Apologetics

APOLOGETICS. - Apologetics is the science that demonstrates the rational credibility of the Catholic faith.

In this definition the word "science" is not understood according to the old and narrow Aristotelian-Scholastic concept, but in the modern sense of a system of questions logically coordinated and demonstrated with certainty, concerning a determined order of truths or facts, specified by a proper formal object, not reducible to another science.

To determine the specific object of apologetics it is necessary to specify the nature of the Catholic religion. This religion was positively established by God and communicated by God himself to men in a supernatural manner, through the intermediary of certain envoys of his, called prophets. This revelation, begun at the origin of humanity, continued with the patriarchs, Moses and the prophets of the Old Testament, was completed and closed with Jesus Christ and his twelve Apostles. Jesus entrusted the whole of divine revelation to a visible, hierarchical, indefectible society - the Church instituted by him - with the mission of guarding it, interpreting it, and teaching it to all humanity for all times, willing that the Christian religion be universally obligatory under penalty of eternal damnation. The Church is therefore the proximate rule of faith; and man must believe all that the Church proposes to him as revealed by God. The formal motive of faith, moreover, is not the direct, intrinsic, scientific or philosophical knowledge of the revealed truths. The majority of these truths are mysteries impenetrable and incomprehensible to the human intellect. And even the doctrines revealed by God that are accessible to man's intelligence in their intrinsic evidence must be believed on the authority of God who reveals them, as the Council of the Vatican teaches (const. Dei Filius, cap. 3, can. 2). The Catholic religion is therefore not a philosophy nor a science, but a faith of divine authority. This supremely obligatory faith must be certain, firm, irrevocable, as all the professions of faith that the Church requires of her followers demand. And it must be reasonable: "obsequium rationi consentaneum," as the Council of the Vatican says (loc. cit., cap. 3). Now it would not be reasonable but imprudent and temerarious, nor could it be firm or obligatory, if the believer did not know with certainty that the truths of faith have really been 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 a prudent fear of falling into error, and therefore would impede the firmness of assent; and furthermore it would render uncertain the precept of faith, which would no longer be obligatory, because lex dubia non obligat. The Church has several times and explicitly declared the insufficiency of a probable opinion and the possibility and necessity of a certain knowledge of the fact of divine revelation (Denz-U., 1171, 1637, 1790, 1799, 1812, 2025, 2145).

Mathematical certainty is not required, however. Moral certainty suffices, which excludes every prudent doubt, every reasonable fear of erring.

The existence of a divine revelation and its preservation by means of the Church are two historical and contingent facts, which we cannot deduce from a philosophical principle (metaphysical certainty) nor infer from a physical law (physical certainty), but can only ground on historical testimonies. They therefore involve only a certainty of the moral order. Our researches of historical criticism may leave some difficulty or hesitation. But they are transparent clouds that do not veil the light of the sun.

The apodictic, certain, primary arguments of the apologetic demonstration are the miraculous facts in their threefold species: physical, intellectual, moral.

The miracle is a divine testimony in proof of the credibility of the revealed doctrine, it is the divine seal that authenticates the supernatural origin of the Catholic religion. And since God, infinite truth, cannot attest to falsehood, we can with certainty conclude the credibility of a revelation guaranteed even by a single miracle. The demonstration by miracle can be schematized thus. History assures us with moral certainty that extraordinary facts have been accomplished by God to attest the divine and revealed origin of the Catholic religion. Science proves to us with physical certainty that these facts are not natural but divine. Philosophy demonstrates to us with metaphysical certainty that God cannot be a witness to a falsehood. The Catholic religion is therefore divine and revealed, and consequently can reasonably be believed.

There are furthermore secondary, confirmatory arguments: the sublime perfection of the revealed doctrine and its full correspondence with the spiritual needs of human nature, the fruits of Catholic doctrine in the moral order, and others of which we shall speak elsewhere.

It might seem useless to linger to illustrate the necessity of a science that is the justification of the Catholic faith before reason. Is such a justification not perhaps the first need and the first duty of our faith, according to the admonition of St. Peter: "Parati semper estote ad satisfactionem (πρὸς ἀπολογίαν) omni poscenti vos rationem de ea, quae in vobis est, spe" (I Pt. 3, 5)?

