Moral attributes of god as the basis of Kant’s ethicotheology

The article examines Kant’s ethicotheology, its essence, method and functions. It is shown that the concept of ethicotheology is specifically Kantian and is used by Kant synonymously with the concept of “moral theology”. It is argued that ethicotheology becomes the foundation for theological knowledge of the divine essence, certification of its existence and deduction of its certain properties. The basis of Kant’s ethicotheology is the notion of the highest good. It appears in Kant’s critical philosophy in two versions - ideal and distribution models. The ideal model implies a harmonious combination of holiness with the fullness of beatitude, while the distributive model implies a proportional correspondence of the level of beatitude to the achieved level of virtue. The highest good is the foundation both for postulating the existence of God and for deducing the moral attributes of the divine essence. It is noted that Kant has two main lists of moral attributes. It is substantiated that despite the divergence in the naming of certain moral attributes, the same ternary model and a completely identical mechanism for combining these three attributes into a single whole is involved. It is demonstrated that the trinity of the moral attributes of the divine essence is of fundamental importance for Kant’s critical philosophy, since it reflects the architectonic structure of the reason itself. In this trinity of attributes, the first two - holiness and goodness - are opposed to each other; this opposition is removed in the third attribute - justice (wisdom), which appears in Kant as a limitation of the second attribute by the first. The same mechanism underlies the identification of three categories of reason in each of the four groups and the system of transcendental ideas corresponding to the group of categories of relation. Kant sees a figurative representation of this peculiarity inherent in reason itself, expressed in ethicotheology in the predication of three moral attributes to God, both in the identification of a trinity of supreme deities in many polytheistic religions, and in the Christian doctrine of God as a Trinity.