Holiness, or Heiligkeit

One of the difficulties of philosophical reading is the technical and sometimes merely idiosyncratic usage philosophers make of language. For example, the term understanding has a specific meaning when one reads a Kant text, as this refers to the cognitive power that legislates over nature, but is thereby limited to experience. For Kant, understanding is a noun, but one whose analogue would not be comprehension, but something like mental power. Philosophers take words that have conventional meanings and use them outside of those conventions, in such a way that an unprepared reader would doubtlessly experience confusion over the strange employments of the term.

I have selected holiness because it stands between an idiosyncratic and a conventional use. By holiness we tend to think something that commands a profound religious reverence. That reverence we likely attribute to its divine, rather than human, nature. The Bible is holy for its divine inspiration.

Kant first uses this term in the following context, which I think demonstrates its funny status: “If morality cognizes by the holiness of its law an object of the greatest respect, then at the level of religion it presents in the highest cause that carries out those laws an object of worship, and [thus] morality appears in its own majesty.” (7/6, marginal/actual Hackett pagination). Here holiness seems to have meaning both in the context of morality, which belongs wholly to human being, and in the context of religion.

The object of holiness is the moral law, which produces a feeling of respect in the moral agent. It incites respect because it is an unconditional law, that regulates without exception. In this latter aspect it stands radically separate from any civil law. In fact, it is so unique that Kant might contend it finds affinity only by something of divine inspiration, such as the 10 commandments. Yet the basis for the 10 commandments, insofar as it is part of the Bible, is the fact that it was divine revealed (to Moses and transmitted in the Bible). Whereas the moral law is conceived by any and all human beings as rational agents, and it has no origin necessary other than human reason.

In the reading from the “Second Piece”, holiness is used repeatedly in its more familiar context, namely in reference to Jesus Christ, the “Son of God,” or as Kant puts it, the “ideal of holiness”. Yet we should ask after the source of its “holiness.” While it seems clear that Kant intends at least the same reverence as indicated above, is it reverence based in divinity or in the “majesty” of pure rational morality, i.e. humanity? We should ask this question as well because we know, from the preface to the second edition, that Kant considers this work (the Religion book) to be philosophical theology, rather than Biblical theology (13/12). The source of the divinity of philosophical theology is, presumably, morality, yes (6/4)? This is why when we speak of JC, we speak of him not as a historical or even revealed figure, but as the “personified idea of the good principle”. What is more, I cannot help noting that JC is the infinite made finite, and in this respect a holiness that is both (or neither) divine and (nor) human.