But errors and prejudices have obscured this truth and produced a baneful apologetic laxism. There are the voluntarists who, having no confidence in reasoning reason, believe they can place the Catholic faith on a surer basis, giving it our will as its foundation. For these, apologetics must consist in a moral therapeutics and in the bringing into value of the so-called "reasons of the heart." It is true that the act of supernatural faith is accomplished under the impulse of the will, but this happens after the judgment of the rational credibility of the truths of faith, that is, when the apologetic cycle has been closed. The Catholic faith is not an arbitrary act of the despotism of the will, a blind adherence of sentiment, a fanaticism, the legendary credo quia absurdum, falsely attributed to St. Augustine. A faith of such a kind would be immoral and physically impossible, because the intellect can adhere only to a thing that is true or at least subjectively believed to be such, and the will cannot demonstrate to be true what is false. The will intervenes also in the judgment of the credibility of the revealed doctrine, but not to substitute, even partially, for reason; it only removes the obstacles that can impede a convincing vision of the arguments of the intellectual order. And the moral preparation with its related voluntaristic motives is not the object of apologetics but of the moral disciplines.

To the voluntarists are added the dogmatists, who consider faith as an exclusive work of supernatural grace. For them, apologetics must limit 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 conquered by reasoning, but by praying and living it. The practice of faith will make each believer feel that it is the truth. "Do you wish to go to faith? Act as if you already believed. Take holy water and have Masses celebrated" (Pascal). Undoubtedly the Catholic faith is a gift of God's grace, but this grace does not destroy the rights of reason, it is not a magical force nor a kind of suggestion that makes us judge as certain what is doubtful, and as rational what is illogical. The grace of God usually intervenes also to facilitate a more effective knowledge of apologetic arguments. But these arguments are convincing by themselves and in 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 demonstrer" (Conc. Vat., loc. cit., cap. 4). Contrary to the teaching of the Church, moreover, is the claim to know experimentally the truth of the Catholic religion, practicing it without faith. The first necessary condition for being part of the Catholic Church and being able to receive 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 supernaturalness of the Catholic faith. The arduous problem of reconciling the judgment of credibility, the conclusion of a syllogism, and the act of faith, commanded by the will and a gift of divine grace, would require a treatment not permitted in this article. Suffice it 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 the revealing God, but only the necessary condition for faith to be reasonable. And the condition can be of another nature and have properties different from those of the conditioned entity.

Another error, of Protestant origin, is that of believing that the exposition of revealed doctrine is enough to make its truth known. It is even added that this is the best apologetics. Certainly the sublimity of Catholic doctrine is a great argument for its credibility, but it does not give us certainty of its divine origin through a supernatural revelation, as will be seen in another article.

The most widespread prejudices against the necessity of apologetics are encountered among men of the priestly ministry, of the care of souls, of missionary action, who in the name of experience affirm that apologetic disquisitions, while they do not lead unbelievers to faith, disturb the conscience of many believers, raising doubts and difficulties previously unknown. These people confuse necessity with sufficiency, and the general necessity with the individual necessities of apologetics. Undoubtedly apologetics is powerless to resolve the problem of unbelief by itself, and it is not even a complete preparation of all the faculties of the human soul for faith. The Catholic religion is not only a doctrine for which it is enough to demonstrate its logical foundation, but is also a moral law, more difficult to practice than to believe, in asmuch as it demands the mortification of all our passions and the total transformation of the carnal man to make him conformable to Jesus Crucified. The motives of a moral and volitional order, determining the passage from the judgment of credibility to the act of faith, ordinarily have the greatest prominence in conversions, because they are the most decisive; but intellectual preparation is not a superfluous luxury. And one must be wary of certain easy but ephemeral conquests, founded only on sentiment, on life's disillusionments, on 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.

In proclaiming the necessity of apologetics, moreover, it is not intended to affirm that it is indispensable to the individual faith of every believer. Each of the faithful must know with certainty that the Catholic religion is revealed by God and that the Roman Catholic Church is the only true Church founded by Jesus Christ. Of these two facts, as of every other truth, one can have a certainty of common sense, vulgar, prescientific, and a critical, reflected, scientific certainty.

