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  • The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890-1914
  • Grant Kaplan
The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890-1914. Edited by David G. Schultenover, S.J. (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. 2009. Pp. xiv, 247. $69.95. ISBN 978-0-813-21572-3.)

This collection of essays covers the relationship between American pragmatism and (largely) Franco-Catholic attempts to apply pragmatism to bridge what many felt was an expanding gulf between traditionally Catholic metaphysics and the realities of the modern world, especially evolution and historical consciousness. In addition to a preface and an introduction, the book, which stems from a 2004 meeting at the American Academy of Religion, contains eight essays by scholars from America and Europe.

Although the book's title does not give this away, the pragmatism under consideration is of the Jamesian variety, and the modernism under consideration covers only the philosophical and not the historical questions that surrounded the modernist crisis. The reader learns quickly that of the Pragmatists only William James made a significant impact in French circles. Despite the singularity of French interest in American pragmatism, it was serious enough to call into question whether the French disdained pragmatism; to the contrary, the French thinkers under consideration took it quite seriously.

On the whole the essays are of a high quality. The first and last essays, by Stephen Schloesser and Clara Ginther respectively, are the best and most enjoyable. Schloesser offers a titillating and learned contextual essay to frame the collection. He contends that the collection reveals the modernist crisis to be not simply an intra-Catholic squabble, but as "central to the [fin de siècle] [End Page 846] epoch's fundamental anxieties and attempted solutions" (p. 58). Schloesser displays his massive learning as he weaves larger social realities together with acute philosophical and theological analysis.

Of all the essays, Ginther's takes most seriously the position of the neo-Scholastics who opposed modernism mightily. Her exposition for George Tyrrell manifests a Catholicism in crisis. In a deep sense, Tyrrell wanted to show the "cash value" of Catholic religious tenets that, when presented in the old intellectualist way, made Catholicism seem unconnected to the faith experience of ordinary believers. Thus pragmatism appealed to Tyrrell, who read James avidly. Tyrrell also saw dangers in a pragmatic or modern approach to religion that sought to jettison doctrine and objective transcendence. As Ginther shows, Tyrrell's concern to connect spirituality with theology and doctrine with lived experience made him suspect in Rome. One century later such a concern would strike most defenders of orthodoxy as more necessary than dangerous.

The other thinkers under consideration, especially Maurice Blondel, appealed to a vitalism to articulate their dissatisfactions with older scholastic method.As presented here, they felt the need to find new categories but did not want to undermine the metaphysical claims of the Church. This begs the question: Why did ecclesiastical authorities oppose them so strongly? And why did the same authorities not see the limitations of arid Scholasticism? Perhaps any concession to vitalism might have opened the door to pantheism, or condoning these methods might have undermined ecclesiastical authority in a time of tumult. These questions might have been addressed more directly in the book.

Overall, David Schultenover's collection significantly advances the understanding of French Catholic modernism and the reception of James in France during the critical decade before World War I. One might have wished that the essays were more cohesive as a group, but this should not prevent interested scholars from appreciating the many gems in the volume.

Grant Kaplan
Saint Louis University
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