The Essential Supernatural: A Dialogical Study in Kierkegaard and Blondel

By Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai

Søren Kirkegaard and Maurice Blondel are positioned together in a dialogue regarding the vision of the supernatural. Maurice Ashley Agbaw-Ebai draws from this a sharper image of the preeminent place religious experience possesses in human life and thought. Kirkegaard's lament of Christian lack of fervor and Blondel's concern that religion and philosophy no longer interact are both examined and Agbaw-Ebai concludes that they both indicate the same outcome: a "dominant leveling of society" that robs religion of its particularity. This devastates the individual because he is no longer challenged to seek a relationship with God and expose himself to the supernatural. The boundlessness of man must be acknowledged or else his actions will never be understood, and religious experience and philosophy must coexist with mutual reference or self-knowledge will never amount to the discovery of supernatural destiny. And this, asserts Agbaw-Ebai, is the shared urgency of both Kirkegaard and Blondel. 

Like these philosophers who have preceded him, Agbaw-Ebai exhorts us to never allow the sense of our relation to the supernatural as a settled matter. The philosophy of religion we have inherited does not protect us from having to confront our own subjectivity with autonomy: to be God without God and against God, or to be God with and through God.

• Language: English
• Publisher: St. Augustines Press
• Release date: Mar 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781587312410

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Introduction

A Historical Overview of the State of the Question of the Dialectics of Relating with God, from the Enlightenment to the Contemporary Secular Era

0.1 The Dialectics of the Supernatural in Kierkegaard and Blondel

Prima facie, Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) are two disparate personalities: one was a Dane whose task, as he saw it, was to be a Christian missionary to Christianity, a gadfly, a spy, to introduce Christianity into Christendom, becoming a Christian in Christendom. The other, Blondel, a French-man, anxious about the polarization between the worlds of religion and philosophy, and bent on demonstrating that both fields, though autonomous, need not exclude each other, especially if the latter recognizes its task and its limit. As Kierkegaard himself points out in the review of his authorship in the introduction to The Point of View:

A point has been reached in my authorship where it is feasible, where I feel a need and therefore regard it now as my duty: once and for all to explain as directly and openly and specifically as possible what is what, what I say I am as an author (. . .) The content, then, of this little book is: what I in truth am as an author, that I am and was a religious author, that my whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian, with direct and indirect polemical aim at that enormous illusion, Christendom, or the illusion that in such a country all are Christians of sorts.¹

Two questions, therefore, defined the problematic of Kierkegaard: What is Christianity, and what does it mean to become a Christian? Living in the middle of nineteenth century Denmark in which everyone more or less professed an adherence to the Christian faith, Kierkegaard diagnosed a lethargy and shallowness in the practice of the Christianity of his day.

Kierkegaard was therefore convinced that what was presented as Christianity in the public sphere, by pastor and Church, was very distant and dissimilar from the Christianity of the New Testament. In Kierkegaard’s reading of the state of things, a Christianity that had become identifiable with the reigning culture, with the zeitgeist, could no longer possess the transformative energies that must define and shape a relationship with Jesus Christ. In almost polemical tones, Kierkegaard writes: When Christianity entered into the world, people were not Christians, and the difficulty was to become a Christian. Nowadays the difficulty in becoming a Christian is that one must cease to become a Christian.² In other words, the Christianity that was operational in Kierkegaard’s day, in his assessment, was distant from the Christianity of the New Testament. And so, ceasing to become a Christian meant that one had to eschew the cultural Christianity of Christendom and return to the New Testament Christianity, a return which was the only path capable of reinvigorating the Christian faith.

In Kierkegaard’s eyes, this diagnosis meant much more than lamenting Christianity’s loss of fervor. It was indicative as well of the absence of a living relationship with God, for a faith that has lost its steam cannot bring about the intersubjectivity that ought to define religious practice, in that the individual is no longer eager to build an engaging and active relationship with the supernatural and to live out the demands of such a relationship, thanks to the help that comes from the supernatural. Kierkegaard attributes this diminishment of a living faith to Christianity’s acquiescence to a mindset of leveling that had become commonplace in society, a flattening that resulted in the forfeiture of any feel of particularity that ought to characterize the religious phenomenon. Kierkegaard writes:

It must be obvious to everyone that the profound significance of the leveling process lies in the fact that it means the predominance of the category generation over the category individuality. In antiquity the total number of the individuals was there to express, as it were, the value of the outstanding individual. Nowadays, the standard of value has been changed so that equally, approximately so and so many men go to one individual, and one need only be sure of having the right number in order to have importance (. . .) The individual no longer belongs to God, to himself, to his beloved, to his art or to his science, he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction to which he is subjected by reflection, just as a serf belongs to an estate. (. . .) There is no other reason for this than that the eternal responsibility, and the religious signaling out of the individual before God, is ignored.³

The above text points to the motif of Kierkegaard’s unease with the dominant leveling of society, namely, that it robs the religious experience of its particularity, in the name of fitting into the acceptable ethos or what is in vogue in society. Kierkegaard therefore sees the argument for particularity as necessary for the revival of a living faith, a faith that is not a cultural costume, but rather, a faith that engages and challenges the individual in a dynamic relationship with God, in a context in which having such a relationship and living it out has become overwhelmingly diluted. As part of remedying the situation of leveling that in Kierkegaard’s opinion has destroyed the individual,⁴ Kierkegaard calls for resistance on the part of the individual to the tyranny of collective levelling. Kierkegaard maintains:

No age, and therefore not the present age, can bring the skepticism of that process to a halt, for as soon as it tries to stop it, the law of the leveling process is again called into action. It can therefore only be held up by the individual attaining the religious courage which springs from his individual religious isolation.⁵

The courage to be an individual and the audacity to go against the grain of cultural Christianity appears to be, for Kierkegaard, the only viable option for a return to the Christianity of the New Testament. These become the lifetime tasks for Kierkegaard, as evident in his treatment of the dialectics between the individual and societal mores especially in Philosophical Fragments, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, The Present Age, The Two Ages, and Fear and Trembling. But what is really wrong about generality that elicits such a consistent objection from Kierkegaard? It would appear that the answer resides in his conviction that the demands of New Testament Christianity are such that every individual as individual had to take a stand, for or against the spiritual élan that was being proposed by the New Testament. Every individual had to take up his or her daily crosses and follow Jesus [Lk 9:23]. Individuality, very much different from individualism, is therefore central to becoming a Christian. And to the extent that generality or Hegelian collectivism shielded the individual from this responsibility of becoming a Christian by simply jumping on the bandwagon of the whole, Kierkegaard became convinced that the path towards a revived Christian spirituality and existence had to start with asserting the place of the singular individual over and even against the collective.

In Fear and Trembling, for example, the crux of the matter in Genesis 22 lies in the irreconcilable tension that Abraham faces between the ethical prohibition against murder and the love that a father owes the son, on the one hand, and the religious duty of obedience to God, on the other. In other words, by making this demand of Abraham, God invites and perhaps obliges Abraham to choose between obedience to the abstract, universal and impersonal moral law, thou shalt not murder, and duty to God’s concrete, individual and personal will. It is this deference to the individual that will lead Kierkegaard to understand truth as subjectivity, a position that is crucial to any meaningful engagement of the Kierkegaardian conception of relationality with God, a relationality that is finally embodied in the leap of faith that not only transcends the aesthetic and the ethical stages of life, but perhaps, astonishingly, even the religious stage, especially if by religious is implied the cultural Christianity of the Denmark and Europe of Kierkegaard’s age, and beyond. If Kierkegaard had much to say to the state of Christianity and religious practice at the heart of the modern period when faith was still somehow in vogue, though in a very cosmetic sense, then surely, he would have something to say as well today, when secularism has further enhanced the erosion of Christian faith and religious practice, especially in the West, the traditional homeland of Christianity.

Of course, it is important to acknowledge the position held by some that secularism frees us from the generalizations of one people under God, which, as the history of religious wars and conflicts in the Western world attests, elicited a degree of religious intolerance that left much devastation in its wake. From this premise, the exclusion of God from the public sphere appears as a path to peace. However, it is one thing to argue that the will of God demands that I tolerate those that perceive God’s will differently from me, and another to basically see religion and the phenomenon of the supernatural as a problem that has to be resolved by political authorities, for whose interest it must now be to exclude religion from public life with obvious consequences for the private practice of faith. In this life, one might pose the question: what insights can we draw from Kierkegaard regarding the question of relating with God today, from the positions he espoused in the first half of the nineteenth century? That is the question that this work poses to Kierkegaard.

