PROMETHEUS AND KANT: NEUTRALIZING THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND DOXOLOGY

PROMETHEUS AND KANT:NEUTRALIZING THEOLOGICALDISCOURSE AND DOXOLOGY

ANTHONY C. SCIGLITANO

“No one was ever less like Prometheus on Caucasus than Christ on HisCross. For Prometheus thought he had to ascend into heaven to stealwhat God had already decreed to give him. But Christ, Who had inHimself all the riches of God and all the poverty of Prometheus, camedown with the fire Prometheus needed, hidden in His heart.”

Thomas Merton, from Raids on the Unspeakable1

Introduction: Prometheus and Placing Kantmoth_1534 387..414

In the modern age, the civilizing fire of Prometheus has come to signify akind of anti-theological humanist manifesto that, at least in Merton’s eyes,has also led to a virulent form of anti-humanism and barbarism. While somemodern writers agree with Merton’s view, a host of other exemplars ofmodernity, including Percy Bysshe Shelley, Goethe, and Karl Marx, find inthe ancient demi-god a proper name for their own humanistic endeavors.Whether used in praise or condemnation, however, “Prometheanism” mostoften indicates a rebellion against a personal, transcendent divinity for thegood of humankind such that humanity replaces the divine as the center ofmeaning and value.2 In this sense, at least, Prometheanism joins forces with acertain kind of nihilism, where “nihilism” signifies the erasure of a transcen-dent horizon for the good, the true, and the beautiful. Hence, my discussionof Kant as a Promethean thinker comes close to Conor Cunningham’s argu-ment that Kant is a closet nihilist.3 Indeed, a helpful and perhaps surprisingly

Andrew C. SciglitanoSeton Hall University, Religious Studies Department, 400 South Orange Ave., South Orange NJ07079 [email protected]

Modern Theology 25:3 July 2009ISSN 0266-7177 (Print)ISSN 1468-0025 (Online)

© 2009 The AuthorJournal compilation © 2009 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

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theological summary of the kind of Prometheanism this article investigates isto be found in Albert Camus.

According to Camus, modern forms of Prometheanism can only be post-Christian phenomena because through Christianity there emerges the beliefin a truly transcendent and personal God responsible for the administrationof the entire universe and everything in it.4 With the advent of Christianity,cosmic fate gives way to personal responsibility. When modern intellectualsfound the doctrines of Christ’s divinity and resurrection increasingly implau-sible, he contends,5 Jesus became a mere innocent human being consigned bythe Creator to the same destiny as the rest of us, namely, suffering and death.6

Divine compassion and love no longer radiate from Golgotha. Instead, theCreator, and in some instances the created world, were juxtaposed to theredeemer. On Camus’ view, the modern Promethean directs its rebellion atthe God of Abraham on behalf of suffering humanity.7

The question I want to explore in this article is how and to what extentImmanuel Kant is a prominent but largely unrecognized member ofPrometheus’ modern family. Kant presents an interesting case for at least tworeasons. First, he is not at all an obvious candidate for Promethean member-ship. Whereas intellectual hubris is the mark of the Promethean, Kant’s mainconcern in his most famous work is to set limits on the pretensions ofknowledge.8 Humility, not hubris, would seem to be his fundamental disposi-tion. In the absence of cognitive overreach, then, one might hope for a kind ofrhetorical bombast that would justify the Promethean label. Here too,however, Kant would be difficult to find guilty as his style, especially in hismajor works, is usually one of intellectual sobriety and modesty. The difficultyof mounting a successful prosecution makes the case interesting.A second anddirectly related reason that Kant makes for an interesting case is that preciselythrough his seeming divergence from the putative hubris of the usual suspects(i.e., Goethe, William Blake, Shelley, Nietzsche, Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx), hemay shed light on an alternative route to Prometheanism that is at once moresubtle and more relevant to us today than the approach adopted by theseothers. This alternative model would first restrict the human capacity to knowGod, whether through natural reason or through revelation, and then, on thebasis of that restriction, make human reason, will, social or cultural locationthe judge of revelation itself. Reason of some kind can then claim the right todevelop its own religion against which all historical faiths are to be judged.9 Iwant to be especially clear here. The issue is not whether Kant restricts therange of reason; Duns Scotus and William of Ockham likewise had previouslyset limits on what they believed reason could accomplish in the theologicalarena. The theological issue, rather, is whether Kant permits God the freedomof self-revelation for us. I will argue that he does not.10

The charge against Kant, then, is Prometheanism. The difficulty in pros-ecuting the case emerges from the defendant’s expressed claims not to tres-pass on doctrinal territory, but to remain within the limits of philosophical

388 Anthony C. Sciglitano


discourse, his lack of rhetorical excess, and his refusal of cognitive overreach.Indeed, from within these limits, Kant may offer important anthropologicalinsights into the meaning of fundamental Christian doctrines. Theologyshould welcome, and in fact has benefitted from, such interpretation.11

Conceding the difficulty of conviction, however, is not necessarily to indicateits impossibility. What is necessary to gain a conviction requires evidence thatthe defendant goes beyond the limits of philosophical discourse and doesindeed trespass onto theological territory. Moreover, the trespass mustsuggest a Promethean result.

My first task, then, is to gain a more precise understanding of the charge,that is, a more precise taxon of Prometheanism in its different iterations anda decision as to which iteration is relevant to Kant’s own case. I will thenexamine Kant’s claims that his philosophical revolution makes room forfaith, on the one hand, and the discursive distinctions that he believes oughtto be of comfort to theologians, on the other. I want to ask just how muchcomfort one might gain given the conditions laid out by Kant. A third sectionexamines Kant’s discussion of grace, revelation, and Christ in his Religionwithin the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793) and in his later text, The Conflict ofthe Faculties (1798).12 The focus of this discussion, and thus its limitation, willbe to test whether the discursive distinctions that Kant makes hold up underscrutiny. The key point through all of this will not be that Kant limits what wecan know about God, but more nearly what God can in fact reveal of himself.

In an important sense, this article suggests itself as a modest supplement toGordon Michalson’s Kant and the Problem of God where he argues that Kant’sphilosophical work is not, as it is often taken to be, the friend of liberaltheology.13 I am in essential accord with Michalson’s basic judgment:

Notwithstanding Kant’s own personal piety, the effect of his position isthat language about God gradually becomes either redundant or a dis-guised version of language about ourselves, in a manner foreshadowingLudwig Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity.14

Michalson thinks that the content of Kant’s writing on religion collapsesthe “wall of separation between divine transcendence and autonomous ratio-nality by systematically subordinating the former to the latter.”15 While inagreement with Michalson’s basic point, I want to add to it a critical readingof Kant’s attempt to justify his hermeneutic moves in the face of theologicalconcerns. In other words, I want to focus on how Kant undermines divinetranscendence through the rules that he elaborates for the relation betweenphilosophical and theological discourse. Without this supplement, I fear,Kant could reply to Michalson that, while what he says is accurate, Michalsonnonetheless fails to attend to Kant’s protestations that he is not addressingtheological discourse, but chooses instead to remain within the bounds ofmere reason.

Prometheus and Kant 389


A. Tracking Prometheus

The need for a more rigorous grasp of the Promethean charge requires a briefdetour through explicit ancient and modern Promethean discourses. I makeno claim to an exhaustive analysis, but instead look to draw forth from severalworks the main lines of the Promethean style, where “style” indicates not somuch a literary ornamentation, but a fundamental approach to the real.16 Whatwe are seeking are the most fundamental elements of a Promethean approachto reality, and then possible variations on this approach. Certainly two of thesefundamental elements are protest and self-assertion. Here, however, theseelements will be investigated within a larger theological setting that disclosesa movement from a theocentric to an anthropocentric worldview, one thatveers sharply away from Christian doxological discourse. Indeed, one of themost important features of the Promethean discourses I will examine is theircollective and systematic opposition to praise. In addition, I want to suggestthat two variations of Prometheanism can be discovered within the literaturein both its ancient and modern forms. The first type I will designate “aggres-sive Prometheanism.” The reason for the adjective will become clear below.Following Harold Bloom’s treatment of Shelley, who is an important figure forour case, I will designate the second type “urbane Prometheanism.”17

The Promethean protest can be specified as a protest on behalf of sufferinghumanity in the face of a personal, transcendent deity perceived as unsym-pathetic and perhaps even malevolent. In Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound,Prometheus’ anger is on behalf of humanity whom Zeus would destroy fortheir recalcitrant ignorance and barbarism.18 Reason and culture must bestolen, Prometheus judges, and brought to humanity so that human corrigi-bility can reveal the rashness of Zeus’ judgment. This can then allow for areconciliation culminating in a civilization governed by reasoned principlesrather than by force.19 Generally speaking, Aeschylus’ Prometheus is a thiefand a rebel who places himself between Zeus and humanity’s future lot ofsuffering. There is undoubtedly an anti-doxological strain in Aeschylus’poem, as Prometheus rails against those he considers Zeus’ toadies,20 but incontrast to what we will find in Marx and others, Aeschylus in no way rulesout, and even appears to predict, a future reconciliation:

Zeus I know is ruthless,/And he keeps law within his own will./Nevertheless his temper shall in time turn mild,/When my words cometrue and he is broken./Then at last he will calm his merciless anger,/Andask for a pact of friendship with me;/And I shall welcome him.21

Also notable is that while Aeschylus sees Zeus as the most powerful of thegods, he is not for the Greeks considered the Creator of the world.

