APOLOGETICS. – Apologetics is the science that demonstrates the rational credibility of the Catholic faith.
In this definition, the word “science” is not understood in the old and restricted Aristotelian-scholastic sense, but in the modern sense of a system of logically coordinated and demonstrably certain questions concerning a determinate order of truths or facts, specified by its own formal object and irreducible to any other science.
To determine the specific object of apologetics, it is necessary to clarify the nature of the Catholic religion. This religion was positively established by God and communicated by Him to men in a supernatural manner through certain envoys known as prophets. This revelation, which began at the origin of humanity, continued through the patriarchs, Moses, and the prophets of the Old Testament, was completed and closed with Jesus Christ and His twelve Apostles. Jesus entrusted the entire divine revelation to a visible, hierarchical, indefectible society—the Church He instituted—entrusted with the mission of preserving, interpreting, and teaching it to all humanity for all time, intending that the Christian religion be universally obligatory under pain of eternal damnation. The Church is therefore the proximate rule of faith, and man must believe all that the Church proposes as revealed by God. The formal motive of faith, however, is not direct, intrinsic, scientific, or philosophical knowledge of revealed truths. Most of these truths are impenetrable mysteries beyond human comprehension. Even those revealed doctrines accessible to human intelligence in their intrinsic evidence must be believed on the authority of God revealing them, as the Vatican Council teaches (Constitution *Dei Filius*, ch. 3, can. 2). The Catholic religion is thus neither a philosophy nor a science but a faith based on divine authority. This faith, which is supremely obligatory, must be certain, firm, and irrevocable, as all professions of faith required by the Church demand. It must also be reasonable: “an obedience consonant with reason,” as the Vatican Council states (loc. cit., ch. 3). It would not be reasonable but imprudent and rash, nor could it be firm or obligatory, if the believer did not know with certainty that the truths of faith were truly revealed by God and that the Catholic Church is the legitimate interpreter of divine revelation. A doubtful or merely probable knowledge of these two facts would leave room for prudent fear of error, thereby preventing the firmness of assent; it would also render the precept of faith uncertain, since *lex dubia non obligat*. The Church has repeatedly and explicitly declared the insufficiency of probable opinion and the possibility and necessity of certain knowledge regarding the fact of divine revelation (Denz.-U., 1171, 1637, 1790, 1799, 1812, 2025, 2145).
Nevertheless, mathematical certainty is not required. Moral certainty suffices, excluding any prudent doubt or reasonable fear of error.
The existence of a divine revelation and its preservation through the Church are two historical and contingent facts that cannot be deduced from a philosophical principle (metaphysical certainty) nor inferred from a physical law (physical certainty), but can only be grounded in historical testimony. They therefore entail only a certainty of moral order. Our historical-critical investigations may leave some difficulties or hesitations, but these are like transparent clouds that do not obscure the light of the sun.
The primary, apodictic, and certain arguments of apologetics are miracles in their threefold aspect: physical, intellectual, and moral.
A miracle is a divine testimony in proof of the credibility of revealed doctrine; it is the divine seal that authenticates the supernatural origin of the Catholic religion. Since God, infinite Truth, cannot attest to falsity, we may conclude with certainty the credibility of a revelation even if guaranteed by a single miracle. The demonstration through miracles can be outlined as follows: history assures us with moral certainty that extraordinary deeds were performed by God to attest to the divine and revealed origin of the Catholic religion; science proves with physical certainty that these deeds are not natural but divine; philosophy demonstrates with metaphysical certainty that God cannot bear witness to a falsehood. The Catholic religion is therefore divine and revealed, and consequently may be reasonably believed.
There are also secondary, confirmatory arguments: the sublime perfection of revealed doctrine and its full correspondence with the spiritual needs of human nature, the fruits of Catholic doctrine in the moral order, and others to be discussed elsewhere.
It might seem unnecessary to dwell on the necessity of a science that justifies Catholic faith before reason. Is this justification not the first need and duty of our faith, according to the admonition of St. Peter: “Always be ready to give an explanation (*πρὸς ἀπολογίαν*) to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is within you” (1 Pt 3:15)?
