Portier, William L.

English

University of Dayton

University of DaytoneCommonsReligious Studies Faculty Publications Department of Religious StudiesFall 2011Review: 'Maurice Blondel, A Philosophical Life'William L. PortierUniversity of Dayton, wportier1@udayton.eduFollow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pubPart of the Religion CommonsThis Book Review is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of Religious Studies at eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusionin Religious Studies Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of eCommons. For more information, please contact frice1@udayton.edu,mschlangen1@udayton.edu.eCommons CitationPortier, William L., "Review: 'Maurice Blondel, A Philosophical Life'" (2011). Religious Studies Faculty Publications. 35.https://ecommons.udayton.edu/rel_fac_pub/35who appreciate nuance. Anyone who wants to understand how and why VaticanII was a historical necessity, what really happened there, and why we are todaywitnessing a struggle between those who see the council as a revolutionaryevent and those who prefer to see it as little more than a confirmation of whatthe Church has always taught must study this book. It masterfully constructs aconvincing historical argument that there is a striking continuity of intentionand method between the so-called “Modernists” (1890–1914) and the so-callednouvelles théologiens (1930s–1950s)—both groups pejoratively labeled andcondemned by the Vatican. Today the struggle has passed to those who arguethat something momentous happened at Vatican II and those who argue theopposite. The contenders are divided, as they were in the earlier periods, overaccording due weight to the human subject as a historical, developmental beingwho can know absolute truth only historically and developmentally.Jürgen Mettepenningen shows that today’s Church owes an incalculable debtto the courageous theologians (Congar, Chenu; Bouillard, Daniélou, de Lubac; andSchillebeeckx and Schoonenberg, to name just the better known) who sacrificedtheir reputations to develop a more authentic theological method than the onethey had inherited. The method of the nouvelle théologie by-passed the thick andtendentious layer of ahistorical neo-Scholastic manuals for a ressourcement—a return to the Scriptures, the Church Fathers, and the liturgy, giving them acritical-historical reading and finding in them a historical-mindedness that wastruer to the human grasp of revelation (turn to the subject) than could be found inthe ahistorical, static conceptualizations of neo-Scholastic dogmatism that pro-grammatically eschewed historical and developmental realities.The genetic connection of the nouvelle théologie and Modernism iscogently demonstrated, beginning with the fact that both terms were inventedby magisterial insiders to disparagingly label and control movements deemedthreatening to church doctrine. However convincingly Mettepenningen arguesthat the nouvelle théologie is a “cluster concept . . . representing a variety ofvisions,” nonetheless the nouvelle théologie and “Modernism” methodologi-cally were born of the common desire “to restore contact between theologyand the living faith” (141), a contact not available in the ahistorical, static,deductive method of the “closed” system of manual theology.Teachers should consider this study essential reading to provide an illu-minating context for studying the documents of Vatican II. It can open readers’eyes to the possibilities for church renewal and reformation that are undeniablypresent in those documents.Marquette University DAVID G. SCHULTENOVER, SJMaurice Blondel, A Philosophical Life. By Oliva Blanchette. Grand Rapids, MI:Eerdmans, 2010. xvi + 820 pages. $45.00 (paper).No one is better qualified to write about Maurice Blondel than OlivaBlanchette. In 1984 he published his now standard translation of Blondel’sdoctoral dissertation, L’Action (1893), Essay on a Critique of Life and a ScienceBook Reviews 363of Practice. Blanchette’s lengthy and important new biography shows thatthere is much more to Blondel than L’Action and the modernist crisis. Helived well beyond the modernist period and died in 1949 at the age of eighty-eight. Born in 1861 into an old Burgundian Catholic family, Blondel chosephilosophy over law, the family profession of choice. He studied philosophyat the École Normale Supérieure from 1881 to 1884. At the Sorbonne inJune 1893, he defended his controversial doctoral dissertation, L’Action.Blondel married Rose Royer the following year and they had three children.She died in 1919, in the twenty-fifth year of their marriage. After a year atthe University of Lille, Blondel taught philosophy at the University of Aixen Provence from 1896 to 1927. He was an