Enlightenment
Many consider Kant to be the most important of all modern philosophers, on account of the scope of his theorising and the cogency of his thought.19 I offer no contest. Kant also had interesting and influential things to say about Jesus and his place within religion,
14 Porter, Creation, p. 2.
15 Michel Foucault, ‘What is Enlightenment? (Was ist Aufklärungin)’, Catherine Porter (trans.), in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York: Pantheon Books, 1984, pp. 32-50: p. 39.
16 Ibid, p. 42.
17 I have attended conferences at British and other European university’s where ‘the Enlightenment’ has been the stated topic of a lecture by a philosopher, theologian or biblical scholar, during which Kant’s essay and the broad outlines of his philosophy are the sole reference points. Foucault can reasonably be cited as encouraging this tendency, although his focus on Kant in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’, and his insistence that ‘it is necessary to stress the connection that exists between this brief article and the three
Critiques’ (Ibid, p. 44), is tempered by his stated desire not to exaggerate the essay’s importance (p. 32), and
his admission that ‘no historian…could be satisfied with it for an analysis of the social, political, and cultural transformations that occurred at the end of the eighteenth-century’(p. 37). Foucault was as good as his word: the irony of his association with the concept of ‘Enlightenment’ (minus the definite article) is that he has produced some of the most celebrated, original and controversial studies of concrete historical, cultural trends associated with the age, such as his Folie et déraison: Histoire de la folie à l'âge classique (1961), and
Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la Prison (1975): History of Madness, Jean Khalfa (ed.), Jonathan Murphy
and Jean Khalfa (trans.), London: Rutledge, 2009; Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison, Alan Sheridan (trans.), London: Penguin Books, 1977.
18 Jesus makes a number of appearances in Immanuel Kant’s critical philosophy, although Kant always seemed reluctant to mention him by name: in the Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), for instance, he is the ‘Holy One of the Gospel’ (der Heilige des Evangelii): Groundwork of the Metaphysics of
Morals, Mary Gregor (ed. & trans.), Christine M Korsgaard (intro.), Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998, sect. ii, p. 21.
19 Of course, most rankings of this kind are the philosophical equivalent the ‘dream team’ of sporting icons from different eras, but the results of surveys such as the one run by philosopher Brian Leiter, from his influential philosophy web-page, are interesting all the same: see ‘The 20 “Most Important” Philosophers of the Modern Era’, Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, 04 May 2009, accessed 24 June 2012: http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/the-20-most-important-philosophers-of-the-modern-era.html
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especially in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (1793-1794),20 and his emphasis on ethics in religion coheres with my insistence on the priority of moral readings of Jesus in the Enlightenment. And when one considers that G. E. Lessing issued the first of the Fragments ten years before the publication of Kant’s ‘Was ist Aufklärung?’, there is strong a temptation to read one German scholar, Reimarus—a distinguished son of Hamburg whose intellectual development seems to have been stimulated by his travels—as an independent realisation, through the medium of biblical criticism, of that vision of Enlightenment imagined by the German philosopher Kant, who rarely left his home city of Königsberg.21 There is little doubt that the two thinkers shared some of the same goals, but I have resisted this temptation, and my reasons are twofold: 1) part of my project here is to construct a historically evidenced genealogy for some of the key themes in the Fragments published by Lessing, and this means that I am particularly (though not exclusively) interested in those thinkers who might reasonably have impacted on Reimarus when he was composing the Apologie, and his younger contemporary, Professor Kant, was not one of them; and 2) Kant’s later ‘critical’ philosophy, where ethics really comes to the fore, conceives of religious commitment as a warranted postulate of faith, but not of knowledge.22 By contrast, Reimarus’s posthumously published writings on Jesus and Christian origins, and the broader moral and political questions they raise, are rooted in older, more confident traditions of theological rationalism, which remained a ubiquitous presence in the period known as ‘the Enlightenment’, but which Kant rejected in his later work.23
20 See Kant, Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason: And Other Writings, Allen Wood and George di Giovanni (eds. & trans.), Robert Merrihew Adams (intro.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 31 – 205, pts i – iii.
21 For an interesting discussion of Kant’s interest in distant cultures, juxtaposed with his famous aversion to travelling, see Steve Palmquist, ‘How Chinese was Kant?’, The Philosopher, No. 84.1, Spring 1996, pp. 3 – 9.
22 This was certainly the position Kant had developed by the time he published Kritik der reinen Vernunft in 1781: see Critique of Pure Reason (incorporates 1st and 2nd edns.), Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (eds. & trans.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 117, 500, 684 – 690.
