In the Middle Ages apologetics had been handicapped by the fact that the Catholic faith was taken too much for granted by most of the European populations. It was simply a part of the air they breathed. To find genuine objections to Christian faith the apologists were forced to seek out Jews and Saracens. This happy situation of religious unity was not destined to perdure. From the sixteenth century onward Europe was divided into hostile religious camps, and controversy became the dominant form of religious literature.
In the sixteenth century, religious controversy was primarily an inter-Christian affair. Most of it centered upon particular doctrines debated between Protestants and Catholics; for example, the Mass, indulgences, the invocation of saints, purgatory, the sufficiency of the Scriptures, and the authority of the pope. These domestic disputes among Christians were generally conducted on the presupposition that all parties to the discussion were convinced Christians. Hence the primary apologetical problem—the credibility of the Christian religion—scarcely arose in this literature. For this reason the inter-Christian polemics of the sixteenth century will be dealt with here only very briefly and, as it were, in passing.
In the seventeenth century one finds increasing evidences of skepticism and religious indifferentism, engendered in part by the hostility (including even religious warfare) among rival Christian groups. Under this external opposition Protestants and Catholics were to some extent brought together in a common effort to show the importance of religious convictions and the preeminent value of the Christian religion.
In the eighteenth century the forces of the Enlightenment staged a more blatant attack on the claims of Christianity, appealing to the positive sciences, especially history, to prove their case. Christian apologetics, seeking to answer in kind, concentrated increasingly on scientific historical evidences and relied rather less upon lofty metaphysical considerations.
The great new fact that conditions the development of apologetics from the sixteenth century onward is, of course, the Protestant Reformation. As the name indicates, this movement was directed toward an inner purification of the Church rather than toward an outward expansion of Christianity. None of the great reformers was deeply involved in the immediate problems of winning over non-Christians to the faith; hence they had little to say about apologetics in the strict sense of the term. Nevertheless, some of the great reformers, such as Luther, Melanchthon, and Calvin, through their discussions of the relations between faith and reason made notable contributions to the future of apologetics.
Martin Luther (1483—1546), while he occasionally polemicized against the Jews, constructed no formal system of apologetics. Not only would this have been foreign to his main purpose—the inner reform of the Church—but it ran counter to his idea of the relations between faith and reason.1 Partly because of his background in the Ockhamist tradition, he distinguished sharply between two spheres: the natural, temporal, earthly sphere and the sphere of the spiritual, the eternal, the heavenly. In the first sphere, he held, reason was the proper guide; properly used, it could sharpen man’s natural prudence and could even lead to a certain civil righteousness. In the second sphere, however, reason was simply incompetent. When it strove to occupy itself with the heavenly and the divine it became insufferably arrogant—in Luther’s vigorous language, the “devil’s whore”. Reason prior to faith, he held, could only raise objections and engender doubts. But if, on the other hand, reason was willing to submit to revelation, it could become a useful handmaid of faith. It could help one to interpret the Scriptures and to attain theological wisdom.
In Luther’s eyes, the problem of faith and reason was not so much a matter of epistemology as of soteriology. To try to draw up a set of preambles of faith that would demonstrate the antecedent possibility or probability of revelation was for Luther an act of works—righteousness, smacking of Semi-Pelagianism. Thus apologetics, conceived as a natural preparation for faith, stood condemned by his doctrine of the sole efficacy of grace (sola fide, sola gratia).
While he rejected any naturalistic apologetics, conducted from a position outside of faith, his system did perhaps make room for a type of apologetics constructed from within faith. The development of such an apologetics—which would show the inner power of faith from the standpoint of the believer—would have to wait for authors such as Kierkegaard and Barth, both of whom were strongly influenced by Luther’s dynamic and existential concept of reason.
Luther’s close associate and systematizer Philipp Melanchthon (1497—1560) in his early years as a theologian was totally won over by Luther’s views on the relationship between faith and reason. In the first edition of his Loci communes (1521) he adopted a negative stance toward autonomous reason and philosophy. But several years later he regained his youthful devotion to classical philosophy and to Aristotle in particular. By the 1536 edition of the Loci communes Melanchthon was ready to declare that philosophy was not only useful within faith, as the servant of theology, but was also a propaedeutic device for leading men to the gospel. He came to hold that reason could establish without the aid of revelation that God exists; that He is eternal, wise, truthful, just, pure, and beneficent; that He created the world, conserved all things in existence, and punished the wicked.2 More and more Melanchthon relied upon the natural evidences in favor of Christianity:
Accordingly the later editions of the Loci contain a formal apologetic for Christianity as a divinely revealed philosophy. The antiquity of the Christian revelation, which includes the Old Testament, the excellence of its doctrine, the continued existence of the Church, in spite of the hostility of the world, the flesh, and the devil, the attestation by miracles—all these are cited in support of the gospel in good traditional fashion.3
Although many of Melanchthon’s theological positions were repudiated by the normative Lutheranism that established itself in Germany in the latter part of the sixteenth century, his Aristotelian Scholasticism won acceptance. As a result Lutherans of the “age of orthodoxy”, such as Johann Gerhard (1583—1637) and particularly Abraham Calov (1612—88), took over many of the medieval Thomistic theses to justify the assent of faith before the bar of natural reason. David Hollaz (1647—1713) drew up an elaborate natural theology in which he established not only the existence and attributes of God, as Melanchthon did in the passage cited above, but offered philosophical proofs for the resurrection of the body. He also tried to demonstrate that the mystery of the Holy Trinity did not contradict anything in sound philosophy. “In an effort to demonstrate the plausibility of the Christian faith, many Orthodox theologians made extravagant claims for reason and philosophy, so that to many an observer it must have seemed that there was very little actually remaining for divine revelation to supply after philosophy had done its best to discover the true nature of reality.”4
The Lutheran dogmaticians of the seventeenth century strove energetically to construct a rational proof for the doctrine that Scripture is an inspired and infallible source of faith. Summarizing the views of these theologians, one modern historian5 enumerates eight external criteria and eight internal criteria that are supposed to be capable of engendering at least a human conviction regarding the divine authority of Scripture. These criteria are basically similar to the ones already noticed in Duns Scotus and those that had by this time been set forth by Calvin and his disciples.
John Calvin (1509—1564), the most systematic of the sixteenth-century reformers, sets forth an integral fundamental theology in the first book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion (definitive edition, 1559).6 He admits in theory that man can by the contemplation of creation arrive at a knowledge of God’s existence, life, wisdom, power, goodness, mercy, and other attributes (1.1-5). But he goes on to say that man’s inherited depravity is such that he inevitably falls into idolatry unless God assists him by positive revelation. In order to correct man’s faulty vision, God must, so to speak, equip man with a pair of spectacles. The special revelation of God is contained, for all practical purposes, in Scripture alone (1.6). Thus for Calvin the reasons for accepting Scripture as divine coincide with the reasons for accepting the Christian faith.
As the primary and sufficient reason for admitting the divine origin of Scripture, Calvin alleged the inward testimony of the Holy Spirit (1.7), but then he adds auxiliary proofs from reason that serve to confirm what one already knows by inspiration. In Calvin’s view these rational arguments suffice, so far as human reason goes, to render the Scriptures (and hence Christian revelation) fully credible. The indicia that he lists at this point are not very different from the traditional apologetical arguments for Christianity.
For the Old Testament Calvin lists the following signs of credibility: the sublimity of the matter (its heavenly doctrine, savoring of nothing earthly); the majesty of style (at once humble and eloquent); the antiquity of the books (which in his estimation “far outstrip all other writings in antiquity”); the honesty of the writers (e.g., in reporting the disgraces of the Patriarchs); the miracles, publicly attested; predictive prophecies, later fulfilled; and finally the wonderful preservation of the original text throughout all the vagaries of history (1.8.1-10). Turning to the New Testament, Calvin gives still other arguments more specially adapted to this part of the Bible, such as its authorship by untutored men, the universal consent of the Church as to its authority, and the blood of so many martyrs who died as witnesses to its veracity (1.8.11-13).
Arguments such as these, Calvin maintains, are available in case anyone should wish to establish the validity of the Scriptures on rational grounds; but Calvin admits that the arguments do not give full conviction unless confirmed by the inner testimony of the Spirit. On the other hand, he who has the Spirit’s own witness does not need to rely on any rational arguments.
Calvin’s apologetical arguments do not appear very impressive today. Like other apologists since Justin, he vastly overestimates the antiquity of the Old Testament as compared with the writings of other civilizations, e.g., Egypt. His appeal to the miracles and much of his argument from prophecy move in a vicious circle; for the reliability of the biblical reports of miracles and fulfilled prophecies is the very thing in question. Some of Calvin’s arguments, no doubt, give valid grounds for a high esteem of the Christian Scriptures, but they do not lead necessarily to the conclusion that they are divinely inspired and completely free from error. Still less do they provide, as many Calvinists wished them to, a practical norm for determining the limits of the canon.
THE COUNTER-REFORMATION AND BAROQUE SCHOLASTICISM
The Catholic polemicists who responded to Luther in his own lifetime—most of whom wrote in Germany and the Low Countries—were concerned with particular points controverted among Christians and not with a general Christian apologetic. For this reason it will suffice to mention only the names of theologians such as Johann Eck (d. 1543), Johannes Cochlaeus (d. 1552), the Franciscan Nicholas Herborn (d. 1534), and the Louvain controversialists John Driedo (d. 1535), Albert Pigge (d. 1542), and Jacobus Latomus (d. 1544), all of whom stoutly defended papal primacy and the Catholic teaching concerning the sacraments and justification. Under the distinguished leadership of Cardinal William Allen (d. 1594) and Thomas Stapleton (d. 1598) in the latter part of the sixteenth century Douay and Louvain became important centers for the training of missionary priests for England. Several of these (such as the Jesuits Campion, Southwell, and Persons) were capable pamphleteers for the Catholic cause.
Catholic apologetics in a more traditional style continued to be written in Italy and Spain throughout the sixteenth century and well into the seventeenth. In the first quarter of the sixteenth century, churchmen in Italy continued to oppose the new paganism, especially in the form of Averroistic Aristotelianism. Cardinal Adriano of Corneto (d. 1521), in his On True Philosophy from the Four Doctors of the Church,7 argued on the authority of the great Latin Doctors of the Church that faith should take precedence over reason. The Florentine Platonist Giovanni Francesco Pico della Mirandola (d. 1533), following in the footsteps of his distinguished uncle, Giovanni Pico, inveighed against the philosophical errors of the Epicureans and the Aristotelians.8 The humanist tradition of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (d. 1494) and Marsilio Ficino was carried forward by the Augustinian friar and bishop Agostino Steucho of Gubbio (d. 1548) in his Perennial Philosophy.9 Fragments of God’s original revelation to Adam, he maintained, survived in Zoroaster, the Hermetic Books, and the great philosophers of Greece and Rome. The concordant testimony of these sages harmonized with biblical revelation and pointed the way to Christ.
About the same time several brilliant Italian Dominicans were laying the foundations for the revival of Thomism in the sixteenth century. Sylvester of Ferrara (d. 1525) and Tommaso de Vio (Cajetan; d. 1534) were drawn to some extent into polemics against the Averroists and the Lutherans, but their main importance lies in their contribution to the Thomistic renewal.
The greatest systematizer of Catholic polemics against the Protestants was the Italian Jesuit St. Robert Bellarmine (1542—1621), who began his teaching career at Louvain (1569) and was subsequently called to the Roman College, where he lectured to missionary students from 1576—1586. He was created a cardinal in 1599. The three volumes of his Disputations concerning the Controversies of the Christian Faith against the Heretics of this Age10 put order and coherence into the chaotic exchange of arguments in the theological literature of the previous sixty years. The popularity of this work is attested by the fact that it went through one hundred editions in the next century and a half.
Bellarmine’s friend the Oratorian Cardinal Caesar Baronius (1538—1607) made a contribution to Catholic apologetics by his Ecclesiastical Annals,11 a twelve-volume work intended to offset the propagandistic effect of the Lutheran account of Church history published by the Centuriators of Magdeburg in 1560—1574.
Among Bellarmine’s students was a Belgian Jesuit, Leonard Lessius (d. 1623), who at Louvain wrote prolifically on social ethics, and efficacious grace. He wrote apologetical treatises to prove from Scripture that it is impossible to be saved unless one professes the true religion, which is Catholic Christianity. Persons who are ignorant of the true faith without personal fault, he asserts, will be damned not for the sin of infidelity but for sins that they could have avoided.12
Lessius took up the defense of the Christian conception of God against what he perceived as a recrudescence of ancient atheism. In his Divine Providence, without any appeal to revelation, he uses a combination of arguments from metaphysics, from the order of the universe, and from the consensus of wise philosophers, as reported by Steucho.13 Natural theology in his treatise emerges as an independent discipline distinct from metaphysics and revealed theology. He derives his conclusions “by common sense or ordinary philosophic maxims from astronomy, comparative religion, mechanics, and biology”.14 This nontheological approach was to be adopted by many successors seeking to stem the rising tide of atheism and agnosticism.
