The eighteenth century, as has been seen, opened up a rich variety of options for the apologist. One might construct a rational, metaphysical justification for faith, as did Huet, Leibniz, and Wolff; or a more concrete apologetic based on the analogies of nature with the supernatural, as did Ray and Butler; or a biblical-historical apologetic, as did Grotius, Lardner, and Houtteville; or, finally, an inward apologetic of the heart, based on the aspirations of the human spirit, as did Pascal.
It was the last of these options that most attracted the first generation of nineteenth-century apologists, both Protestant and Catholic. At this point in history, people seem to have become more conscious than ever before of their own individuality and subjectivity. They sought contact with the higher world not through abstract reason but rather through feeling and the movements of the heart. This approach is evident in many leading apologists in the first part of the century, such as Schleiermacher in Germany, Kierkegaard in Denmark, Coleridge in England, and Chateaubriand in France.
The path for this new apologetics was cleared by Immanuel Kant (1724—1804). In his Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant portrayed the speculative reason as hardly more than a calculating machine, capable of organizing the data of sense experience but not of rising above empirical data and of dealing realistically with the transcendent or the divine. In his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) Kant supplemented this outlook by pointing out that the sense of moral obligation and the demands of conscience make it necessary, for practical purposes, to postulate the reality of God, of freedom, and of immortality. Thus Kant made room for a certain type of faith resting not simply on external authority but rather on personal motives that are subjectively compelling though objectively insufficient. In his Opus postumum Kant apparently identified the voice of conscience very closely with the divine presence within the human consciousness, thus laying the foundations of what was to develop into the subjective idealism of Fichte.
Kant, while he professed a certain skepticism regarding historical revelation, found a philosophical basis for some of the fundamental Christian doctrines, notably in his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793). His dualism of speculative and practical reason set the philosophical framework for much of the apologetics of the early nineteenth century, especially in the Protestant world. Many followed his suggestion that faith should be grounded in the voice of conscience and in the sense of moral obligation. Within the context of the Romantic revival, however, Kant’s moralism was alleviated by a deeper regard for the feelings, his individualism by a keener sense of community, and his formalism by a deeper interest in historical concreteness.
Germany
As much as any single individual, Schleiermacher may be credited with having first fashioned an apologetic suited to Protestants of the new age. Raised among the Moravian brethren, Friedrich D. E. Schleiermacher (1768—1834) retained a strong Pietistic bent. But at the same time he moved easily among the dechristianized professors and writers of Berlin. His mission, as he conceived it, was to mediate between the Pietistic Christianity of his forebears and the enlightened romanticism of his intellectual companions. In this sense he was a mediating theologian.
Schleiermacher’s first book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers,1 was programmatic for his entire life work; it was also the manifesto of a sophisticated religious revival. He takes the offensive by beginning with an indictment of the spiritual poverty of the Enlightenment. “Suavity and sociability, art and science have so fully taken possession of your minds, that no room remains for the eternal and holy Being that lies beyond the world.”2 “With pain I see daily how the rage for calculating and explaining suppresses the sense [of religion].”3 But this sense is innate and cannot be permanently crushed. If anyone looks into his own heart he will find a sense and taste for the infinite, which longs for satisfaction. Schleiermacher was profoundly convinced that the times were propitious for bringing religion to the cultured men of the day.4 His dominant concern is well summarized in a sentence from his open letter to Gottfried Christian Friedrich Lucke: “Shall the knot of history be thus loosed: Christianity with barbarism and learning with unbelief?”5
In his effort to mediate, Schleiermacher takes pains to show that religion should in no way be identified with the bric-à-brac of traditional dogmas and practices. He tells his cultured readers how he himself learned to cleanse his thought and feeling from the rubbish of antiquity,6 and he advises them to forget everything that usually goes by the name of religion.7 He proclaims that it is possible to be both religious and fully abreast of new developments in science and philosophy. As he reconstructs religion from the inside outward on the basis of inward emotions and dispositions, he turns the apologetic sword against traditional orthodoxy. In his second speech8 he radically redefines practically all the key concepts of religion, including miracle, revelation, inspiration, prophecy, God, and immortality. Schleiermacher is not seeking, as some apologists have done, to sell conventional Christianity by sugarcoating it: he is revising Christianity to make it something that he as a man of his times can personally accept. The deliberateness with which Schleiermacher goes about this task is something new.
As one who subscribes to the Kantian critique of speculative reason, Schleiermacher has no intention of trying to demonstrate either the existence of God or the fact of revelation. In his great dogmatic synthesis, The Christian Faith, he attacks the arguments from miracle and prophecy. These signs, he maintains, are not sufficiently probative to bring conviction, although they may suffice to corroborate the faith of those who already accept Christ as Redeemer.9
In his own way, however, Schleiermacher does construct an apologetic for Christianity. Negatively, as has been seen, he seeks to show that the dogmas can be so reinterpreted that Christianity does not prevent one from being fully modern. Positively, he maintains that the religious sense achieves its highest fulfillment in Christianity. In both On Religion and The Christian Faith he begins this demonstration by showing that religion cannot flourish except within a “Church”, “a communion or association relating to religion or piety”.10 “If there is religion at all, it must be social, for that is the nature of man, and it is quite peculiarly the nature of religion.”11 Then he goes on to show that a religion must be definite and that any “Church” must be rooted in the characteristic religious experience of some great founder. The inquirer is, in practice, faced by a choice between historically existing religions.
In the introductory section of his Christian Faith Schleiermacher gives his most elaborate vindication of Christianity as the highest religion. He begins by defining piety as an immediate consciousness of absolute dependence. On the basis of this definition he has no difficulty in establishing the superiority of monotheism over polytheism, for human beings are not absolutely dependent on any of the gods of polytheism. There are three great monotheistic faiths: Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. Judaism, he argues, is not really an option because it is a particularistic religion, restricting the love of Yahweh to the race of Abraham, and because it is “almost in process of extinction”.12 Islam and Christianity, the two great monotheistic world religions, are of very unequal worth. Islam—sensuous, passive, and fatalistic—subordinates the moral order to the order of nature. Christianity, which by contrast subordinates the natural to the moral order, is spiritual, teleological, and conducive to human freedom. Christianity, therefore, is the highest form of monotheism; monotheism is the highest kind of religion; and religion is necessary for a truly human life.
Yet the fact remains, according to Schleiermacher, that the central affirmation of Christianity—the fact of Redemption by Jesus of Nazareth—cannot be verified outside of faith. To believe it one must experience Christ’s redeeming power, imparted through the Holy Spirit. Under this influence one acquires a God-consciousness that finds its unsurpassable exemplar in the filial consciousness of Jesus. Only those who have undergone this experience, by opening themselves to it in love, are able to perceive that it raises one’s God-consciousness to the highest pitch and thus validates itself.13
Schleiermacher was perhaps the first to construct a thoroughgoing “inner apologetic” that proceeds through the progressive unfolding of the innate longing for communion with God. He stands at the opposite extreme from the positivism of the evidential school and from the rationalism of the Wolffian supernaturalists. He is the prototype of all later apologists who look upon speculative reasoning as a mere accompaniment of the vital movement of the human spirit in its aspiration to dynamic self-fulfillment.
In his Brief Outline on the Study of Theology Schleiermacher set forth his program for apologetics. He proposed that the entire enterprise of biblical, historical, and practical theology should be prefaced by a new discipline, called “philosophical theology”, which “has thus far never been exhibited or recognized as a unit”.14 This new discipline, using the framework developed in philosophy of religion, seeks to present the essence of Christianity in such wise that it can be recognized as a distinctive mode of faith.
Philosophical theology, as Schleiermacher conceives it, is divided into two main branches: apologetics and polemics. Apologetics seeks to view Christianity in relation to religious communities in general; polemics, to detect and correct deviations within the Christian community. The task of apologetics, as Schleiermacher here describes it, is not to bring others into the community—a task pertaining rather to “practical theology”—but rather to communicate to the faithful a “conviction of the truth of the mode of faith” propagated in the Church community in such manner that it becomes intellectually acceptable.15 Apologetics, then, must set forth a formula of the distinctive nature of Christianity, establish the claim of Christianity to a distinct historical existence, and show how the developments of the community have been in line with its initial orientation.
One of Schleiermacher’s disciples, Karl Heinrich Sack (1789—1875), in several volumes on apologetics and polemics, tried to carry out his master’s program for philosophical theology, and in so doing made a great contribution to the establishment of the discipline that would later be called “fundamental theology”. Sack’s Christian Apologetics,16 however, deviates somewhat from Schleiermacher’s own intention, reverting to the conventional concept of apologetics as a rational grounding of the Christian faith in demonstrable divine facts. After first expounding the value of religion in general, Sack points out the deficiencies of the non-Christian religions. Then he turns to the idea of revelation as God’s self-communication through personal witnesses and shows how this idea is surpassingly verified in the appearance of Jesus as the Christ. Next he points out how salvation, or Redemption, as the true and proper effect of revelation, is offered by Christ, who in this respect fulfils the prophecies and types of the Old Testament. He then demonstrates that Christianity has singular power to foster religious and moral life, thus contributing to human freedom and progress. Finally, in his concluding section he grounds the life-giving power of Christianity in the Word of God and in the Holy Spirit.
The philosophy of religion continued to develop in close relationship to idealistic philosophy, thanks to thinkers such as Jakob Friedrich Fries (1773—1843) and Wilhelm M. L. De Wette (1780—1849). The latter constructed a phenomenology of revelation, viewed as the inbreaking of something radically new that nevertheless fulfilled the previous aspirations of the recipient. The Christian revelation, he argued, was unique in that it had given a wholly new direction to the religious spirit in the world.
The philosophy of religion was carried to new heights by Georg W. F. Hegel (1770—1831). Somewhat in the spirit of the Anselmian faith seeking understanding, he sought to make his philosophy a rational appropriation of the Christian patrimony. In his youthful romantic period he wrote eloquently of the religion of Jesus as a gospel of love, life, and freedom. In his mature work he sought to show how the principal Christian dogmas (Trinity, Incarnation, Redemption) were but a symbolic or imaginative projection of the rational truths set forth in his own system of dialectically evolving pantheism.
Some of Hegel’s disciples, such as his editor, Philipp Conrad Marheineke (1780—1846), attempted to combine the philosophical idealism of their master with orthodox adherence to Church teaching. In his System of Christian Dogmatics17 Marheineke interpreted the Church as the locus in which the Absolute attains full self-consciousness, concretely actualizing the presence of the Spirit in history. In a certain sense this fusion of philosophy and dogma may be viewed as an apologetic, for it tended to exhibit the rational basis for traditional Christian doctrine.
A more radical member of the Hegelian school, David Friedrich Strauss (1808—1874), drastically reinterpreted the Christian message, deliberately subordinating traditional orthodoxy to the interests of a new evolutionist philosophy. Strauss’s famous Life of Jesus18 maintained that the union of finite and infinite has its realization not in a single individual, Jesus Christ, but in the whole of humanity, as the latter becomes divinized. The Christ of the New Testament was for Strauss a myth bearing the true and revelatory idea of God-manhood. Since the major part of Strauss’s Life of Jesus was devoted to exposing the historical unreliability of the Gospel stories, his work was enthusiastically hailed by unbelievers and passionately condemned by committed Christians.
Many of the most significant answers to Strauss came from apologists of the Schleiermacher school. One of them, Carl Ullmann (1796—1865), exemplifies a devotional type of apologetics not uncharacteristic of the times. His best-known work, The Sinlessness of Jesus: An Evidence for Christianity, argues apologetically from the New Testament portrait of Jesus and from Jesus’s testimony concerning Himself to the conclusion that Jesus was in fact sinless, as befits the Redeemer of mankind. To the objection that the Gospel portrait might be a fiction Ullmann replies, with Rousseau, “The inventor of such an image would be more astonishing than his subject.”19 Then he adds that the effects of the manifestation of Jesus in the religious regeneration of the world would not have a proportionate cause except in a real person. “He especially who has felt in his own heart the peculiar power experienced by the Gospel delineation of the Lord Jesus, will entertain no kind of doubt as to its reality and origin.”20
In reply to Strauss, Ullmann wrote two articles that he later combined into a pamphlet entitled Historical or Mythical?21 When Strauss later maintained that the only religion left to modern man is the worship of genius, Ullmann replied with a brochure called The Worship of Genius.22 Here and in a brief reply to Feuerbach, The Distinctive Character or Essence of Christianity,23 Ullmann contends that the singular unity of the human and the divine in Jesus surpasses all achievements of human genius and is reliably attested both by the Gospels and by the abiding influence of Christ in the Church.
