Converts to the Real. Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy by Edward Baring

Abstract

Reviewed by: Converts to the Real. Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy by Edward Baring Stephen Schloesser and S.J. Converts to the Real. Catholicism and the Making of Continental Philosophy. By Edward Baring. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2019. Pp. 504. $49.95, £39.95, €45.00. ISBN 978-0-674988-37-8). In this monumental work of transnational intellectual and institutional history, Edward Baring maps the Catholic network that made possible the diffusion of phenomenological thought and hence the making of Continental philosophy. This network of schools, scholars, conferences, and publications grew in response to Pope Leo XIII’s mandate for an international neoscholastic revival in Aeterni Patris (1879). The Catholic quest for the “real,” both epistemological and ontological, soon led to exchanges far beyond creedal boundaries. Neoscholastics (and later, Christian existentialists) made common cause with similar quests by German thinkers. As a result, argues Baring, “The Catholic reception of phenomenology was a subterranean but massive structure, linking many of the most important developments in the history of twentieth-century philosophy”—“the first continental philosophy of the twentieth century was Catholic. (p. 20). Baring’s archeological and genealogical method meticulously excavates innumerable places, persons, and events. In the 1880s, new establishments included the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (1887), the Theological Faculty in Swiss Fribourg (1889), and the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie in Louvain (1889). The “topology of Catholic intellectual networks made Louvain a model for progressive neo-scholastics around the world,” including the United States, Brazil, Spain, Bohemia, Germany, and especially Milan’s Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore. (p. 36) National compositions of student bodies grew increasingly diverse. At the Great War’s outbreak in 1914, foreign students in Louvain made up one-sixth of those taking the baccalaureate, and a third of doctoral students. By 1930, fifty-seven of Louvain’s 160 students came from abroad, including those from Bengal, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, and Yugoslavia. [End Page 816] As institutional establishments catalyzed publishing ventures, neoscholastic reviews arose in Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and Spain. These journals formed a transnational network in various ways, including publications (frequently translated) by foreign authors. (Baring’s study required an impressive linguistic diversity of primary sources.) For example: Léon Noël’s Francophone work on the German Edmund Husserl traveled from Louvain to neoscholastic centers in Milan and Madrid before arriving in German speaking Vienna, capital of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Multilingual migration “suggests that the transnational bonds linking one neo-scholastic to another were often more robust than those linking them to secular philosophers writing in the same language” (p. 53). The exchange was also transatlantic. The Modern Schoolman, founded in 1925 by Jesuit philosophy students at Saint Louis University, reached out to Munich for a contribution from fellow Jesuit Erich Przywara, editor of Stimmen der Zeit. Przywara’s essay appeared in 1934 (in English) as “Edmund Husserl.” In 1937, another article on Husserl appeared in The New Scholasticism founded ten years earlier by the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Its author, Kurt F. Reinhardt, a German-born student of Husserl and a Catholic convert, had emigrated to the U.S. and started teaching at Stanford University in 1930. In 1939, Alberto Wagner de Reyna, having earned his doctorate at the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú and become one of Latin America’s most prominent Christian existentialists, published La Ontología fundamental de Heidegger in Buenos Aires. Neoscholastic networks also provided venues for women scholars. In 1916, Edith Stein completed her doctoral dissertation under Husserl, joined the faculty at Freiburg and served as his teaching assistant until 1918. In 1922, Stein was baptized Catholic, having been drawn by phenomenology and scholastic thought to conversion. Her 1929 contribution to Husserl’s seventieth birthday Festschrift (edited by Martin Heidegger) became the “most famous and influential confrontation between Husserl and scholasticism” (pp. 74–75). In 1932, at Milan’s Cattolica, Sofia Vanni Rovighi reviewed the international Société Thomiste meeting held outside Paris in Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, Six years later, she published La Filosofia di Edmund Husserl. In 1933–34, the German Hedwig Conrad-Martius— Edith Stein’s baptismal godmother—published her argument connecting Heidegger...