Yet errors and prejudices have obscured this truth and produced a pernicious apologetic laxity. There are voluntarists who, lacking confidence in reasoning reason, believe they can place Catholic faith on a more secure foundation by making our will its basis. For them, apologetics must consist in moral therapy and the valorization of the so-called “reasons of the heart.” It is true that the act of supernatural faith is elicited under the impulse of the will, but this occurs only after the judgment of the rational credibility of the truths of faith—that is, once the apologetic process has been completed. Catholic faith is not an arbitrary despotism of the will, a blind adhesion of sentiment, fanaticism, or the legendary *credo quia absurdum*, falsely attributed to St. Augustine. Such a faith would be immoral and physically impossible, for the intellect can adhere only to what is true or at least subjectively believed to be such, and the will cannot render true what is false. The will does intervene in the judgment of the credibility of revealed doctrine, but not to replace reason, even partially; it merely removes obstacles that might hinder a convincing view of intellectual arguments. The moral preparation with its voluntaristic motives is not the object of apologetics but of moral disciplines.
To volunteers are added the dogmatists who regard faith as an exclusive work of supernatural grace. For them apologetics must confine itself to inculcating the necessity of mortifying one’s passions and to indicating the means chosen by God to communicate his grace, namely prayer and the sacraments. Faith is not won by reasoning but by praying and living II. The practice of faith will make each believer feel that it is the truth. “Do you wish to go to faith? Act as though you already believed. Take holy water and have Masses celebrated” (Pascal). Undoubtedly Catholic faith is a gift of God’s grace, yet this grace does not destroy the rights of reason; it is neither a magical force nor a kind of suggestion that makes us judge as certain what is doubtful and as rational what is illogical. God’s grace often intervenes to facilitate a more effective knowledge of apologetic arguments. But these arguments are convincing in themselves and by themselves, even if not seen with the “eyes of faith.” Nor is the supernatural intervention of grace absolutely necessary in the apologetic process, “cum recta ratio fidei fundamenta demonstret” (Council of Trent, loc. cit., chap. 4).
Contrary to the teaching of the Church is the claim to know experimentally the truth of the Catholic religion by practicing it without faith. The first necessary condition for belonging to the Catholic Church and for receiving the sacraments is faith. To receive them without faith is profanation and imposture.
Some dogmatists have seen a contradiction between the scientific, natural, necessary conclusion of apologetics and the freedom and supernatural character of Catholic faith. The difficult problem of reconciling the judgment of credibility—conclusion of a syllogism—with the act of faith, which is commanded by the will and a gift of divine grace, would require treatment beyond the scope of this article. It suffices to say that they are two distinct intellectual acts, specified by different formal motives. The judgment of credibility, motivated by apologetic arguments, is not the act of faith, motivated by the authority of God revealing, but only the necessary condition so that faith may be reasonable. And the condition can be of a different nature and have different properties from those of the entity conditioned.
Another error, of Protestant origin, is the belief that merely expounding revealed doctrine suffices to make its truth known—indeed, that this is the best way. Certainly the sublimity of Catholic doctrine is a great argument for its credibility, yet it does not give us certainty of its divine origin through supernatural revelation, as will be seen in another article.
The most widespread prejudices against the necessity of apologetics are found among those engaged in the priestly ministry, the cure of souls, and missionary activity, who in the name of experience assert that apologetic disquisitions, while failing to lead unbelievers to faith, disturb the consciences of many believers by raising doubts and difficulties they had never known. These persons confuse necessity with sufficiency and general necessity with the individual needs of apologetics. Undoubtedly apologetics alone cannot resolve the problem of unbelief, nor is it a complete preparation of all the faculties of the human soul for faith. The Catholic religion is not merely a doctrine whose logical foundation need only be demonstrated; it is also a moral law, harder to practice than to believe, since it demands the mortification of all our passions and the total transformation of carnal man so as to conform him to Jesus Crucified. The motives of moral and volitional order, which determine the transition from the judgment of credibility to the act of faith, ordinarily have the greatest prominence in conversions because they are the most decisive; yet intellectual preparation is no superfluous luxury. We must beware of certain facile but ephemeral conversions based solely on sentiment, life’s disillusionments, or needs for comfort and happiness. Apologetics is necessary to prepare the unbeliever intellectually for faith in the manner required by his rational nature and to give to his faith, as to the faith of all believers, a logical, stable, and firm foundation.