Apologetics in Spain was relatively untouched by the Protestant Reformation. The Spanish humanist and educator Juan Luis Vives (1492—1540) composed a serene and systematic apologetical summa, On the Truth of the Christian Faith (Basel, 1543).15 Book i is a survey of naturally knowable religious doctrines. Not unlike the first book of Savonarola’s Triumph of the Cross, it centers about God and the human soul. Book 2 gives a summary treatment of the principal revealed mysteries, beginning with the Trinity but focusing chiefly on the Incarnation, life, death, and Resurrection of Jesus. Book 3, cast in the form of a dialogue between a Christian and a Jew, deals principally with the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament. Book 4 is a dialogue with a Muslim concerning Muhammad and the Qur’an. The final book then points out the superiority of Christianity over all other religions.
Vives’s work is well structured and profits from much of the literature already examined. He shows himself thoroughly familiar with Augustine, on whose City of God he had written a commentary, Thomas Aquinas, and Ficino. In his fourth book he draws heavily—though without explicit acknowledgement—on Ricoldus de Monte Croce.16 While Vives lacks the originality of Nicholas of Cusa, the vividness of Savonarola, and the philosophical depth of Ficino, the amplitude, balance, and fine Latin style of his work were to assure it considerable influence in the coming century. Melchior Cano, Philippe de Mornay, and Hugo Grotius put Vives to good use.
Aside from the great work of Vives, the most interesting Spanish apologetical work of the mid-sixteenth century is perhaps the Against All Heresies (Paris, 1534) of the Salamanca professor Alfonso de Castro (1495—1558).17 Composed in the form of an apologetical dictionary, this work sets forth the various deviations, old and new, from Catholic orthodoxy.
An important work for the development of fundamental theology was the posthumously published De locis theologicis (On Theological Sources) of Melchior Cano, O.P. (1509—1560).18 Profiting from an earlier manual written by Johann Eck in response to Luther and Melanchthon, Cano discussed in this work ten fonts of theological proof. Although not primarily apologetical in intent, this work might almost as well have been called On Apologetical Sources. In a final, fourteenth, book, never actually written, Cano was to have explained the use of the loci for purposes of controversy against non-Catholics.
Beginning about the middle of the sixteenth century, Spain witnessed an extraordinary revival of Scholasticism, which included great commentators on St. Thomas, such as the Dominicans Banez and John of St. Thomas, and some more original or eclectic thinkers, such as the Jesuits Suarez and Lugo. The Scholastics of this period did not develop any special treatise on apologetics such as Thomas Aquinas had set forth in his Summa contra gentiles, but they did give considerable attention to the motives of credibility in their treatises on the virtue of faith, especially when commenting on the 2a2ae of the Summa theologiae. With a few examples it may be possible to indicate the kind of materials that lie hidden in these little-read tomes.19
Gregory of Valencia, S.J. (d. 1603), is notable for his insistence that the arguments of credibility are not strict demonstrations but are sufficient to render the decision of faith reasonable and prudent. In his notion of the goal of apologetics he includes the idea of motivating the will of the prospective convert so as to elicit a positive desire to believe.20
Francisco Suarez, S.J. (d. 1617), in his discussion of the motives of credibility, puts primary emphasis on the inner qualities of Christian doctrine—its purity and holiness—and on its efficacy in leading men to a higher moral life.21 These factors weigh more heavily for Suarez than miracles, though he also takes pains to establish the relationship between miracles and the divine truth that they guarantee.22
The Jesuit Caspar Hurtado (d. 1646), accepting the view that the arguments of credibility are not demonstrative but only indicative, anticipates to some extent Butler and Newman by pointing out that the convergence of so many signs in favor of the Christian revelation is such as to found a legitimately firm conviction.23
Juan de Lugo, S.J. (d. 1660), while giving considerable weight to the intrinsic qualities of Christian doctrine, as pointed out by Suarez and others, puts more weight on miracles, which he terms the “clearest and strongest source” (illustrissimum et potissimum caput).24
Among the Dominicans Domingo Banez (d. 1604) holds with Gregory of Valencia that apologetical arguments are not strictly demonstrative but that the faith is reasonably credible through a multiplicity of probable arguments. There is no stringent proof, he observes, that the conquest of Jerusalem or the overcoming of idolatry in the first Christian centuries were providentially decreed.25
John of St. Thomas (d. 1644) makes much of the Augustinian and Thomistic argument for Christianity from the rapid conversion of so many nations, especially through such humble instruments as the Apostles and their companions. At times he somewhat overextends the argument from universal consent, writing almost as if everyone accepted the Christian faith.26
The French Thomist Jean Baptiste Gonet, O.P. (1616—1681), while generally following in the footsteps of the Spanish Dominicans, gives greater emphasis than they do to the proof from prophecy, declaring, “This argument is the weightiest of all.”27 He likewise adduces a number of additional arguments of dubious value, such as the predictions of the Sibyls, the pagans, Jews, and Muslims, and the admirable agreement of ecclesiastical writers with one another.
Two Spanish Jesuit apologists, writing in the latter part of the seventeenth century, introduce a certain rigorism foreign to the Scholastics just discussed. Miguel de Elizalde (1616—1678) and his disciple Thyrsus Gonzalez de Santalla (1624—1705) seem to have been influenced by the mathematicism of Descartes. Elizalde in his Method of Seeking and Finding the True Religion28 is one of the first to insist that the truth of Christianity can be rigorously demonstrated from the rational evidences prior to the gift of faith. Against Suarez and Lugo he vigorously maintains that the “fact of revelation” is not something believed in faith but rather something proved.
Thyrsus Gonzalez, who is principally known as an opponent of probabilism in moral theology, wrote an apologetical treatise on the manner of converting Muslims29 in which he displays the same kind of supernaturalistic rationalism already noted in the work of Elizalde.
In France from the mid-seventeenth century the chief apologetical questions concerned the dangers and values of doubt, tolerance, and religious indifferentism. A subtle form of religious indifferentism was inculcated by the political theorist Jean Bodin (1530—1596), who in his interreligious dialogue Heptaplomeres30 allows seven participants to set forth their views on religion. The participant who contends that no religion is demonstrable and that all are of equal value evidently speaks for the author.
Michel de Montaigne (1533—1592) managed to combine an almost cynical diffidence regarding the powers of the human intellect with an apparently sincere adherence to the Catholic faith. In his Apology for Raymond Sebond (written 1575—1576) he takes the position that Sabundus should not be severely censured for his paralogisms, because the human mind is powerless to deal cogently with philosophical and religious questions. The only safe course is to adhere humbly to the teaching of the Church.31
Skeptical currents such as these, in addition to the turmoil of the Wars of Religion, set the background for the voluminous apologetical productivity of the period on the part of both Protestants and Catholics. The leading Protestant apologist of the sixteenth century in France is undoubtedly the Huguenot layman Philippe de Mornay (1549—1623), a close adviser of Henry of Navarre before the latter became a Catholic and ascended the throne of France. In 1578 Mornay published a polemical but not very original Treatise on the Church directed against Roman Catholicism.32 Three years later, during a period of repose in Holland, he composed his most important work, On the Truth of the Christian Religion,33 which entirely avoids controversies among Christians themselves.
In his preface Mornay explains his purposes in writing, namely, to combat both the antipathy to religion and religious indifference on the part of many nominal Christians as well as to strengthen their convictions to the point where they will be motivated to live up to the demands of the gospel. Turning then to apologetical method, Mornay calls attention to the necessity of arguing from principles that are accepted by the adversary as well. In the case of pagans one may appeal to self-evident principles and to demonstrable philosophical truths; in the case of Jews, to the Old Testament. Regarding the relations between faith and reason Mornay does not materially differ from many Catholic writers of the Scholastic tradition.
Like most apologetical treatises since the Summa contra gentiles, Mornay’s begins with philosophical demonstrations. The first nineteen chapters deal with the existence and nature of God, the creation of the world, providence and evil, the immortality of the soul, original sin, and the last end of man. In his doctrine of God Mornay includes two chapters on the Trinity. He seeks to demonstrate this first from created effects and analogies, using the Neoplatonists and other pagan philosophers as witnesses. Then, following Raymond Martini, he invokes rabbinic authorities to support a Trinitarian exegesis of certain texts from the Old Testament.
Chapter 20, a crucial turning point in the treatise, demonstrates the necessity of religion if man is to attain his last end, union with God. Here Mornay makes use of Ficino. Then he lays down three notes by which the true religion is to be recognized: it must promote worship of the one true God; it must rely on God’s revelation as to the way in which He wills to be worshiped and served; and it must offer effective means of reconciliation with God. In the remaining chapters Mornay shows that these characteristics are verified in the Jewish religion of the Old Testament and even more perfectly in Christianity, which is the fulfillment of the messianic hope of Israel.
Mornay’s Truth of the Christian Religion has the strengths and weaknesses of similar treatises issued in early modern times. Its main importance is perhaps that it introduces into Protestant circles the same kind of apologetical writing that had been customary for centuries in the Catholic world.
A generation after Mornay, another Huguenot author, Moi’se Amyraut, published A Treatise concerning Religions, in Refutation of the Opinion Which Accounts All Indifferent (1631).34 As the title indicates, this work is specifically directed to the problem of religious indifference. It deals successively with three types of error: that of the Epicureans, who deny divine Providence; that of the “philosophers” (deists), who admit Providence but deny any supernatural revelation; and that of the indifferentists, who admit that God has made a revelation but do not wish to hold men to profess any particular religion. Amyraut has no difficulty in showing that this last attitude is contrary to the tenets of all the great religions that purport to rest on revelation—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. As signs of the true religion Amyraut specifies that it should comprehend the human situation, that it should effectively help to reconcile man with God, that it should maintain itself against its enemies, and that it should be accredited by great and signal miracles.
Catholic apologetics after Montaigne continues to make use of a combination of skepticism and fideism and to pave the way for faith by exposing the feebleness of reason. A very interesting, though somewhat perverse, representative of this tendency is Montaigne’s friend and disciple, the Abbe Pierre Charron (1541—1603). His best-known work, The Three Truths,35 is primarily a reply to Treatise on the Church by Philippe de Mornay. As his first truth Charron declares that there is one God—and then proceeds to support this thesis on the ground that atheism presumptuously pretends to grasp the nature of the God whose existence it denies. Second, Charron seeks to show that the non-Christian religions proudly claim an unattainable knowledge of God. In the third and longest part of his book he maintains that the Protestants, claiming to have access to the Christian revelation without the guidance of the Church, rely too much on the capacities of their own minds.
The Franciscan Minim friar Marin Mersenne (d. 1648), famed in his day as a mathematician and philosopher of science, produced a full-scale defense of the Christian idea of God and divine Providence. His Impiety of the Deists, Atheists, and Libertines of This Time36 is a dialogue between a theologian and a deist modeled on Cicero’s De natura deorum. In the early chapters the two interlocutors agree rather easily, on the basis of reason alone, that God exists as a single, infinitely perfect being. The theologian goes on to refute modern adversaries, including the Cabbalists, the skeptic Pierre Charron, the neo-Averroist Geronimo Cardano, and the pantheist Giordano Bruno. Much of his argument is directed against charges that the punishment of the damned is incompatible with the love and justice of God. In the course is his argumentation Mersenne relies heavily on evidences of design and arguments from celestial mechanics. At the end of the dialogue the deist is convinced that for the salvation of his soul he must become a Catholic.
Other Catholic apologists of the period, such as Bishop Jean-Pierre Camus, St. François de Sales, Cardinal du Perron, and the Jesuits Juan Maldonat and François Veron seek to undermine Calvinism by proposing a series of skeptical difficulties.37 In particular they deny that the meaning of Scripture can be known by private interpretation. Their arguments have a certain efficacy if one grants that the Catholic faith is “in possession” and that anyone who wishes to depart from it must be able to give adequate reasons for doing so.
The Franciscan apologist Jean Boucher, while he reprimands the Pyrrhonism of Montaigne and Charron, shows an acute consciousness of the limits of human reason. In his Triumphs of the Christian Religion38 he returns frequently to the Augustinian thesis that even in worldly matters man can understand almost nothing unless he first makes the venture of believing. Jean-François Senault in his L’Homme criminel (1644) bases his apologetic not on abstract rational considerations but rather on a concrete descriptive anthropology. His portrait of man’s paradoxical situation, caught in the toils of self-love, prepares the way for Pascal’s existential “logic of the heart”. “Pascal, therefore, can claim no distinctive contribution to Christian apologetics in his use of the psychological approach and in his emphasis upon the moral aspect of Christianity, which constitute his two main points of departure from the traditional apologetic method.”39
FRANCE IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Blaise Pascal (1623—1662), after making extraordinary discoveries as a youth in the fields of mathematics and physics, underwent a thoroughgoing religious conversion in 1655 and thenceforth applied the full force of his genius to the service of religion. At the convent of Port Royal, where his sister was a nun, he imbibed a strict Augustinianism and became convinced that the certainties of faith are unattainable except to the heart that loves. About 1656, while seeking to win over two of his friends—charming but worldly “free-thinkers”—he conceived the idea of writing an apologetic for the Christian religion.
Pascal’s projected apologetics remained incomplete. It comes down to the present day in the form of scattered sentences and paragraphs, known as the Pensees. Although many have tried to reconstruct how these fragments would have fit together in a single work, the evidence is too sparse to permit more than frail conjectures. Many modern critics accept in substance the plan set forth by Filleau de la Chaise that purports to rest upon the latter’s recollection of a lecture given by Pascal in 1658 concerning his proposed apology. If this plan is applied to the materials in the Pensees, one would get an apologetic in three main sections, somewhat as follows.
