its Symbols

by Stephen Palmquist (stevepq@hkbu.edu.hk)
Philosophy begins in wonder. This was the view Plato expressed in his
Theaetetus (CDP 155d) and echoed by many other philosophers down
through the ages. Wonder in this sense is not merely idle curiosity, but a
passion for the unknown that drives us to seek an underlying meaning
behind the diversity of our life, impelling us to ever new depths of insight
and heights of understanding. I have chosen to introduce philosophy to you
in this course by starting not with wonder, but with its opposite, ignorance.
This is because the logical progression of the parts of the tree of philosophy
is opposite to the normal chronological progression in our experience of
doing philosophy. In these lectures I am attempting to explain philosophy in
such a way that, having completed the course, you will be able to set out on a
philosophical journey of your own. That means that, although the best way
to learn philosophy may be to move from metaphysics through logic and
science to ontology, the best way to do philosophy will be to move from
wonder through wisdom and understanding to a fuller recognition of your
own ignorance.
Wonder relates primarily to our amazement at the great diversity of
human experience, especially experiences giving rise to questions that
cannot be answered merely by logical reasoning, but only by living through
the experience itself. The most basic kind of philosophical wonder is
wonder about the meaning of life. We cannot satisfy that wonder merely by
developing metaphysical theories, sharpening our logical thinking skills, or
expanding the depth and range of our knowledge. Rather, the meaning of
life gradually emerges out of our willingness to be open to the kinds of
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"wonderful" experiences we are discussing here in Part Four. Even though

our discussion of these experiences depends on words just as much as in the
previous lectures, we must keep in mind that we experience wonder most
profoundly in silence. All the theories we are examining as possible
"answers" to the various problems raised here in Part Four pale in
insignificance compared to the real answer we receive whenever we
experience the wonder of silence. For silent wonder, more than any number
of words, can impress us with a true sense of our own reality, and can urge
us on to a level of wholeness that words alone can never express, giving the
diversity of our words their ultimate meaning.
As you have been learning to do philosophy, I hope you have already
experienced this philosophical kind of wonder. Indeed, another reason for
starting this course with lectures on ignorance is that I have found this is
one of the best ways to awaken wonder in those whose modern, scientific
world view tends to isolate them from the many experiences that used to be
a natural part of everyone's life, prior to the domination of technology over
human society. I have considered teaching this course in the reverse order,
starting with a lecture on death and ending with a lecture on myth.
Although this would probably have made the course more interesting at the
beginning, and thus attracted you more quickly to a serious study of
philosophy, there would have been a danger of interpreting the kinds of
experience discussed here too scientifically, without recognizing the
wondrous mystery they point us toward. These days, when beauty is so
often locked within the confines of a museum's walls, when religious
experience is so often identified with doing "churchy" things, when death so
often happens in the anonymity of a hospital ward, it has become all too
easy to think we have really experienced the mysteries of life, when in fact
all we have done is isolate ourselves from the real thing through the
trappings of technology. Recognizing our ignorance of ultimate reality has, I
hope, shocked you out of the common complacency that kills our instinct to
wonder.
Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is one of the best examples of a philosopher
who appreciated the shock value of recognizing human ignorance, as well as
the connection between such a recognition and philosophical wonder. His
collection of insights, called Penses, is filled with passages expressing the
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tensions in human existence, as in the following:

What a chimera then is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a
chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile
worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the
pride and refuse of the universe!
... Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble
yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely
transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which
you are ignorant. Hear God....
Whence it seems that God, willing to render the difficulty of our
existence unintelligible to ourselves, has concealed the knot so high, or
better speaking, so low, that we are quite incapable of reaching it; so that it
is not by the proud exertions of our reason, but by the simple submissions of
reason, that we can truly know ourselves. (PP 434)
Pascal's paradoxes point us beyond our ordinary way of looking at the
world, and confront us with a transcendent reality whose mystery stirs up
silent wonder in the depths of our heart.
Today I shall introduce one of the most common and yet profound ways
of experiencing the wonder of silence: namely, the discipline that has as its
object the ultimate reality most people call "God". As we saw last week, one
of the names traditionally given to the philosophical task of understanding
this and other ways of experiencing the "unity in diversity" of existing
things is "ontology"-i.e., the "study of being". Ontology, the study of what is,
is one of the methods philosophers have used to resolve the various
tensions created by our philosophical reasoning. For example, Kant not only
recognized the tension between freedom and fate, as we saw in Lecture 22,
but also argued that man has a "practical need" to resolve it in order to
appreciate the "totality" of human knowledge and experience. We saw in
Lecture 29 how he initially attempted to resolve this tension by adopting
something like an ontological point of view in his account of the role of
beauty and purpose in nature. In Lectures 32 and 33 this week we shall
examine Kant's most significant example of how the tension between
theory and practice is resolved in experience.
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The ontological study of human experiences of the transcendent (i.e., of

God) has often been regarded as one of the tasks of the branch of applied
philosophy known as "philosophy of religion". However, the scope of this
discipline ought to be limited to issues related more directly to our
knowledge, such as the arguments for the existence of God, the nature and
reliability of religious language and beliefs, and the problem of evil. The
task of understanding what is typically called "religious experience"
belongs to the branches of the tree of philosophy only insofar as we are
asking whether or not such experiences can give us knowledge of God. The
examination of the experiences as such belongs more properly to the leaves
of the tree. The common term "religious experience" can be misleading,
though, since it could be taken to imply that such experience can occur only
in people who belong to some established religion. But in fact, many people
who are not religious in any traditional sense do have experiences of this
type at some point in their life. This suggests that we need a new name to
refer to such experiences when studying their ontological character.
Rudolf Otto (1869-1937) was a German theologian who adopted a
Kantian framework in attempting to construct a thoroughgoing interpretation of religion and religious experience. His stress on discovering the
essence of the empirical manifestation of religious experiences was quite
different from Kant's stress on their rational foundation. Nevertheless,
Otto believed his ideas could serve as a helpful complement to Kant's. After
investigating the similarities between the religious experiences of people in
many different traditions, especially those normally regarded as "mystical",
Otto wrote a book, called The Idea of the Holy (1917), offering a now famous
description of the fundamental characteristics of such experiences. Let's
look today at just a few of his main ideas.
Because the word "God" is not used in all religious traditions, and
because traditions that do refer to God inevitably employ different names
and/or descriptions of God, Otto decided to avoid using the word "God" as
much as possible. Moreover, in examining the bare phenomena of our
experiences (i.e., when we focus only on what we can observe), we do not
actually find God as such. What we find is various types of experience.
Therefore, Otto coined the words "numen" and "numinous" to refer to
whatever object gives rise to the deep, religious experiences sometimes
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referred to as the "presence" of God. (Remember, Kant had distinguished

