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 restricted Aristotelian-scholastic concept, but in the modern sense of a system of logically coordinated questions demonstrated with certainty, concerning a determined order of truths or facts, specified by its own formal object, not reducible to another 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 God himself to human beings in a supernatural manner, through certain envoys of his, called prophets. This revelation, begun at the origin of humanity and 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 whole of divine revelation to a visible, hierarchical, indefectible society—the Church instituted by him—with the mission of preserving it, interpreting it, and teaching it to all humanity for all time, intending the Christian religion to be universally binding under pain of eternal damnation. The Church is therefore the proximate rule of faith; and man must believe everything 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 revealed truths. Most of these truths are mysteries impenetrable and incomprehensible to the human intellect. And even doctrines revealed by God that are accessible to human intelligence in their intrinsic evidence must be believed on the authority of God revealing them, as the First Vatican Council teaches (Dei Filius, chap. 3,
can. 2). The Catholic religion is therefore neither a philosophy nor a science, but a faith founded on divine authority. This supremely binding faith must be certain, firm, and irrevocable, as all the professions of faith that the Church requires of her followers impose. And it must be reasonable: « obsequium rationi consentaneum », as the First Vatican Council says (loc. cit., chap. 3). Now it would not be reasonable but imprudent and rash, nor could it be firm or binding, if the believer did not know with certainty that the truths of faith had truly 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 thus prevent firmness of assent; moreover, it would render the precept of faith uncertain, and faith would no longer be binding, because lex dubia non obligat. The Church has repeatedly and explicitly declared the insufficiency of a probable opinion and the possibility and necessity of certain knowledge of the fact of divine revelation (Denz-U., 1171, 1637, 1790, 1799, 1812, 2025, 2145).
Mathematical certainty, however, is not required. Moral certainty is sufficient, excluding every prudent doubt and every reasonable fear of being mistaken.
The existence of a divine revelation and its preservation through the Church are two historical and contingent facts, which we cannot deduce from a philosophical principle (metaphysical certainty) or infer from a physical law (physical certainty), but can establish only on the basis of historical testimonies. They therefore entail only certainty of a moral order. Our investigations of historical criticism may leave some difficulty or hesitation. But these are transparent clouds that do not obscure the light of the sun.
The apodictic, certain, primary arguments of apologetic demonstration are miraculous facts in their threefold species: physical, intellectual, and moral.
A miracle is a divine testimony offered in proof of the credibility of 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 conclude with certainty that a revelation guaranteed even by a single miracle is credible. The demonstration through miracles can be schematized as follows. History assures us with moral certainty that extraordinary facts were accomplished by God in order to attest to 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 falsehood. The Catholic religion is therefore divine and revealed, and consequently may reasonably be believed.
There are also secondary, confirmatory arguments: the sublime perfection of revealed doctrine and its complete correspondence with the spiritual needs of human nature, the fruits of Catholic doctrine in the moral order, and others that will be discussed elsewhere.
It might seem unnecessary to dwell on illustrating the need for a science that justifies the Catholic faith before reason. Is not this justification perhaps the first need and the first duty of our faith, according to the admonition of St Pietro: « 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 disastrous apologetic laxity. There are the voluntarists who, having no confidence in reasoning reason, believe that they can place the Catholic faith on a more secure foundation by making our will its basis. For them, apologetics must consist in a moral therapy and in emphasizing 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 occurs after the judgment of the rational credibility of the truths of faith, that is, when the apologetic cycle has been completed. The Catholic faith is not an arbitrary act of the despotism of the will, a blind assent of feeling, a fanaticism, or the legendary credo quia obturdum, falsely attributed to St Agostino. Such a faith would be immoral and physically impossible, because the intellect can assent only to something true or at least subjectively believed to be true, and the will cannot prove true what is false. The will also intervenes in the judgment of the credibility of revealed doctrine, but not in order to replace reason, not even partially; it merely removes the obstacles that may prevent a convincing vision of arguments belonging to the intellectual order. And moral preparation, together with its related voluntarist motives, is not the object of apologetics but of the moral disciplines.
