‘Tis the season to shun folly

The Christmas season brings kindly smiles on our faces, which it should, and bien pensant notions into our heads, which it shouldn’t.

One such notion is that all religions have so much in common that their differences pale into insignificance. If God is one, why should there be different faiths?

In modern times, this folly goes back to Kant’s ‘universal religion’ based on an innate and universal moral sense towering above the little fideistic constructs people slap together for their own pleasure.

Kant’s ‘universal religion’ goes beyond ‘universal church’. That’s merely Christian ecumenism, the belief that all Christian confessions should come together into a single worldwide ecclesia.

That ecumenism is hopelessly naïve takes nothing away from the underlying noble impulse. Most noble impulses are naïve and impractical, but where would we be without them?

On the other hand, belief in Kant’s “moral law within me” as an umbrella under which all the little differences among religions could be settled to everybody’s smiley satisfaction strikes me as simply wrong.

In general, one observes that those who insist on basic similarity among all religions, and reduce them all to morality, tend not to take any of them seriously. Kant himself was a prime example of that.

For one thing, his universal religion implicitly had no place for Judaism, which Kant described as a “useless old cult displacing true religion”. Since Judaism (or any other creed) couldn’t by definition displace the overarching universal religion, one has to infer that by “true religion” he meant Christianity.

It follows that, to Kant, other religions were untrue, which is to say false. Hence one detects an element of self-refutation in his whole concept of a universal religion.

No such overarching entity could possibly bring together under its aegis both truth and falsehood. Otherwise we’d have to accept that truth simply doesn’t matter, which is indeed the founding presupposition of modernity, but one that has little to do with any religion.

There’s no denying the significance of Kant’s contribution to philosophy, particularly its epistemological branch, but he wasn’t much of a metaphysical thinker. Nor could he use his philosophy to grasp the true nature of modernity, as it was unfolding before his eyes. His ‘practical philosophy’ was at times very impractical indeed.

How Kant really felt about Christianity becomes clear from his comments on the Enlightenment, which he described as “man’s release from self-incurred tutelage”. This is as clear a statement of atheism as one can find this side of Lenin’s League of the Militant Godless.

Such a view of religion also reminds us of the formative influence exerted on Kant by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (“Man was born free but is everywhere in chains”). Rousseau also believed in the innate goodness of the noble sauvage, of which Christendom later deprived him.

Kant correctly identified the predominantly anti-Christian animus of the Enlightenment. The problem was that he welcomed it as deliverance from the self-imposed shackles of faith.

In the same spirit Kant extolled the cutting edge of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution: “…this revolution finds in the heart of all observers the kind of sympathy that borders on enthusiasm.” (Obviously Burke’s Reflections wasn’t on Kant’s reading list, for otherwise he would have known that not “all observers” felt that way.)

The notion of an innate moral sense independent of any beliefs strikes me as false. According to Kant, we are born with our morality the way we are born with our bladders.

This view is hard to accept on many levels, no matter how much one may respect those who also held it, such as Aristotle and Kant’s contemporary Adam Smith.

Here is one objection: it doesn’t explain the cultural, historical and individual differences in concepts of morality. Our bladders have been always and everywhere the same, but what’s moral to one group of people at one time may be wicked to another group at another time.

For example, Plato and Aristotle, both moral philosophers of some note, extolled the virtue of slavery, an institution their contemporaries considered essential but most of us today find abhorrent. (Even if we make allowances for Hellenic slavery being distinctly different from the modern versions.)

One can come up with endless other examples. Unlike Biblical kings or Muslims, we think polygamy wrong. Unlike most of today’s people, most Victorians thought abortion wrong. In the West, the death penalty was considered moral until the mid-twentieth century, at which point it got to be deemed unacceptable in most places.

In other words, if man has an innate moral law within him, this law is oddly flexible: the secular view on what is moral changes from one age to the next, from one society to another and even from one individual to another. Add and multiply all those changes, and Kant’s moral law begins to look more like a transient expedient than a categorical imperative.

As many other such notions, this has to come down to free will: if we believe in God, then it goes without saying that he created morality along with everything else.

However, a man’s choice of a moral path remains free, and different people exercise this freedom in different ways at different times. Our nature is not a moral guide employed in eternity; only God’s nature is. That’s why only religion can provide a universal set of immutable moral criteria.

And anyway, this is the season to celebrate not Kant’s but Christ’s universal religion. The clue is the name: Christmas.