Continuity of Apologetic Teaching

Chapter II: Continuity of Apologetic Teaching

In this chapter, for the sake of brevity, the external-extrinsic motive of credibility will be indicated by the letter A, the external-intrinsic motive by B, and the internal motives by C.

I. The Prophets of the Old Testament

The prophets of the Old Testament proved their divine mission in three ways:

A. By miracles and prophecy: miracles, as in the signs given to Moses (Exod. IV, 1–19; 3 Kings XVII, 23–24); and the fulfilment of prophecy (3 Kings XVIII; Jeremias XXVIII, 8–9, 15–17).

B. By the excellence of their religious teaching.

II. Christ and the Apostles

(1) Christ.

A. By miracles (Matt. XI, 4; Mark II, 10) and by prophecy fulfilled (John V, 39; Luke XXIV, 25).

B. By the sublimity of His teaching (Matt. V–VII; John VII, 46).

C. By the interior peace He gave to His hearers (John XIV, 27; Luke XXIV, 32).

(2) The Apostles.

A. St. Peter argues from miracles and prophecy fulfilled (Acts II, 22–24; III, 14–16); so does St. Paul (1 Cor. XV, 4–8); and so, throughout their Gospels, do SS. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

B. St. Paul claims that the Christian life of the faithful is itself a sign confirming the doctrine taught (2 Cor. III, 2).

C. He appeals also to the testimony of the Spirit (Rom. VIII, 9–16), to the fruits of the Spirit (Gal. V, 22–23), and to the peace of God (Phil. IV, 7).

III. The Fathers of the Church

(1) The Apostolic Fathers. St. Clement (Epistle, c. A.D. 96), St. Barnabas (Epistle, c. A.D. 100), St. Ignatius of Antioch (Seven Epistles, c. A.D. 110), St. Polycarp of Smyrna (Epistle, c. A.D. 110), and Papias, Bishop of Hierapolis in Phrygia (c. A.D. 130) all appeal, A, to miracles and, especially, to the fulfilment of prophecy in defence of the Christian Faith — this latter argument being pressed as most effective in winning Jewish converts.

(2) The Second-Century Apologists. St. Justin (100–165), in his two Apologies and his Dialogue with Trypho; Tertullian, in his Apologeticum (c. A.D. 200); and St. Irenaeus, writing against the Gnostics (c. A.D. 180): these Apologists, recording the calumnies levelled against the Faith, confute them, A, B, by arguments drawn from the purity of Christian lives, from miracles, and from the fulfilment of prophecy, together with the moral miracle of the world’s conversion. Tertullian’s appeal to the internal motive drawn from “the testimony of a soul naturally Christian” (Apologeticum, c. 1) is especially well known.

(3) The Third Century. Clement of Alexandria (c. A.D. 200), in his Cohortatio ad Graecos and his Paedagogus, contrasts the fullness and purity of Christ’s teaching with the turpitude, superstition, and impiety of paganism, and in his Stromata (Bk. VI, c. 15) appeals, A, B, to miracles, to the fulfilment of prophecy, and to the wonderful diffusion of the Christian Faith. Origen (185–253), in his Contra Celsum (Bk. I, c. 2), appeals especially to the miracle of the Resurrection, but also makes use of intrinsic criteria.

(4) The Fourth and Fifth Centuries. Lactantius (d. 325, Institutiones Divinae), Eusebius of Caesarea (Demonstratio Evangelica), St. Cyril of Jerusalem (315–386), and St. John Chrysostom (347–407) all appeal, A, B, to the probative force of miracles and prophecy. St. Augustine (354–430), especially in his three works De Vera Religione, De Utilitate Credendi, and De Civitate Dei, appeals to arguments both external and internal in proof of the divinity of the Christian Faith. His City of God might almost be described as a commentary on the words of the Vatican Council: “The life of the Church is a great and perpetual motive of credibility, and affords irrefragable proof of its divine message.”

IV. The Scholastic Writers

(1) The Thirteenth Century. Avicenna in the East and Averroes in the West, both professing Mahometans, had interpreted Aristotle against the Christian Faith. Fr. Raymund Martin, O.P., in his Pugio Fidei adversus Mauros et Judaeos, wrote against them, proving the truth of Christianity, A, from the fulfilment of prophecy.