Blondel, on the other hand, captures the essence of his philosophical undertaking with the famous opening lines of L’Action (1893): Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?⁶ In other words, how do I come to act in my life as a conscientious human being, in terms of my own existence here and now? It is by way of responding to this question that Blondel settles for action as the defining reality that explains who the human being is, for to be human is to act, for the human condition is of necessity to act. As a human being, I am an acting person, and I can only be known when I act. Accordingly, it is thanks to my actions that my humanity manifests itself and makes me accessible to others. As Blondel states, I am and I act, even in spite of myself; I find myself bound, it seems, to answer for all that I can do.⁷ In this light, action for Blondel is not tied to or bound up with any particular act or any given set of actions, but all encompassing, as Blondel describes it: It is good to propose to man all the exigencies of life, all the hidden fullness of his works, to strengthen within him, along with the force to affirm and to believe, the courage to act.⁸ Given this boundlessness in terms of what constitutes action, it can be asserted that action is an activity of the spirit, for it is difficult if not impossible to posit and explain all of human action by the dictates of the natural order, given, as asserted above, the cosmopolitan character of action.

Along the lines of this comprehensive and broad-based understanding of action, Blondel further explains the meaning of action, thus:

In question is the whole of man; it is not in thought alone then that we must seek him out. It is into action that we shall have to transport the center of philosophy, because there is also to be found the center of life. If I am not what I will to be – what I will, not with my lips, not in desire or in project, but with all my heart, with all my strength, in all my acts – I am not.⁹

The whole meaning and destiny of human existence must therefore, be studied and comprehended by looking at human action. And this is the justification for why action cannot be peripheral to philosophy, if philosophy has to study the question of what it means to be human, and the ultimate destiny of human existence. In effect, to study who the human being is, is to study human action, for one’s person becomes translucent thanks to the way one acts.

Thus, Blondel raises the question of action because it is only in action that we can call all into question, challenging every predetermination and presupposition. In this light, all false ways of being and acting must be eliminated, for in opting for the scientific approach to the question of action, Blondel resolved to take nothing for granted, no facts, no principles or duties. To be faithful to the scientific approach implies stripping the self of all previous uncertain support systems,¹⁰ and embracing all passions, prejudices, negations, consciousnesses, errors and all philosophical systems. As Blondel writes:

It is therefore a science of action that must be constituted, a science that will be such only insofar as it will be total, because every way of thinking and deliberate living implies a complete solution of the problem of existence, a science that will be such only insofar as it will determine for all a single solution to the exclusion of all others.¹¹

In this light, if the problem of action is to be raised scientifically, we cannot subscribe in advance to any moral postulate or intellectual given to subscribe to. Nothing must be so sacrosanct as to be outside the realm of questioning and rational scrutiny and engagement. Why should this be the case? Because, as Blondel maintains, the question of action is the question about the whole of the human being. It is not just about rationality. And because it is in action and not only in the rational that we find the whole person, action thus becomes the center of philosophy, for in action is found the center of human life, in that that which is human appears, is encountered, understood and engaged if and when it shows itself in action.

Given this perspective, action is therefore central because I am my actions and my actions are me. As Blondel points out, action is produced even in spite of me. More than a necessity, action often appears to me as an obligation.¹² There is, therefore, an intrinsic link between my actions and my being. And the central issue when talking about action is the necessity and possibility of the subject’s in a moral self-determination, the degree of reflection and engagement within the human being as a rational and free being. If action is a central condition of one’s being, then the question of faith and relating with God in living subjectivity becomes a question of action living itself out in concrete choices. This explains why a philosophy of action is central to Blondel’s philosophy of religion, for action is what captures the whole person in his or her existence, for that which constitutes human action as it flows from human rationality is distinctively human. Action is, therefore, the point of departure from which the human being must make a choice owing to the entelechy of the human being in the face of the supernatural necessity that reveals itself in action, which is obviously the link between reflection and experience.

