Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

was centered on the New Testament, and even "History" was linked to biblical history. It is no wonder, then, that instruction in philosophy and mathematics suffered—subjects that Kant, "in his middle years, could not look back upon without a laugh." Moreover, even then, he could "find absolutely no taste for the ritual of piety, or rather religious affectation original: "Frömmelei." This term refers to a superficial, performative, or hypocritical display of religious devotion, which Kant found distasteful compared to genuine faith., to which many of his classmates conformed, sometimes out of very base motives." Yet, Schultz was at least an educated, level-headed man, distant from sentimentality and weakness; in him, the Spener-Francke Pietism A movement within Lutheranism founded by Philipp Jakob Spener and August Hermann Francke that emphasized personal transformation and practical Christian living over rigid dogma. from his student days in Halle was paired with a thorough knowledge of Wolffian philosophy The rationalist philosophical system of Christian Wolff, which was the dominant intellectual framework in German universities before Kant’s own theories took hold..¹)

2. University Years and the Following Period.

Even at the university, which he entered in the autumn, a certain connection between Kant and Königsberg Pietism persisted. Although he did not enroll as a theologian—as the biographer Schubert once assumed—and likely did not enroll in any specific faculty at all, he did attend the lectures of his former director, Schultz, on Dogmatics The systematic study and explanation of the core doctrines or "dogmas" of the church., primarily out of personal loyalty and veneration. The mathematician and philosopher Knutzen, whom Kant notoriously valued most among all his university teachers, also combined his philosophical convictions with a Pietist religious outlook. Among other works, he wrote a original title: "Philosophischer Beweis von der Wahrheit der christlichen Religion, darinnen die Notwendigkeit einer geoffenbarten Religion insgemein und die Wahrheit oder Gewißheit der christlichen insbesondere aus ungezweifelten Gründen der Vernunft nach mathematischer Lehrart dargetan und behauptet wird" "Philosophical Proof of the Truth of the Christian Religion, in which the necessity of a revealed religion in general and the truth or certainty of the Christian religion in particular is demonstrated and asserted from undoubted grounds of reason according to the mathematical method" (Königsberg 1739 f.). Nevertheless, it is reliably attested that it was not the religious direction that particularly attracted the young Immanuel to his teacher, but rather the fact that Knutzen stimulated independent thinking in philosophical and mathematical-physical matters.

¹) For further details, see my ‘Life of Kant’, pp. 6–14.