When we proclaim the necessity of apologetics, we do not mean that it is indispensable to the individual faith of every believer. Each faithful person must know with certainty that the Catholic religion is revealed by God and that the Roman Catholic Church is the one true Church founded by Jesus Christ. Of these two facts, as of every other truth, one can have a certainty of common sense, vulgar and prescientific, and a critical, reflective, scientific certainty. Both give the certainty of adherence and exclude error subjectively and objectively. Yet rudimentary and indistinct knowledge of the motives of credibility suffices only insofar as culture is lacking and reason is still immature.
The scientific demonstration of apologetics is therefore necessary for all priests who are teachers of the faith and have the office of instructing the faithful and defending them against the errors of unbelief. Today it is also necessary for all educated laity for three reasons: 1) whoever has been given by God an able intelligence and possesses a higher culture must have a greater knowledge of the Catholic religion and therefore also of its rational foundations; 2) the person of a certain culture needs apologetics to preserve his faith and to resolve many troubling difficulties encountered in school, lectures, the press, and conversations; 3) the educated layman also has the duty of intellectual apostolate imposed by Christian charity, an apostolate now necessary because of the spread of unbelief that, invoking history, science, and philosophy, denies not merely one or another Catholic dogma as in past ages of growth, but the very existence of any revealed religion. Priests and educated laity must not give credence through their silence to the pseudoscientific conclusions of contemporary unbelief.
Apologetics has its origins in Christian apologies, from which it slowly developed; yet only in recent times have its proper object and scientific procedure been defined.
What happens to every science also happens to apologetics. First a science is born, develops, lives; then specialists define its object, fix its limits, and establish its method. Yet in the case of apologetics there still reigns no little confusion on these problems. Many manuals of apologetics contain treatises and questions of the most disparate kind. We find in them philosophical theses on the objectivity of knowledge, proofs of the existence of God, discussions of the spirituality and immortality of the soul, dogmatic questions on the supernatural order, on faith, on the internal constitution of the Church, on the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, discussions of problems in ecclesiastical history, canon law, comparative religion, etc. The practical utility of such manuals is not denied, but an encyclopedic conception of apologetics deprives the discipline—which has the task of establishing the rational foundation of the Catholic faith—of its character and prestige as a science; it overwhelms the reader with a jumble of questions, some treated by dogmatic method, others by rational method, and still others by both methods at once, sometimes confusedly; and it leaves many with the impression that the rational credibility of Catholic doctrine—the only purpose of apologetics—depends on the solution of so many other problems, on whose solution legitimate reservations may be entertained. Another grave consequence of these encyclopedic manuals is the inevitable superficiality of their treatment. Scientific progress has today reached such a stage that competence in many and diverse branches of human knowledge surpasses the common capacity of the human mind.
The delimitation of the field of apologetics is therefore of the utmost importance. “For it is a fault in every science that a man should linger over what lies outside its scope” (St. Thomas Aquinas, *In libr. Ethic.*, I, lect. ii). To know which questions are extraneous to apologetics, one must bear in mind the differences between it and: a) apologetics (in the strict sense), b) dogmatic theology, c) philosophy, d) history.
Apologetics, according to its etymology, denotes a discourse (*logos*) defined by a defense (*apo-*) against any attack. Plato wrote the *Apology of Socrates*, St. Athanasius the *Apology of His Flight*, Newman the *Apology of His Life*. In Christian usage, apologetics is the defense against a particular attack on the Catholic religion, whose object may be quite varied: a doctrine, a moral precept, a disciplinary law, a great figure of the Church, etc. It is a debate with the adversary to refute his error. It therefore has an essentially defensive purpose, for which the apologist descends to the adversary’s ground, adopting the method required by the particular case, and may employ contingent arguments of personal and relative value (*argumenta ad hominem*). Christian apologetics is not a science in itself but is the defensive function of every sacred science.
Apologetics has the same etymological origin as the word “apology,” but as a substantivized adjective (ἀπολογητική) it implies *epistēmē* and designates a science, as do other adjectives of Greek origin, e.g., physics, ethics, politics, etc. Nor does it derive its raison d’être from the need for defense against contrary impugnments of unbelief; rather, it arises from the necessity of providing a rational basis for the faith of believers. It ought to exist even if, hypothetically, all men in the world were Catholic. Apologetics therefore has an essentially positive task, possesses its own formal object, and employs arguments of objective and absolute value.