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), in his Summa contra Gentiles (Bk. I, c. 6), appeals, A, B, to the miracles of Our Lord, the conversion of the nations, the fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy, and the wonderful life of the Church — noting that the Church now largely dispenses with the necessity of miracles, though God still works them for the confirmation of Faith. Elsewhere he appeals to internal criteria, C: the action of the Holy Ghost leading to Faith (IIa IIae, q. 2, a. 9 ad 3); the influence of the light of Faith in confirming the judgment of credibility (IIa IIae, q. 1, a. 4 ad 3); and the experimental knowledge of divine truths given by the gift of wisdom, which strengthens Faith already received (IIa IIae, q. 8, a. 2). Richard of St. Victor writes: “Lord, if there is error, by Thee are we deceived; for Thy doctrines are confirmed by so many signs and wonders, and of such a nature, that only by Thee can they be done” (De Trinitate, Bk. I, c. 2).

(2) The Fourteenth Century produced no notable Apologetic; Ockham and the Nominalists unduly minimised the power of reason, preparing the way for the later fideism of Luther.

(3) The Fifteenth Century. Savonarola, in his Triumph of the Cross, written shortly before his death in 1497, appeals to motives both extrinsic and intrinsic. Marsilius Ficinus, so infatuated with the revival of Greek studies that he sometimes addressed his congregation as “Beloved in Plato,” maintained in his De Religione Christiana et Fidei Pietate that Plato was, in a sense, a precursor of Our Lord, and appeals chiefly to the intrinsic motives; Ludovicus Vives, on the other hand, appeals to criteria both extrinsic and intrinsic.

V. From the Reformation to Kant

1. Adversaries of the Christian Faith. The origin and spread of Rationalism sprang from the elevation of private judgment in matters of religious speculation; from it come the Socinians, whose heirs are the present-day Unitarians. Without an authoritative exponent of doctrine, the sequel is inevitably quot homines, tot sententiae — as many opinions as men. Rationalism at once took two forms, philosophical and biblical, and philosophical rationalism itself subdivided into spiritualistic and empirical schools.

Philosophical Rationalism (Spiritualistic School). The deists Voltaire and Rousseau, and the pantheist Spinoza, belong here. Voltaire openly ridiculed Holy Scripture; Rousseau rejected miracles, prophecy, and all supernatural truths — though in the third of his Lettres de la Montagne he admits the possibility of miracles, and in Emile (Bk. IV, “Profession de la foi du vicaire Savoyard”) there occurs a well-known laudatory passage on Christ and the Gospels. Spinoza denied any real distinction between God and the world; in his Ethica and Tractatus Theologico-Politicus the truth of Scripture is declared to be merely allegorical and symbolic. Wolf, self-styled “professor of the human race,” acknowledged the existence of God but rejected all supernatural truth not provable by intrinsic arguments from the idea of God and morality.

Philosophical Rationalism (Empirical School). Hobbes and Hume, as sensists, denied the validity and necessity of the first principles of reason; Huxley’s life of Hume, in the English Men of Letters series, devotes its main attention to defending Hume’s arguments, including the celebrated argument against miracles, which will be examined later in this treatise. In France, Diderot, d’Alembert, and the Encyclopedists denied even the truths of Natural Religion, and many became outright materialists.

Philosophical Rationalism (Biblical School). The authority of both Testaments was called into question — in England by Bolingbroke and Shaftesbury, in Germany by Lessing and Reimarus, pursuing the destructive criticism associated with Spinoza, whose teaching, emphasising the divine immanence in creation, failed to grasp the complementary truth of divine transcendence.

2. Protestant Apologists.

Some employed both external and internal criteria: Duplessis-Mornay, De la Vérité de la Religion Chrétienne (1579–81); Hugo Grotius, De Veritate Religionis Christianae (1627); Huet (1684–1768), Credibility of the Gospel; Paley (1743–1805), Horae Paulinae and Evidences of Christianity; Leibnitz (1646–1716), Systema Theologicum.

Others appealed to internal motives exclusively: Locke (1632–1704), Reasonableness of Christianity and Essay Concerning Human Understanding; Clarke (1675–1729), Being and Attributes of God; Butler (1692–1752), Analogy. Internal motives were, understandably, more congenial to private judgment and subjectivism, agreeing better with the Lutheran theory of justification and the Lutheran notion of predestination implied in the famous dictum, pecca fortiter, crede fortius — “sin boldly, believe more boldly.”

