My wife and I had our 28-week ultrasound this week (Baby Jack is healthy and looking good!), and while we were there, the ultrasound tech used the phrase “Imperative for the Kingdom”, and I was so very taken by it. I’d never heard it before, which there’s not too many English phrases that’s the case for at this point for me, so I always perk up when one crosses my path and try to find out all I can about it. “Imperative for the Kingdom” really isn’t very google-able, and I didn’t end up finding out the truth about where it came from or anything. But it kept rattling around in my brain, so I decided to write a story with that title and see what it meant to *me*.
This is that story…
Imperative For The Kingdom
“‘Act only according to that maxim whereby you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.’ Now there’s a philosophy money-quote if I’ve ever heard one. Kant writes one sentence and deontological ethics is born. The formulations will get more complicated, but they all come from here. Now what does it mean in plain English? Remember, Kant is less worried about the downstream consequences, the teleology, and is more worried about the deontology, the intention and principle behind our actions. What he’s saying there is, when you act, ask yourself ‘would it be a good thing if everybody did this?”
***
Professor Killian Green stepped out of Larkson Hall into the breezy Southern California evening. Undergraduates flooded the stone steps around him, on their way to the library or the party. He liked teaching at night. Afternoon was also all right, but philosophy in the morning was a surer headache than four scotches.
He walked through the town beside the campus. Its quaintness felt forced because he’d attended the contentious meetings where the town council voted to ban franchises. He walked around the block to avoid Harvey’s, the bar where he stopped after his Thursday and Friday night classes but never his Monday night class, since today was Monday and he did not want to be tempted.
On Mondays he’d taken to extending his walk, exploring nearby areas of the larger city. It wasn’t walkable at all, and within just a few blocks of the outermost official town-block it became much more downscale, but he made a game of it. He told himself that he took these walks to remind himself that campus was not the world, and that outside his bubble there were many people who were suffering. Part of him just liked the hint of danger, though.
He went West three miles, sticking to main streets, wanting the hustle and bustle and cars screaming by and open storefronts with music blasting. The tucked away residential corners with people pretending they were suburbs weren’t the weapon he needed on these sojourns. He tried listening to music but nothing seemed to capture the mood and so he took out his AirPods and listened to the Monday night sounds, the street people in their living rooms.
Then he passed an open doorway, and from inside he heard a voice that stopped his feet, held him there languoring in it. Honeyed and deep, resonant with meaning, present and powerful.
“Do not cease to pray and ask that you may be filled with the knowledge of His will, strengthened with all might, according to his glorious power, giving thanks to the Father who has qualified us to be partakers of the inheritance of the Saints. He has delivered us from the power of darkness and conveyed us into the Kingdom of the Son of His Love, in whom we have redemption through his blood.”
The voice was without judgment, without guile. It called to him, beckoning him home. It was not the words but the voice which drew his feet towards the door. He crossed its threshold. He had imagined something tiny; instead it were as if the storefront were a Narnian wardrobe. The ceiling was low and cramped and not wide but the room went back into the block for dozens and dozens of rows of mismatched, straight-backed chairs, every one of them full.
“In whom then, my Brothers and Sisters, does God instruct us to place our trust? In the blind sight of our fallen eyes?”
“No!” It was not a chant back, not rehearsed, but a genuine outcry, started by someone in the front and rippling back through the rows in a chorus of No large and small.
“Does God ask us to place our trust in the songs of our poisoned tongues?”
“No!” Stronger this time, picking up steam of its own, and it pulled his feet inside the building and up the rows along the center aisle. There was something real about this interplay, something he’d never heard before, least of all in the Catholic pews of his youth, where the Mass was mourned and the guilt flowed like blood.
“In his will! Strengthened by His might! According to His glorious power! That is the path to the Kingdom of His Son!”
The scattered No swerved into a chorus of Yes and Amen and Hallelujah, and before Killian knew it he was halfway up the aisle that split the long room, and the people in the back were starting to notice him and point and wonder who this man was that had wandered into their midst.
“Ask yourself my Brothers and my Sisters, What is Imperative for the Kingdom? When you choose your actions ask, What is Imperative for the Kingdom? When you discipline your thoughts ask only, What is Imperative for the Kingdom? And answer to yourself that it is only God’s will which is Imperative. For the day of choosing will come, my Brothers and Sisters, when accounts are made!”