Across the modern, and indeed post-Christian divide, writers who take upthe cause of Prometheus must account for a God who is revealed as creatorand a no-less-suffering humanity. Even when the Creator’s role is either



limited or denied, as in the case of Goethe’s Prometheus (1773), the necessityof the denial is apparent:

Cover your heaven, Zeus,/With cloudy vapors/And like a boy/Beheading thistles/Practice on oaks and mountain peaks-/Still you mustleave/My earth intact/And my small hovel, which you did not build,/And this my hearth/Whose glowing heat/You envy me.22

Like Aeschylus’ Prometheus before him and Shelley’s after, Goethe’s rejectsa religion of prayer and sacrifice as a naïve plea in the face of human oppres-sion, naïve because no answer is forthcoming from the divine, no help forhuman anguish, no consolation for “man’s tears.”23 Goethe’s poem buildstowards a kind of crescendo of Promethean sentiment that first demotes Zeusbeneath “omnipotent Time” and “eternal Fate,” and then, in a startling ref-erence to Genesis rather than Greek poetry, seizes the Promethean mantel ina most aggressive way: “Here I sit, forming men/In my image,/A race toresemble me:/To suffer, to weep/To enjoy, to be glad-/And never to heedyou,/Like me!”24 Goethe places impersonal fate and time above the God ofcreation, but then turns to Scripture and replaces the Creator with a differentimage-maker, the poet himself. God is both creator and not creator, butultimately of little significance as the poet usurps his creative role. Thisparticular usurpation is not, and obviously cannot be found, in the originalPrometheus cycle. It derives from the necessity of addressing the god of theBible in a post-Christian age.

In contrast to the book of Job, Goethe’s high-octane Prometheanism pro-hibits any divine response, and then gains its unchallenged rhetorical powerfrom its focus on human suffering, and thus on soteriology. The soteriologyposited imagines a race of adult, feeling humanity in contrast to unfeeling,childish, and self-centered Zeus. For Goethe, here, insofar as there is acreator, that creator has malformed humanity, which now requires a new,contrasting exemplar; namely, the poet himself as creator and creative savior.The Promethean tunnel-like focus on alienation or fragmentation andredemption is what Denis Donoghue has in mind when he faults thePromethean writers not because they think these issues important, butbecause they think they alone are important.25 Donoghue’s point can betheologically embraced by noting the Promethean reduction of all issues tosoteriology and the eventual erasure of a doctrine of creation. Of course toerase a doctrine of creation is simultaneously to remove a central rationale forpraise.

Philosophical Prometheanism is no less concerned with human sufferingand no less contemptuous of worship than its more poetic partner. In hisdissertation, Marx famously quotes Aeschylus’ character: “in a word, I detestall the Gods.”26 Less well-known, perhaps, is the full significance that Marxgives to this passage. Marx thinks that Prometheus’ declaration of war oughtto be philosophy’s



own profession, her own slogan against all the gods of heaven and earthwho do not recognize man’s self-consciousness as the highest divinity.There shall be none other beside it . . . Prometheus is the foremost saintand martyr in the philosophers’ calendar.27

Without question, this is a rather clear combination of protest and anthro-pocentrism. I should also note that because Marx is post-Christian, whichmeans that he is also post-Jewish, his brand of Promethean rebellion will bea rebellion against the God of Israel as he both mimics and utterly trans-forms the terms of the first commandment. What now becomes the markerof idolatry is the “worship” or “non-worship” of human self-consciousness,as the soteriological narrative takes shape as the overcoming of human eco-nomic and spiritual alienation through the apocalypse of revolution.28 Ifnature or history is inherently flawed, it falls to the poet and the philoso-pher to forge a new nature or a new history to redeem the world: poetand philosopher are new gods who wield the fire of revolution andredemption.

Several elements of the modern Promethean style thus stand out: a rejec-tion of the world as given or as a given and therefore to be understood as gift;a focus on human subjectivity as active, creative, transformative, and thus assoteriological; a replacement of the divine in various ways with what ishuman; a rejection of God as Creator; a heavy soteriological emphasis, wheresoteriology opposes the work of salvation to the work of the Creator; and amarginalization or exclusion of worship save for self-referential purposes.

To this point, however, I have investigated only aggressive strains ofPrometheanism, and I have already conceded that this type does not suitKant’s authorial demeanor. The question, then, becomes whether there iswithin the different forms of Prometheanism a less stridently rebelliousstrand, one that treats god not as an object of strife or hatred but more nearlyas a neutralized and impotent deity unworthy of protest (since reconciliationor salvation largely proceeds apart from his will). It is this form ofPrometheanism, I am suggesting, that can be appropriately ascribed to Kant’sreligious philosophy. The challenge, then, is to determine if such an identi-fiable type exists. Following Harold Bloom’s notion that Shelley, as opposedto Blake, is the more “urbane” romantic who “civilizes the sublime andmakes a renovated universe a subject for gentlemanly conversation,” I dubthis less aggressive and crude Prometheanism “urbane Prometheanism.”29

The urbane Promethean is no Job who faces God and cries out to him from hissuffering, but rather is a figure who finds reasons to turn away and ignoreGod as a failed, useless figure. Is there anything of this calm, urbanePrometheanism in Aeschylus?

To the extent that Marx quotes Aeschylus’ Prometheus, and Shelley, in hisPrometheus Unbound, follows the original in its disdain of supplication in theface of divine power, Aeschylus’ poem can certainly support aggressive



Promethean readings. In the original, however, Prometheus comes to a pointperhaps not so much of outright rebellion, but of indifference to Zeus. This isborn of his conviction that Zeus’ reign will be short-lived: “Bow! Pray! Asalways fawn upon the powerful hand! For great Zeus I care less than nothing.Let him do and govern as he wills, for the short time he has. He will notgovern long among the gods.”30 Prometheus’ accusatory, anti-doxologicalvoice shifts rather dramatically from outright contempt to modulated indif-ference, which gains its metaphysical basis in his view that Zeus, thoughpowerful and free,31 remains subject to fate,32 a view somewhat uncomfort-ably echoed in Goethe’s poem mentioned earlier. This note of Prometheanindifference can be traced all the way to Shelley’s far more urbane variety.Thus, while urbane Prometheanism retains all the basic elements of itsmore aggressive variety—anti-doxological, soteriocentric, anthropocen-tric—it nonetheless distinguishes itself from the former through its tone ofcalm indifference to the personal god.

The most important Prometheus poem of the modern field for purposes ofmy argument is clearly Prometheus Unbound, Shelley’s attempt to follow inbut also at the same time re-write the direction of Aeschylus’ cycle. Shelley’sPrometheus is a quieter version of Aeschylus’, one who shudders at hisformer hatreds. Confronted with the equivalent of Dickens’ Ghost of Christ-mas past, Shelley’s Prometheus sees his Aeschylan hubris as most unfortu-nate: “Were these my words, O Parent?” he asks of Earth; “They were thine,”comes the reply. “It doth repent me: words are quick and vain; Grief for awhile is blind, and so was mine. I wish no living thing to suffer pain.”33 WithPrometheus’ repentance, Shelley hints at the possibility of reconciliationbetween Jupiter and Prometheus himself. This most likely would have beenthe course of the Aeschylan drama.34 Shelley, however, makes clear in hispreface that he is not at all interested in reconciling Prometheus to Jupiter, hisunjust oppressor.35 Although Prometheus bears the disintegrative marks of apast rebellion, the rebellion itself comes to be read by Shelley, with echoes ofFeuerbach, as self-alienation. What this means is that repentance cannot berepentance for sins against a transcendent God. On the contrary, repentancefor sins make better sense more as a realization of how Prometheus’ angerhas externalized itself as a powerful, amoral or immoral force, and that thispower must lose its disintegrative energy.36 Both morality and soteriologyhere are fundamentally autonomous, and humanity’s self-consciousnessregarding this autonomy is a key soteriological element. In other words,the problem that needs resolution for Shelley is the weak, disintegrated,and antagonistic nature of the world that requires reconciliation withitself through humanity’s own self-reconciliation, liberation, and creativeempowerment.37

As for Jupiter, he will die in Act III at the hands of his gloomy son,Demogorgon. Prior to Jupiter’s death, however, Shelley will bleach the godof any attributes save for power. This bleaching operation is crucially



noteworthy. Christian and Jewish doxology is predicated upon God’sattributes of wisdom, truthfulness, mercy, righteousness, and loving-kindness as revealed through Israel’s biblical testimony and in the ongoingwitness of the faith community. Doxological discourse has its ground inGod’s action for the world in creation, covenant, and Christ. Consequently,any reduction or erasure of the divine attributes serves to undermine doxol-ogy. Clearly Aeschylus does not perform this operation, since he is neitherfollowing after Milton’s Paradise Lost nor the biblical narrative. Shelley mostassuredly is, however.38 Shelley can mimic the classic Prometheus in hisdistaste for praise, but he must now perform an operation that was nevernecessary for Aeschylus: the bleaching out of God’s generosity in creation,mercy, righteousness, and liberating power in covenant, and sacrificial lovefor creation in Christ. In contrast to a general Christian connection betweenCreator and Redeemer, in terms of agency, attributes, and intentionality, thePromethean uncoupling of Creator and Redeemer, joined to a bleaching ofdivine attributes, nicely recasts humanity in the form of a victim opposed toan arbitrary and unfeeling God. This is Prometheus’ claim in Aeschylus’poem, though, it must be said, most likely not Aeschylus’ full position, andnot even his full picture in Prometheus Bound. After all, he does havePrometheus explain to tortured Io that once she reaches Egypt, “Zeus shallrestore your mind, and come/ Upon you, not with terror, but with a gentletouch.”39 In fact, for Shelly, as in Feuerbach, evident is not only a bleaching buta leeching as well: humanity, at least in its ideal form, stands to gain whatderives from the blood of the god it has slain. Thus, Shelley self-consciouslyadds to this bleaching and leeching of God a comparable mitigation of Satan’svices. For he wants to portray in Prometheus the human ideal, the universalMan, who, on this reading, can restore human integrity through either elimi-nating or ignoring the transcendent God.