This orientation of the natural order towards the supernatural is grounded in the inability of the natural order to be self-sustaining, given that left to the self, human need outweighs human possibilities to meet that need, which leaves Blondel in what one might describe as an Augustinian restlessness, as captured in his journal entry of July 17th 1894. Blondel speaks to God, like Augustine in the Confessions:

You allow me a very vivid and very painful sense of the obscurity of your ways, of the difficulty of your faith, and, if I dare say so, of the uncertainty of your very existence and revelation. That suffering must prevent me from remaining either in darkness or in a false light, must join me to other souls, themselves in the dark, and teach me to bring them out of darkness; I must even encounter that distressing obscurity in the hearts of those consecrated to you. Where then, shall I recognize your presence and your action and your charity, you terribly hidden God? In the very security of faith, therefore, I feel the doubts, the anxiety of the search, the difficulties which the affirmation of Christianity involves (. . .) I feel the full force of modern prejudices and the dreams of a new humanity in my very bones; I can intimately imagine the state of mind of numerous men, learned, penetrating minds, who move with joy and pride in philosophical speculation; I think, full of fear, of all those, of everything which is without you; and my thought and my heart are mortally troubled.¹³

In this text which mirrors the complexities of Blondel’s soul, namely his unfulfilled and inevitable willing that confronts a mysterious Supernatural Being, one finds the eventual impulses that shaped and defined his task of the natural necessity of the Supernatural and the Supernatural reality of the natural, for Blondel begins to clearly discern that he has a mission to fulfill. As he himself writes again in his Cahiers Intimes:

I must show the actual paths of reason towards God incarnate and crucified; I must conciliate the claims of modern thought; I must move science and philosophy by the methods which are dear to them and which they are right to love; I must remain natural as long as anyone and longer than anyone in order to show more singly, more peremptorily, more pacifically, more broadly, more impersonally, the inevitable need for the supernatural. How few men are disposed to follow along those laborious paths, to open up a scientific road among so many obstacles, to understand equally the legitimate exigencies of the modern mind and the redoubtable intransigencies of Christian truth, to fill in the intervening space, and to throw into the abyss between them, so as to fill it, one’s life, one’s heart, one’s thought, one’s reason, one’s faith, one’s future in time and eternity, the whole of oneself? It is to that task that I must consecrate myself. There lies my duty.¹⁴

Blondel’s self-assigned task is therefore, to demonstrate the inevitability of the need for the Supernatural, in human life. Given this inner insufficiency reminiscent of Augustine, the question of faith in Blondel’s view, takes as its point of departure the insufficiency of human action in the natural order. And faith is the doorway because faith does not cancel out human action as it unfolds, but rather brings about the opening of action at the point in which action is unable to go either further or backwards.

L’Action (1893) is therefore a fully rounded metaphysics of action in which man’s totality, and not exclusively his intellect, played a vital role in the approach to God and in the understanding of tradition.¹⁵ Gauging human action, Blondel arrives at the conclusion of the insufficiency of the natural order, evidence of which is already apparent in the conflict between the willed will and the willing will – a position that will be examined in greater detail in Chapter Two of this work. The willed will, action in concreto, cannot be equated with the willing will, that is, action as unquenchable desire. As Blondel points out, "it is this hidden contradiction between what we would call the voluntary (le volontaire) and the willed (le voulu) that must be considered for a moment, in order to determine the meaning of the acts that express it."¹⁶ For Blondel, therefore, the willing will is the common movement of aspiration to will, la volonté voulante, which must be distinguished from what humans actually will which always fails to be adequate to the willing will, that is, la volonté voulue. As Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan point out in their introduction to The Letter on Apologetics, this distinction between the two wills is indicative of the Blondelian position that:

From whatever angle we approach the human situation, we are faced with problems which demand solution. Throughout the course of the dialectic, the discrepancy between what we essentially will and what we suppose ourselves to be willing is always declaring itself. But it is not that the particular objects which we will are not worth willing at all. The trouble is that they are insufficient – they are not adequate to "la volonté voulante."¹⁷

In other words, human existence in its totality is latently oriented toward action, that is, toward going out into the world around us, reaching out to our fellow human beings.

However, the tendency of human beings has been to seek to fulfill by one’s self, the infinite desire in us by placing the infinite into the finite, the absolute into the relative. Here, we have a theme that is central to the trilogy of Augustine, Kierkegaard and Blondel. Said differently, the absoluteness of the religious value is attributed to natural activity, so much so that one attributes to natural phenomena an infinity, what Blondel calls a surplus that such actions cannot possess.¹⁸ Blondel argues:

The idea of God (whether we know how to name Him or not) is the inevitable complement of human action; but human action also has as its inevitable ambition to reach and to use, to define and to realize in itself, this idea of perfection. What we know of God is this surplus of interior life that demands to be used: therefore, we cannot know God without wishing to become God in some way.¹⁹

