Abstract

The essay analyzes Kant's definition of the Church as an ethical community. This defini¬tion coincides with the liberal - and subversive, as Kant's contemporaries understood - view concerning the merely private character of religion. The secularization of law and the denial of any "ius in sacra" of the State, however, do not mean that the citizens are concerned only with the statutory ecclesiastic prescriptions. Rather, according to Kant the State ought to conceive as socially dangerous every Church which does not aim at its own dissolution in favor of pure morality.