Maurice Blondel: Transforming Catholic Tradition (Thresholds in Philosophy and Theology) 0268104778, 9780268104771

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Maurice Blondel

Thresholds in Philosophy and Theology Jeffrey Bloechl and Kevin Hart, series editors Philosophy is provoked and enriched by the claims of faith in a revealed God. Theology is stimulated by its contact with the philosophy that proposes to investigate the full range of human experience. At the threshold where they meet, there inevitably arises a discipline of reciprocal interrogation and the promise of mutual enhancement. The works in this series contribute to that discipline and that promise.

Maurice Blondel Tr a n s f o r m i n g C a t h o l i c Tr a d i t i o n

Robert C. Koerpel

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana

University of Notre Dame Press Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 undpress​.nd​.edu Copyright © 2019 by University of Notre Dame All Rights Reserved Published in the United States of America Portions of this text have appeared elsewhere by the author in different form and are used with permission: “Between History and Dogma: On the Spirit of Tradition in the Demands and Limitations of Modernity,” New Blackfriars 95, no. 1055 (2014): 3–20. © 2013 the author. New Blackfriars © 2013 the Dominican Council. “Blondel’s L’Action: The Liturgy between Two Worlds,” The Heythrop Journal 52, no. 3 (2011): 430–44. © 2011 the author. The Heythrop Journal © 2011 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. “Maurice Blondel and the Sacramentality of Human Rationality” The Heythrop Journal 59, no. 5 (2018): 804–16. © 2016 Trustees for Roman Catholic Purposes Registered. “Tradition, Truth, and Time: Remarks on the ‘Liturgical Action’ of the Church,” in The Hermeneutics of Tradition: Explorations and Examinations, edited by Craig Hovey and Cyrus P. Olsen (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2014; used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers, www.wipfandstock.com). Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Koerpel, Robert C., author. Title: Maurice Blondel : transforming Catholic tradition / Robert C. Koerpel. Description: Notre Dame : University of Notre Dame Press, 2018. | Series: Thresholds in philosophy and theology | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018043819 (print) | LCCN 2018044786 (ebook) | ISBN 9780268104795 (pdf ) | ISBN 9780268104801 (epub) | ISBN 9780268104771 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268104778 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Modernism (Christian theology)—Catholic Church. | Catholic Church—Doctrines. | Tradition (Theology) | Blondel, Maurice, 1861–1949. Classification: LCC BX1396 (ebook) | LCC BX1396 .K64 2018 (print) | DDC 230/.2092—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043819 ∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper). This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [email protected]

To Catherine D.

v

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. —David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

Contents

O ne

T wo

T hree

F our

Five

S ix

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

The Development of Blondel’s Philosophical and Theological Thought

9

Blondel’s Ecclesiological and Theological Inheritance: Tradition from the Late Medieval through the Post-­Tridentine Periods

37

The Problem of Representation, Scripture, the Rise of Modern Thomism, and Blondel’s Response

59

Tradition, History, and the Intellectual Life of Nineteenth-­Century Catholicism: The Methodological Conflict between Blondel and Loisy

79

Mapping the Soul’s Journey toward Truth: Blondel’s Philosophy of Action between Faith and Reason

101

Tradition in History and Dogma: Blondel and the Problem of Theology and History in Modern Catholicism

121

viii  Contents S e v en After

E ight

History and Dogma: Tradition as Participation in God’s Truth

137

Blondel and the Sacramentality of Human Rationality

165

Conclusion

195

Notes

199

Bibliography

247

Index

261

Acknowledgments

Even though the writing of this book was a solitary affair that took place in the sequestered privacy of my office, it was sustained, nourished, and enriched by countless acts of self-­sacrifice, patience, generosity, and friendship from many people. The book came into its final form in the last five years, but many of the issues it explores I began thinking about years before, during the late-­night philosophical and theological discussions I had with Micah Cavaleri at our favorite Irish pub. I remember fondly these conversations stirring within me an intellectual inquisitiveness that remains to this day. I am grateful to him for our friendship. The initial draft of this book was my doctoral thesis written in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America under the benevolent supervision of Brian V. Johnstone, C.Ss.R. If there is a pastoral model for doctoral supervision, Brian is it. His unassuming manner was a breath of fresh air in a school that was at the time ideologically polarized, hemorrhaging faculty, and in need of intellectual and theological renewal. As one might expect, Brian made many valuable suggestions and revisions to both the form and content of the thesis. His wise counsel, diplomatic skill, and steady hand guided the thesis through the school’s notoriously bureaucratic process to its defense. I must also gratefully acknowledge Chad Pecknold, who read, commented on, and supported the thesis. This book has benefited from a number of friendships. Jeff McCurry unbegrudgingly read and revised more pages in this book than any friend should be asked to read. Our friendship has improved this book considerably, and has made me a better writer and thinker. I count as a great blessing my friendships with Will T. Cohen, Julie Schumacher Cohen, Dave Cloutier, and Jay Carney that continue to enrich my life. I am grateful ix

x  Acknowledgments

for the many discussions I have had at various times with Brad Klingele, Brendan Sammon, Matt Hoven, Max Engel, Nathan Lefler, and Annie Hounsokou. All of them, often in implicit and indiscernible ways, have helped me refine my thoughts about many issues I examine in this book. At points throughout the writing of this book, Annie Hounsokou and Charles Rochas have been kind enough to translate for me some of Blondel’s complicated French prose. I can’t think of a better academic home to have written the final draft of this book than from within the Theology Department at the University of St. Thomas. I am grateful to all my colleagues in the Theology Department for their collegiality. I must thank Bernie Brady for keeping me employed for the past several years, and for his support and encouragement of my teaching and scholarship. I owe a special debt to my colleagues Mark McInroy, Mike Hollerich, Paul Gavrilyuk, Phil Rolnick, Paul Niskanen, and Barb Sain, all of whom read, commented, and discussed various chapters of the book with me. Mary Reichardt from the Center for ­Faculty Development spent hours helping me sharpen my prose and ­clarify the ideas in the book. Were it not for Mary’s editorial wisdom and diligent copyediting skills, this book might have remained unpublished. I also want to thank Matthew Levering, Lewis Ayres, John Thiel, Francesca Murphy, and David L. Schindler for their encouragement and support. At different stages of writing the book, all of them have been generous with their time in reading, reviewing, and commenting on the entire book or chapters. I wish to thank Jeffrey Bloechl and Kevin Hart for their support of the book, the three anonymous reviewers, and the editorial board and staff at the University of Notre Dame Press, particularly Stephen Little, Matthew Dowd, Wendy McMillen, and copyeditor Scott Barker. My many thanks to Keanu Daley for his help with the index. Finally, my family has supported me in numerous ways throughout the writing of this book. In terms of moral support, I owe much to my in-­ laws, Michael and Annette Cullen. I am lucky to be counted among the few who think highly of their parents-­in-­law and find their in-­laws’ presence encouraging and heartening. I am immensely grateful to my mother, Catherine M. Koerpel, for her generosity, spiritual and material support, and affection for us. I admire and marvel at the ease with which she expresses her unconditional love for me and my family. My three children, Ailish, Niamh, and Eamon, have provided my life with more meaning

Acknowledgments  xi

and filled it with more joy than I could have ever imagined. Their wit, sense of humor, and our laughter together continue to save me from taking myself too seriously. I dedicate this book to my lovely wife, Catherine D. Koerpel, who has nourished and deepened my life in untold ways. Without reservation, she has willingly sacrificed her time and comfort for me while I wrote this book. Our life together is a source of great joy and delight in my life. Her persistent patience consoles, encourages, and reminds me on a daily basis of God’s subtle and unobtrusive presence in my life.

Introduction

As strange as it may seem, “tradition” is an elusive term. Perhaps we are so deeply formed by the plurality of traditions we embody in the twenty-­first century that we take their meanings for granted. Or maybe when we consider what tradition means, we discover it is a concept too rich in meaning to have any at all. The evasive and pervasive presence of tradition in human experience creates the unique challenge of articulating its meaning with precision. For those interested in Roman Catholicism, the task is complicated by virtue of the distinct theological significance it accords to tradition. Although all Christian denominations proclaim scripture to be the divinely revealed Word of God, Roman Catholicism distinguishes itself by teaching that scripture and tradition constitute, in the words of the Second Vatican Council’s “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” (Dei verbum), a “single sacred deposit of the Word of God, which is entrusted to the Church.”1 The distinctive and significant role attributed 1

2  Maurice Blondel

to tradition in the economy of revelation is emphasized throughout the document, from the affirmation of tradition’s transmission of the Word of God to the central interpretive role it provides for scripture. There is a breadth and depth to the claim being made in the teaching that escapes attention until one considers its implications: God’s presence is communicated, mediated, and encountered beyond the divinely inspired words of scripture precisely through tradition. That is, through the many doctrines, teachings, liturgical customs, practices, actions, persons, writings, events, places, and happenings that make up what the twentieth-­century historical theologian Yves Congar refers to as the “monuments of tradition.”2 Yet, tradition is a reality more profound, much deeper, and always greater than a collection of ancient customs or a conservative force in human history safeguarding against change. As the Second Vatican Council puts it, tradition is a “mirror, in which the Church, during its pilgrim journey here on earth, contemplates God.”3 The history and development of the notion of tradition in modern Catholicism is a fascinating and complex process, involving historical, social, conceptual, and theo-­political forces and figures that no one book can promise or profess to cover adequately. This book is no exception. It does not offer a detailed discussion or an exhaustive account of the many forces and figures that have shaped modern Catholicism’s notion of tradition. Rather, it centers on the conviction that the thought of twentieth-­ century French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) provides modern and contemporary Catholicism with a notion of tradition that vivifies Christ’s sacramental presence by discerning and drawing the incarnational and spiritual dimensions of history into the concrete life of the Church. And it contends that his account of tradition as a synthetic form of Christian knowledge and the bond between history and dogma offers a corrective to the modern theological problem of revelation’s relation to human history and the post-­Tridentine tendency to think of tradition as a separate source of revelation from scripture. It is a paradox of history that Blondel has become one of the most influential, least well-­ known, and consistently misunderstood figures in Catholicism.4 The latter two perhaps can be attributed to the fact that he was not a theologian by professional training or admission, and he spent a considerable amount of time and energy defending the orthodoxy of his work to many Catho­ lic theologians of his day.5 In 1881, at the age of twenty, Blondel came

Introduction  3

from the provincial French city of Dijon to Paris to study philosophy at the prestigious École normale supérieure. Twelve years later he defended and published his controversial and well-­known doctoral thesis on action, Action (1893),6 and by the middle part of the twentieth century the new mode of thinking he inaugurated through its publication had penetrated French theology so deeply that it was declared by one of its readers to be the most influential work of the first half of the twentieth century.7 As a professionally trained philosopher, Blondel sought to expand the scope of philosophical reflection in his day by thinking about religious and theological issues philosophically. His theological legacy, if he can be said to have one, is still very much alive in the number of figures associated with the mid-­twentieth-­century nouvelle théologie and ressourcement movements in Catholic theology who exerted a decisive influence over the Second Vatican Council and continue to fuel debate in contemporary theology today.8 Blondel’s rich account of human action and its ability to overcome the institutionalized opposition between the natural and supernatural in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Catho­ lic theology, and his account of the vital role tradition plays in Christian self-­understanding were, in the words of Henri de Lubac, the “main impulse” for “Latin theology’s return to a more authentic tradition.”9 Key figures of the movements, such as Jean Daniélou, Yves Congar, Marie-­ Dominique Chenu, Edward Schillebeeckx, Karl Rahner, and Henri de Lubac, sought “a more profound tradition,” as Congar put it in his controversial and seminal work on reform in the Church,10 in a new examination of the permanent sources of theology: “the Bible, liturgy, [and] the Fathers (Latins and Greeks).”11 By the end of the twentieth century, one hundred years after the famous defense of Blondel’s thesis at the École, John Paul II confirmed the importance of Blondel’s thought, averring that beyond its philosophical significance it provides “his readers with a spiritual and intellectual nourishment that is capable of sustaining their lives as Christians.”12 Yet despite the import of Blondel’s thought for modern theology, his significance for postconciliar, contemporary theology remains to be adequately assessed by the English-­speaking world. This book seeks to fill the lacuna of English-­speaking studies on Blondel and his influence on modern theology, and to introduce Blondel to scholars and a wider audience interested in intellectually examining key aspects of and

