Kant and belief in miracles

The main scope of this paper is an analysis of I. Kant’s views on the nature and the typology of miracles, as well as the interrelation between the concept of miracle and the belief in miracles and the Kantian moral religion in general. In the rationalistic philosophy of religion of the Enlightenment era, with its intrinsic anthropological optimism, there is no place for a belief in miracles, which paralyses quite radically the function of theoretical reason. Kant conceives a miracle not primarily as a violation of an empirical law, but as a non-empirical act of an empirically known cause; and the negation of miracles in the world, as well as a recognition of a particular event in our experience as a miracle, represents thus quite equally an excess of legal powers of rational knowledge. In his classification of miraculous events Kant focuses mainly upon “theistic” miracles (coming from God) and “angelic” miracles. The latter ones, however, do not manifest themselves in experience due to radical evil burdening upon the will of finite actors, i. e. to their natural propensity to accept sensual motives as sufficient into their supreme principle of action. Under these conditions man absolutely cannot have a good heart (disposition) and commit morally good actions. The possibility of goodness requires a “revolution of disposition”, a reversal in the hierarchy of the motives of the will. Such a reversal is totally unthinkable as committed by the force of the human being alone, in its ordinary state, and yet it is categorically demanded by a law of practical reason. Hence a notion of a supernatural assistance in this radical act of the will, provided that the human being exerts moral activity to the best of his powers, which makes it worthy of such assistance. The “revolution of disposition” and the assistance to it by grace are crucial points in Kant’s moral religion; if everything that occurs according to rules inaccessible for our reason is a miracle, then moral faith in that miracle is demanded by a vital interest of the practical reason itself.