The voluntarists are joined by the dogmatists who regard faith as the exclusive work of supernatural grace. For them, apologetics must be limited to inculcating the necessity of mortifying one’s passions and indicating the means chosen by God to communicate his grace, namely prayer and the sacraments. Faith is not attained 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 toward faith? Act as though you already believed. Take holy water and have Masses celebrated » (Pascal). Catholic faith is undoubtedly a gift of God’s grace, but this grace does not destroy the rights of reason; it is neither a magical force nor a kind of suggestion that makes us judge what is doubtful to be certain, and what is illogical to be rational. God’s grace also ordinarily intervenes to facilitate a more effective knowledge of apologetic arguments. But these arguments are convincing in and of themselves, even when they are 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 is the claim that the truth of the Catholic religion can be known experimentally by practicing it without faith. The first necessary condition for belonging to 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 supernatural character of Catholic faith. The arduous problem of reconciling the judgment of credibility, the conclusion of a syllogism, with the act of faith, commanded by the will and bestowed by divine grace, would require a treatment not possible in this article. It is enough to say that these 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 himself, but only the necessary condition for faith to be reasonable. And the condition may be of another nature and possess properties different from those of the conditioned entity.
Another error, of Protestant origin, is the belief that the exposition of revealed doctrine is sufficient to make its truth known. It is even added that this is the best apologetics. Certainly, the sublimity of Catholic doctrine is a powerful argument for its credibility, but it does not give us certainty that it proceeds from God through a 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, pastoral care, and missionary activity. On the basis of experience, they maintain that apologetic discussions, while not leading unbelievers to faith, disturb the consciences of many believers by raising doubts and difficulties of which they had been unaware. These people confuse necessity with sufficiency, and general necessity with the individual needs addressed by apologetics. Undoubtedly, apologetics is powerless to solve the problem of unbelief by itself, nor is it a complete preparation of all the faculties of the human soul for faith. The Catholic religion is not merely a doctrine for which it is enough to demonstrate its logical foundation; it is also a moral law, more difficult to practice than to believe, since it demands the mortification of all our passions and the total transformation of the carnal man, so as to make him conform to Jesus Crucified. The moral and volitional motives that determine the passage from the judgment of credibility to the act of faith ordinarily have the greatest importance in conversions, because they are the most decisive; but intellectual preparation is not a superfluous luxury. And one must beware of certain easy but ephemeral conversions founded solely on sentiment, on the disillusionments of life, and on needs for comfort and happiness. Apologetics is necessary in order to prepare the unbeliever intellectually for faith in the manner required by his rational nature and to give his faith, like the faith of all believers, a logical, stable, and firm foundation.
In proclaiming the necessity of apologetics, one does not mean to assert that it is indispensable to the individual faith of every believer. Every member of the faithful must know with certainty that the Catholic religion has been 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 may have a common-sense, ordinary, prescientific certainty, and a critical, reflective, scientific certainty.
Both provide certainty of adherence and subjectively and objectively exclude error. But rudimentary and indistinct knowledge of the motives of credibility is sufficient only in proportion to a lack of culture and the weakness of a still immature reason.
The scientific demonstration provided by 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 laypeople, for three reasons: 1) whoever has received from God a capable intellect and possesses a higher level of culture must have a greater knowledge of the Catholic religion and therefore also of its rational foundations; 2) a person with a certain degree of culture needs apologetics in order to preserve his faith and resolve the many disturbing difficulties encountered at school, in lectures, in the press, and in conversation; 3) the educated layperson likewise has the duty of intellectual apostolate, imposed by Christian charity—an apostolate now necessary because of the spread of an unbelief that, in the name of history, science, and philosophy, denies not merely one or another Catholic dogma, as in the former periods of heresy, but the very existence of any revealed religion. Educated priests and laypeople must not, by their silence, lend credibility to 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 with every science. First a science is born, develops, and lives; then specialists define its object, establish its limits, and determine its method. In the case of apologetics, however, considerable confusion still reigns over these questions. Many apologetic manuals contain treatises and questions of the most disparate kinds. Indeed, they include philosophical theses on the objectivity of knowledge; demonstrations of the existence of God; treatments of the spirituality and immortality of the soul; dogmatic questions concerning the supernatural order, faith, the internal constitution of the Church, and the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff; discussions of problems in ecclesiastical history, canon law, comparative history of religions, and so forth. The practical usefulness of such manuals is not denied, but an encyclopedic conception of apologetics deprives the discipline charged with establishing the rational foundation of Catholic faith of the character and prestige of a science. It burdens the reader with a jumble of questions, some treated by the dogmatic method, others by the rational method, and still others by both methods, at times confusedly; it leaves many with the impression that the rational credibility of Catholic doctrine—the sole purpose of apologetics—depends on the solution of so many other problems, concerning whose solution reservations are legitimate. Another serious consequence of these encyclopedic manuals is superficiality.
inevitable superficiality of the treatment. Scientific progress has today reached such a degree of development that competence in many different branches of human knowledge exceeds the ordinary capacity of the human mind.