between the "phenomenal" and "noumenal" in a similar way (see Figure
III.5).) Of course, most people would call this object "God". But Otto's goal
was not to propose a theory about the object causing such experiences (i.e.,
whether it is really God, or nature, or just something we ate for lunch);
instead, he only wanted to give a phenomenological description of what
happens. This is, by the way, the typical method employed in doing ontology.
For that reason ontology and "phenomenology"-i.e., describing the essential
character of the phenomena we experience-always tend to be closely
related disciplines.
According to Otto, the feeling of being in the presence of a numen,a
transcendent reality that is "wholly other" than my own self, is a basic
human experience, and should therefore serve as the starting point for any
ontology of religious experience. The result of experiencing this numinous
presence is to feel deeply impressed with my own dependence on it. This
gives rise to what Otto called a "creature-feeling". He warned against the
temptation to regard this "feeling of dependence" (as Schleiermacher had
called it) as the primary reality, and to think we infer from it the belief in
some underlying object. On the contrary, Otto claimed, the object
mysteriously presents itself to us first, and the mystical feeling follows only
as a consequence. No matter what we believe about God, this numinous
presence will appear to us as something that can be described by appealing
to the idea of the "holy".
Otto devoted a great deal of effort to the task of explaining the nature of
our experience of the numinous. The "holy" object, he argued, will be both
"nonrational" and "nonmoral". This does not mean it will be irrational and
immoral, but only that questions of rationality and morality will be
irrelevant when it comes to the feeling aroused by such a deep experience.
Otto further named this feeling "mysterium tremendum" and argued that it
involves five distinct "elements": awe, majesty, urgency, mystery (or
"otherness"), and fascination. The feeling of awe refers to a special kind of
fear or dread (a tremor) in the presence of something mysterious. (We shall
look more closely at this feeling in Lecture 34.) The recognition of the
majesty of the numinous object then gives rise to a sense of humble
self-abasement (or "creaturehood") in us. The fact that this is a real
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experience of a living object, and not just an abstract philosophical theory, is

expressed in the "energy" or urgency we feel whenever we have such an
experience. This urgency can sometimes intensify our
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dread, as when it comes in the form of "the

Figure XI.1: TheNuminous
wrath of God", but it also leads to the
Breakthroughandthe
recognition that this object is "wholly other"
Idea of theHoly
(i.e., mysterious). These feelings are all rather
negative so far, and might on their own cause
us to flee from the numinous object; but they
are balanced by a sense of fascination that
keeps us intensely interested in the experience and in its unknown object. With this
brief description of Otto's theory in mind, we
can summarize it by combining the two maps
in Figure X.1, as in Figure XI.1.
It is worth mentioning that
Kant himself had a profound awareness of this kind of numinous experience. For example, the passage concluding the second Critique (quoted
above, at the very end of Lecture 22) refers to the "starry heavens above me"
and the "moral law within me" as basic experiences ("I see them before me"),
giving rise to the feelings of "admiration and awe", as well as to a sense of
mysterious urgency and dependence ("I associate them directly with the
consciousness of my own existence"): one could hardly cite a better
example of Otto's ontological description of religious experience! Moreover,
Kant elsewhere described these same experiences in terms of the "hand of
God" in nature and the "voice of God" in our hearts. These two ways reason
has of manifesting itself to human beings were, for Kant, self-validating, for
they represent the very source of our scientific knowledge and moral
goodness, respectively. As such, they unify the endless diversity that always
characterizes our actual experiences of truth and goodness. This, in fact, is
why the source of logical reasoning cannot itself be logical; nor can the
source of the moral law itself be moral. Kant recognized (though he
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unfortunately did not emphasize the fact) that the "starry heavens" (nature)
and the "moral law" (freedom) are like boundaries that we bump our heads
against if we try to pass beyond them. For, just as Otto claimed, the source
of these boundaries must itself be nonrational and nonmoral in order to be
capable of unifying the diversity of our rational and moral experiences.
Anyone who has had such experiences of the numinous will have an
immediate response to Nietzsche, or to anyone else who wishes to argue
that God is dead. The death of God as Nietzsche proclaimed it was real
enough; but it was the death of a false God, a God invented by human
rationality more than by divine revelation. Those who have experienced
God will know we cannot force God to live within the boundaries of any
human system. Just as Nietzsche rightly claimed, to attempt to do so is to
kill God; and the only proper response is to break out of that mold in order to
regain the possibility of experiencing the life-giving reality itself. But this
raises a crucial question: Once we have experienced the numinous, how can
we describe it or understand it without forcing it into an unnatural mold?
Many scholars in the twentieth century addressed this question by
referring to the power of symbols. In the remainder of today's lecture I shall
discuss the views of an existentialist thinker we already met in Weeks VI
and X and will meet again next week. Of Paul Tillich's many interesting
insights, his account of the nature of faith and its relation to symbols is one
of the most important. According to Tillich everyone has faith, because
everyone has some "ultimate concern", even those who are not aware of it.
Our ultimate concern is the thing or person or goal that all our energies in
life are directed toward; it is the final determining factor in all our
decisions. For many students, "doing well in university" is their ultimate
concern-the issue determining what they do and when they do it most of the
time. However, Tillich claimed that some things do not deserve this honor,
for "the surrender to a concern which is not really ultimate" is "idolatrous"
and hence "destructive" (DF 16,35): "Our ultimate concern can destroy us as
it can heal us. But we never can be without it." An improper object of
ultimate concern is dangerous because faith is more than mere trust or
rational belief. As Tillich wrote in The Courage to Be (CB 168):
Faith is not a theoretical affirmation of something uncertain, it is the
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existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience.