4  Maurice Blondel

developments in modern and contemporary Catholicism. Blondel’s influence today, when it is felt, is primarily in the areas of philosophical and theological anthropology, where his philosophy of action delineates the structure of the human will and discloses with phenomenological rigor and pragmatic sagacity a new way of thinking about humanity’s relationship to God in the modern world. However, in 1904, more than a decade after the publication of Action (1893) and during the height of the Modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, Blondel wrote the remarkable essay History and Dogma,13 in which he applied his new philosophy of action to the pressing problem of theology’s relation to history. In this work he argues for a notion of tradition that is the synthetic bond which embraces the modern practice of historiography (reason) and the doctrinal claims of Christianity (revelation). I argue in this book that his lesser known and underappreciated account of tradition provides modern and contemporary theology with a new horizon from which it is able to move beyond the limitations of history, as it has been defined by modernity, and attend to the demands of revelation in the unwavering and particular claims it makes upon humanity. In this area of Blondel’s thought, modern and contemporary theology discovers the “precision,” as it were, that allows tradition to mediate and re-­present God’s action in human history through Christ and his Church. Readers of this book will discover in Blondel’s notion of tradition a rich resource for their theological thinking. Looking to the past often provides instructive resources for moving beyond the problems of the present. Although Blondel occupied a different time and place than today’s readers, they will find that the questions and issues of his time are still the ones we wrestle with today. Chief among them is how tradition represents the Word of God in human history, a divisive theological issue at the heart of modern and contemporary Catholicism and one that continues to divide Christians today. Blondel wrote at a time when the broader epistemological changes that shaped Western thought in modernity raised new questions about the self and self ’s ability to understand and re-­present revealed truth in human history. The seventeenth-­century thinker René Descartes (1596–1650) initiated a new form of thought that forced the self to become estranged and disengaged from the created order. The disengaged modern self that appeared in the wake of Descartes’s thought was subject to a decisive eighteenth-­century shift in

Introduction  5

thinking about the conditions of truth brought about by Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). The decisive shift was away from thinking about truth in terms of the self ’s participation in the created order and toward thinking in terms of the self ’s ability to construct an accurate representation of the world. The effect of this epistemological change on tradition and scripture is profound, for it is during this period that tradition’s ability to reveal God’s presence in human history is no longer taken for granted and at times is seen as an obstacle to God’s revelation. As a result of the new conceptual conditions and theo-­political landscape of the modern period, Blondel inherited a notion of tradition that had moved away from thinking about tradition primarily as a liturgical and ontological reality mediated and communicated through ecclesial practice (action) and toward conceptualizing tradition principally as a bureaucratic reality mediated and communicated through institutional and juridical means. However, Catholic ecclesiology in its best form always has depended on the institutional and juridical means of tradition and also the liturgical and sacramental means of tradition. One of Blondel’s most important and unrecognized contributions has been to restore the animated vitality between the institutional and liturgical dimensions of tradition essential to the living, dynamic nature of tradition in Catholicism. To give the reader a broad view of Blondel’s influence, this book situates Blondel’s account of tradition within the conceptual, historical, and theo-­political developments of modernity and their effect on the relationship between reason and revelation. It does not confine Blondel to the narrow ideological trenches of modernism and its aftermath. It recognizes modernism and the Modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church as an important context for understanding the development of Blondel’s thought, but it also intentionally situates Blondel’s thought within broader theological and philosophical problems that emerge in modernity. Exploring the broader forms of rationality and theological discourses that have shaped tradition give the reader a critical overview of the development and transformation of the concept of tradition in modern Catholicism and provides a sense of the greater cultural context from which Blondel’s idea of tradition emerges. This book also interprets Blondel as a philosopher of religion who engages theological issues and responds to pressing theological questions in modern Catholicism. I

6  Maurice Blondel

do not read Blondel strictly as a philosopher and in a strictly philosophical register. For some readers old enough to remember, this may arouse partisan passions over right readings of Blondel that emerged from the controversy of the 1950s and 1960s between Henry Duméry and Henri Bouillard.14 Anyone interested in Blondel’s thought is faced with the perennial problem of determining where philosophy ends and theology begins. This is always difficult to determine, even when the distinction between them is acknowledged and followed in principle. This book recognizes the distinction between theology and philosophy and follows it to preserve the intellectual integrity of both disciplines, the gratuity of the gift of revelation, and to honor Blondel’s thought and method. The spirit of Blondel’s thought, though not always the letter of his writing, is to move beyond the notion of philosophical discourse that is grounded apart from the theological (supernatural). However, he insisted that this be done philosophically, not theologically. This is the hermeneutical blessing and curse of reading Blondel. This book interprets Blondel as judiciously thinking and gingerly writing near the narrow threshold between philosophical and theological discourses in modern Catholicism. Readers will discover that this book does more than simply introduce them to Blondel’s thought, his idea of tradition, and the ecclesiological, conceptual, and theological histories from which it emerges. It intentionally seeks to develop and advance Blondel’s thought by bringing it into dialogue with contemporary thinkers. The constructive chapters of the book situate his notion of tradition within modern hermeneutical theories and develop a Blondelian “hermeneutic of tradition.” Following Blondel’s own rhetorical approach to “the Problem,” as he calls it in the opening pages of History and Dogma, I frame the problem of tradition around binaries (polarities) and examine how a Blondelian notion of tradition provides a theological framework through which God’s concrete action in history can be discerned within the dynamic tension between the binaries of truth and change, theology and history, faith and reason, ontology and epistemology, scripture and tradition, and the apostolic deposit and the development of doctrine. All binaries are artificial in a sense, but they do help us to understand various approaches to conceptual and theological problems in modern Catholicism. I use binaries as a heuristic device, as Blondel did, to disclose the primordial theological and philosophical problems at the center of modern Catholicism’s epistemological crisis of

Introduction  7

the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. My goal is to display and articulate how Blondel’s thought, and specifically his notion of tradition, resolves the epistemological crisis in modern Catholicism by “synthesizing” these binaries, not circumventing them. The latter is a very different approach and conceptual process, an approach that Blondel does not take in History and Dogma. Finally, the book also engages creative contemporary theologies of tradition that promote the Second Vatican Council’s understanding of tradition in the economy of revelation and constructive proposals for the practice of biblical exegesis that stand in need of a conceptually enriched theory of tradition. My goal in these chapters is not to suggest Blondel’s thought offers a panacea for the contemporary theological problems Catholicism faces. It doesn’t. Nor is it to offer one more ideological stance for thinkers to adopt within the marketplace of ideas, a “Blondelianism,” the specter of which he no doubt would have abhorred. Instead, my goal is to show readers that Blondel has something to teach them, some wisdom to share with them, and some insight to offer them. Indeed, my goal is to let Blondel be a living a voice that still speaks to us today.

One

The Development of Blondel’s Philosophical and Theological Thought

M a i n e d e B i r a n ’ s “ Sp i r i t ua l i s t ” P h i lo s o p h y, Positivism, and Leibniz’s Vinculum

Maurice Blondel was born on November 2, 1861, in Dijon, France, to an old, aristocratic Burgundian family of lawyers, physicians, and civil servants. As the shy and sensitive fourth child of a wealthy notary, he lived a life free of financial pressure. At a young age, insects and their metamorphosis captivated him, instilling within him a love of nature and both a realist and symbolic appreciation of the concrete world.1 In turn, his perception of the dynamic interplay between the real and symbolic in the natural world nurtured his devotion to the liturgical life of Catholicism. Because he was deeply pious, his friends and family encouraged him to cultivate an interior life that, as a young man, helped him become attuned to the spiritual élan inherent in concrete human beings in action. 9

10  Maurice Blondel

The interplay between the real and symbolic in the natural world and Blondel’s appreciation of the spiritual dynamism at work in human action took on a philosophical form during his secondary education from 1870 to 1879 at the lycée in his hometown. There he was introduced to the “spiri­ tualist” philosophy of François-­Pierre Maine de Biran (­1766–1824),2 a contemporary of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and considered “the French Kant” in certain French philosophical circles.3 De Biran was critical of the reductionist and empiricist tendencies of the French Enlightenment. In particular, he criticized the way materialistic psychologies of French philosophes such as Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–80) appropriated René Descartes’s epistemic rationalism. French psychology used the Cartesian cogito— “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito ergo sum), Descartes first-­person starting point for knowledge about human consciousness—to understand activities such as perception, memory, habit, and judgment. However, de Biran insisted that the intentional experience of human effort, disclosed through experimental self-­observation, is a more basic reality to human consciousness than reason and thought (cogito).4 Following Descartes he maintained that the first person is the proper starting point for psychology, but first person as volo (“I will”) not as cogito (“I think”). The real starting point for knowledge of human consciousness is “willed effort,” not disembodied thought (cogito) alone: that is, the whole person as acting agent, free and striving personality, and embodied “spirit” with a propensity for faith and belief. Along with his contemporaries Henri Bergson (1859–1941), Pierre Duhem (1861–1916), and Edouard Le Roy (1870–1954), Blondel belongs to a group of French thinkers who fell under the indirect intellectual influence of de Biran through the philosophers Jean Gaspard Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900), Jules Lachelier (1832–1918), and Émile Boutroux (1845–1921).5 Ravaisson, Lachelier, Boutroux, and others sympathetic to and influenced by de Biran’s spiritualist philosophy engaged with the vari­ ous forms of scientific positivism and reductionism found in such major nineteenth-­century French thinkers as Auguste Comte (1798–1857), Hippolyte Taine (1828–95), and Ernest Renan (1823–92). What was troubling about Comte’s positivism was that it was more than a methodological approach to the natural sciences; it was a broad philosophical approach to the development of human existence and the human spirit in its totality. Comte’s law of three stages (theological, metaphysical, and positive)6

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   11

didn’t aspire to reform, transform, or even destroy Christianity. It sought to replace Christianity in Europe. His originality and his intellectual, metaphysical, and spiritual offense, if he can be said to have one, “lies in trying to reduce the whole knowledge of man . . . to no more than the subject-­matter of sociology.”7 Comte’s positivism and the way it was developed had a totalitarian orientation, “regulating how we are to use such terms as ‘knowledge,’ ‘science,’ ‘cognition,’ and ‘information.’ By the same token, the positivist rules distinguish between philosophical and scientific disputes that may profitably be pursued and those that have no chance of being settled and hence deserve no consideration.”8 By the middle part of the nineteenth century, Comte’s positivism had been reformed, popularized, and championed by the scholar and journalist Émile Littré (1801–81). Littré’s version of positivism and doctrine of immanence, which reduced the explanation of all reality to the positive sciences (“scientism”), had taken hold among late nineteenth-­ century French intellectuals, such as Taine and Renan. In this strain of secular positivism, metaphysical assumptions served no purpose in the positive sciences, since the objective of these sciences was “to formulate the interdependence of phenomena without penetrating more deeply into their hidden ‘natures’ and without trying to find out whether the world ‘in itself,’ apart from the cognitive situations in which it appears to us, has features other than those accessible to experience.”9 This epistemological reductionism still functions today as the first principle of attempts to ground the origins of human consciousness in matter.10 By the time Blondel arrived in Paris in 1881 to study philosophy at the École normale supérieure, however, positivism under Taine’s and Renan’s influence was “far less the programme of a new school of thinking and much more a new spirit—the scientific spirit—that was common to independent minds.”11 Blondel philosophically inherited, methodologically employed, and critically engaged with positivism in the first few chapters of “Part III: The Phenomenon of Action” in Action (1893).12 The philosophical l­egacy of positivism that Blondel inherited and that functions as part of the conceptually setting of Action (1893) was the source of much of his thesis’s originality, and of its misunderstanding among many neo-­Thomist theologians, who, unaware of contemporary developments within modern French philosophy at the time, were unable to understand its proper concept and appreciate its originality.