Shelley’s urbane Prometheanism continues the general focus on soteriol-ogy, and also its marginalization of God as creator, maker of covenants, orjudge. For Shelley, as for Goethe and Marx, if salvation is to occur at all, itwill proceed through a process of human integration independent of anyspecial help the divine may or may not provide and not through a recon-ciliation of the world to God, or through God’s own historical economy.Transposed back into the biblical world, it would seem that Prometheanwriters seek to neutralize the awesome transcendence of Yahweh, place hisfreedom at the mercy of fate, and retain his services only so long as hispresence negatively supports rebellion. Shelley follows suit, but does so ina calm, disinterested fashion. In a sense, the difference between Goethe’sPrometheus and Shelley’s is temporal. Goethe’s Prometheus is encounteredduring the heat of battle, when Prometheus turns toward Zeus in protestand anger; by contrast Shelley’s Prometheus appears, at least in hisconsciousness, when he has already finished with God and is now movingon.



B. Kant as Comforter

The argument that Kant shares in this general Promethean family needs to beworked up to in stages precisely because it is by no means obvious. I willbegin by examining a variety of ways in which Kant seeks to soothe andassuage theological worries and by trying to understand his stated theologi-cal concerns. In the process some evidence will begin to mount that Kant’sway of distinguishing philosophical from theological discourse severely cir-cumscribes both the theos and the logos of theology, that is, both who God canbe and what he can do, on the one hand, and what theologians can bepermitted to say about either, on the other hand.

By 1787, Kant is aware that his Critique of Pure Reason has ruffled bothphilosophical and theological feathers. He responds to the theological con-cerns through a set of discursive distinctions and through the developmentof his practical philosophy of religion which retrieves what he considers thecentral tenets of faith. The discursive distinctions match up with differentphilosophical issues. In the 1787 preface to the first Critique, Kant distin-guishes between possible theoretical knowledge, and the critical form ofdiscourse that accompanies it, and possible practical knowledge and its atten-dant discourse. He notes that he limits reason in his first critique not only tomake room for belief ( glaube), but also to protect noumenal realities fromphenomenal misconstrual, that is, to protect the notion of God from becom-ing a spatio-temporal object, and therefore an idol, the notion of freedomfrom mechanistic laws or determinism, and the concept of soul from mate-rialism.40 Kant’s prophylactic measures spring directly from his transcenden-tal epistemology. In essence, since time and space as the sensible forms ofintuition alone make possible the reception of any and all sense data, andthereby knowledge of phenomena, these same forms of intuition limitknowledge to spatio-temporal phenomena (constituted as such by the sensesin communication with the understanding and the thinking self). Thus, ifGod were to be known theoretically, rather than thought practically, theconcept “God” would necessarily be placed within spatio-temporal reality,and would therefore be nothing short of an idol. He takes a similar line onfreedom. The phenomenal realm is for Kant (and Newton) a realm of mecha-nistic causality rooted in force and not purposiveness or freedom; to placehuman freedom in that phenomenal realm is thus to deprive it of its verynature.41

In the preface to the second edition of his Religion (1794), Kant turns toanother discursive distinction to designate the proper relation between hisphilosophy of religion and historical revelation. The relation can be imaged,he says, as two concentric circles, with rational religion occupying thesmaller, inner circle restricted to reason alone, and revelatory religion occu-pying the larger, outer circle, which includes historical elements along withrational ones. As Kant writes, “The philosopher, as purely a teacher of reason



(from mere principles a priori), must keep within the inner circle and, thereby,also abstract from all experience.”42 Kant intends through his experiment,that is, through an examination of religion according to reason alone, todiscover to what extent revelation leads back to pure or moral religion.Success in this endeavor would be to show that “reason can be found to benot only compatible with Scripture but also at one with it, so that whoeverfollows the one (under the guidance of moral concepts) will not fail to comeacross the other as well.”43 Kant, then, posits a near identity between thereligion of reason and revelatory religion, although revelatory religionencompasses a number of items not found in pure moral or rational religion.

Beyond these discursive distinctions, Kant wants to reassure his Christianreaders that his system does not exclude the habitus of faith, which he definesas

the mind’s steadfast principle to assume as true what we must necessar-ily presuppose as a condition for the possibility of [achieving] the highestmoral final purpose, and despite the fact that we have no insight intowhether [achieving] this purpose is possible, or for that matter whetherthis is impossible.44

In the Critique of Judgment, where this passage comes from, matters of faithare limited to the summum bonum or highest good and its conditions, namely,the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.45 The summum bonumitself, for Kant, is the attainment of a perfectly proportionate relation betweenvirtue and happiness;46 the existence of God and the soul’s immortality arenecessary conditions for this highest good which pure practical reason com-mands us to promote, but which is never realized in this life.47 Thus God andthe immortality of the soul are necessary postulates for moral reason becausethey make thinkable the highest good in the next life, and thus keep themoral enterprise from being “spurious.”48 Apart from these postulates, themoral demands would remain, but we would be living in a morally absurduniverse (the option taken by Camus in The Myth of Sisyphus). Neither Godnor the immortality of the soul, however, are necessary to the moral law assuch; only freedom is a necessary condition of the moral law, and based uponthis relation to the moral law, freedom can be considered a fact rather than apostulate for faith.49 In the end, then, God and the soul are postulates ofpractical reason; they are unprovable, and thus for theoretical reason a matterof faith, yet reasonably thought given the call of duty to which our freedommust respond.

Before moving on to consider Kant’s explicitly religious writing, it isimportant to note one further point. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant makes aclaim that might well be not all that comforting to his theological readers. Atthis stage, not only are the summum bonum, God, and the soul’s immortalitymatters of a rational or ethical faith, but they are also “the only objectswhatsoever that can be called matters of faith.”50 A suspicious mind might



think that Kant is here reneging on his discursive distinctions, and that he isseeking to constrict the outer circle of revelatory religion until it is fullydigestible and in fact entirely subsumed by his pure religion. While this maybe the case, it is also possible that Kant is simply giving a kind of rationalpraeambula fidei to faith in the more traditional sense. This remains to be seen.Two observations are necessary at this point. First, in his speculative andethical critiques, Kant entertains no revelation from God’s side. God and theimmortality of the soul function as conceptual stopgaps thinkable only inservice of the ethical system that emerges from the experience of a moralimperative and its condition, freedom. To be fair, he does think of God andthe soul’s immortality as elements of faith, but not faith understood as aresponse to grace or to divine revelation, indeed, not as response at all. Thisbegins to suggest that the divine attributes, grasped through Israel’s faithfulresponse to God’s historical engagement with his people and the world, aresuffering a bleaching similar to that found in Shelley and Goethe. The secondpoint is directly related to the first. Faith, for Kant, is rooted in reason’sdiscourse, and, in Michalson’s terms, in reason’s self-generated needs ratherthan in a dialogue of any sort with the divine.51 On this view, faith is not aresponse to a divine word of love, but rather a response to the demands of themoral law within each individual, what Kant calls at one point, “the Godwithin us.”52 Faith is thus more akin to an internal monologue, even ifStephen Palmquist is correct to say that Kant has a doctrine of prayer.53 Anexamination of Kant’s explicit reading of Christian faith is now warranted ifonly to see whether and to what extent divine transcendence is excludedfrom or permitted entrance into Kant’s system.

C. Strategies of Neutralization: Fundamental and Systematic

The Prometheans briefly examined above neutralize divine freedom byusurping the role of the creator, bleaching the divine of attributes (other thanpower, which is transferred to Man), and finding a road to salvation thatexcludes God’s self-revelation through a historical economy. A similar movein Kant’s thought is also noted where theological discourse appears neutral-ized through generic distinctions that function to preclude divine self-revelation. My concern in this section is to discover other ways in which Kantneutralizes divine self-revelation and economic activity first in terms of fun-damental, and then in terms of systematic theological categories.

Recent theology has drawn a distinction between negative and positivemystery that is significant for my distinction between human cognitive limi-tations with respect to knowledge of God, on the one hand, and God’sself-revelation for us, on the other. Negative mystery designates the formerand positive mystery the latter.54 Positive mystery names the unveiling of thedivine plan in and through the mysterion, the One who opens up the Trini-tarian life of God for the world. From this point of view, mystery correlates to



Love. As such, it is essentially excess, superabundance, always more—thusmaking theological speech possible, in some sense necessary, but also neces-sarily inadequate. By contrast, negative mystery indicates cognitive inad-equacy, that is, the inability to know the transcendent as transcendent. Kant’sconstrual of religious discourse falls into the latter category. He knows, ofcourse, that one can hear a word from Christ, but denies that this word can beknown as divine. In a sense, Kant denies the experience of excess insofar asthat experience can point to anything other than human autonomy. Thisbecomes evident in his discussion of grace.

