In order to fully understand and properly analyze this philosophical treatise in the nature of faith by one of the most difficult of all writers to penetrate, one really needs to know just one fact: Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is the work which essentially brought Kant’s writings on the philosophy of religion to an end. That termination of effort was the result of a writer deciding he’d written all he had to say on a particular subject.
It is not just that Kant stopped publishing writing on the subject of religion shortly after publishing this work. Within two years, not only would Kant’s would no longer be issuing his philosophical theories and logical assertions about religion in print, he would not be found even speaking on the topic of religion in a public space. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a title that gives absolute no hint of the controversy it would produce nor of the subversive ideas the text forwards which stimulate that controversy. Such was the intensity of the controversial reaction that King Frederick William of Prussia issued an official edict banning Kant from writing about religion ever again. When he violated this ban by collecting the remaining unpublished sections together in a single volume in an attempt to circumvent the letter of the King’s law, he was then banned from even speaking about religion. All which naturally leads to one of the great questions of philosophy: the heck?
What is so controversial about this work that it engendered such extreme a reaction on the part of the Prussian monarch? Though Kant would later engage in an act of desperate disingenuous by asserting that his only intention with this text was to provide rational framework for believing in a moral universe based on faith and that it was only an issue of misinterpretation which so corrupted that intent that it could be viewed as a direct attack upon the fundamental precepts of Christianity. One of the great mysteries of philosophy is a man so clearly evident as a giant intellectual grasshoppers amid a planet of intellectual ants ever thought this plan could work. It does not take a degree in theology to realize that this is a work of philosophy with persistently undermines the dogma and doctrine of organized Christianity. In fact, it commits what might be viewed as the greatest of all heresies: it surgically removes the deity of Christ from the person of Jesus.
Some have described Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason as comprehensive re-structuring of Judeo-Christian faith. The foundational Biblical concept of “original sin” is repurposed into Kant’s alternative concept of “radical evil.” The premise, however, remains essentially unchanged: man is naturally inclined to pursuit corrupt means to attaining a goal, even if the goal itself is based on pure intentions. What Kant does is remove all the spiritual flotsam and jetsam that this psychological defect has anything to do with Adam and Eve, a serpent, and a garden. There is no “fall from grace” that exists as the primary force for man being so easily led into evil by temptation; it’s just the way we were made.
From this starting point, Kant proceeds to recreate Christianity as a religion which one can subscribe to on faith steeped in reason, not superstition. Naturally, the final destination here is one which wipes away everything that the Catholic Church had constructed its power upon: priests aren’t required any more than wafers and wine. All the solid basis of morality which Kant found acceptable in Christianity remains, but in a way that is stripped from all the corruption constructed by man to preserve power and authority. Kant had basically created a template for Christianity with no need for Christ. And that, Charlie Brown, is not what Christmas is all about, which is why spent the last years of his life never against bring up the subject in mixed company.
