State and Church by Kant and Mendelssohn

Abstract

In the middle of the 18th century in Germany was the unique religious situation when within
the limits of the state many different religions coexisted. It gave an impulse for German philosophers
to concern the questions of religion politic and the conditions under which the harmonic
coexistence of adherents of different religions within the limits of one state might be possible.
The article considers two such projects – the project of Kant (presented above all in a later work
“Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone” and in an earlier article “An Answer to the Question:
What is Enlightenment?”) and the project of Mendelssohn (in the work “Jerusalem or on
Religious Power and Judaism”). The positions of both philosophers have very many common
features, what allows us to assume a certain infl uence of Mendelssohn if not on the origin of the
ethic-religious views of Kant then at least on the direction Kant’s views developed and on the
form they were expressed.