It is instructive to trace the phases of Protestant opinion regarding Faith: (a) Protestants, having rejected the authority of the Church, put forward Scripture alone as the rule of Faith, maintaining that the guidance of the Holy Spirit is a sufficient means for each individual’s interpretation of the sacred writings — hence the subjectivity and variety of their belief, in which Faith is identified with religious experience and degenerates into pietism, a corruption of genuine piety. (b) Protestants profess, more properly, a personal confidence that their sins have been forgiven through the merits of Christ — the faith which, in Protestant teaching, justifies without works. (c) Luther’s adoption of Nominalism and the empiricism of Ockham made doubtful the rational grounds supporting even the truths of Natural Religion, such as the existence of God; for Ockham, all truths transcending experience are accepted on faith alone — hence fideism. (d) The Reformers claimed, as Baius and Jansenius later claimed, that the elevation of our nature to union with God was due to the original gift of integrity, and therefore should not be called supernatural — so that revealed mysteries answer not merely to human aspirations but to human needs. Here the contrast with the Pelagian error is instructive: Pelagianism erred by exaggerating the power of human faculties, Protestantism by exaggerating human need; Pelagians denied original sin, Lutherans overstated the corruption it caused.

3. Catholic Apologists.

Bossuet, in the second part of his Discours sur l’Histoire Universelle (1681), makes use of all three classes of criteria, as St. Augustine does in the City of God. Huet, in his Demonstratio Evangelica (1679), stresses the argument from prophecy, though not always with sufficient critical care. Pascal, in the Pensées, shows the divine origin of Christianity from both external and internal criteria, though his thought sometimes tends toward Jansenism. Concina, O.P., directs his attack against every form of unbelief in Della Religione Rivelata contra gli Atei, Deisti, Materialisti, Indifferentisti, as do Bergier, Gotti, St. Alphonsus, and Cardinal Gerdil.

VI. From Kant to the Present

1. Adversaries of the Christian Faith.

(a) Philosophical Rationalism now appears in idealistic as well as empirical forms.

The Idealists: Kant attempted to reconcile Hume’s empiricism with Wolf’s spiritualism, teaching the subjective necessity of the categories of speculative and practical reason, while denying that speculative reason can attain knowledge of the existence of God, of human liberty, or of the immortality of the soul. These truths he accepted only as postulates of practical reason — a kind of moral faith demanded by the Categorical Imperative — while rejecting all supernatural truths and retaining only the truths of Natural Religion. Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, for their part, were pantheists: Hegel declared that there is nothing superior to human nature, which is, in fact, “God in the making.” Among the Eclectics, Cousin, Jouffroy, and Jules Simon were deists. Among the Empiricists and Positivists, Comte, Littré, Taine, Renan, and Stuart Mill limit human knowledge to “phenomena of consciousness” and “laws of experience,” while Herbert Spencer claims that faith and morality now demand our attention as objects of an “Unknowable.”

Kant’s system, in more detail, runs as follows. Speculative reason cannot attain certitude of the ontological, or objective, value of first principles: the principle of causality, for instance, is only subjectively necessary — a synthetic a priori judgment — so that speculative reason cannot prove the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, freedom of the will, or the binding force of moral obligation. Practical reason, on the other hand, recognises the binding force of moral obligation as an internal rational fact; its first principle — “act as you would wish all men to act” — has no objective foundation, but is merely a formal law subjectively necessary, since to recognise an obligation from an objective source would involve a servitude of the will. Moral faith, however, cannot exist without freedom of will, immortality of the soul, and the existence of God: since man cannot fulfil the moral law without freedom, we must “morally” admit free will though it cannot be speculatively proved; since the perfection demanded by the Categorical Imperative can be attained only through an infinite series of approximations, we must “morally” admit a future life; and since the man who fulfils the moral law deserves happiness, which is not found on earth, we must “morally” admit the existence of a rewarding God. The certitude of these truths is thus subjectively and practically sufficient, though objectively and theoretically insufficient — Kant substituting the Categorical Imperative for the Protestant appeal to the inward “instinct of the Holy Spirit.”

(b) Biblical Rationalism in the nineteenth century took two forms. The first was Mythicism: De Wette (d. 1849) and Strauss (d. 1874) treated the historical events of both Testaments as comparable to the mythical legends of Romulus and Remus, De Wette attacking the Old Testament and Strauss, in his Leben Jesu, treating the character and works of Christ as fables arising from an idealising tendency of the human imagination. The second was the evolutionary criticism of Baur (d. 1860), leader of the Tübingen school, who, adopting Hegelian philosophy, reduced Christianity to a synthesis of two opposite systems — Petrinism, favouring the Jews, and Paulinism, favouring the Gentiles — and regarded the Fourth Gospel, which he denied to St. John, as the synthesis of these two. To this school belong Ewald (d. 1875), Hitzig (d. 1875), Knobel (d. 1863), E. Reuss (d. 1891), and Wellhausen.