In Part 1 the author discusses the enigmatic situation of man. Addressing himself to a typical “libertine” of the day (i.e., one who considered himself emancipated from religious belief and religious norms of conduct), Pascal describes this person as self-satisfied, engrossed in present pleasures, indifferent to all questions concerning God and the afterlife. From this indifference Pascal seeks to rouse him: “Seeing the blindness and misery of man, looking upon the whole mute universe, and man without light, abandoned to himself, without knowing who put him there, nor what he has come to do, nor what will become of him when he dies, incapable of all knowledge, I am overcome by dread like a man who has been brought in his sleep to a savage desert island, who wakes up not knowing where he is and without any way of escaping.”40
With extraordinary psychological insight Pascal dissects the nature of man, showing both his nobility and his wretchedness. He shows the paradoxes of the human situation, man’s foolish pride and vain imaginings, his weakness before the wild powers of nature, and his superiority over those powers insofar as he knows his misery, repents of his failures, yearns for all truth and goodness. “Man is but a reed, the feeblest in all nature, but he is a thinking reed. . . All our dignity, then, consists in thought” (no. 347).
Unlike previous apologists, Pascal makes no effort to give metaphysical arguments for the existence of God. He ridicules those who argue: there is no vacuum, hence God exists (no. 243). Even if such proofs were valid, to what would they lead except an empty deism? What good would it do to arrive at a God whose only importance is to have given the world an initial fillip, setting it spinning on its way. Deism, for Pascal, is almost as remote from Christianity as atheism. The only God he cares to know is the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. . . the God of Jesus Christ” (no. 556; cf. Pascal’s Memorial).
Instead of proving the existence of God in the abstract, Pascal draws attention to the strange fact that human nature can neither comprehend God nor do without Him. “If man was not made for God, why is he never happy except in God? If man was made for God, why is he so contrary to God?” (no. 438).
Particularly impressive is the dialectic by which Pascal leads the libertine to admit that the question of immortality concerns himself. He contrives a speech that he puts on the mouth of the freethinker. After describing the weakness and ignorance in which he finds himself, the freethinker says: “And from all this I conclude that I should then pass all the days of my life without thinking of investigating what will become of me. Perhaps I could find some enlightenment for my doubts, but I do not want to take the trouble, or move one step to search. . .” (no. 194). Such an attitude, concludes Pascal, is contrary to a man’s own evident self-interest and can win him no esteem in the eyes of others. Only two kinds of people are reasonable: those who, knowing God, serve Him with their whole heart; and those who, not knowing Him, seek Him with their whole heart (no. 194).
In what might have made up the second major part of his apology, Pascal makes an inventory of the various philosophies and religions. Do they give a plausible account of the actual state of man and do they offer any remedy that could give man happiness? Most religions and philosophic systems either confirm man in his foolish pride or involve him more deeply in passion or condemn him to despair. Biblical religion, however, is an exception. By attesting that man was made in the image of God, it establishes his true greatness. By its doctrine of the Fall the Bible sufficiently accounts for his present inclination to frivolity and evil. Finally, the Bible speaks worthily of God. It makes Him lovable by the doctrine that God Himself comes to make atonement for man’s sin and lead him to salvation.
At this point Pascal has brought the libertine to the point of wishing that he could believe, without having yet proved that Christianity is true. Here, perhaps, Pascal would have inserted his famous wager. If Christianity is true, you have everything to gain from embracing it; if false, you have lost nothing (no. 233). But suppose the libertine objects, “I should gladly make this bet, but I cannot believe.” Pascal replies, “Imitate the actions of those who have staked everything on the truth of Christianity. Take holy water, have Masses said, etc., and you will soon find yourself able to believe” (no. 223). To the one who says, “I would quickly give up my pleasures if I had the faith”, Pascal replies, “You would quickly have the faith if you surrendered your pleasures” (no. 240).
Pascal profoundly analyzes the relations between faith and reason. Like Augustine he finds a unity within difference, a concord within contrast. Nothing is more reasonable, he maintains, than for reason to submit to authority (no. 272). In its decision to submit, reason is not governed by probative evidences but rather by “reasons of the heart” (no. 277). This term in Pascal does not mean emotion or blind sentiment but rather an intuitive type of logic. It issues not from the esprit de geometrie but from the esprit de finesse (no. 1). The man who seeks stringent evidence for the truth of Christianity will not find it. God has so arranged things that there is “enough light for those who desire only to see, and enough obscurity for those who have the contrary disposition” (no. 430). Those who are able to believe without proofs do so because God inclines their hearts (no. 284).
The third and last section of the apology, according to the plan here being followed, would have been a historical demonstration of the truth of Christianity. Perhaps the following paragraph was intended as its outline:
PROOF. (1) The Christian religion, by its establishment, having established itself so powerfully, so gently, while so contrary to nature. (2) The holiness, sublimity, and humility of a Christian soul. (3) The wonders of Holy Scripture. (4) Jesus Christ in particular. (5) The apostles in particular. (6) Moses and the prophets in particular. (7) The Jewish people. (8) The prophecies. (9) Perpetuity. No religion has perpetuity. (10) The doctrine, which gives an account of everything. (ii) The holiness of this law. (12) By the conduct of the world. (no. 289)
Pascal’s treatment of the biblical evidence is strongly Christocentric. Jesus Christ, he says, is the center of both Testaments: of the Old as looking forward to Him, and of the New as its model (no. 740). In a lengthy paragraph, “The Mystery of Jesus”, Pascal expresses his deep devotion to his Lord (no. 553). This devotion is integral to his apologetic. The great marvel of Jesus Christ is that outside of Him one can understand neither God nor himself: “Outside of Jesus Christ we cannot know what is the meaning of our life or our death, nor what God is, nor what we ourselves are” (no. 548). With an implicit reference to the opening passage of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Pascal says that although signs and wisdom may prepare a person to accept Christianity, the acceptance itself involves submission to the folly of the Cross (no. 587).
The arguments from miracles and prophecies, Pascal stresses, are not absolutely convincing but are of such a nature that one cannot say it is unreasonable to believe (no. 564). Miracles, as an external and bodily sign, are necessary because man is not a pure spirit: the whole man, body and soul, must be convinced (no. 806). The process of discerning miracles involves a dialectical relationship between miracles and doctrine: miracles discern right doctrine, and right doctrine discerns miracles (no. 803).
The prophecies, Pascal maintains, are “the greatest of the proofs of Jesus Christ. . . for the event which fulfilled them is a subsistent miracle from the birth of the Church to the end of time” (no. 706). Following the then accepted view of biblical scholars, Pascal imagines that the first five books of the Old Testament were written by Moses himself; consequently, he exaggerates the element of predictive prophecy in the Old Testament. He marvels, for instance, that Moses should have been able to foresee so many details of the history of the people under the Old Covenant (no. 711). In addition to prophecy, Pascal finds typological or figurative meanings in many Old Testament realities, as related to their New Testament counterparts. For instance he holds that the Flood and the Red Sea are types of the water of baptism. This, too, is evidence of divine inspiration (cf. nos. 643-92).
Unlike many apologists, Pascal does not seek to establish the authenticity of the Old Testament by external testimonies regarding its authorship. But he argues from the portrait of Jesus in the Gospels. “Who taught the Evangelists the qualities of a perfectly heroic soul, to paint it so perfectly in Jesus? Why do they make him so feeble in his agony? . . . But when they make him so troubled, it is when he troubles himself, and when men trouble him, he is perfectly strong” (no. 801). To prove the truthfulness of the apostolic testimony, Pascal like Eusebius41 shows the absurdity of imagining the Twelve plotting to claim falsely that Jesus had risen from the dead and then dying as witnesses to their own lies (no. 801).
Pascal gives only a few indications of how he would have argued to the truth of Christianity from the Church as sign. The Church, he maintains, has the three marks of true religion: perpetuity, virtuous conduct, and miracles (no. 844). “A thousand times”, he writes, “the Church has been on the verge of total destruction, but each time that it was in this condition, God raised it up again by extraordinary feats of power” (no. 613).
At the end of his apologetic Pascal is careful not to claim too much. “It is indubitable”, he writes, “that after all this one should not refuse, considering what life and religion are, to follow the inclination to accept it, should this come into our hearts; and it is certain that there are no grounds for mocking those who accept it” (no. 289).
The reconstruction made here of the approximate order of Pascal’s ideas is very tentative. But even when one does not know how to assemble them, the fragments are more impressive than the finished masterpieces of others. With Pascal thought and life, piety and reflection, were inseparable. His apologetic is shot through with a profound grasp of the human heart and a deep Christian spirituality, only slightly tarnished by the rigorism of Port Royal. Like other apologists of his day Pascal directed his arguments to the religiously indifferent intellectuals. His style almost miraculously combines passion and clarity. Few of his arguments, taken in themselves, are truly original. He has evidently made considerable use of Augustine’s De vera religione for his views on the relations between faith and reason. For his scriptural arguments he refers occasionally to Raymond Martini and Grotius. His analysis of the human predicament relies partly on Montaigne. But Pascal has known how to select what is most effective, to give it the stamp of his personal genius, and to express it in immortal prose. Few if any apologetical works have brought so many unbelievers on the way to faith.
The only apologetic work of the seventeenth century that from a literary point of view bears comparison with the Pensees of Pascal is the Discourse on Universal History (1681) by the celebrated court preacher and bishop Jacques Benigne Bossuet (1607—1724). Appointed by Louis XIV to serve as tutor to the Dauphin, Bossuet fulfilled this charge very conscientiously from 1670 to 1681. Writing in a simple style for the benefit of his royal pupil (who seems not to have been overendowed with intellectual interests and capacities), Bossuet divides his work into three parts. Part 1 summarizes in about one hundred pages the main stages of world history; Part 2, about two hundred pages, deals with the continuity of religion; and Part 3, less than one hundred pages, discusses the successive empires from the Scythians to the Romans.
Part 1, which concentrates on biblical history, with a few glances at Greece and Rome and a concluding section on the history of Christian Europe, is a rather dry and shapeless chronicle, but it provides the background for Part 2, which is obviously of far greater interest to the author. Here Bossuet shows that the key to the meaning of world history is to be found in religion, which relates events to God, who has fashioned for Himself a chosen people under the Old Law and under the New:
You can easily follow the history of these two peoples, and notice how Jesus Christ effects the union of the one with the other, since he, as expected or as given, has at all times been the consolation and the hope of the children of God.
Hence you see that religion is always uniform, or rather always the same, since the beginning of the world. The same God has always been recognized as author, and the same Christ as Savior, of the human race.42
In the following chapters Bossuet gives an admirably compact and persuasive narrative of the salvation history of the Old and New Testaments. He accounts for the delay of more than 4,000 years between the creation and the Incarnation on the ground that men had to learn from bitter experience their need of a Redeemer (2.1, p. 132). In the Old Testament section he makes much of the prophetic testimonies to Christ, but his exegesis, it must be confessed, is weak even by the standards of his own age. The following paragraph illustrates the synthetic vision, rhetorical power, and untroubled confidence with which Bossuet proposes his arguments. After a number of quotations from the Davidic Psalms, he continues:
The other prophets did not see less of the mystery of the Messiah. There is nothing great or glorious which they did not say of his reign. One sees Bethlehem, the smallest town of Judah, made illustrious by his birth, and at the same time, rising to a still greater height, he sees another birth by which he issues from all eternity from the bosom of his Father (Mi 5:2). Another sees the virginity of his mother, an Emmanuel, a God with us (Is 7:14), coming forth from this virginal womb, and an admirable child, whom he calls God (Is 9:6). This one sees him coming into his temple (Mal 3:1); this other one sees him glorious in his tomb, in which death was overcome (Is 11:10, 53:9). In publishing his glories, they are not silent concerning his disgraces. They saw him sold; they knew the number and the use of the thirty pieces of silver with which he was purchased (Zech 11:12-13). At the same time as they saw him great and exalted (Is 52:13), they saw him despised and hardly recognizable in the midst of men, the object of the world’s wonder as much by his humiliation as by his greatness; the most abject of men, the man of sorrows, laden with all our sins: doing good, and unacknowledged; disfigured by his wounds and thereby healing ours; treated as a criminal; led to punishment with the wicked and peacefully delivering himself up to death like an innocent lamb. They saw a long posterity being born from him (Is 53) by this means, and vengeance wreaked upon his unbelieving people. In order that nothing should be wanting to the prophecy, they counted the years until his coming (Dan 9); and unless a man blinds himself, there is no longer any possibility of failing to recognize him.43
Aware of the complexity of the total argument from the fulfillment of prophecy, Bossuet wisely chooses to concentrate on a few essentials. God, he declares, has chosen to make various palpable facts, “attested by the whole world”, so evident that their significance is apparent to even the most untutored—namely, “the desolation of the Jewish people and the conversion of the Gentiles, both taking place at the same time, and both likewise coinciding with the moment when the gospel was first preached, and when Jesus Christ appeared”.44
In his chapter on “Jesus Christ and His Teaching” Bossuet very appealingly presents what is most novel and inspiring in the personality and doctrine of Jesus. “He announces lofty mysteries, but he confirms them with great miracles. He commands great virtues, but at the same time gives great lights, great examples, and great graces.”45 Bossuet’s pages in this chapter on the new precept of charity and on the “law of the cross” merit a place among the great pages of apologetical literature. Time has not dimmed their luster.