23 Kant was not unsympathetic towards the urge of philosophers to extend thinking beyond the objects of possible experience to posit some transcendental, ontological ground —a ‘cause’ or a ‘designer’—but he concluded that such striving can never deliver claims to knowledge, since the categories deployed in such metaphysical speculation, such as ‘causation’, acquire their epistemological force only within the context of the phenomenal world, and cannot be applied intelligibly to a transcendental (and hypothetical) reality: see ibid, in particular his ‘Critique of all theology from speculative principles of reason’, pp. 583 – 589; this comes after his famous critique of the three classic theistic proofs (pp. 568 – 583). A similar point had already been made by Hume, albeit in a more straightforwardly empiricist fashion: see Dialogues; and
Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ‘Section 11: Of A Particular Providence and of a Future State’,
pp. 187 – 198. This skepticism about the possibility of providing any explanatory reason for the existence of the universe—the possibility of our being able to reason from our limited conception of the effect (the universe) to a coherent and probable cause (God)—cuts Kant and Hume adrift from a tradition of rationalist philosophical-theology which runs from, say, Descartes to Reimarus.
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As indicated above, I assume the legitimacy of positing a period of major intellectual, social and political reform in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I do not necessarily assume that this Enlightenment should be understood first and foremost as an intellectual, rather than a socio-cultural phenomenon;24 intellectual history happens to represent my research interests, and it seems to me to be the most relevant emphasis when considering modern, critical scholarship on Jesus. This is not a view shared by everyone, however. In an essay packed with suggestive ideas, but rather lacking in historical evidence, Charles T Davies argues that the Quest was ‘spawned by the [French] Revolution’.25 Drawing on the work of William Barrett, he quotes the poet Heinrich Heine’s comparison of Kant and Maximilien Robespierre, with the former having unsettled the Ancien Régime, toppled by the likes of Robespierre, having undermined the traditional arguments for the existence of God (and, presumably, the divine right of Kings),26 while the biblical scholarship exemplified by Reimarus is said to have ‘energised the propaganda of the Revolution.’27 Davies’s essay constitutes a distinctive critique of Albert Schweitzer’s account because he does not actually question the position accorded to Reimarus in the tradition; what he questions is the marginal place of the French contribution: ‘While it is true that the first Life of Jesus scholars are German, it was the French Revolution and the Enlightenment that made the Quest so imperative.’28
The role of Jesus in the literature and socio-political movements of the French Revolution is underexplored in reception history, and Davies is right to argue that ‘Jesus scholarship was never politically neutral.’29 But I will not be following Davies into the political firestorm of the French Revolution (at least not in this thesis). The only scholarly study of Jesus by a French author that Davies actually discusses is Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1863),30 and so the ‘historical Jesus’ of the French Revolution emphasised by
24 Israel insists, against his critics, that he never claims that the radial Enlightenment ‘achieved its partial success in the late eighteenth century through the power of ideas alone’ (Democratic, p. 14), but his claim just three pages later ‘that la philosophie was the primary cause of the [French] revolution’ (p. 17), shows in no uncertain terms where he thinks the proper emphasis belongs, and constitutes a marked contrast to the socio-cultural approach of a historian like Roger Chariter in Les origines culturelles de la Revolution
Fran̨caise (1990): The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Durhma, NC., / London: Duke University
Press, 1991. One of the distinguishing features of Jacob’s account of the radical Enlightenment is the significant role that she accords to sociability, especially through freemasonry.
25 Charles T Davies, ‘The Historical Jesus as a Justification for Terror’, in J Harold Ellens (ed.), The
Destructive Power of Religion: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam (vol. 2 of 4): Religion, Psychology and Violence, Westport, ST / London: Praeger, 2004, pp. 111 – 129: 111.
26 See ibid, p.114. 27 Ibid, p. 115. 28 Ibid, p. 122. 29 Ibid, p. 115 30 Ibid, pp. 121 -124.
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Davies, seems to be that idea of Jesus ‘as he actually was’ regardless of what anyone (especially the Church) has maintained, which is neither the preserve of scholars, nor a creation of the French Revolution. Jesus may indeed have been ‘depicted as the great teacher of natural morality wherever the impact of the Revolution was strong’,31but such depictions are of a much older vintage, and it is one of the tasks of this study to illuminate those depictions and the socio-political functions that their creators and publishers seem to have envisaged for them. The question of how successful such depictions were as instruments of socio-political change is, of course, another matter altogether.