The Kant was gone from him in that moment, as he staggered up the aisle towards that honeyed voice. He couldn’t see who spoke. He was close enough now that he should have seen but the Spirit was on him and it blurred not his eyes but his mind until there was only the voice and the feeling. Only the Kingdom.
Applause. Cheering and whooping. He staggered down the aisle. The noise was for him. Eyes were on him. All the eyes. Pushing him down the aisle. He fell to his knees before a young man in a colorful garment that was not quite a robe but not quite a vestment. This was the source of the voice. The young preacher smiled. His teeth were imperfect, broken in his mouth, but he smiled proudly, and Killian was filled with that smile.
“Welcome to the Kingdom, Brother.”
***
“‘Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end.’ Why does this second formulation of Kant’s Categorical Imperative follow from the first? Well, the first posits autonomous will as the only possible source of moral action. That’s why animals have no morality, only instinct. Having recognized Free Will as essential to ourselves, we are bound by the Categorical Imperative to universalize that recognition. We must treat the freedom, and by extension the humanity, of ourselves and others not merely as a subjective, contingent end pursued in some cases, but as an objective end, pursued categorically, recognized universally.”
***
He found himself at home that night with no firm idea of how he’d gotten there. The shelves of books on his wall seemed remote, somehow new; his oldest and closest friends as if seeing them for the first time. He could see how worn his favorites were, worn down by his thumbs passing over and over them. He felt an immense pride in the focused hours those books represented, and yet they were strangers this night. They seemed quaint compared to the oneiric calm that filled him.
He did not sleep but did not feel tired. He had prayed before, or tried to, but always exploded with laughter within moments and been unable to regain the serious impulse. Irony, irony, irony. The greatest philosophers, the ones he loved best, they all prayed. And now he prayed as well, and he connected with something deeper, with the wellspring of the feeling that had been transmitted in that honeyed voice.
He went the next day and taught his classes, but all he thought of was the voice. Would he go again that evening? It called to him more than the drink ever had, because it was not a numbing but a sensating. Evening came and he found himself afraid, and he would have walked around the block to avoid the church except that it wasn’t remotely on his way home so he didn’t have to avoid it.
But that night when he got home, he found the prayer came to him anyway. The voice came to him, the Spirit came to him, and he had visions of himself stumbling down a thousand aisles in a thousand surprisingly deep storefronts, and he thought himself dreaming save that his eyes were not closed and the books were still there, well-thumbed as ever, yet useless when compared to the spirit.
The next night he was less afraid but still did not return, not to the honeyed voice nor the endless aisle. He could not see their faces, his fellow parishioners, but he could see the backs of their heads as he walked up the aisles, and he could hear their beatific voices every time he fell to his knees.
Then Wednesday came, and he finished his classes at three, and he sat in his office with the door closed. He tried to read but the book seemed like it came from another universe. He prayed, but not for anything, just closed his eyes and the feeling came. Three hours passed like a moment. He looked up and it was getting dark.
He went on effortless steps to the storefront church, and heard the honeyed voice from a block away. It froze him in his tracks. His mouth filled with saliva, then dried out completely in a matter of moments. A step at a time, savoring it, he approached.
“The King said to them, ‘I have dreamed a dream, and my spirit is troubled to know the dream.’ And Daniel said to the King, “The secret of this dream can neither wise men, enchanters, magicians, nor soothsayers show to you, but there is a God in Heaven who shall make its meaning clear.’”
He reached the threshold, and stepped across, looking again at the backs of the heads of a packed house. Only this time he could see faces, as some turned to talk with a neighbor or to see who had just walked in. He saw faces lined and marked, faces fat and slender, black and white and every hue in between. These were the working class, those whose welfare he tried so desperately to think of in his daily life that sometimes he wondered if he must see them as his rank inferiors. Only now he was among them, praying, not better nor worse, a part of their gathering, faithful throng in this blessed moment.
“You, O’ King, beheld a great image. Its head was of fine gold, its breast and its arms of silver, its belly and its thighs of brass, its legs of iron, its feet part of iron and part of clay. You saw a stone that was cut without hands, which struck the image on its feet of iron and clay, and broke them in pieces. Then the iron, the clay, the brass, the silver, and the gold, broken in pieces together, and became like the Chaff of the summer threshing floors; and the wind carried them away, so that no place was ever found for them; and the stone that struck the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth.”