More questionable, however, is the apparent complacency with which Bossuet dwells on the desolation of the Jews, which he interprets as their definitive rejection as the people of God. He does not hesitate to accuse the Jewish people collectively of the crime of deicide and to depict the legions of Titus as mere instruments in the hands of an avenging God.46 The termination of the Aaronic priesthood and the commingling of the families of Israel are for Bossuet evident proofs that the Old Law has ceased and that the Messiah must have come.
With his customary eloquence Bossuet describes the conversion of the Gentiles. While he exaggerates the rapidity with which the Church expanded and the simplicity of those who preached the gospel, he effectively develops the Pauline thesis that the foolishness of the Cross has triumphed over the wisdom of this world.47
In the concluding section of Part 2 Bossuet extols the strength and stability of the Church triumphing over all idolatry and all heresies. “This Church, always attacked, but never conquered, is a perpetual miracle, and testifies brilliantly to the immutability of the divine counsels.”48 Bossuet makes much of the uninterrupted succession that can be traced from Peter to Innocent XI. Against the Catholic Church, strongly built on the rock of Peter, all heresies and persecutions beat in vain.
Although Part 3, from a literary point of view, is not inferior to Part 2, it need not be considered here. Bossuet’s consideration of the succession of empires, while it contains many religious reflections, is not directly apologetical in content.
While Charron and others had sharply distinguished between the apologetic for Christianity and the apologetic for Catholicism, these two phases of apologetics practically coincide in the thought of Bossuet. He rejects Protestantism because he does not find in it the qualities that draw him to Christianity itself. In his principal controversial work, A History of the Variations of the Protestant Churches (1688), Bossuet impugns Protestant Christianity for its lack of unity and stability. The Catholic Church, in contrast to the Protestant sects, “so unalterably attached to decrees once pronounced, that not the least variation can be discovered in her, shows herself a Church built upon the rock, always in full security from the promises she has received, firm in her principles, and guided by a Spirit who never contradicts Himself”.49 This exaltation of the changeless uniformity of Catholicism was well suited to an age that identified change with degradation and diversity with chaos.
Bossuet represents almost to perfection the self-understanding of the Church as it would have appeared to a leading churchman of the grand siècle. His work shows the classical order and balance that mark the painting of Poussin and the drama of Racine. He is perfectly confident of his positions and seems to experience no need to agonize in the search for truth. The critical problems with which biblical scholars such as Richard Simon50 were beginning to wrestle have no interest for Bossuet. “The difficulties raised against the Holy Scriptures”, he writes in the Discourse51 “are easily overcome by men of good sense and good faith.” It is precisely this unawareness of the precariousness of his own positions that gravely weakens the apologetic of Bossuet. He has no realization how difficult to justify is his own decision to view world history in the light of the Bible and, even more narrowly, in reference to Christ as its center and summit. Pascal, who would not have rejected Bossuet’s interpretation of history, has the advantage of greater sensitivity to the personal options involved. Pascal, with his personal anxiety before the mystery of the universe, speaks more powerfully to our troubled century than the self-assured Bishop of Meaux.
Bossuet’s great rival in the episcopacy, François de Salignac de la Mothe-Fénelon, generally known simply as Fenelon (1651—1751), who served at the royal court as tutor to a grandson of Louis XIV, is principally known as a philosopher and spiritual writer. His Treatise on the Existence and Attributes of God and his seven Letters on Various Themes of Metaphysics and Religion deal to some degree with apologetical questions. His Treatise begins, in almost Cartesian fashion, from the author’s experience of himself as a body that thinks and wills. He then passes to consider the beauties and order of nature and thereby rises to the apprehension of a transcendent cause, corresponding to the idea of the infinite that springs up spontaneously within the human spirit. The infinitely perfect being can be affirmed, he says, by reflection on the beauty and harmony of the natural world, itself the arena of less divine “infinites”. Fenelon’s feeling for the beauty of nature as a locus in which to detect and affirm God’s existence is one of his most distinctive contributions, preparing the way for the aesthetic sensibility of the Enlightenment and Romanticism.
In his Letters on Religion Fenelon summarizes his natural theology and goes beyond it to explore the truth of revealed religion. He praises the monotheism of the Jews as superior to the polytheism of the pagans. The messianic expectations of the Jews, he finds, were fulfilled in Christ, who teaches a gospel of universal altruistic love. The Catholic faith, he reasons, is the only form of Christianity that does not leave the faithful prisoners of their own private judgment. To come to the truth we must follow the biddings of interior grace, which enable us to recognize in the Church the external authority we need.
While Bossuet was serving as tutor to the Dauphin, Louis XIV in 1670 appointed as his assistant Pierre Daniel Huet (1639—1721), a prodigiously erudite man who later became Bishop of Avranches. In several philosophical works on faith and reason52 Huet repudiated Descartes’ identification of clarity with certitude, maintaining on the contrary that demonstrations based on moral experience are more solid than mathematical proofs. In religion, he contended, the motives of credibility cannot give more than probability, but grace inclines the intellect to assent with a certitude surpassing any rational proofs.
Huet’s major apologetical work, A Demonstration of the Gospel to His Highness, the Dauphin,53 is a bulky folio volume with 650 pages of text and 75 additional pages of indexes. In great part it is a response of Christian orthodoxy to the rationalistic critique of the Bible contained in Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670). Influenced no doubt by Spinoza, Huet constructs his apologetics on the analogy of geometry. In the preface he explains that the gospel can be proved by reasons as valid in their own order as geometrical demonstrations are in the mathematical order. He then lays down seven definitions, two postulates, and four axioms. The body of the treatise consists of ten propositions.
Huet’s argument in substance comes down to this: All the biblical books were written at the times to which they are attributed and by their commonly supposed authors. But the Old Testament prophesies many events to be accomplished in the life of the Messiah. These prophecies were fulfilled in the career of Jesus, who must therefore be acknowledged as the Messiah. The Christian religion is therefore true. As a corollary it follows that all other religions are false and impious.
The major part of Huet’s effort is taken up with vain efforts to prove what few modern apologists would consider even faintly probable—for example, that Moses wrote the entire Pentateuch and that all the religions in the world trace their ancestry to Moses. In his proofs of the Messiahship and divinity of Jesus Huet heaps up such a mass of arguments that the reader is virtually crushed. For all the titles of Jesus (e.g., light, fire, sun, star, flower, font, rock) Huet quotes parallel texts in the Old and New Testaments.
If the learned Huet contributed something to the systematization of Catholic apologetics, his clumsiness offset whatever gains he achieved. The unconvincing character of most of his arguments made it quite evident that the geometrical form of his treatise was ill adapted to the subject matter.
The most popular apologetical work of seventeenth-century France, and one of the best, was the three-volume work of the Huguenot pastor Jacques Abbadie (1654/1657—1727). In Volumes 1 and 2, together entitled Treatise on the Truth of the Christian Religion54 this work demonstrates successively the existence of God, the necessity of religion, the truth of the Jewish religion, and the truth of the Christian religion. Then in a separate work entitled Treatise on the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ,55 later published as the third volume of the treatise just mentioned, Abbadie undertakes to prove that Jesus Christ was true God, “of one same substance with his Father”.
Abbadie’s apologetic reflects both the merits and defects of his century. Highly systematic, he orders his questions with the utmost clarity. Familiar with the Old Testament criticism of Spinoza and with the paleontological speculations of La Peyrere, he makes a genuine effort to come to grips with new and urgent questions. At the same time he is a man of piety, who like Pascal can employ the “logic of the heart”. In one of the best sections of his book he shows how the intrinsic attributes of the Christian religion correspond with the religious needs of man.
Like most of his contemporaries, however, Abbadie is given to a rigid, syllogistic type of logic that cannot deal easily with literary and historical questions. Complacent in his orthodoxy, he is not seriously open to any evidence that tends to undermine established positions. He is totally committed to the proposition that Moses wrote the Pentateuch and to the fact that the world could not possibly be older than one would gather from computing the years from Adam to the present day, on the basis of the biblical accounts. In his volume The Divinity of Jesus Christ Abbadie assumes an almost defiant tone toward all adversaries. If Jesus was not of one substance with the Father, he argues, then Islam would be better than Christianity, Jesus would have been justly condemned to death by the Sanhedrin, and, indeed, religion itself would be indistinguishable from superstition and magic. This minatory type of argumentation is better calculated to foster apostasy than to convince doubters. For styles of apologetics better adapted to a scientific and empirical era, we may now turn to Holland and England.
The leading Protestant apologists of Holland in the seventeenth century were Arminian Calvinists, theologically close to du Plessis-Mornay. The most popular Protestant apology of the century was probably that of Hugo Grotius (Huig de Groot, 1583—1645). Originally published in verse form in Dutch (1621) for the use of sailors traveling to non-Christian parts of the globe, The Truth of the Christian Religion56 was expanded and transformed by the author himself into a Latin treatise in 1627. It soon appeared in many European languages as well as in Persian, Arabic, Malayan, and Chinese.
In his preface Grotius respectfully acknowledges the work of his many predecessors, mentioning by name Sabundus, Vives, and Mornay. His own work is not remarkably different in structure, but several significant changes are introduced.
Book 1, dealing with the general truths of natural religion, is brief and easy to follow. The existence and attributes of God, the immortality of the soul, future rewards and punishments, and the necessity of religion are all established by popular arguments chosen more for their persuasive force than for their demonstrative rigor.
Book 2, which seeks to vindicate the preeminence of the Christian religion, begins more positivistically than the works here previously examined. First Grotius argues to the historical existence of Jesus, alleging the testimony of pagan authors and the admissions of anti-Christian polemicists. Then he goes on to establish the credibility of the apostolic testimony to the miracles and Resurrection of Jesus. After these extrinsic proofs he examines the intrinsic arguments for the supremacy of Christianity: the excellence of the rewards it promises, the purity of its precepts, and the moral qualities of Jesus. Then Grotius argues from the marvelous expansion of Christianity, adding the usual comment that if this had occurred without miracles the occurrence itself would be miraculous.
Book 3 differs from the works seen thus far by introducing a somewhat serious effort at source criticism. It attempts to establish, first, that the New Testament is by the authors to whom it has traditionally been ascribed, and second, that these authors were well informed and honest and hence are worthy of credence. In answer to the objection that the Bible contains contradictions, Grotius maintains that the apparent inconsistencies are minor, are not insoluble, and establish the lack of collusion between the biblical witnesses.
The last three books (4-6) are directed respectively against paganism, Judaism, and Islam. They are not remarkable for originality; but the section on Judaism has the merits of being reasonably brief and of seeking to meet the real objections of the Jews.
From a speculative and dogmatic point of view, Grotius is disappointing. He has little interest in metaphysical argument. He gives no clear indication as to whether he accepts the orthodox dogmas regarding the Trinity and the Incarnation. He consequently omits the usual rationes convenientiae in favor of the Incarnation. The main merits of Grotius are, first, that he began to apply documentary criticism to the Bible, especially the New Testament, and, second, that he wrote in a clear and readable style. Although he makes use of very numerous references to pagan philosophers, historians, and rabbinic commentaries, he relegates much of his supporting evidence to footnotes, thus adapting his work better to the ordinary reader without sacrificing scholarly thoroughness.
In the course of the seventeenth century, Holland became a refuge for theologians of unorthodox opinions, both Jewish and Christian. It was here that the Jew Baruch Spinoza (1632—1677) set forth his pantheistic philosophy and launched his attack on the inspiration of the Bible. He was answered by the contentious Calvinist Pierre Jurieu (1637—1713), also known for his ardent polemics against Bossuet and other Catholics. Jurieu took into his protection the apostate Catholic Pierre Bayle (1647—1706) and gave him a teaching post at Amsterdam. When Bayle, however, wrote in favor of the toleration of atheists, Jurieu denounced him as a secret atheist and terminated his academic career. Taking advantage of the ensuing leisure Bayle then composed his gigantic Historical and Critical Dictionary (1697), which was to be used by the eighteenth-century philosophes as the “arsenal of the Enlightenment”.
In the closing decades of the seventeenth century two other Dutch Arminians, close in mind and spirit to Grotius, made significant apol-ogetical contributions. Philip van Limborch (1633—1712), Scripture professor at the Remonstrant College in Amsterdam, published a very successful dialogue On the Truth of the Christian Religion: A Friendly Conversation with a Learned Jew.57 By moderate arguments Limborch defends the superiority of the Christian over the Mosaic revelation.
Limborch’s colleague at Amsterdam, the Swiss-born Jean Leclerc (1657—1736), while primarily famed for his work in biblical criticism, deserves mention as an apologist. In Treatise on Incredulity58 he examined the sources of unbelief and came to the conclusion that it was largely the result of the worldliness, indifference, immorality, and intolerance of Christians. In two appended letters, Leclerc gave positive grounds for the acceptance of the Christian religion. In this area of his thought he shows considerable dependence on Grotius, whom he greatly admired.
ENGLAND IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
In the latter part of the seventeenth century the intellectual leadership of Europe passed for a time from France to England, and to England one must look for the most creative advances in apologetics. The dominant mood of the seventeenth century is one of exuberant confidence in the divinely established harmony between reason and nature. The approach to God through reason and nature, rather than through positive historical revelation, gave rise to deism.