Faith is not an opinion but a state. It is the state of being grasped by the
power of being which transcends everything that is and in which everything
that is participates. He who is grasped by this power is able to affirm
himself because he knows that he is affirmed by the power of being-itself.
In this point mystical experience and personal encounter are identical. In
both of them faith is the basis of the courage to be.
We shall look more closely at Tillich's concept of "courage" in Lecture
34. The problem at this point is that the proper object of faith is what Otto
called the "numinous"-in other words, it is the mysterious object of certain
deep but inexplicable experiences we have. So how can faith exist if its
object is a mystery? Tillich's answer was that objects that are not
mysterious can lead us to the mysterious object. The former objects are
called "symbols". Thus Tillich defined the special, religious form of faith as
"the acceptance of symbols that express our ultimate concern in terms of
divine actions" (DF 48).
Tillich carefully distinguished between "symbols" and "signs". A sign is
a knowable object that merely points beyond itself to some other knowable
object, whereas a symbol is a knowable object that points beyond itself to a
hidden reality, while at the same time participating in the mystery to which
it points. A road sign directs us to the place we are going, but when we reach
our destination we see that it has nothing to do with the sign(s) we followed
along the way. Like Wittgenstein's "ladder" (see Figure V.1), we can discard
a sign once it has done its job. A symbol, by contrast, is intimately
connected with our ability to experience the reality in question. Without
symbols, we would be unable to experience
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the thing symbolized. As such, Tillich

argued, "symbolic language alone is able to
express the ultimate.... The language of
faith is the language of symbols" (DF
41,45). The difference between signs and
symbols is, in fact, parallel to the
difference between analytic and synthetic
logic. We can depict this difference by
using the map in Figure XI.2, where the
double-headed arrow (being a combination of the two types of arrow given in
Figure X.1) represents participation.
This correlation between the
sign-symbol relationship and the analyticsynthetic relationship is not accidental.
Figure
XI.2:
The
Logic
of Signs
and
Symbols
For symbolic language is based on synthetic logic, while our ordinary, literal
use of words (as signs) is based on analytic logic. Thus, just as the former,
according to Tillich, relates to the language of faith, so also the latter relates
to the language of knowledge. As we saw in Part Two, our literal use of words
requires any "A" to remain "A" and hence always to be opposed to "-A". As a
result, any "B" that is not identical to "A" must be included as part of "-A".
(This, by the way, is often regarded as the third law of analytic logic, called
the "law of the excluded middle": "B = either A or -A".) Signs always direct us
in this way around the world of the known and the knowable. But whenever
we use words in a symbolic way, the original symbol ("A") itself presents to
us a hidden reality
("-A") that we can actually experience, because this A
participates in the -A, and vice versa. (Obviously, synthetic logic therefore
rejects the law of the excluded middle.) Symbols enable objects,
paradoxically, to be for us something they are not, so we should not be
surprised to find some philosophers basing symbolic language on the "law
of paradox" or "law of participation" (see Lecture 12).
Let's take my wedding ring as a simple example. If I were to regard this
object merely as a sign of my status as a married person, then the ring itself,
as an object, would not be very important to me. I would be more concerned
with how it looks on me than with what it means to me. If I were to lose it, I
would be sad mainly because of its monetary value, being made out of gold.
But the loss would not have any effect on my marriage, since I could buy a
new one that would point to my married status just as effectively. However,
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because I regard my ring as a symbol of my commitment to love my wife as

long as we are alive, the ring itself actually participates in my marriage. To
lose it or even to decide not to wear it would be a tragedy, since part of my
marriage would thereby be lost. I could, of course, buy another ring to
replace it; but it would take a long time for that new object to become as
profound a symbol of the mystery of love as my original ring is. For love, as
we saw last week, is one of the most common types of experiences that
require us to interpret objects as symbols.
Since this week's lectures deal mainly with "religious experience", let's
use the Christian ritual of the Eucharist as another example to help clarify
just how symbols operate. When Christians partake of the Lord's Supper,
each participant usually eats a small piece of bread and drinks a small
amount of wine or grape juice. The significance of this ritual varies greatly,
depending on whether the person regards these common, "knowable"
objects as signs or as symbols. Regarded as signs, the bread and wine point
the person to some other knowable reality, such as the actual body and blood
of the historical man named Jesus Christ (in the case of the Catholic who
believes in the doctrine of "transubstantiation"), or to the memory of this
same person and what he did (as in the typical Protestant interpretation).
In both cases the original objects lose their importance as bread and wine
once we apprehend the object to which they point. Regarded as symbols,
however, these same objects no longer have anything to do with magic or
memory; instead, they are recognized for what they are (namely, bread and
wine), but they are believed to participate in the mystery of the Incarnation
of God in human flesh. Eating them is therefore a profound expression of
one's own willingness to participate in this mystery. By experiencing this
ritual symbolically, the person is transported by these ordinary objects into
a deep communion with a mysterious reality that can never be
comprehended, except perhaps in the incomprehensible wonder of silence.
To conclude our brief look at Tillich's position, let's use his definition
of faith to distinguish between metaphysics and ontology-two disciplines
that are easily confused, even by philosophers. Whereas metaphysics is the
search for knowledge of an ultimate reality, ontology is a search for
experience of an ultimate concern. So as we study various forms of ontology
here in Part Four, we must keep in mind that the "ultimate", toward which
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our attention is pointed by the various symbols we meet in our experience,

is an ultimate attitude or way of life much more than an ultimate object or
set of dogmas. Such symbols should all be regarded not as giving us
metaphysical knowledge of ultimate reality, but only as kindling within us
the silent fire of concern for the ultimate direction and meaning of our life.
In the remaining two lectures this week, we will go back to Kant, in the hope
that his Critical philosophy may be able to provide us with some even
deeper insights into what it means to be religious in this way.
32. Evil and the Paradox of Grace
Ever since Lecture 8 I have been putting more emphasis on the ideas of
Immanuel Kant than on any other philosopher-indeed, far more than would
normally be thought appropriate for an introductory-level course such as
this. Kant's terminology is so complex, his theories so deep, and his
arguments so controversial, that most teachers of beginning students dare
not mention anything more than the essential features of Kant's moral
theory, with perhaps some passing references to his epistemology. But in
this course, we have covered not only these areas (in Lectures 22 and 8), but
also his view of metaphysics proper (Lecture 9), his basic logical
distinctions (Lecture 11), his defense of the principle of causality for
science (Lecture 21), his political theory (Lecture 27), and his theory of
beauty (Lecture 29). I have two reasons for focusing so much attention on
this one philosopher. First, I am far more familiar with his theories than
with those of any other philosopher, so I am more confident in offering
interpretations that are both accurate and meaningful. Indeed, much of my
research and nearly all of my publications have focused on this one figure.
The second reason, however, is far more significant: I believe Kant comes
closer to a balanced and systematic treatment of the whole range of
philosophical issues than any other philosopher. Moreover, his treatment is
nearly always insightful and usually right as well!
The one exception to my generally positive impression of Kant's
approach to philosophical issues came when I first read his book, Religion
within the Bounds of Bare Reason (1793). At that time, I was still in the early
stages of developing my own interpretation of the other areas of Kant's
philosophy. As someone who hopes to qualify as a Christian, though without
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sacrificing my freedom to question, doubt, and/or reinterpret some of the