Likewise influenced by Schleiermacher is the Pietistic brand of apologetics found in August Tholuck (1799—1877). In reply to De Wette’s Theodore; or, The Skeptic’s Conversion,24 a book that countenanced the ordination of agnostics to the ministry, the youthful Tholuck wrote his early, and partly autobiographical, Guido and Julius; or, Sin and the Propitiator Exhibited in the True Consecration of the Skeptic.25 Using the device of a highly emotional exchange of letters between two university students, the one in theology, the other in classical philology, Tholuck extols the joyful experience of regeneration through Christ and maintains that the new life impressed upon men’s hearts by the Holy Spirit is its own guarantee.
In a later work, The Credibility of the Evangelical History,26 Tholuck takes Strauss to task for his a priori rejection of miracles and his exaggerated efforts to find inconsistencies in the Gospels. But Tholuck himself is aprioristic in his assumption that the Gospels can always be harmonized. His reply to Strauss, like that of other mediating theologians in the Schleiermacher school (e.g., August Wilhelm Neander and Johann Peter Lange) suffers, as Albert Schweitzer remarked, from the false supposition that the Fourth Gospel provides an authentic historical framework into which the Synoptic pericopes can somehow be inserted. The controversy surrounding Strauss had a good result insofar as it finally drove New Testament scholars to forge better techniques for appraising the historicity of the Gospel accounts. This achievement, however, belongs not to the Schleiermacher school but to the Liberals of the second half of the century.
Denmark
Few theologians have been more violent in their attacks on apologetics than the Danish journalist-philosopher, Sören Kierkegaard (1813—1855). And yet Emil Brunner has said of him with good ground: “We may indeed claim that no other thinker has ever worked out the contrast between the Christian Faith and all the ‘immanental’ possibilities of thought with such clarity and intensity as he has done. Kierkegaard is incomparably the greatest Apologist or ‘eristic’ thinker of the Christian faith within the sphere of Protestantism.”27
Kierkegaard exposed the weaknesses of estheticism, of self-complacent bourgeois morality, and the mass spirit. But above all he directed his invective against the efforts of the Hegelians to commend Christianity by adapting it to the exigencies of their rationalistic view of history. The seminary professor Hans Lassen Martensen (1808—1884), one of Denmark’s foremost Hegelian theologians, suffered the fiercest blows from Kierkegaard’s rhetoric.
In many passages Kierkegaard seemed to reject the entire apologet-ical effort as illegitimate. “If one were to describe the whole orthodox apologetical effort in one single sentence,” he wrote, “but also with categorical precision, one might say that it has the intent to make Christianity plausible. To this one might add that, if this were to succeed, then would this effort have the ironical fate that precisely on the day of its triumph it would have lost everything and entirely quashed Christianity.”28 Rational proofs, he maintained, were out of place in theology. “For whose sake is it that the proof is sought? Faith does not need it; aye; it must even regard proof as its enemy. But when faith begins to feel embarrassed and ashamed. . . , when faith thus begins to lose its passion, when faith begins to cease to be faith, then a proof becomes necessary so as to command respect from the side of unbelief.”29 But such proofs are unavailing, for “to defend anything is always to discredit it.”30
The proofs, moreover, were logically invalid. In the early pages of Philosophical Fragments31 Kierkegaard, following Kant, tries to show the paralogisms in the usual demonstrations of God’s existence. In his Postscript he argues characteristically that “to prove the existence of one who is present is the most shameless affront, since it is an attempt to make him ridiculous”.32
In many of his works he rejects all avenues of demonstration of the divinity of Christ, which he considers to be the central, if not the unique, fact of the Christian faith. The proofs from the antiquity of the true religion he mocks as a rhetorical “showerbath”: “Eighteen centuries have no greater demonstrative force than a single day, in relation to an eternal truth which is to decide my eternal happiness.”33 To prove the truth of Christianity from the reliability of the gospel history is equally fruitless. At best this procedure would result in putting one in the position of the original witnesses, who saw only “a humble human being who said of himself that he was God”.34 As for the miracles, it is idle to mention them, for “whoever does not believe does not see the miracle.”35
More fundamentally Kierkegaard was concerned with the impassable ditch that Lessing had discerned between the accidental truths of history and the desperately essential truth of salvation. Historical truth, he argued, was simply incommensurable with an “eternal decision”. The passage from the one to the other was a “leap” into a new category.36
Repeatedly in his writings Kierkegaard insisted that there can be no access to faith through objective logical thinking. For him the doctrine of the Incarnation was the central Christian affirmation, and it meant that the Creator had become a creature, the infinite finite, the eternal temporal, the necessary contingent. Such a union of incompatible attributes was strictly contradictory and inconceivable, and any attempt to make it plausible could amount only to adulteration.
In a curious way—Kierkegaard suggests, without developing the thought—a kind of apologetic can be developed out of the very absurdity of the Christian affirmation. Faith itself is a miracle, he declares.37 The very fact that some people have believed that God appeared on earth in the humble figure of a man is so astounding that it provides an occasion for others to share the faith.38 Christianity is the only historical movement that has ever proposed to base man’s eternal happiness on his relationship to an event occurring within history. Since no philosophy or mythology has ever had this idea, Kierkegaard finds it possible to conclude that “it did not arise in the heart of any man.”39
Kierkegaard was familiar with the ironical conclusion of Hume’s Essay on Miracles that while historical evidence is not capable of establishing miracles in the past, still “whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it [Christianity], is conscious of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all the principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience.” As Walter Lowrie points out, Kierkegaard was deeply struck by Georg Hamann’s comment on this passage: “Hume may have said this with a scornful and critical air, yet all the same, this is orthodoxy and a testimony to the truth from the mouth of an enemy and persecutor—all his doubts are proofs of his proposition.”40
In spite of certain extreme affirmations Kierkegaard clearly did not think that the value of Christianity consisted in its absurdity alone. Rather it answered a real human need. According to his anthropology no one comes into the world as a fully constituted self. In many of his works Kierkegaard describes the internal tensions between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, the contingent and the necessary.41 The task is to achieve some kind of creative synthesis of these opposite tensions. Anticipating the phenomenology of Blondel and others, Kierkegaard describes the “stages on life’s way” by which a person rises from the demonic detachment of the aesthete to the sweet reasonableness of the “ethical man”, and finally to the courageous commitment of religious faith. The passage from philosophic reason to faith is achieved not through objective reasoning but through passionate subjectivity and cannot be made without “fear and trembling”. But the step taken in the personal responsibility of the Christian decision is warranted because without it one cannot attain the fullest degree of inwardness and authenticity.42
In Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard clarifies this existential logic by showing how all efforts to evade the religious decision, proposed in the most challenging form by the Christian paradox, lead ultimately to despair. Sin is despair before God; it is the surrender of hope of becoming an authentic self. The central Christian paradox, for Kierkegaard, offers the only valid answer to the sickness of despair.43 Despair is the failure to have faith, but, paradoxically also, despair is the first fact of faith, for it arises from the ineluctable drive toward the acceptance of a life transcendentally grounded in God. The experience of despair rouses the spirit from dullness to the passionate interest needed for truth and faith considered as subjectivity.
For Kierkegaard, then, faith was ultimately irrational, but it was the consummation of an existential dialectic and thus, in a paradoxical way, a fulfillment of reason. Through passionate subjectivity one can find a way beyond the sterile dichotomies of philosophical reason. “The highest pitch of every passion is always to will its own downfall; and so it is the supreme passion of the Reason to seek a collision, though this collision must in one way or another prove its own undoing.”44 Because human existence is essentially paradox, to think is to participate in something transcending the thinker. Thus the destruction of reason in faith is at the same time the supreme achievement of what reason aspires to do.
Kierkegaard’s form of apologetics is unquestionably vulnerable to criticism. In order to throw the reader back on inwardness and subjectivity, Kierkegaard hardens to an extreme the transrational elements that Christian theology has traditionally recognized under the rubric of mystery. He takes over from rationalist theology the idea that God must be “absolutistically” conceived as the necessary, the immutable, the infinite, and he rejects without discussion all the distinctions by which classical theology had sought to remove the apparent contradiction from the Incarnation. Undoubtedly Kierkegaard stands in need of some correction on points such as these; but he performed a salutary and much needed service by calling attention to the scandal and offense of the gospel, and to the fact that philosophic reason itself stands under divine judgment. In his profound phenomenological analysis of the role of subjectivity and the “leap of faith” he thematized with true genius the inner logic of the existential decision. Many important insights that had begun to surface in Pascal and Schleiermacher received in Kierkegaard their classic form of expression.
Great Britain
Something of the same intense subjectivity that guided Schleiermacher in Germany and Kierkegaard in Denmark was introduced into England by the poet, essayist, and polymath Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772—1834). Without being a specialist in theology, Coleridge never ceased to concern himself with religious questions.45 In his early Bristol lectures, delivered in 1795 during his Unitarian period, he presented a rather rationalistic apologetics based on Butler and Paley. After being converted a decade later to Trinitarian theology, he propounded an original and highly personalistic epistemology of faith, influenced on the one hand by modern German philosophy (Lessing, Kant, Schelling) and on the other hand by Neoplatonism, which he knew from personal study and from the writings of the Cambridge Platonists.
At this stage in his career Coleridge became convinced that apologists such as Paley, by uncritically accepting the empiricism of Locke, had destroyed their own capacity to answer effectively the objections of Hume. In his Aids to Reflection Coleridge repeatedly castigated the evidential school for forgetting that Christianity is not just a theory but rather spirit and life. In a famous passage he wrote:
Hence I more than fear the prevailing taste for Books of Natural Theology, Physico-theology, Demonstrations of God from Nature, Evidences of Christianity, &c. &c. Evidences of Christianity: I am weary of the Word. Make a man feel his want of it; rouse him, if you can, to the self-knowledge of his need of it; and you may safely trust it to its own Evidence—remembering only the express declaration of Christ himself: No man cometh to me unless the Father leadeth him.46
In his theory of knowledge Coleridge makes a sharp distinction, somewhat similar to Kant’s, between understanding—the faculty that deals with sense data—and reason, which can rise to the spiritual order. Faith, for Coleridge, is an exercise of the “higher reason”, a term that in his use of it closely resembles Kant’s practical reason but that, unlike the latter, includes imaginative and emotional elements derived from religious experience. In view of his doctrine of higher reason, Coleridge can say that—strong as are the historical evidences in favor of Christianity—“the truth revealed through Christ. . . has its evidence in itself, and the proof of its divine authority in its fitness to our nature and needs;—the clearness and cogency of this proof being proportionate to the degree of self-knowledge in each individual hearer.”47
Proceeding on these premises, Coleridge holds with Augustine that faith must precede understanding. Without the prevenient grace of God, which elevates and attunes the higher reason, one would be incapable, he judges, of responding to the divine signs that come to him through history and experience. Hence Coleridge can write, much in the fashion of Schleiermacher: “Miracles are parts of our Religion and Objects of our Belief, not Grounds of it.”48 And again:
My whole & sincere opinion is this: that Miracles are a condition & necessary accompaniment of the Christian Religion; but not it’s [sic] specific & characteristic Proof. They were not so even to the first eye-witnesses; they cannot be so to us. I believe the Miracles, because many other evidences have made me believe in Christ; & thus, no doubt, the faith in miracles does then react on it’s [sic] cause, & fills up & confirms my faith in Christ.49
Coleridge’s friend and disciple Frederick Denison Maurice (1805—1872) followed up on this rejection of the authoritarian, extrinsicist view of revelation and on the system of evidences that had been built up around that view. In his What Is Revelation?, polemicizing against Henry L. Mansel’s Bampton Lectures of 1858, Maurice bewailed “the unfortunate rage for apologetic literature in the Christian Church”50 and lamented the baneful effects of Paley’s Evidences on the faith of clergy and laity alike. At a time when England was being rocked by the controversy growing out of Strauss’s Life of Jesus, Maurice maintained that the current debates about documents could never lead to any religiously satisfying results. In faith, he argued, the believer knows God as He personally imparts Himself in experience, and this personal communion is for the believer its own evidence.