12  Maurice Blondel

The scientific rigor of Action (1893) was in part the result of the patron of his thesis, Émile Boutroux,13 who, in addition to carrying on the legacy of de Biran’s “spiritualist” philosophy, was also interested in science’s relation to religion. As a historian of philosophy Boutroux taught Blondel to think with meticulousness and precision while he was a student at the École normale, and was the intellectual inspiration behind the pene­trating and insightful critique of the natural sciences in Action (1893).14 Boutroux taught Blondel to hone his philosophical methodology, giving it a more technical form, what in Action (1893) is often referred to as the “regressive analysis” of human action. As Blondel’s mentor, friend, and the patron of his thesis on action, Boutroux played an important diplomatic role before the controversial defense of Blondel’s thesis in 1893. Boutroux was also instrumental to Blondel eventually obtaining a permanent teaching position after the defense of the thesis.15 In de Biran’s thought filtered through Ravaisson, Lachelier, and Boutroux, Blondel found a spiritually richer, more metaphysically thorough, and more scientifically rigorous form of thought than in the traditionalist thought of Félicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854). Nor was there the dismissive hostility toward the Enlightenment and epistemic fideism found in such other traditionalist figures as Louis de Bonald (­ 1754–1840). De Biran’s critique of scientific reductionism and empiricism inspired Bergson’s well-­known “vitalist” philosophy, with its emphasis on the creative, driving force (élan vital) in all life, as well as the “philosophy of action” developed at the end of the nineteenth century by Blondel and Blondel’s teacher and mentor, Léon Ollé-­Laprune. Throughout his career Blondel continued to engage with de Biran by teaching his works in the history of modern philosophy courses he taught in the university. Blondel’s work was often interpreted in the spiritualist philosophical tradition of de Biran, and he was quick to acknowledge his philosophical debt to de Biran.16 More specifically, de Biran’s ideas on physical effort in relation to the implementation of intentions would come to expression in Stage Three of part III of Blondel’s Action (1893).17 Late in his career he engaged de Biran on the question of contemplative action in the first volume of the trilogy on action, being, and thought.18 But in a more indirect and general sense, Blondel adopted de Biran’s interest in the human aspiration toward the absolute as the guiding thesis of his own philosophical project. De Biran’s introspective methodology and

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   13

emphasis on internal self-­observation are palpable in action’s progression and expansion through the various stages of human experience in Action (1893). The synthesis between the infinite and finite revealing and concealing itself throughout the dialectic of Action (1893), and action’s inexorable trajectory toward transcendence, echo de Biran’s psychology of the human soul, which, as de Biran puts it, has “faculties and modes of operation which derive from a principle much higher than itself . . . intellectual intuitions, inspirations, supernatural motions in which the soul, delivered from itself, is wholly subject to the action of God.”19 When Blondel graduated from the lycée in 1879 and matriculated at the University of Dijon one year later, he discovered the thought of the influential early modern philosopher, mathematician, and polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). Leibniz was an ecumenically minded, neo-­Aristotelian philosopher who sought to forge an alternative to the Cartesian view of reality.20 In an effort to establish the foundation for certain knowledge about the world and to reconcile Scholastic metaphysics with the mechanical principles of the new science of Galileo and Copernicus, Descartes circumscribed Aristotle’s expansive notion of substance by dividing all reality into mental and physical substances.21 The Cartesian division of reality into mental and physical substances beset philosophers with a number of metaphysical problems, but the problem that bedeviled such thinkers as Leibniz was how in the Cartesian view a finite mental substance (mind) interacts with a material substance (body). To make matters more complex, the Cartesian conception of matter as res extensa (spatial extension) made it difficult to understand how individual bodies or any material thing could be a genuine substance. In the broader conceptual context of the Cartesian distinction between material and mental substances, Leibniz developed an alternative metaphysical view of reality composed of simple, indivisible substances (monads) that are independent of each other, and therefore cannot interact with each other.22 A substance’s independence means that each substance must be internally self-­moved, making all the properties of the substance essential. But since Aristotle it was common to distinguish the essential properties from the accidental properties of a substance. The essential properties of a substance were properties without which the substance could not be a substance and the accidental properties were properties that could change.23 However, Leibniz argues that all properties

14  Maurice Blondel

of a substance are essential, are contained within, and contain an internal principle of change and perception. All substances, including material substances, are in a sense mental, according to Leibniz.24 Toward the end of his career Blondel revisited this controversial point in Leibniz’s philosophy in defending the theory of “cosmic thought” (la pensée cosmique).25 Blondel maintained Leibniz was right in refusing to accede to the Cartesian metaphysical picture of reality as divided between mental (human beings) and material (nature) substances. In offering an alternative view of the mental dimension of material substances, Leibniz refused to concede the conceptual possibility of an intelligible organic universe. But Leibniz’s idea of the vinculum substantiale (substantial bond) is the seminal concept animating Blondel’s philosophy of action. It’s the idea that would become the subject matter of Blondel’s Latin thesis of 1893,26 and the idea from which the philosophy of action transpired as the link between thought and being, immanence and transcendence, and history and dogma. After these two works, Blondel’s Latin thesis of 1893 and Action (1893), it would unfold as a central theme around which his thought interweaves the Trinitarian structure of history, the encounter between infinite and finite being, the Eucharistic action of the Church, and the notion of tradition as the bond between history and faith.27 At the heart of the vinculum was the immanent mystery of the verbum caro factum and the caro verbum facta. Through it he was able to perceive the humanity of Christ not as a conditional mechanism, but as the point of contact between humanity and Christ and the reality through which humanity shares in the divine.28 The idea first came to Blondel’s attention in 1879 when his professor at the University of Dijon, Henri Joly, devoted an entire lecture to the ten-­year correspondence between Leibniz and Bartholomew des Bosses, a Jesuit theologian keen to reconcile Leibniz’s philosophy with Christian doctrine.29 Leibniz proposed the vinculum to des Bosses as a metaphysical hypothesis to explain the original synthetic unity and harmony among the composite substances of Leibniz’s philosophy.30 What captured Blondel’s attention was the reference to the vinculum as a way of conceiving the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. To him the Eucharist was not one example of the many of the vinculum, it was the “perfect example, the definitive vehicle, the total and perfect realization of the Leibnizian hypothesis.”31 Blondel adopted Joly’s realist interpretation

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   15

of the vinculum, Joly’s opinion that the theological questions surrounding the vinculum had to be taken seriously, and that the vinculum was a plausible metaphysical possibility.32 For the most part, scholars tended to dismiss the vinculum as a theological innovation appended to Leibniz’s philosophy at the end of his life. Others viewed it as an expression of his irenic nature and his desire to appease des Bosses, a Catholic admirer eager to accommodate his philoso­ phy to the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.33 In the Latin thesis Blondel argues that the vinculum’s conceptual chronology, conceived at the end of Leibniz’s career well after his mature philosophical perspective had been established, does not preclude one from taking the vinculum seriously, as an idea that ought to be developed, and perhaps would have been developed by Leibniz had he the good fortune of living a longer life.34 To relegate the vinculum to the dustbin of philosophical ideas by virtue of its association with the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, as many of Leibniz’s interpreters were wont to do, is to misunderstand the role that Catholic doctrine plays in the development of the vinculum. Further, it is to confuse the theological implications of the vinculum for the Catholic belief of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist with the speculative resolution it provides to a conceptual problem within Leibniz’s philosophy. Blondel insists that the vinculum was a philosophical not a theological problem. Des Bosses and Leibniz were well into the correspondence and had exchanged and settled their viewpoints on the Eucharist before the vinculum entered the discussion.35 From Blondel’s perspective the vinculum was not merely Leibniz’s theological invention to accommodate the Catholic faith, as scholars often interpreted it to be. The truth of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was never in question, according to Blondel, “but rather its mode of realization” in the context of Leibniz’s philosophy.36 A century before Leibniz, early modern Scholastic thinkers such as Francisco Suárez had conceived of a bond (vinculum) in different conceptual terms. Linguistically, the doctrine of the vinculum belonged to an older and different Scholastic philosophical tradition than the tradition within which Leibniz wrote and thought.37 Yet scholars have pointed out that Leibniz was conversant with the older Scholastic tradition.38 Read within the ambit of this older Scholastic discourse, the view that Leibniz’s vinculum is principally about transubstantiation seems less plausible. Still,

16  Maurice Blondel

Leibniz theorizing about the vinculum was part of an explanation about transubstantiation to des Bosses. The Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation did raise an important philosophical problem for Leibniz,39 and the Eucharist remained a “key philosophical concern of Leibniz’s from the period of his earlier work, not least because the notion that the body of Christ could be in different places at the same time effectively disproved the Cartesian notion of substance as extension.”40 But in the Latin thesis Blondel maintains that “when Leibniz first mentioned a [vinculum], he was not thinking of transubstantiation; [transubstantiation] was invoked by the two correspondents as an example and from a particular angle.”41 Blondel’s interpretation of the correspondence and his interest in the vinculum garnered little attention in the scholarly world. However, it did provide his thought with a foundation for the spiritual and metaphysical realism of his philosophy of action. In the third chapter of the Latin thesis, Blondel examines what he refers to as “la méditation secrète de Leibniz”42 found in a supplemental study associated with the letter from Leibniz to des Bosses dated February 15, 1712. In the study Leibniz discusses the divine preservation and mediation of the material world and the metaphysical bond that emerges from this preservation and mediation, which has its analogue in the hypostatic union of the person of Christ. Leibniz writes to des Bosses: God not only considers single monads and the modifications of any monad whatsoever, but he also sees their relations, and the reality of relations and truths consists in this. . . . Through these [relations], things seem to us to form a unity, and truths in fact can be expressed concerning the whole that are also valid according to God. But over and above these real relations, a more perfect relation can be conceived through which a single new substance arises from many substances. And this will not be a simple result, that is, it will not consist in true or real relations alone; but, moreover, it will add some new substantiality, or substantial bond, and this will be an effect not only of the divine intellect but also of the divine will. . . . And in this consists the metaphysical bond of soul and body, which constitute one complete substance, and an analogy to this is the union of natures in Christ. And these are the things that make a per se unity or one complete substance.43

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   17

The notion of a “secret mediation” Blondel observes in Leibniz’s correspondence with des Bosses orchestrates Blondel’s thought. It is the conceptual key to unlocking the mystery of human action within human experience, the synthesis between the infinite and finite dialectically leading action to the concept of the “one thing necessary,”44 and finally to the completion of action in the chapter “The Bond of Knowledge and Action in Being.”45 It is the philosophical tool through which Blondel developed his notion of tradition as a part of the communal action of the Science of Practice in Action (1893),46 and then a decade later in History and Dogma as, first, the bond of the Christian community, and, second, the substantial bond between history and dogma on the one hand, and theology and history on the other. Philosophically it opened a whole new horizon of thought for Blondel to explore the mediation, synthesis, and unity of the heterogeneous aspects of reality. Indeed, the originality of his philosophy of the supernatural, the way in which his thought is able “to gather the rays of light that the revelation of this Christian mystery projects in our thought, even though the source of this remains hidden from it,” as Oliva Blanchette eloquently puts it, can be attributed to the conceptual breadth and depth of the vinculum in Blondel’s thought.47 Late in his career, when the idea of the vinculum was established as a foundational source of his thought, Blondel lamented how insignificant the doctrine seemed to Leibniz and des Bosses.48 He clearly saw more in the vinculum than Leibniz and des Bosses could see. Reflecting on the significance of the vinculum in a paper written to a former student decades after he first encountered the idea in Henry Joly’s lecture at the University of Dijon, Blondel observes: “The question raised by Leibniz and des Bosses concerning transubstantiation during the Eucharist leads us to conceive of Christ, without detriment to the constituent monads, as the bond which makes substantiation possible, the vivifying agent for all of creation: vinculum perfectionis.”49

Ro m a n t i c i s m a n d L é o n O l l é - ­L a p r u n e

In contrast to the Christian rationalism that emerged in response to eighteenth-­century Enlightenment atheism and deism, nineteenth-­century Christian apologetics in France after the French Revolution was premised

18  Maurice Blondel

less on rational arguments for the existence of God, the trustworthiness of the New Testament, accounts of miracles, and the fact of revelation. Under the influence of Romanticism, nineteenth-­century Christian apologetics emphasized the aesthetic and moral qualities of Christianity as a religion and its potential to satisfy natural, human aspirations and the legitimate demands of human society.50 Even nineteenth-­century Christian thinkers such as Lamennais, who made use of traditional rationalist apologetics, insisted that religious belief required more than intellectual assent—it required the free consent of the will. Many nineteenth-­century Christian thinkers absorbed the wistful mood at the turn of the century, a mood that under the influence of Rousseau turned to an exaltation of imagination, sentiment, feeling, and mystery, and consequently derided Voltaire, the desiccated nature of Enlightenment rationalism, and the anemic philo­ sophical approaches of positivism and empiricism. The will has always played a natural role in the practice of religious belief, but it had been neglected by modern Christian thinkers anxious to respond with abstract metaphysical arguments to the rationalism of Descartes and the Enlightenment.51 By the nineteenth century the affective nature of human existence and the significance of the will was recognized, explored, and emphasized as an important feature of religious thought and belief.52 François-René de Chateaubriand’s (1768–1848) The Genius of Christianity; or, Beauties of the Christian Religion53 expressed this shift and evoked the Romantic mood in France. Chateaubriand scolded Enlightenment thinkers for emphasizing reason as the privileged path to truth and progress at the expense of feeling and sentiment and for failing to recognize that human beings are composed of both head (reason) and heart (sentiment, feeling). His apologetic work took aim at Enlightenment opponents of Christianity who argued Christian doctrine is repugnant, detrimental to human freedom, its moral vision an impediment to the development of moral consciousness, and in general deleterious to the human spirit. Chateaubriand’s book did not offer profound theological and philosophical arguments for or in defense of Christianity. Rather, it exhorted the heart and imagination, arguing that in terms of inspiring literature, art, music, and worship Christianity was the most awe-­inspiring, sublime, and creative religious tradition. Of all the world’s religions Christianity is “the most humane, the most favorable to liberty and to the arts and sciences; that the modern world is indebted to it for every

