Abstract

Kant's famous statement (from the first Critique) that he found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith acknowledges a religious or theological telos to the entire critical project. This article outlines a series of relations of 'knowledge' to 'faith' in the architectonic repetitions with variation that plays from the first Critique through the Religion. Various deployments of 'truth' at each stage presume a kind of 'faith' or trust all the way along. These deployments are shown to follow a pattern which echoes that set out in Northrop Frye's understanding of literary modes descending from myth to romance to high and low mimetic and ending in the ironic. These modes describe realms of possibility and necessity, and their nesting in Frye's explication of literature is shown to be itself an echo of more formal theories of Tarski and Godel.