traditional dogmas, I had welcomed Kant's metaphysical humility: his
persuasive demonstrations that God's existence cannot be proved
theoretically (arguments whose details we have not had time to examine in
this course) seemed to be a profound philosophical confirmation of the
biblical warnings against trying to storm heaven with human knowledge.
His moral theory had seemed even more obviously compatible with
Christian thinking: the dual principles of freedom and the moral law struck
me as a beautiful restatement of Jesus' internalization of ethics; and Kant's
moral argument seemed like an appropriate way of expressing the moral
person's conviction that God must exist, even though we cannot prove it.
Even in his account of beauty and natural purpose in the third Critique,
Kant had seemed intent on developing a theocentric philosophy-one that
points the reader to an ever-deepening awareness that God is "all in all" (1
Corinthians 15:28). But when I first read Kant's Religion, my heart sank: he
seemed to be reducing the riches of religious experience to nothing but
morality in disguise!
Fortunately, I decided to reread Religion a few years later, when my
perspectival interpretation of Kant's System was more thoroughly
developed. In so doing, I felt as if interpretive scales were falling from my
eyes: an entirely new understanding of what Kant was attempting to
accomplish became clear to me. When I first read the book, I had allowed
myself to fall for the traditional interpretation, whereby Kant is not really
seriously attempting to defend religion at all, much less Christianity, but is
merely hoping to convert religiously-minded people to a Kantian substitute
for religion. What I realized the second time around is that Religion is not a
book about the "philosophy of religion" in the sense we ordinarily think of it
nowadays; rather, it is a book about the being of religion, an interpretation
of what it means to be religious. Moreover, I realized that Kant was not
reducing religion to mere morality, but was raising morality (which is a
hopeless ideal on its own) to the higher (and more realistic) level of
religion! For this reason, and because I have studied this book more
carefully than any of Kant's other works, I shall devote most of two lectures
to explaining its contents.
What does it mean to be religious? Is "being religious" something all
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human beings necessarily experience, or is it just an optional choice some

people make-e.g., when they are afraid of what will happen to them after
they die? And which religion, if any, is the best one to follow? Kant's
Religion is a systematic attempt to answer these and many other questions,
based on the foundations laid in his preceding systematic works. He divided
the book, somewhat predictably, into four parts, each representing a stage
in the process of explaining what makes religion what it is. Here we shall
examine the first two stages, leaving the other two for the following lecture.
But first, an overview of these four stages (see Figure XI.3) should help you
to keep track of where we are going. Book One asks whether human beings
are good or evil by nature, and defends both an interesting two-sided
answer, in terms of the "radical evil" that lies at the very root of our nature.
Book Two considers how we are able to overcome the problems created by
the presence of such evil in the world, arguing that some inscrutable
assistance from a benev-
FigureXI.3:TheFourStagesinKant'sSystemofReligion
olent God must be presupposed. Books Three and Four then deal with the
new problems that arise when good-hearted people come together in social
groups. Book Three argues that the final "victory" over evil can take place
only when human beings join together in a religious community (i.e., a
"church"). And Book Four distinguishes between true and false ways of
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serving God in a church.