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   19

improvement, from agriculture to the abstract sciences . . . to the temples reared by Michelangelo and embellished by the Raphaels . . . nothing is more divine than its morality.”54 For Blondel, Chateaubriand’s work was a “musical prelude” to the Catholic renewal taking place in France and the renewal that Blondel saw as part of his own apologetic project. It brought into sharp relief the dynamic nature of the “Christian spirit” in its multiplicity and diversity. Yet as persuasive and aesthetically pleasing as Chateaubriand’s apologetic may have been, “a canvas of Raphael’s is no defense against the relentless sword of the dialectic,”55 as Blondel puts it in his own work on apologetics. That is, Blondel believed a more rigorously philosophical apologetic was necessary to meet the exigencies of modern critical thought. Still, Chateaubriand’s Romanticism managed to make Christianity intellectually respectable and fashionable in France once again. It provides an important and underappreciated cultural context for Blondel’s philosophical apologetics and his mission, vision, and vocation as a philosopher. After completing the licence ès lettres, bachelier ès sciences, and bachelier en droit degrees and receiving his licentiate in 1880, Blondel decided against following the family tradition of pursuing a career in civil service and in 1881 matriculated in the Faculty of Philosophy at the École normale supérieure, the year after Henri Bergson and Émile Durkheim finished. At the École normale, Blondel found the Catholic renewal initiated by Chateaubriand alive in the thought and work of Blondel’s teacher and mentor, Léon Ollé-­Laprune (1839–98). Ollé-­Laprune was a devout and avowed lay Catholic philosopher with Ultramontane political tendencies influenced by the thought of Blaise Pascal and John Henry Newman. He was educated at the École normale, and in 1875, during the anti-­Catholic Third Republic and antireligious mood of Paris, he was appointed to a lectureship at the École normale. Ollé-­Laprune’s work on apologetics was more philosophically rigorous than Chateaubriand’s. It attributed a significant role to the will and focused on the role assent and certitude play in all knowledge and intellectual activity, including knowledge about God. If truth is indi­visible, Ollé-­ Laprune claimed, then theological discourse and philosophical method ought not to be juxtaposed to each other. In fact, should the philosopher genuinely pursue truth with her whole being (soul), as a total engagement of oneself and one’s intellect and will, not intellect alone, she

20  Maurice Blondel

will arrive at Christianity as the final destination of the journey and fulfillment of her quest for truth.56 Indeed, Catholicism, for Ollé-­Laprune, provided a framework for reconciling the modern tensions between faith and reason, philosophy and theology, and religion and science. Ollé-­Laprune also reacted strongly against the tendency endemic to modern thought to separate and often juxtapose faith to reason. His insistence that all knowledge of truth involves the will along with the intellect,57 including knowledge of the self-­evident truths of science and mathematics, put him deeply at odds with secular currents of positivism, empiricism, and rationalism in nineteenth-­century French philosophy. But Ollé-­Laprune also attracted thinkers along with Blondel who were conceptually conversant with such currents but not methodologically subject to or constrained by them. What Blondel found in Ollé-­Laprune’s approach to philosophy was an approach to philosophical reasoning that viewed concrete and existential questions of human life and destiny as an essential line of inquiry for philosophy. When philosophical reasoning is approached as a form of life and action, it discloses that the natural structure of human existence aspires to a supernatural end. This way of discovering the limitations of philosophy through philosophy’s own method meant, for Ollé-­Laprune, that philosophy (reason) must yield to theology and acknowledge its own inadequacy.58 Ollé-­Laprune’s desire to overcome the modern rationalist conception of a “separate philosophy,” the separation between philosophy and religion and a theory of knowledge that divorces reason from life, and to integrate philosophy within human life, all inspired Blondel’s method of immanence and its demonstration of the need for the supernatural within the human person. Blondel’s attraction to Ollé-­Laprune’s philosophical vision did not elide methodological differences between the two thinkers. The differences became apparent and public when Blondel, after graduating from the École normale in 1893, published a critique of Ollé-­Laprune’s apologetics three years after the defense of his thesis on action in The Letter on Apologetics. In this work, Blondel critiques Ollé-­Laprune’s work on moral certitude, calls it a “method of convenience,” and suggests it identified a correlation between morality and religion but lacked the philosophical rigor and method demanded by the new apologetics.59 In Ollé-­Laprune’s attempt to show how the natural aspirations of the human soul comport

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   21

with the content of Christian revelation, philosophical apologetics finds itself in the oxymoronic position of either ceasing to be apologetics or ceasing to be philosophical. The problem, Blondel continues, is that “if one insists on the conformity of dogmas with the requirements of human thought, one runs the risk of seeing in them nothing but a human doctrine of the most excellent kind; if one lays it down at the outset that it surpasses human reason and even disconcerts human nature, then one abandons the chosen ground and the field of rational investigation.”60 The critique strained Blondel’s relationship with Ollé-­Laprune. Blondel never confronted his former teacher and mentor, but his friend and colleague Johannes Wehrlé did and refers to Ollé-­Laprune’s strong negative reaction to Blondel’s critique.61 However, Blondel’s critique did not prevent Ollé-­Laprune from intervening with the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome on Blondel’s behalf when the same work provoked neo-­Scholastic theologians to accuse Blondel of “Kantianism,” a refrain Blondel heard often after Letter on Apologetics’ publication. Moreover, at the request of Ollé-­Laprune’s wife and son, Blondel delivered the eulogy for Ollé-­Laprune at the 1899 annual meeting of alumni of École normale supérieure. Years later, Blondel expanded the eulogy and published it as a book on Ollé-­Laprune.62 The book afforded him the opportunity to take stock of Ollé-­Laprune’s significance for French philosophical thought, make up for his harsh critique in Letter on Apologetics, and come to a deeper appreciation of Ollé-­Laprune’s influence on his own thought. It was Ollé-­Laprune, Blondel observes, who was the first in the French philosophical tradition to promote an “integral philosophy” in which man is in accord with the total order, other human beings, himself, and God.63 Ollé-­Laprune’s goal of writing an “integral philosophy,” a philosophy immersed in the totality of human life, including religious belief, was an objective Blondel never lost sight of, even if he pursued a different philosophical means of obtaining it.

Ac t i o n (1893 ) a n d L at e N i n e t e e n t h - ­C e n t u ry C at h o l i c i s m

The École normale supérieure at the end of the nineteenth century was an unlikely place to produce a leader for the Catholic intellectual renaissance of the twentieth century. Blondel’s friends and family warned him

22  Maurice Blondel

of the dangers the secular French university milieu posed to his faith. But at a young age he recognized that his mission as a philosopher to integrate the life of the modern mind with the demands of religion would require him to understand the former on its own terms. It was a place of extremes, Blondel recalled in an interview, where one fluctuated from dilettantism to scientism, where Russian neo-­Christianism clashed with the rigorous virtuosity of radical German idealism; where in art and literature, as in philosophy not to say in religious pedagogy itself, the notional, the formal, even the unreal seemed to triumph; where the very efforts that one made to reopen the sources of a profound life and of a fresh art ended only in symbolism, without succeeding in rehabilitating the concrete, the direct, the singular, the incarnate, the living letter which takes the whole human composite, a sacramental practice which introduces into our veins a spirit more spiritual than our spirit, a popular common sense and Catholic realism.64 The scientism Blondel encountered at the École was a development of Comte’s philosophical positivism, which no longer viewed science as a form of inquiry and discourse into the nature of human knowledge, but simply assumed all knowledge can be reduced to the positive sciences. The dilettantism Blondel encountered was not exactly the kind practiced by Kierkegaard’s aesthete, who, faced with the fundamental choice, must transcend the aesthetic and ethical realms to reach the religious.65 It did share Kierkegaard’s criticism that dilettantism has manipulative, escapist, and empty self-­serving aims. But Blondel’s dilettante, the one he addresses in the opening chapters of Action (1893),66 is the person who denies that the question of the Good is a natural and integral part of rational reflection on the problem of human action, and the person who refuses to engage religion’s relationship to human understanding in the course of reflection upon the nature of human knowledge and the process of cognition. There is a kind of sophisticated despair and deceit in the dilettante’s refusal to consider what lies veiled beneath the surface of the lines as he takes pleasure in the beauty of art and delights in the precision of science. At the beginning of his second year at the École, he chose the topic of his thesis much to the dismay of his superiors, who insisted “thought,” not “action,” was the proper subject matter of a doctoral thesis in philosophy.

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   23

In the thesis, Blondel proposed a new way of relating the supernatural to the natural through action by following philosophy’s task of discerning the traces of transcendence in human beings and society. Following the tradition of his teacher and mentor Ollé-­Laprune, he was concerned that action not be conceived or confined merely within the natural order as a “separate philosophy.” And in contrast to Hegel, he was in search of a philosophy not to replace Christian truth but “rather to open up a position in philosophy through which the light of the Christian revelation could pour in. For this he thought some kind of philosophical system was necessary, but he was at pains to provide a system that would be true to philosophy without impinging on the surpassing truth of revelation.”67 In short, he wanted to create a rigorous philosophical method using the natural light of human reason to explore humanity’s desire for the transcendent absolute. Blondel graduated from the École normale in 1893 and published Action (1893) the same year. Action (1893) begins with a discussion of freedom and necessity (determinism) in action. Freedom is never absolute, but rather it is real only in being exercised through the process of deliberation among particular intentions, wherein it must choose to place itself. The necessity of actualizing freedom in action by choosing among particular intentions is the occasion by which the dialectical tension between freedom and necessity inscribed in the will emerges. The necessity of choosing one particular intention gives rise to a disproportion within the act of freedom itself. That is, the object willed, what Blondel names as the “willed will” (volonté voulue), or the particular intention one has chosen as a particular goal or end, is confined, and is no longer proportional (equal) to the infinite power of willing, or, as he calls it, the “willing will” (volonté voulante). It is the inequality within the will itself that becomes the dialectical principle between the two wills (willed will and willing will) through which one finds oneself engaged in the phenomenon of action. The ideal of freedom is equality between the wills, but the disproportion between the will’s particular decision (the willed will) and the infinite power of the will (the willing will) is great enough that the will desires and searches for a willed object less disproportionate to its infinite power of willing. The willing desire for an object proportional to its infinite power of willing is the location of the spiritual dynamism at work in the human person and the starting point for Blondel’s account of human

24  Maurice Blondel

action. In the choice of any particular action, there is always an unknown element, something that escapes us to be discovered in the pursuit of an object equal to the power of willing. But this does not mean Blondel is searching for a mystical end of action beyond the necessity that is a part of the determination of human action. The point of the Science of Practice, the critical method Blondel uses to establish a universally valid science of human action, is to explore and to make known the unknown known of human action within action itself.68 The necessity of the supernatural appears in action as a consequence of the failure of consciousness to discover equality or proportion between any willed object (willed will) and the infinite power of willing (willing will). The inequality of the wills that discloses to consciousness the necessity of the supernatural does not therefore mean that Blondel has argued for and proved the transcendent absolute exists, but rather that the will stands in need of finding some satisfaction that transcends the immanent order of action. In the context of Blondel’s phenomenology, every human choice contains more than a particular intention (motive) that is a part of the natural order; it contains an infinite power of willing. One can limit the infinite power of willing by placing the infinite in some finite reality of the natural order, or in the sufficiency of itself. In what Blondel calls the “death of action” is an attempt to naturalize the supernatural or immure the infinite in the finite.69 On the other end of the spectrum is the “life of action,” the consciousness that the human will, which includes the willed will and the willing will, cannot equal itself by itself.70 In human action the necessity (willed will) and freedom (willing will) of the will cannot rectify itself or find reconciliation in the natural order. Only the transcendent absolute can reconcile the human will. Blondel’s life of action does not ascribe any positive content to God, but instead argues for the necessary presence of God hidden in the mystery of the human will. The human person can recognize the necessary presence of God in action and consent to the immanence of the Transcendent as the perfection of human action that it cannot achieve on its own. Or, it can reject it. Reason can disclose the necessity of God for the perfection and completion of action, but it can only show its necessity; it cannot display its content. If the human person is to be fully free, its perfection depends on its conforming its willed will to the will that is the source of its liberation. The totally free gift of God is absolutely necessary for human freedom.