“Grace,” Kant writes, “can be admitted as something incomprehensible,but cannot be adopted into our maxims either for theoretical or for practicaluse.”55 Grace is in the strict sense, “useless.” Such uselessness might haveprofound significance were Kant inclined to indicate that which cannot bemanipulated or used as the most important thing of all, but this is not whathe intends. Instead, grace for Kant is both unknowable and impracticable andso can be left out of a rational construction of human anthropology. Inkeeping with his discussion of the limits of reason in his first Critique, Kantargues that

the summoning of the effects of grace belongs to the last class and cannotbe incorporated into the maxims of reason, if the latter keeps to itsboundaries; nor, in general, can anything supernatural, because all use ofreason ceases precisely with it. For it is impossible to make these effectstheoretically cognizable (that they are effects of grace and not of imma-nent nature), because our use of the concept of cause and effect cannot beextended beyond the objects of experience, and hence beyond nature.56

Theoretical reason is unable to say anything about the character of grace lestit trespass on the limits of reason established in the first Critique. Theselimitations are important for Kant’s project, to which he now adds a practicalconcern: to bring grace into rational or practical discourse, Kant thinks, is toattenuate a moral emphasis on human freedom, and, no less importantly, torender grace nothing but a part of the natural network of efficient causality.God’s action for humans would thereby be reduced to the status of aninner-worldly Newtonian force.

Kant appears to have set up a binary opposition between grace andfreedom, as if they are in competition.57 If grace is said to work, then humanfreedom must be denied. He would, however, refuse this criticism. Kantwould argue that he resists precisely this error by limiting the range ofappropriate discourse. Grace and freedom need not be opposed to oneanother, he would say, but if we allow grace into our discourse, it can onlyreflect what we can know or relate to what we ought to do. If it comes intodiscourse as what we can know, then we have made it part of the phenomenalworld of appearances and therefore of mechanistic causality; if grace bears onwhat we do, at least in any way that we can speak of it, then we cannot have



full responsibility for our actions. Thus grace must remain outside thebounds of theoretical and ethical discourse. Even if we did want to assumesome divine assistance, Kant says, it would have little impact on ethics sincewe would need to make ourselves worthy of receiving it in the first place.58

Grace, for Kant, would appear to be both unknowable and ethically super-fluous. Thus, mystery is related not to God’s self-disclosure, but rather to ourcognitive inadequacy. In Promethean terms, Kant has shut God up in his ownnoumenal kingdom, and we are now free to assume total authority in ourphenomenal one.59

A second and related theological issue is that of revelation, the locus clas-sicus of which is Scripture itself. Kant certainly thinks it appropriate that aChurch, designed to support the moral ends of the ethical commonwealth,has a public scripture as an aid in this purpose, and he also notes in Religionthat the necessary revelation concerning our moral conduct is given to us inboth Scripture and reason.60 We should also note that he does articulatesomething like a sola scriptura doctrine, at least in relation to tradition and“ecclesiastical faith,” in that Scripture has a unique authority to recommendit, whereas traditions tend to vanish with a change in political winds, andviews associated with “ecclesiastical faith” are many and thus divisive.61 Inaddition, Scripture and public worship help inculcate moral tendencies inless intellectual members of the citizenry through the edification that storiesand the engagement of the senses that ritual provides.62 Yet this support ofscriptural revelation is very much provisional and contextual. Against tradi-tion, Kant will argue for Scripture. But Scripture itself will in turn suffer asevere subordination in the face of moral or pure religion. In fact, the goal hearticulates is gradually weaning oneself away from such baby food towardsthe maturation of pure religious faith.63 Like Gotthold Lessing before him andG.W.F. Hegel after, Kant argues that Scripture brings to light truths thathuman beings would ultimately arrive at themselves because these truths areinherent to and spring from human reason itself, that is, they are autonomouscreations.64 Speaking against “the biblical theologian,” who recommendsfinding eternal life in the Scriptures, Kant claims:

Since the moral improvement of the human being is the sole conditionfor eternal life, the only way we can find eternal life in any Scripturewhatsoever is by putting it there. For the concepts and principlesrequired for eternal life cannot really be learned from anyone else: theteacher’s exposition is only the occasion for him to develop them out ofhis own reason.65

Such a passage sounds like a perfect epigraph to Kierkegaard’s effort, in hisPhilosophical Fragment, to distinguish Christ from Socrates.66 Kant depicts the“teacher” as the midwife of practical concepts and maxims rather than theOne who is both the enduring condition for the possibility of eternal life andthe One who brings that condition in a historical event. Two points of interest



emerge from this Kierkegaardian interlude. First, Kant would seem to denyany referent for revelation other than human practical reason; second, heseeks to remove from revelation its basic form, that is, the eventfulness that ispart and parcel of this form. Prohibited by Kant’s epistemic and practicalstrictures, in other words, are the very in-breaking events typical of thebiblical narrative. This prohibition then serves to reduce the authority of thebiblical narrative, and thus its disclosive capacity vis-à-vis divine identity,and make it subservient to the practical hermeneutic to which Kant willsubject it. The undermining of biblical authority becomes clear in at leastthree ways: first, in his express hermeneutical principles; second, in his dis-cussion of ecclesiastical faith and pure religious faith in both Religion and inhis later Conflict of the Faculties; and, third, in his Christological discussion. Wecan consider the first two together since Kant’s hermeneutical principle hasfor its context the difference between pure religious and ecclesiastical faith;Kant’s Christology will require a more detailed discussion because of itscentrality to his work and to my thesis.

Kant distinguishes in both Religion and in The Conflict of the Facultiesbetween ecclesiastical and pure religious faith.67 Although ecclesiastical faithbases itself on a historical event of revelation, and thus sacrifices the univer-sality that is, for Kant, the key mark of truth, it is nevertheless important inthat it gives “something that the senses can hold on to.”68 Kant thinks that thissensuous, historical element is important in “introducing” a faith, and claimsthat “some historical ecclesiastical faith or other, usually already at hand,must be used.”69 Ecclesiastical faith acts as the instrumental “vehicle” forpure religious faith.70 Kant will later suggest that Christianity is the onlyreligion that contains pure religious faith, but here the particular religiondoes not matter so long as a moral interpretation is given to whatever scrip-tural texts a religion has. Pure religious faith, by contrast, is not rooted inhistorical events and narratives, but rather in what Kant takes to be theessence of religion, that is, practical reason or morality.71 A religious faith thatis pure is a faith free of historical and empirical contaminants. The implica-tion for Scripture is that, on Kant’s view, one need not adhere to the plainsense of scripture, but should seek to interpret scripture in light of ethicallaws generated by practical reason itself, even if such readings appear to be“forced.”72

The hermeneutic priority of the self-generated moral sense finds in Kanttwo kinds of justification, both of which have been used in more recentdiscussions by Gianni Vattimo.73 First, he argues that no theological violationshould be cited since scripture contains no significant—i.e., moral—contentapart from what human reason has placed there in the first place. When Kantformally articulates the priority of the moral sense over the plain sense, hedraws upon difficult passages from the Old Testament that, perhaps, earliertheologians such as Origen would also have read in a “spiritual” way.74 ForKant, however, the more important point is the contingency and particularity



of any biblical passage in relation to the necessary and universal form ofmoral reason. This change in form not only eliminates the textual authority ofOld Testament passages, which in any event could be relativized by way of amore traditional Protestant intra-textual hermeneutic. But what is morecrucial is the way Kant’s prioritizing of the tropological sense serves toexplain away the biblical categories of grace, election, and messiah. He con-cedes that a literal reading of scripture’s meaning can, on occasion, supportpragmatic and thus doctrinal ends, but that “this kind of interpretationcannot only fail to promote but even hinder the real end of religious teach-ing—the development of morally better human beings.”75 As an example ofa mistake that needs to be corrected through moral interpretation, Kant citesPaul’s carrying “over the doctrine of election to grace from the doctrines ofthe Mosaic-messianic Scriptures to those of the Gospels. . . .”76 Kant clearlyhas in mind what he takes to be a severe doctrine of predestination and justas clearly thinks that this is Paul’s actual meaning. It follows, for him, thatchurches that have chosen against such a doctrine have done so on the basisof a moral interpretation. Whatever the historical case may be, Kant’s moralcriticism of the doctrine of election strictly cordons off any notion of divinesovereignty or, in other words, the freedom to elect whomever God will.Moreover, he does not restrict himself to criticism of extreme doctrines ofpredestination:

And so, if certain texts seem to regard faith in revealed doctrine as notonly meritorious in itself but even superior to morally good works, wemust interpret them as referring only to moral faith, which improves andelevates the soul by reason—although, admittedly, the literal meaning ofsuch texts as “he who believes and is baptized will be saved” etc. goesagainst this interpretation.77

Without going into detail, it is noteworthy how the messianic claims ofChristianity suffer a similar fate at Kant’s hands. Such claims would beparticularistic and would, if made the essence of religion, mistake the eccle-siastical “vehicle” of pure religious faith for pure religious faith itself.78