The delimitation of the field of a. is therefore of the utmost importance. « Est enim vitiosum in unaquaque scientia, ut homo moretur in his quae sunt extra scientiam » (s. Thomas, In libr. Ethic., I, lect. 11).
In order to determine which questions are extraneous to a., one must bear in mind the differences between this science and: a) apologetics, b) dogmatic theology, c) philosophy, and d) history.
a) Apologetics, according to its etymology, denotes a defensive discourse (λόγος) against (ἀπό) any kind of attack. Plato wrote the Apology of Socrates, s. Athanasius the apology for his flight, and Newman the apology for his life. In Christian usage, apologetics is the defence against a particular attack on the Catholic religion, whose object may be highly varied: a doctrine, a moral precept, a disciplinary law, a distinguished personage of the Church, etc. It is a debate with the adversary, intended to refute his error. It thus has an essentially defensive purpose; to achieve it, the apologist enters the adversary’s field, adopts the method required by each individual case, and may employ contingent arguments of personal and relative value (argumento ad hominem). Christian apologetics is not a science in itself, but the defensive function of every sacred science.
A. has the same etymological origin as the word apologetics, but, as a substantivized adjective (ἀπολογητική), with ἑπτάτημα understood, it designates a science, as is the case with other adjectives of Greek origin, such as physics, ethics, and politics. Nor does it derive its raison d’être from the need for defence against the contrary objections of unbelief; rather, it arises from the necessity of providing a rational foundation for the faith of believers. It ought to exist even if, hypothetically, all people in the world were Catholics. A. therefore has an essentially positive task, possesses its own formal object, and employs arguments of objective and absolute value.
A. must therefore leave to apologetics, or rather to the respective sacred sciences, the refutation of errors extraneous to its formal object: for example, to the biblical sciences the solution of cosmological, biological, anthropological, etc. problems concerning Sacred Scripture; to dogmatic theology the reconciliation of the dogmas of faith with the conclusions of the natural sciences; and to ecclesiastical history the question of the Holy Inquisition, the trial of Galileo, and the many other accusations directed 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 a., from which it receives its logical premise. In its demonstrations dogmatic theology proceeds in the light of faith, that is, with arguments based on divine authority, drawn from supernatural revelation and the Church’s magisterium. Arguments from reason are secondary in dogmatics. A., on the contrary, proceeds by the natural light of reason and proves its theses with historical, scientific, and philosophical arguments. When it argues from Sacred Scripture, it considers it as a historical and human book. When 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 also treat apologetic questions and expound the Church’s abundant teaching on the subject, but on a different plane, as it does with other questions that are the formal object of other sciences.
A. therefore differs from dogmatic theology in object and method. The dogmatic treatises on the internal constitution of the Church, the infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, the inspiration of Sacred Scripture, divine Tradition, supernatural Faith, etc., must therefore be referred to dogmatics.
c) Philosophy has as its object abstract, universal, and eternal truths, whose intrinsic evidence it demonstrates with metaphysical certainty. A., on the other hand, has as its object historical, contingent, and free facts, and reaches conclusions based on extrinsic evidence and moral certainty. A. makes use of logic, metaphysics, and above all theodicy, but this does not mean that it should be regarded as a part of philosophy. Dogmatic theology likewise makes use of philosophy, but 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, and the spirituality and immortality of the soul. These are called the prolegomena, rather than precisely the foundations, of faith.
d) History attests only to the material facts used in apologetic demonstration, which consists precisely in proving that these facts are not human and natural, like all the facts that are the object of history, but divine and supernatural, and that they were accomplished in connection with the proof of theses concerning supernatural revelation. Therefore, although a. presupposes history and makes use of historical criticism, it goes beyond history in its object, purpose, and arguments. A. must not, therefore, be confused with the history of religions, which studies religious facts solely from the historical point of view. Nor, in order to lead an unbeliever to faith, is it necessary to present to him, as prolegomena, the errors, absurdities, degrading practices, and ridiculous rites of religious sentiment abandoned to itself. This might instead scandalize him and cause him to conceive of religion as a misfortune for the human race. Only after positively demonstrating the divine origin of the Catholic religion can a. usefully prove the transcendence of this religion, which came from heaven, over all religions invented by human beings, while avoiding the exaggerations of certain apologists who are unable to see, outside revealed religion, anything but superstitions, errors, and immorality. Through his unaided natural powers, man has been able to attain knowledge of religious truths and practise moral virtues. Nor can it be ruled out that the followers of false religions, especially when acting in good faith, may not have been entirely deprived of special helps, even of a supernatural order.