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   25

More than a century later, and without a sense of the theological, political, and ecclesial milieu of late nineteenth-­century Catholicism, it may be difficult to appreciate the impression Blondel’s argument we just sketched above made on those who first encountered it.71 Catholicism was shaped by the final stage of the political process of separation between church and state in France and by Leo XIII’s Thomistic revival: Leo’s attempt to reconstruct Christian society in the midst of modernity on the basis of his encyclicals,72 his “grand design,” as it has been called, and his policy of ralliement73 toward the Third Republic. These theo-­political and philosophical events are noteworthy in themselves, but they contributed to the phenomenon called “ghetto Catholicism,” an insularity against which Blondel and other twentieth-­century Catholic thinkers reacted.74 It was an inauspicious time for Catholic intellectuals to offer original arguments and to rethink tradition’s relation to history, theology, and scripture. The school of thought dominating theological orthodoxy in Catholic theology from the First to the Second Vatican Councils was a theological system constructed to defend and demonstrate the objective order of the Church’s divine teachings in response to the subjectivism of liberal Protestantism and modern rationalism. It was a form of Thomism that came of age during the First Vatican Council’s dogmatic constitution on the Catholic faith, Dei filius (1870), and tended to conceive of the act of faith, the assertions of divine truth in scripture, and tradition ahistorically, with a certitude and clarity that Blondel criticizes as seeing “too clearly to see properly” and too proud of its “myopic certainty” to engage critically with its own underlying rationality and claim to supernatural origin.75 Less than a decade after the First Vatican Council promulgated Dei filius, Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni patris (1879) diminished what was left of philosophical and theological eclecticism in nineteenth-­century Catho­lic theology by anchoring Catholic thought in the firm philosophical footing of Thomistic philosophy. The intention of Aeterni patris was to reinvigorate the listless intellectual life of nineteenth-­century Catholic seminaries, to protect seminarians from rationalism, considered the most nefarious expression of modern philosophy, and to thwart the temptation toward fideism it detected in French theology. But its unforeseen effect was that the official and dominant form of Catholic theology to emerge in Roman universities and seminaries at the end of the nineteenth century turned in

26  Maurice Blondel

upon itself culturally, intellectually, and spiritually, retreating to the thirteenth century tout court through its disdain and ignorance of modern philosophy and science and its unwillingness to engage both. The exception to this trajectory of official Roman Catholic theology of the period was “Louvain Thomism,” which taught and wrote in the vernacular, was less clerical in nature by virtue of its position as a university institute, and engaged with disciplines and students from European universities.76 The centralization of Thomistic thought initiated by Aeterni patris was methodologically instituted and standardized for Catholic theology through Roman textbooks and manuals, which became the main source of theological reflection in Catholicism between the two Vatican Councils. The principal manuals,77 written in Latin, took a propositional view of revelation, employed deductive theological reasoning, categorized doctrinal teachings based on the degree of their ecclesiastical authority, and with a remarkable degree of uniformity mapped out with precision and unequivocal detail the topography of Catholic theology and philosophy to be thought and taught. The theological aridity and intellectualism of the manuals was perceptible in the strictly a priori sequence that the apolo­getic argument the manuals unfolded, beginning with the possibility of revelation, demonstrating revelation’s uncontestable supernatural origin in signs such as miracles and prophecies, and then moving on to a discussion of the miracles of Jesus Christ, particularly his resurrection, as historically verifiable proof of his claim to be sent by God. The power of the manualist argument depended upon the epistemological validity of Christ’s claim to speak with divine authority and the certainty of the Church’s authority as custodian of divine truth under the assistance of the Holy Spirit. When Blondel’s Action (1893) appeared amid Catholicism’s process of institutionalizing and standardizing Thomistic thought, it was considered a novel and original piece of work. Unlike the rigid nature of the Roman manuals’ arguments, it was orientated toward broaching the existentially decisive questions of human life years before it became philosophically fashionable to do so. Its form of thought offered Christian thinkers the spiritual and intellectual nourishment they were looking for in addition to charting a new, spiritually rich speculative path out of the epistemological crisis Catholicism faced at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. It employed a “method of immanence,”78 whose

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   27

purpose was to prompt readers of the post-­Christian era to pause for a second look at the dynamism of human action on its deeper levels where its disguised desires and latent longings are found. Were the reader willing to follow the dialectic of the wills through the various stages of human action, she would discover that there is more to human life than the principle of immanence that modern rationalism and naturalism espouse as dogma. Indeed, without reducing Christian truth to moral terms dictated by practical reason, yet avoiding the Scylla of fideism and the Charybdis of intellectualism, Blondel’s form of thought allowed Christian thinkers to rediscover the sublime synthesis 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. Blondel succeeded in reintroducing the notion of transcendence into French philosophical discourse through the category of action at a time when the doctrine of immanence dominated French philosophy. What Blondel proposed, then, was that if faith is to be supernatural, the challenge is to understand how its inaccessible essence is made accessible through the senses and recognized through the relation of the interior and exterior. The question of how the supernatural revelation appears in human history would become the main issue in Blondel’s 1904 publication History and Dogma. But the answer he gives in History and Dogma has its roots in Action (1893), where he argued that revelation is given only through a mediator. In religious practice, action returns as the mediating bond, the vinculum, and the site of humanity’s receptivity to God’s supernatural gift of faith, the place wherein God intervenes in creation.

T h e L e tt e r o n Ap o lo g e t i c s

Not surprisingly, Blondel’s thesis on action was controversial. He passed his defense in 1893 and published a revised version of it the same year. However, the next year the minister of higher education refused to grant him a teaching post, alleging that his philosophical method compromised its integrity with revealed religion. With the help of Boutroux and Raymond Poincaré he was able to secure a position at the University of Lille, and subsequently at the University of Aix-­Marseille, where he would spend the rest of his career at the far end of the country, a long way from Paris.

28  Maurice Blondel

At the time of its publication in 1893, Action (1893) received very little attention from Catholic thinkers; however, it did elicit a strong reaction from the French philosophical establishment, making Blondel something of a philosophical pariah for a few years.79 Three years after the publication of Action (1893), Blondel wrote what one of his interpreters has called his masterpiece,80 Letter on Apologetics, in reply to Abbé Charles Denis’s misconception of Action (1893) as a work of psychologi­ cal apologetics. As the new editor of Annales de philosophie chrétienne, Abbé Denis wrote an article calling for a new apologetics and praising Blondel’s Action (1893) for returning Christian apologetics to the plane of moral psychology. Blondel’s Letter on Apologetics was originally published to defend the strictly philosophical character and aim of Action (1893) against the misconception of its psychological nature and purpose. But Blondel took advantage of the opportunity to mitigate the tension that had formed between the French philosophical establishment on account of Action’s (1893) reception. Letter on Apologetics managed to allay the fears voiced by philosophers’ response to Action (1893), but it occasioned the tension and misunderstanding with Catholic theologians. Letter on Apologetics is a work in progress, not Blondel’s final statement on apologetics,81 but it stands as a direct challenge to the official, Roman Catholic apologetics and the neo-­Scholasticism of the day. The “traditional apologetics” at the heart of Blondel’s critique in Letter on Apologetics is the type of Thomism that emerged from the First Vatican Council as a system constructed to answer the arguments of eighteenth-­ century Enlightenment philosophers who had called into question the historical veracity of Christian revelation. By the late nineteenth century, idealism was the primary philosophical movement and was indifferent to the historical facts of Christian revelation. Kant’s critique of speculative reason and its inability to arrive at knowledge about God and things-­ in-­themselves had shifted focus away from questions concerning the authenticity of the alleged witnesses of Christian revelation and toward the sheer immanence of consciousness itself. The philosophical conversation had moved on unbeknownst to traditional Catholic apologetics. By virtue of his profession as a lay Catholic philosopher, Blondel’s thought was only indirectly constrained by the institutional setting, expectations, and theological formalism of nineteenth-­century Catholic apologetics. He recognized the new conceptual context produced by the

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   29

conditions of the nineteenth century required a new starting point for apologetics. The task of philosophy is to trace the echo of transcendence in human life and society and to explore reason’s capacity to examine the immanent affirmation of the transcendent absolute through human action, which is to be distinguished from the reality of the transcendent absolute. Apologetics must begin with the immanence of consciousness, the foundational claim “that nothing can enter into a man’s mind which does not come out of him and correspond in some way to a need for development.”82 The problem, according to Blondel, is that “nothing is Christian and Catholic unless it is supernatural, not only transcendent in the simple metaphysical sense of the word, because there could be truth or beings superior to ourselves which we could nevertheless affirm immanently by the use of our own powers, but strictly supernatural, that is to say, beyond the power of man to discover for himself and yet imposed on his thought and on his will.”83 The only way to resolve the conflict between the immanent notion of reason in modern thought and the transcendent nature of Christian faith is to demonstrate through rigorous reflection that the inner development of human consciousness directed by its own laws stands in need of something other than itself to complete and perfect itself. Through the new apologetic method, “it becomes apparent that the very notion of immanence is realized in our consciousness only by the effective presence of the notion of the transcendent.”84 Letter on Apologetics took up this challenge and made its case in a style, language, and grammar that was original and inflammatory for 1896. What set Blondel’s approach apart was to begin with the absence of the supernatural instead of its presence, and through the unfolding of the logic of action show the necessity of God’s self-­gift as the one thing necessary for the fulfillment of human destiny. The dialectic of action follows the trajectory of human action to its logical limits, where it must continue to act, but act in recognition or rejection of an action that transcends us. Yet, even though Blondel’s dialectic establishes a law by which the drama of human action unfolds out into the cusp of the Infinite, it preserves the freedom and nonnecessity of grace. Through action we do not have the ability to produce or define the gift, but the aptitude to recognize and receive it: “In a word, by a sort of prevenient grace, that baptism of desire which, presupposing God’s secret touch, is always accessible and necessary apart from any explicit revelation, and which, even when revelation is

30  Maurice Blondel

known, is, as it were, the human sacrament immanent in the divine opera­ tion.”85 In the unfolding of the dialectic of human action, the “religious problem” is raised from within the concrete reality of human life in its psychological, social, political, and cultural dimensions. One of Letter on Apologetics’ most provocative statements was on the use and nature of miracles, which in traditional apologetics was used as objective proof of God’s transcendent presence in history. However, in Letter on Apologetics, Blondel writes that “miracles are truly miraculous only for those who are already prepared to recognize the divine action in the most usual events. And it follows that philosophy, which would offend against its own nature by denying them, is no less incompetent to affirm them, and that they are a witness written in a language other than that of which it is the judge.”86 Blondel’s critics seized upon this statement and removed it from its proper context within the broader discussion of the various methods used by apologetics. The traditional ­Catholic apologetics Blondel was critical of in Letter on Apologetics employed mira­ cles as the probative evidence of divine presence in human history. It established a direct, simple, and extrinsic connection among the natural capacities of the human soul, mind, miracles, and Christian revelation, a kind of Christian rationalism that overlooked the disruptive and transformative reality of the supernatural, and in effect naturalized the supernatural and supernaturalized the natural. Despite its claim to the contrary, it assumed Christian revelation was an essentially human problem addressed to a human reason totally indifferent to the gratuitous and unexpected gift from God. It “considers the supernatural at the outset from the point of view of the natural. It merely exploits the witness of the soul, which Tertullian called ‘naturally Christian,’ it does not radically and necessarily contradict those who accept Christianity as a superior but still human form of morality and doctrine. In short, the very notion of the supernatural remains vague and ambiguous.”87 The problem here, according to Blondel, is that, before the act of faith, God does not leave one’s reason and will in a state of indifference. There is, as he says, a kind of “supernatural insufficiency” in human nature for which it is the proper role of philosophy to explore. If the criticism of traditional apologetics’ use of miracles was not enough to bring Blondel into the center of the Modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, his constructive account of apologetics certainly

