370 Kant: A Biographycoerced, that is, under laws of virtue alone."^164 Kant goes on to argue that
such a community needs to be understood as a community "under God,"
and that therefore the moral state must be understood as a church. While all
historical churches depend on historical, revealed, or "ecclesiastic" faith,
Kant hopes there will eventually arise the "pure faith" of moral religion.
Indeed, he claims that the gradual transition of ecclesiastic faith toward
pure religious faith represents the coming of the Kingdom of God. These
views of Kant seem a bit strained, especially his argument that the ethical
community must be a community under God. We must assume that there
is a God as a supreme law-giver because moral laws are essentially internal
laws and a community needs juridical laws, which are external. These ex¬
ternal laws must conform with the ethical laws, that is, they must be at the
same time true duties, and someone who truly knows our hearts is the only
one who can accomplish the establishment of such laws.
In the second division of the essay Kant then goes on to outline the his¬
torical course of the gradual establishment of the Kingdom of God or the
dominion of the good on Earth. In the course of that outline he answers
the question "Which period of the entire church history in our ken up to
now is the best?" He replies "without hesitation, the present." His reason
is that he sees the seeds of true religion being sown at this time. "In mat¬
ters which ought to be moral and soul improving by nature, reason has wrest
itself free from the burden of faith constantly exposed to the arbitrariness
of its interpreters."^165
In the final section, on religion and priestcraft, he launches an all-out
attack on external religious practices, arguing that we must differentiate
between true service of the church and counterfeit service. Religion, "sub¬
jectively considered," is for Kant nothing but "the recognition of all our
duties as divine commands." He can thus differentiate between revealed and
natural religion based on whether duty or the divine command is prior. In
revealed religion, I must first understand that something is a divine com¬
mand in order to see it as my duty; in natural religion, duty comes first.^166
Kant argues that Christianity can be viewed as both a natural and a
learned religion. He also argues that as a natural religion it is one that "can
be proposed to all human beings comprehensibly and convincingly through
their own reason." It is a religion whose possibility and even necessity has
been made visible in an example, "without either the truth of those teach¬
ings or the authority and the worth of the teacher requiring any other au¬
thentication."^167 This is what the first three essays have shown.
Insofar as Christianity is based not only on reason but also on facts, it