Maurice’s actualistic, personalist view of revelation obviously called for a different type of apologetics than was current at the time, but he himself did not supply this need. He gave no convincing reasons for holding that Christians really possessed the type of communion with God that he so glowingly described. As Alec Vidler remarks, “If we are looking for Christian apologetics—meaning by that the argumentative defence of Christianity—we shall turn to Maurice in vain.”51
Coleridge and Maurice, of course, spoke for only a minority of the Anglicans of their day. The evidential tradition represented by Mansel had a brilliant advocate in Richard Whately (1787—1863), the eccentric Oxford logician who in 1831 was appointed Anglican archbishop of Dublin. In 1837 Whately composed a remarkably clear and persuasive volume, Introductory Lessons on Christian Evidences, addressed to younger readers. As primary evidences Whately stressed the Old Testament prophecies, the New Testament miracles, and the unstudied candor of the Evangelists. Whately also composed a pamphlet, Historic Doubts Relative to Napoleon Buonaparte (1819), in which he tellingly satirized the historical skepticism of Hume.
The evidential school in Scotland was capably represented by the Scottish evangelical preacher Thomas Chalmers (1780—1847), chiefly renowned for the part he played in the disruption with the Established Church. His popular manual The Evidence and Authority of the Christian Revelation was gradually expanded in successive editions until it became the two-volume Miraculous and Internal Evidences of the Christian Revelation. Like Paley and Whately, Chalmers makes his demonstration turn chiefly on miracles, prophecies, and the historical reliability of the New Testament testimony to Jesus. Then he analyzes the excellence of the “moral system contained in the Bible” and its wonderful agreement with the light of conscience. The self-evidencing power of the Bible, he holds, “makes its doctrines portable to every understanding, and its lessons portable to every heart”.52 While one cannot help but respect the author’s staunch devotion, the chief value of his treatise is to show how congenial Christianity as he understood it is to biblically and morally oriented persons like himself.
The watchmaker type of apologetics likewise reappears in Chalmers, especially in his Discourses on the Christian Revelation Viewed in Connexion with Modern Astronomy (1817) and the Natural Theology that comprises the first two volumes of his Works.
A more experiential type of apologetics may be found in the work of Chalmers’s countryman, the layman Thomas Erskine (1788—1870). Sometimes called the Scottish Schleiermacher, Erskine was on cordial terms with F. D. Maurice. Like both these theologians he looked to the inner life of the believer for the rational basis of faith. In his best known work, Remarks on the Internal Evidence for the Truth of Revealed Religion (1820), he stresses the moral influence of the gospel and bypasses the usual arguments from miracles, prophecy, and eyewitness testimony. The biblical teachings, he declares, “not only present an expressive exhibition of all the moral qualities which can be conceived to reside in the Divine mind, but also contain those objects which have a natural tendency to excite and suggest in the human mind that combination of moral feelings which has been called moral perfection”.53
Among the various difficulties that could be raised against this approach, perhaps the most obvious is that Erskine’s own ideas of God and morality, like those of Chalmers, were in fact drawn principally from the Bible. His strong appeal to natural religion was criticized for its lack of a philosophical and empirical basis, and in a prenote to the later editions he remarked, rather lamely: “I am aware also that there is considerable vagueness in the term ‘natural religion’, but there is no other word for it, and a metaphysical accuracy is not of much moment here.”54 Perhaps Erskine would have done better to admit that there was some circularity in his apologetics. As a testimony to the inner life of a deeply convinced Christian, Erskine’s Internal Evidence is not unimpressive.
France
The Romantic movement in France assumed a form less vehement but on the whole more sentimental than in Germany. Its effects may be discerned in Catholic apologetics under the Revolution, the first Empire, and the Restoration. Toward the end of the eighteenth century French apologists abruptly turned away from positivistic, documentary types of argument and from rationalistic philosophy of the Cartesian sort. This could be abundantly illustrated from authors who flourished during the Revolution and the first Empire.
Cardinal Cesar de La Luzerne (1738—1821) in his Pastoral Instruction on the Excellence of Religion laid down the principle that since the enemies of religion are seeking to make it odious, the apologist must concentrate on manifesting its beauties. “Our goal is less to make you see how true religion is than to make you feel how beautiful it is.”55 Archbishop Adrien Lamourette (1742—1794) in his Thoughts on the Philosophy of Unbeliefbases an argument on the sweet tears of the devout congregation at Mass (“quelles larmes delicieuses!”).56 Abbe de Crillon, in his Philosophical Memoirs57—the fictional autobiography of a German baron—recommends religion as the sole remedy for the new sickness from which youth has been suffering since Goethe wrote his Werther. The young baron of the story is converted at the graveside of his deceased beloved.
The dramatist and literary critic Jean François de Laharpe (1739—1803) in his posthumously published Fragments of an Apology for Religion elegantly summarized the whole content of the Bible as a “history of divine love”.58 About the same time the illuminist philosopher Louis-Claude de Saint—Martin (1743—1803) proposed an apologetics of the heart in a highly mystical and theosophical style.59
The apologist who most gloriously rode the crest of the revolt against the Enlightenment was surely François Rene de Chateaubriand (1768—1848). An ardent disciple of Rousseau in his youth, he paradoxically turned the Rousseauistic critique of reason and exaltation of sentiment into an apologetic weapon for the anthropological value of the Catholicism that Rousseau had clearly rejected. After wrestling with many doubts in his youth, he regained his faith, partly, he says, through the effect upon him of the deaths of his mother and of one of his sisters. In terms reminiscent of Crillon he summarizes his own conversion in the sentence “I wept, and I believed.”60 His The Genius of Christianity; or, Beauties of the Christian Religion, one of the most influential apologetic works of all time, remains high on the list of French literary classics.
In the introduction to Part 1 Chateaubriand explains his reasons for holding that a new apologetic is needed. The standard works, he contends, proceed deductively to prove particular doctrines on the basis of the mission of Jesus Christ. But today the basis itself is contested; hence one must take the opposite route, from effects to causes—“not to prove that the Christian religion is excellent because it is from God, but that it comes from God because it is excellent.”61
In Part 1 Chateaubriand treats “Dogmas and Doctrines”. “There is nothing beautiful, sweet, and great in life except what is mysterious”, he begins. In this spirit he discusses the Trinity, the Incarnation, the sacraments, the Decalogue, and the Mosaic books of Scripture. Then he proves the existence of God from the wonders of nature and the immortality of the soul “from morality and sentiment”.
In Part 2, “The Poetic of Christianity”, Chateaubriand seeks to demonstrate that Christianity stimulates the most splendid achievements of drama and poetry. By opening up the perspectives of heaven and hell, with their populations of angels, saints, and demons, Christian revelation gives a new range of sublimity and inner depth to human attitudes and emotions, thus enriching the possibilities of epic and drama, as may be seen from the work of Dante and Tasso, Milton and Racine. The Bible, he adds, vastly surpasses Homer in simplicity and poignancy of style.
Part 3 deals with the fine arts and literature. The benefits of Christianity to music are illustrated by Gregorian chant, its contributions to the visual arts by Raphael and Michelangelo, its architectural expression by the Gothic cathedrals. In philosophy, Chateaubriand asserts, “Clarke in his Treatise on the Existence of God, Leibniz in his Theodicy, and Malebranche in his Inquiry Concerning Truth have accomplished so much in metaphysics that they left nothing to be done by their successors.”62 The Christian achievement in the realms of history and oratory is illustrated especially by Bossuet.
In Part 4, “Worship”, Chateaubriand makes much of the beauties of the liturgy. After opening this part with an essay in praise of the melody of bells, he expatiates on the offices for the dead, on Christian tombs and cemeteries, and the like. He speaks briefly of Jesus Christ in order to introduce a section on the clergy and the religious life, followed by an eloquent survey of the Christian missions, which includes a highly idealized description of the Paraguay Reductions and a moving panegyric of the North American martyrs. The entire work closes with an enumeration of the many blessings that the Church has conferred upon mankind through its schools, its hospitals, and its other charitable works.
Chateaubriand’s apologetic, while it may have proved next to nothing, succeeded in presenting Christianity in colors that appealed enormously to French readers of the day. It enlarged the scope of apologetics by viewing Christianity in the context of civilization and especially of the arts. Without being in any sense a theologian or even a profound thinker, Chateaubriand provided a much needed alternative to the scholarly hairsplitting in which apologetics had become involved. By calling attention to the many blessings brought into the world by Christianity he helped to restore the morale of a Church that had been too long on the defensive, and thus he evoked an enthusiastic response among a people eager for a restoration of the glories of ancient France.
The typical seminary apologetics of the early nineteenth century, however, continued to follow essentially the pattern set by Grotius. The founder of the Sulpician school, Denis Luc de Frayssinous (1765—1841), before being raised to the episcopate in 1822, gave an immensely popular series of lectures at Saint-Sulpice in Paris from 1803 to 1809 and from 1814 to 1820. These were then printed under the title A Defense of Christianity.63 Although he has been called “the outstanding Catholic apologist during the Restoration period”,64 Frayssinous shows neither philosophical depth in speculation nor methodical exactitude in the handling of historical evidences. He was still seeking to use the weapons of the seventeenth-century arsenal against adversaries of the Enlightenment.
Under the Restoration the most vital movement in French apologetics became the traditionalism of de Maistre and Bonald. As Walter Horton has said,65 traditionalism was essentially an emigre philosophy. Unlike Chateaubriand, de Maistre and Bonald did not set out to woo the soul; rather they threatened and demanded that reason submit to the authority of God.
Joseph de Maistre (1753—1821), while he wrote no systematic treatise on apologetics, was the true founder of the movement. This Savoyard nobleman, as a young man, had been a Freemason and had felt the influence of Saint-Martin’s mystical illuminism. But when the revolutionary government abolished class distinctions, eliminating three “social orders” of nobility, clergy, and commoners, he judged that France would be plunged into anarchy and chaos. He emigrated in 1792, and went first to Switzerland and then to Italy. From his post as ambassador of the King of Sardinia to the Czar of Russia (1802—1816) he watched and encouraged the European powers in their struggle against Napoleon. His conversations with other intellectuals and emigres at the Russian court were the basis of his St. Petersburg Dialogues.66
In these Dialogues de Maistre sketched a theology of history that invites comparison with Bossuet’s. Whereas Bossuet had emphasized the harmony of God’s plan, de Maistre underlines the element of violence in human history. War, riot, and public execution, he believes, are all instruments used by God to punish human pride. He gives eloquent and passionate expression to his thoughts on divine providence and the problem of evil. Suffering is necessary, he argues, in order to expiate the evil of sin. All the horrors of the French Revolution were but a divine chastisement for the satanic insurrection against God and His Church set off by the proud speculations of the Enlightenment. To return to the way of salvation, both national and personal, people would have to recognize that their primary need is to be curbed under the double yoke of political and spiritual sovereignty.
The same mystique of authority permeates de Maistre’s anti-Gallican work On the Pope,67 in which he contends that men are born into servitude but that they can be made free by submitting to the absolute authority that God has established in the world. The pope alone, thanks to his divine prerogatives, can make true freedom possible. “This liberty became possible only through him in his character of unique chief of that religion which is alone equal to the work of moderating the wills of men, and which could not without him exert the full measure of its power.”68
Like other traditionalists de Maistre sees the Church, especially the papacy, as necessary for social harmony and progress. Not only is the pope superior to all other religious agencies, such as the episcopate; he alone can provide the nations with a uniform moral code and act as final referee to adjudicate their quarrels. Without such pontifical supervision Europe and the world are doomed to violent, recurrent lapses into anarchy due to national jealousies.