According to Kant evil is the basic limiting condition that gives rise to
the need for religion. That there is evil in the world is not an issue he
believes is open to doubt. The philosophical tasks are to identify what evil
is, why it is here, and where it comes from (i.e., how it arises). In the process
of discussing these issues, he totally ignored the so-called "problem of evil"
that is now regarded as one of the major areas of concern for philosophers
of religion-i.e., the problem of explaining how a good and all-powerful God
could permit undeserved suffering and evil to exist. Such an attempt to
justify God in the face of evil is called a "theodicy". Kant's total neglect of
this issue in Religion may be due in part to the fact that he had written a
separate essay on this subject shortly before starting to write this book.
That essay, entitled "On the failure of all the philosophical essays in the
theodicy" (1791), had argued that the attempt to defend God in this way is
bound to fail. Appealing directly to the biblical story of Job (the Old
Testament character whom God allowed to suffer horrendously, merely as a
test of his faith), Kant had examined nine different types of theodicy,
demonstrating why each one must fail. Any attempt to concoct rational
excuses for God's decision to allow evil to exist is misdirected, because
knowledge of such mysteries is beyond the limits of human understanding.
Instead, the very insolubility of the problem serves to heighten the
existential significance of evil by forcing each individual to accept or reject
God on the basis of faith.
Book One of Religion begins by asking whether human beings are good
or evil by nature. First, Kant rejected the possibility that we might be both
good and evil; this can be true of our empirical character (because actions
can be partly good and partly bad in their outcome), but the motive behind
an action must be either good or evil. Kant then distinguished between a
"predisposition" (the universal tendency all human beings have at birth,
before any moral actions have been performed), a "disposition" (the
fundamental subjective basis, in the depths of our character, that
determines how we choose to act at any given point in time), and a
"propensity" (the likely tendency of a person, or indeed, of the whole human
race). Kant proceeded to argue that our predisposition is good, because our
animality, our humanity, and our personality all contain features that are
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clearly intended for good; our disposition may be good or bad at any given
time, because it cannot be both; and our propensity is always towards evil,
because our predisposition has somehow been corrupted. Just how this
corruption occurred is a question Kant claimed human reason is powerless
to answer. But as a reminder that it has occurred, he adopted the term
"radical evil", thus indicating that the human will (or disposition) has been
corrupted at the very outset ("radical" means "at the root") by an
unexplainable evil force that does not belong to our original nature (our
predisposition).
What exactly is this evil? Kant defined evil as a reversal in "the moral
order of the incentives" that determine our maxims (RBBR 31). You may
recall from Lecture 22 that for Kant a choice is morally good whenever we
obey the voice of the moral law in our hearts, and that a person who makes
such a choice deserves praise if he or she has had to sacrifice some personal
happiness (or "self-love") in order to do the right thing. Evil is therefore a
person's decision to let matters of self-love be more important than the
commands of conscience. Kant argued that empirical evidence alone is
enough to demonstrate that human beings everywhere begin their moral
lives with choices based on self-love rather than on the moral law. He also
tried to develop a transcendental argument, though its details remain
obscure in the text. I have reconstructed this argument as follows: a person
cannot make a truly moral choice until he or she knows what evil involves
as well as good; since our predisposition is good, we instinctively know
what is good by listening to our conscience; but until we actually make an
evil choice, we cannot be said to have attained genuine freedom, inasmuch
as we will not have a true understanding of what is at stake; the first
genuinely free (i.e., moral) act of every person must therefore be a choice to
do evil.
Why begin a book about "rational religion" with the claim that we all
start out by ruining our chances of living a morally spotless life? Doesn't
this call into question the rationality of our effort to obey the moral law-an
effort whose importance Kant had emphasized so firmly in the second
Critique? Indeed it does! And this point baffled most of Kant's philosophical
peers, who accepted the Enlightenment's absolute faith in the powers of
human reason, and thought Kant did too. Goethe, for example, exclaimed
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that Kant had "slobbered on his philosopher's cloak" with the doctrine of
radical evil (see KCR 129n). But Kant himself was not put off; for he knew
what he was doing. Our experience of evil and our inability to explain its
rational origin except by merely confirming its mystery ("it's radical!")
serve to fill us with an existential wonder that impels us to be religious.
Indeed, Kant's intention in Book One was to present us with the
transcendental conditions for the possibility of religion: religion is possible
only in a world where rational beings are meant to be good, but are unable to
fulfill that existential goal. And this is the world we find ourselves living in.
Book Two takes a somewhat surprising turn. Having argued that
human beings inevitably start out with an evil disposition as a result of the
negative influences of radical evil, Kant went on to claim that the presence
of our good predisposition gives us a grain of hope that there may be a way
of transforming our evil disposition into a good one. But how can this
happen? First, Kant suggested, the only hope for anyone who believes
morality is a worthwhile goal to pursue is to believe in a God who in some
way provides us with the assistance we need to overcome our evil
disposition. In traditional Christian theology, such assistance is referred to
as "grace". The main question for Book Two is: on what basis does a person
have rational grounds for hoping that God will provide such assistance? In
particular, is there something we must do to merit divine grace, or is it a
free and unmerited gift from above? Kant's solution to this problem is often
criticized for being paradoxical and, as a result, unclear. But I believe the
paradox is intentional: for in the context of Kant's Critical philosophy, any
attempt to explain how God (the transcendent reality) could assist human
beings (living as we do in the phenomenal world) is bound to be paradoxical.
Kant would defend his explanation as merely an accurate reflection of a
paradoxical situation.
Book Two begins by introducing what Kant called the "archetype" of
perfect humanity (RBBR 54), then uses familiar biblical imagery to describe
its nature. This archetype has a divine origin; yet it "has come down to us
from heaven" to reside within each person (54-55). It empowers us to do
what would otherwise be impossible: to turn away from the evil disposition
(or evil "heart", as Kant also called it) and begin living by a new principle. In
order for this change to a "good heart" to be effective, however, we must
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have "practical faith" in this archetype. By this Kant meant that we must
believe that if we do everything in our power to obey the moral law, then God
will supply what is lacking. On this basis, many interpreters have accused
Kant of defending a form of "righteousness by works", whereby we must
earn our own salvation. Yet this is not the way Kant himself portrayed his
position. Rather, he insisted such divine assistance is entirely undeserved
and, in any case, cannot be controlled or determined by anything we do or
fail to do. Indeed, he even warned that we are unable to see anyone's
disposition (even our own!) clearly enough to know for certain whether it is
good or evil. God, he claimed, judges us by this disposition, but because we
are ignorant of its true nature at any given point in time, the only basis we
have for judging our current status is to assess the morality of our actions.
If we see evidence of moral progress, this is a sign that our disposition may
be good. Nevertheless, because we all started with an evil disposition, our
situation is hopeless unless we believe God will make up for our
shortcomings. In order for religion to be rational, though, God must use
some basis for deciding who to assist and who not to assist. Kant's point,
then, was not that we can make ourselves worthy to be accepted by God
(who demands perfection), but rather, that we can make ourselves worthy
to be made worthy by God.
Because the archetype has the same function in Kant's system of
rational religion that Jesus has in Christianity, Book Two deals with a
number of theological issues relating to Jesus' nature and status. The issues
include Jesus' divine nature, his human nature, his virgin birth, his
resurrection from the dead, his status as a moral example, and various
broader doctrines such as sanctification, eternal security, and justification
by grace. Many interpreters have claimed that Kant's intention was to deny
any real value to most if not all of these traditional doctrines. However,
such interpretations are based on a careless reading of the text. For what
Kant's actual strategy in each case was to argue that such doctrines can
have a legitimate rational meaning provided they serve the practical goal of
helping the religious believer to follow the moral law more consistently. In
each case he warned against any interpretation that is likely to produce a
morally lazy individual. What many interpreters overlook is that he also
warned against the opposite danger: dogmatically asserting that certain
doctrines cannot be true, simply because they cannot be proved
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theoretically. Even a doctrine such as the virgin birth, Kant warned, cannot
be absolutely denied, inasmuch as the possibility of miracles is an issue that
lies beyond the bounds of human reason. As explained in great detail in my
recent book, Kant's Critical Religion (2000), the true intention of Kant's
arguments is to show us how those who wish to believe that, for example,
Jesus was God in human form, must interpret this doctrine in order for it to
support rather than hinder the genuinely religious core of a person's beliefs.
Kant himself certainly did not recommend that we adopt such doctrines as
philosophers; he did not claim that we must believe them in order to be
accepted by God. But he did demonstrate that we can believe them without
sacrificing our rationality, and that doing so can sometimes greatly
strengthen our religious faith.
One of the main reasons so many interpreters have misunderstood
Kant's intentions in Religion is that the standard English version of this
book for most of the twentieth century utilized a very misleading translation of the title. Greene and Hudson translated Kant's title (Die Religion
innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft) as Religion within the Limits of
Reason Alone. Yet Kant elsewhere clarified that the term Grenzen refers to
the boundaries that separate an area from the surrounding territory, not as
absolute limits that cannot be surpassed. (For the latter, Kant used the term
Schranken.) Moreover, the term "blossen" does not mean "alone"; it means
"naked" or "bare". The effect of these two mistranslations has been to give
readers the initial impression that Kant's book will be an attempt to force
religion entirely within the strict limits of reason. But as we have already
seen, this is not what he did. Rather, his strategy in each Book is to
distinguish between what reason can and cannot tell us about our religious
impulses.
In Book One we learned that reason can tell us what evil is, and that we
are all inevitably ensnared by evil desires; but it cannot tell us the source of
this mysterious phenomenon, except to say that it is not rooted in the very
definition of what it means to be human. In Book Two we learned that
reason can tell us how conversion works and what we must do in order to
have rational grounds for hoping God will save us; but it cannot tell us who
really is good, nor can it give us definite knowledge of who will receive God's
grace. In the next lecture we shall see how important it is to keep in mind
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that Kant was not promoting a one-sided view of religion as nothing but
moral reason in disguise, but was describing the two sides of all genuine
religion: the rational (and therefore universal) core along with the
historical (and therefore inevitably non-universal) shell. As we shall see,
both aspects of religion must work together in order our religious
experience to be genuine.
Taken together, evil and grace represent a twofold basis for wonder as
we ponder the human situation. Grace in particular is not something we can
ever hope to understand through reason alone-unless we have actually
experienced it. Good philosophy is superior to traditional theology precisely
to the extent that it does not claim to understand what is by its very nature
incomprehensible. It merely hopes and provides rational grounds for hope.
But in so doing, its function is not to undermine religion, but rather to
prepare us to experience the fruit of such hopes. Lecture 33 will examine
how Kant himself regarded the first two stages of his theory as giving rise to
the experience of religion through the forming of communities devoted to
serving God.
33. Community and the Mystery of Worship
You probably noticed in the previous lecture that Kant's account of
what it means to be religious bears a striking resemblance to the biblical
stories of the fall of Adam in Genesis 1-3 and the saving work of Jesus in the
Gospels. So close are the parallels that some commentators have actually
accused Kant of simply translating Christian ideas into a rational
terminology. Before continuing with our study of Religion, we must
therefore consider how best to interpret these parallels. They are, in fact, a
crucial part of Kant's strategy. For in the Preface to the second edition, he
explained that the book carries out two experiments: the first is to see how
far philosophy can go in disclosing the rational elements of all genuine
religion; the second is to see how well the beliefs and practices of one
specific "historical faith" correspond to this rational ideal. For the latter,
Kant chose Christianity, the tradition "already at hand" (RBBR 11, 123).
With this in mind, we should not interpret the presence of parallels as a
weakness in Kant's theory; rather, the closer the parallels, the more
successfully Kant has demonstrated that Christianity has a high degree of
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compatibility with rational religion. For he always justified the elements of

