Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition by Robert C. Koerpel (review)

In the opening pages of his book, Koerpel reminds the reader that all Christian denominations proclaim scripture to be the Divine Word of God. In addition to sacred scripture itself, Roman Catholicism places a significant role on tradition in the interpretation of that Word. "Tradition," as a term used in the present treatise, includes the many doctrines, teachings, customs, practices, actions, persons, writings, events, places, and happenings that have occurred in the life of the Church, some of them great, such that Yves Congar may rightly speak of "the monuments of tradition."

Maurice Blondel was born 1861 into a prominent family in Dijon, France. At age 20, he left his paternal home to study philosophy at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris. Twelve years later in 1893 he published Action, a version of his doctoral dissertation, which may be broadly characterized as an interpretation of Christianity from a point of view integrating Neoplatonism with modern pragmatism. Upon completion of his degree, he was at first denied a teaching post to which he would have been entitled, because his book was considered a work of Catholic apologetics, far too theological to be considered a work of philosophy. In fact, it was a philosophical attempt to define the relationship between philosophical reasoning and Christianity. He subsequently completed a second dissertation on the Vinculum Substantiale of Leibniz, and with the help of Edmund Boutroux and Raymond Poincare he was able to secure a position at the University of Lille. He later accepted a position at the University of Aix-Marseille, where he would teach the rest of his career until his death in 1949.

Blondel lived in a period when the positivism of August Comte was taking hold. He entered the Ecole Normale Superieure one a year after Henri Bergson and Emile Durkheim had finished. Pierre Duhem and Edouard Le Roy were also among his notable similarly engaged contemporaries. In spite of the ascendency of the positive sciences, there was a sense that Europe had lost something in the secularization that followed the French Revolution. Positivism had robbed religion of its rational foundation, a cornerstone of scholastic teaching since the Council of Trent. Durkheim, like Blondel, began the study of religion from a philosophical perspective, but from the negative point of his ingrained atheism.

Action begins with a discussion of freedom and necessity. Blondel maintains that freedom is never absolute but is real only when exercised in deliberation, that is, in choosing among alternatives. If the human person is to be fully free, its perfection depends on its conforming its "willed-will" to the source of its liberation. The totally free gift of God is absolutely necessary for human freedom.

Koerpel believes that "Blondel's form of thought allowed Christian thinkers to rediscover the sublime syntheses between nature and grace, faith and reason, and theology and history, a synthesis capable of rendering an account of hope open to the practice of charity." And further, to his credit, "Blondel succeeded in reintroducing the notion of transcendence into French philosophical discourse."

Other important works followed Action. In 1904 Blondel published History and Dogma, in which he addresses the mode in which revelation appears in history. He speaks of reason's capacity to examine the immanent affirmation of the transcendent absolute implicit in human action. In 1934 he published the two-volume La Pensee. Nearly two decades later, an essay, Exigences philosophiques du christianisme, written shortly before his death, was published posthumously in 1950. Koerpel does justice to each in his exposition and insightful commentary, impossible to recapitulate here.

Koerpel finds that what set Blondel's approach apart from his coreligionists' is that he begins with the absence of the supernatural instead of with its presence. It is through the unfolding of the logic of action that we see the necessity of God's self-giving for the fulfillment of human destiny. It is obvious Blondel's neo-Kantianism destroys the rational basis for belief. The...