Traditionalism was first developed into a thoroughgoing system—political, philosophical, and religious—by the Vicomte Louis de Bonald (1754—1840), a French nobleman who emigrated during the Revolution, returned during the Empire, and lived to publish his most important works under the restored Bourbon monarchy. The essential truths needed to live a human life, he argues, lie beyond the reach of rational inquiry, but they have been revealed by God since the dawn of history. All thought, he believed, presupposes language, which itself contains certain primitive truths inaccessible to reason alone. Thus language itself becomes a “primitive revelation”. Tradition, as the bearer of revealed truths, has divine and infallible authority. The Catholic Church according to Bonald is indispensable because she alone transmits tradition in its plenitude. By his insistence on centralized authority in Church and in State Bonald deliberately set himself in opposition to the democratic tendency of the age. By appealing to political and intellectual reactionaries de Maistre and Bonald, in the long run, performed an unwitting disservice to the Church. Quite apart from their faulty theory of knowledge, they erred in identifying Catholicism too exclusively with one particular form of polity: absolute monarchy with Catholicism as the State religion. The nostalgia for this type of restoration, although it remained powerful in nineteenth-century Catholicism, ended in failure.69
The theologian and evangelist of the “new apologetic”, as it came to be called, was Abbe Felicite de Lamennais (1782—1860). Born like Chateaubriand at St. Malo in Brittany, he too fell under the spell of the philosophes. He read his way back into the Church, however, and after some private study was ordained in 1816. Almost immediately he began to devote himself with passionate ardor to the restoration of Catholic intellectual life and to the renewal of ecclesiastical studies.70 Less royalist and restorationist than de Maistre and Bonald—de Lamennais eventually became an extreme liberal—he shared their philosophical traditionalism and their theological Ultramontanism. Perceiving that an apologetics based on Cartesian and rationalist assumptions could never meet the difficulties of the modern mind, he sought to ground the justification of faith on a more realistic estimate of the powers of reason. This meant for him an antirational authoritarianism. As he wrote to de Maistre in 1821:
They ought to realize at Rome that their traditional method, according to which everything is proved by facts and authorities, is no doubt admissible in itself, and one neither can nor need abandon it; but it is insufficient, because it is no longer understood. Since reason has proclaimed itself sovereign, one must go straight to it, seize it on its throne, and compel it, under pain of death, to prostrate itself before the reason of God.71
Lamennais’s apologetic is developed in the four volumes of his Essay on Indifference in Matters of Religion.72 Volume 1 begins with a spirited but fundamentally conventional attack on indifferentism in three characteristic forms: the atheistic indifference of those who cynically use religion as a means of controlling the populace; the deistic indifference of those who reject revelation in favor of natural religion; and the fundamentalist indifference of those who deny the importance of all but a few central Christian doctrines. After refuting these three positions by exposing the contradictions into which their advocates have fallen, Lamennais turns to the constructive part of his apologetic. Religion commends itself, he declares, by conferring immense benefits on individuals and societies, for it is the source of law, virtue, and sacrificial love. But religion cannot be stringently demonstrated; its acceptance is always a free and voluntary adherence to testimony.
Volume 2 contains the true heart of the Mennaisian apologetic. Cartesian doubt, he argues, can never lead to certitude about anything, for every proof depends on presuppositions that can themselves be doubted. True certitude, he holds, must be sought from the raison generale or sens commun, which is infallible because it derives from the divine revelation that God implicitly obliged Himself to confer when He created man and that He in fact conferred upon the first parents.
Once one admits the universally attested truths of primitive revelation as a divinely guaranteed and certain source of knowledge, one will have to accept the existence of God and the importance of adhering to the true religion—for the whole human race acknowledges these two points. The diversity of religions might seem to show that God has given no clear testimony of Himself; but in fact it proves only that it is possible to fail to use the means God has provided for recognizing the true religion. From all that precedes, it should be evident, Lamennais contends, that these means are authority and tradition. In chapter 20 he draws the crucial—but illogical—corollary that the true religion is that which rests on the greatest visible authority. From this point on, he has an easy time establishing that Christianity, in its Roman Catholic form, is the true religion. The authority of an infallible pope makes Catholicism the supremely authoritative, and hence the true, form of Christianity.
In Volumes 3 and 4, more in line with the conventional apologetics of the schools, Lamennais maintains that the true religion is discernible by the four marks of unity, catholicity, perpetuity, and holiness, since these marks, when conjoined in one body, carry the greatest possible measure of authority. At the conclusion he adds a brief and rather unoriginal presentation of the traditional arguments from prophecy, miracles, and the beneficent effects of Christianity.
It is to the credit of Lammenais that he, like Bonald before him, called attention to the social nature of man and religion, which had been all but forgotten in the individualism of the Enlightenment. He was justified, moreover, in pointing out that Christian apologists had too uncritically taken over the assumptions of Cartesian philosophy. He rightly pointed to the weakness of the deductive and historical proofs that awkwardly inserted a positivistically conceived Christianity into an almost deistic framework. But the philosophy of “general consent” was hardly a satisfactory alternative to the defective apologetics of the past. From the premise that authority is needed somewhere, it scarcely follows that the most authoritative religion is the only true one. General consent could be used at least as easily in favor of a popular and democratic religion as in favor of papal sovereignty. Not surprisingly, many youthful enthusiasts for traditionalism, such as Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Lamennais himself, were soon won over to radical republicanism and defected from the Church, if not from Christianity.
The apologist who best succeeded in combining the political liberalism of Lamennais with firm allegiance to the Holy See was perhaps the pulpit orator Henri-Dominique Lacordaire (1802—1861), who became a Dominican in 1839. Associated with Lamennais in the editing of the newspaper L’Avenir in 1829—1831, he submitted to Gregory XVI’s condemnations of traditionalism (1832, 1834) and in 1834 wrote a refutation of the philosophy of “common sense”. In his celebrated Conferences de Notre Dame, preached at Paris in 1835—1836, 1843—1846, and 1848—1851, and in his course of sermons at Toulouse in 1854, he attempted to develop a new apologetic. As he wrote to a friend (October 24, 1844): “It is a wholly different point of view in the demonstration of Christianity than anything previous. Pascal, Bergier, La Luzerne, Frayssinous—all, in fact—demonstrate the truth of Christianity from the outside; my demonstration, on the contrary, is taken from within. It is a contemplation of the inside of faith and a view of its harmony with all the general laws of the world.”73
Instead of arriving at the Church as the conclusion of a protracted demonstration, he begins by a consideration of the Church and shows how admirably she corresponds with the needs of human nature and the aspirations of modern society. Only then does he turn to a study of Christian origins and of the person of Jesus Christ.
Chateaubriand, de Maistre, Lamennais, and Lacordaire were all more eminent for their eloquence than for the depth and rigor of their thought. For a more philosophical approach to apologetics somewhat akin to traditionalism, one may turn to the Abbe Louis-Eugene Bautain (1796—1867). Like Chateaubriand, de Maistre, and Lamennais, he fell away as a young student from the piety of his Catholic childhood. He became an outstanding disciple of the eclectic philosopher Victor Cousin and then plunged into an intense study of German idealism, which left him disillusioned as to the powers of speculative reason in the realm of metaphysics. With the help of a devout friend, Mlle. Humann, he was rescued from skepticism and by meditation on the Gospels became a fervent convert to the faith. Dispensed from the ordinary course of seminary training (as Lamennais had also been), he was ordained in 1828. The remainder of his life he consecrated to the goal of converting the intellectuals of the day to Christianity. “In our days,” he wrote, “to return to Christianity one must begin by being a philosopher.”74
This thesis is illustrated in the Philosophy of Christianity,75 two volumes of letters exchanged between Bautain and four of his disciples, three of whom were young Jews considering whether to enter the Catholic Church. These letters give a vibrant record of Bautain’s apol-ogetical method in action. His first step is to demonstrate negatively the incapacity of reason—and of Kantian critical philosophy—to give any coherent synthesis of reality. (Kant was for Bautain, as Montaigne was for Pascal, the Bible of the unbeliever.)76 The bankruptcy of reason, according to Bautain, rules out the possibility of apologetics in its traditional form, for it demolishes all speculative proofs of the existence of God and of the fact of Christian revelation.
The only effective route to faith, for Bautain, requires the inquirer to pass through the stage of hypothetically accepting, on the basis of human faith in persons who already professed Christianity (perhaps here Bautain was thinking of his own relationship to Mlle. Humann), the idea of Christian revelation. Once we allow the contents of revelation, contained in the Bible and in Christian tradition, to impress themselves on our mind, God begins to flood our souls with light. The power of the Word acts upon us as physical light acts upon the eye. Revelation requires no discursive demonstration because it validates itself by its inherent luminosity.
Pressed by objectors who accused him of vaporous mysticism, Bautain gradually supplemented this intuitionist doctrine with reasoned arguments of credibility. Christianity, he maintained, established itself as the highest philosophy thanks to its power to enlighten human existence and to supply answers to burning questions on which discursive philosophy is mute.
Bautain’s rejection of traditional apologetics aroused fierce opposition in many parts of Europe. His local bishop, and later the Roman authorities, ordered him to sign various sets of propositions affirming the capacity of unaided reason to demonstrate the existence of God, the spirituality and immortality of the soul, and the fundamental principles of epistemology and metaphysics, as well as to recognize with certitude the fact of revelation as evidenced by miracles, by prophecies, and especially by the Resurrection of Christ.77 Bautain made his submission sincerely, acknowledging that in his earlier writing, under the influence of Kantianism, he had unduly depressed the powers of human reason. But he continued to believe that, while in principle reason could achieve a demonstration of credibility on metaphysical and historical grounds, in practice conviction does not come this way. Because human nature has been corrupted by original sin, we cannot ordinarily arrive at faith unless we allow the Word of God to heal and enlighten us. Thus the normal road to divine faith is through a provisional acceptance of the Christian message on the basis of human faith.
Bautain is commonly charged with having fallen into various philosophical and theological errors, but much of the difficulty came from the failure of his critics to understand the philosophical vocabulary he was using. In any case he had a far better grasp of the psychology of conversion than many of the professional apologists who opposed him. Like Lacordaire, he is to be praised for improving on the rationalistic and extrinsicist apologetics that had established itself in the majority of seminaries.
Germany
The Catholic movement in Germany and Austria evinced new signs of vitality with the Romantic revival toward the end of the eighteenth century. Small circles gathered around Princess Amalie Gallitzin in Munster, Clemens Maria von Hofbauer in Vienna, and Josef von Gorres in Munich. These groups were for the most part opposed to Scholasticism and favorable to sentiment and intuition. But in Mainz, a very different trend established itself, largely through the influence of Bruno Liebermann (1759—1844), a diocesan priest from Strasbourg who was brought to the seminary in Mainz by Bishop Johann Ludwig Colmar.
Liebermann published in the years 1818—1822 an immensiely influential seminary textbook, Institutiones theologiae. This work, unoriginal but throughly orthodox, carries on the tradition of the French Jesuits of the eighteenth century, directing its arguments for revelation primarily against the deists. Under the influence of thinkers such as Wolff, Liebermann follows a syllogistic method, carefully defining his terms, setting forth his thesis, proving it, and then responding to objections. This work, because it ignores contemporary developments in philosophy and theology, belongs in spirit more to the eighteenth century than to the nineteenth.78
The great majority of German Catholic apologists of the early nineteenth century were, like Bautain, heavily influenced by Kant and the idealist philosophers. Georg Hermes (1775—1831), a priest and professor at Munster, was long troubled by religious doubts, but eventually hit upon a personal solution that, like Bautain’s, made use of Kant’s own weapons in the service of faith. In the preface to the first volume of his Introduction to Catholic Christian Theology79 he tells of his anxious search for a criterion of certitude and his immense joy at finding an answer. The contents of biblical history, including the very bestowal of Christian revelation, are in his view mere contingent facts and therefore not susceptible of demonstrative proof. While they elude speculative reason, they are nevertheless not beyond the grasp of practical reason, which makes it evident that we are obliged to believe whatever is required for observance of the moral law, which bids us to respect and promote the dignity of every human person. In his second volume Hermes applies this principle and shows that we cannot live up to our moral obligations unless we believe the contents of the New Testament, including the miracles wrought by Christ.