the latter with arguments that do not depend on Christian tradition.
In Books One and Two Kant has established the rational elements that
make religion a necessary concern for all human beings. Every person
starts out with a potential to be good (based on their predisposition), yet
inevitably allows this original innocence to be corrupted with evil choices.
Each individual is thereby presented with the challenge of how to
transform their evil heart into a good heart-a change that is possible only
for those who have faith in the assistance of a divine power present within
them, in the form of the "archetype" of perfection. Books Three and Four
shift from a focus on individual salvation to an examination of how
individuals who have experienced such an inner transformation can form
communities of good-hearted people in order to please God through their
actions. This conception of the whole human race pleasing God is the
ultimate goal of all genuine religion. The problem, as Kant noted at the
outset of Book Three, is that individuals-even good-hearted ones-inevitably
corrupt each other whenever they relate together in groups:
Envy, the lust for power, greed, and the malignant inclinations bound up
with these, besiege his nature, contented within itself, as soon as he is
among men. And it is not even necessary to assume that these are men sunk
in evil and examples to lead him astray; it suffices that they are at hand, that
they surround him, and that they are men, for them mutually to corrupt
each other's predispositions and make one another evil. (RBBR 85)
The solution to this problem is to form a community for the purpose of
encouraging each other to do good. Kant called such a community the
"ethical commonwealth". It differs from a "political commonwealth"
insofar as the latter unites people together by means of external laws ("laws
of coercion"), whereas the former must use only internal laws ("laws of
virtue"). Some Christian readers have complained that a genuinely religious
community must be far more than merely a group of people who meet
together to do good deeds: social organizations such as the Rotary Club
meet that criterion without needing to be religious at all! But Kant actually
recognized this problem. For the second step in the argument of Book Three
is that an ethical commonwealth is bound to fail in its attempt to encourage
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moral goodness if it does not conceive of itself as a "People of God" under

divine guidance. For without viewing the community from this perspective,
there would be no hope that our differing views of what constitutes a
"virtuous life" (see Lecture 24) could work together for the common good
without applying any external force.
The argument Kant used to support this crucial step is brief and has
been overlooked by virtually all past interpreters. So let us take a closer
look. The argument presented in the simple paragraph at RBBR 89 can be
expressed in a more logically precise form as follows:
1. The highest good: The true end of human life on earth is to realize the
highest good, by seeking to be worthy of happiness through obedience to the
moral law. Working towards this goal is a human duty.
2. Radical evil: Human beings on their own seem to be incapable of
achieving the highest good, because of the radical corruption in the heart of
each individual. At best, all we can say is that "we do not know whether ... it
lies in our power or not."
3. Ethical commonwealth: No organization based on externally legislated
rules (i.e., no "political commonwealth") can achieve this goal, because the
moral law can be legislated only internally-i.e., through an "ethical
commonwealth".
4. "Ought" implies "can": Anything reason calls us to do (i.e., any human
duty) must be possible; if it seems impossible, we are justified in making
assumptions that will enable us to conceive of its possibility.
5. Divine assistance: The only way to conceive of a human organization that
could succeed in becoming an ethical commonwealth (i.e., in promoting the
highest good as "a social goal") is to presuppose the assistance of "a higher
moral Being through whose universal dispensation the forces of separate
individuals, insufficient in themselves, are united for a common end." This
Being legislates the moral law internally to all individuals, thus insuring the
harmony of their diverse actions.
6. God exists. In order to work towards the fulfilment of the highest good,
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we must therefore presuppose that God exists as a gracious moral lawgiver,