In this light, because God is conceived of as being perfect in all things, the human being desires to attain that by playing God, giving infinite value to the finite, in the human attempt to capture God. In this desire for human autonomy and independence, God appears on the scene only because God is that which we cannot be ourselves, or attain with our own strength. Ludwig Feuerbach gives much traction to this line of thinking in arguing that faith is necessary and useful because God is the perfection of all human traits:

God is thy highest idea, the supreme effort of thy understanding, thy highest power of thought. God is the sum of all realities, i.e., the sum of all affirmations of the understanding. That which I recognize in the understanding as essential I place in God as existent: God is what the understanding thinks as the highest. But in what I perceive to be essential is revealed the nature of my understanding, is shown the power of my thinking faculty.²⁰

To Feuerbach, humans attribute to God all that they find in themselves, only without limitations. Human realities are therefore the realities of God, existing in humans with limits, but in God, without limits. Feuerbach, again writes:

To enrich God, man must become poor; that God may be all, man must be nothing. But that he desires to be nothing in himself, because what he takes from himself is not lost to him, since it is preserved in God. Man has his being in God; why then should he have it in himself? Where is the necessity of positing the same thing twice, of having it twice? What man withdraws from himself, what he renounces in himself, he only enjoys in an incomparably higher and fuller measure in God.²¹

If God is what the human being wishes for the self, then God is therefore, the projection of the human mind, for as one thinks about God, such is one’s thought, and the measure of one’s God is the measure of one’s understanding.²² In this light, God appears as the objective nature of human understanding. God is essentially a creation of human intelligence, the object that captures human aspirations. There is, therefore, a utilitarian picture of God in this line of modern thought, as captured by Feuerbach.

Reacting to this worldview, what follows, according to Blondel, is what he characterizes as the human sense of a superstitious self-sufficiency, which, to Blondel, is not sustainable, for it forces an infinite desire into the cloak of finitude – a futile attempt at turning a blind eye to a mystery that outlasts and surpasses the limit of our human powers. We are therefore faced with a dilemma, Blondel writes: Man aspires to be a god: to be god without God and against God, to be god through God and with God, that is the dilemma.²³ This impasse, from the Blondelian reading of things, constitutes the trial of the modern period – to view God and religion in a manner that, while not always explicitly rejecting God and religion, effectively transforms humans into the supernatural by attributing absolute and exclusive validity to the finite and the temporal.

This false sense of self-sufficiency that will become commonplace with the modernist movement shows itself in the human desire to perfect the self, to absorb what has escaped human beings infinitely, a grabbing of the infinite that pushes humans to fabricate God according to their own image and likeness – almost returning the favor of Genesis 1:27 – In the image of God he created them; male and female he made them. This attempt at becoming self-sufficient alone shows the will’s attempt, by its own strength, to tie the divine to itself and to hand over the divine as a docile captive to the will, hence, subjugating the divine to the power of the will. But given that human willing continues to be more than willed actions, Blondel makes this rather startling observation:

From all these attempts, there follows only this doubly imperious conclusion: it is impossible not to recognize the insufficiency of the whole natural order and not to feel an ulterior need; it is impossible to find within oneself something to satisfy this religious need. It is necessary; and it is impracticable. Those are, in brutal form, the conclusions of the determinism of human action.²⁴

It is necessary; and it is impracticable; – Does Blondel then conclude that humans are powerless to bring about unaided any form of human satisfaction of the necessary need for the divine? It appears to be the case, for he makes the argument that the willing will continues to exceed the willed will. It is impracticable because the willed will cannot fulfill the infinite demands of the willing will. Given the failure of the superstitious sense of human autonomy that finds self-sufficiency in human insufficiency, there opens up in human action the possible necessity for the Supernatural, which now appears as a natural necessity. As will be developed in Chapter Two, it is the One Thing Necessary, the unavoidable choice that one has to make – yes or no to the Supernatural. In this sense, relating with God is a question born from human action, human willing, a reality that is not dated and hence speaks to modern and secular sensibilities – Blondel’s primary interlocutors. Cultivating a living relationship with God is an unavoidable step in what it means to be human. In this light, L’Action is a portrayal of Blondel the philosopher and the Christian:

As a philosopher, he thought that philosophy could not be indifferent to the problem of the ultimate destiny of man, without which it would not be worth a moment’s trouble. As a Christian, he believed that man’s final end was wholly beyond nature, was properly supernatural. No doubt this supernatural end escapes the direct grasp of reason, otherwise it would no longer be religious and revealed, but purely rational. If nevertheless it is so, it must inevitably be manifested in some way in the concrete reality of human existence. We have then to establish, by the sole means of philosophy, that man aspires to an end which is other than natural, that the supernatural presents itself to him as a hypothesis which philosophy cannot establish, but which answers actual needs that reason alone is unable to satisfy.²⁵