Indeed, for Kant messianism is a holdover from Jesus’ way of speaking as aJew to Jews, and needs to be critiqued through an analysis of how he spoke“as a moral teacher to human beings in general.”79 Kant even has a somewhatutopian vision for a religious peace that depends upon ecclesiastical disputesbeing resolved by pure religious faith [reinen Religionsglauben], what he callshere, in an equivalent expression, “pure moral religion.” He begins withJudaism:

The euthanasia of Judaism is pure moral religion [reine moralische Reli-gion], freed from all the ancient statutory teachings, some of which werebound to be retained in Christianity (as a messianic faith). But thisdivision of sects, too, must disappear in time, leading, at least in spirit, to



what we call the conclusion of the great drama of religious change onearth (the restoration of all things), when there will be only one shepherdand one flock.80

Judaism, here, suffers a kind of double supersessionism as first it gets sur-passed by Christianity, which then gets surpassed in turn by a pure moralreligion that cleanses it of all Jewish and all Christian accoutrements. More tothe point, pure moral religion is the humanly self-generated solution to thesoteriological problem of hedonistic impulse. In other words, Kant’s entirehermeneutic of religion is soteriological through and through, from hishermeneutics to his explicit treatment of Christology (to be discussed furtheron). This soteriological focus is interesting in part because it anticipates thePromethean strands treated earlier. It is also of interest because a soteriologi-cal focus is at such strength that it serves to erase, in a rhetorically subtle way,doxological consideration. For Kant, praise or worship can serve a purpose,albeit a purpose not moral in itself but only instrumental to self-generated,rational morality. A fully developed moral sensibility would no longer needsuch external aids, and thus, like Shelley’s Prometheus, can simply ignoretheir putative divine object.

Kant’s second justification for the priority of the moral sense over the plainsense comes in the form of an appeal to tradition. He notes that it wascommon practice in earlier eras to find a spiritual sense by which to interpretscripture, and thus his advocacy of the tropological sense falls in line withtraditional Christian practice.81 Vattimo and Lessing make similar appeals totradition, though they choose the spiritual sense of Joachim de Fiore as ajustification rather than the more traditional tropological/moral sense.82 Asnoted above, Kant’s appeal to the moral sense does not apply solely todifficult or confusing passages of Scripture, but also to central texts anddoctrines of the Christian tradition. Given this hermeneutical strategy, theplain sense becomes wholly captive to Kant’s interpretation by way of hisown moral philosophy. Such philosophical interpretation rules out historicalevents as unique events of divine revelation, eliminates a doctrine of election,and minimizes a doctrine of grace with its concomitant existential disposi-tion—humble and active gratitude that issues in works of love. Historicallyspeaking, what all three philosophers (Kant, Lessing and Vattimo) fail toacknowledge is that early Christian exegetes (a) did not view a spiritual sensereading in competition with the literal sense of the text, but rather as follow-ing it through to its Christological core, and (b) that early Christian exegetesdid not generally employ a spiritual sense reading to deny a transcendentsource for revelation, grace, election, or the Incarnation. Indeed, without atranscendent source a spiritual reading could not be justified in the firstplace.

The result of Kant’s position on revelation is that pure religious faith is tobe considered the “canon of religion”83 and ecclesiastical faith merely its



vehicle, or what Hegel terms its “positivity.”84 Kant’s position again recallsLessing’s. Kant and Lessing (and later Vattimo) profess a progressive notionof revelation as pedagogy.85 It may appear unlikely to find this developmentin Kant, but he evidently takes Lessing’s view for granted. In The Conflict ofthe Faculties, Kant writes that “A method of teaching, too, is connected withthis vehicle (that is, with what is added to the teachings of religion).”86 Thismethod should be viewed as useful for its time, but largely passé in thepresent. In other words, there is nothing significant in the form of scripture,but only in its ethical content. The form of revelation is disposable. Kantmakes particular note of Paul’s use of Jewish expressions to make Christian-ity culturally palatable to his audience, “though if we make the mistake ofincluding [these remnants of] Judaism in the tenets of faith, they can wellmake us moan: nunc istae reliquias nos exercent—Cicero.”87 Thus certain peda-gogical allowances are to be made for particular times, but when reason alonecan appreciate the importance of the underlying ethical principle, theseallowances become burdensome and unnecessary. The main point is thatKant, like Lessing, views the form of revelation as progressively witheringaway (to borrow a phrase of another famous German) as reason’s revolutiontakes hold. And Kant makes very clear from the outset of the first Critique(1787) that he promotes nothing less than an intellectual revolution.88

If we move from fundamental or formal hermeneutical issues to issues inwhat would normally be considered systematic theology, we immediatelyobserve that Kant’s Religion bounds over the doctrine of Creation and pro-ceeds immediately to theological anthropology, more specifically, to theologi-cal anthropology as a soteriological problem involving radical evil. Ifsoteriology pervades Kant’s hermeneutical interest, it also informs the verybeginning of his systematics. Of course he is not wrong to see that humanityis a problem to itself, and his diagnosis takes more seriously human iniquityand the difficulty of affirming general moral progress than Enlightenmentthought usually does. The point here is that Kant excludes a crucial elementof traditional Christian theology without which a significant rationale fordoxological discourse simply disappears, thus facilitating the emergence ofPrometheus. This exclusion should not be entirely surprising given theearlier discussion concerning Kant’s view of discourse regarding God’s workin the world. Nevertheless, given his anthropological interpretation of otherChristian doctrines, such as the Incarnation, one would expect that Kantwould give a compelling reading of the first two chapters of Genesis ratherthan beginning, as he does, with chapter three. Conor Cunningham’s treat-ment of Kant as a nihilist helps explain why this is the case. Given Kant’sview that the world is the world of appearances, that is, the phenomenalworld, and that no theoretical access to the noumenal is available, it is notclear what one can say about the Creator. At an extreme, Cunningham sug-gests that Kant can be read as a pure constructivist: human subjectivityconstitutes the objects of possible experience; less extreme is the view that



human cognition represents those objects, but that there is no way to checkthose representations against anything outside the mind’s own operations,even if noumenal reality is legitimately postulated. Either way, it is not clearwhat the Creator would be praised for.

Kant’s Christology is of special interest here since the Christian confessionof Christ as God who becomes human for us through a singular event ofkenosis or self-emptying stands at the very center of faith. John Macquarriereads Kant’s Christological thought as a form of humanism. Macquarrieargues that Kant depicts Christ as a teacher rather than a redeemer, as amodel and external example of what perfect obedience to the moral lawlooks like.89 While this reading is perfectly reasonable, and also agreeswith the Prometheanism that Camus sees in the modern period, I want toconsider how a variety of traditional Christian claims are systematicallytransformed in Kant’s Religion and the hermeneutical justifications for thesetransformations.

Kant commences his Christological discussion under the category, “ThePersonified Idea of the Good Principle” with a reading of the prologue to theGospel of John. This section is a somewhat traditional rendition of Christianteaching, to be followed by a philosophical translation in the section entitled“The Objective Reality of this Idea.” Kant renders the prologue to John’sgospel as follows:

This human being, [human being in moral perfection], alone pleasing toGod, “is in him from all eternity”; the idea of him proceeds from God’sbeing; he is not, therefore, a created thing but God’s only-begotten Son,“the Word (the Fiat!) through which all other things are, and withoutwhom nothing that is made would exist” (since for him, that is, for arational being in the world, as can be thought according to its moraldetermination, everything was made).90

Observe how the philosophical translation of the incarnation has alreadybegun within Kant’s representation of the prologue as he closes any distancebetween human nature and Christ. He completes this move when he arguesthat the only thing Christianity got wrong when interpreting this datum is itsconstrual of the incarnation as a singular event with respect to a singularperson.91 In other words, Kant has moved from the “personified” Christ tothe “objective,” depersonalized Christ in the form of the idea of the moral lawwithin. Thus, the essence of philosophical-moral thought is to universalizethe event and make of it an atemporal idea tenable for practical purposes.Jesus’ divinity, insofar as it differentiates him from humanity, runs counter topractical reason in that it opens up the idea, and perhaps the moral excuse,that Christ is inimitable.92 Make Christ unique and discipleship becomesimpossible, Kant reasons. For Kant, Christ is an example of the moral arche-type that is always already discoverable within human nature:



If there never had been one human being capable of unconditional obe-dience to the law, the objective necessity that there be such a humanbeing would yet be undiminished and self-evident. There is no need,therefore, of any example from experience to make the idea of a humanbeing morally pleasing to God a model to us; the idea is present as modelalready in our reason.93

In other words, Kant closes the gap between Christ and the rest of human-ity by removing the historical and personal eventfulness of the Incarnation.Under a Kantian interpretive regime, Christ neither brings nor reveals any-thing that is not already in human reason. This follows from Kant’s earlierclaims related to doctrines of grace and revelation, and from his epistemol-ogy more generally. Yet there is also an equivocation in Kant’s interpretationthat makes it less of the straightforward humanism that Macquarrie, forexample, imagines. Kant’s monophysitism can be read in either direction. Ifthe moral law is what is divine, and this law finds its perfect example inChrist, but also resides in all of us, then it becomes possible to read Kanteither as reducing the divine to the human or elevating the human to thedivine. Whichever interpretation one chooses, however, it is not possible toposit either movement as a work of grace, or as opening the human being toa truly transcendent reality. Any transcendence is purely to the supersensible,i.e., human freedom and the moral law within, and not, for Kant, to thesupernatural. Christianity is a natural religion, although its means of deliverymay be considered “divine.”94 Of course if Christ is not the bringer of a newrelation to God, literally the One without whom reconciliation is impossible,the Church’s rationale for praise either vanishes or becomes a kind of moralmnemonic device. The documents of revelation are not really about God’saction for us in creation or salvation, but rather about human nature andmorality discoverable, eventually, by reason alone.