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   31

was. He was proposing a “method of immanence” that followed the trajectory of thought in Action (1893) by discovering the natural insufficiency of thinking, willing, and acting. The method of immanence determines the relationship between faith and reason, theology and philosophy, and grace and nature in such a way that the supernatural is indispensable and, at the same time, inaccessible to the human person. In saying the supernatural appears necessary, Blondel went to great lengths to clarify this statement and to ensure that it did not compromise the freedom of the recipient or the gratuitous nature of the gift from the Giver. What is necessary, according to Blondel, is that in our willing as human agents we are led to recognize the supernatural insufficiency and to acknowledge the need for a further gift that we cannot produce or define but only entertain and acknowledge. “If our nature is not at home with the supernatural, the supernatural is at home with our nature; so it is inevitable that the titles of naturalization which it gives us should never disappear without trace; to turn away from one’s destiny is not to free oneself from its control. That is the meaning of the necessity which connects these two heterogeneous orders without infringing their independence.”88 Philoso­phy remains on this side of the mysterious marriage between nature and grace, faith and reason, drawing the real presence out of the real absence of the supernatural in human action. Both theology and philosophy retain their autonomy and in doing so can have a fruitful relationship. Their respective autonomies are the condition that makes it possible for philoso­phy to consider theological problems. Toward the end of Letter on Apologetics, Blondel is keen to reaffirm that philosophy itself cannot demonstrate or produce the supernatural, since philosophy is a discipline that confines its discourse to the realm of the natural. However, philosophy can and must demonstrate the necessity of both what we have and of what we lack. That is, philosophy’s task is to show the disproportion between the willing will and willed will and that the indispensable condition for the fulfillment of human action is inaccessible to humanity. Through the interplay between the indispensable and inaccessible, and the necessary and the impossible, philosophy discloses the real participation of human action in what it lacks, the supernatural. As he puts it toward the end of Letter on Apologetics, what “philosophy shows is that man can never legitimately or in reality confine himself to the human level, that, even when he appears to do so, this appearance

32  Maurice Blondel

conceals, if he is sincere, a real participation in what he fails to recognize, and that, in a word, no natural solution is a solution at all.”89 Philosophy’s role in the new apologetic scheme in Letter on Apologetics was lost on many Catholic critics. In particular, they misunderstood the distinction between the “philosophy of immanence,” which does not transcend consciousness, and the “method of immanence,” which begins in consciousness and ends with offering the necessity of a transcendent, Infinite God. In his article “Les illusions de l’idéalisme et leurs dangers pour la foi,” the French Dominican Marie-­Benôit Schwalm claimed to have found fifty statements of questionable orthodoxy in both Action (1893) and Letter on Apologetics.90 Schwalm conceded Blondel’s intention was orthodox, but Blondel’s neo-­Kantian idealism, according to Schwalm, was the driving force behind his method of immanence and could not be reconciled with Aristotelian epistemology, Thomistic metaphysics, and the normative teaching authority of the Church: “Blondel is a neo-­Kantian. For him the philosophical method is the Kantian method, pushed to its ultimate phenomenological consequence: Speculative reason knows we have ideas; it does not know whether these ideas correspond to anything outside us.”91 Without measure and nuance Schwalm attacked Blondel’s “Kantianism,” claiming it destroyed the rational basis for belief by denying miracles are the “evident and necessary signs of the presence of the supernatural in the Church.”92 This appeared to contradict the First Vatican Council’s teaching on the role of miracles in Christian apologetics. As Blondel became the target of the anti-­Modernist campaign over the next ten years, the charge of “Kantianism,” first found in Schwalm’s article, would become the leitmotif of Catholic critics. In fact, Kantianism, Henri de Lubac observed in retrospect, was the intellectual fetish of neo-­Thomist, anti-­Modernist circles.93 In addition to Kantianism, Blondel was criticized for speaking of an “interior need” and “appetite” that prepares humanity for Christian reve­ lation.94 Yet the language of interior need was not as novel as it seemed. Having just purchased the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, Blondel published a series of pseudonymous articles on Cardinal Dechamps from 1905 to 1907,95 showing that Dechamp’s work on apologetics, approved at the First Vatican Council, advocated an apologetic method of immanence well before Blondel mentioned it. Still, for critics such as Hippolyte Gayraud, the mention of necessity meant Blondel was guilty of

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   33

“naturalism,” because by definition and character the supernatural is gratuitous.96 For Gayraud and fellow neo-­Thomists, “what is invincibly postulated by human reason, what is necessary and indispensable to his nature, cannot be supernatural. The conclusion [is] that the method of immanence ends by denying the supernatural and falls into naturalism.”97 In two articles defending Blondel’s method, Lucien Laberthonnière, the Oratorian priest and editor of the Annales de philosophie chrétienne under Blondel’s ownership, observed that Schwalm’s and Gayraud’s accusations of fideism and naturalism contradicted each other, which, according to Laberthonnière, vitiated their charges against Blondel’s method.98 Nevertheless, Kantian subjectivism, fideism, voluntarism, anti-­ intellectualism, and naturalism persisted as key phrases inveighed against Blondel during the anti-­ Modernist campaign of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They delineated his relationship with the dominant form of Catholic speculative theology at the beginning of the twentieth century and set the stage for what Henri de Lubac has called Blondel’s classic work of philosophical theology,99 History and Dogma.

“ Ep i s t e m o lo g i c a l C r i s i s ” i n t h e I n t e l l e c t ua l L i f e o f E a r ly T w e n t i e t h - ­C e n t u ry C at h o l i c i s m

The nineteenth-­century conceptual shift in emphasis away from the Cartesian cogito character and toward the Romantic, affective character of Christian faith furnishes a broad speculative and theological frame of reference for understanding Blondel’s interest in the category of action and philosophical apologetics.100 The shift has its theological origins in the conceptual unraveling between the intellect and the will that takes place after Aquinas’s Aristotelian and Augustinian synthesis, the late medieval process Thomas Pfau recently identified as “modernity’s disaggregation of practical and theoretical reason and the innumerable speculative problems and perplexities to which this development gives rise.”101 The demise of “action” as a meaningful category and the stunted, instrumental conception of the will that Enlightenment moral philosophy produces is a consequence of the rupture of practical and theoretical reason in modernity.102 By his own admission, Blondel envisaged his thought within this conceptual context and history. Healing the fissure between practical and

34  Maurice Blondel

theoretical reason was neither simply a matter of repristinating Aristotle’s intellectualist approach, as Blondel’s neo-­Thomist interlocutors had in History and Dogma,103 or uncritically capitulating to Kant’s critical idealism, as had the leading French Catholic biblical scholar of the time, Alfred Loisy (1857–1940), whose thought Blondel categorizes in History and Dogma as “historicism.” It was a matter of teasing out a synthesis between the two, Blondel wrote to Boutroux, “between Aristotelianism which devalues and subordinates practice to thought, and Kantianism which separates them and values the practical order to the detriment of the other.”104 Viewed within this speculative context and the background of these ideological pitfalls, Blondel’s recovery of a noninstrumental account of action as a central category of twentieth-­century philosophical and theological anthropology is all the more remarkable.105 The subsequent chapters of this book describe how the breach between theoretical and practical reason in modernity gave rise to a highly institutionalized and juridicized view of tradition, conceptualized and embodied primarily in bureaucratic terms divorced from practice. Of course, there are other historical, ecclesiological, and theo-­political forces that contribute to the dilution of tradition. But the epistemic breach between theoretical and practical reason is the axis around which the abstract emaciation of tradition in modern Catholicism revolves. It is in reaction to this division of reason that Blondel’s thought develops. We see this development also in his two main interlocutors in History and Dogma. In 1902, Loisy published L’Évangile et l’Église106 in part as a response to the work of German Church historian Adolph von Harnack. In Das Wesen des Christentums (1900),107 Harnack purported to have discovered the essence of Jesus’s teaching not in the doctrine of the Church but in the love ethic of the Gospels. Loisy’s response, however, reduced Christian dogma to ephemeral expressions meant to symbolize the Church’s belief that the religion of Jesus possessed the essential ingredients of “true” religion, what Loisy would later call the general sense of man as homo religiosus, a “religious human being.” Loisy’s work is one of the first examples of Catholic biblical scholarship’s application of historical-­critical methods in the absence of any institutional interest in the historical nature of the Bible and tradition. Loisy’s work and his role in the publication of Blondel’s notion of tradition are discussed in more detail in later chapters. I mention it here

Development of Philosophical and Theological Thought   35

because it broaches an implicit argument and theme that begin to take shape in chapter 2. Loisy’s work, the Modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, and the ecclesiastical response it elicited are best understood as products of an “epistemological crisis” within the intellectual life of early twentieth-­century Catholicism. They provide a window through which we can view the tense, complicated relationship between theology, tradition, and history that develops within Catholicism at the turn of the century. They also disclose that by the early twentieth century modern Catholicism had institutionalized conceptual frameworks inadequate to deal with critical interest in the historical nature of the Bible and of tradition and the conflictual relationship between theology, tradition, and historical studies. Both of these issues are partially the products of the broader changes at work within European culture and society in the late nineteenth century.108 In his analysis of epistemological crises within traditions, Alasdair MacIntyre argues that any resolution of such crisis involves, among certain requirements, new theoretical and conceptual structures, “imaginative conceptual innovations,” which enable the tradition to escape the limitations of the theses that were central to it before and as it entered the epistemological crisis.109 MacIntyre contends that the “justification of the new theses will lie precisely in their ability to achieve what could not have been achieved prior to that innovation.”110 The theological examples he mentions are Newman’s account of the way in which the fourth-­century definition of the doctrine of the Trinity used controversial philosophical and theological concepts to resolve the Trinitarian controversies arising out of competing and irreconcilable interpretations of scripture, and Aquinas’s new conceptual framework that synthesized the Aristotelian and Augustinian traditions and led to the flourishing of medieval thought.111 As we explore the conceptual, historical, and theo-­political shifts in Western thought, their impact on tradition, and the epistemological crisis they precipitate within modern Catholicism, I’d like to suggest that readers view Blondel’s thought as an act of “imaginative conceptual innovation.” Granted, this is a category foreign to Blondel’s thought. His philosophical objective was to construct a truly scientific method (“Science of Practice”) that would establish with critical rigor the universal validity of the problem of action to the satisfaction of the French philosophical community, before raising the necessity of the supernatural. In fact, Blondel recognized

36  Maurice Blondel

his method required a philosophical rigor, not “imagination,” that went beyond what he found in his mentor and teacher Ollé-­Laprune’s work, since Blondel would argue for the necessity of the supernatural, not simply the supernatural’s correspondence to humanity’s deepest desires, as Ollé-­ Laprune had. But we would be remiss were we not to read—and then possibly misread—Blondel’s thought, specifically the Science of Practice, as an act of imaginative conceptual renovation and innovation of the doctrine of immanence endemic to modern philosophical thought. Through a method of immanence initiated by Spinoza and matured in Hegel,112 Blondel’s philosophy of action discerns a transcendent truth within a fully developed notion of immanence and takes an authentic step forward with the notion of immanence in modern philosophy. Imaginative conceptual renovation and innovation is also at work in Blondel’s theological remarks on tradition. MacIntyre’s category offers a heuristic device through which we can begin to see Blondel’s notion of tradition as a conceptually enriched resolution to early twentieth-­ century Catholicism’s epistemological crisis and theological impasse. That Blondel’s notion of tradition navigates a synthetic way between intellectualism, fideism, and historicism at a time when these forms of thought appeared to be the only intellectually viable ways forward in Catholicism is one of his major contributions to modern and contemporary Christian thought. Perhaps his example still bears a lesson today for those of us who may be tempted to resolve the inherent tensions and polarities in Christianity between faith and reason, history and theology, and scripture and tradition in exclusively post-­Christian or purely theological terms.

two

Blondel’s Ecclesiological and Theological Inheritance Tradition from the Late Medieval through the Post-­Tridentine Periods

For good reason, scholars are inclined to locate the origins of contemporary Catholicism’s distinctive notion of tradition in the Reformation, Reformation politics, Counter-­Reformation polemics, and post-­Tridentine theology. For example, in the context of discussing the authority the Second Vatican Council’s “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” (Dei verbum) accords to tradition, the distinguished North American theologian John Thiel sees contemporary Catholicism’s definition of tradition as a product of the Protestant Reformers’ rejection of Catholicism’s ascription of authority to ecclesiastical tradition as divine revelation and the Reformers’ acceptance of the Bible as the sole authority of divine reve­lation. In response to the Reformers’ rejection of ecclesiastical tradition and emphasis on the sole authority of the Bible, the Council of Trent unambiguously defined the communication of divine revelation as consisting of both scripture and tradition. Thiel continues: 37

