Christopher Kul-Want - Introducing Kant: A Graphic Guide

I followed a rigorous and austere schooling in grammar and philology, accompanied by a rgime of inflexible piety.
We stress above all the felt power of Gods grace to transform the believers life through a conversion of born again experience.
In religious controversy, we urge that the aim should be to win over the heart of ones opponent rather than to gain intellectual victory.

Pietism was founded in Germany by Philipp Jakob Spener (16351705). The Pietists regarded Christian faith not as a set of doctrinal propositions but as a living relationship with God.

For Pietism, the institution of the Lutheran church was considered less important than the church invisible, whose membership in principle included the whole of humanity.

Despite Pietisms emphasis upon intuitive experience, its adherents laid great stress upon devotional exercises. A contemporary of Kants at the Collegium Fridericianum, David Ruhnken, who later became teacher of philology at the University of Leiden, spoke of the pedantic and gloomy discipline of fanatics which dominated the organization of the school.

The curriculum of the institution was filled with uninterrupted prayers and periods of devotional exercises, with periods of edification, sermons and catechizing.
Theoretical classes were designed to insist upon the topics relation to religious and theological questions.

Whilst Kant cherished the memory of the domestic Pietism of his parents and maintained respect for their traditional Pietist calm and serenity, he had nothing but scorn for the official version of Pietism encountered at school.

Partly under the influence of rational philosophy, he later became opposed in principle to religious ceremonies. In a letter of 1775 to J.C. Lavater he stated, No confession of faith, no appeal to holy names nor any observance of religious ceremonies can help to gain salvation.

I regard petitionary prayer as the wheedling of God.

As rector of the University of Knigsberg, he was always indisposed when his official participation in religious observances was required.

Kants one inspiring teacher at the Fridericianum was the Latin master Heydenreich who introduced him to a life-long love of Latin literature. Of Heydenreichs other colleagues, Kant was later to comment...

They were incapable of inflaming the sparks within us for the study of philosophy or mathematics but could certainly blow them out!

Nevertheless, by the age of sixteen, Kant had fulfilled the state-imposed matriculation requirement of the local university.

Accounts of Kant during his early years as a student show him to be poor, although there are indications that he was supported financially by some of his fellow students in return for his help with their work!

The University of Knigsberg was organized in the four traditional faculties, the three higher faculties of theology, law and medicine, and the fourth or lower faculty of philosophy. It is not known in which faculty Kant enrolled, but in spite of great poverty he did not pursue the qualification for a bureaucratic post in the Prussian administration.

I dedicated myself to the lower faculty of philosophy.

For much of the 18th century, the lower faculty was the most dynamic and innovative in the university. Because its curriculum was not adapted to the demands of the university, the range of subjects covered by philosophy included physics and geography, ignored by the higher faculties, and even religion, jurisprudence and medicine, which were their protected domains.