Both give the certainty of adherence and exclude error subjectively and objectively. But the rudimentary and indistinct knowledge of the motives of credibility is sufficient only by reason of the lack of culture and the weakness of a still immature reason.

The scientific demonstration of apologetics is therefore necessary for all priests, who are the teachers of the faith and have the office of instructing the faithful and defending them from the errors of unbelief. And today it is also necessary for all cultured laypeople for a threefold reason: 1) whoever has received from God a capable intelligence and possesses a higher culture must have a greater knowledge of the Catholic religion and therefore also of its rational foundations; 2) a person of some culture needs apologetics to preserve his faith and to resolve many troubling difficulties encountered in school, in conferences, in the press, in conversations; 3) the cultured layperson too has the duty of intellectual apostolate, imposed by Christian charity, an apostolate today necessary because of the spread of an unbelief that, in the name of history, science, and philosophy, denies not only one or another Catholic dogma, as in past times of heresies, but the very existence of any revealed religion. Priests and cultured laypeople must not accredit with their silence the pseudoscientific conclusions of contemporary unbelief.

Apologetics has its origins in the Christian apologies, from which it slowly developed; but only in recent times have its proper object and scientific procedure been defined.

This is what happens to every science. First a science is born, develops, lives; then specialists define its object, fix its limits, and establish its method. However, for apologetics there still reigns no little confusion on these problems. Many apologetics manuals contain the most disparate treatises and questions. We find in them, in fact, philosophical theses on the objectivity of knowledge, the demonstration of the existence of God, the treatment 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, the discussion of problems of Church history, of canon law, of the comparative history of religions, etc. The practical usefulness of such manuals is not denied, but an encyclopedic conception of apologetics takes away the character and prestige of a science from the discipline whose task is to establish the rational foundation of the Catholic faith; it oppresses the reader with a farrago of questions, treated, some with the dogmatic method, others with the rational method, others with both methods sometimes confusedly; it leaves in many the impression that the rational credibility of Catholic doctrine — the sole purpose of apologetics — depends on the solution of so many other problems, on whose solution legitimate reservations are held. And another grave consequence of these encyclopedic manuals is the superficiality inevitable superficiality of the treatment. Scientific progress has today reached such a stage of development that competence in the many and diverse branches of human knowledge exceeds the common capacity of the human mind.

The delimitation of the field of apologetics is therefore of the utmost importance. « Est enim vitiosum in unaquaque scientia, ut homo moretur in his quae sunt extra scientiam » (St. Thomas, In libr. Ethic., I, lect. 11).

In order then to know which questions are foreign to apologetics, one must bear in mind the differences between this science and: a) apologetics as defense [apologia], b) dogmatic theology, c) philosophy, d) history.

a) Apologia, according to its etymology, indicates a discourse (λόγος) of defense (ἀπό) against any attack whatsoever. Plato wrote the apology of Socrates, St. Athanasius the apology of his flight, Newman the apology of his life. In Christian usage the apologia is the defense against a particular attack on the Catholic religion, whose object can be very varied: a doctrine, a moral precept, a disciplinary law, a great figure of the Church, etc. It is a debate with the adversary, in order to refute his error. It therefore has an essentially defensive purpose, to achieve which the apologist descends onto the adversary's ground, adopts the method required by individual cases, and may make use of contingent arguments, of personal and relative value (argumentum ad hominem). Christian apologia is not a science in its own right, but is the defensive function of every sacred science.

Apologetics has the same etymological origin as the word apologia, but, as a substantivized adjective (ἀπολογητική), it implies ἑπιστήμη and designates a science, as happens with other adjectives of Greek origin, for example physics, ethics, politics, etc. Nor does it derive its reason for being from the need for defense against the contrary assaults of unbelief, but rather from the necessity of giving a rational basis to the faith of believers. It ought to exist even if, by hypothesis, all men in the world were Catholics. Apologetics therefore has an essentially positive task, possesses its own formal object, and uses arguments of objective and absolute value.

