Apologeticae sive Theologiae Fundamentalis, Tomus I: Demonstratio Christiana

By the decrees just praised the Church wishes not only to defend the suitable criteria of revelation, but also to rout the unsuitable ones. For the Vatican Council rejects sentimentalism, while Pius X rejects apologetic immanentism. Both agree in this: having rejected the philosophical (intrinsic) and historical (extrinsic) criteria, above all miracles and prophecies, they have recourse to purely psychological arguments — that is, arguments drawn neither from religion itself nor from the divine facts that accompany religion, but from the man who practices religion. They differ, however, as follows:

1. The apologetic sentimentalism of the Protestants¹ appeals exclusively to the subjective movements which the human soul undergoes while it undergoes revelation.

The older Protestants (the Pietists), indeed, maintained that every believer is moved or inspired interiorly by the Holy Spirit in such a way that he discerns the genuine word of God by its "savor" and "taste," with that same evidence by which he distinguishes white colors from black and pleasant foods from bitter ones.²

But an inspiration of this kind, a private inspiration of the Holy Spirit, is affirmed gratuitously. Indeed, it is proved not to exist, since individual Protestants believe contradictory and plainly false things, all the while appealing to the "testimony of the Holy Spirit." What they call private inspiration is in reality a private motion or subjective feeling.

Hence the more recent Protestants, under the leadership of Kant and Schleiermacher, substitute for the imaginary testimony of the Holy Spirit the natural religious sense or internal experience (religiöses Gefühl, inneres Erlebnis). For almost the whole of Protestant theology and philosophy, following Kant, teaches that pure or theoretical reason is incapable of religious knowledge (agnosticism); religion is grasped by practical reason alone, i. e. by conscience or internal experience.

But a criterion of this sort: 1°. takes away all objective certainty of religion and of revelation. For if those things, and those alone, are said to be revealed which please each person's internal experience, every religious truth dissolves into each person's subjective opinion. One and the same proposition one man could call revealed, another not revealed. Indeed, the said criterion 2°. destroys even all subjective certainty of revelation. For the "religious sense" and "internal experience" do not proceed from the cognitive faculty of reason, but from the will or rather from blind feeling. Hence they produce no certain knowledge, and they vary continually at the whim of feeling, so that one and the same man calls now these things, now those, revealed.

It is clear, therefore, that this Protestant criterion is altogether unsuitable for attesting true revelation.

2. Apologetic immanentism does not indeed judge revelation from the subjective movements of the soul alone, but holds it to be divine for this reason: that it answers to the aspirations and exigencies of the whole of human nature and life.

In the nineteenth century, indeed, Kantianism and positivism struck such deep roots that not only most non-Catholics but many Catholics too grew weary of "traditional" apologetics, which proves revelation by philosophical and historical reasons. To win over these "modern" minds, certain Catholic men, among them Ollé-Laprune, Fonsegrive, and Brunetière,³ invented what they call the "new" apologetics. Its novelty consists in this: that it exalts psychological arguments more than is fitting and regards them as primary criteria.⁴ It strives with all its might to show that man by his nature desires and demands revelation; that revelation not only agrees with the noblest desires and strivings of mind and heart, but is altogether necessary for rightly ordering intellectual and moral life. The other criteria, especially miracles and prophecies, it does not indeed despise, but employs in second place, once modern minds have already been won over by psychological motives.

Soon, however, the Modernist authors, above all Loisy, Blondel, Laberthonnière, and Tyrrell,⁵ rejected outright every philosophical and historical criterion, and above all miracles and prophecies. They do not tolerate a truth brought in from without ("extrinsicism") and known and proved by reason alone ("intellectualism"). They hold that alone to be true which gushes forth from one's own "ego" and is demanded by one's own "ego," i. e. by the whole soul and human life ("immanentism"). Every transcendent truth must, by its origin, prove itself immanent.

Hence the Modernist apologists work solely and exclusively "to persuade man that in himself and in the innermost recesses of his nature and life there lies hidden a desire for and an exigency of some religion — and not of any religion whatever, but of one altogether such as the Catholic religion is; for this, they say, is demanded outright by a perfect explanation of life."⁶

This apologetic immanentism Pius X condemned both in the encyclical "Pascendi"⁷ and in the "Oath against the errors of Modernism,"⁸ teaching that miracles and prophecies are "the most certain signs of the divinely originated Christian religion, and the same are most well suited to the understanding of all ages and of all men, even of the present time." He disapproves, moreover, of those Catholics "who, although they reject the doctrine of immanence as a doctrine, nevertheless use it for apologetics; and they do this so incautiously that in human nature they seem to admit not only a capacity for and suitability to the supernatural order — which Catholic apologists have always demonstrated with appropriate qualifications — but a genuine exigency in the true sense of the word."⁹

In truth, we have already proved¹⁰ that revelation is morally necessary for the human race in its present state, but is not of itself demanded by human nature. If it were demanded by nature, it would no longer be a supernatural and gratuitous revelation, but a natural one owed to nature. Consequently, the Modernists understand revelation not as an objective locution of God, but as subjective religious experience in the neo-Kantian sense.¹¹ Hence the apologetic method of immanence does not build up revelation, but destroys it.¹²

From everything we have so far said about criteria in general, it is clear that the Catholic Church defends miracles and prophecies as the principal criteria, whereas the adversaries of the Catholic cause either make light of those divine facts or reject them outright. Hence we must now treat of miracles and of prophecies one by one.