In its early phase deism is best represented by Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583—1648), who came into contact with skeptical ideas during his service as ambassador to France (1618—1624) and attempted to construct an antidote to skepticism. Having published his treatise On Truth59 in 1624, he later expanded it under the title On the Religion of the Gentiles (De religione gentilium, posthumously published, 1663). Taking the universal consent of mankind as the infallible index of truth, Herbert maintains that God has impressed upon all men certain common religious notions. He specifies the following five (without however denying that there are others):
1. There is a supreme Power (whom one may call God).
2. This sovereign power must be worshiped.
3. Virtue combined with piety constitutes the principal or best part of divine worship, as has always been believed.
4. All vices and crimes are hateful and should be expiated by repentance.
5. There are rewards and punishments after this life.
All who subscribe to the truths of natural religion are in Herbert’s opinion members of a Church that truly deserves to be called Catholic and outside of which there is no salvation. He does not entirely reject the idea of revelation, but he denies that it communicates additional truths. Rather, he says, it makes us more than ordinarily certain of things known by reason and gives us an experience of God’s gracious approach to man. Later deists, going beyond Herbert of Cherbury, tended to reject entirely the idea of a supernatural order, including the notions of grace, revelation, incarnation, and miracle.
Among the early opponents of deism was Robert Boyle (1627—1691). While firmly convinced that the progress of science helped to manifest the creative hand of God, Boyle argued in numerous short tracts for the existence of revealed truths beyond the range of human reason.60 In a late work, The Christian Virtuoso (1690), Boyle defended the truth of the Christian revelation on the basis of three main proofs: the sublimity of Christian doctrines, the testimony of miracles, and the beneficial effects of the Christian religion on the history of the human race.
In his will Boyle set up a foundation for an annual series of eight lectures to be delivered in a parish church of London “for proving the Christian religion against notorious infidels, viz., atheists, theists, pagans, Jews, and Mahometans, not descending lower to any controversies that are among Christians themselves”.
The first Boyle lecturer was the classical scholar Richard Bentley (1622—1742), who chose for his topic in 1692 The Folly of Atheism and What Is Now Called Deism, Even with Respect to the Present Life. These lectures were essentially an argument against Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan had been published forty years earlier. The first lecture dwells on the evil consequences of atheism both for the individual—whom it deprives of life’s best hope—and for society, which is securely founded on religious faith. In his second lecture Bentley seeks to prove the existence of God from the faculties of the human soul. Lectures 3 to 5 proceed to establish God’s reality from the design of the human body; and lectures 6 to 8, taking advantage of Newton’s Principia (1686), aim to prove God’s existence from the wonderful order of the heavens.
In 1694 Bentley delivered a second series of Boyle lectures, A Defense of Christianity, but they were never printed, and the manuscript copies have been lost. The very fact that he gave this course is, however, a reminder that Bentley was not content to let the matter rest with natural theology. Already in his first series of lectures he asserted that there “is a wide difference between what is contrary to reason and what is superior to it and out of its reach”.61 Thus he subscribed to the classical conception of revelation as the manifestation of things above the grasp of reason.
Isaac Newton (1642—1727) enthusiastically endorsed the apologetical use that Bentley in his first volume had made of the Principia. In a letter to the author he declared: “When I wrote my treatise about our system, I had an eye upon such principles as might work with considering men for the belief of a Deity; and nothing can rejoice me more than to find it useful for that purpose. But if I have done the public any service this way, it is due to nothing but industry and patient thought.”62 Newton’s own theology was Latitudinarian, probably even Unitarian, but he did not yield to the most orthodox divines in his reliance on Holy Scripture. Among his posthumously published papers are his curious speculations entitled Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John, in which he asserts that to reject the prophecies of Daniel is to reject the Christian religion.63
In the full glow of the Newtonian illumination theologians appealed with increasing confidence to the reflections of the divine attributes in the order of nature. John Ray (1627—1705), who may be regarded as the founder of modern botany and zoology, produced an influential volume on The Wisdom of God in Creation (1691), in which he dwells enthusiastically on the teleological structure of living organisms and the marvels of animal instinct. Somewhat less penetrating but equally characteristic of the time are the Boyle lectures of William Derham (1657—1735), later published (1713) as Physico-Theology, or a Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God from His Works of Creation. Derham finds in the design of the world innumerable proofs of God’s power, wisdom, and goodness. As for the apparent deficiencies in nature, one cannot, he says, censure God for them, for the full purposes of God’s will escape men’s limited minds.
Among the most influential of the Boyle lectures were the two series delivered by the Anglican Samuel Clarke (1675—1729) in 1704—1705. Although Clarke has been accused of Arianism in theology, the peculiarity of his doctrinal position has no great effect on his apologetic. His first volume, entitled A Demonstration of the Being and Attributes of God, was specifically intended as an “answer to Mr. Hobbes, Spinoza, and their followers” and seeks by a set of highly metaphysical deductions to establish successively that there must be a necessary being, eternal, infinite, omnipresent, unique, intelligent, free, omnipotent, omniscient, and infinitely good.64 What Clarke does is essentially to reconstruct the natural theology of medieval Scholasticism on the basis of Newtonian rather than Aristotelian physics. Like Newton, Clarke accepted the quaint idea that absolute space is the sensorium of God—a notion possibly derived from the Cambridge Platonists of the seventeenth century.
The second volume of Clarke’s Boyle lectures, directed against the deists, deals with The Unchangeable Obligations of Natural Religion and the Truth and Certainty of the Christian Revelation. The gist of the argument is that any deist who sincerely confronts the claims of Christianity will inevitably embrace it and that any deist who refuses to do so is on a path that leads logically to atheism (antipation of Newman’s choice between Catholicism and atheism as the two consistently logical alternatives). The doctrines of Christianity, Clarke maintains, are agreeable to unprejudiced reason; they have a natural tendency to improve human conduct and, taken in unison, constitute the most consistent and rational system of belief ever known. To this pragmatic approach Clarke then appends the customary extrinsic arguments from the miracles of Jesus, the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, and the testimony of the Apostles. Appealing to the authority of Eusebius, Clarke contends that “all the books of the New Testament were either written by the Apostles; or, which is the very same thing, approved and authorized by them.”65 The written testimony of the Apostles, he concludes, “was the most credible, certain and convincing evidence that ever was given to any matter of fact in the world”.66
In the preface to his second volume of Boyle lectures Clarke felt obliged to take notice of the “indecent and unreasonable reviling” of his older contemporary, John Locke (1632—1704), who had objected to the facility with which Clarke concluded to the essential properties of matter and of God. Locke in his Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) found fault with the theory of innate ideas and sought to base religious knowledge upon man’s experience of the world about him.
In particular, Locke assails the innatism of Herbert of Cherbury, whose five principles of natural theology, he maintains, are neither evident nor universal.67 Locke nevertheless regards the idea of God as “naturally deducible from all parts of our knowledge” with a certitude equal to that of the most evident geometrical theorems.68 In Book 4, chapter 10, he sets forth a rather crude demonstration of God’s existence based on the principle of causality. By means of this proof he concludes to the reality of an eternal and powerful being that stands at the origin of the world.
Locke, as a convinced Christian, unhesitatingly accepts the idea of revelation. In a famous passage he writes:
Reason is natural revelation, whereby the eternal Father of light, and fountain of all knowledge, communicates to mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their natural faculties: revelation is natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God immediately, which reason vouches the truth of, by the testimony and proofs it gives that they come from God. So that he that takes away reason, to make way for revelation, puts out the light of both, and does much—what the same as if he would persuade a man to put out his eyes, the better to receive the remote light of an invisible star by a telescope.69
Locke explicitly discusses the criteria of revelation in his Discourse on Miracles (1703). Taking for granted as a presupposition the existence of God as creator and governor of the world, he maintains that a divine mission cannot be credited except under three conditions: (1) it must deliver nothing derogating from the honor of the one, only, true, invisible God or inconsistent with natural religion and the rules of morality; (2) it must not inform man of things indifferent, or of small moment, or easily knowable by the application of their natural powers; and (3) it must be confirmed by supernatural signs. Miracles may be reasonably taken to be divine until such time as disproved, by a contrary mission attested by yet greater wonders: “His [God’s] power being known to have no equal, always will, and always may be, safely depended on, to show its superiority in vindicating his authority, and maintaining every truth that he hath revealed.”70
Locke simply takes for granted the historicity of the biblical miracles. In The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695), a work designed to show that the one essential of Christian belief is the acceptance of Jesus as Messiah, Locke holds that Jesus established His Messiahship both by His many miracles and by His fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy. Locke dwells particularly on Isaiah 9, Micah 5:2, Daniel 7:13-14, and Daniel 9:25.71
Although Locke’s version of the Christian creed was, by traditional standards, a very attenuated one, he remained a committed Christian who accepted the idea of supernatural revelation attested by supernatural signs. Some of Locke’s disciples, however, were to use their master’s epistemological principles in support of an anti-supernaturalistic deism.72 In 1696 John Toland, an admirer of Locke, published the treatise Christianity Not Mysterious, which rejects the Lockean idea that there could be a revelation superior but not contrary to reason. The only possible function of revelation, in Toland’s deistic position, would be the clarification of naturally knowable religious truths.
Typical of the radical deism of the eighteenth century is Christianity as Old as Creation, a work published by Matthew Tindal in 1730. Radicalizing Locke’s positions, Tindal argues that the Bible is nothing but a republication of the religion of nature.
The early part of the eighteenth century witnessed a great proliferation of apologetical works in defense of supernatural revelation against the deists.73 Noteworthy among these was the immensely popular monograph of Thomas Sherlock, The Trial of the Witnesses of the Resurrection of Jesus (1729), a work that concludes with the verdict that the Apostles are not guilty of having given false witness. A thorough vindication of the historical basis of the Christian faith was given by Nathanael Lardner (d. 1768) in his The Credibility of the Gospel History (published in 13 sections from 1727 to 1755). The Puritan minister of Dublin, John Leland (1691—1766), who has been called “the indefatigable opponent of a whole generation of deists”, wrote, partly against Toland, a well-known treatise on The Advantages and Necessity of the Christian Religion (1733). The Irish bishop and philosopher George Berkeley (1685—1753) composed in 1732 a dialogue, Alciphron, orthe Minute Philosopher, in which Christianity is defended against the skeptics on the ground of its tendency to good, its superiority to the other religions, its natural harmony with human needs, as well as the usual arguments from miracles and prophecy.
William Warburton (1698—1779), who had been a lawyer before becoming an Anglican priest, published in 1737—1741 six books on The Divine Legation of Moses Demonstrated on the Principles of a Religious Deist, more conspicuous for the vehemence of their asseverations than for the lucidity of their reasoning. His basic argument is that the Jews must have been assisted by a special divine providence since they succeeded in maintaining social order without belief in rewards and punishments in a future life—a belief that deists regarded as indispensable for prosperity and social existence.
The most successful of this crop of responses to deism was undoubtedly that of Joseph Butler (1692—1752), an Anglican clergyman who became Bishop of Bristol in 173 8 and Bishop of Durham in 1750.74 In his work, significantly entitled The Analogy of Religion, Natural and Revealed, to the Constitution and Course of Nature (1736), Butler writes as a religious empiricist who has reflected deeply on the phenomena of nature and has assimilated the lessons of Locke’s treatise on probability.
Butler takes for granted in this work what would have been conceded by his adversaries, and indeed by practically all his contemporaries—namely, that there is an all-powerful author and governor of nature. He asks himself what is to be inferred from this with regard to natural and revealed religion. In Part 1 he shows that the observed course of nature gives strong reasons to suppose that this present life may be a probation leading to a future state in which man will be rewarded or punished for what he has done on earth. It is therefore altogether likely that moral improvement may be the chief purpose of his life on earth. Although the argument from natural analogy is not, Butler concedes, such as to exclude all doubt, it gives sufficient credibility “to engage men to live in the general practice of all virtue and piety”.75
In Part 2 Butler directly confronts the question raised by the deists, whether natural religion gives sufficient guidance so that any additional, supernatural revelation must be judged useless and hence incredible. To this he replies, first, that the principles of natural religion are not widely recognized except among peoples to whom the biblical revelation has been authoritatively proclaimed. Then he adds that although the greater part of Christianity may indeed be a republication of the religion of nature, it cannot be reduced to this alone. If it be true that Christ is man’s divine savior and that the Holy Spirit is his sanctifier, these facts are far from unimportant. Thus all men are under an obligation to “search the Scriptures” in order to determine whether these claims are credible.76
In chapters 2 and 3 Butler goes on to show that there can be no a priori presumption against miracles and revelation on the ground of their singularity, for nature itself is full of irregularities and singularities. He then contends (chapter 4) that if an ostensibly revealed religion is more self-consistent and conducive to virtue than systems of admittedly human devising, there is a presumption in favor of the truth of its claims. Even if man, with his limited human grasp, cannot eliminate all the apparent anomalies and obscurities in biblical faith, this is no more an argument against its divine origin than the unaccountable phenomena of nature are proofs against the divine authorship of the world (which the deists do not question). So too, Butler continues (chapter 5), the manner in which creatures come into being through the instrumentality of others and depend on others for their sustenance and growth makes it antecedently likely that God might communicate the goods of Redemption through a mediator. The want of universality in the Christian religion, he argues (chapter 6), proves nothing against its truth, for it is evident from the course of nature that Providence, while extending its care to all, does not confer upon all the same kind and degree of benefits.
