Childhood and Early Youth 53above all, it is necessary to break the natural willfulness of the child. While the school¬
master who seeks to make the child more learned is to be commended for cultivating
the child's understanding, he has not done enough. He has forgotten his most impor¬
tant task, namely that of making the will obedient.^106While it might appear contradictory that a voluntary conversion was to be
brought about by breaking the child's natural will, it was not so in the eyes
of the Pietists. They viewed this break only as the first step in the so-called
Bußkampf (struggle of contrition) towards the Durchbruch (breakthrough).
Accordingly, the religious outlook that the school tried to instill in its pupils
was somewhat unusual. While all the other schools of the period also placed
a great deal of emphasis on formal religion, they did not require the kind
of Pietistic conviction that was considered desirable by some of the Königs¬
berg Pietists.
Not surprisingly, Kant understood this aspect of their view well - and
rejected it in its entirety. It was a "hypothesis" that
the separation of the good from the evil (that forms an amalgam in human nature) is
brought about by a supernatural operation, i.e. the contrition and crushing of the heart
in a repentance, which borders on despair. Only the divine spirit can bring us to a suf¬
ficient state of repentance. We must pray for it - being contrite that we are not contrite
enough.^107
This was repugnant to him. He considered it hypocritical because the
grieving and contrition were not ultimately the responsibility of the one
to be converted. What was thought to lead to the radical conversion that
differentiated the true Christian from the merely nominal one, appeared
to him impossible. On this hypothesis, we could never know whether we
really were converted, because this would presuppose knowledge of an
unknowable supernatural influence. Furthermore, a Pietist could be dis¬
tinguished from other people by his absolute reliance on God for every¬
thing, and by his complete rejection of any kind of moral autonomy. At
the same time, a Pietist tended to exhibit a certain kind of false pride as
belonging to the "select" few, those who are, as God's children, saved and
form the elite of Christendom. The mature Kant rejected both aspects of
the Pietistic way of life. The first was for him the expression of a "servile
attitude" (knechtische Gemütsart)}^08 The other justified in his eyes "the
particular kind of disdain" that he saw always connected with the label
"Pietism."^109 It is not clear whether he already felt this way about Pietism
in 1740, but it is not unlikely, given that his friend Ruhnken wrote they both
were "groaning" under the heavy discipline of the fanatics between 1732