Apologetics must therefore leave to apologiae, or rather to the respective sacred sciences, the refutation of errors foreign to its formal object; for example, to the biblical sciences the solution of cosmological, biological, anthropological problems, etc., concerning Sacred Scripture; to dogmatic theology the reconciliation of the dogmas of faith with the conclusions of the natural sciences; to ecclesiastical history the question of the Holy Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, 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 it is taught by the Catholic Church. It presupposes apologetics, from which it receives its logical premise. And in its demonstrations dogmatic theology proceeds in the light of faith, that is, with arguments of divine authority, drawn from supernatural revelation and from the magisterium of the Church. Arguments of reason are secondary in dogmatics. On the contrary, apologetics proceeds with the natural light of reason and proves its theses with historical, scientific, and philosophical arguments. If it argues from Sacred Scripture, it considers it as a historical and human book. If it takes into account the decisions of the magisterium of the Church, it accepts them as data of the problem to be demonstrated with arguments of reason. Certainly dogmatic theology too can and must treat apologetic questions and set forth the copious teaching of the Church on the matter, but on a different plane, as it does for other questions that are the formal object of other sciences.

Apologetics therefore differs from dogmatic theology in its object and in its method. Accordingly, the dogmatic treatises on the internal constitution of the Church, on the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, on the inspiration of Sacred Scripture, on divine Tradition, on supernatural Faith, etc., must be referred back 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, and free facts, and has conclusions of extrinsic evidence and of moral certainty. Apologetics makes use of logic, metaphysics, and above all of natural theology, but it must not for this reason be called a part of philosophy. Dogmatic theology too makes use of philosophy, but no one denies their specific difference.

On the basis of this distinction, all essentially philosophical treatises must be referred back to philosophy, including those on the existence of God, on natural religion, on the spirituality and immortality of the soul, which are called the prolegomena, not precisely the foundations, of faith.

d) History attests only the material facts of the apologetic demonstration, which consists precisely in proving that these facts are not human, natural, as are all the facts that are the object of history, but divine and supernatural, and accomplished in a connection of proof to theses with supernatural revelation. Therefore apologetics, while presupposing history and making use of historical criticism, goes beyond history in its object, purpose, and arguments. One must not therefore confuse apologetics with the history of religions, which studies religious facts only from the historical point of view. Nor, in order to lead an unbeliever to the faith, is there any need to set before him, as prolegomena, the errors, absurdities, degrading practices, and ridiculous rites of religious sentiment abandoned to itself. This could in fact scandalize him and make him conceive of religion as a misfortune for the human race. Only after having positively demonstrated the divine origin of the Catholic religion will apologetics be able usefully to prove the transcendence of this religion, come from heaven, over all religions of human invention, while avoiding however the exaggerations of certain apologists, who can see nothing outside revealed religion but superstitions, errors, and immorality. Man has been able, with his natural powers alone, to attain to the knowledge of religious truths and to the practice of moral virtues. Nor can it be excluded that the followers of false religions, especially if in good faith, were totally lacking in special helps, even of a supernatural order.

Apologetics must demonstrate the historical reality of divine revelation. But since this is an extraordinary and supernatural fact, one must first 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 apologetics. The second treatise has as its object the historical fact of divine revelation, accomplished at 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, he is the supreme revealer who completed it and definitively closed it; therefore divine revelation is also called Christian revelation.

In demonstrating the historical fact of divine revelation, apologetics can therefore limit itself to proving the divine mission of Jesus Christ to communicate to men the revealed religion.

With this demonstration, the revelation of the Old Testament also remains implicitly proved, insofar as Jesus Christ confirmed it, made it his own, abolishing that part which had the function of preparation and symbolic figure of the definitive revelation. Nevertheless, in the demonstration of Christian revelation, apologetics will not neglect the arguments that can be drawn from the history of the religion of the Old Testament and to which reference will be made further on.

The divine mission of Jesus Christ is then proved 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, wrought both in the physical order and in the intellectual order and in the moral order. It does not necessarily fall to apologetics to demonstrate the divinity of Jesus Christ: that belongs properly to dogmatic theology. Apologetics, when it 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 last treatise of apologetics has as its object the divine mission of the Roman Catholic Church to guard, interpret and teach the Christian revelation. It is divided into two parts: the first demonstrates that Jesus Christ, living on this 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 through miraculous facts is analogous to the other one of 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 wrought by God in its favor. It results historically and scientifically 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 through the marks of unity, holiness, catholicity and apostolicity, being based on dogmatic presuppositions, can be made more completely by dogmatic theology.

