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

Reflection on the relationship between faith and reason is a significant indicator of the vitality of the Christian intellectual tradition. The robust debates that occurred in France in the interwar period over the possibility and nature of Christian philosophy are an extraordinary chapter in this tradition that makes this volume most welcome. Sadler has judiciously selected and translated twelve contributions to these debates that are grouped in three distinct phases that took place between 1931 and 1936. Sadler’s introductory essay (96 pp.) is a salutary aid both for understanding the multiple historical contexts of the debates and for sketching a thematic outline of the basic positions that were expounded. The chronologically arranged bibliography, spanning 1927–2010, is a boon for further multilanguage research pertaining to the original debates and its subsequent echoes and expansions. Finally, there is a combined onomastic and topical index.

The major interlocutors included the secular rationalists Emile Bréhier and Léon Brunschvicg who viewed Christian philosophy as an impossibility. Bréhier contended that “one can no more speak of a Christian philosophy than of a Christian mathematics or a Christian physics” (p. 127). In response to these secular philosophers who ignited and then receded from the debates, there was a variety of positions espoused by Catholic thinkers, many of whom were influenced by the Thomistic revival sparked by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879). Furthermore, it is not insignificant in accounting for the vibrancy of these debates that several of the Catholic participants were laymen who were trained in secular academies.

Ironically, neo-Scholastic philosophers such as Fernand Van Steenberghen also rejected the term Christian philosophy for calling into question philosophy’s rightful autonomy. In contrast, lay Catholic philosophers Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain both defended the just prerogatives of philosophical reason and argued for the legitimacy of Christian philosophy, both as an historical reality and as a theoretical desideratum. Gilson’s 1931–32 Gifford lectures published as The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy (London, 1936) made a compelling case, pace Bréhier, that revelation had been historically generative of reason.

Overall, Sadler highlights the position of Catholic lay philosopher Maurice Blondel by including four of his compositions. In contrast to the Scholastic thinkers, Blondel sought to overcome modern philosophy’s self-sufficient rationalism by using the modern method of immanence. Blondel’s “philosophy of action, ” originally expounded in his magnum opus L’Action (Paris, 1893) and reworked in a spate of publications that appeared in the 1930s, elaborated a philosophy of insufficiency that through a dialectical ascent concludes to the exigency of a supernatural fulfillment that the human spirit is powerless to effect on its own. Blondel adopted the term Catholic philosophy to distinguish his approach from the others. According to Blondel, the relationship between reason and faith, philosophy and revelation, nature and grace, is not an extrinsicist placage, or sheer juxtaposition, but the philosophical quest as expounded in his “integral philosophy” establishes an “empty space” that is oriented to the supernatural fulfillment offered by Christian revelation. Although Blondel’s critics argued that he confused the natural and the supernatural orders, Blondel insisted on an interpenetration without confusion that respected philosophy’s autonomy and the gratuity of supernatural fulfillment.

The volume also includes pieces by Gabriel Marcel, to whom Sadler attributes a fourth Catholic position; Etienne Borne; Antonin Sertillanges; Bruno de Solages; and Léon Noël. They offer rejoinders and nuanced appreciations of the primary positions described above. Of particular interest are the efforts to reconcile the positions of Blondel and Gilson such as de Solages’s piece. Not included in the volume is the previously translated essay “On Christian Philosophy” by Henri de Lubac (see Communio, 19 [1992]: 478–505) that also argues for a mediating position.