A. must demonstrate the historical reality of divine revelation. But since this is an extraordinary 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 a. 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 centre of the history of divine revelation; he is the supreme revealer who completed it and brought it definitively to a close. Divine revelation is therefore also called Christian revelation.
In demonstrating the historical fact of divine revelation, a. can therefore limit itself to proving the divine mission of Jesus Christ to communicate revealed religion to humanity.
This demonstration also implicitly proves the revelation of the Old Testament, insofar as Jesus Christ confirmed it and made it his own, abolishing that part which had served as a preparation and symbolic figure of the definitive revelation. Nevertheless, in demonstrating Christian revelation, a. will not neglect the arguments that can be drawn from the history of the religion of the Old Testament, to which reference will be made below.
The divine mission of Gesù Cristo is then proved by demonstrating: 1. that Gesù Cristo declared himself to be the one sent by God and the Messiah foretold by the Prophets of the Old Testament; 2. that this declaration of Gesù Cristo is credible: a) from the intellectual and moral transcendence of his personality; b) from the miraculous deeds connected with his messianic testimony, accomplished both in the physical order, in the intellectual order, and in the moral order. The demonstration of the divinity of Gesù Cristo does not necessarily belong to apologetics: it properly pertains to dogmatic theology. Apologetics, once it has demonstrated that Gesù Cristo 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 apologetics concerns the divine mission of the Roman Catholic Church to preserve, interpret, and teach Christian revelation. It is divided into two parts: the first demonstrates that Gesù Cristo, while living on this earth, instituted, in order to preserve and propagate his doctrine, a visible, hierarchical, and perpetual organism, with the primacy of Pietro and his successors; the second part demonstrates that the Roman Catholic Church is the Church founded by Gesù Cristo: a) because it is its only legitimate continuation, with the Roman Pontiff as successor of Pietro; b) because its mission is authenticated by many physical, intellectual, and moral miracles. This demonstration through miraculous deeds is analogous to that of the divine mission of Gesù Cristo. The Roman Catholic Church asserts that it was founded by Gesù Cristo as the guardian and teacher of the Christian religion, and in proof of this assertion it appeals to the miraculous deeds performed by God in its favor. It is established historically and scientifically that these deeds are real, supernatural, and explicitly or implicitly connected with the aforementioned 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 Gesù Cristo through the marks of unity, holiness, catholicity, and apostolicity, being founded on dogmatic premises, can be made more fully by dogmatic theology.
Some apologists, following the example of Cardinal Dechamps (1810–83), have proposed replacing the apologetic method indicated above, which proceeds genetically from Gesù Cristo to the Church, with the so-called ascending or regressive method, which proceeds from the Church to Gesù Cristo. “We have,” said Lacordaire, “changed our 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 crown, beginning with the most visible part, in order then to descend into the more hidden part that supports the entire structure” (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 for its divine origin, may be followed, provided that the demonstration of the divine mission of Gesù Cristo 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 wondrous life of the Church is not regarded as the sole 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 divine revelation and then its preservation in the Roman Catholic Church, without, however, separating the two demonstrations, which complete and reinforce each other.
Among apologetic arguments there exists a relationship of connection, solidarity, and convergence that sheds new light on and gives particular efficacy to the final conclusion concerning the credibility of the Catholic religion. Indeed:
a) The Catholic religion contains a system of theoretical and practical doctrines, free from evident errors and immorality, coherent and sublime, answering to the deepest human needs and aspirations.
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 novel manner, with singular persuasive effectiveness. The wondrous wisdom of Gesù Cristo excludes the hypothesis of his being mistaken concerning his divine mission, and his incomparable holiness not only excludes the hypothesis of his lying, 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 for by the religion of the Old Testament.
c) This religion, too, which foretold and prepared for Gesù Cristo and his work, in turn displays transcendent and divine characteristics. Its ethical monotheism, the moral greatness of its Prophets, its gradual and harmonious development, and the unity and stability of its doctrine over so many centuries and amid obstacles of every kind are not naturally explicable facts. The Old and New Testaments are two phases of one and the same religion, which continue and complete each other. The Prophets of the Old Testament foretold the perfection and worldwide triumph of the religion of Israel through the Messiah, whose biography they traced.
d) In Gesù Cristo all the prophecies of the Old Testament were fulfilled. And the coming, life, and death of Gesù Cristo were accompanied by innumerable miracles of every kind, culminating in his resurrection from the dead.