38  Maurice Blondel

Though understood and even expressed in different ways since the sixteenth century, this formulation [of divine revelation as both Scripture and tradition] has come to carry not only the authority of an orthodox understanding of God’s inspired Word but also, by virtue of its particularity and controversial history, much of the identity of Roman Catholicism in the Tridentine and post-­Tridentine periods.1 Without question, the Reformation and the Council of Trent are paramount events in the development of contemporary Catholicism’s notion of tradition. But to appreciate Blondel’s legacy in theology and to understand how he inherited a late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Catholic ecclesiology that had obscured Christ’s presence in tradition, one first needs to explore the late medieval conceptual, theological, and ecclesiological pressures that shaped Catholicism’s notion of tradition. Tracing the shifts in late medieval theological discourse reveals a move away from thinking about tradition primarily as a liturgical and ontological reality mediated through ecclesial practice, or action, and toward conceptualizing tradition principally as a bureaucratic reality mediated through institutional and juridical means. The overarching positive good of the shift toward conceptualizing tradition as a bureaucratic reality is that it discloses the necessity of the institutional and juridical means of tradition in protecting and safeguarding the sacramental integrity of the Church. However, Catholic ecclesiology depends not only on the institutional and juridical framework of tradition but also on the liturgical and sacramental means of a living tradition. After discussing tradition in the late medieval period, we are better equipped to understand how the transformation of tradition was well under way when the Council of Trent addressed it in the sixteenth century. When the Council of Trent did address the contentious issue of tradition, it did not define tradition or discuss the theological character and integrity of the traditions the Reformers objected to. Rather, the Tridentine decree on scripture and tradition (“First Decree: Acceptance of the Sacred Books and Apostolic Traditions”) declared the salvific content of the Word of God as revealed in the written word of the canonical scriptures and unwritten traditions, both of which are to be accepted with “like feeling and reverence.”2 In affirming that revelation consists of both scripture and tradition, the Tridentine decree clarified tradition’s role in the economy of revelation

Blondel’s Ecclesiological and Theological Inheritance   39

and set a clear precedent for post-­Tridentine thinking about tradition. But the decree’s declaration of one source of revelation in two forms (scripture and tradition) did not explain the nature of the relationship between scripture and tradition, leaving the relationship open to interpretation by post-­Tridentine thinkers. Despite the decree’s official declaration of one source of revelation in two forms, the majority of post-­Tridentine Catholic theology through the late nineteenth century expressed the doctrine of revelation in terms of a two-­source formula: partim libris scriptis et partim sine scripto traditionibus (partly in written books and partly in unwritten traditions), and substantiated the concept of tradition from a theological horizon that had reconceived tradition’s truth in reference to the ecclesiastical teaching authority of the magisterium. By the time Blondel published his notion of tradition at the height of the Modernist crisis in the early twentieth century, figures associated with the Modernist crisis, such as Alfred Loisy, were reacting to the post-­ Tridentine theological trend toward substantiating tradition’s truth in the reference to the ecclesiastical authority of the magisterium. This post-­ Tridentine trend was institutionalized and officially expressed at the First Vatican Council’s “Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith” (Dei filius), which affirmed the magisterium as the primary subject of the active tradition of the Church and the Council’s ascription of infallibility to the pope by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority.3

T r a d i t i o n i n t h e L at e M e d i e va l P e r i o d

To understand the idea of tradition Blondel inherited and corrected for late nineteenth-­century Catholicism we need to trace the transformation of tradition and its relation to scripture back to the late medieval period. In patristic and early medieval thought, tradition and scripture were far from being antagonists, as they would be during and after the Reformation. Patristic and early medieval thinkers considered scripture and tradition distinct, yet essentially and productively entwined realities. Through the inspiration of the Spirit, the teachings of the pope, bishops, and all believers were seen as participants in the power of the Word of God. This participation, however, did not mean that tradition was a new postapostolic form of revelation, nor did it mean that commentary on the Gospels

40  Maurice Blondel

was a newer testament. Rather, patristic and medieval thinkers, each in their own distinct ways, were able to distinguish tradition from the scriptural texts without eliding them or opposing each to the other. Even such a thirteenth-­century thinker on the cusp of conceptual change as Henry of Ghent (1217–93), who was able to imagine the previously unimaginable conflict of authority between the Church, tradition, and scripture, stayed within patristic and medieval patterns of thought regarding tradition’s relation to scripture. But in and around the fourteenth century there is a palpable shift in emphasis away from the patristic and early medieval idea of tradition (traditio, paradosis) as received and embodied in the practice of the members of the Body of Christ. The move away from the more participatory patristic and early medieval idea of tradition is toward the juridical modern idea of tradition as a reality that is centralized in the teaching authority of the magisterium4 and channeled and managed through ecclesiastical office. The shift in the idea of tradition comes to expression in post-­Tridentine thought and obtains in Catholic theology into the nineteenth century. Although the patristic and early medieval notions of tradition did refer to the teaching authority of ecclesiastical office in the transmission and practice of tradition,5 the shift had its origin in the late thirteenth-­and early fourteenth-­century mendicant versus secular debates over Franciscan poverty. The debates raised the specter of an irreconcilable conflict between the teaching of the Church and the teaching of scriptural texts. This was especially the case in the early fourteenth-­century usus pauper debate about the demands and limitations of the Franciscan vow of poverty. At the center of the debates was the question of postapostolic revelation and the authority such revelation carries. But in the aftermath of the debates, a shift can be detected in the relationship between the Church and its magisterial authority in relationship to scripture.6 From this shift new forms of thought emerge regarding the relationship between scripture and tradition, as is characterized by Henry of Ghent’s preoccupation with the unique authority of scripture and Duns Scotus’s (1265–1308) ontological formalism and emphasis on the importance of nonscriptural revelation.7 Thomas Aquinas and Bonaventure participated in the debates,8 but unlike Henry of Ghent, Siger of Brabant, and Duns Scotus, Aquinas and Bonaventure did not have to write and teach within the intellectual milieu that followed the Condemnation of 1277,9 where the ecclesial politics that

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ensued from medieval theology’s reengagement with the primary sources of pagan philosophy exerted a new set of pressures on reason’s relation to revelation.10 Both inherit and continue, in their distinct ways, the patristic legacy of tradition, distinguishing tradition from the scriptural texts without opposing each to the other, since conceptually both sacra pagina and sacra doctrina fall under the same formal object of divine revelation.11 That Aquinas and Bonaventure did not bear these pressures is reflected in the distinct yet fluid relation between the registers of faith and reason in each thinker’s discourse.12 The fluidity is captured in Aquinas’s well-­known aphorism from the first question of the Summa theologiae: “Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.” It is even more salient in the negligible role the distinction between God’s absolute and ordained powers (potentia Dei absoluta et ordinata) plays in each thinker’s account.13 Still, this relatively insignificant distinction was a feature of their thought, “but their interests had always lain with God as known to us by reason or revelation, and the ‘absolute’ power [of God] was no more than a formal saving clause.”14 However, when the full impact of the reception of Aristotle and his commentators in the newly formed medieval universities became clear in 1277, the desire to protect the sovereignty and freedom of God and to eliminate Greek naturalism propelled the potentia Dei absoluta et ordinata distinction from the margins of medieval theological discourse to its center. When the potentia Dei absoluta et ordinata distinction comes to the fore in late medieval theological thinking, it signifies a shift away from thinking about tradition as an aspect of revelation primarily mediated and represented through the diffuse complex of liturgical customs, practices, and guilds embodied by premodern Christians15 and toward thinking about tradition as an aspect of revelation that is communicated and mediated through God’s potentia absoluta. To be sure, liturgical customs and practices continued to mediate and communicate tradition, but a new horizon for thinking about tradition that departs considerably from patristic and early medieval patterns of thought emerges and begins to structure theological thinking about tradition’s mode of mediation and its representation in the modern world. As the potentia Dei absoluta et ordinata distinction was codified in the late medieval mind, there was a shift in thinking about God and God’s relation to the world that broached the previously unthinkable possibility

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that this “God of pure freedom might always posit and demand what is contrary; for instance, that man should hate him (Robert Holkot), [and] that the innocent should be damned and the guilty saved (Ockham).”16 During the fourteenth century a drastic depreciation in theologi­ cal thinking follows in the wake of widespread acceptance and popularity of William of Ockham’s (1287–1347) new intuitional epistemology. It is during this period that theological discourse abandons realism and intellectual abstraction as its primary form of thought, weakening the mind’s direct link between the Creator and the predictable world order familiar to classical and early medieval cosmology.17 The speculative trust in nature theologians adopted and utilized from Greco-­Roman thought, which allowed them to synthesize the truths of natural theology with the data of divine revelation, disappears.18 And in the place of classical and early medieval epistemic confidence in nature, nominalist thought focused on the doctrine of God’s potentia absoluta. The upshot of this new form of theological thinking was that “the essentially supernatural life of the Christian, seen in action in divine faith and love, and derived from a totally new and God-­given principle of grace which had inspired and dominated the work of an Anselm, a Bonaventure or a Thomas, was now relegated, as unknowable and inexpressible, to the purely religious sphere of belief, and in practice ignored.”19 It should be noted that there were many complex aspects of late medieval thought conspiring to challenge the patristic and medieval idea of tradition and its role in the economy of theological thinking. Jeffrey Stout has traced the central social and intellectual difficulty of the Reformation, what he calls the “problem of many authorities,” to the breakdown of the notion of scientia as the privileged form of intellectual argument and persuasion to fourteenth-­century nominalistic empiricism. Stout is interested in the medieval language and grammar Descartes inherits, but the breakdown of the notion of scientia gives us a window through which we can view the changing conception of tradition in the late medieval and early modern periods. As Stout observes, the late medieval breakdown of scientia placed a heavy burden on the notion of authority, the domain of opinio and of probability, an epistemic category distinct from scientia in medieval intellectual inquiry and argument. As the notion of au­thority bore a disproportionate burden of intellectual and social weight, it became unstable:

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As competing authorities multiplied and began to diverge more and more sharply, conventional means for resolving disputes arising from such competition became less and less effective. Where probability is a matter of what authorities approve, and the authorities no longer speak with one voice, it becomes anything but clear which opinions one should accept.20 The drastic depreciation of theological thinking that occurs during this period is partially the result of nominalism’s emphasis on God’s supposedly arbitrary and capricious absolute power, and its consequent appeal to the literal word of scripture and papal pronouncements; but it is also the consequence of the problem of many authorities, and subsequently of nominalism’s tendency to approach tradition fideistically, without critical reception and reasoned engagement. Tradition was not considered a serious resource for theological thinking. It served as an opportunity for credu­ lous submission, and therefore the followers of nominalism, as David Knowles points out, “were left without any clear knowledge as to what was of immemorial tradition in the Church and what was the speculation of recent schoolmen or the claim of papal propagandists. It was only a step to reduce revealed doctrine to the message of Scripture alone, and this step was in fact soon taken by [ John] Wycliffe and his followers.”21 In contrast to Wycliffe and his followers, canonist thinking during the period exploited the burgeoning notion of a purely oral transmission of tradition running parallel to scripture. As the theo-­political turbulence of the Great Western Schism (1378–1417) consumed the end of the fourteenth century, canonists, who emphasized papal decrees and the living authority of the pope often at the expense of scripture, took on a more powerful and prominent role in the Church, and in so doing exacerbated and facilitated the process of separation between the Church, tradition, and scripture, a process that would reach a crescendo a century later during the Reformation. The theo-­political process that separated the classical and ancient medieval synthesis between the Church, tradition, and scripture was subtle, but its effect on the tradition was persistent and palpable in the transformation tradition underwent in the late medieval period from an ecclesiastically diffuse, dynamic reality representing God’s presence in the many and varied, embodied practices (actions) of the Church to a procedural reality located in the teaching authority of ecclesiastical office.22

