Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life (Ressourcement: Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought

by Oliva Blanchette

French philosopher Maurice Blondel had a tremendous impact on both philosophy and religion over the first half of the twentieth century. He was at once a postmodern critical philosopher and a devout traditional Catholic, trying not only to reconcile these two seemingly disparate factors in his own mind, but also to prove to others that the two must go together. / In the first critical examination of the philosopher’s life Oliva Blanchette tells the story of Blondel’s stormy life confronting an Academy dismissive of religion and a Religion uncomfortable with rational philosophy. This book not only follows his biographical history, but also presents his systematic philosophy, from the beginning of his journey to the culmination found in Philosophical Exigencies of Christianity, the book for which he signed the publishing contract the day before he died. / Maurice Blondel is part of the Retrieval and Renewal in Catholic Thought series, edited by David L. Schindler.

Genres: Philosophy

836 pages, Paperback

First published May 15, 2010

Reviews

[Gregory Sadler · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a second time in his career, Oliva Blanchette has made the most substantive English-language contribution to date to study of the French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel. Back in the 1980s, dissatisfied with the earlier translation of Blondel’s early masterwork Action (1893), Blanchette provided an improved version that long ago became the standard for Anglophone Blondel scholarship. The contribution he makes now with his present book is an intellectual biography, in the truest sense, of this seminal, difficult, and often overlooked thinker.

Every period and each piece are contextualized not only within the French intellectual scene, but also in within the scope of Blondel’s own life, vocation, teaching, and relationships. Blanchette brings Blondel to life as a human personality by making copious use not only of Blondel’s published correspondence, memoirs, interviews, and notebooks, but also materials from the Centre d’Archives de Maurice Blondel. We discover, just for one example, not only the multifarious contents of the courses Blondel taught, but also that he antedates Gilson (more typically credited with this) in introducing medieval thinkers to the French Philosophy curriculum. Blanchette also offers reasons why Blondel employed so many pseudonymous personae in commenting on his own work and combating his opponents. The turns, developments, decisions, setbacks, and triumphs of Blondel’s own philosophical vocation, his “intellectual apostolate,” are mapped out.

If one wants to study Maurice Blondel's thought, or even understand the French and Catholic milieux of philosophy from 1880-1950, this book is an essential purchase. Practically every important blondelian idea is explained or at least referenced and located within the larger scope and seep of his thought.

[Rory Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

A detailed summary of both the life and the works of Maurice Blondel.

This is an invaluable contribution to the understanding of the philosophy of Maurice Blondel. Not only does it provide information about the events in Blondel’s life, but it also works through his writings chronologically, explaining the content and implications of each in its specific context. That is particularly useful as Blondel sometimes wrote under pseudonyms, so it can be confusing for those coming to Blondel’s thought for the first time, to clarify what exactly he wrote.

This book explains the overall thrust of Blondel’s philosophy. That is very helpful as Blondel’s ideas are complicated. What he was essentially trying to do was to bridge the difference between a Kantian subjectivist idealism, and a Thomist objectivist realism. His starting point is an idealist phenomenology but he was adamant that that was a ‘methodological’ approach (which conveniently uses Idealist approaches), not a ‘doctrinal’ commitment to Idealism (which asserts that Idealism is true and Realism is false). The nuance and the importance of that distinction was not always recognised by his opponents, who consequently often misunderstood him and caused him significant problems in how they misconstrued his thought.

This is a long book (more than 800 pages) so it is difficult to suggest that it could or should have done more. Nevertheless, where there could have been greater clarity is around the ways in which Blondel was misinterpreted. Understanding how people misunderstood Blondel is an important part of learning how to correctly interpret his claims.

Some of the significant misunderstanding seems to have occurred in Rome, among Thomists like Garrigou-Lagrange. He (and others) seems to have repeatedly characterized Blondel as offering a contradictory subjectivist philosophy. That is not an accurate understanding of what Blondel himself said and thought he was offering. But is it an accurate summary of the implications of what Blondel’s thinking amounts to? Has Garrigou-Lagrange correctly assessed an overall (in)coherence of Blondel? Or is Blondel’s philosophy a profound and coherent synthesis which people like Garrigou Lagrange just fundamentally misunderstood? Those are really important questions about Blondel’s philosophy which this book does not resolve.

Blondel’s methodology is one that shares important elements in common with the phenomenological approaches of Husserl, Rousselot, Marchal, Rahner and Lonergan. But there are also significant differences of emphasis. It is difficult to prove or disprove the claims of those kinds of phenomenological methodologies, as they tend to revolve around what seems to be obvious to those who practice them. This makes it difficult to reach a conclusion about whether Blondel’s philosophy actually has anything of significance to contribute to modern thought. It would have been useful if this book could have addressed that point a little more, and marshaled an argument to identify why it might be appropriate (or inappropriate) to view the world in a Blondelian way.

Overall, however, this is one of the most comprehensive studies of Blondel and his works and it is written by an academic with an established expertise in translating and interpreting Blondel's thinking. This means that the book is an essential read for anyone interested in early twentieth century French philosophy. Blondel’s thought also influenced some of the key theologians at Vatican II, so this is also a book which may interest theologians studying the Second Vatican Council.