The Near and Distant God

Poetry, Idealism and Religious Thought from Holderlin to Eliot

Ian Cooper

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367603403
• eBook ISBN: 9781351194617
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

"Poetry and philosophy from the time of Kant to the mid-twentieth century are centrally concerned with the question of how the Spirit - or the Holy Spirit - is present in the world. This book argues that the development of modern poetry in German and English can be seen as a protracted response to the religious crises of post-Idealist thought. The German tradition develops through poets such as Holderlin as much as through philosophers such as Hegel and Nietzsche, and in England German ideas profoundly influenced the British Idealist school. Cooper's compelling study makes parallel readings of German and English writers with deeper historically-based affinities than has previously been realised. Eduard Morike and Gerard Manley Hopkins, both churchmen, each studied Idealism as undergraduates in their respective countries: each responded to it in his spiritual verse. And we find similar parallels in two of the defining works of twentieth century poetry: between Rilke's response to Nietzsche in the Duino Elegies, and Eliot's response to Bradley in the Four Quartets. Ian Cooper is Centenary Research Fellow at Selwyn College, Cambridge."

Part I

Chapter 1
The Near and Distant God

History, Freedom, and Hermeneutics

Kant's Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason), which appeared in two instalments in 1792 and 1793, was controversial on account of its premise that there is a propensity for evil in man, and moreover that 'dieses Böse ist radical' [this evil is radical] (GS, VI, 37).¹ Kant seemed to be arguing for a concept (original sin) that enlightened thought, propped up on Kant's own ideas, had been trying to undermine. And yet Kant's identification of human evil is a consistent development of the argument of the first two Critiques. Die Religion attempts to complete the journey begun in the discussion of practical reason, and fill in the detail of what is involved in the moral life. Evil is seen as any deviation from the universal rational law, and this deviation is identical with the refusal of autonomy, of the noumenal freedom that the second Critique postulated together with God and immortality. Our propensity for evil consists in our ability (our freedom) to turn against freedom by subordinating obedience to the moral law to the claims of self-love ('Selbstliebe', VI, 36). As such it consists in an inscrutable ('unerforschlich', VI, 22) 'first ground' underlying all our individual, empirically observable acts of deviation. This is the sense in which evil is innate. 'Radical' evil therefore suggests not only 'corruption', as defined in the traditional doctrine of original sin, but also everything Kant understands by 'transcendental'. Evil is a radical possibility of human freedom; it is a factor that structures human life, and is present at the birth of every individual but not created by birth (VI, 22). Kant is concerned, in his treatment of good and evil, with the ineffable grounds of existence itself.

Having dwelt extensively on original sin, Die Religion moves on to consider the reasonableness of expecting redemption. Clearly, despite evil's radicality, good has a certain priority over it, since evil itself can only be defined through reference to freedom. Kant calls this priority 'die ursprüngliche Anlage zum Guten' [original predisposition to the good] (VI, 44), and says it can be re-empowered through a conversion, or revolution, in our thinking: 'Das ist: wenn er den obersten Grund seiner Maximen, wodurch er ein böser Mensch war, durch eine einzige unwandelbare Entschließung umkehrt (und hiemit einen neuen Menschen anzieht)' [That is: if by a single and unalterable decision a human being reverses the supreme ground of his maxims by which he was an evil human being (and thereby puts on a 'new man')] (VI, 47—48). Through this 'turn' we make the universal, selfimposed law into the maxim governing our actions, and thereby undergo a form of rebirth ('eine Art von Wiedergeburt') similar to that spoken of in John's Gospel (VI, 47). However, sincë such rebirth must for Kant be a noumenal affair, a change in our status as free beings rather than as mere material phenomena, we cannot actually know whether the revolution has been accomplished, since appearances are all we have to go on. Rather, we can hope for signs of gradual reform, in our 'continuierlichem Wirken und Werden' [incessant labouring and becoming] (VI, 48) in the phenomenal world, showing that we are 'auf dem guten (obwohl schmalen) Wege eines beständigen Fortschreitens vom Schlechten zum Bessern' [upon the good (though narrow) path of constant progress from bad to better] (VI, 48), and are thus bringing ourselves closer to the summum botmm, the point regulating all moral conduct. Moreover, from that vanishing point beyond space and time, that is, from the perspective of God, the constant process of development within space and time is seen as already completed in the moment of conversion itself. This is Kantian justification:

Dies [beständiges Fortschreiten] ist für denjenigen, der den intelligibelen Grand des Herzens (aller Maximen der Willkür) durchschauet, für den also diese Unendlichkeit des Fortschritts Einheit ist, d.i. für Gott, so viel, als wirklich ein guter (ihm gefalliger) Mensch sein. (VI, 48)

[For him who penetrates to the intelligible ground of the heart (the ground of all the maxims of the power of choice), for him to whom this endless progress is a unity, i.e. for God, this is the same as actually being a good human being (pleasing to him).]

