A Kingdom of God on Earth. Kant’s Legacy on Church and State in German Idealism

The paper aims to reconstruct and analyze the model established by Kant between 1784 and 1797 concerning the Church-State relationship. We will start by considering Kant’s essays of 1784, in order to understand why the conflict between the public and private use of reason particularly affects the figure of the clergyman. Then, we will show that Kant’s view on the relationship between Church and State expresses the necessity for the ethical community to keep together two apparently conflicting aspects: the unconditioned necessity of each member to follow the interior moral legislation, and the conditioned necessity to play a role in the political community as a juridical subject. Finally, we will focus on how Kant’s model, insofar as it is shaped by the concept of reconciliation, could be taken as either positively or negatively paradigmatic for two key authors of German idealism, namely, Fichte and Hegel.