"They Talk Too Much"

That is the commentary of a sixteen year old Catholic girl regarding an apostate American sect which she has occasionally frequented with her apostate godmother.

Affectation: Too Much "Zeal": Too Much "Participation"

While in his home Kant encountered pietism at its best, in the Collegium he came upon a pietism whose zeal fostered a spirit of hypocrisy.

When young and active boys are expected unanimously and daily to give evidence of great religious fervor, they are bound to do so without observing strict proportion to the emotion actually felt.

Kant's early acquired honesty saved him from such short-cuts to favor. "He was quite unable," says Borowski, "to acquire a taste for that form of piety, or rather that affected piety, to which many of his classmates adapted themselves, often from very low motives."

This whole experience in the Collegium was for him a painful one, for he was sensitive by nature, and the remark he is said to have made in later life, that "fear and trembling overcame him whenever he recalled those days of youthful slavery," may well be authentic. Certain it is that he acquired a lasting abhorrence of all religious emotion and would have nothing to do with prayer or the singing of hymns the rest of his life.

What strikes one with surprise, indeed, is not that he rebelled against certain practices connected with religion (After reaching maturity, he never attended church services; he even took special pains to avoid them. When a new rector of the University was inaugurated it was the custom for the professors to march in procession to the cathedral to take part in a religious service. In course of time Kant became rector and duly led the academic procession, but deserted it at the church.) but that he did not turn against religion altogether. It was probably the memory of his mother and his acquaintance with men like Schultz and Knutzen that accounted for the relative sanity and justice of his mature estimate of pietism. Instead of condemning it utterly he was able to separate the good from the bad. "Even if the religious consciousness of that time," we find him writing in his old age to his friend Rink, "and the conceptions of what is called virtue and piety were by no means clear and satisfactory, it yet contained the root of the matter. One may say of pietism what one will; it suffices that the people to whom it was a serious matter were distinguished in a manner deserving of all respect. They possessed the highest good which man can enjoy--that repose, that cheerfulness, that inner peace which is disturbed by no passions. No want or persecution rendered them discontented; no controversy was able to stir them to anger or enmity."

Theodore Greene's Introduction to Kant's Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. xxviii-xxix.

Word and Sacrament

Heretic and apostate sects overemphasize the Word because it is all they have. We Catholics have right worship too so there is less pressure on us to invent our own religiosity, God has done (and does) that for us with the prescribed matter and forms of His Church!

How different the world would have been had Immanuel Kant been raised in a devout Catholic sacramental life! he, that illustrious intellectual victim of the Protestantism of Prussia, whose tortuous intellectual labyrinths continue to sow confusion for many.

The Catholic Mass, the Holy Eucharist, Jesus Christ in the Flesh is the remedy for every intellectual error.

The Great Disputation