Kant’s soteriology intensifies the suspicion that all divine action forhumanity, and thus any rationale for praise, has been excluded from hissystem. His practical reading of sacrifice is ingenious to say the least. Reject-ing the traditional commercium or substitution doctrine whereby Christ ismade sin for us,95 and thus reconciles humanity to God, Kant turns to apurely anthropological reading of sacrifice. Practical reason reads sacrifice asthe replacement of an evil set of moral maxims by a good set that respects themoral law.96 The sacrifice is the exchange of a life lived on the basis ofhedonistic maxims for one lived on the basis of the moral law and its maximswith all the attendant difficulties that such a life involves. Kant’s translationof biblical language is nothing less that a tour de force of anthropological“misreading” in Harold Bloom’s sense97:

The emergence from the corrupted disposition into the good is in itselfalready sacrifice (as “the death of the old man,” “the crucifying of theflesh”) and entrance into a long train of life’s ills which the new human



being undertakes in the disposition of the Son of God, that is, simply forthe sake of the good, yet are still fitting punishment for someoneelse, namely the old human being (who, morally, is another humanbeing) . . . this disposition which he has incorporated in all its purity, likeunto the purity of the Son of God—or (if we personify this idea) this verySon of God—bears as vicarious substitute the debt of sin for him, andalso for all who believe (practically) in him: as savior, he satisfies thehighest justice through suffering and death, and, as advocate, he makesit possible for them to hope that they will appeal justified before theirjudge.98

By placing himself in the universe of Anselm’s satisfaction theory, however,Kant stumbles into a conundrum. For Anselm, the divinity of Christ bringswith it the infinite mercy of God so that sin can be forgiven. Kant, however,has ruled out Christ’s ability to bring this mercy and so faces the problem ofwhat to do about past sins beyond the reach of present conversion. In otherwords, why reform if damnation for past sins awaits one around the corner?Kant argues that one can reasonably count on mercy, for practical reason tellsus that God should recognize the frailty of his creatures and their difficulty inliving the moral law despite their most profound attempts. The Holy Spiritcan then be interpreted as the comforter; not the divine comforter of course,but the comfort provided by consciousness of a new moral disposition thatthe divine judge must reckon to our advantage in the end.99

And so that good and pure disposition of which we are conscious (and ofwhich we may speak as a good spirit presiding over us) creates in us,though only indirectly, a confidence in its own permanence and stability,and is our Comforter (Paraclete) whenever our lapses make us apprehen-sive of its constancy.100

For Kant, then, salvation itself must be our own doing, and so one morecondition for doxological discourse slips away; indeed, it is the moral indi-vidual we ought to praise for he has generated the moral law, perhaps failedto live it, but then sacrificed so that, to his own glory, he has also broughtsalvation.

Conclusion

The doxological turn in theology, initiated by Barth and Balthasar, and con-tinued by Radical Orthodoxy, has been an anti-Promethean movement fromthe beginning. The Prometheanism I have examined in this article protests onbehalf of human suffering and asserts its own rights in the face of God. Theserather obvious signs of Prometheanism, however, can serve to hide its essen-tial attack on theological discourse understood as fundamentally doxological.This attack is not limited to Scripture passages of disdain for those whowould worship a transcendent God, but rather takes a more subtle form as itre-writes the biblical narrative.



I have argued that Promethean re-writing is a kind of bleaching operationthat erases divine attributes such that the term “god” comes to signify arbi-trary power, and then even that power is dissolved. One means of bleachingis to eliminate from the biblical narrative the God who generously creates andorders the world, grants the dignity of his image, and reveals his ownidentity in and through covenant relation. What remains of the biblical nar-rative is the pain, suffering, and dis-integration of human existence. Putotherwise, the biblical story is severed from its Old Covenant roots, replacedby a post-Christian revision of the Prometheus story, and reduced to a sote-riological problem that calls out for a solution. Yet even soteriology, in Shelleyand Marx, can no longer include a reconciliation between God and humanity,for the primary sin of humanity would seem for both—Marx in his aggres-sive style and Shelley in his urbane and knowing indifference—to be not sinagainst God and one another, but rather sinful alienation and enervation ofhumanity through worship of God.

This specification of the Promethean label as fundamentally soteriologicaland yet anti-doxological, along with a distinction between aggressive andurbane types of Prometheanism, opens the possibility for reading Kant as aPromethean thinker. His type would, in general, be of the urbane variety, ashis philosophy mostly refuses the cognitive and rhetorical bombast of itsaggressive cousin, but does systematically enforce an anti-doxological, sote-riocentric regime through his philosophical, fundamental, and systematictheological arguments. Discursive distinctions between philosophical andtheological discourse that Kant makes, ostensibly to avoid doctrinal trespass,on further examination severely censure what the theologian can say aboutGod’s action in creation and history, and thus begin a process by whichChristian doxology becomes undermined.

If Kant severely limits what religious discourse can say of God, it makessense to suspect that he will also censure or constrict various elements offundamental and systematic theology. It is nothing new to view Kant’s Reli-gion as an exercise in the moral interpretation of Christian doctrine. What Iam stressing here are the semantic strictures within which he places grace,revelation, and its content such that these theologoumena no longer justifypraise of a transcendent God. The Promethean bleaching takes place throughhis critical philosophy and his discursive distinctions. Together, these strat-egies of neutralization prohibit speaking of God in terms of the biblical form,and thus effectively remove the eventfulness of revelation. Kant’s discourse,like Goethe’s, Marx’s, and Shelley’s, eliminates the possibility for genuinecovenant dialogue, and banishes grace and revelation, at least insofar aseither could offer anything human beings could not secure for themselves.More specific aspects of these broader issues, such as a doctrine of electionand the messiah suffer a similar hermeneutical exile. Like Shelley’s Jupiter,these ideas have outstayed their use, and can now either be given a strictlymoral interpretation or be put down.



Within the more systematic field, we saw that Kant, like his Prometheansuccessors, gives little space to any doctrine of creation. Indeed, this particu-lar bleaching must be viewed as a crucial mark of Promethean discourse as itundermines the traditional Christian gratitude for God’s work in granting,ordering and sustaining the world. Kant’s Christological reflections end upbleaching the figure of Christ of his singularity as the Incarnate One orindeed of his particularity as a Jewish teacher. Christ re-figured by Kant nolonger brings himself and his body, but rather stands for the moral lawalready within all of us. This bleaching is once again accompanied by aleaching: if Christ is divine, human beings are divine as well, insofar as theyeach possess the moral law. To the extent that morality and a moral interpre-tation of Scripture are front and center in Kant’s entire religious oeuvre, weare justified in concluding that soteriology stands as the central theme of hisreligious writings. The problem, however, is that he has already ruled out adiscourse on grace or historical events of salvation that God would enact forthe world. At the end of day, neither Kant nor Shelley would recognizeHeidegger’s claim that only the god—whichever god—can save us; for bothof them that is no longer a possibility; we must save ourselves. Whatever wemay say about Kant’s own religious practice and notwithstanding the peda-gogical value of prayer and worship on his view, the argument here showshow Kant has effectively undermined all the traditional and biblical reasonsfor such practices. Christian gratitude for Creation and Covenant, Salvationand Consummation devolve onto humanity itself, where glory exclusivelynow takes up residence. Kant, of course, does not bring all of Prometheus,and he should not be blamed for all the ills that more fire-breathing thanfire-bearing intellectuals inspire. Nevertheless, with the changes he ringsupon the Christian narrative, he assumes his role in the drama as Heracleswho would liberate Prometheus from his rock, thereby allowing him, at leastin modern forms, to discard the god, and with the god, the crucial words ofJohn the Baptist: “The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me;I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I havebaptized you with water; but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit” (Mark.1:7–8).

NOTES

1 Thomas Merton, Raids on the Unspeakable (New York: New Directions Publishing Corpo-ration, 1966), p. 87.

2 In this sense, Prometheanism is akin to nihilism. In Martin Heidegger’s interpretation ofNietzsche, “nihilism” indicates not a particular viewpoint, but rather is an “event of longduration in which the truth of being as a whole is essentially transformed and driventoward an end that such truth has determined” (Nietzsche, vol. IV: Nihilism, translatedby Joan Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, Frank A. Capuzzi [San Francisco: HarperSan-Francisco, 1982], pp. 4–5). Heidegger reads Nietzsche to proclaim a new age in which thedeath of God heralds the end of the transcendent as a place from which values andmeaning emerge: “Nihilism is that historical process whereby the dominance of the “tran-



scendent” becomes null and void, so that all being loses its worth and meaning. Nihilismis the history of the being itself, through which the death of the Christian God comes slowlybut inexorably to light” (Ibid., p. 4). Meaning and value are thus completely generated fromwithin the immanent sphere of this world; transcendence is denied. I have chosen toemphasize Prometheanism here because Kant wants to maintain some form of deity and hewants to hold out for the absolute value of the human person’s dignity, even if neither ofthese are truly transcendent realities.

