What Perfection Demands: An Irenaean of Kant on Radical Evil

In this essay I will show that the incoherence many commentators have found in Kant’s Religion is due to Augustinian assumptions about human evil that they are implicitly reading into the text. Eliminate the assumptions, and the inconsistencies evaporate: both theses, those of universality and moral responsibility, can be held together without contradiction. The Augustinian view must be replaced with what John Hick has dubbed an “Irenaean” account of human evil, which portrays the human being and his or her task in developmental terms. This developmental model is put forward by Kant in both the Lectures in the Philosophy of Religion and in his Conjectural Beginnings of Human History. In this essay I discuss both the Augustinian and Iranaean accounts of human evil, and argue for the advantages of the developmental (Iranaean) account in making philosophical sense of Kant’s texts. I show that Kant indeed held such a view in both the Lectures and in the Conjectural Beginnings, and that he never abandoned the developmental model in Religion. Reading Kant’s Religion through an “Iranaean” lens reframes the locus of the debate, illumines multiple elements of the text that previously remained obscure, and demonstrates why Kant had good reason to claim that we all begin in a condition of radical evil but must nevertheless assume responsibility for this.