and that to obey the moral law is to please God. That is, the ethical
commonwealth can succeed only if it takes a religious form. (KCR 167-168)
I call this Kant's "religious argument" for the existence of God. In a nutshell,
it states that trusting in a moral God provides the only rational basis for
believing that our human duties can be fulfilled.
The technical term used in Book Three for this "People of God" is
church. What is crucial in Kant's view is to regard the church not as a purely
physical, humanly-organized entity, but to see it as an invisible spiritual
reality, based on rationally-justifiable principles. Indeed, following the
pattern of the four main categories (see Figure III.9), Kant suggested four
basic principles for the organization of any "true church" (RBBR 92-93): (1)
its quantity is "Universality, and hence its numerical oneness ... with
respect to its fundamental intention"; (2) its "quality" is "purity, union
under no motivating forces other than moral ones"; (3) its "relation", both
"of its members to one another, and ... of the church to political power", is
determined by "the principle of freedom"; and (4) its "modality" is "the
unchangeableness of its constitution", i.e., of certain "settled principles"
that are "laid down, as it were, out of a book of laws, for guidance". The form
of the true (universal) church, then, can be mapped onto the cross as
follows:
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Figure XI.4:
The Archetypal Characteristics of the Invisible Church
The two 1LARs that give rise to this 2LAR can be identified as distinguishing between characteristics concerned with laws (+) or freedom (-) on
the one hand, and between their external (+) or internal (-) manifestations
on the other.
The goal of Book Three is to show how an ethical commonwealth,
under God's guidance and based on these principles, can make the "kingdom of God" real on earth. Much of Book Three is therefore devoted to
discussing how the church can meet this goal more effectively. First and
foremost, the participants in a church must distinguish between their
specific historical/ecclesiastical traditions (called their "faith" by Kant)
and the principles of rational morality that lie at its core (called the
"religion" proper). Kant had this distinction in mind when he claimed
(RBBR 98): "There is only one (true) religion; but there can be faiths of
several kinds." The problem is that religious people tend to regard their
faith as a unique source of salvation, sometimes even denying that moral
goodness (the core of "pure religion" in Kant's view) has any relevance at
all. This tendency often leads them to regard their scripture as a set of
absolute truths telling them what to believe and what to do, regardless of
the content. Kant actually agreed that all faiths need a revelation, as best
preserved in a holy scripture such as the Bible, because reason alone (as we
have seen) cannot answer all our questions. However, he argued that those
who interpret scripture for the church ought to use morality as their
principal guideline. To illustrate how this can be done, he suggested
symbolic interpretations of numerous Christian doctrines and practices,
showing how interpretations that point beyond the literal story to an
underlying moral meaning preserve what is most essential to the Christian
message, while protecting it from being perverted into cultic propaganda.
The key question here is: "How does God wish to be honored?" (RBBR
95). Religious believers tend to answer in one of two ways: either God wants
us to be good and regards worship as an optional extra, or God wants us to
worship and regards moral goodness as unimportant or even impossible.
Kant argued that a true religion will adopt the former standpoint, while a
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false religion adopts the latter. The latter is false because it requires as a
duty belief in dogmas that cannot be known to be true by bare reason,
claiming that those who blindly believe will be given the gift of moral
goodness without actually needing to do good deeds at all. True religion, by
contrast, correctly recognizes that doing good is the universal duty of all
human beings (the only way to please God), adding that our inevitable
moral shortcomings can be overcome through faith that God's grace will
provide a supplementary gift to make up for the duties we are unable to
fulfill. Book Four develops this theme in considerable detail, in terms of the
distinction between "true service" and "pseudo-service" of God.
To illustrate the difference between true and false service, we can
imagine ourselves ordering a meal at our favorite restaurant. Waiter A fills
the order with the food that was requested, but never smiles or engages in
friendly conversation. Waiter B is all smiles and chats at length about
everything under the sun, but ends up letting the food go cold and bringing
someone else's order to the table. A friendly attitude would obviously be a
welcomed supplement to good service, but on its own it is insufficient. In
this example waiter A performs 'true service', despite being unfriendly,
whereas waiter B performs 'pseudo-service' by allowing the supplement
(friendliness) to stand in the way of performing good service (delivering hot
food to the correct table). Kant seemed to have such situations in mind
when he defined pseudo-service as
the persuasion that some one can be served by deeds which in fact frustrate
the very ends of him who is being served. This occurs ... when that which is
of value only indirectly, as a means of complying with the will of a superior,
is proclaimed to be, and is substituted for, what would make us directly
well-pleasing to him. (RBBR 141)
Does Kant's conception of the service of God in a true religion leave any
legitimate role for worship, prayer, and other attempts to experience God in
our daily life? The traditional interpretation claims that he totally rejected
all such practices as illusions that lead to pseudo-service. But this ignores
one of the most important distinctions in Book Four, between "direct" and
"indirect" ways of serving God. We serve God directly and immediately
whenever we do our moral duty; we serve God indirectly whenever we do
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something that heightens our awareness of what this duty is, or encourage
us to obey it. Along these lines, Kant explicitly allowed that religious
practices such as prayer, church-going, baptism, and communion can play a
significant role in a genuinely religious life: they stir up our moral sense and
make us more keenly aware of what we ought to do. Kant's negative words
about such practices apply only to false interpretations of their
significance, as when someone interprets praying for a neighbor's financial
problems as fulfilling a religious duty without ever considering helping the
neighbor, or thinks attending church pleases God even if we learn nothing
about how to live a better life, or regards baptism as a way of forcing God to
accept people into the heavenly kingdom, or treats the communion ritual as
a magical way of making a bad person good. The correct interpretation in
each case must be symbolic: such practices belong to genuine religion only
when they point beyond themselves to a moral meaning.
Some of you may be inclined to conclude up to this point that the
traditional interpretation is right, that Kant did attempt to reduce religion
to morality. We can settle this issue once and for all by examining Kant's
definition of religion. The first main section of Book Four begins by
defining religion as "the recognition of all duties as divine commands"
(RBBR 142). The reductionist interpretation reads this as meaning "to be
religious is to act morally". But this is not what Kant wrote! Rather, his
whole point is that religion goes a step beyond self-sufficient morality by
calling on God for assistance in what is recognized as an otherwise
impossible task. The text goes on to distinguish between "natural religion"
(religion that can be universally known through bare reason) and "revealed
religion" (religion that requires access to some specific historical faith). For
the philosopher, natural religion must have priority, because it is grounded
in what we can know (namely, our human duties); but in order to realize the
final goal of religion and actually please God, natural religion must be
supplemented with revealed religion. The test of whether a faith's alleged
revelation is genuine is whether or not it encourages the believers to do
their duties. But this is not reductionism; rather, it is a reasoned attempt to
ensure that religious faith is rooted in a rational core than can be shared by
all human beings.
Although I have not emphasized the architectonic pattern in Kant's
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religious system up to now, you may have noticed that each of its four stages
can be expressed in terms of a three-step argument. Accordingly, his system
of religion can be summarized by mapping all the steps onto a 12CR (cf.
Figure III.9), as follows:
Figure XI.5: The Twelve Steps in Kant's Religious System