Some apologists, following the example of Cardinal Dechamps (1810-83), have proposed to replace the apologetic method indicated above, which proceeds genetically from Jesus Christ to the Church, with the method called ascending or regressive, which goes from the Church to Jesus Christ. "We have," said Lacordaire, "changed tactics. Instead of starting from the base, we started from the summit; instead of digging into the foundations of the pyramid, we considered its head and its crown, beginning from the most visible part, in order then to descend into the most hidden part, which supports the whole edifice" (Conférences de Notre-Dame, cont. 27). This method, which is founded on the wondrous life of the Roman Catholic Church as a perennial motive of credibility of its divine origin, may be followed, provided that one does not exclude the demonstration of the divine mission of Jesus Christ, does not deny the possibility of demonstrating the fact of the Christian revelation independently of the demonstration of the divine institution of the Roman Church, and does not consider the wondrous life of the Church as the only certain motive of the credibility of the Catholic religion.

The best and most natural method remains the descending one which first demonstrates the existence of the divine revelation and then its preservation in the Roman Catholic Church, without however separating the two demonstrations, which complete and reinforce each other.

There exists among the apologetic arguments a relationship of connection, of solidarity and of convergence which gives a new light and confers a special efficacy on the final conclusion of the credibility of the Catholic religion. And indeed: a) The Catholic religion contains a system of doctrines, theoretical and practical, immune from evident errors and immoralities, coherent, sublime, responding to the deepest human needs and aspirations.

b) The preacher of this doctrine was a humble thirty-year-old craftsman, from the obscure land of Galilee, unlettered, who taught in an extraordinary and new way and with a singular persuasive efficacy. The wondrous wisdom of Jesus Christ excludes the hypothesis of an error on his part concerning his divine mission, and his incomparable holiness not only excludes the hypothesis of a lie on his part, but constitutes a miracle of the moral order and therefore a divine confirmation of the truth of his affirmation that he was the Messiah foretold and prepared by the religion of the Old Testament.

c) Even this religion, which foretold and prepared for Jesus Christ and his work, presents in its turn 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 obstacles of every kind are not facts naturally explicable. The Old and the New Testament are two phases of one and the same religion which continue and complete each other. The Prophets of the Old Testament foretold the perfecting and the triumph throughout the whole world of the religion of Israel through the Messiah, whose biography they traced.

d) In Jesus Christ all the prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled. And the coming, the life and the 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 presumable 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 in his own way. History then demonstrates that Jesus Christ really founded a visible, hierarchical, perpetual society for the guarding, 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 innumerable miracles wrought by God in all the centuries of the Church's history, proving directly its divine mission and indirectly the divine mission of its founder. And the Roman Catholic Church "is by itself, by its wondrous propagation, its eminent holiness and its inexhaustible fecundity in every good, by its catholic unity and unconquered stability, a great and perennial motive of credibility and an irrefragable testimony of its divine origin" (Conc. Vat., loc. cit., cap. 3).

"That only a part of these facts, in which the divine action is manifested, should be found in the history of a religion, is already a sufficient proof; but that all these signs should agree and unite in the religion of Jesus Christ is an unanswerable argument. Everything is explained by a single cause: the action of God who wishes to manifest himself to men... In the rationalist hypothesis there are required as many coincidences, exceptional circumstances and hidden forces as there are characteristic facts of Christianity. Its divine truth is the only key that solves 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).

Classical, traditional apologetics, made of history and founded principally, if not exclusively, on motives extrinsic to the revealed truth, has been called too historicist, extrinsicist and intellectualist by some contemporary lay Catholic philosophers, who have proposed new ways held to be more suitable and effective for the modern mentality imbued with Kantianism, subjectivism and immanentism.

The common characteristic of the new apologetics is to set aside the argument from miraculous facts, judged at least ineffective, and to base itself 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. Fonsegrive (1852-1917), in many writings and especially in Le catholicisme et la vie de l'esprit (Paris 1898), demonstrated the identity of the laws of man's spiritual and moral life with the beliefs and maxims of Christianity, concluding that this religion is indispensable to our life "higher, richer and, one may say, more alive and more lived."

