365 - Kant Anniversary

Kant Anniversary
By George S. Hendry

THIS year marks the two hundredth anniversary of the appearance of a philosophical work which has probably been more assiduously studied, expounded, and discussed than any other in modern times. Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was published at Riga in July, 1781, just as the War of the American Revolution was nearing its end at Yorktown, and- the clouds of the French Revolution were gathering on the horizon-Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities opens in the year 1781. Kant thought he, too, was starting a revolution which he compared to that of Copernicus. His book proved indeed to be revolutionary, not only through its primary philosophical thesis, but also through its profound effects on theology.

The immediate impact of the Critique on theology was negative because of its destructive criticism of the traditional proofs for the existence of God. Kant argued that in view of the limitation of our cognitive faculties, which cannot produce knowledge without the input of sense experience, it is impossible for human reason to establish knowledge of God, who transcends such experience. But Kant did not intend to dispute the existence of God; his aim was, as he put it, "to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith."¹ In the Critique of Practical Reason, which followed in 1788, he argued that this "room" is to be found in the area of moral experience, where we encounter the unconditioned in the form of the categorical imperative. It is through this aspect of his thought that Kant made his major, positive impact on theology, which has looked more and more to ethics as that area of human experience in which faith in God can become a significant reality.

The Critique of Pure Reason, however, has not been without its positive impact on theology. It was slow in coming, and it came, strangely, in Catholic theology. Kant has been called "the philosopher of Protestantism," and there is no doubt that his repudiation of natural theology has a strong affinity with Luther's teaching on the inability of reason to ascend to the knowledge of God. But this is heresy in the eyes of Catholicism, and it is probably on this account that the Critique was placed on the Index in 1827. The first Vatican Council in 1870 defined

George S. Hendry is Professor of Systematic Theology, Emeritus, Princeton Theological Seminary. It was while working on Karl Rahner that the Kant anniversary came to Dr. Hendry's attention. Curiously, as he puts it, "the philosopher of Protestantism" has been adopted, and adapted, by some Catholics "who are now gathering theological figs from the thistles of the transcendental method." With this in view, Dr. Hendry wondered if the title for this piece might be "The Transcendental Method: an Ecumenical Pilgrimage." But on further reflection he concluded that if Kant's Critique were to appear with that title, nobody would read it."
¹ Critique of Pure Reason, B xxx.

366 - Kant Anniversary

it as a basic tenet of Catholicism that "God, the beginning and end of all things, can be known with certainty through the natural light of human reason from created things." This statement was chosen by Karl Barth as the target for his massive attack on natural theology in the Church Dogmatics. But things have changed since then. The Critique of Pure Reason has demonstrated its revolutionary power most dramatically-and ironically-in the fact that the transcendental method, which Kant developed and applied to our cognitive experience, and in the two following Critiques to our moral and aesthetic experience, has been taken up by a number of Catholic theologians who have extended its application to religious experience and, indeed, to the experience of human existence as a whole.

The transcendental method, which is the central theme of the first Critique, denotes an investigation of our knowledge, which is directed, not to what actually happens when objects are presented to our cognitive faculties, but to the conditions which make it possible a priori, that is, prior to experience, for our cognitive faculties to produce knowledge. A figure used by Kant himself at the very beginning may help to make the meaning plain. The impressions received from objects by our senses are, he says, "the raw material" which our understanding "works up" (or "processes," as we would now say) into knowledge.² In this process the understanding employs its own machinery, consisting of the categories, which are not derived from experience, but reside in the understanding "as their birthplace."³ It is only by means of them that the raw material, which is delivered to the senses can be processed into knowledge of objects. The kind of inquiry which is directed to these conditions of the possibility of knowledge, what they are, how they function, and how they are validated, Kant called transcendental; and transcendental he carefully distinguished from transcendent, which he applied to ideas lying beyond the range of experience and, therefore, of verification.

The best known of contemporary Catholic theologians who have adopted the transcendental method is Karl Rahner. Of course, he has also adapted it in a number of ways, but not so drastically as to render its relation to the Kantian original unrecognizable.

