metonymy4u

If you think about it the Christian “Good News” (Gospel) tradition requires the everlasting presence of “bad news” to perpetuate the hierarchies of traditional Christianity. For Gospelist-Pauline-Augustinian Christianity, eternal carnal sin is a prerequisite for their particular notion of the good life. Human lives for these early Christians are nothing more than the occasion of our submission to the divine word and an ascendency towards the eternal golden light of truth. The Pauline divine is forever external to the sin-ridden human coil and is the final arbiter of universal good and evil. What Kant, a Lutheran Pietist of the 18th century, did then is reverse this traditional relationship between the divine and the ethical. For Kant, morality is properly defined not as the divine word made flesh, but rather as that particular earthly outcome of each individual’s struggle with the morality vs. prudence tension. What the Christian allegory does for Kant is to help cast this struggle in terms of our sense of the sublime (universal) implications of our actions as contingent beings. Only in such a light can we come to understand our notion of the divine – not indeed as the source of the true moral light but rather as the product of each individual’s particular way of building a contingent and imperfectly sublime moral guide out of their unique struggles. Our ends are in fact just as rough-hewn as they seem to us, and no more. Rather than being the guarantor of truth everlasting, god then becomes a rather frail and contingent being, dependent on our own fleeting ability to renew every day a sense of wisdom that is only as real as our own wise efforts. Our sacrifices are only as noble as the next being willing to make the same sacrifice.