Only in chapter 7 of Part 2 does Butler turn to the positive evidence tending to prove that Christianity, besides being antecedently likely, is factually revealed. His principal arguments are from miracles and prophecies, but unlike most previous apologists he does not attempt to prove individual supernatural events taken separately. Rather he weaves a single general argument from the whole course of biblical history and from the fortunes of Judaism and Christianity since New Testament times. Only within this global framework does he think it profitable to weigh the evidence in favor of any particular miracle or prophecy. The very multitude of these signs, he points out, is a factor in their favor. “Upon the whole: as there is large historical evidence, both direct and circumstantial, of miracles wrought in attestation of Christianity, collected by those who have writ upon the subject; it lies upon unbelievers to show, why this evidence is not to be credited.”77 So too with prophecy: “A long series of prophecy being applicable to such and such events, is itself a proof that it was intended of them.”78 Although some or all such utterances taken separately might be explained naturally as referring to other events, it remains to be explained why the whole series of them is applicable to Christ and the Church. In summary, Butler’s argument is cumulative and convergent. “For probable proofs, by being added, not only increase the evidence, but multiply it.”79
In his final chapter (2.8) Butler raises against himself the difficulty that his arguments from presumptions and probabilities are not powerful enough to induce men to make great sacrifices and to stake their whole lives upon the result. To this he replies that in almost all the practical decisions of life, including those of gravest consequence, man acts “upon evidence of a like kind and degree to the evidence of religion”.80
In this connection he refers to a point made earlier (2. 6) in connection with the common objection that if God wanted to make a revelation He would surely signalize it in a way that all could recognize as indubitable. To this Butler replies that the objection would hold if God unconditionally wanted all men to accept the revelation, but it might well be that God intends His message only for those who are serious and upright in their motivation.81 If so, it should not be surprising if those who are frivolous, careless, or desirous of evading moral obligations should fail to be convinced. Here again the analogy from natural knowledge helps. Quite clearly, levity, passion, and prejudice impede one’s perception in areas other than religion. Why then should this not be true in the moral and religious sphere?
Once the nonbeliever recognizes that his own faults may lie at the root of his doubts, he will be shaken out of his complacency and will awaken to his serious duty to investigate. If this does not bring him to firm conviction, it should at least make him aware how rash it would be to vilify and scorn Christian belief.
In this classic work Butler breaks away completely from the standard format of apologetical treatises since the Middle Ages. He avoids the complacent apriorism of the Enlightenment and the authoritarian extrinsicism of late Scholasticism. Shunning the lofty flights of metaphysical reasoning, he keeps close to empirically known facts. With the pragmatic instincts of the typical Anglo-Saxon, he makes deft use of presumptions and probabilities. If this be in itself an inferior type of evidence, it is appropriate, he thinks, for beings of limited intelligence who depend so heavily upon the senses. For man, he maintains, probability is the very guide of life.
Like Pascal, Butler is able to accept obscurities in the evidence and to account for them. He sees that geometrical clarity has little place in the moral and religious sphere. But Butler, the cool and reflective churchman, is far removed from the personal mysticism of Pascal. While the convert of Port Royal is on fire with devotion to the God of Jesus Christ, Butler looks upon religion objectively as the potential source of a series of truths by which to regulate one’s moral conduct. His originality consists in his use of empiricism to provide an epistemological footing for evidence of a moral and historical character. His mastery of the complexities of convergent evidence is unique among apologists up to his time and links him with his great nineteenth-century disciple, John Henry Newman.
British apologetics in the second half of the eighteenth century was largely taken up with answering David Hume (1711—1776), who did much to weaken the complacent optimism of the deists and the dogmatism of the orthodox. In his Dialogues on Natural Religion (composed 1751, published posthumously), Hume criticized the traditional arguments from design and raised the difficulty that from contemplating the universe one might well conclude that there is no governor except “blind nature, impregnated by a great vivifying principle, and pouring forth from her lap, without discernment or parental care, her maimed and abortive children”.82 In his Natural History of Religion (1757) Hume seems favorable to the theistic position but is highly critical of the superstitions that often accompany the desire to propitiate a supernatural being. Earlier, in his Essay on Miracles, defining miracle as a violation of the laws of nature established by firm and unalterable experience, he took the view that human testimony could never be sufficient to establish such an event, since it is always more probable that the witness is mistaken or untruthful than that such an extraordinary event has occurred.
Among the most important defenses of miracles in reply to Hume, the following three are noteworthy: William Adams (1707—1789), Essay on Mr. Hume’s Essay on Miracles (1752); George Campbell (1719—1791), Dissertation on Miracles (1763); and John Douglas (1721—1807), Criterion, or Miracles Examined (1756). The best arguments in these works were to be recapitulated by Paley, the leading representative of the evidential school.
William Paley (1743—1805)83 did for eighteenth-century England what Abbadie had done for seventeenth-century France: he summed up in clear and systematic form what was best in the arguments of his predecessors. Paley is still remembered for his Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785), which proposes a Christian utilitarianism. In Horae paulinae (1790), his most original work, he amasses arguments for the reliability of the historical indications contained in the thirteen Pauline Epistles, making use of parallels found in Acts and elsewhere. His two best-known works are even more directly and deliberately apologetical. In 1794 he published A View of the Evidences of Christianity, which was so successful that it remained compulsory reading for all seeking entrance to Cambridge University until the twentieth century. In 1802 he issued his Natural Theology, one of the classical presentations of the argument from design. Something deserves to be said about both of these major works.
Underlying Paley’s apologetic is a moralistic and utilitarian theory of revelation. The purpose of revelation, he holds, is to influence human conduct by informing men of the rewards and punishments that await them in the future life.84 In the opening pages of the Evidences he argues skillfully for the antecedent likelihood of revelation, granted the existence of a wise, beneficent Creator and the need that man experiences for additional light and assurance. He then replies to Hume’s argument against the discernibility of miracles. The argument does not hold, he maintains, for there can be no presumption that miracle stories must be false. If God is capable of intervening in the world, if revelation is likely, and if miracles are the appropriate way of sealing revelations, then miracles are likely in the context of what appears to be a revelation.
In the first major division of Part 1 Paley aims to show that there is satisfactory evidence that the original witnesses of Christianity were converted to a radically new manner of life and passed their lives in labors, dangers, and sufferings in order to bear witness to their beliefs. Those beliefs, moreover, were substantially the same as contained in the New Testament and therefore centered on the miraculous history of Jesus. In this connection Paley demonstrates at length the credibility of the New Testament accounts, drawing on the voluminous work of Lardner, mentioned above. Then Paley concludes that the testimony of the New Testament must be true for it is evident that the Apostles would not have gone about lying in order to teach virtue.
In the second major division of Part 1 Paley seeks to establish, by comparison with other religious movements, that there is no satisfactory evidence “that persons pretending to be original witnesses of any other similar miracles have acted in the same manner, in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief of the truth of those accounts”.85 He takes up in particular the alleged miracles of persons such as Vespasian and Apollonius of Tyana and shows how unimpressive and poorly attested are these miracles compared with those of Christ. In these pages Paley leans heavily on the arguments drawn up by Adams and Douglas in their answers to Hume.
In Part 2 Paley furnishes nine other arguments, which he considers auxiliary, for the truth of Christianity. They are the arguments from prophecy, from the originality of the New Testament code of morality, from the character and doctrine of Christ, from the candor of the New Testament writers, from the agreements of the New Testament writers in their portrayal of Christ, from the originality of Christ’s character, from the agreements between the New Testament and profane history, from the undesigned coincidences among the New Testament writers, from the impossibility of accounting for the Easter faith without supposing the real Resurrection of Christ, and, finally, from the rapid and extensive propagation of the Christian religion. All of these arguments are traditional. Paley expounds them persuasively but without much originality.
In Part 3 Paley takes up seven popular objections that might seem to militate against his own arguments for Christianity. He explains, for instance, why many Jews and pagans did not accept the Christian message and why miracles were not greatly stressed by the early Christian apologists. To the objection that “if God had given a revelation, he would have written it in the skies”, Paley replies with arguments borrowed from Bishop Butler to the effect that if revelation has the same author as nature one might expect it to contain a like obscurity and that there might be good reasons why God would not wish to compel our assent with overpowering evidence.
While the fame and popularity of Paley’s Evidences are sufficient testimony to its merits, the book has little more than historical interest today. Paley was a skillful advocate, but he remained on the surface of things. He did not probe deeply into metaphysics or criteriology and therefore failed to justify his extrinsicist view of revelation and his extraordinary insistence on the evidential value of miracles. His argument from the biblical miracles, although it may have seemed solid in the eighteenth century, has lost much of its force because it presumes that the Gospels and Acts are, on the whole, eyewitness reports. Paley knew nothing of oral tradition, of the complex processes by which legends are formed, or of the subtle shades of difference between various forms of popular history. For him, as for Abbadie and others, there were but two alternatives: factual history and imposture.
The Evidences presupposed the existence and the essential attributes of God. Only later, in his Natural Theology, did Paley give his rational justification for this presupposition. This work begins with the famous (though even in Paley’s time far from original) comparison between the world and a watch. As it would be irrational to assert that a watch required no maker, so, he reasons, it is necessary to postulate a designer for the world. Following the basic lines of argument already developed by writers such as John Ray and William Derham, Paley proceeds to give a lengthy analysis of the manifold instances of design in the world. Like Ray, he prefers to concentrate less on astronomy than on biology. Drawing on medical and anatomical literature, he expatiates on the structure and functions of plants, insects, mammals, and especially on the organs of the human body. The examination of the human eye, he holds, would itself be a sufficient cure for atheism.86 Here, as in the Evidences, Paley presents his case with remarkable force and clarity but with a dissatisfying lack of profundity. While he piles up illustrations, he fails to examine the logical steps and presuppositions in a manner that meets the obvious objections. He does not go into the difficulties of Hume, whom he had read, or of Kant, whose Critique of Pure Reason (1781) was probably unfamiliar to him. He accepts the mechanistic assumption, that “the problem of creation was, ‘attraction and matter being given, to make a world out of them.’ ”87 If this is one’s view of nature, one can easily surmise that the world owes its purposiveness to an external designer. But has Paley given enough value to the intrinsic purposiveness of living organisms? Largely as a result of the work of Darwin, whom Paley greatly influenced, the argument from design as previously proposed is no longer convincing.
GERMANY IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES
In no other European country was there so creative an apologetical encounter between theology and unbelief as in England. One may therefore summarize more briefly what occurred in continental Europe.
In Germany the tone for the discussion in the eighteenth century was to a great extent set by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646—1716). This remarkable mathematician, physicist, historian, and jurist wrote several major philosophical works touching on religious questions. In his youthful De arte combinatoria (1666) he proposed the development of a universal logic along the lines suggested by Raymond Lull. In 1669 he outlined the plan of a definitive apology entitled Demonstrationes catholicae, which was intended to reestablish the religious unity of Europe and to prepare for the successful evangelization of the world. According to Leibniz’s outline this work was to consist of a series of Prolegomena dealing with logic, metaphysics, physics, and practical philosophy, to be followed by four parts: (1) a demonstration of the existence of God; (2) a demonstration of the immortality of the soul; (3) proofs of the Christian mysteries; and (4) proofs of the authority of the Church and of Holy Scripture.88
Leibniz was intent upon forging a philosophical system that would reconcile the new developments since Descartes and Spinoza with Aristotle and the ancients. In a letter to his former professor Jakob Thomasius, dated April 30, 1669, he expressed the apologetical importance he attributed to this task: “I venture to assert that atheists, Socinians, naturalists and skeptics can never be opposed successfully unless this philosophy is established. I believe this philosophy is a gift of God to this old world, to serve as the only plank, as it were, which pious and prudent men may use to escape the shipwreck of atheism which now threatens us.”89
Leibniz strongly rejected the contention of Pierre Bayle that faith is contrary to reason and that the act of faith must therefore be blind and irrational. In his “Discourse on the Conformity of Faith with Reason”, prefixed to his Theodicy (1710), Leibniz replies that faith, while in a certain sense above reason, is never contrary to it. But unlike Locke he is not content with a juxtaposition of faith and reason on the basis of mutual noninterference. He holds that truths of faith necessarily agree with the a priori principles of reason, such as the principle of contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. Revelation and miracles, while they go beyond the physical powers of created agents, are within the scope of reason insofar as God must have a sufficient reason for decreeing such exceptions. Whether such interventions have in fact occurred is for Leibniz a question of fact, to be established by historical evidence. He has no personal doubts but what the revelation attested in the Bible is sufficiently founded on reliable testimony and is therefore to be accepted.
In the case of Leibniz, as in that of many other apologists, the effort to defend the faith was inseparable from a critical rethinking of Christian doctrine. He labored to show, for instance, that the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation and the Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation could both be properly understood in a sense that did not go against self-evident rational principles. Approximating in some ways the tradition of the Calvinist churches, he regarded the presence of Christ in the Eucharist as a substantial but spiritual presence. So too he sought to defend the eternity of hell by the somewhat novel suggestion that the souls of the damned continually perform new acts of sin. In his Theodicy, replying to Bayle, he attempted to account for evil in the world without prejudice to the power and goodness of God and in this connection propounded his famous thesis that this is the best of all possible worlds. In other works Leibniz sought to give a rational demonstration of the immortality of the soul. He considered that those who based their acceptance of this doctrine on faith alone unduly weakened the rational foundation of Christian faith.
In various controversial writings Leibniz engaged in debates with Locke, Hobbes, and Spinoza. In lengthy correspondence with Samuel Clarke he combated Newton’s view that it was necessary for God to interfere in the world in order to keep the universe in operation. Against the Socinians he wrote the essay Defense of the Trinity by Means of New Logical Inventions (1671).
Leibniz’s disciple Christian Wolff (1679—1754) early in his career composed an outline of apologetics under the title The Method of Demonstrating the Truth of the Christian Religion (1707).90 He insists on a geometrical, a priori method that starts with the existence and perfections of God and goes on to demonstrate, in view of man’s actual state, the necessity of immediate divine revelation and of its expression in prophetic and apostolic writings. In his most mature religio-philosophical work, Natural Theology,91 Wolff sets forth stringent demonstrations both a priori and a posteriori of the existence and attributes of God. He adds refutations of errors such as atheism, deism, and naturalism.
In eighteenth-century Germany the deistically inclined “physico-theology” that had already become popular in England won wide acclaim. Johann Albert Fabricius (d. 1736) translated two major works of Derham, and he himself wrote works entitled Hydrotheology (water) and Pyrotheology (fire). Other enthusiasts of the movement published works with such odd titles as Phytotheology (plants), Petinotheology (birds), Brontotheology (thunder), Lithotheology (stones), and Insectotheology.
Somewhat similar in orientation was the apologetical work of the Dutch mathematician Bernard Nieuwentijdt, The Right Use of the Contemplation of the World for the Knowledge of the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God and Also for the Persuasion of Atheists and Unbelievers (1715). This vast and ambitious treatise exploits numerous areas of scientific information for signs of the attributes of God and only in a concluding section deals with properly revealed mysteries. Bodily resurrection is defended on the basis of analogies in plant and insect life.
Later in the century the Swiss botanist Charles Bonnet erected a bold and original religio-cosmological system on the basis of Leibnizian principles. In his Contemplation of Nature (1764—1765) he speculates on the worlds above man. In 1769 he published a two-volume work, Philosophical Palingenesis, which propounds a scientific basis for the doctrine of immortality by linking the soul to a tiny imperishable organism composed of subtle matter. In the final portion of this work, later published separately under the title Philosophical Reflections on the Proofs for Christianity (1770), he deals with revealed truth. He proposes a naturalistic explanation of miracles on the basis of a theory of pre-established harmony. In the closing section, dealing with the credibility of the Bible, he stresses the wonderful doctrines and effects of Christianity as the primary signs of its credibility.
As in England so in Germany there were deistic rationalists hostile to all revealed religion. The best known representative of this tendency is Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694—1768), the orientalist from Hamburg, who composed a bulky Apology for or Defense of the Rational Worshipers of God, five sections of which were published after his death by Lessing under the title Wolfenbuttel Fragments (1774—1777). Reimarus, like Toland and Tindal, holds that the world itself is a sufficient revelation of God and that a purely rational religion is sufficient. He vigorously attacks the whole conception of historical revelation and rejects miracles as unworthy of God. He finds the Old Testament crude and childish in its teachings and repulsive in the immorality of its heroes. Turning to the New Testament he finds the Resurrection accounts too conflicting to serve as a basis of faith. In a final fragment published by Lessing in 1778, On the Purpose of Jesus and His Disciples, Reimarus argues that Jesus was a deluded fanatic, that His disciples perpetrated a deliberate deception, and that the Christian religion is therefore a colossal fraud.
The dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729—1781), who had begun his career as a divinity student, retained a lifelong interest in religious questions, even if he did not staunchly adhere to the Lutheranism of his fathers.92 In some of his writings he seems to stand close to the deists, but to their philosophy he added at least the idea of progress. In his The Education of the Human Race (1777), building on a favorite theme of Irenaeus and Origen he takes the view that the biblical religion, and Christianity as its culmination, have led humanity to insights concerning God that would never have been achieved by unaided reason. In particular Lessing valued the religions for promoting the ideals of sincerity, tolerance, and brotherly love—though he also criticized religion when it interfered with these values. His exaltation of tolerance and his critical attitude toward positive religion best appear in his play Nathan the Wise (1779).
While not an apologist in the ordinary sense, Lessing made some provocative observations on the question of Christian evidences. He published Reimarus not because he fully agreed with the latter’s dogmatic anti-supernaturalism but because he thought that Reimarus had successfully destroyed the possibility of defending Christianity on the basis of the biblical proofs from prophecy and miracle.
Lessing’s own views on apologetics may be gathered at least in part from his brochure On the Proof of the Spirit and of Power, written in reply to a pamphlet by Johann David Schumann (1777), which had reaffirmed the traditional historical arguments for Christianity in answer to Reimarus. Lessing took exception to the idea set forth by Bonnet and others that although historical truth cannot be demonstrated yet one must believe the biblical prophecies and miracles as firmly as truths that have been demonstrated. “Accidental truths of history”, he maintained, “can never become the proof of necessary truths of reason.” The passage from historical truth to the truths of faith, he reasoned, was an illegitimate leap from one genus of discourse to another, over “the broad, ugly ditch which I cannot get across”.93
Lessing did not himself reject all proofs for Christianity. At the conclusion of his pamphlet against Schumann he asserts that one can accept Christianity on the basis of its inner truth, insofar as this speaks with certainty to one’s heart. One no longer has to rely upon miracles and prophecies, though these signs may have been necessary to procure the acceptance of Christianity by the multitude at the time when the religion was strange and new. Now that the building is complete, the scaffolding may be torn down. Faith is sustained by the “ever continuing miracle of Christianity itself”.94
In addition to the bold and creative thinkers thus far discussed, eighteenth-century Germany and Switzerland had their share of traditionally orthodox controversialists. For example, the Swiss mathematician and physicist Leonard Euler (1707—1783) in his Defense of Divine Revelation against the Objections of Freethinkers,95 after replying to the deistic objections against revelation, concludes that one can rely firmly on all the gospel promises because they are accredited to man by the supreme miracle of Christ’s Resurrection. The Swiss scientist and poet Albrecht von Haller (1708—1777), in a collection of letters, replied to the deists and Encyclopedists of England and France, respectively.96 Theodor Christoph Lilienthal (1717—1782), professor at Konigsberg, in 1760—1782 composed sixteen volumes of lengthy but unoriginal arguments against the objections of deists and unbelievers.97 The Gottingen professor Gottfried Less (1736—1797), after publishing a work on the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection against Reimarus, wrote several volumes of general Christian evidences much read in their day. His succinct treatise, The Authenticity, Uncorrupted Preservation, and Credibility of the New Testament,98 in which he presents some of the early testimonies to the New Testament writings previously assembled by Lardner, was translated into English. To show the credibility of the Gospels he gives a somewhat oversimplified picture of how “thirteen poor, inconsiderable, unlearned, and almost unknown men” spread the Christian message to the “whole world”.
CATHOLIC APOLOGETICS IN FRANCE AND ITALY
In Roman Catholic countries the apologetics of the eighteenth century took the form of a series of defensive reactions against the new philosophies of the Enlightenment.99 The Benedictine François Lamy (or Lami; 1636—1711), a disciple of Nicolas Malebranche, published a philosophical polemic, The New Atheism Overthrown, or, Refutation of the System of Spinoza.100 He sought to refute Spinoza’s monism by proving that man is, as Descartes had contended, a composite of two substances: body and soul. Against Spinoza’s determinism Lamy alleged the immediate experience of free will. He argued further that Spinoza’s pantheistic system, if accepted in practice, would lead to disastrous moral consequences.
In other works Lamy set forth the positive grounds for accepting Christianity. His Evident Truth of the Christian Religion101 is a rather jejune demonstration of the “fact of Christian revelation” from miracles, prophecies, and the testimonies of the witnesses to Jesus Christ. In a later and more elaborate apologetic, The Unbeliever Led to Religion by Reason102 he sets forth the Christian evidences in nine rather tedious dialogues between Arsile and Timandre. He gives both a priori arguments from the antecedent necessity of a mediator and a posteriori arguments from the New Testament witnesses.
As the eighteenth century progressed, French apologists, like their colleagues in England, showed an increasing tendency to shift their ground from philosophical reasoning to historical evidence. This development is already discernible in the work of the Oratorian Alexandre Claude François Houtteville (or Houteville; 1686—1742), who issued in 1722 The Christian Religion Proved by Facts.103 Book 1, the most original part of this work, demonstrates that the miraculous events narrated in the Gospels are worthy of acceptance according to the general laws of historical evidence. In the first place, he observes, since miracles are not self-contradictory, they are worthy of serious investigation (chapter 6). Further, the Gospel miracles are vouched for by contemporary eyewitnesses (chapter 7) who were sincere and truthful (chapter 8). The Gospel facts, moreover, were public and of general interest (chapter 9). They stand at the basis of certain later facts, such as the willingness of the early Christians to die for their faith (chapter 10). The miracles of Jesus were admitted by the Jews and pagans of the first Christian centuries, although it would have been to the interest of these adversaries to deny them (chapter 11). Finally, the miracle stories have been handed down without corruption (chapter 12). In Book 2 Houtteville sets forth the conventional arguments from Old Testament prophecies of Christ, and in Book 3 he replies to fourteen major objections raised by the deists to the veracity of the Gospels. At the end he appends a dissertation on the systems that the unbelievers propose as alternatives to Christianity.
Houtteville’s work is clear and well ordered. His efforts to apply exact historical method to the Gospels represented a real advance, but the undeveloped state of historical science in his day has, of course, made his work quite obsolete by modern standards.
Throughout the remainder of the eighteenth century, Catholic apologetics was compelled to reply to brilliant antagonists such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712—1778), who advocated a kind of sentimental deism; Voltaire (1691—1778), who mordantly satirized the ideas of providence and election in a cascade of pamphlets, novels, and historical works; and the Baron Paul d’Holbach (1723—1789), who propounded, especially in his Systeme de la nature, a thoroughgoing atheistic determinism. Many of the leading articles in Denis Diderot’s famous Encyclopedie—a work of eighty-four volumes published from 1751 to 1780—were overtly hostile to Christianity and the Catholic Church. One historical survey reports: “Some nine hundred works in defense of Christianity were published in France between 1715 and 1789, ninety in one year (1770) alone.”104
The most prolific Catholic adversary of the philosophes was the Abbe Nicolas Sylvestre Bergier (also known as Nicolas-Syvian Bergier, 1718—1790), whose collected works in Migne’s edition comprise eight bulky volumes. Against Rousseau he wrote in 1765 Deism Refuted by Itself105 a successful popular work in the form of twelve letters. The first three deal respectively with the possibility, necessity, and factual existence of supernatural revelation; the fourth takes up the authority of the Church as a divine teacher, and the remainder answer various objections that Rousseau, or his mouthpiece in Emile, the “vicar of Savoy”, had raised against Catholic Christianity. Bergier’s primary tactic is to expose the internal inconsistencies in the adversary’s position—a task not too difficult in the case of Rousseau. Bergier’s own proofs for Christianity are primarily drawn from the New Testament miracles, which he, like Houtteville, views as incontestable supernatural facts. Less subtle than Pascal, Bergier holds that while doctrine is proved from miracles, the converse is never the case.106
Two years later Bergier published, in reply to the now forgotten Freret, a work entitled The Certainty of the Proofs of Christianity,107 which undertakes to defend traditional Christian apologetics from Eusebius to Houtteville against the historical objections that have been raised. Without insisting on the strict authenticity of the New Testament books, Bergier regards their trustworthiness as demonstrable and the efforts to degrade them to the level of the New Testament apocrypha unavailing. He upholds the argument from miracles and denies that it is weakened by the alleged parallel of the false miracles worked at the tomb of the Jansenist Abbe Paris. The Gospel miracles, says Bergier, won converts, but the Jansenist miracles succeeded only in convincing those who were previously confirmed Jansenists.108
Bergier then replied to the Baron d’Holbach’s Christianisme devoile by his Apologie de la religion chretienne (1769)109 and two years later, in response to d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770), Bergier brought forth his Examination of Materialism,110 in which he takes up d’Holbach’s points one by one. In Part 1, examining the cosmos and man, he seeks to show that materialism is incapable of accounting for movement in the world and, a fortiori, for what is characteristic of human life. He defends the freedom of the will, the spirituality of the soul, and personal immortality. In Part 2 Bergier refutes d’Holbach’s atheism not so much by proposing arguments for the existence of God as by proving that d’Holbach’s objections against Clarke and others do not hold.