3 Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference ofTheology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). See chapter four on Kant. Cunning-ham’s treatment appears to vindicate Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s contention that Idealism,especially Kant’s critical idealism, leads to nihilism. See p. 94.

4 Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York:Vintage Books, 1991), pp. 31–32: “Only a personal god can be asked by the rebel for apersonal accounting.”

5 Ibid., p. 34.6 Ibid.7 Ibid., p. 34: “Jesus profaned is no more than just one more innocent man whom the

representatives of the God of Abraham tortured in a spectacular manner.” A theologicaltreatment of this issue is important, for it permits the uncoupling of Prometheanism froma pro-science viewpoint. Pierre Hadot, in his The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of theIdea of Nature, uncovers what he sees as two approaches to nature in the Western tradition:Promethean and Orphic. The Promethean tradition, that of Francis Bacon, strives touncover nature’s secrets to improve the lot of humanity; the Orphic tradition is the morecontemplative stream that would let nature reveal itself. Both streams, he thinks, areimportant. Hadot invokes Goethe as an example of the contemplative stream againstBacon. Here, however, we can see that the Prometheus label does not serve as well as hewould like. After all, Goethe, as I will argue, is the writer of an aggressively Prometheanpoem that virulently opposes the suffering creature to an unfeeling god. My point is thatinsofar as a discussion of Prometheanism limits its purview to the natural world, it willmiss significant aspects of the story. In addition, if Goethe can be seen as both a contem-plative and a Promethean, there is reason to believe that “pro-Promethean” can beuncoupled from “pro-science,” and also that anti-Promethean can be uncoupled fromanti-science. See Pierre Hadot, The Veil of Isis: An Essay on the History of the Idea of Nature,trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). See especially, pp.138–155.

8 This observation is not meant to dispute Gordon Michalson’s more sophisticated view ofthe first Critique in light of Kant’s entire oeuvre. Michalson notes that the image of Kant asholding to reason as a kind of metaphysical policeman, with its main purpose beingrestraint of noetic overreach, misses the point that “reason,” for Kant, is a unified reality,frequently personified, that is full of needs that go beyond critical purposes to generate asystem both in the areas of moral reason and religion. The antinomies of the Transcenden-tal Dialectic open the space for a resolution in the form of moral or practical reason, whichfor Kant takes priority, rather than theoretical reason. See Gordon E. Michalson, Kant andthe Problem of God (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999). See especially pp. 83–93.

9 Candidates for this kind of Promethean maneuver would be Jacques Derrida, GianniVattimo, and John Hick, all of whom are influenced by Kantian versions of reason in theirphilosophies of religion. See Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” trans. by SamuelWeber, in Acts of Religion (New York and London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 40–101. For his callfor a Kantian retrieval, see especially, pp. 47 ff. and 50–51. For Vattimo, see his Belief, trans.by David Webb, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999) and After Christianity,trans. By Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). See also John Hick,An Interpretation of Religion: Human Responses to the Transcendent (New Haven, CT: YaleUniversity Press, 1989). See especially chapter 14, “The Pluralistic Hypothesis,” pp. 241–252.

10 I think this is the case both in terms of a mediated contemplation of divine glory in creationand in terms of his explicit religious ideas, which I will address here.

11 I am, however, not alone in seeing Kant as a Promethean thinker who influences post-modern thought in this direction. John Betz has recently observed the “Promethean tone of



his [Kant’s] entire oeuvre and his radical, subterranean proximity to Nietzsche . . .” in anarticle that focuses on the pipeline flowing from Kant’s aesthetic theory directly to post-modernity’s rejection of the analogia entis and its ongoing attempts to deconstruct Chris-tianity itself. See John Betz, “Beyond the Sublime: The Aesthetics of the Analogy of Being(Part One),” Modern Theology 21/3 (July 2005), p. 378.

12 Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (1793), trans. George diGiovanni (cited as Religion from here forward) and The Conflict of the Faculties (1798), trans.Mary J. Gregor and Robert Anchor (cited as Conflict from here forward), in Immanuel Kant:Religion and Rational Theology, trans. Allen Wood and George Di Giovanni (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996).

13 Gordon E. Michalson, Jr., Kant and the Problem of God, p. 2.14 Ibid.15 Ibid.16 See Denis Donoghue, Thieves of Fire: The T. S. Eliot Memorial Lectures (London: Faber and

Faber, 1973), p. 34. See also Hans Urs von Balthasar, Glory of the Lord, volumes 2 and 3entitled “Clerical Styles” and “Lay Styles” respectively to indicate a variety of approachesto the mystery of God’s self-revelation in Christ.

17 Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry (Ithaca andLondon: Cornell University Press, 1971), p. 283; cf. pp. 282–284.

18 The background story is nicely recounted by Philip Velacott. See his introduction toAeschylus, Prometheus Bound and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (New York andLondon: Penguin Books, 1961), pp. 8–9.

19 Ibid.20 Two examples from the mouth of Prometheus: “Bow! Pray! As always fawn upon the

powerful hand! For great Zeus I care less than nothing” (Prometheus Bound, p. 48); “Under-stand this: I would not change my painful plight, On any terms, for your servile humility”(Prometheus Bound, p. 49). Marx quotes the latter passage: “But to the pitiful cowards whorejoice over the apparently worsening social position of philosophy, she repeats whatPrometheus said to the servant of the gods, Hermes: Understand this well, I would notchange my evil plight for your servility” (Karl Marx, Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan[Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977], p. 13).

21 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, p. 26.22 The poem is printed in The Spinoza Conversations Between Lessing and Jacobi: Text with

Excerpt from the Ensuing Controversy trans. Gerard Vallee, J. B. Lawson, and C. G. Chapple(Lanham: University Press of America, 1988), pp. 7–9.

23 Ibid., p. 8.24 Ibid., p. 9.25 Donoghue, Thieves of Fire, p. 29. Donoghue writes that “Perhaps the most extreme heresy

among Promethean writers is their assumption that the Promethean intervention is thewhole story of human life, that nothing else matters” (p. 29). In the categories I amdeveloping, this would indicate that soteriology, in contrast to creation and covenant, is allthat matters. Donoghue juxtaposes Plato’s Protagoras to the modern take on Prometheus asa “salutary rebuke” (Ibid.).

26 Karl Marx, Selected Writings, pp. 12–13.27 Ibid., p.13.28 M. H. Abrams and Denis Donoghue have observed this same turning of the supernatural

into the natural as a key component of the romantic literary imagination. Donoghuecaptures some of the dynamics of this transformation in his Thieves of Fire: “In a secular age,theories of inspiration become theories of imagination, because the source is deemed to beman himself. Imagination is the secular equivalent of God as Creator, including especiallyGod as self-creator, in Coleridge’s phrase, “the infinite ‘I Am.’” Donoghue, Thieves of Fire,p. 50. This is also the basic thesis of M. H. Abrams’ Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition andRevolution in Romantic Literature (New York and London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1971), butsee especially pp. 65–70.

29 Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 283.30 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound and Other Plays, trans. Philip Vellacott (New York and

London: Penguin Books, 1961), p. 48, lines 937–940.31 Ibid., p. 22, lines 49–50.



32 Ibid., p. 35, line 518.33 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Prometheus Unbound,” in Shelley’s Poetry and Prose (New York and

London: W. W. Norton and Company, 2002), p. 218, lines 303–305.34 See in Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound and Other Plays (New York: Penguin, 1961), Philip

Velacott’s introduction, pp. 7–13.35 Shelley self-consciously refuses simply to fill in the lost elements of the ancient drama:

“Had I framed my story on this model I should have done no more than have attemptedto restore the lost drama of Aeschylus; an ambition, which, if my preference to this modeof treating the subject had incited me to cherish, the recollection of the high comparisonsuch an attempt would challenge, might well abate. But in truth, I was averse from acatastrophe so feeble as that of reconciling the Champion with the Oppressor of mankind”(Shelley, Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, p. 206).

36 See Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company, p. 307 to this effect: “Jupiter is only the bound-ary or outward circumference of the Titan’s energies and desires. Prometheus is naileddown, not by an external principle of evil, but by his own separated faculties, gone wrongin their isolation from each other.” Further on, Bloom writes, “Urizen [Blake’s character ina poem of the same name] and Jupiter then vanish because they have no existence onceMan has reintegrated himself” (Ibid.).

37 Key to this reintegration is Prometheus’ renunciation of hatred and revenge. See Ibid., p.308.

38 See Abrams on the importance of the biblical pattern of redemption and Milton’s ParadiseLost for the Romantic poets in his Natural Supernaturalism, pp. 17–71. Abrams puts it thisway: “For a number of these writers also put themselves forward as members of the smallcompany of poet-prophets and bards; they measured their enterprise against the earlierrevelation of past, present, and future things, either as presented in the Bible itself or asrepresented by Milton or other Biblical poets; and they understood, either in epic or someother major genre—in drama, in prose romance, or in the visionary “greater Ode”—radically to recast, into terms appropriate to the historical and intellectual circumstances oftheir own age, the Christian pattern of the fall, the redemption, and the emergence of a newearth which will constitute a restored paradise” (p. 29). It is of interest here that Abramsbegins not with creation/paradise, but with fall.