He moved down the aisle, gawking at the impossible realness of the faces, filled with light, filled with Spirit, humanity fulfilled. He wanted to speak to every one of them, and yet there was nothing to say, nothing that needed to be spoken aloud anyway. Halfway down and people were pointing at him, recognizing him, marking his return. His jaw was slack, his eyes sallow, overwhelmed as he was by the combination of the moment’s weight and his own lightness.
“Then Daniel said to the King ‘I shall tell this dream’s interpretation now before the King. You, O’ King, are king of Kings, to whom the God of Heaven has given the Kingdom, the power, the strength, and the glory; and wherever the children of men dwell, the animals of the field and the bird of the sky have He given into your hand, and has made you to rule over them all; you are the head of gold. After you shall arise another kingdom inferior to you, and a third Kingdom of brass, which shall bear rule over the earth. The fourth Kingdom shall be strong as iron, because iron breaks in pieces and subdues all things. Then a divided Kingdom, part of clay and part of iron, so the Kingdom shall be part strong and part broken.’”
He reached the front of the aisle, which was not in fact endless. He stood before the young preacher with the crooked teeth, and then he fell to his knees, ready to receive a blessing.
“‘And in those days’, Daniel said to him, ‘shall the God of Heaven set up a Kingdom which shall never be destroyed, nor shall its sovereignty end; And this is the stone of your dream, which became a mountain and filled the earth.’”
The preacher looked down at him, and smiled. But that smile stirred a great unease within Killian. The preacher laid hands on him, and the hands felt unnatural for all their supple charm. He heard the words of the blessing, heard the cheers of the crowd behind him, but none of it could shake the feeling:
The preacher was not human, but machine.
***
“‘Thus the third practical principle follows from the first two as the ultimate condition of their harmony with practical reason: The idea of the will of every rational being as a universally legislating will.’ I told you these would get more confusing as we went. This one further emphasizes the idea of ‘autonomy’ or free will, freedom of action. This is as opposed to ‘heteronomy’, which isn’t sexual it just means “rule-making-by-others”. Kant makes it clear that doing the right things according to the principle of universalization isn’t enough if you aren’t doing it by your own will. You cannot be ignorant or otherwise coerced. It has to come from you.”
***
Killian became obsessed. He sat in his office after classes every day, doing research on the internet. Then he would go to the church, and sit in the back, and listen to the preacher. It no longer filled him with the Spirit, yet he went every night. He hadn’t been to Harvey’s for scotch in months. He began to meet his fellow parishioners when they would come over and introduce themselves, but he held himself back from them. Instead he would sit in a corner and seethe.
It became clear to him that, if he was correct and the preacher was not human, the parishioners didn’t know it. None of them discussed it openly, and he didn’t ask directly of course, but they also didn’t seem to shy away from related topics. When he brought up the latest trends in android tech, they didn’t hasten to change the subject. Indeed he was forced to listen to a cherubic toll-booth-worker harangue him for thirty minutes about the dangers of sex robots after he mentioned a study he’d read in passing.
He researched the history of the church. When he was unable to find anything, he hired a private investigator with money he could not spare on an adjunct professor’s salary to dig deeper into its origins. It was less than four years old, and had started shortly after the first round of post-uncanny-valley androids had hit the commercial market, a fact which for him all but confirmed his suspicions.
He knew if he got real, final confirmation, he was going to tell the congregation. There wasn’t the slightest doubt in his mind about it. They deserved to know. He saw the collection pillar going around, people touching their phones to it to give their tithe for the service. They thought it was putting food on someone’s table. Whoever or whatever was really getting that money, it was a grift.
He started waiting after the nighttime service, watching for the young preacher to leave and following him home. Except he never left. He had a registered address on his tax forms, but he never seemed to leave the storefront church and go there. Two nights, then three, four, five, Killian stayed there until three or four in the morning, running himself ragged teaching during the day and sleeping a few hours here and there.
He went to the preacher's listed address and staked it out, and not a single light ever came on. He called in sick for three straight days and sat in his car outside, leaving only to go to the bathroom and buy food, but not a single visitor went in or out in 72 hours. At the end of that period, bleary from lack of sleep and driven by seething anger, he tied a bandana around his face and broke into the house.
There was no furniture. It was a couple of empty rooms and a kitchen with no refrigerator.
