The Defense of Christianity, From Triumphant Positivism to the “Bankruptcy of Science”
De Franceschi, Sylvio Hermann
The Defense of Christianity, From Triumphant Positivism to the “Bankruptcy of Science” - 2024.
24
From the time of the 1880s, which marked the beginning of a real craze for Pascal, until 1896, when the publication of the famous Lettre sur les exigences de la pensée contemporaine en matière d’apologétique by Maurice Blondel launched a new challenge to apologists, the French authors who embodied fin-de-siècle Christian apologetics, Protestants and Catholics alike, were confronted with the need to decide once again the fate that should be reserved for the Pensées. While they are in the process of evaluating, not without difficulty, the legacy of the Swiss Alexandre Vinet, Protestants end up concluding that the Pascalian apology has lost many of its virtues and that it is ineffective for unbelievers of the end of the 19th century. Catholics, on the contrary, seem to rediscover the merits and advantages of an apologetic approach which makes it possible to respond to the main concerns of a ending century, while France is the scene of a real “crisis of the Catholic conscience”.
The Defense of Christianity, From Triumphant Positivism to the “Bankruptcy of Science” - 2024.
24
From the time of the 1880s, which marked the beginning of a real craze for Pascal, until 1896, when the publication of the famous Lettre sur les exigences de la pensée contemporaine en matière d’apologétique by Maurice Blondel launched a new challenge to apologists, the French authors who embodied fin-de-siècle Christian apologetics, Protestants and Catholics alike, were confronted with the need to decide once again the fate that should be reserved for the Pensées. While they are in the process of evaluating, not without difficulty, the legacy of the Swiss Alexandre Vinet, Protestants end up concluding that the Pascalian apology has lost many of its virtues and that it is ineffective for unbelievers of the end of the 19th century. Catholics, on the contrary, seem to rediscover the merits and advantages of an apologetic approach which makes it possible to respond to the main concerns of a ending century, while France is the scene of a real “crisis of the Catholic conscience”.
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