39 Aeschylus, Prometheus Bound, p. 45.40 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 117. “Thus, he writes, “I cannot even assumeGod, freedom and immortality for the sake of the necessary practical use of my reasonunless I simultaneously deprive speculative reason of its pretension to extravagant insights;because in order to attain to such insights, speculative reason would have to help itself toprinciples that in fact reach only to objects of possible experience, and which, if they wereto be applied to what cannot be an object of experience, then they would always actuallytransform it into an appearance, and thus declare all practical extension of pure reason tobe impossible. Thus I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith . . .”

41 In this sense, The Critique of Pure Reason is positive in that it restrains speculative reasonfrom overstepping its bounds and infringing on the territory of practical reason, therebyallowing practical reason its rightful place. Practical reason, for its part, does not threatento turn a noumenal reality such as freedom into a sensible reality or into a thing asspeculative reason does. Kant’s contrast between “cognizing” (proving that somethingexists) and “thinking” an object (where proof of existence is not necessary, only that thepossibility of the object is not conceptually contradictory and has some practical signifi-cance) is relevant here. See ibid. pp. 115–116.

42 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, p. 64. This passage is from thepreface to the second edition and was written in 1794.

43 Ibid.44 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1957) §91, p. 145.45 Ibid., p. 143.46 For Kant the summum bonum is a synthetic a priori concept that comes up against the

antinomy of joining virtue to happiness, and finds that the only way to combine twoconcepts with opposed principles is to subordinate one to the other; thus virtue is the



supreme good, while happiness is subordinate to virtue and is related to our existence asfinite creatures. See Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, trans. H. W. Cassirer (Milwaukee, WI:Marquette University Press, 1998), pp. 138–150, esp. p. 149.

47 Ibid., p. 153: “Now what is signified by complete conformity of the will to the moral law iscalled holiness, this being a state of perfection which cannot be attained by a rational beingbelonging to the world of sense at any moment of its existence.” For similar reflections onGod as a condition of the fulfillment of the summum bonum see pp. 156–166.

48 Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 147.49 Indeed, freedom for Kant is the only “supersensible” object that gains objective reality;

freedom is noumenal and is nevertheless known, but known in practical terms, not specu-lative; as a speculative possibility, freedom presents itself as a problem for it does seem tohave an effect on the world of appearances, but yet is beyond that world. See Critique ofPractical Reason, p. 4. Kant defines freedom as “independence from the inclinations” andthe power to obey the moral law (Ibid., pp. 147–148).

50 Kant, Critique of Judgment, §91, pp. 142–143.51 See Gordon E. Michalson, Jr., Kant and the Problem of God, pp. 83–93.52 See Kant, The Conflict of the Faculties, pp. 271–272: “Only a moral interpretation, moreover,

is really an authentic one—that is, one given by the God within us; for since we cannotunderstand anyone unless he speaks through our own understanding and reason, it is onlyby concepts of our reason, insofar as they are pure moral concepts and hence infallible, thatwe can recognize the divinity of a teaching promulgated to us.”

53 See Stephen Palmquist, “Kant’s Critical Hermeneutic of Prayer,” The Journal of Religion77/4 (October 1997), pp. 584–604. I would agree with Palmquist that Kant’s “‘CopernicanRevolution’ in philosophy applies just as much to his theory of religion as it does to hisepistemology” (p. 584).

54 For this distinction, see Kevin Mongrain, The Systematic Thought of Hans Urs von Balthasar:An Irenaen Retrieval (New York: Herder and Herder, 2002), pp. 1–10.

55 Kant, Religion, p. 49.56 Ibid., p. 96.57 Kathryn Tanner has argued that modern religious thought tends to oppose divine freedom

to human freedom as if the two were competitors on the same plane of reality. See her Godand Creation in Christian Theology: Tyranny or Empowerment? (Minneapolis, MN: FortressPress, 1988).

58 Kant, Religion, pp. 89–90.59 Of course for Kant we do have genuine knowledge of one noumenal reality, namely, our

own freedom. Oddly, this noumenal reality can act on the world of phenomena withoutbeing reduced to it. In this sense, Kant’s notion of freedom seems to be a kind of miracle-worker in Hume’s notion of miracle. Freedom can intervene in the world of mechanisticcausality from outside, as it were.

60 Kant, Religion, p. 169.61 Ibid., pp. 140–141. Note his reference to religious wars here.62 According to Kant, in The Conflict of the Faculties, the preaching of Scripture ought to be

for the edification of the congregation, and not an occasion for showing what the“authors themselves might have meant by it” (p. 288). “The testimony of Scripture con-nected with these teachings should also not be treated as historical arguments confirm-ing their truth . . . but merely as examples in which the truth of reason’s practicalprinciples is made more perceptible through their application to facts of sacred history.But this, too, is a very valuable gain for peoples and states throughout the world”(p. 288).

63 Conflict, p. 267: “But since ecclesiastical faith, as the mere vehicle of religious faith, ismutable and must remain open to gradual purification until it coincides with religiousfaith, it cannot be made an article of faith itself.” See also Religion, p. 146.

64 “. . . we must regard the credentials of the Bible as drawn from the pure spring of universalrational religion dwelling in every ordinary human being; and it is this very simplicity thataccounts for the Bible’s extremely widespread and powerful influence on the hearts of thepeople” (Ibid., p. 284).

65 Ibid., p. 263. This would seem to be a necessary conclusion based on Kant’s Copernicanrevolution in The Critique of Pure Reason, where he says, “we can cognize of things a priori



only what we ourselves have put into them” (p. 111). See also Conflict, p. 288: “In explainingthe Bible to the people the preacher must be guided, not by what scholarship draws out ofScripture by philological studies, which are often no more than misleading guesses, but bywhat moral cast of mind (according to the spirit of God) puts into it, and by teachings thatcan never mislead and can never fail to produce beneficial results.”

66 See Soren/́ Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments by Johannes Climacus, ed. Howard V. Hongand Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), especially Section II:“The God as Teacher and Savior: A Poetical Adventure,” pp. 23–36.

67 Conflict, pp. 262 and 273.68 Religion, p. 142.69 Ibid.70 Conflict, pp. 263 and 267.71 Religion, pp. 142–143.72 Ibid., p. 142.73 See Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, trans. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia Univer-

sity Press, 2002), pp. 45 and 47.74 See Religion, pp. 142–143. In the note, he refers to Psalm 59: 11–16 and contends that the

Bible must be interpreted in accordance with morality rather than the other way around.75 Conflict, p. 286.76 Ibid. Cf., Ibid., p. 266.77 Ibid., p. 267. It is perhaps of interest that Kant thinks respect for the elements of ecclesias-

tical faith is of political, though not, strictly speaking, religious import: “This does notmean that it may be attacked publicly in the churches or even passed over dry-shod; for itcomes under the protection of the government, which watches over public unity and peace.However, the teacher should warn [the people] not to ascribe holiness to dogma itself butto pass over, without delay, to the religious faith it has introduced.”

78 Ibid., p. 272; Cf. 282 and 285.79 Ibid., p. 276.80 Ibid., p. 276. “Pure moral religion,” “pure religious faith,” and “practical rational faith”

[praktischer Vernunftglaube] (See Conflict, p. 274 for the last as a parenthetical interpretationof “pure religious faith”) are equivalent terms in Kant’s work.

81 Ibid., p. 266. He does not, however, limit his claim to Christianity alone. See Religion, p. 143for the extension of the principle to the scriptures of late Judaism, to Islam, and toHinduism.

82 See Gianni Vattimo, After Christianity, pp. 25–41 and Gotthold E. Lessing, “The Educationof the Human Race,” trans. Henry Chadwick, in Lessing’s Theological Writings (Stanford,CA: Stanford University Press, 1956), pp. 82–98, esp. pp. 91–98.

83 Kant, Conflict, p. 262.84 On positivity, see G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. Peter C.

Hodgson, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 393–404 and on theclosely related category of representation, see, Ibid., pp. 144–152 and for representation inrelation to thought, see, pp. 152–189. For Hegel, positivity designates not merely the storiesor pictures of revelation, but also more nearly conceptual doctrines such as the divineattributes, the Trinity and the Incarnation. All doctrines must give up their finite, positive,irrational form to be universalized in conceptual form so that they can testify to the spirit.Philosophy is this testimony.

85 This does not mean that they share a notion of inevitable cultural progress a la the Marquisde Condorcet.

86 Kant, Conflict, p. 263.87 Ibid., p. 263. (“now these remains weary us”). Kant considers Judaism a purely statutory

faith and in his Religion he contends that Judaism is not a religion at all, but rather atheocracy.

88 Kant refers to his work as a revolution at least four times in the preface to the secondedition of the Critique of Pure Reason. For a suggestive discussion of the movement fromKant’s Copernican revolution to even more bombastic notions of revolution in Fichte andSchelling, and then in the English Romantics, see M. H. Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze:Essays on English Romanticism (London and New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1984).See especially, pp. 199–200.



89 See John, Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (Philadelphia, PA: Trinity PressInternational, 1990), pp. 175–191.

90 Kant, Religion, pp. 103–104.91 Ibid., p. 106.92 Ibid.93 Ibid., p. 105.94 Kant, Conflict, pp. 269 and 276.95 Kant, Religion, p. 113.96 Ibid., pp. 113–114.97 See Harold Bloom, Map of Misreading (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).98 Kant, Religion, pp. 114–115.99 Ibid., p. 111.

100 Ibid., p. 65.



PROMETHEUS AND KANT: NEUTRALIZING THEOLOGICAL DISCOURSE AND DOXOLOGY

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