intense and inspiring teacher.Among the social Catholics, his students included Marc Sangnier, founderof Le Sillon, and many members of the Semaines Sociales de Bordeaux. Healso taught the Jesuits Henri Bremond and Auguste Valensin. His correspon-dence with each runs to three large volumes. Bremond left the Jesuits afterthe modernist crisis, but Valensin remained. Through him Blondel met otherJesuits in France such as Henri de Lubac, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, andYves de Montcheuil. From France, Blondel’s influence on twentieth-centuryCatholic theology spread to such figures as Joseph Maréchal, Karl Rahner,and Hans Urs von Balthasar, all, in Blondel scholar Bishop Peter Henrici’sphrase, “les jésuites blondelizants.”In March 1926, the retina in Blondel’s right eye hemorrhaged. The nextFebruary, blindness forced him to resign from teaching. Family and friendshelped Blondel continue writing and he managed to publish his contributionsto the “Christian Philosophy” debate in 1930 and 1931. For almost two years,Blondel’s close friend, Parisian priest Johannès Wehrlé, attempted to editBlondel’s notes for a projected volume on La Pensée. By March 1931, Wehrléadmitted the task was beyond him and returned Blondel’s notes. Later thatyear, Nathalie Panis, a former graduate student of Blondel’s, returned fromteaching abroad and contacted Blondel about working as his assistant. Paniscame to Aix in December 1931 and never left. She collaborated closely withBlondel during the last seventeen years of his life. She continued in charge ofBlondel’s archives at Aix and Blanchette came to know her during his ownresearch as a young philosophy professor. Blanchette explains her role in hisacknowledgments and dedicates his book to her as “faithful disciple andcollaboratrix in Blondel’s legacy to the philosophical world.” He describes hisbook as, “in many ways, the story of Blondel’s life as told by Blondel himselfto Mademoiselle Panis” (xvi).But Blanchette’s book is much more than conventional biography. Itincludes a complete chronological exposition of Blondel’s work. It has twoparts of roughly four hundred pages. Part One, The Journey Inward, treats inten chapters Blondel’s life and thought up to his blindness and the arrival ofNathalie Panis in 1931. Part Two, The Systematic Summation, treats in eightchapters the works, unknown to many Anglophone readers, Blondel producedin collaboration with Panis between 1932 and 1949. Chief among them arehis two trilogies, the first on Thought (2 vols., 1934), Being (1935),and Action(2 vols., 1936, 1937). The second trilogy was to be on Philosophy and the364 HORIZONSChristian Spirit. The first two volumes appeared in 1944 and 1946. Unable tofinish the third volume, Blondel gathered previous material that sketched it.He signed the contract for it the day before he died and it appeared in 1950 asExigences philosophiques du christianisme, “a concise presentation of hisapproach to the study of the Christian spirit as historically relevant and philo-sophically legitimate” (800).In the first three chapters of Part One, Blanchette treats Blondel’s defenseof his dissertation, the process of writing it, and the treatment of the super-natural in the original 1893 version of L’Action. This dissertation offers arigorous philosophical account of the basic human dynamism or élan thatBlondel calls “action.” His analysis distinguishes the “willed will” and the“willing will.” He finds that particular willed actions (“willed will”) neversatisfy the infinite desire of the “willing will.” This leads him to considerphilosophically the possibility of a supernatural gift. In his exposition of thefirst trilogy, Blanchette describes our natural élan” as “a quest for the infinite,an aspiration at once congenital and inefficacious by itself, for a knowledgethat saturates and a fruition that leaves nothing to be desired” (682). Blondeldrew criticism from secular representatives of “separate philosophy” and evenmore from fellow Catholics who not only distinguished philosophy and theologybut tended to separate them in dualist fashion. During the modernist crisis,Blondel critiqued them as “extrinsicists” (194ff ) in “History and Dogma” (1904)and “monophorists” (242ff ) in his 1910 defense of the Semaines Sociales deBourdeaux. Chapters five through seven recount these battles.Blanchette sees Blondel’s engagement with theologians between 1896 and1913 as a “deviation” (261) from his philosophical path. And yet he acknowl-edges that it is Blondel’s very attempt to open philosophy to the supernaturalthat requires renegotiating the boundaries between philosophy and theology.Domincians M.