F. Brunetière (1849-1906), a man of action, looking more to practice than to theory and concerned above all with the "social question," saw in Catholicism a social and civilizing virtue unique in the world. To solve the problems of social life it is necessary to believe in Catholic truth. Science has shown itself incapable of founding a morality and of remedying social ills: in this field it has made "bankruptcy." And rational speculation has a dissolving effect on moral and religious life. Man is a being who lives by faith; and faith "is the foundation and, if you prefer, the condition of every morality, of every science, of every action" (Discours de combat, I, Paris 1900, p. 310). There is no need, therefore, to investigate the speculative reasons that justify Catholicism before reason. It remains justified by the fact that, better than any other religion, it satisfies our need to believe, and that it is necessary to our social life.

Another living French philosopher, M. Blondel, proposed the apologetic method called that of immanence, consisting "in setting in equation within our consciousness what we seem to think, will and do with what we actually do, will and think, so that in fictitious negations and artificially willed ends there may also be found the profound affirmations and the irrepressible needs that are implicated in them" (Lettre sur l'exigence de la pensée contemporaine en matière d'apologétique, Paris 1896, p. 32).

This analysis of our action, of our will and of our thought demonstrates to us that man does not suffice for himself, but that he needs an external and divine cooperation: light for the intellect and strength for the will, that is, revelation and supernatural grace. The supernatural order must exist, because the natural order demands it, and this demand justifies in us the acceptance of revealed truth, when it is presented by the Church. Indeed, we have the absolute internal obligation to accept supernatural revelation, insofar as the demand for it is essential in us, without concerning ourselves with the difficulties of intellectual criticism.

Apologetics must therefore show the perfect correspondence of the Catholic religion and its institutions with the demands of human life, and hence its usefulness, indeed its necessity, for the perfect expansion of our action.

These new methods are not devoid of demonstrative value, but they are insufficient to prove the revealed origin of a religion, which contains many doctrines without any biological equation with human life, and inaccessible to a direct philosophical demonstration. And as for the Catholic doctrines knowable by our natural reason, the new methods can prove that they are true, but not that they are certainly revealed by God in a supernatural manner, as must be demonstrated for the act of Catholic faith founded on the authority of God revealing. Moreover, it is not easy to demonstrate that our needs for Catholic doctrine are essential to human nature, and not the product of education, of the cultural environment in which we grew up, indeed of the Catholic religion itself with which we then wish to demonstrate their conformity. Furthermore, an apologetic demonstration limited to the practical value and the beneficial effects of Catholicism easily leads to religious pragmatism, which judges the more useful religion to be the truer, and does not exclude the possibility of a better religion. Another serious defect of the new apologetics is to discard, or at least not to take into due consideration, the miraculous facts, which are the only certain arguments for the credibility of revealed doctrine. Finally, at the basis of the new apologetics lie false philosophical and theological principles.

According to Brunetière, all our knowledge, both scientific and religious, is based upon an irrational presupposition, which is belief. Blondel starts out, though without accepting it, from the philosophy of immanence, which considers religion only as the spontaneous result of inextinguishable demands of the human spirit, and from an inexact concept of the supernatural, considered as a postulate of the natural order. The supernatural, by its very definition, transcends every cognitive and volitional demand of created nature and is a free gift of God. Absolutely speaking, man's need for a religious truth and for a divine cooperation for his spiritual and moral perfection could have been satisfied by a religion of the natural order.

Blondel denied that he had wished to make the supernatural a concrete demand of our nature, and throughout his life he strove to reconcile his theories with orthodox doctrine. In his recent works (L'Être, La Pensée, L'Action), he modified his positions, explaining man's psychological need and unease as a nostalgia for the supernatural state, from which he has fallen through original sin. A consideration, therefore, that is historical, not metaphysical, of man, which attenuates the difficulty of the concept of the demand for the supernatural, which in the strict sense is not reconcilable with Catholic doctrine. The encyclical Pascendi of Pius X (1908) warns: "We are compelled to complain gravely that there are Catholics who, while rejecting the doctrine of immanence as a doctrine, nevertheless make use of it in apologetics and with so little caution as to seem to admit in the human creature not only a capacity and a suitability for the supernatural order, which Catholic apologists with due restrictions always demonstrate, but a strict and true demand." v. IMMANENZA, METODO d'.

Giuseppe Monti