Hermes’s use of a Cartesian method of doubt and a Kantian recourse to practical reason, while it aroused great enthusiasm in Germany, was offensive to Catholic ears in the Latin world. After his death his books were condemned by Rome. While his system was undoubtedly too rationalistic, his work has the merit of making due allowance for the practical and existential considerations that normally prepare the way for the decision of faith. Unlike most rationalists he acknowledged that grace was necessary for faith to become “living” and productive of good works.
The most outstanding German Catholic apologist of the period was Johann Sebastian von Drey (1777—1853), the founder of the Catholic Tübingen School. Inspired in part by the idealist philosophy of Friedrich Schelling, Drey produced a theology of revelation that on many points resembled that of the traditionalists. Like them, he denied that individual human reason could argue from the visible world to the existence of God. The idea of God had to come from God Himself by revelation and be transmitted through Scripture and tradition. On the assumption that all human communities have been bearers of revelation in some form, Drey reduced the apologetical question to that of identifying which community has revelation in its complete and authentic form.80
In his Apologetics as a Scientific Demonstration of the Divinity of Christianity81 he did much to delineate the discipline of fundamental theology as it was to be understood by Catholics for the next century. Originally, Drey explains in the introduction, he had accepted Schleiermacher’s view that apologetics should simply point out what is essential and distinctive to the Christian religion, but he came around to the view that apologetics must give a secure rational grounding for the fact of Christian revelation and thus provide a solid basis for the other theological disciplines. As a mixed discipline apologetics derives its formal principles from philosophy, especially the philosophy of religion; it derives its material content from the history of religions. Drey’s concept of apologetics, therefore, resembles that of Karl Sack.
In Volume 1 Drey sets forth his general philosophy of revelation: its necessity for the proper development of religion, its purposes, its discernibility, and the conditions under which it can be preserved and disseminated in the world. Then in Volume 2 he examines the relationship of Christianity to Judaism and paganism. As the religion of revelation in its fullness, Drey maintains, Christianity is wholly centered on the Incarnation, the mystery by which God Himself enters history as Savior. The divinity of Christ is demonstrated by traditional arguments, primarily the arguments from miracle and prophecy.
Finally in Volume 3 Drey turns to tradition and especially to the Church as the organism whereby the Christian revelation is made present to successive generations. He demonstrates the credibility of the Catholic Church by direct arguments from Scripture and from the traditional four notes or marks of the Church—one, holy, catholic, and apostolic.
Drey gives a remarkably complete and systematic presentation of Christian and Catholic apologetics, and he handles both the theoretical and positive sections with the competence of a master. His work is valuable for its recognition of the historical character of the Christian religion, for its many-faceted analysis of the concept of revelation, and for its organic view of tradition and of the Church. But neo-Scholastic critics such as Joseph Kleutgen would raise critical questions. Was human reason incapable of grasping the idea of God without revelation? Can theology, reflecting on revelation, transform faith into scientific knowledge? If so, does faith become superfluous? On these points Drey was less than lucid.
Drey’s disciple Johann Adam Mohler (1796—1838), the glory of the Catholic Tübingen school, can scarcely be classified as an apologist, but his works The Unity of the Church82 and Symbolics,83 both of which synthesize Catholicism in terms of the Incarnational Principle, are of apologetical interest insofar as they give an appealing and coherent presentation of the Catholic faith in its inmost essence. His Symbolics also marks an immense step forward in the development of a more irenic type of controversial theology than had been seen since the Reformation.84 Although Mohler argues firmly for Catholic positions, he makes a genuine effort to present the guiding intuitions and inner coherence of the Protestant confessional writings.
Spain and Italy
In the Latin countries apologetics in the first half of the century was powerfully affected by the contest between anticlerical Liberals and Catholic restorationists in France. The leading Spanish apologist of the period, Jaime Balmes (1810—1848), was a moderate conservative. A devout priest and professor, he left behind him no less than thirty-two volumes when he died at the age of thirty-eight. Although he touched on many areas of politics and philosophy, his consuming interest was apologetics. Even his philosophical works were motivated by an apologetical concern. In his Criterion85 and his Letters to a Skeptic on Religious Matters86 he concerned himself with the methodology of arriving at religious truth and sought to expose the confusions in current German and French philosophy. His four-volume Fundamental Philosophy87 (1846), while by no means purely Thomistic in doctrine, is a precursor of the nineteenth-century revival of Scholasticism.
Balmes is chiefly remembered for his eloquent Protestantism and Catholicity Compared in Their Effects on the Civilization of Europe,88 a polemical work that aimed to offset the influence in Spain of the French Protestant historian François Guizot. Contradicting the latter, Balmes argues that Protestantism has done nothing to promote human liberty and progress, whereas Catholicism has always favored them. Furthermore, he contends, Protestantism is faced by the dilemma of either admitting the principle of authority, thus throwing itself into the arms of the Roman Church, or denying that principle, and thus allowing all that it retains of true Christianity to be eroded. For purposes of the present survey, the most interesting feature of Balmes’s book is its “new demonstration of the divine origin of the Catholic Church”.89 Anticipating Dechamps, Balmes argues that the Church exhibits her divine life by her ability to stand up under long and powerful opposition and by her capacity to draw together a multitude of great and independent minds into a wonderful unity of faith (chap. 3).
Less measured and more Ultramontane in tone and content is the work of the noble layman Juan Donoso Cortes (1809—1853), who abjured liberalism in favor of Catholicism relatively in his adult years. His Essay on Catholicism, Authority and Order is a highly rhetorical polemic against French liberalism and socialism. “Catholicism, in deifying authority, sanctified obedience, and in deifying the one and sanctifying the other, condemned pride in its most terrible manifestations, the spirit of domination and that of rebellion.”90
In Italy several of the leading men of letters lent a hand to the task of defending the Church. The poet and novelist Alessandro Manzoni (1784—1873) published in various editions A Vindication of Catholic Morality,91 the primary aim of which was to refute the charges in Simonde de Sismondi’s History of the Italian Republics during the Middle Ages (Paris, 16 vols., 1807—1818).
Among the more theological apologists, Mauro Cappellari, before becoming Pope Gregory XVI in 1831, published in 1799 The Triumph of the Holy See and of the Church against the Assaults of the Reformers, Combated and Repelled with Their Own Arms, a quintessentially Ultramontane polemic. More constructive in spirit was the work of the Theatine Gioacchino Ventura (1792—1861). Strongly influenced by French Romanticism and traditionalism, he composed in 1837 a brief work on the Epiphany that he later expanded under the title The Beauties of the Faith in the Mysteries of Epiphany. In the preface to this work of apologetics and devotion Ventura pays tribute to Chateaubriand for having revived apologetics and declares that “the most effective apologies of the faith and of virtue are not so much those which make it believed as those which make it loved.”92
The dominant theologian at Rome during the mid-nineteenth century was Giovanni Perrone, S.J. (1794—1876), who taught at the Roman College and closely advised several popes on theological matters. He sounded the alarm against the errors of Hermes and wrote several theological pamphlets against them.93 He also helped Bautain to align his views with the accepted teaching on faith and reason, and he was consulted by Newman on the development of doctrine. Perrone’s nine-volume Lectures on Dogmatics94 were orderly and systematic. Modeled on Liebermann’s Praelectiones, they did much to set the tone and method of Latin seminary manuals for the next hundred years. Perrone’s general approach is positive and apologetical rather than dogmatic and speculative, as may be gathered from the fact that the first volume of his course is a rational introduction, On the True Religion against Unbelievers and Heretics.95 Part 1, directed against unbelievers, follows this outline:
1. The possibility of revelation
2. The necessity of revelation
3. The criteria of revelation
a. Miracles
b. Prophecies
4. The existence of revelation, proved from
a. The miracles and prophecies of Christ, His Resurrection
b. The excellence and sanctity of evangelical doctrine
c. The admirable propagation of the Christian religion
d. The conservation of the Christian religion
e. The witness of the martyrs
Part 2, aimed against the “heterodox”, establishes that the Catholic Church, since she alone possesses infallible teaching authority, unity, visibility, and perpetuity, is the true Church of Christ.
Perrone developed his anti-Protestant polemic at greater length in Protestantism and the Rule of Faith.96 Against rationalistic critics of the Gospels (Paulus, Strauss, Renan) he later composed On the Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ against the Unbelievers of this Century.97 Like many apologetical manuals of the ensuing century, this work begins with a defense of the authenticity and historical reliability of the canonical Gospels and only then goes on to prove by means of them the divinity of Christ.
Perrone’s apologetic lacks nothing by way of clarity and logic, but it rests on narrow and uncriticized assumptions. His step-by-step movement from natural theology to Christian revelation, while highly suitable to classroom presentation, fails to correspond to the actual process by which the mind progresses toward religious truth. Like other apologists of the time Perrone falls into a type of supernatural rationalism that grew out of a combination of medieval Scholasticism and Cartesian mathematicism. Bautain and Newman, whose work he corrected, would have had much to teach him.
ENGLISH-SPEAKING CATHOLICS: 1800—1900
England
Until the middle of the nineteenth century most English Catholic apologists were content to leave to Protestants and Anglicans the general task of establishing Christian credibility and to confine their efforts to rebutting objections to Roman Catholicism. Even William Poynter (1762—1827) in his Christianity; or the Evidences and Character of the Christian Revelation (1827) is mainly concerned with vindicating the authority of the Roman Catholic Church as “the depository and dispenser of the mysteries of Christianity”.
With Nicholas Wiseman (1802—1865), the learned professor of Oriental Languages and Rector of the English College in Rome, who was to become Cardinal-Archbishop of Westminster in 1850, English Catholic apologetics emerges from the ghetto. In his Twelve Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion98 he discusses the comparative study of languages, the natural history of the human race, the natural sciences, early history, archaeology, and Oriental literature. His aim, as he puts it, is “to show the correspondence between the progress of science, and the development of the christian evidences”.99 The very sciences, which in their initial stages seemed to posit objections against religion, he argues, have as they developed gradually removed their own objections. Wiseman displays an impressive command of many fields of knowledge, but the apologetical value of his work has not endured; for it is based on the highly questionable assumption that Christian believers are bound to think of the Old Testament as giving a scientifically accurate description of cosmic origins and of man’s primeval history. His book served a good purpose insofar as it encouraged Christians to open their minds fearlessly to the latest discoveries in science.
In 1836 Wiseman delivered a course of Lectures on the Principal Doctrines and Practices of the Church.100 These lectures deal only with those points of Catholic doctrine contested by Protestants (e.g., pope, purgatory, indulgences, transubstantiation) and are therefore beyond the scope of this investigation.
The leading Catholic apologist of the nineteenth century and one of the greatest of all time was John Henry Newman (1801—1890). As a boy he accepted an Evangelical form of Anglicanism heavily tinged with Calvinism. As a student at Oxford he was influenced by the Broad Church views of his mentor, Richard Whately; then he joined the High Church Oxford Movement, and in 1845 he became a Roman Catholic. A cautious and reflective thinker, he was at every stage in his life deeply concerned with the criteria of religious knowledge. Already as an Anglican he wrote two articles later published as the book Essays on Miracles.101 His University Sermons, preached during the years 1826 to 1843, show the gradual development of his views on faith and reason, and foreshadow the main themes of his mature apologetic.102 In 1845 he published An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine,103 in which he explained his reasons for thinking that the Roman Catholic Church is the authentic successor of the great Church of the early centuries. Three years later he wrote a novel, Loss and Gain, in which the hero, Charles Reding, converts to Catholicism as a student at Oxford.104 In 1864 in response to the attacks of Charles Kingsley, he composed the history of his religious opinions, Apologia pro vita sua.105
Finally in 1870 Newman issued his last major work, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent106 wherein he sought to diagnose the manner in which people arrive at personal convictions, particularly in the area of religion. In Part 1 of this book, dealing with the Liberals’ objection to dogmatic religion, he attempts to show that religious assent is real, not notional. While speculative theology may deal in logic and abstractions, the believer, when reciting the Creed, adheres with his whole heart to the living God of revelation. Then in Part 2, addressing himself to the apparent discrepancy between the degree of conviction demanded by faith and the apparently slender grounds on which it rests, Newman evolves his doctrine of the illative sense as the faculty at work in informal inference.