In its basic contrast between these two perspectives, Die Religion presents Kant's combination of empiricism and Idealism in its most developed, and also most problematic, form. By arguing for moral transformation as a 'transcendental' rebirth, Kant undermines the role of empirical details of conduct and character in showing us anything: if the conversion takes place purely beyond space and time, then it has no necessary link to the material, phenomenal, and social life lived purely within space and time. No moral value can attach to what we see in the world of appearance (and the world of appearance is all we can ever see). Nothing in the material world, and therefore nothing we can sense at all, can in fact provide us with evidence that we have set ourselves against evil. There is no point of mediation between our phenomenal and noumenal identities.

This continues to be the case in Kant's discussion of Christ.² Kant stresses that 'Im praktischen Glauben an diesen Sohn Gottes (sofern er vorgestellt wird, als habe er die menschliche Natur angenommen) kann nun der Mensch hoffen, Gott wohlgefällig (dadurch auch selig) zu werden' [In the practical faith in this son of God (so far as he is represented as having taken up human nature) the human being can thus hope to become pleasing to God (and thereby blessed)] (VI, 62). Christ is the one rupture in universal human evil: he is free from sin and therefore is, without any need for conversion, the living completion of the unending progress towards the highest good (he is, in the strict sense of both words, 'perfect' or 'vollkommen'). He is therefore the model ('Urbild', VI, 61) of that freedom which we must achieve through a revolution in our sensibility, and through which we also become sons of God. However, Kant's account of Christ perpetuates rather than resolves the difficulty, since Kant insists that Christ's status as an ideal of perfection, present to reason, has a radical priority over, and is indeed detachable from, the question of his being present to human experience, that is, of his historical realization in space and time: 'Es bedarf also keines Beispiels der Erfahrung, um die Idee eines Gott moralisch wohlgefälligen Menschen für uns zum Vorbilde zu machen; sie liegt als ein solches schon in unsrer Vernunft' [There is no need, therefore, of any example from experience to make the idea of a human being morally pleasing to God a model for us; the idea is present as model already in our reason] (VI, 62). In keeping with his central insight into the nature of practical reason, Kant will not allow the condition of freedom to come from anything outside our own capacity for self-determination (except possibly, in a way that we can never comprehend, from heaven — VI, 61): it certainly is not to be found in the realm of sensuous phenomena. To attach importance to the personal life of Christ, that is, to the way he appeared, rather than to the pure idea of a human being who is perfectly pleasing to God, is for Kant 'anthropomorphism' (VI, 65),³ the elevation of contingency above principle. The historical element of Christianity is neither denied nor asserted here, rather it is seen as irrelevant to the moral development of man.

This emphatic orientation of man's moral being towards an idea rather than a historical actuality has hermeneutic implications. On the one hand there remains an absolute split between the sensuous world and the noumenal world, which not even Incarnation bridges. Kant's understanding of Christ clearly precludes the presence of interpretable signs in history, just as our moral journey cannot be read off from the empirical details of our phenomenal life. On the other hand that split becomes less plausible the more vigorously it is asserted. After all, it would lead to us being wholly unable to form judgements about ourselves and others, since nothing we perceive can be assumed to be a reliable index of moral status. Moreover, the entire process by which Kant has arrived at his deduction of good and evil has been a steady filling up of that realm declared by the first Critique to be completely unknowable. In the second Critique that region is occupied by the postulates of practical reason; by the time of Die Religion it explicitly contains the whole moral dimension of every human life, not to mention the basis of most of the central doctrines of Lutheranism. It therefore seems that in developing his project towards a religious understanding of the 'radical' principles underlying moral existence, Kant has, despite himself, transgressed the dualism he started with: to make detailed claims about the content of the noumenal sphere is itself to connect it to the empirical, phenomenal world in which all our insights and judgements are reached, and so to make any putative dividing line between the two less convincing. Translating morality into hermeneutics again, this suggests that the realm of human history, relegated in Kant's account of good and evil, and certainly in his treatment of the idea of the Son of God, to a position beneath all that is ideal, is much more significant than has seemingly been allowed.