Apologetics must therefore leave to apologetics (in the strict sense) or rather to the respective sacred sciences the refutation of errors foreign to its formal object; for example, to biblical sciences the solution of cosmological, biological, anthropological problems concerning Holy Scripture; to dogmatic theology the reconciliation of dogmas of faith with the conclusions of the natural sciences; to ecclesiastical history the question of the Holy Inquisition, the Galileo affair, and many other accusations against the Catholic Church, the popes, etc.
b) Dogmatic theology is the science not of the existence but of the content of revelation as taught by the Catholic Church. It presupposes apologetics, from which it receives its logical premise. In its demonstrations, dogmatic theology proceeds in the light of faith, i.e., with arguments of divine authority drawn from supernatural revelation and the magisterium of the Church. Arguments of reason are secondary in dogmatics. Apologetics, by contrast, proceeds with the natural light of reason and proves its theses with historical, scientific, and philosophical arguments. If it argues from Holy Scripture, it considers it as a historical and human book. If it takes account of the decisions of the Church’s magisterium, it accepts them as data of the problem to be demonstrated by arguments of reason. Certainly dogmatic theology can and must treat apologetic questions and expound the Church’s abundant teaching on the subject, but on a different plane, as it does for other questions that are the formal object of other sciences.
Apologetics is thus distinguished from dogmatic theology by its object and method. Hence the dogmatic treatises on the internal constitution of the Church, the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, the inspiration of Holy Scripture, divine Tradition, supernatural faith, etc., must be referred to dogmatics.
c) Philosophy has as its object abstract, universal, eternal truths, whose intrinsic evidence it demonstrates with metaphysical certainty. Apologetics, on the other hand, has as its object historical, contingent, free facts, and its conclusions have extrinsic evidence and moral certainty. Apologetics makes use of logic, metaphysics, and above all theodicy, but this does not mean it must be considered a part of philosophy. Dogmatic theology also makes use of philosophy, yet no one denies their specific difference.
On the basis of this distinction, all essentially philosophical treatises must be referred to philosophy, including those on the existence of God, natural religion, the spirituality and immortality of the soul—these are the *prolegomena*, not precisely the foundations, of faith.
d) History attests only the material facts of apologetic demonstration, which consists precisely in proving that these facts are not human, natural—as are all facts that are the object of history—but divine and supernatural, and accomplished in connection with the proof of a thesis with supernatural revelation. Therefore, while apologetics presupposes history and makes use of historical criticism, it surpasses history in its object, purpose, and arguments. One must not therefore confuse apologetics with the history of religions, which studies religious facts only from a historical point of view. Nor is it necessary, in order to lead an unbeliever to faith, to show him—as prolegomena—the errors, absurdities, degrading practices, and ridiculous rites that religious sentiment has bestowed upon itself. This could indeed scandalize him and lead him to conceive of religion as a misfortune for humanity. Only after positively demonstrating the divine origin of the Catholic religion can apologetics usefully prove the transcendence of this religion, which came from heaven, over all religions of human invention, while avoiding the exaggerations of some apologists who cannot see, outside the revealed religion, anything but superstition, error, and immorality. Man has been able, by his natural powers alone, to arrive at knowledge of religious truth and the practice of moral virtues. Nor can it be excluded that followers of false religions, especially if in good faith, may have lacked entirely special helps even of a supernatural order.
The author must demonstrate the historical reality of divine revelation. But since this is a historical-dynastic and supernatural fact, it is first necessary to know what this revelation is and whether, considered abstractly, it is possible and above all discernible as divine. These philosophical questions constitute the first treatise of the author. The second treatise has as its object the historical fact of divine revelation, accomplished in different times but divided into two great phases: that of the Old and that of the New Testament. Jesus Christ is the center of the history of divine revelation, the supreme revealer who completed and definitively closed it; therefore divine revelation is also called Christian revelation.
The author, in demonstrating the historical fact of divine revelation, can therefore limit himself to proving the divine mission of Jesus Christ to communicate revealed religion to men.
With this demonstration, the revelation of the Old Testament is implicitly proven as well, insofar as Jesus Christ confirmed it, made it his own, and abolished that part which had the function of preparation and symbolic figure of the definitive revelation. However, in the demonstration of Christian revelation the author does not neglect the arguments that can be drawn from the history of the religion of the Old Testament, to which reference will be made later.