2. Protestant and Semi-Rationalist Apologists.

Among Protestant Apologists, the conservative writers — Tholuck, Delitzsch, Baumstark, Ebrard — sought to safeguard Supernatural Revelation and defended the authenticity of the Gospels and other New Testament books, appealing chiefly to internal criteria, C. The liberal writers, by contrast, appealed exclusively to internal criteria and rejected the supernatural character of Revelation altogether, under the influence of Kant and Hegel. Schleiermacher (1767–1834) asserts that God may not be distinct from the universe, and that it is sufficient to recognise the Infinite in some way; Revelation, for him, is only a new conception of the Infinite, and Christ’s claim to divinity was due merely to His greater consciousness of the Infinite. Ritschl (1822–1889) relegates the inspiration of Scripture to the judgment of the religious sense; Christ, on his view, is Son of God because of His moral union with God, and miracles are natural events, only symbolic witnesses of divine benevolence.

Among Semi-Rationalists, Hermes, Günther, and, to a lesser degree, Frohschammer, were influenced by Kantian and Hegelian philosophy, and maintained that even the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation may be proved by human reason. Hermes went so far as to hold that a Catholic may regard the truths of Faith as doubtful until he discovers a scientific proof of them — making, in effect, practical necessity rather than the authority of God the formal motive of Faith. Against these, the Catholic Traditionalists, Bautain and Bonnetty, minimised the power of natural reason to such an extent that, on their view, reason could prove neither the existence of God, nor the spirituality and consequent immortality of the soul, nor the freedom of the will — the twin errors of Fideism and Traditionalism. True Catholic teaching holds the golden mean between those who err by excess and those who err by defect: in medio tutissimus ibis.

3. Catholic Apologists.

Some theologians use primarily external criteria reinforced by internal ones: Frayssinous, Lacordaire, Hettinger, Perrone, Zigliara, Tanquerey, and others, appealing to the excellence of Christian teaching, to the wonderful life of the Church as “irrefragable testimony of its divine mission,” and, secondarily, to internal criteria such as those urged by Chateaubriand (Le Génie du Christianisme, 1802), Lamennais (Essai sur l’Indifférence en Matière de Religion, 1817), Lacordaire’s Conférences, Bougaud, Cardinal Deschamps, and Cardinal Newman, who lays particular stress on the argument from the dictates of conscience.

Some Philosopher-Apologists, such as Ollé-Laprune, Fonsegrive, and Brunetière, judge that the most effective method of convincing unbelievers is to appeal first to internal criteria and only later to external-intrinsic ones, holding that the use of external-extrinsic criteria should come last of all.

Blondel and Laberthonnière, however, went further, regarding Apologetics not as belonging to Fundamental Theology at all, but to the philosophy of religion. They proposed a new Apologetic which, in their view, would be more effective against Agnostics and against those who hold the “immanent” to be the sole valid method in sacred science. The method rests on a double foundation: first, that speculative reason cannot defend its own objective value except in accordance with the practical needs of human action, so that thought becomes objectively real only through action, and truth is no longer “the equation of the mind with the object perceived” but “the equation of the mind with life”; and second, that religious truth, even though supernatural, cannot be imposed from a purely external source, but must answer to an inward need for the perfect evolution of our action.

Blondel’s philosophy differs from strict Immanentism in that he does not derive religion from a purely subjective religious sense, nor deny the supernatural character of Revelation; but he does maintain that the Supernatural is needed by our nature, so that his apologetic may fairly be described as Semi-Immanentism. As to how the criteria of credibility fare under this new method: external-extrinsic criteria, such as miracles, are held to have no probative force apart from the exigencies of human action, possessing only a symbolic value for minds already disposed to recognise a divine element in nature, so that their force is wholly subordinated to internal criteria; the external-intrinsic criterion of the wonderful life of the Church is likewise reduced to a merely symbolic value, manifesting the presence of divine action in the world without proving the Church supernaturally founded by God Himself; while the internal criteria are correspondingly exaggerated — supernatural religion is acknowledged not to arise from human nature, yet is held to be sought and, in a sense, demanded by that nature for the perfect evolution of its faculties, so that the divine origin of Catholicism becomes, on this view, practically certain through an experience aided by divine grace.

Criticism of the New Apologetic. This method is open to serious objection. First, it rests upon a kind of semi-Agnosticism — an unwarranted distrust of the power of speculative reason. Second, it rests upon an aspect of the doctrine of immanence which, if pressed, proves too much: if Catholic Faith were truly demanded by our nature, it would not be supernatural, for the Supernatural lies above not merely the powers but the very exigencies of human nature; these apologists fail to see that it is only natural happiness, arising from the natural knowledge and love of God, which our nature of itself strives to attain. Third, and most fundamentally, the formal motive of Faith consists in the authority of God who reveals, and not in religious experience, however genuine.