The third part of Die Religion shows the implications of this underlying relationship between appearance and idea unfolding. Kant is particularly concerned with the Church as a visible institution on earth, a 'representation' of the 'invisible Church' ('unsichtbare Kirche') that lies at the end of the same infinite process he described earlier (VI, 101—02). Now, though, that process is seen in terms not only of personal moral conversion, but of institutional, social, and political reform, approaching ever more closely to the ideal. Kant's discussion of how the invisible is made present (how it is represented) involves his own version of the Lutheran attachment to scripture, and so relates history to writing. He distinguishes between two types of faith: religious faith ('Religionsglaube'), based entirely on the dictates of the universal moral law, and ecclesiastical faith ('Kirchenglaube'), based on the 'statutory' codes of the Church as a historically evolving structure, which are passed on via tradition and (primarily for Kant) scriptural interpretation. The cornerstone of such ecclesiastical faith is belief in revelation:

Wenn wir aber statutarische Gesetze [. . .] annehmen und in unserer Befolgung derselben die Religion setzen, so ist die Kenntniß derselben nicht durch unsere eigene bloße Vernunft, sondern nur durch Offenbarung möglich, welche, sie mag nun jedem einzelnen ingeheim oder öffentlich gegeben werden, um durch Tradition oder Schrift unter Menschen fortgepflanzt zu werden, ein historischer, nicht ein reiner Vernunftglaube sein würde. (VI, 104)

[If, however, we assume statutory laws [. . .] and put our religion in observing them, then cognition of these laws is possible not through our own mere reason but only through revelation. And, whether given to each individual secretly or publicly — that it may be propagated among human beings through tradition or scripture — this revelation would be a historical and not a purely rational faith.]

Despite the apparent insufficiency of ecclesiastical faith compared with pure rational belief (Kant says that laws assuming revelation are contingent because they cannot bind all people at all times in all places, VI, 104), it turns out that the two are related, and moreover that 'historical' faith, belief in a living tradition and continuing revelation within the practising community, is necessary in order to come nearer to the idea given to us through reason:

Wenn wir uns aber nicht bloß als Menschen, sondern auch als Bürger in einem göttlichen Staate auf Erden zu betragen [. . .] uns verpflichtet halten, so scheint die Frage, wie Gott in einer Kirche (als einer Gemeinde Gottes) verehrt sein wolle, nicht durch bloße Vernunft beantwortlich zu sein, Sondern einer statutarischen, uns nur durch Offenbarung kund werdenden Gesetzgebung, mithin eines historischen Glaubens [. . .] zu bedürfen. (VI, 105)

[If, however, we regard ourselves as duty-bound to behave not just as human beings but also as citizens within a divine state on earth [. . .] then the question 'How does God will to be honoured in a church (as a congregation of God)?' appears unanswerable by mere reason, but to be in need of a statutory legislation only proclaimed through revelation, hence of a historical faith.]

Consequently there is now an emphasis on details of experience (what Kant calls 'eine auf Erfahrungsbedingungen beruhende kirchliche Form' [some ecclesiastical form that depends on experiential conditions] VI, 105) as signifiers of an ultimate reality. This use of 'experience' provides a clear counterpoint to the use of 'Son of God' as an idea that does not require any experiential reference, and suggests that the gap between the two sides of the Kantian equation is being closed. Historical faith provides 'etwas Sinnlichhaltbares, irgendeine Erfahrungsbestätigung' [something that the senses can hold on to, some confirmation from experience] (VI, 109), and although Kant maintains that this in itself remains contingent because it lacks universality, it serves as a symbol of that which is truly universal, the one true Church lying at the end of, and providing the vanishing point for, historical evolution. And in so far as historical faith is aware that it points towards that end, its contingency must be regarded as overcome (VI, 115). This new emphasis on the symbolic value of experience brings with it a special interest in the means by which historical faith is transmitted and maintained — Holy Scripture. The hermeneutic side of Die Religion becomes explicit when Kant turns to the role of interpretation: 'Der Kirchenglaube hat zu seinem höchsten Ausleger den reinen Religionsglauben' [ecclesiastical faith has the pure faith of religion for its supreme interpreter] (VI, 109). Kant accords the traditional Protestant privilege to the interpreter of text, the 'Schriftausleger', and more especially to the scholar who has that as his vocation, the 'Schriftgelehrter' (VI, 112). The task of all scriptural interpretation is to provide the community, through the study of text as a cultural and linguistic phenomenon, with an account of the historical origins of its faith, and since this gives the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Poetry, Idealism, Religion
• PART I
• PART II
• Conclusion: Real Presences
• Bibliography
• Index