The divine mission of Jesus Christ is then proven by demonstrating: 1. that Jesus Christ declared himself to be the envoy of God and the Messiah foretold by the Prophets of the Old Testament; 2. that this declaration of Jesus Christ is credible: a) from the intellectual and moral transcendence of his personality; b) from the miraculous facts connected with his messianic testimony, accomplished both in the physical order, in the intellectual order, and in the moral order. It is not necessarily the task of the author to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus Christ: this properly belongs to dogmatic theology. The author, when he has demonstrated that Jesus Christ spoke in the name and by the authority of God, can already conclude that his doctrine is revealed truth.
The third and final treatise of the author has as its object the divine mission of the Roman Catholic Church to guard, interpret, and teach Christian revelation. It is divided into two parts: the first demonstrates that Jesus Christ, while living on earth, in order to preserve and propagate his doctrine, instituted a visible, hierarchical, and perpetual organism, with the primacy of Peter and his successors; the second part demonstrates that the Roman Catholic Church is the Church founded by Jesus Christ: a) because it is the only legitimate continuation of it, with the Roman Pontiff as successor of Peter; b) because its mandate is authenticated by many physical, intellectual, and moral miracles. This demonstration by means of miraculous facts is analogous to the other concerning the divine mission of Jesus Christ. The Roman Catholic Church affirms that it was founded by Jesus Christ as guardian and teacher of the Christian religion, and in proof of this affirmation it appeals to the miraculous facts accomplished by God in its favor. It is historically and scientifically evident that these facts are real, supernatural, and explicitly or implicitly connected with the aforesaid declaration of the Roman Catholic Church. And since God cannot attest to what is false, the declaration of the Roman Catholic Church concerning its divine mission is reasonably credible. The demonstration, moreover, of the identity of the Roman Catholic Church with the Church of Jesus Christ by means of the notes of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, based as it is on dogmatic presuppositions, can be more fully accomplished by dogmatic theology.
Some apologists, following the example of Cardinal Dechamps (1810–83), have proposed substituting for the apologetic method outlined above, which proceeds genetically from Jesus Christ to the Church, the so-called ascending or regressive method, which goes from the Church to Jesus Christ. We have not, said Lacordaire, changed tactics. Instead of starting from the base, we have started from the summit; instead of digging into the foundations of the pyramid, we have considered its head and its crown, beginning from the most visible part, in order to descend then to the most hidden part, which supports the entire edifice (Conférences de Notre-Dame, conf. 27). This method, which is based on the marvelous life of the Roman Catholic Church as a perennial motive for the credibility of its divine origin, can be followed, provided that the demonstration of the divine mission of Jesus Christ is not excluded, that the possibility of demonstrating the fact of Christian revelation independently of the demonstration of the divine institution of the Roman Church is not denied, and that the marvelous life of the Church is not considered the sole certain motive for the credibility of the Catholic religion.
The best and most natural method remains the descending one, which first demonstrates the existence of divine revelation and then its preservation in the Roman Catholic Church, without, however, separating the two demonstrations, which complement and reinforce each other.
There exists among apologetic arguments a relationship of connection, solidarity, and convergence that sheds new light and gives special efficacy to the final conclusion of the credibility of the Catholic religion. For indeed:
a) The Catholic religion contains a system of doctrines, theoretical and practical, immune from evident errors and immoralities, coherent, sublime, and responsive to the deepest needs and aspirations of humanity.
b) The preacher of this doctrine was a humble thirty-year-old artisan from the obscure land of Galilee, unlettered, who taught in an extraordinary and new manner and with singular persuasive efficacy. The marvelous wisdom of Jesus Christ excludes the hypothesis of his error regarding his divine mission, and his incomparable holiness, far from suggesting the hypothesis of a lie, constitutes a miracle of moral order and thus a divine confirmation of the truth of his assertion of being the Messiah foretold and prepared for by the religion of the Old Testament.
c) Even this religion, which foretold and prepared for Jesus Christ and his work, in its turn presents transcendent and divine characteristics. Its ethical monotheism, the moral greatness of its Prophets, its gradual and harmonious development, the unity and stability of its doctrine for so many centuries and through every kind of obstacle are not
facts explainable naturally. The Old and New Testaments are two phases of one and the same religion that continue and complement each other. The Prophets of the Old Testament predicted the perfection and triumph throughout the world of the religion of Israel by means of the Messiah, of whom they traced the biography.
