The rest of Lamennais argument for the divine nature of Christianity concerns mostly what could be called its emotional impact. For instance, Lamennais notes that miracles reveal to us the power of divinity, which surpasses the comprehension of human mind, and thus bolster the dogmatic side of divine revelation. I am not really interested of the question whether miracles actually have occurred, but a more interesting consideration is whether miracles are even possible. A deistic argument against their possibility, which Lamennais recounts, notes that miracles are contradictions, because they should break supposedly unbreakable laws of nature - that is, nothing could be a miracle, because if something broke what we thought was a law of nature, then the supposed law wouldn’t have been a true law in the first place.
Now, making miracles into a logical absurdity seems a sophism of the worst sort and makes one just wonder, if there is something wrong in the suggested definition of miracle, because one can surely imagine what it would be like if some divinely powered entity would break the regular course of nature. Of course, it also depends on what do we mean by a law of nature. If one means by it just a regularity, miracles could be defined as highly improbable events, on the condition that these regularities usually hold. Then again, if a law of nature means something more necessary, we could either think of all these laws as having an implicit caveat, like “unless God decrees otherwise” - and a miracle would then be just an instantiation of such a caveat - or we might think that miracles mean temporary replacement of our world and its laws with another world having different laws of nature. For Lamennais, this sophistical argument is just a proof that deists, who deny all powers from divinity, are a step away from becoming atheists, who, by the way, cannot even show that natural world has any unbreakable laws.
The very crux of the emotional argument for the sanctity of Christianity lies undoubtedly with the person of Jesus and his supposed role in the divine plan. Word of God - whatever that means, but it surely sounds like a mighty person - takes on a rather powerless position and dies just for the sake of giving humans a chance to redeem themselves. As the popularity of Christianity shows, this is a rather powerful story - who wouldn’t like it, if some person of authority sacrificed himself for others? Indeed, one might suggest that this emotional component was an essential aspect at the stage when Christianity spread over the Roman empire. Lamennais, on the other hand, takes this spread as a further proof for the divine origin of Christianity, which seems a bit too quick conclusion, since Christianity surely hasn’t been the only ideology that has gathered followers despite its meager beginnings.
Lamennais still tries to back the sanctity of Christianity by showing that Christianity has been beneficial to the development of society. I have already discussed a similar argument and noted that it is rather doubtful. What is more interesting is Lamennais’ later written defense of his work, attached at least in the edition I've been reading to the final volume. Here Lamennais returns especially to the themes of the second volume and to his account of various philosophical schools, like empiricism and idealism. In the defense, Lamennais is especially interested of what he called dogmatic school of philosophy, the major proponents of which were supposedly Descartes, Pascal, Malebranche, Leibniz, and rather interestingly, Francis Bacon, whom otherwise one might have included with the empiricists. The defining characteristic of this “school” Lamennais finds in reliance on individual human reason. It doesn’t take Lamennais long to find some clear difficulties e.g. in Cartesian reliance on human reason - as Descartes himself attests, the very criterion he suggests, or clarity and distinction of ideas, works as a criterion only if he already supposes the existence of a benevolent divinity, who can guarantee the connection between clarity/distinction and truth. Lamennais thinks that even the famous I think therefore I am falls because of this mistake, since it can at most now show that we must believe in our own existence, not that we have any basis for this belief.
While Cartesian fundamentalism does break at obvious places, Lamennais regards as its worst offence the culture of individual reason it has propagated - after Descartes, everyone believes she can find the truth by following her own opinions. Lamennais explicates his own chosen criterion by saying that instead of individual reason he advocates for common sense or reason, that is, the authority of generations and generations of Church doctrine. He does note some of the more obvious criticisms against his position, especially on the question whether we can truly say that Catholic Christianity is the best authority to rely upon. Unfortunately, he really does not have any better basis for this assumption, except to point to his four criteria of unity, universality, perseverance and sanctity, all of which we have found wanting.
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