Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Oliva Blanchette is professor of philosophy at Boston College. His books include The Perfection of the Universe according to Aquinas and the award-winning Philosophy of Being: A Reconstructive Essay in Metaphysics.

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Maurice Blondel

William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company

Contents

Acknowledgments.........................................................................xvI. Breaking into the Intellectual Scene.................................................3II. Awakening to the Divine Light in Human Action.......................................25III. The Original Philosophy of the Supernatural........................................63IV. The Vocation to Philosophy..........................................................95V. Discourse on Method for Philosophy of Religion.......................................122VI. Crisis of Modernity for Catholic Apologetics........................................167VII. The Broader Social Involvement.....................................................210VIII. The Philosopher of Aix............................................................261IX. The Philosophical Itinerary.........................................................322X. The Question of a Catholic Philosophy................................................357PART TWO The Systematic Summation.......................................................413XI. The Question of Thought.............................................................420XII. The Responsibilities of Thought....................................................453XIII. Ontology of Consolidation in Being In, Through, and Of Itself.....................493XIV. Action as Cooperation with the First Cause.........................................547XV. The Original Philosophy of Action Revisited.........................................595XVI. The Expanded Philosophy of the Supernatural........................................657XVII. Symbiosis of the Human and the Divine in History..................................724XVIII. Christian Spirit and Historical Civilization.....................................774Index of References to Blondel's Works..................................................804Name Index..............................................................................812Analytical Index........................................................................816

Chapter One

A new mode of religious thinking was in the offing, launched as a philosophical dissertation on Action at the Sorbonne. Before we go into this mode of thinking as it appears in L'Action of 1893, it is interesting to note how Blondel first presented himself to the University and how it first reacted to him and his claim to establish supernatural religion as a legitimate and necessary domain for philosophical inquiry.

Blondel first came to Paris in November 1881, at the age of twenty. He had gained admission to the highly touted cole Normale Suprieure through a rigorous competitive exam that was carried on in France every year. He came from the provincial city of Dijon. He was from a well-established family of lawyers and notaries, professional people who gave their children a good bourgeois and Christian education, an example of work well done, a concern for doing the right thing, and even a certain taste for discreet but active proselytizing. He had done his studies at the Lyce of Dijon, the regular state-run school, and not at a Catholic school, and had spent his last year in intense preparation for the very competitive national admission examination that was the only way of access to the cole Normale, then and still considered a Mecca for intellectuals in France.

At the cole Normale, Blondel was to learn to think. Henri Bergson and mile Durkheim had just finished the year before he came there. Victor Delbos and Pierre Duhem, along with many others less well known, were to be his classmates. What he was to learn, however, was not exactly congenial to his way of thinking or to his convictions. Among the faculty he found a deep-seated rationalism that was essentially anti-religious, though two, mile Boutroux and Lon Oll-Laprune, were themselves avowed Christians who supported him in his religious interests. Among the student body, he found a general skepticism derived from Renan, and from a waning scientism as well as a loss of confidence in the power of reason to deal with concrete questions of the meaning of life. Philosophy seemed to be fixated on sensations and ideas as if they were "realities cut up into pieces and stabilized" where, as he was to put it later on, Blondel "could not help but see in them something pseudo-concrete, artificially solidified abstractions" (1928a, 19).

Blondel tells of an incident on the very first day of his stay at the cole Normale that typifies how he was received and how he was to respond. The school was run as a closely regimented fraternity at the time and, at registration, newcomers were put through all sorts of initiation rites by the upper classmen. Among the questions one had to answer was that of religious affiliation, to which Blondel declared that he was a practicing Catholic. This was of some consequence for the discipline of the school, since practicing Catholics were allowed to leave the school at a certain time on Sunday mornings in order to attend mass at a nearby church, whence they got their nickname, les talas, which was short for ils vont la messe. Blondel, who was just arriving from the province and from his family, was somewhat taken aback by the reaction of one of his classmates upon hearing his declaration: "Well now, how can a boy who seems intelligent still call himself tala (catholic)?"But he was not at a loss for an answer. "Thank you for the compliment and for the added quip," he said. "I have every intention, not just of seeming, but of being intelligent" (1928a, 2021). It is this intention, as he adds, that he would try to actualize in his life at the school, in keeping with a need to see clearly, even as a tala, according to an aim that is radically philosophical. For Blondel it would become important to think, not just religiously, but also in a philosophical mode, as he was to learn at the cole Normale.

In order to bring this intention to fruition Blondel realized that he had not only to push reason further forward into a consideration of the religious question, but also to pull it back to a more concrete consideration of life itself in action. It is thus that, at the beginning of his second year at the cole Normale, on November 5, 1882, as he recalled quite precisely (1928a, 34), he began to focus on action as the subject for his dissertation. In doing so he was going back to Aristotle, for, as he also recalled, he was pulling together various texts in the Metaphysics and the Ethics in which action (to ergon) was spoken of as that which unifies in a way that is supra-discursive and charged with the infinite, as well as that which adds precision and perfection to a being (1936, 324-25). But in doing this he was reintroducing into the discourse of philosophy a term or a reality that had long been lost sight of at the end of the nineteenth century in France. In fact, when the classmate sitting next to him in study hall saw his notes, he could only exclaim: "A thesis on Action, great scot! What could that be? The term action does not even appear in the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques of Adolphe Franck," the only one available at the time (1928a, 34). Blondel's readiness to innovate in philosophy was not lost on this classmate.

But this...