Newman never believed that it was possible to amass a set of philosophical or historical arguments that would carry the inquirer ineluctably to the conclusion, “I must become a Christian (or a Catholic).” For this reason he never saw eye to eye with Perrone, under whom he studied when in Rome. Of the Roman school he wrote:
They know nothing at all of heretics as realities—they live, at least in Rome, in a place whose boast is that it has never given birth to heresy, and they think proofs ought to be convincing which in fact are not. Hence they are accustomed to speak of the argument for Catholicism as a demonstration, and to see no force in objections to it, and to admit no perplexity of intellect which is not directly and immediately wilful. This at least is their tendency in fact, even if I overstate their theory.107
On many occasions Newman professes great admiration for Butler and a corresponding distaste for Paley and the evidential school. Butler recognized the necessity of relying on presumptions and of weighing sets of probabilities. Paley on the other hand asked only for a judicial neutrality and sought to demonstrate Christianity to an impartial court. Newman felt that this purely objective and scientific approach would be incapable of bringing true religious conviction.108 In his “Letter to the Duke of Norfolk” he wrote: “For myself, I would simply confess that no doctrine of the Church can be rigorously proved by historical evidence: but at the same time that no doctrine can simply be disproved by it.”109 For this reason, he avoided making his argument turn on the miraculous occurrences narrated in Scripture, though he was far from denying that miracles had occurred.110
Recognizing the subjective element in all religious inquiry, Newman preferred to cast his apologetics in autobiographical form: “In religious inquiry each of us can speak only for himself, and for himself he has a right to speak. His own experiences are enough for himself, but he cannot speak for others; he cannot lay down the law.”111 His personal apologetic takes the form of what Jan Walgrave has aptly called the “existential dialectic of conscience”.112 For Newman there are only two thoroughly consistent religious attitudes: atheism and Catholicism. Whatever inclines a person to reject the one tends, unless obstructed, to lead him to embrace the other. The logic here involved is not simply an affair of the mind, but a whole set of tastes and attitudes, a way of approaching questions that, if pursued to its end, will lead one to embrace the fullness of revealed truth or alternatively to reject God altogether.113
The atheistic alternative was unacceptable to Newman because of the testimony of conscience, which he regards as a specific and irreducibly distinct function of the human mind. Judgments of moral value, he maintains, have absolute imperative force as commandments from on high and therefore imply the existence of a personal God—a supreme legislator, all-powerful ruler, and universal judge. Children and simple people, Newman contends, adhere naturally to conscience and therefore spontaneously accept the existence of God unless there are positive circumstances that interfere.114
A second fact, scarcely less evident than the existence of God, was for Newman God’s absence. Looking about the world, he was filled with an oppressive sense of evil, which seemed to contradict the power and goodness of God. This could be explained, he believed, only by some primeval catastrophe whereby the human species had been alienated from its Creator. All nations in their religious rites bore witness to the human sinfulness and the necessity of atonement. Yet the fact that people did engage in prayer and sacrificial ceremonies testified to an unquenchable hope of redemption. To Newman, with his profound conviction of the goodness of God and the indigence of man, it was scarcely thinkable that God would not have supplied what was was so imperiously needed—a divinely given way of salvation, accompanied by a teaching authority sufficiently strong to withstand the arbitrary willfulness of human beings.115
Newman therefore approaches the Christian evidences with a whole set of presumptions and hopes that provide the clue to the complex record of religious history. Natural religion, in his opinion, provides an anticipation that revelation will be given, an antecedent probability so strong that it could be for some minds “almost a proof, without direct evidence, of the divinity of a religion claiming to be the true, supposing its history and doctrine are free from positive objection, and there be no rival religion with plausible claims of its own”.116 For Newman, “There is only one Religion in the world which tends to fulfil the aspirations, needs, and foreshadowings of natural faith and devotion”, for Christianity alone has “a definite message addressed to all mankind”.117
With these presuppositions, Newman sets forth in the last section of his Grammar of Assent (chap. 10, part 2) an impressive historical argument for the truth of Christianity based on a convergence of probabilities. His point is not simply that of the eighteenth-century French ethician Eusebius Amort, that Christianity is more probable than other religions, but rather that the accumulation of probabilities can give rise to legitimate certitude.118 The argument includes two main parts, corresponding respectively to the history of the Jews and that of the Christian Church. First, he maintains, the history of the Jews shows an extraordinary tenacity of theistic faith in the face of the idolatry of the surrounding nations, together with a persistent and growing conviction concerning the coming of the promised Messiah. Jewish history, moreover, terminates in a final national disaster following upon the rejection of Jesus as this Messiah. Second, the history of Christianity exhibits the fulfillment and partial correction of the messianic expectation of Israel and agrees perfectly with Jesus’s own prediction that His religion would spread to the ends of the earth and become a great empire “not as other victorious powers had done, and as the Jews expected, by force of arms or by other means of this world, but by the novel expedient of sanctity and suffering”.119 Christianity survives today not as a mere relic of the past but as a mighty moral force that successively masters all its persecutors.
In other works, notably the Apologia, Newman develops more fully the Catholic dimension of his apologetic. Divine revelation, he argues, if delivered over to the dominion of human reason, would inevitably deteriorate and dissolve into chaos and confusion. Since no truth, however sacred, can stand up against the wild tendencies of unaided reason, it is not surprising that “in these latter days,. . . outside the Catholic Church things are tending—with far greater rapidity than in that old time from the circumstance of the age—to atheism in one shape or other.”120 Only an infallible living authority can effectively arrest this process of decline, and the only form of Christianity that even claims to exercise such authority is the Catholic Church. Its infallibility is “a supereminent prodigious power sent upon earth to encounter and master a giant evil”.121 In the Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine Newman seeks to show more in detail that the Catholic Church has followed a line of organic development that is proof of her vital continuity with the revelation originally given in biblical times.
With his remarkable combination of gifts—historical learning, religious piety, psychological discernment, and literary power—Newman unquestionably ranks with Augustine, Pascal, and a few others, among the finest apologists of all time. His apologetic, which reflects his own spiritual pilgrimage, offers endless matter for study and reflection. Not content with subjective desires and presumptions, he candidly faces the objective data in their full complexity and constructs a vast and many-dimensioned synthesis. Avoiding the rationalism, naive biblicism, and philosophical modishness of many apologists of his day, he constructed a work of enduring value.
At the distance of more than a century, however, one cannot help but remark that Newman belonged to his own time. As a Victorian Englishman he loved culture and tradition; he was alarmed by the liberal and radical movements that were already threatening to shake the civilization of Europe. As a university don he cherished ideas and found satisfaction in a highly dogmatic faith. And with his sharp and sensitive conscience he loved to retire into meditative communion with God. Depending on their point of view, some will share and others will deplore Newman’s pessimism about the course of reason unrestrained by external authority. His prophecies about the spread of simple infidelity have been to a large extent fulfilled. But it must be asked whether Newman was too wedded to an idealized patristic era and too blind to the possibilities of a more secular future. Those who retain a taste for the interior life and sacred tradition will be drawn to Newman. But extroverts and activists may find him too introspective and withdrawn.
No English Catholic of the nineteenth century is in a class with Newman as an apologist. For the sake of completeness, however, we should mention among his contemporaries Cardinal Henry Edward Manning (1808—1892), a convert to the Catholic Church in 1851 who touched upon apologetics in many of his works. In his four lectures on The Grounds of Faith he argued that to reject the divine authority of the Catholic Church is “to make all authority for faith merely human” and consequently “to convert all doctrine into the subjective imagination of each several man”.122
The anatomist St. George Mivart (1827—1900), who had been converted to Catholicism in 1844, made a contribution to apologetics by his efforts to reconcile evolutionism with the faith. He rejected Darwin’s theory of natural selection and in On the Genesis of Species123 maintained that God had established and concurred with natural laws in the production of the human body, while creating the soul ex nihilo. For his services to the Church in the realm of science, Mivart was awarded a doctorate by Pius IX in 1876.
Mivart also felt impelled to answer the objection that the standard teaching on hell was “a horrible doctrine, worse than atheism”. He speculated in 1892 that the sufferings of the damned would be progressively reduced until these souls achieved a certain relative felicity. After the Holy Office had placed his essays on this subject on the Index, he published another article expressing his total and faithful submission to the judgment of the Holy See.124 But shortly before his death he advanced a theory of the Church as an evolving organism, a theory that his bishop, Cardinal Vaughan, rejected and condemned. As a consequence he was buried without ecclesiastical rites, but the case was reopened, and in 1904 he was given a Catholic burial.
The United States
Until the middle of the nineteenth century Catholic apologists in the United States, like their colleagues in England, were generally content to show that, supposing Christianity to be the true religion, Catholicism was its true form.125 The missionary Prince Demetrius Gallitzin (1770—1849) and the Alsatian-born Jesuit Anthony Kohlmann (1771—1836) were heavily engaged in defending Catholicism against unjust charges. In the following generation Archbishop Francis P. Kenrick of Baltimore (1796—1863) and his immediate successor, Archbishop Martin J. Spalding (1810—1872), wrote systematic defenses of Catholic as opposed to Protestant Christianity. All these works were eclipsed by Cardinal James Gibbons’s The Faith of Our Fathers (1876), the most widely read Catholic apologetical book ever published in the United States. Drawing upon his missionary experiences in North Carolina and Virginia, Gibbons succeeded in presenting the Catholic faith in a way eminently satisfying to nineteenth-century Americans. In successive chapters he gave a serene exposition of those points of Catholic doctrine chiefly disputed by Protestants, such as saints, images, purgatory, the Mass, indulgences, and clerical celibacy. In his chapter on civil and religious liberty he enthusiastically endorsed the separation of Church and State.
A more comprehensive form of apologetics, which attempted to justify Christianity itself in justifying Catholicism, was developed by two remarkable converts of the midcentury: Orestes A. Brownson (1803—1876) and Isaac T. Hecker (1819—1888). Brownson, after passing through Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, came to the Church in 1844 by way of French philosophy. He was much influenced—as Bautain had been—by the intuitionism of Victor Cousin and by the socialism of the Comte de Saint-Simon. In Pierre Leroux he came upon the principles of hierarchy and communion expounded in secular form. Applying these principles to religion, Brownson concluded that the divinization of humanity cannot be achieved except through a supernaturally endowed mediator, Jesus Christ. In his autobiographical work, The Convert126 Brownson explained how this chain of thinking led him not only to supernatural faith but to Catholicism. The divine-human life that first became present in Jesus Christ could not be communicated, he believed, except through a Church in uninterrupted communion with the Apostles.127
Immediately after his conversion Brownson turned his back on all kinds of Utopian dreams and practically lost interest, for a decade, in social progress. But in the years 1854—1864 he returned to his earlier interests and in several essays argued that Catholicism is necessary to sustain popular liberty. His The American Republic128 is an excellent presentation of his political philosophy within a religious perspective. Disagreeing with European Catholic thinkers such as de Maistre, Brownson believed that the American Constitution was fully compatible with Catholic principles of freedom under divine authority. In a review article on Juan Donoso Cortes’s Essay on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism, he praises the author’s learning and eloquence but criticizes him for his excessively negative view of the world and of popular forms of government. Political absolutism, according to Brownson, is detrimental to the vitality of the Church and unacceptably subjects religion to State control.129
Isaac T. Hecker (1819—1888), the founder of the Paulists, who had some associations with Brownson in connection with the Brook Farm experiment, likewise entered the Catholic Church in 1844. His first apologetical work, Questions of the Soul,130 was partly autobiographical. It sets a new pattern in Catholic evidences in that it offers no logical or historical defense of Catholicism but argues simply that the innate yearning of the human heart for authority and for union with something greater than itself is uniquely satisfied by the Catholic Church with her authoritative teaching and her sacramental system. In a second work, Aspirations of Nature131 Hecker is concerned to show that Catholicism is the religion that best harmonizes with the American tradition of respect for reason, freedom, human dignity, and universal brotherhood. To demonstrate that Protestantism does not meet these qualifications he quotes extensively from Luther’s attacks on reason and free will. Regarding private judgment, Hecker distinguishes his position from that of Balmes. Catholicism in Hecker’s view protects private, in the sense of personal, judgment in all that it is possible for the human mind to know.