e) Reasoning a priori, it is not likely that Gesù Cristo would have entrusted the preservation and propagation of his teaching to a book that his enemies could destroy and that each person could interpret in his own way. History then demonstrates that Gesù Cristo actually founded a visible, hierarchical, and perpetual society for the preservation, interpretation, and teaching of his doctrine, and that the Roman Catholic Church is the only Church founded by Gesù Cristo. This historical demonstration is confirmed by the seal of innumerable miracles performed by God throughout all the centuries of the Church’s history, directly proving its divine mission and indirectly the divine mission of its founder. And the Roman Catholic Church “is, by reason of itself, its wondrous propagation, eminent holiness and inexhaustible fruitfulness in every good, its catholic unity and unconquered stability, a great and perpetual motive of credibility and an irrefragable testimony to its divine origin” (Conc. Vat., loc. cit., cap. 3).
“That even only one part of these facts, 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 agree and be united in the religion of Gesù Cristo is an incontrovertible argument. Everything is explained by a single cause: the action of God who wishes to manifest himself to men... In the rationalist hypothesis, as many coincidences, exceptional circumstances, and occult forces are necessary as there are characteristic facts of Christianity. Its divine truth 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, 4e ed., Parigi 1894, p. 363).
Classical, traditional apologetics, drawn from history and founded principally, if not exclusively, on motives extrinsic to revealed truth, has been called excessively historicist, extrinsicist, and intellectualist by certain contemporary lay Catholic philosophers, who have proposed new paths considered more suitable and effective for the modern mentality imbued with Kantianism, subjectivism, and immanentism.
The common characteristic of the new apologetics is to dispense with the argument from miraculous facts, judged at least ineffective, and to base itself on the ascertainment 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 spiritual and moral human life with the beliefs and maxims of Christianity, concluding that this religion is indispensable to our «higher, richer and, one might say, more living and more fully lived» life.
F. Brunetière (1849–1906), a man of action, looking more to practice than to theory and chiefly concerned with the «social question», saw in Catholicism a social and civilizing virtue unique in the world. To resolve the problems of social life, it is necessary to believe in Catholic truth. Science has shown itself incapable of founding a morality and remedying social evils: in this field it has «gone bankrupt». 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). It is therefore unnecessary 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 placing in equation in 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 we may also find the profound affirmations and coercive needs that are implied in them» (Lettre sur l'exigence de la pensée contemporaine en matière d'apologétique, Paris 1896, p. 32).
This analysis of our action, our will, and our thought demonstrates to us that man is not sufficient unto himself, but 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 an absolute internal obligation to accept supernatural revelation, insofar as the demand for it is essential within us, without concerning ourselves with the difficulties of intellectual criticism.
Apologetics must therefore demonstrate the perfect correspondence between the Catholic religion and its institutions and the requirements of human life, and hence its usefulness, indeed its necessity, for the perfect expansion of our activity.
These new methods are not without demonstrative value, but they are insufficient to prove the revealed origin of a religion that contains many doctrines without any biological equation with human life, and inaccessible to direct philosophical demonstration. As for 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 the education and cultural environment in which we have grown up, or even of the Catholic religion itself, by means of which we subsequently wish to demonstrate their conformity. Furthermore, an apologetic demonstration limited to the practical value and 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 that it rejects, 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 apologetics rests on false philosophical and theological principles.
According to Brunetière, all our knowledge, both scientific and religious, is based on an irrational presupposition, namely belief. Blondel proceeds, although without accepting it, from the philosophy of immanence, which considers religion solely as the spontaneous result of the human spirit’s inexhaustible needs, and from an inaccurate concept of the supernatural, considered as a postulate of the natural order. The supernatural, by definition itself, transcends every cognitive and volitional demand of created nature and is a free gift of God. Absolutely speaking, the human need for a religious truth and for divine assistance in 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 demand of our nature and throughout his life strove to reconcile his theories with orthodox doctrine. In his more 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 fell through original sin. This is therefore a historical, not metaphysical, consideration of man, which lessens the difficulty of the concept of the demand for the supernatural, which in the strict sense is irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine. The encyclical Pascendi of Pius X (1908) warns: «We are compelled to lament deeply that there are Catholics who, while rejecting the doctrine of immanence as a doctrine, nevertheless make use of it in apologetics with so little caution that they seem to admit in the human creature not only a capacity and a suitability for the supernatural order, something that Catholic apologists always demonstrate with due restrictions, but a strict and genuine demand». V. IMMANENZA, METODO d'.