The Discipline of Pious Reason: Goethe, Herder, Kant Daniel ...

esponds: ‘God must be held at a distance’. Thought must either possess God or exalt
Him from afar. These two poles exist in a dialectic which circles between yielding to
the desire to fuse with God and cultivating a will which thwarts such desire. Desire
must be both satisfied and unsatisfied. What is crucial is that both moments (despite
their antithetical relation) have an identical result—the suppression of piety. Both
pieties put paid to any further critical discussion of piety as a concept. It is here we
have the reason for philosophy of religion’s silence on this issue and in consequence
the reason for its incessant dogmatism.
This ‘dialectic’ is of course just an abstract summary of the transitions involved in the
three ‘scenes’ I have described in this essay. On the one hand, piety is a desire for
God. Such is the fundamental principle of the neoplatonic piety against which Goethe,
Herder and Kant were reacting. Moreover, they attacked it because it is selfdestructive:
piety is itself destroyed as soon as God is obtained. It obeys the logic of
desire elucidated by Aristophanes in Plato’s Symposium—the fulfilment of desire is
the end of desire. Goodchild writes similarly,
The offence of piety that claims to identify its divinity, whether through ascending
to heaven, or by the divinity ascending to earth, is that it abolishes the temporal
existence of piety, and, with it, piety itself. (2002, p. 7)
In the beatific vision, piety becomes redundant to itself. On this view, the goal of
philosophy is the elimination of all talk about piety, for once the desire on which
philosophy is founded (fusion with God) is achieved, a critical philosophy of piety is