-B. Schwalm and Reginald Beaudoin helped Blondel realizethe distance between Aquinas himself and the extrinsicists Blondel criticized.He lectured on Aquinas at Aix between 1911 and 1913 and introduced himinto the university curriculum. Though Blanchette describes the fear of con-demnation that hung over Blondel and his family during the modernist crisis,and his medical leave from Aix between 1901 and 1906, he minimizes theintellectual effects of the crisis on Blondel’s philosophy, for example, in hisrelatively brief treatment of Pascendi (230–31) which ignores Blondel’s initialagony over the encyclical. Chapter ten on “The Question of a Catholic Phi-losophy” recapitulates the debates of 1930–31 from Blondel’s perspectiveand makes clear the extent to which Blondel’s philosophy requires a rethinkingof the modern boundaries between philosophy and theology.Part Two treats Blondel’s systematic exposition of his philosophy in thetwo trilogies which he described as an “explication of the philosophy ofaction” (795). Blanchette’s account of the first trilogy in Part Two’s first fivechapters is the philosophical heart of the book. The last three chapters of PartTwo treat the uncompleted second trilogy. He finds the treatment of action inthe final volume of the first trilogy to be “more spontaneously metaphysical”than the original 1893 work (657). If Blanchette has a thesis to argue, it isagainst scholars such as Henri Bouillard (599–603) who see more of a breakBook Reviews 365between early and later Blondel. By contrast, Blanchette insists on the con-tinuity of Blondel’s thought. In emphasizing the “circumincession” of being,thought, and action in the first trilogy, Blanchette claims that, according toBlondel, “Being is the principle, the focus, and the end of our thinking andour acting” (492). Rather than an “evolution” in Blondel’s thought from 1893 tothe first trilogy, he sees “a revolution back to its origins in a philosophy ofThinking and Being.” For Blanchette, its own interior dynamic drives Blondel’sthought and not accusations of immanentism or idealism from outside (657).Blanchette acknowledges Blondel’s deeply religious nature and motiva-tions, and somewhat more grudgingly, his impact on twentieth-century the-ology. But he thinks that “theologically-inclined interpreters,” such as deLubac, Bouillard, and de Montcheuil, often misread him, failing to distinguishsufficiently between philosophy and apologetics, and seeing too much disconti-nuity between his treatments of action in 1893 and 1936–37 (143, 600–01, 659).Against well-meaning theologians, Blanchette insists on Blondel’s philosophicalintent and on the consistency of his fundamental metaphysical concern. But thisis complicated by Blondel’s reading of modern philosophy as attempting toabsorb the Christian idea of human finality as a return to God (274). ThoughBlondel defends philosophy’s autonomy, he wants to open it to the possibility of“think[ing] religious life philosophically” (1), as he does in the second trilogy,and of examining the “hypothetical” necessity of the supernatural (138–43).Blondel’s philosophy constitutes a radical challenge to the understandingof philosophy and theology and their relationship that western theologiansand philosophers inherit from their modern predecessors. To the extent thatcontemporary theologians find themselves between a collapsing christologicalcenter, in which all is grace in the same way, and resurgent conceptions of bothphilosophy and theology as more separate than distinct, they remain in need ofan adequate and stable response to Blondel’s challenge.Demanding and rewarding, Blanchette’s detailed chronological expositionof Blondel is unique in the literature. It succeeds in conveying the depth andpainstaking intricacy of Blondel’s philosophy and will serve for a long timeas the best secondary access to Blondel in any language. It has an excellentName Index and an Index of References to Blondel’s Works. The latter notonly provides the key to the book’s citations but also serves as an annotated,chronological guide to Blondel’s works and their English translations. Thisbook is indispensable for all philosophical and theological libraries. David L.Schindler is to be commended for including it in the Ressourcement series.Hooray for Eerdmans’ publishing such an important book in its entirety!University of Dayton WILLIAM L. PORTIERA Short Life of Jonathan Edwards. By George M. Marsden. Grand Rapids, MI:Eerdmans, 2008. xii + 152 pages. $15.00 (paper).This is one of more than twenty volumes in the Eerdmans series, “TheLibrary of Religious Biography.” Marsden, an emeritus chair holder at the366 HORIZONS

Review: \u27Maurice Blondel, A Philosophical Life\u27

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Review: \u27Maurice Blondel, A Philosophical Life\u27

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