The posthumous biography of Isaac Hecker by Walter Elliott, in a defective French translation with a glowing preface by Abbe Felix Klein,132 was one of the factors leading up to the condemnation of Americanism in Leo XIII’s encyclical Testem benevolentiae (1899).133 Among the errors singled out in this encyclical was a method of apologetics according to which Catholic teaching should be whittled down to suit modern civilization and to attract those not of the faith. Nobody was mentioned as holding this view. Though some suspicion attached to Hecker, he cannot be fairly accused of having taught what Pope Leo condemned.
CATHOLICISM IN CONTINENTAL EUROPE: 1850—1900
France and Belgium: Vatican Council I
From 1850 to 1870 French apologetics continued along the same lines as in the first half of the century. Walking in the footsteps of his friend and master Bautain, the Oratorian Father Auguste J. A. Gratry (1805—1872) championed an intuitive approach to the knowledge of God, notably in his Guide to the Knowledge of God.134 We are all born, Gratry believes, with an innate sense of the divine and hence with an obscure and confused knowledge of God and a yearning to know God in his intimate being. By the ardor of our love we dispose ourselves to submit to the movements of the Spirit and accept God’s gracious self-revelation. In his Philosophy of the Credo Gratry contends that Christianity is so beautiful that we must wish it to be true and so well proven that we cannot doubt that it is true.135
Following Lacordaire, a brilliant series of pulpit orators appeared from year to year to give the Conferences de Notre Dame. The Jesuit Gustave-Xavier de Ravignan (1795—1858) was perhaps the most outstanding of these pulpit apologists. One of the most popular apologists of the period, largely forgotten today, was Auguste Nicolas (1807—1888), a lawyer from Bordeaux. After publishing in 1842 to 1845 four immensely successful volumes, Philosophical Studies on Christianity,136 he followed them some twenty years later with volumes on The Divinity of Jesus Christ137 and The Art of Believing.138
The Belgian Redemptorist Victor Dechamps (1810—1883), who later became Bishop of Mechlin and in 1875 cardinal, received an early orientation toward apologetics when his father directed him in his boyhood reading of Lamennais. Among his major apologetic works the first place belongs to his Conversations on the Demonstration of Christian Revelation,139 a dialogue some five hundred pages in length that attempts to construct a more practical and realistic approach to Catholic belief than was available in the seminary textbooks. According to Dechamps’s “method of providence”, it is sufficient to call attention to two facts—one interior and the other exterior—that are universally accessible through common human experience. By the “interior fact” he meant the fact that one wants to live a good life but feels unable to do so without divine enlightenment concerning one’s ultimate destiny. By the “exterior fact” he meant the Church herself, which claims to speak for God and to answer the need for divine assistance. The correspondence between the psychological need and the external institution uniquely capable of satisfying it suggests the likelihood that the Church may be God’s providential answer to the human need for divine help and guidance. To demonstrate the divine origin of the Church, according to Dechamps, it is not necessary to make a critical analysis of first-century source documents. It is enough to contemplate the Church as a present and obvious fact. Her unity, durability, universality, and holiness, Dechamps maintains, leave no doubt but that she is a “subsistent miracle”.140
Vatican Council I (1869—1870) took up the relations between faith and reason, which had become a storm center in the controversies with the rationalists. While the Council did not sponsor any particular apologetical system, it had much to say about the evidences of credibility. After pointing out that faith is not the mere result of rational argument but a gift of divine grace, the Council noted that in addition to the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, God has been pleased to supply external evidences in order that the decision of faith should be in full harmony with human reason. In this connection the Council spoke of miracles and prophecies as being the primary signs, but it refrained from stating that the biblical prophecies and miracles are a sufficient sign to be wholly convincing to the contemporary inquirer.141
In a later paragraph (Denz 3013) the Council spoke of the Church herself as a “motive of credibility” and specified this further by calling attention to many of the same properties as those that Dechamps—following Lamennais—had used in his description of the “external fact”.142 Although some have thought that the Council’s appeal to the Church as a moral miracle was attributable to the influence of Dechamps, who was himself present at the Council, others contend that the paragraph was primarily the work of Franzelin, who relied on Kleutgen and, indirectly, on the theologians of the Tübingen school.143 In any case it seems probable that Dechamps, through his friend Cardinal Dupanloup, influenced the language of the Council; and he was undoubtedly pleased at seeing his own line of argument endorsed by such high authority.
In the closing decades of the nineteenth century French Catholic apologetics entered the period of extraordinary ferment that was to last through the first quarter of the twentieth century. A multitude of valiant champions came forth to meet the advancing army of modern incredulity in its various forms, e.g., evolutionary idealism, monism, materialism, positivism, and agnosticism.144
In the 1880s primary attention was focused on the conflict between science and religion. The greatest defender of the faith in this area was Msgr. François Duilhe de Saint-Projet (1822—1897), Rector of the Institut Catholique at Toulouse, who organized several Catholic scientific congresses. In 1855 he published his Scientific Apology for the Christian Faith, which went through many editions and was revised in 1899, after the author’s death, by J. B. Senderens.145 After an introductory section dealing with the relations between the different orders of knowledge—scientific, philosophical, and religious—Duilhe de Saint-Projet considered the various problems that had arisen in the domains of cosmology, biology, and anthropology. Writing somewhat in the spirit of Wiseman and Mivart, he recommended an attitude of positive openness to new scientific discoveries and even tried to find in them confirmations of the data of revelation. An unfortunate effect of this approach was that it led to a movement known as concordism. In a hasty and undignified manner apologists successively revised their interpretations of Genesis so as to make Moses agree with every new scientific theory about the origins of the universe, of life, and of the human species.
Perhaps the most productive French apologist of the late nineteenth century was the Abbe Paul de Broglie (1834—1895), professor of apologetics at the Institut Catholique at Paris. His first apologetical work, Positivism and Experimental Science,146 dealt with the theory of knowledge. During the remainder of his career he worked principally in the field of comparative religion. His “method of transcendence” appears most clearly in his Transcendence of Christianity147 and in his Problems and Conclusions of Comparative Religion.148
Although he recognized the legitimacy of the metaphysically based apologetics that had been traditional in the schools since the time of Thomas Aquinas, de Broglie considered that it could not be effective so far as the vast majority were concerned. As Thomas himself recognized, metaphysics is the most difficult of sciences, one that presupposes a great deal of maturity and wisdom. In the present day, moreover, most readers are poorly disposed for metaphysics, since Kant has made a profound impression on modern thought. Seeking to meet the capacities and prejudices of the intellectuals of his day, the Abbe sought to draw up a purely inductive argument based on universally recognized historical facts. Applying the axioms of common sense to the facts of comparative religion, he concluded to the absolute transcendence of Christianity and hence, by virtue of the principle of causality, to its divine origin.
Like Eusebius of Caesarea, Paul de Broglie divides his argument into two main steps. First he compares the religion of the Old Testament with that of the surrounding peoples; then he views primitive Christianity against the background of all other religions. The originality of Hebrew monotheism, he maintains, is such that it cannot be plausibly explained on natural grounds. Humanly speaking, it would have been impossible for a few enlightened leaders to have imposed their faith upon a people dedicated to the worship of Baal, of Astarte, or of Moloch. Whether it arose early or late in the history of Israel, the persistent monotheism of this people is a wonderful fact, presupposing the power of a divine revelation behind it.
A further peculiarity of Israelite religion is the pervasive theme of messianic prophecy. From the promises made to Abraham to the predictions of Isaiah and Daniel, the people’s religious hopes are concentrated on a future deliverer who will restore the glory of Israel and found a truly universal religion. In Christianity this promise was undoubtedly fulfilled. A scion of Israel extended to all nations in a new and higher form the worship of the God of Israel.
Second, Christianity is transcendent with regard to all that had preceded it. It is a harmonious living synthesis of all that is good in the various religions. It combines the monotheism of Israel, the Muslim insistence on the absolute sovereignty of the invisible God, the sacred rites and imagery characteristic of the mystery religions, and the asceticism of the Far Eastern religions. Yet it is not a merely artificial combination dependent on these elements. The Gospels make it clear that Christianity originated as a single coherent faith.
The advances of comparative religion, therefore, may be judged to have made it more evident than ever that Christianity owes its existence to an intervention from on high. This new form of demonstration, based on the history of religions, is particularly apt for the times. It does not replace but merely supplements the classical arguments from the sanctity of Jesus, His Resurrection, the conversion of the Greco-Roman world, and the homogeneous development of Catholic doctrine. Even when all the arguments are taken cumulatively, the apologist admits, they do not yield mathematical clarity. But for those who are drawn by divine love, the evidences are more than sufficient.149
The Abbe de Broglie unquestionably made a very impressive case for concluding that Christianity is the absolutely transcendent religion. He was well informed and relatively objective. But one may well ask whether it is possible for a scholar to become sufficiently familiar with the religions of other times and places to reconstruct their relationships with such assurance. Are not the data as elusive as the metaphysics that Paul de Broglie found beyond the reach of his contemporaries? And did he not assume too easily that, because religion had been a necessary support for human progress in the past, it must continue to be so in the future? Might not religion itself become at some point a vestigial organ? These questions perhaps became more acute in the twentieth century than they were in the nineteenth.
About the same time that Paul de Broglie was seeking to answer objections arising from the new science of comparative religion, others were heavily engaged in defending the historicity of the Bible. In this field the leading scholar was Fulcran Vigouroux (1837—1915), a Sulpician whose The Bible and Modern Discoveries in Egypt and Assyria150 passed through six editions between 1877 and 1896. Vigouroux also edited the apologetically oriented Dictionary of the Bible151 in five massive volumes (1895—1912). He was Secretary of the Pontifical Biblical Commission from its establishment in 1903 until 1912. Chiefly concerned with apologetical questions, Vigouroux tended to be conservative in exegesis.
Germany
The main achievement of Catholic apologetics in the latter half of the nineteenth century in Germany was massive systematization. A number of distinguished textbooks, encyclopedic in size and scope, were issued by erudite professors. Three may be mentioned as representative.
Franz Hettinger (1813—1890), professor of apologetics at the University of Wurzburg, composed a learned and ably written Christian Apology152 and followed this up with a more rigorously scientific Manual of Dogmatic Theology.153 In both works the general pattern is the same. Beginning with religion in general, the author goes on to consider successively the possibility and necessity of revelation, the signs of revelation (miracles and prophecies), the credibility of the Gospels, the divinity of Christ (which is demonstrated from the claims of Jesus, taken in combination with His physical and moral miracles and especially His Resurrection), the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy in Christ, the wonderful expansion of Christianity, and the Church as a standing miracle. As a kind of nineteenth-century Paley, Hettinger incorporated into his apologetical summae nearly every argument known to earlier authors. He did so with balance and system but without originality.
Paul von Schanz (1841—1905), who taught apologetics at Tübingen, wrote a three-volume A Christian Apology154 directed principally against positivist adversaries. The first volume, on God and nature, deals at great length with scientific difficulties raised against the biblical accounts of the Creation and the Flood. Volume 2, on God and revelation, begins with a very full discussion of the various races and their respective religions and closes with a historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus. Volume 3, concerned with the Church, proves the validity of Catholicism from the usual four marks and, as might be expected from the situation in the Germany of the day, devotes many pages to the primacy and infallibility of the pope.
