Professor Michael Rosen: The Shadow of God: Kant, Hegel, and the Passage from Heaven to History

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The Shadow of God is a book about secularization. However, rather than treating secularization
as a result of forces from outside religion it looks at it endogenously, from the point of view of
the tension between faith and reason within monotheistic religion itself. This leads to the great
problem of rational theology: the justification of the goodness of the world in the face of the
existence of (apparent) evil.

Kant, I argue, developed a distinctive, “post-Lisbon” theodicy, centred on human agency
and responsibility, directed towards an afterlife of reward and punishment by a just God. Guided
by this, I present revisionist (or, as I would prefer to say, corrective) re-readings of some of the
great central themes of German Idealist philosophy: Kant’s theory of freedom; the categorical
imperative; Hegel’s conception of Geist and history; amongst others.

One consequence of Kant’s relentless demand for justification and its associated
requirements of impartiality and transparency is that the gap between God and man is closed, but
at the price of making God impersonal. In short, Kant, despite not being a secular thinker, turns
out to be a secularizing one. Alongside the orientation to divine judgement and the afterlife,
however, we also find in Kant a conception by which human beings see themselves as
participating in a shared collective project that extends through history. This idea (“historical
immortality”) runs through German Idealism although it is by no means confined to it.

Historical immortality has had very deep consequences. Its presence is everywhere within
the revolutionary, conservative, progressive and nationalist movements of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries.