Philosophical Exigences of Christian Religion by Maurice Blondel

Abstract

Reviewed by: Philosophical Exigences of Christian Religion by Maurice Blondel Robert C. Koerpel BLONDEL, Maurice. Philosophical Exigences of Christian Religion. Translated by Oliva Blanchette. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021. vii + 257 pp. Paper, $40.00 English- speaking philosophers and theologians owe a great debt to the late Oliva Blanchette (1929–2021). For the most part, he is responsible for introducing them to the work of influential French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949). In 1984 Blanchette published an English translation of Blondel's seminal work Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, followed by a monumental philosophical history of Blondel's life and thought, and finally, a month before Blanchette's death last year, the English translation of the present work under review. Blondel was a professionally trained philosopher and devout Catholic who sought to expand the scope of philosophical reflection in his day by thinking about religious and theological issues philosophically. In 1881, at the age of twenty, Blondel came from the provincial French city of Dijon to Paris to study philosophy at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure. Twelve years later he defended and published his well-known doctoral thesis on action, L'Action: Essai d'une critique de la vie et d'une science de la pratique, and by the middle part of the twentieth century the new mode of thinking he inaugurated through its publication had penetrated French theology so deeply that it was declared by one of its readers to be the most influential work of the first half of the twentieth century. Blondel's rich account of human action and its ability to overcome the institutionalized opposition between the natural and supernatural in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Catholic theology, his original approach to philosophy's relationship to theology in modernity, and his account of the vital role tradition plays in Christian self-understanding have exerted a decisive influence over modern and contemporary Catholicism. Blanchette's final translation consists of two main essays, "The Christian Sense" and "On Assimilation as Fulfillment and Transposition of the Theory of Analogy," that were intended to be methodological prolegomena to the third volume of Blondel's trilogy, Philosophy and the Christian Spirit. The final volume remained unfinished at the time of Blondel's death in 1949. There are also two shorter pieces appended to the main essays ("Reconsideration and Global View: Circumincession of the Problems and Unity of Perspectives" and "Appendix: Clarifications and Admonitions"), which, as their titles suggest, seem to function as "clarifications" and "reconsiderations" of the two main essays. The book is a concise examination of the Christian spirit that offers readers a summary of Blondel's philosophical approach and a précis of his thought as one of the most original, orthodox Catholic intellectuals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Anyone interested in Blondel's thought is faced with the perennial problem of determining where philosophy ends and theology begins. This is always difficult to determine, even when the distinction between them is acknowledged and followed in principle to preserve the intellectual integrity of both disciplines and the gratuity of the gift of revelation. The [End Page 589] spirit of Blondel's thought is to move beyond the notion of philosophical discourse that is grounded apart from the theological (supernatural). However, he insisted that this be done philosophically, not theologically. On full display in the first of the two main essays of this work is Blondel's mature articulation of philosophy's relation to theology, and his gift for defining the supernatural and the Christian spirit in terms that allow the subjectivity, intimacy, and personalism of the nature–grace relationship between the Creator and creature to emerge, while maintaining the gratuitous nature of grace and reason's autonomy. As he puts it: "the supernatural does not consist only in the sharing of a metaphysical secret, nor in the sudden promotion of anything that we would have a taste for because it would have no connection with our innate aspirations; it consists in a transformation of our faculties, of our hopes, of our natural possibilities; and it confers on the relations between man...