In response to Chancellor von Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, a struggle against the Church in the name of modern civilization, it became especially necessary to show that Catholicism is not an obstacle to human progress. To meet this need Albert Maria Weiss (1844—1925), a Dominican with a special interest in social questions, wrote an immense Christian Apology from the Standpoint of Morals and Culture,155 in which he sought to establish the credibility of Catholic Christianity on the ground of its moral teaching and its beneficent social effects. Weiss wrote with fire and eloquence, but his work lacks order and conciseness; it is criticized by Protestants for being unjust to Luther and the Reformers.156
Germany
In Germany, where Protestant authors published prolifically in the field of apologetics, theologians may be divided into two main groups: the one more conservative and biblically oriented, the other more liberal and progressive. As examples of the first group one may take the Reformed theologian August Ebrard (1818—1888) and the Lutheran Christoph Ernst Luthardt (1823—1902).
Ebrard, a professor at Erlangen, began his apologetical career with a resounding reply to Feuerbach and D. F. Strauss, Scientific Criticism of the Gospel History.157 In later editions Ebrard expanded this polemic to take on F. C. Baur, E. Renan, and D. Schenkel for having impugned the historicity of the Gospels. His principal work was his two-volume Apologetics; or the Scientific Vindication of Religion.158 The major portion of this ponderous treatise is taken up with refuting on scientific grounds various modern theories concerning the human origins and the early history of religion.
Luthardt, a mediating theologian in the tradition of Schleiermacher and Sack, was the most successful Lutheran apologist of the period. His fame rests chiefly on the first three volumes of his four-volume series of Apologetical Lectures delivered at Leipzig.159 Volume 1, On the Fundamental Truths of Christianity160 portrays, somewhat in the manner of Pascal, the enigmas of human life and points out that they demand a personal God who manifests himself as living love. Volume 2, On the Saving Truths of Christianity, points out that the “contradiction of all contradictions is sin” and that the only answer to this is the redemptive work of Christ.161 The essential truths concerning Jesus, according to Luthardt, are not mere casual historical facts but, by reason of their importance for the inner life, can be grasped with firm moral conviction. Volume 3, On the Moral Truths of Christianity,162 warns against the illusions of seeking progress and culture without God and advocates as the true path of happiness the harmonious union of culture with religion. Without being profoundly original, Luthardt gathered up some of the best thoughts of his predecessors in a basically conservative, devotional type of apologetics. He drew freely upon Catholic apologists such as Pascal, Nicolas, and Hettinger, as well as upon Protestants such as Ullman and Tholuck.
The liberal wing of German theology was dominated by the neo-Kantian system of Albrecht Ritschl (1822—1889), who depicted the doctrine of the kingdom of God, conceived as a communion of love, as the heart of Jesus’s message. This demanded a new type of apologetics that, instead of seeking to justify the dogmas of Christianity before the bar of speculative reason, would seek to show the reasonableness of faith as a practical judgment. Wilhelm Herrmann (1846—1922), one of the first theologians to ally himself with Ritschl, seems to have looked upon the Christian’s experience of communion with God163 as mediated through the figure of Jesus Christ, as self-validating, and hence beyond the need of apologetical justification. Critics of Herrmann, however, have difficulty in seeing how one could reach such intuitive certainty that the New Testament portrayal of Jesus is accurate.164
Among the Ritschlian dogmaticians, Julius Kaftan (1848—1926) is outstanding for the attention he gives to apologetics. In his The Truth of the Christian Religion165 he holds that faith, since it operates in the domain of feeling and of the practical judgment, can be neither proved nor disproved by scientific evidence. But apologetics, he says, must show on theoretical grounds why it is reasonable to make an act of faith in the Christian revelation. Kaftan’s principal argument is that, without a revelation such as Christianity purports to be, there is no way of giving intelligibility to human history as a whole or of answering unavoidable questions regarding the origin and final purpose of all things. Without Christianity, he says, “our highest knowledge would remain incomplete, a Postulate or hypothesis”.166
Another Ritschlian, Hermann Schultz (1836—1903), in his Outlines of Christian Apologetics,167 rests his defense of Christianity on ethical grounds. Christianity, he affirms, is uniquely conducive to a sound and unlimited development of human culture.168 The gospel, being purely ethical and religious in scope, contains nothing that could conceivably be overthrown by scientific discovery.169
A similar defense of Christianity by means of a drastic reduction of its content may be found in the celebrated lectures of Adolf von Harnack (1851—1930), What is Christianity?170 Harnack appeals to scientific historical criticism of the New Testament to establish his thesis that the gospel, as originally preached by Jesus, centered about the “higher righteousness” of love, a doctrine that commends itself by its simplicity and sublimity. Harnack, in his opening chapter, criticizes earlier apologists for seeking to defend nonessentials. In his version of the gospel, reformed according to the requirements of neo-Kantian philosophy, the miracle stories and the bodily Resurrection of Jesus can be left aside.
The English-Speaking Countries
During the latter part of the nineteenth century a great part of the Protestant and Anglican apologetical effort was expended on domestic controversy between radicals and conservatives within the Christian household. Most apologists in Britain and the United States were content to follow along the lines of the evidential school, although some paid greater heed to internal and moral evidences than to the traditional arguments from miracle and prophecy. Apologetics courses were often given in the form of founded lectureship.171
A great deal of the apologetics of this period centers about the historicity of the Gospels. George P. Fisher of Yale, in his Essays on the Supernatural Origin of Christianity,172 took on Renan, Strauss, and the radicals of the Protestant Tübingen School. A little later in England, Joseph B. Lightfoot in his Essays on the Work Entitled “Supernatural Religion”173 used his massive learning in the field of Christian origins to devastate the brash statements of a British enthusiast for German radical criticism.
After the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859), a multitude of conservative apologists took up the pen in defense of the biblical creation narrative. Professor Charles Hodge, Princeton Theological Seminary’s learned systematician, declared: “A more absolutely incredible theory was never propounded for acceptance among men.”174 Mark Hopkins rejected the Darwinian theory as essentially atheistic, and the British statesman William E. Gladstone was moved to write The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture.175 On the other hand, President James McCosh of Princeton University in his Christianity and Positivism176 saw possibilities of reconciling Darwinism with Christian faith. Natural selection, for him, was but the reverse side of supernatural design. Many other Protestant theologians were likewise open to the new theory. The Scottish popular philosopher Henry Drummond (1851—1897), in his Natural Law in the Spiritual World177 attempted to construct an evolutionary interpretation of the kingdom of God by applying Butler’s principles of analogy.
The most distinguished apologetical manual in English in this period was that of the Scottish New Testament exegete Alexander B. Bruce, Apologetics; or, Christianity Defensively Stated (1892). After explaining in his introduction the aims and methods of apologetics, he gives in Book 1 a brief sketch of the Christian view of the world and then weighs its merits against those of five alternative theories of the universe: pantheism, materialism, deism, Unitarianism, and agnosticism. In his consideration of Spencerian agnosticism he concedes that the proofs of God are rarely convincing except to those who already believe on other grounds.178 But if one takes the Christian idea of God as a hypothesis, he argues, everything else that one knows tends to verify it. This argument in some ways anticipates the “presuppositionalism” of the Reformed theologians such as Cornelius Van Til in the twentieth century.
In his consideration of Israelite religion (Book 2) Bruce admits at least for purposes of the argument the documentary hypotheses of Julius Wellhausen and others concerning the development of the Old Testament. In such systems of religious evolutionism, says Bruce, there is nothing detrimental to Christianity.179 In the final chapter of this Part he acknowledges many defects in Old Testament religion (querulousness, vindictiveness, legalism, exclusiveness) but holds that these present no stumbling block to intelligent Christian faith, since the Old Testament revelation is not claimed as final and perfect.
In Book 3, on Christian origins, Bruce takes a relatively conservative position on the authorship and historical value of the four Gospels. The miracle stories, he admits, have little persuasive force for modern unbelievers, but they retain their didactic value for instructing believers with regard to the mission of Jesus. The physical Resurrection of Jesus, on the other hand, cannot be explained away on natural grounds.180 After further chapters on the Lordship of Jesus and on the various New Testament authors Bruce closes his work with a wise and moderate statement on the supreme religious authority that Christ enjoys in the minds of the faithful. Christianity, he holds, is God’s final word to men: “On the simple principle of the survival of the fittest, it is destined to perpetuity and ultimate universality.”181
Unlike some of the German apologists, Bruce does not delve deeply into problems of epistemology or natural science. His is a basically biblical apologetic, prefaced with some considerations regarding natural theology. Within its limits it is a highly successful piece of work. With some updating on critical and exegetical questions Bruce’s apologetic writings could still be serviceable today.
The nineteenth century is unquestionably one of the most fruitful in the entire history of Christian apologetics. The sheer complexity and volume of the material is overwhelming, but it is possible to pick out some clear directions and to register some solid gains. In this period apologetics overcomes the sterile rationalism that had affected it in the previous century; it relates itself more vitally to the interpretation of history and to religious experience. It finds new links with the philosophy of religion, political theory, and the positive sciences.
Schleiermacher first called for an apologetical prolegomenon to the whole of theology. This systematization was first put into effect for Protestants by Sack and for Catholics by Drey. It was worked out with remarkable clarity, though not with great depth, by Perrone and the Roman school, who tended to isolate apologetics too much as a purely rational discipline independent of the will, the feelings, and divine grace.
The philosophical foundations of apologetics were enriched by new explorations in epistemology and the philosophy of religion on the part of German philosophers. The net effect of this reflection was to set off religion more clearly as a distinct mode of knowledge, dissimilar to merely empirical and mathematical sciences. For some apologists this led to a certain fideism, an unwillingness to justify the assent of faith by any rational process—a tendency we have observed in many Protestants, such as Kierkegaard, Maurice, and Herrmann, and less acutely in Catholics such as Bautain. For others the influence of critical philosophy resulted in an apologetics of the heart (Schleierma-cher, Tholuck, and in an analogous way Chateaubriand and Ventura), in intuitionism (Gratry), or in some form of religious pragmatism based on the postulates of practical reason (Hermes, Ritschl, Kaftan).
Normative Catholic theology, rejecting the Kantian critique, continued to insist on the demonstrability of the existence of God and of the credibility of revelation (Balmes, Perrone, Vatican Council I). But thinkers such as Newman rely less on the classical proofs than on the experience of conscience and of human guilt. Many Catholic theologians of the period, impatient with long and tenuous historical arguments, base the reasonableness of faith upon the present reality of the Church as sign (Balmes, Dechamps, Vatican Council I).
Apologetics relates itself in an ambivalent way to political and social life. French traditionalism early in the century, horrified by the chaos of the Revolution, views religion as a force that is capable of restoring order, unity, and discipline. Donoso Cortes and even Newman, with their antipathy to liberalism, share something of the same orientation. But others, such as Lamennais, Brownson, and Hecker, look upon Catholicism as a force of progress. In a more defensive way the same is true of Luthardt and Weiss. While giving Christianity credit for fostering true freedom and human welfare, they warn against secular idolatry.
In the scientific area apologetics has to face challenges from the progress of natural and historical knowledge. A crisis is brought on by the Darwinian theory, but farsighted apologists such as Mivart and Drummond are able to take this in stride. Another crisis arises out of biblical criticism. The radical New Testament exegesis of Strauss and the Protestant Tübingen school is at first answered heatedly and polemically. But scholars such as Lightfoot and Harnack are able to use scientific source criticism in support of the historical reliability of the Synoptic Gospels. Toward the end of the century Bruce takes a sane and balanced attitude toward scientific criticism of both the Old and the New Testaments. Catholics of the same period, such as Vigouroux, still adopt an unduly conservative attitude, which will not be abandoned until the middle of the twentieth century.
A final challenge to traditional apologetics is offered by the new science of comparative religion. Paul de Broglie, more than any other single theologian, shows himself able to master the findings of this science and to use them as an additional source of Christian evidences. While his arguments are not rigorously probative—and are not intended to be—they are solidly persuasive and have not lost their value at the dawn of the twenty-first century, although the state of the evidence and the questions being asked have somewhat changed since his time.