He went back to the church and saw the preacher preach once more, and now it seemed so obvious, the not-quite-humanness of the motions, the impossibly consistent tone of that honeyed voice. How had he ever been taken in? How were all these people taken in? He looked around at their faces, laughing and solemn by turns, and pitied them. How could they tolerate being such fools, even if they didn’t know?
***
“‘Act according to maxims of a universally legislating member of a merely possible Kingdom of Ends’ Ah, yes, Utopia. That place where all beings follow the Categorical Imperative. In such a realm, we are all sovereigns when deciding morality, and subjects when obeying it. When each of us acts out of reverence for all universal laws that make the Kingdom possible, and treats all fellow citizens as ends-in-themselves rather than means, then shall perfection be achieved. Kant certainly thought so anyway. What do you think? Is this a pipe dream, or will we get there one day?”
***
Killian went to the church a final time. He lacked hard proof, but had the witness of his heart, and he knew that more of these folk might be swayed by forceful witness than a piece of paper, even one with a confession writ on it. He knew that this was a sham. He stepped across the threshold. The feeling was gone. It was the same strangely-deep room, the same mismatched rows of chairs, the same back of the same heads, the same honeyed voice, and yet. And yet, inside him the feeling was gone, and he could not summon it. That’s because it’s not real, he told himself. All these folk were living and paying something that wasn’t what they thought it was, and he was here to set them free.
“At the appointed time shall he return; but it shall not be in the latter time as it was in the former,” the honeyed voice called out. He knew that it must be coincidence that the verse might refer to him. The preacher—whoever controlled the preacher—didn’t even know his name. They’d never spoken. There was no way they could know what he had come to do. It was a coincidence.
“Then the ships shall come against him; therefore shall he be grieved, and shall return, and have indignation against the holy covenant, and shall do his own will. He shall return preferring those who forsake the holy covenant.”
He tried to advance down the aisle. He had practiced this. He had whispered his speech into the mirror, shouted it into his pillow, intoned it in every possible way until it felt like a prayer. And yet now, he could not step. His feet had been light; now they were made of clay. His vision had been wide; now his eyes were metal. He stood still, just past the threshold, awkwardly in view of everyone who might turn around to see him.
“Forces shall stand on his part, and they shall preface the sanctuary, even the fortress, and shall take away the burnt offering, and he shall set up the abomination that makes desolate.”
People were turning to see now. The back of heads became faces, not aware of the news he had come to deliver, blissfuly enraptured to the honeyed voice, in thrall of its spell and getting what they needed from it, some respite from workaday lives for which they paid only what they could afford.
Need they be awoken? Is that Imperative for the Kingdom?
“Such as do wickedly against the covenant shall he pervert by flatteries, but the people who know their God shall be strong!”
Amen came in a loud chorus from the assembly. Even those who gawked back at him, standing still in the aisle, shuffling his feet without going anywhere, even they shouted amen.
“I say, the people who know their God shall be strong!”
Who was he, to take this from them? He could not even say that he would not go back, if he could press a button and fall once more under that spell. Perhaps that spell, cast with whatever magic was available, actually was salvation. Perhaps his seething anger was only envy. Perhaps his brave truth-telling was a tantrum for a lost pacifier. He remembered that feeling, better than drink, better than… not just better but different, suffusing everything, that lightness that took him places to which he did not otherwise know the route.
“Those who are wise among the people shall instruct many. Some of those who are wise shall fall, to refine them, and to purify, even to the time of the end, because it is yet for the time appointed.”
He stepped back, across the threshold, into the night. Before he was fully gone, the heads had turned back to the preacher, and he could no longer see their faces. He turned and walked away, and the honeyed voice followed him long after the words were lost beneath the vastness of the sky.
He walked back towards campus, on feet that carried him without thought. He entered Harvey’s, and sat at the bar. Nobody looked up from their drinks to acknowledge him. There was a new bartender, who he did not know. He ordered a scotch and sipped it, alone in a crowd. He wondered if he would ever feel again what he had first felt upon walking into that storefront. He wondered if he would take that feeling, if the only way he could get it was in the knowledge that it was fake. He sipped his scotch. He did not have that choice.
END
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this story, you can help me out by liking, commenting, or sharing with others. Have a great week!
“Who was he, to take this from them?” I think the issue isn’t taking their salvation away, but not having anything to replace it with. If this robot is their only source of hope, and Killian has no other means of giving them salvation, then taking it away would only leave them hopeless. It may be the morally right thing to do, but it’s still cruel.