To Blondel, two things therefore stand out for philosophy: firstly, that if philosophy is concerned with everything human, then philosophy cannot avoid the question of the Transcendental or the Supernatural. To do so will be a dereliction of duty before a most vital element of human existence, given that faith in the Supernatural has been very much a part of human history. Secondly, though philosophy cannot escape the question of the Supernatural if philosophy must cover the expanse of all things human, it is beyond the scope of philosophy to establish the Supernatural, for Blondel believes that would be tantamount to asking the finite intellect to ascertain the existence of a reality that is infinite. But though philosophy cannot establish the Supernatural, philosophy faces the problem of the Supernatural through the philosophical analysis of all human activity, that is, ontological, ethical, aesthetic, technical or simply practical, in a word, human action.

Additionally, for Blondel, the question about relating with the Supernatural must take cognizance of the question of the relationship between philosophy and the Supernatural. Understanding Blondel’s position on the place of philosophy in leading to the natural, and the limits of philosophy, is vital to grasping the phenomenon of human action as it opens up to the Supernatural. This inevitability of the natural to open up to the Supernatural demanded a method that would preserve the scientific study of both phenomena. To convey this perspective, Blondel writes:

For if one tried to begin with the supernatural, treating it as a factual datum, one would be abandoning philosophy. If one tried to produce the supernatural from natural premises as an apodeictic conclusion, an undertaking which has been condemned under the name of semi-rationalism, one would be abandoning orthodoxy. And if one simply brushed aside these difficulties and tried to produce a really convincing proof by this method, one would abandon both philosophy and orthodoxy. It would indeed be strange to offer to philosophers who are hostile to Christianity a doctrine which would be philosophical only if it ceased to be orthodox or would be orthodox only if it ceased to be philosophical – unless it failed to be either at the same time.²⁶

How then, must we speak about the supernatural especially from the perspective of intersubjective relationality with the supernatural? Such a question is necessary, especially given the Blondelian position that action, absent the supernatural, reaches a position of impasse in the face of which a closure on the dynamics of the subject before the supernatural amounts to an abortion of action. This, that is, the subject’s relationship with the supernatural, is therefore a task that Blondel engages, with a realistic expectation of what philosophy can bring to bear on the supernatural question. Like Kierkegaard, Blondel has a very measured opinion of philosophy, though recognizing its relevance:

Philosophy cannot attach to the supernatural the sort of certainty which it confers on all that it affirms: it cannot therefore pronounce on the question of fact, it can only determine the dispositions which prepare for the understanding of facts and for the practical discovery of truths which emanate from another source.²⁷

In effect, while philosophy can and should concern itself with the religious question, it is beyond the scope of philosophy to ascertain the veracity of the facts of religion. Philosophy can lead the mind to apprehend and make meaning of the religious question, but it can neither ground nor resolve the religious question as it does with other disciplines, for unlike other disciplines, religion and the God-question not only admit of contingent facts, but more so, do not subscribe to the idea of fixed general laws of nature.

Miracles, for instance, constitute an integral part of the religious phenomenon. While philosophy can provide the language needed in explaining a miracle, philosophy within the bounds of philosophy cannot say why the miraculous is true or even believe it, even though it can aid the explanation of the miraculous, for philosophy adopts itself to the idea of nature as a given, as fixed, while miracles break through the deadening character of nature. As David Hume (1711-1776) asserts, a miracle is a violation of the laws of nature.²⁸ Hume goes on to argue that though miracles constitute an integral part of Christianity and Christianity cannot exist without one, there is no sufficient evidence in support of miracles, and hence, reasonable persons cannot believe in miracles.²⁹ To Hume, the whole phenomenon of miracles circles around the irrational given that they cannot be proven, and religion as a whole, Christianity in particular, is an irrational phenomenon which Hume would desire to see erased from the face of the earth, even if he remained unsure, or, ever the skeptic that he was, skeptical of such a possibility. To Hume, the rejection of any rational grounds for miracles leaves religion at the mercy of a theological fideism. Hume writes:

Mere reason is insufficient to convince us of its veracity: And whoever is moved by Faith to assent to it, 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