d) In Jesus Christ all the prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled. And the coming, life, and death of Jesus Christ were accompanied by very many miracles of every kind, culminating in his resurrection from the dead.
e) Reasoning a priori, it is not reasonable to suppose that Jesus Christ would have entrusted the preservation and propagation of His teaching to a book, which His enemies could destroy and which each person could interpret as they wished. History, moreover, demonstrates that Jesus Christ in fact founded a visible, hierarchical, and perpetual society for the custody, interpretation, and teaching of His doctrine, and that the Roman Catholic Church is the only Church founded by Jesus Christ. This historical demonstration is confirmed by the seal of countless miracles performed by God throughout the centuries of the Church’s history, which directly attest to its divine mission and indirectly to the divine mission of its Founder. The Roman Catholic Church, moreover, by its very nature—through its marvelous propagation, outstanding holiness, inexhaustible fruitfulness in every good work, its Catholic unity, and its inviolable stability—provides a great and abiding motive for credibility and an irrefutable testimony to its divine origin (Council of Trent, loc. cit., chap. 3).
“That even a single one of these signs, in which divine action is manifested, should be found in the history of a religion is already sufficient proof; but that all these signs should converge and unite in the religion of Jesus Christ is an unanswerable argument. Everything is explained by a single cause: the action of God, Who wills to manifest Himself to men... In the rationalist hypothesis, as many coincidences, exceptional circumstances, and hidden forces are required as there are characteristic facts of Christianity. The divine truth of Christianity is the only key that resolves an immense number of historical and moral problems” (P. de Broglie, *Problèmes et conclusions de l'histoire des religions*, 4th ed., Paris 1894, p. 363).
The classical, traditional apologetic, based on history and relying primarily—if not exclusively—on extrinsic motives rather than revealed truth, has been deemed too historicist, extrinsicist, and intellectualist by some contemporary lay Catholic philosophers, who have proposed new methods deemed more suitable and effective for the modern mentality, steeped as it is in Kantianism, subjectivism, and immanentism.
The common characteristic of the new apologetic is its disregard for the argument of miraculous facts, judged at least ineffective, and its reliance instead on the observation of the spiritual, moral, and social needs of human nature, which only the Catholic religion can fully satisfy. The French philosopher G. Fonsegrie (1852–1917), in many writings—especially in *Le catholicisme et la vie de l'esprit* (Paris 1898)—demonstrated the identity between the laws of spiritual and moral human life and the beliefs and principles of Christianity, concluding that this religion is indispensable to our “higher, richer, and, one might say, more vibrant and fully lived life.”
F. Brunetière (1849–1906), a man of action who focused more on practice than theory and was chiefly concerned with the “social question,” saw in Catholicism a unique social and civilizing force in the world. To resolve the problems of social life, it is necessary to believe in Catholic truth. Science has proven incapable of establishing a morality or remedying social ills; in this field, it has “gone bankrupt.” Rational speculation, moreover, has a corrosive effect on moral and religious life. Man is a being who lives by faith; and faith “is the foundation, or, if you prefer, the condition of every morality, every science, and every action” (*Discours de combat*, I, Paris 1900, p. 310). It is therefore unnecessary to investigate the speculative reasons that justify Catholicism before reason. It is justified by the fact that, more than any other religion, it satisfies the desire for a moral life and does not exclude the possibility of a better religion. Another serious defect of the new apologetic is that it dismisses or at least fails to give due consideration to miraculous facts, which are the only certain arguments for the credibility of revealed doctrine. Finally, the new apologetic rests on false philosophical and theological principles.
According to Brunetière, all our knowledge—whether scientific or religious—is based on an irrational presupposition: belief. Blondel, while not accepting it, begins from the philosophy of imagination, which considers religion merely as the spontaneous result of inextinguishable exigencies of the human spirit, and from an inaccurate concept of the supernatural, regarded as a postulate of the natural order. The supernatural, by definition, transcends every cognitive and volitional exigency of created nature and is a free gift of God. Strictly speaking, the need that man has for religious truth or divine assistance for his spiritual and moral perfection could have been satisfied by a religion of the natural order.
Blondel denied having intended to make the supernatural a concrete exigency of our nature, and throughout his life he strove to reconcile his theories with orthodox doctrine. In his later works (*L'Être, La Pensée, L'Action*), he modified his positions, explaining man’s need and psychological distress as a nostalgia for the supernatural state from which he has fallen.