The Ideal Which Must Direct Us by Gregory Fox
What is the relationship between life and dogma? More specifically, what is the relationship between life and Christian truth? These are not obscure or purely academic questions—they deal with the most urgent and pressing problems that the Christian faces in their day-to-day life and in their relations with others. Faced with questions from unbelievers, skeptics, or agnostics, the Christian must be able to give a response to the question: Why Christianity? Why Jesus Christ instead of another? The Christian, in other words, must “be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks [him] to give the reason for the hope that [he has]” (1 Pet 3:15).
The French Oratorian—and victim of ecclesiastical censorship during the Modernist Crisis—Lucien Laberthonnière (1860–1932) dedicated his life’s work to this question. Reacting strongly against the Thomism and scholasticism of his day, which he believed incapable of dealing with the existential question of Christian life, Laberthonnière instead drew upon the Pascalian tradition within Catholic thought to formulate his apologetics. Following in the footsteps of the French Catholic and mathematician Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), Laberthonnière critiqued a philosophy and theology that treated the church and Christian truth as primarily external impositions on human life and thought. Laberthonnière’s 1903 essay “L’apologétique et la méthode de Pascal” is a clear exposition of his and Pascal’s conception of an apologetics which seeks to preserve the vital link between Christian truth and human life. This article intends to look briefly at that essay in order to see what sort of insights can be gleaned from it.
Two Methods of Apologetics
In our day, the word “apologetics” has an air of insincerity to it. We associate it with grifters, cheap arguments, and (perhaps) bad YouTube video essays. Usually, when apologetics come up, one expects to hear arguments which arrive at prefabricated conclusions—arguments with little to no relevance for the inner dialectic or movement of life itself. Yet, apologetics need not be understood this way.
Against this view, apologetics for Laberthonnière is a way of making Christian truth our own. It is not about proving, in a disinterested and schematical way, the truth of the Christian religion—as if it were merely one fact among others that one could “prove” the same way one proves a natural fact! Instead, it is “the effort of the human spirit to convert itself to Christian truth, to know and assimilate it, in a word to make it our truth,” as Laberthonnière writes in “L’apologétique et la méthode de Pascal.”
Now, according to Laberthonnière, there are two apologetical methods. Both methods share the same object (to render Christianity understandable, to make it “credible” to the unbeliever, and so on), but they differ radically in their means.
The first method, which Laberthonnière calls “empirical,” treats Christianity as a sort of positive, external fact, “entirely foreign to man as he is,” equivalent to any other fact. Under this view, Christian truth would “come to us only from the outside and would impose itself on us as a fact imposes itself”. It would remain something that was only after the fact, an afterthought, après coup.
For the empirical method, Laberthonnière argues, grace is “added to nature, without penetrating it or changing it . . . remaining above it and outside of it.” Christianity, in this case, remains (merely) a superimposition on an already completed (and basically unchanged) nature. In short, an apologetics, as Ernesto Buonaiuti once quipped, where “Christian life had taken on the shape of an eternal syllogism.”
On the other hand, the second method—Laberthonnière’s preferred “method of immanence”—begins with our “need and duty to know, in order to live . . . what we are and what we have to do”. This method begins with the desire to structure one’s life according to a living truth—our desire to determine “the ideal which must direct us”. By using this method, we would discover Christianity to be something beyond mere external imposition. It would, in fact, be something welcomed, “expected and demanded from within” ourselves—without at all being owed to us in any way. It would be an encounter with a living truth, namely Jesus Christ, which would touch a striving and a desire that arises from within us; the internal dialectic (which we will catch a glimpse of later on in Laberthonnière’s essay) of our life, which is ultimately fulfilled by God himself.
The problem, as Laberthonnière formulates it, of the relationship between life and Christianity ultimately “consists of . . . reconciling these two orders of truths [grace and nature], without sacrificing the one or the other, avoiding [a] rationalism which ignores [méconnaît] revelation, and [a] fideism which ignores reason.” For Laberthonnière, the method of immanence provides the solution to this problem.
The Method of Immanence
“From Pascal’s point of view,” Laberthonnière declares, “[apologetics] is not a question, first of all, of verifying the reality of a historical fact . . . for why should we worry about knowing if such a fact in particular is real or not[?]” When faced with such a deluge of historical facts, there seems to be no a priori reason for us to care about the historicity of the Christian faith over and against any other alleged fact. Apologetics, then, for the unbeliever, seems to begin from a totally external and arbitrary starting point—namely this or that external fact. But as William James has shown us, we do not stand before a set of facts with an equal amount of intensity or interest. Some facts or theories are, as James would say, live hypotheses, while others are dead. There must therefore be a reason, according to Laberthonnière, why we ought to “occupy ourselves with this [fact] instead of others”. In other words: what makes Christianity a live hypothesis?
Laberthonnière and Pascal believe that we can find such a reason by turning towards our inner needs and experiences. Such an experience which Pascal believes to be very illuminating is the contradictory nature of man’s existence, the simultaneous greatness and wretchedness of our existential situation. As Pascal puts it:
Man’s greatness is so obvious that it is drawn from his very wretchedness. For what is natural in animals we call wretchedness in man. From this we realize that, his nature now being like that of the animals, he has fallen from a better nature which previously was his. . . .
We have in ourselves the capacity for knowing truth and for enjoying happiness, but we have neither a truth which is constant nor one which satisfies.
Pascal does not start from anything exterior to man’s experience. Man’s greatness, and his current state of wretchedness, is apparent as an internal and external fact, and these two contraries demand resolution. For Pascal and Laberthonnière, any truth worthy of the name must also be able “to give us a reason for these astonishing contradictions.”
At this point, it is clear that his essay does not intend to give any sort of conclusive “proof” that the Christian religion is true. But we have at last arrived at a reason as to why we ought to consider Christianity, why we ought to investigate it. Under the first apologetical method, Christianity and Christian dogma appeared as a set of historical facts totally unrelated to man’s experience of himself and his own recognition of his current state. However, for Laberthonnière, it is only with Pascal’s method of immanence that Christian dogma takes on a concrete relationship with man’s life. A method, I should add, which is quite the opposite of what our current apologists peddle. ♦
Gregory Fox is an independent researcher whose primary focus is the history of social, democratic, and liberal Catholicism in 19th- and 20th-century France. His previous contributions to Today’s American Catholic include essays on Leon Chaine, Virgil Michel, and Guiellermo Roviro.
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