This map summarizes Kant's solution to the first of his two experiments.
He regarded these twelve elements as describing what it means to be
religious, regardless of what tradition a person belongs to. The remaining
question, then, is to what extent Christianity conforms to this model.
In the Preface to the first edition of Religion, Kant distinguished
between the standpoints of the philosophical theologian and the biblical
theologian: the former take reason alone as their guide, while the latter
regard scripture as the primary authority. In this way, he left room for
Christians (or any other religious believers) to defend those aspects of their
faith that might not have a directly moral content. As we have seen, all he
required is that the believer's faith must not contradict morality. Kant never
denied the legitimacy of a unique Christian standpoint (nor that of any
other religious faith); he merely showed us how to be sure our faith
maintains a genuinely religious character, without degenerating into mere
superstition or fanaticism. Kant's own conclusion regarding his second
experiment was surprisingly positive: he repeatedly referred to Christianity
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as the only truly moral faith, even suggesting at one point that it may be
destined to become "the universal religion of mankind" (RBBR 143,
145-151).
I hope I have made clear in this and the previous lecture that Kant's
theory of religion is not so much a "philosophy of religion" that covers the
topics we now tend to expect from books on that subject, as a philosophical
theology that aims first and foremost to clarify what it means to be religious,
and secondly argues that the Christian faith has the highest potential of all
such faiths to promote the universal religion that has a pure moral core.
That Kant (despite commentators' tendency to believe otherwise) was
writing a book about religious experience can perhaps best be seen by
examining the evidence that his entire philosophy was an attempt to
develop what I call a "Critical mysticism"-i.e., a way of understanding how
we can experience transcendent reality (e.g., God) without interpreting that
experience in a way that will transgress the boundaries of Critical
philosophy.
The last book Kant published before starting to develop his Critical
philosophy was called Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, Illustrated by Dreams of
Metaphysics (1766). In this work he examined and interpreted the mystical
experiences of the Swedish visionary, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688-1772).
After giving both positive and negative assessments of the nature of such
experiences, Kant settled on a moderate position: metaphysical
speculations about ultimate reality are to thought what mystical visions are
to sensation; in both cases, we must first determine the limits of what we
can know, and beyond that, we should affirm only those mysteries that
promote moral goodness. That Kant himself had a deep experience of
transcendent reality is evident from numerous hints he gave throughout his
writings. But we have no time to consider such claims here; instead, we
shall begin next week with a lecture on an openly Christian philosopher
who was deeply affected by Kant's philosophy in general and his philosophy
of religion in particular.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE
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1. A. Would it be possible to experience the wonder of noise?

B. What is the relationship between wonder and ignorance?
2. A. What is the opposite of "ontology"?
B. Would it be possible to experience an unholy symbol?
3. A. Could a person's nature be "partly" good and "partly" evil?
B. Must a person be morally good before being accepted by God?
4. A. Could there be more than one "invisible church"?
B. Can a person really hear the voice of God?
RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor
in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational2, tr. J.W. Harvey
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1977[1923]), Chs. III-VI, pp.8-40.
2. Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith , Ch.3, "Symbols of Faith" (DF 41-54).
3. John Hick, An Interpretation of Religion (Houndmills, Hampshire:
Macmillan Press, 1989), Ch.10, "Religious Meaning and Experience",
pp.153-171.
4. Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Book One
and "General Observation" to Book Four (RBBR 15-39,179-190).
5. Stephen Palmquist, "Immanuel Kant: A Christian Philosopher?", Faith
and Philosophy 6:1 (January 1989), pp.65-75.
6. Stephen Palmquist, Kant's System of Perspectives, Ch. X, "Religion and
God in Perspective" (KSP 313-323).
7. Christopher L. Firestone, "Kant and Religion: Conflict or Compromise?",
Religious Studies 35 (1999), pp.151-171.
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8. Adina Davidovich, Religion as a Province of Meaning: The Kantian

foundations of modern theology (Minneapolis, Mn.: Fortress Press, 1993).
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PALMQUIST - Tree.31. The Numinous and Its Symbols

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31. The Numinous and its Symbols

"wonderful" experiences we are discussing here in Part Four. Even though

tensions in human existence, as in the following:

The ontological study of human experiences of the transcendent (i.e., of

referred to as the "presence" of God. (Remember, Kant had distinguished

experience of a living object, and not just an abstract philosophical theory, is

dread, as when it comes in the form of "the

existential acceptance of something transcending ordinary experience.

the thing symbolized. As such, Tillich

("-A") that we can actually experience, because this A

because I regard my ring as a symbol of my commitment to love my wife as

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

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

human beings necessarily experience, or is it just an optional choice some

serving God in a church.

compatibility with rational religion. For he always justified the elements of

moral goodness if it does not conceive of itself as a "People of God" under

we must therefore presuppose that God exists as a gracious moral lawgiver,

Figure XI.5: The Twelve Steps in Kant's Religious System

QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT/DIALOGUE

1. A. Would it be possible to experience the wonder of noise?

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

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