He agrees with Heidegger that the "categories" of Kant are appropriate only to the knowledge of objects, and that the knowledge of human existence requires a different type of concepts. Heidegger called these "existentials," and Rahner has adopted the term; but he is not an existentialist. He describes the field of his inquiry as anthropological, because he wishes to take account of the fact that human selfunderstanding is historically conditioned and varies from time to time. Nevertheless, the main endeavor of "the transcendental-anthropological

² B 1.
³ B 90.

367 - Kant Anniversary

method," as he calls it, is to bring to light those basic and constant elements which underlie the variables in the human experience of self.

Rahner's most striking divergence from Kant is that he translates natural theology from the cloudland of the transcendent, where Kant had located it, to the dimension of the transcendental, where it functions as "the condition of the possibility" of the true knowledge of God. In this way he seeks to resolve the apparent contradiction between Kant's denial of natural theology and the dogmatic affirmation of it by the first Vatican Council. Rahner argues, along with some other Catholic theologians, that the statement of the Council is not factual but transcendental. That is to say, it affirms, not the actuality, but the possibility of a natural knowledge of God ("God can be known," cognosci posse). Actual knowledge of God takes place in the revelation of the word, but this knowledge can be received by us only because we have a prior experience of God, who is present to all, whether we know it or not. When the Council speaks of God as "the beginning and end of all things," it is speaking of "the fundamental ground and absolute future of all reality,"⁴ knowledge of which is given with our experience of ourselves, and which forms the transcendental condition for the receiving of revelation. In other words, the statement of the Council is referring to what Kant would have called the schema, or shape, of the concept of God. But God is not only the beginning and the end, God is revealed as the Creator and the Redeemer, who unites the beginning and the end.

Rahner also turns the transcendental-anthropological method against Kant himself. Kant's rejection of natural theology is part of his broader thesis that any attempt to extend our knowledge by reasoning from a priori concepts of the understanding beyond the range of sense-experience must end in illusion. This applies not only to the knowledge of God, but also to the knowledge of the world, and even to the knowledge of the self. Yet, as Kant himself acknowledged, there is in us an irrepressible urge to do precisely this, an urge which is inherent in the nature of reason itself. In our efforts to understand (and the primary factor in understanding is combination) we are driven beyond all that is partial, relative, conditioned, to seek the complete, the absolute, the unconditioned. But when we permit reason to transgress the bounds of sense, we find ourselves in a quagmire of illusion. It is a strange and contradictory situation, and even more strange, perhaps, that Kant should appear to have acquiesced in it. He freely conceded that it is in the nature of reason to reach beyond the limits of the temporal and the spatial, and when he turned to the practical reason, he allowed it the right to enter the realm of theology and to require God to exist. Yet he refrained from raising the question whence this impulsion of reason might be derived. Kant has often been praised for his self-restraint, but

⁴ "Theology and Anthropology," in Theological Investigations, IX, p. 34.

368 - Kant Anniversary

his restraint in this matter, as Rahner views it, is a violation of the very nature of philosophy, which "can never exclude anything in advance as a subject which is a priori alien to it."⁵ Ralmer holds that the transcendental method, if consistently applied, will lead philosophical anthropology to its own theological a priori. How else can we account for "the absolute orientation of the finite towards the infinite"?⁶ Rahner traces it to "a transcendental determination of man, constituted by that which we call grace and self-bestowal on God's part."⁷

Rahner's "transcendental theology," as he sometimes calls it,⁸ recalls the famous words of Augustine: "Thou hast made us unto thyself [ad te], and our heart is restless, until it find rest in thee."⁹ The restless heart is an anthropological fact of experience, and Ralmer sees no reason why philosophy should not press its transcendental investigation of it to its primal source in God.

⁵ "The Current Relationship between Philosophy and Theology," in Theological Investigations, XIII, p. 63 (translation slightly altered).
⁶ "Experience of Self and Experience of God," op. cit., p. 125.
⁷ "The Current Relationship… "op. cit., p. 62.
⁸ "Possible Courses for the Theology of the Future," op. cit., p. 45.
⁹ Confessions, I, 1, 1.