Bergier’s masterwork is his twelve-volume Historical and Dogmatic Treatise on the True Religion. Published in 1780, it is an exhaustive treatise from a philosophical, historical, and theological perspective on the existence and justification of Catholic Christianity. It contends that revelation is morally necessary to conserve the truths of natural religion and to keep it from degenerating into deism and skepticism. In his biblical section Bergier labors to prove the historicity of the miracles and prophecies of the Old and New Testaments. He then goes on to reflect on the marvelous conversion of the civilized world to Christianity and on the blessings that Catholic Christianity has brought to individuals and societies. Deism, he argues, is inherently unstable; it quickly relapses into atheism or agnosticism. The many signs in favor of Christianity prove beyond doubt that it could not be a human invention. “Of all known religions, none has produced on earth fruits so precious, constant, and universal as has Christianity. . . . Besides, Christianity has survived for eighteen hundred years in spite of the contradictions, battles, losses, schisms, disputes and revolutions to which it has been subjected; a more powerful hand than that of men has effected this wonder; hence there is a God.”111
Bergier was a very industrious, well-informed, courteous, and lucid apologist. He was respected by Voltaire and by the other philosophes of his day as a worthy opponent. A half century after his death, Felicite de Lamennais called him “the greatest apologist of recent centuries and perhaps of all centuries”.112 His great forte was his ability to pick out inconsistencies in the positions of his opponents, and his principal foible was his failure to rise above the common assumptions of the intellectuals of his day. Thus in writing against Rousseau he seems to accept the latter’s extrinsicist view of revelation. In reply to Freret he falls into a positivism of “miraculous facts”, and in refuting d’Holbach he seems to accept the deistic notion of God that d’Holbach is rejecting. Although he ably restated the traditional arguments, Bergier failed to develop a positive theory of Christian credibility that commended itself to later generations.
Voltaire, the leading publicist for deism in eighteenth-century France, stirred up a host of Catholic adversaries. The Jesuit Claude François Nonnotte (1711—1793) published several works in answer to the sage of Ferney, most importantly his two-volume The Errors of Voltaire,113 which politely and moderately points out where Voltaire misrepresents the facts of history. The wittiest and most effective answer to Voltaire was the Letters of Certain Jews to Monsieur Voltaire,114 by Antoine Guenee. Voltaire is chided for his ignorance of the ancient languages and his shortcomings as a biblical scholar, as exhibited in many of his generalizations about the religion of the Jews.
Among the defenders of Catholic orthodoxy in France, a place of honor belongs to Guillaume François Berthier, who was the editor and principal author of the Jesuit Journal de Trevoux from 1745 until 1762, when the Jansenist-dominated Parlement of Paris suppressed the Society of Jesus in France. Chiefly known for his spiritual reflections on Scripture, he was esteemed by allies and adversaries alike for his piety, learning, and civility in debate. In his apologetical writings he skillfully exposed errors in Diderot’s Encyclopedie and responded to the accusations of Voltaire against the Church.
Italian Catholics in the eighteenth century looked on with horrified anxiety as the waves of deism and atheism swept over England and France. Already schooled by their predecessors of the seventeenth century to detest the heresies of Luther and Calvin, the Italian apologists regarded the new errors as the natural and inevitable outcome of the Protestant principle of private judgment. Faith, in their view, depended in very large measure on the living authority of the Church, especially that of the pope. This general trend to center apologetics on the question of the Church and to refute all the other sects and religions from the standpoint of Catholic Christianity characterizes, for instance, the works of the Jesuit pulpit orator Paolo Segneri115 and those of the Dominican apologists Moniglia, Concina, and Gotti. Cardinal Vincenzo Gotti’s The True Church of Jesus Christ116 is a milestone in the development of the apologetics of the Church.
One of the most popular and typical apologies of the period was the Truth of the Faith117 by the Italian Redemptorist St. Alphonsus de’ Liguori (1696—1787), a work in which the author recapitulates the main points of two of his earlier tracts against modern unbelief and heresy. The book consists of three main parts. Part 1, against the atheists and materialists, establishes the existence of God and the spirituality of the human soul. Part 2, prefaced by a brief chapter on the necessity of revelation, sets forth the standard arguments from prophecy and miracle to prove, chiefly against the deists, the fact of Christian revelation. This part closes with a series of chapters on divine providence, the immortality of the soul, and future rewards and punishments. Part 3, directed primarily against the Protestants, undertakes to show that the Roman Catholic Church alone is legitimate, as may be seen from its historical continuity with the apostolic Church and from the continuing miracles within it (including the liquefaction of St. Januarius’s blood). The Protestant churches are dismissed as false because their founders had no divine mission and because they have no stable rule of faith. In the closing chapter Alphonsus takes a strong position in favor of the infallibility of the pope, which was to be defined as a dogma a century later.
Less typical of Italian apologetics at the time was the Barnabite Cardinal Hyacinthe-Sigismond Gerdil (1718—1802). B orn in Savoy, he taught some years at Turin before being called to Rome as a cardinal. Although French was his native language, he composed the majority of his more important works in Italian. In a number of shorter treatises Gerdil attacked the empiricism of Locke, the liberalism of Montesquieu, and the naturalistic educational theories of Rousseau. In his early work he defends the ontologism and occasionalism of Malebranche, but by the time he wrote his lengthy Introduzione allo studio della religione118 he had evolved toward an eclectic Platonism. Appealing to figures such as Plato, Descartes, Newton, Leibniz, and Wolff, he argues against Bayle and others that the wisest men of the most enlightened centuries have esteemed religion and have known how to distinguish it from popular superstition. Religion, he maintains, is necessary, for without it men would not have the motivation to adhere to the demands of justice. The Catholic religion, offering certitude, excels all others. Protestantism, by its doctrine of free examination, contains the seeds of its own destruction.
While Gerdil differs from most of the Italian apologists of his century by reason of his positive attitude toward modern philosophical developments, he resembles them in his infallibilist tendencies and in his antipathy to Protestantism. In no country did eighteenth-century Catholic apologists take an active share in the creative development of new forms of thought, as the Anglicans were doing in England or the Lutherans in Germany.
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY SCHOLASTICISM
In Catholic universities and seminaries, apologetics was conducted in a somewhat closed world as part of a lengthy course of training for future priests and their professors. The treatise was constructed in light of the dogmatic treatise on the virtue of faith, as developed by thinkers such as Suarez and de Lugo. Apologetics was generally seen as a rational discipline, conducted with a view to establishing the “motives of credibility”. The treatises of this period typically made a tripartite division. First came natural religion, establishing the existence and nature of God and the possibility of divine revelation. Second came the demonstration of the fact of Christian revelation, and last came the proof that the Catholic Church was the true Church of Christ. The development of this tradition exhibits very subtle advances within a basically constant pattern.
The German Jesuit Vitus Pichler presented a somewhat rationalist version of this schema in his Cursus theologiae polemicae universae (1713). The book begins with “a fundamental controversy” directed against the deists in which, using the principles of reason alone, the author seeks to prove the necessity of revelation and the fact that Christianity is the one true religion. Then, proceeding a posteriori, he finds sufficient testimonies to the fact of revelation, which are given through the testimony of the Church as the divinely accredited mediator.
In France another Jesuit, Claude Buffier, composed an important Exposition of the Clearest Proofs of the True Religion (1732),119 which was less aprioristic and more historically oriented. After contenting himself with showing that God could reveal and that God’s goodness might prompt him to do so, Buffier placed the main weight of his argument on a historical demonstration that Christian revelation had occurred and was certified by miracles as divine signs. Luke-Joseph Hooke, a professor of Irish extraction teaching at the Sorbonne in Paris, published in 1752 the first edition of his influential Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion,120 a work partly inspired by Clarke and directed primarily against deists such as Tindal. In his first volume he acknowledges the validity of natural religion, but finds it to be so incomplete and obscure that it does not suffice for salvation. In Volume 2 he discusses the possibility and desirability of revelation and shows that it can be discerned by divine signs such as prophecies and miracles. Then he goes on to establish the divine origin of Mosaic and Christian religion.
The essential pattern of Hooke’s apologetics was to be followed in many other Scholastic treatises, such as those of Antoninus Valsecchi, O.P. (1708—1791), and several important Benedictines, including Martin Gerbert (1720—1793) and Benedikt Stattler (1728—1797). Gerbert makes a sharp distinction between the fact of revelation, which can be established by reason, and the content of revelation, which can only be known by revelation. These authors differ among themselves about the capacities of pure reason in the realm of religion. Stattler has often been considered the author of the distinctions between the necessity of revelation, the possibility of revelation, and the fact of revelation. He applies the principles of a necessary and possible revelation, as known from philosophical reason, to establish criteria by which true and false revelations can be distingished. The Mosaic and Christian revelations pass the tests, but post-Christian Judaism and Islam do not.
The Italian Dominican Petrus Maria Gazzaniga (1722—1799), who taught at the University of Vienna at the time of Maria Theresa’s reform of studies, brought this type of apologetics to its final phase in his Praelec-tiones theologicae (editions of 1766 and 1788). The approach is decidedly extrinsicist. Revelation, he holds, is morally necessary for the knowledge of truths that are in principle within the grasp of reason; it is absolutely necessary for strict mysteries, which are suprarational. Revelation consists in God’s making known of particular truths and certifying them by his infallible authority. As criteria of revelation, Gazzaniga mentions that it must not contradict what is naturally known to be good and true and that it must be certified by external signs, namely, miracles and prophecies. The question of truth, therefore, ultimately depends on divine attestation. Like many other manualists of the period, Gazzaniga makes a purely formal argument that purports to be independent of the actual content of Christian revelation.121
Apologetics in the early modern period takes on a very different shape than it had had in earlier centuries. For the Fathers it was a debate about the relative merits of paganism, Judaism, and Christianity. For the medieval theologians, apologetics was a contest among the three great monotheistic faiths—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—all of which appealed to historical revelation. But after the Renaissance, apologetics had to address thinkers who rejected revelation entirely and who in some cases denied the existence or knowability of God. For the first time in history, orthodox Christians felt constrained to prove the existence of God and the possibility and fact of revelation. In so doing they sometimes conceded too much to their deist adversaries, making it appear that unaided reason could erect a satisfactory natural religion that in many respects reduplicated Christianity itself.
These years did not produce any grand apologetical syntheses comparable in magnitude and depth to those of Augustine and Aquinas. The authors who did compose summas on a vast scale, such as Vives, Mornay, Abbadie, and Paley, were not notable thinkers in their own right. Bossuet, whose Discourse on Universal History has a certain grandeur, lacked the learning and critical spirit needed for the full success of his project. Devoted though they were to natural theology, the apologists of this period were too shallow in philosophy to attain a lofty, comprehensive vision of reality comparable to those of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.
Partly as a result of the weaknesses already noted, the initiative in this period no longer lies with the protagonists of the Christian cause but rather with the adversaries. Seeking to meet the objections of Voltaire and his cohorts, the apologists are vexed and harassed, anxious and defensive. They seem unable to turn the tables on the adversaries by mastering and correcting the new currents of thought—as Origen had done for middle Platonism, Augustine for Neoplatonism, and Aquinas for Averroistic Aristotelianism.
On the positive side, we may take note of progress along systematic lines. Scholastic authors excelled in analyzing the various kinds of apologetical evidence—subjective and objective, deductive and inductive, historical and contemporary. But their work, especially in the seminary manuals, tended to be dry, formalistic, and aprioristic. Treating revelation very abstractly, they failed to communicate a vibrant sense of Christ and His Church. In combination with other approaches, this Scholastic apologetics will eventually feed into the official teaching of the Church, notably at the First Vatican Council.
The efforts of some Scholastics, Catholic and Protestant, to construct fully demonstrative and quasi-mathematical proofs for the truth of Christianity (Huet, Elizalde, Gonzalez, Wolff) are generally recognized to be unsuccessful. At the opposite extreme were skeptics who called for blind faith to compensate for the feebleness of human reason (Montaigne, Charron). In exploiting skepticism they were playing with a dangerous instrument that could easily be turned against faith itself.
Pascal, building on the work of the skeptical fideists, sets forth with singular power the contrast between “reasons of the heart”, serviceable in apologetics, and “reasons of the mind”, valid in the scientific sphere. His insight into the role of subjectivity in the decision of faith strikes a modern, existential note.
The British and German apologists in their dialogue with deism grappled seriously with the relationship between the natural sciences and Christian evidence. This problem, which seemed to have been solved in a way favorable to biblical faith by the time of Paley, was to break out with new virulence in the nineteenth century, especially in connection with the theory of evolution.
British apologists such as Butler and Paley, building on the empiricism of Locke and Hume, made effective use of probabilities and presumptions in apologetics. While their common-sense approach injected a healthy note of realism, they sometimes fell into an unfortunate legalism that their greater disciple, Newman, was to detect and correct.
Partly through the assaults of adversaries such as Spinoza and Reimarus, modern biblical criticism began to develop in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Moderate Christian thinkers, such as Simon, Grotius, Leclerc, and Lardner, made use of this incipient science to enrich their apologetics. Controversialists such as Houtteville advanced the discipline of historiography.
The almost exclusive insistence on biblical and historical evidences in the eighteenth century involved certain dangers. The “fact of revelation” came to be considered too positivistically as an arbitrary intervention from on high, and the reasonableness of faith was made to depend too much on bookish erudition. Lessing perceived this danger more clearly than his more orthodox opponents, and he pointed to the need for grounding one’s conviction in the contemporary performance of the Church. Many apologists of the nineteenth century, from their own point of view, were to look for present “proofs of the Spir it and of power”.
In summary, then, the centuries considered in this chapter are transitional. Apologetics is beginning to reorient itself, almost reluctantly, to the problems and thought forms of the modern mind and is thus preparing the paths of the future.