Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France ed. by Gregory Sadler (review)

300 BOOK REVIEWS Reason Fulfilled by Revelation: The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France. Edited and translated by GREGORY SADLER. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011. Pp. 336. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN: 978-0-8132-1721-5. This fine volume will be welcomed by those interested in the issue of “Christian philosophy” as it developed in the twentieth century, as well as those concerned with the issue of faith and reason generally. Sadler’s book consists of a lengthy introduction and a set of translations, divided into three parts. The first, historical part of the introduction is designed to move the reader from the vague sense of the term “Christian philosophy,” found as early as Justin Martyr and Augustine, to the attempts in the 1930s to define it precisely. In the second part of the introduction, Sadler outlines the main positions taken for and against Christian philosophy in the French debates of the 1930s. It is important to do so, since Anglophone North Americans have been largely limited to viewing Christian philosophy as rendered by Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, and, to a lesser degree, Fernand Van Steenberghen. Sadler introduces the thought of many of the participants in the debate. The second and more important part of the volume consists in Sadler’s translations of twelve contributions by nine participants. The volume ends with a superb bibliography, set out chronologically, which lets the reader quickly get a feel for the breadth of the original debates as well as for the considerable body of work produced since then. The focal points of the “debates” of the 1930s were two actual debates. The first was a session of the Societé française de Philosophie held on March 21, 1931, devoted to “La notion de philosophie chrétienne.” This debate “was clearly set up by Xavier Léon to be primarily a tag-team bout between two rationalists and two Thomists” (40). Arguing against Christian philosophy were Émile Bréhier, whose history of philosophy had begun to appear in 1927, and Léon Brunschvicg of the Sorbonne. Arguing for Christian Philosophy were two of Brunschvicg’s students, Gilson and Maritain. Gilson had returned to the Sorbonne in 1921, founded the Institute of Mediaeval Studies in Toronto in 1929, and right after the debate, would deliver his Gifford Lectures, The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy. Maritain had begun teaching at the Institut catholique de Paris in 1914, had started the “Thomist Circle” with his wife Raissa in 1919, which made him a prominent public intellectual in France, and would publish The Degrees of Knowledge in 1932. Brehier argued historically. When Augustine produced theology, he “spoiled” the gold of Greek philosophy so that there simply was no philosophy until the moderns separated it again from theology: “Christianity is essentially the mysterious history of the relations between God and man . . . which can only be revealed,” he said, while “the substance of philosophy is rationalism, i.e. the clear and distinct consciousness of reason that is in things BOOK REVIEWS 301 and in the universe” (50). Brunschvicg, the abler philosopher, added that the philosophy of Aquinas lacks the “properly rational meaning of philosophy . . . because the reason that precedes the 17th century had not yet arrived at maturity” (52). Catching “Christian philosophy” on the horns of a dilemma, he set out an argument that would be oft repeated: “The author of a system of philosophy can assuredly be Christian, but this is only an accident without any relation to that philosophy, as we would say about the author of a treatise on mathematics or medicine” (51), a riposte that goes back to Feuerbach. Gilson offered a kind of disputed question in support of the “notion” of Christian Philosophy, as a mean between pure rationalism and a Tertullian “theologism.” Christian philosophy “is the true meaning of St. Augustine’s credo ut intelligam and St. Anselm’s fides quaerens intellectum” (138-39), and is anything but accidental. The relation between “Christian” and “philosophy” is “intrinsic,” so “it is not enough that a philosophy be compatible with Christianity; it is necessary that Christianity have played an active role in the very establishment of that philosophy,” and “what is...