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This new conceptual structure for thinking about tradition is reflected at the opposite end of the ecclesial spectrum from canonist thinking in the work of such fourteenth-­and fifteenth-­century Conciliarists as Pierre d’Ailly (1350–1420), whose thinking hinges on the prospect of God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta). For d’Ailly, the idea of a purely oral transmission of tradition represents God’s divine prerogative by which God reveals himself, should God deem it necessary to do so. God can and already has revealed himself in a postapostolic form of special reve­ lation running parallel to the canonical scriptures.23 In d’Ailly’s horizon, the written word of scripture is a sufficient mode of revelation, but in God’s freedom and omnipotence God chooses (potentia absoluta) to reveal himself through the working of the Holy Spirit in a direct manner requiring no liturgical embodiment or ecclesial practice.24 What is new here in d’Ailly’s thought is the emphasis placed on the speculative axiom that revelation contains no limit, save the principle of noncontradiction, and, consequently, God can intervene directly in creation, by virtue of his potentia absoluta, without employing secondary instrumental causes.25 That d’Ailly conceives of an unmediated form of tradition for which no embodied liturgical or ecclesial practice is needed to render it intelligible is an indication that the bond between the Church and scripture has been broken by a doctrine of revelation that has reconceived the relationship between the created and uncreated realms. Now that the natural world is no longer seen as “participatorily enfolded within the divine expressive logos,”26 D’Ailly is required to envision the order of the natural world as principally dependent upon God’s divine will.27 The shift in thinking about God and God’s relation to the world characterized by the new emphasis on God’s absolute power provided the conceptual structure within which tradition was considered less in terms of the synthetic bond that mediates God’s presence through the ecclesial action of the Church and more in terms of a contractual artifice that governs the different ecclesiastical arrangements, bodies, and practices. John Milbank has argued that the conceptual pressure the potentia Dei absoluta et ordinata distinction exerted on d’Ailly’s account of an unmediated notion of tradition, and that encouraged the move away from thinking about tradition primarily as a liturgical and ontological reality and toward an understanding of tradition principally as a bureaucratic re­ality, is one of the decisive factors in the construction and formation of the

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secular.28 Indeed, a number of interrelated theological and political forces flow out of this distinction to form the speculative horizon for modernity. Chief among the theo-­political forces facilitating the modern shift in emphasis toward conceptualizing tradition as a bureaucratic reality is the tension between the regnum (kingship) and the sacerdotium (priesthood), which had its origin in the Gregorian reform of the eleventh century, but remained unresolved in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries when d’Ailly and other Conciliarists were writing. Despite the Gregorian reform’s success in reinvigorating papal authority, redeeming the life of clergy and liberating the Church from lay ascendancy (of the lay investiture struggle), the reform’s complete success required what it could not have accomplished, namely, that the feudal structure and the system of benefices that gave rise to the reform be dissolved.29 As a consequence of its inability to resolve the occasion for the reform, the reform itself left the medieval Church vulnerable, in both theory and practice, to the conceptual and linguistic influence of the emerging domain of the secular. As the Church began to speak of itself in terms of a centralized, bureaucratic institution, one can detect a trace of the transition to a more bureaucratic understanding of tradition that would manifest itself in much of modern Catholic theology.30 This moment is captured well when in the twelfth century the Church, including the clerical bureaucracy, established itself as the “mystical body of Christ,” the secular world sector proclaimed itself the “holy Empire.” This does not imply causation, either in the one way or the other. It merely indicates the activity of indeed interrelated impulses and ambitions by which the spiritual corpus mysticum and the secular sacrum imperium happened to emerge simultaneously—around the middle of the twelfth century.31 The linguistic volleying that takes place between the Church and the nascent secular domain of the twelfth century accompanies the distinction between juridical and sacramental powers that appears during this period. Canonists and theologians begin to distinguish “between the ‘Lord’s two Bodies’—one, the individual corpus verum on the altar, the host; and the other, the collective corpus mysticum, the Church.”32 The division between the sacramental and juridical powers that takes place during the later ­Middle Ages is a reflection of the internal reconfiguration the Church was

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beginning to experience as it formed a novel relationship with the emerging inchoate secular domain.33 Indeed, the sacramental reality to which the corpus mysticum referred when uttered, Henri de Lubac observed, began to fade to the connotation of corpus mysticum as a sociological and juridical reality:34 “That originally liturgical notion, which formerly served to exalt the Church united in the Sacrament, began to be used in the hierarchical Church as a means to exalt the position of the emperor-­like pope . . . the pope could be the head of the ‘mystical body of the Church’ as a corporation or polity or regnum more easily than head of the ‘mystical body of Christ.’ ”35 The juridical and sacramental reconfiguration finds its concrete expression in the division of labor between the priest and the bishop: “The Eucharist was the priest’s job; bishops governed the Church. Priests were concerned with the real body of Christ, in the celebration of the Mass, and bishops with his mystical body, as the Church herself was now called.”36 The effect of this sacramental and juridical reconfiguration on the late medieval idea of tradition is that tradition began to be seen as a distinct mode of truth, as a category that ought not to be considered under the rubric of scripture, and, at times, set in distinction from the written word of scripture. In short, it was in the wake of the conceptual and theo-­political shifts in late medieval thought that modern theological thinking was able to envision revelation as composed of two distinct sources, scripture and tradition.

T r a d i t i o n a f t e r t h e R e f o r m at i o n : The Council of Trent

The intellectual turbulence that consumed Catholicism in the wake of the Reformation is undoubtedly the high-­water mark in the development of the idea of tradition in modern Catholicism. The Reformation account of justification by faith and scripture alone succeeded in forcing sixteenth-­ century Catholicism to bring to official expression its notion of tradition. To defend the Catholic position against the protests and contraventions of the Reformers, and to stem the abuses that rightly concerned them, the Tridentine decree on scripture and tradition was promulgated during the fourth session of the Council of Trent, on April 8, 1546.37

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Although the decree has generated an extensive history of interpretation,38 the decree rendered its notion of tradition in vague and general terms, affirming merely the existence of apostolic traditions and the obligation to respect them without elaborating the precise nature of tradition.39 The apparent simplicity of the Tridentine decree, however, should not be mistaken for the complex political and theological history that gave birth to it.40 Trent made the shrewd and clever decision not to articulate the full nature of tradition, since many of the Reformers had objected not so much to the Church as the repository of the truths necessary for salvation, but to the abuse of authority that such institutional privilege often lent itself to. Having restrained itself from elaborating the full nature of tradition, the Council forced the Reformers to object to the Church’s official defense of the question of tradition on speculative grounds, allowing the Church to avoid the difficult and contentious question of which concrete ecclesiastical traditions were apostolic in origin and thus valid expressions of the truth inspired by the Holy Spirit. One also needs to mention the difference of opinion showing itself among the Council fathers at Trent. Yves Congar has suggested that the diversity of opinion with regard to any definitive idea of tradition is the one overarching fact one can glean from the deliberations between the Council fathers and theologians in the general congregations prior to the promulgation of the final decree.41 The diversity of opinions among the Council fathers manifested when the question of the content of tradition became the subject of discussion, and, in particular, whether the decree should affirm the binding value and authority of ecclesiastical, human, and apostolic traditions.42 It seems clear from the debates that the Council did not intend its notion of tradition to be associated with the concept of an oral tradition, despite the decree’s assertion that unwritten traditions “were received by the apostles from the mouth of Christ Himself, or else have come down to us, handed on as it were from the apostles themselves at the inspiration of the holy Spirit.”43 Had the decree specified the distinction between traditions pertaining to faith (traditiones ad fidem pertinentes) and traditions pertaining to observances and ceremonies (traditiones ad mores pertinentes), as suggested by various groups in the sessions leading up to the promulgation of the final decree, it might have prevented a number of theologians from misinterpreting tradition in the final decree as standing for revealed

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dogmas and moral principles.44 In fact, traditiones, Maurice Bévenot argues, “referred always primarily to the various rites, observances and practices of the church and only indirectly to the fact that some of them (e.g. the sacraments) involved the faith too.”45 Along with the question of the content of tradition at Trent was the distinct though related question of the relation between tradition and scripture. In the language of the final decree, “gospel” is considered a rich and an all-­encompassing term46 in which the “salvific content” of God’s self-­gift to the world in the person of Christ reflected in faith (fides) and conduct (mores) is disclosed in the written word of canonical scriptures (libris scriptis) and unwritten traditions (sine scripto traditionibus), both of which are to be accepted pari pietatis affectu, “with a like feeling of piety and reverence.”47 Though the final decree did not contain the two-­source formula of partim . . . partim (partly scripture, partly tradition), but instead the coordinating conjunction et, indicating one source of revelation in two forms, a critical mass of pre-­Tridentine Catholic theology48 and the preponderance of post-­Tridentine Catholic discourse expressed revelation in terms of the partim . . . partim distinction between scripture and tradition.49 In order to substantiate its account of revelation, Trent maintained an ecclesiological pneumatology in the spirit of the early Church fathers and medieval theology, which perceived an unbroken covenantal bond, guided by the presence of the Spirit, between the apostolic deposit and texts, the historical moments of the Church, and the Church’s present moment.50 But the Reformation had called into question the authenticity of the bond between the past and the present, and also the provenance and practice of the Church’s many embodied traditions. In many instances the Church’s concrete embodiment of particular traditions had become so wanton that the character of tradition as a legitimate and integral expression of revelation now was seen as an abusive human invention obscuring the presence of God.51

T r a d i t i o n i n t h e P o s t-­T r i d e n t i n e E r a

In its effort to reply to the Reformation, most post-­Tridentine Catholic theology began to substantiate the concept of tradition from a theological horizon that had reconfigured its ecclesiological referent from “seeing tradition as having its reference to the past, [to seeing] it in reference

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to the current magisterium of the Church.”52 In the newly reconfigured post-­Tridentine Catholic theology53 can be seen the shift in emphasis in which the principle of receptivity, as the primary discourse for speaking of tradition, recedes and gives way to the principle of living teaching authority (magisterium) as the privileged language and grammar in which the modern notion of tradition is discussed.54 The post-­Tridentine shift in emphasis away from receptivity to authority was more pronounced in France than the rest of Europe, where the French Revolution had turned to violence, hunting down ordinary priests and Catholics who refused to support the Revolution’s persecution of French nobility and clerics. In an effort to repair the destruction the Revolution had wrought on the Church through its unprecedented violence, persecution, secularization of ecclesial institutions, and confiscation of ecclesial properties, Pius VII (1800–1823) signed the Concordat of 1801 with Napoleon. The long march of Ultramontane ecclesiology through nineteenth-­century France was achieved—perhaps unintentionally—by the Concordat of 1801.55 The Concordat prevented Napoleon and the Gallican bishops from redrawing the ecclesiastical map of France on his authority. The Gallican tradition’s failure to address adequately the new pressures from the modern French state and the Concordat of 1801 made possible the conditions for the emergence of Ultramontanism during the period of the Bourbon Restoration (1815–48), and an aggressive form of Ultramontanism that flourished after the French revolution of 1848. The Gallican tradition, according to many of its Ultramontanist critics, offered an impoverished ecclesiological vision for the French Church and state, which was “orientated toward the support of a simply national ecclesio-­political system having as its most conspicuous feature the subordination of the Church to the State.”56 The 1853 encyclical Inter multiplices seemed to confirm this view, and made it clear that seminary textbooks still bearing traces of Gallican ecclesiology and tradition were to be replaced. Although Ultramontanism exercised a considerable influence on the development of the Church’s thinking with regard to papal infallibility up to the First Vatican Council, the Ultramontane doctrine of papal infallibility failed to provide a long-­term, compelling theo-­political alternative to Gallicanism for the French state.57 Ultramontanism in its nineteenth-­century form was unable to flourish politically in the twentieth century as a result of the failure of such

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nineteenth-­century Ultramontanists as Joseph de Maistre (1754–1821) to articulate an intelligible account of tradition capable of reconciling the conceptual tension between the ideas of infallibility58 and sovereignty.59 For de Maistre, Louis de Bonald, and Félicite de Lamennais before his break with Rome, sovereignty and infallibility were synonymous with each other: “Infallibility was simply the property by which a given decision of authority was the last word, against which there was no appeal; that is, what Lamennais called ‘supremacy.’ ”60 For his part, de Maistre had adopted the early modern absolutist notion of national sovereignty that, by the time he was writing, was a common part of Enlightenment political discourse, and developed its ecclesiastical potential by framing the Church as the ubiquitous, transnational authority. De Maistre understood the concept of tradition in terms of the inherited precedence of the past reflected in a society’s fundamental beliefs and embodied ideally in monarchical power. But unlike his predecessor, the British statesman and political philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–97), de Maistre considered tradition more than simply inherited precedence employed as a pragmatic tool for ordering society. Tradition, for de Maistre, was divine revelation, the primitive revelation that, despite human error, disclosed fundamental truths about humanity that could only be derived from God.61 The basic ideas of sovereignty and infallibility were, in their various religious, social, and political expressions, the normative dogmas to which reason must submit. Having opposed reason to tradition and correlated the latter with authority, de Maistre was able to employ authority as a “polemical battering-­ram,” Isaiah Berlin notes, and to devote his rhetorical gifts and intellectual powers to “making the facts fit his preconceived notions, not to developing concepts which fit newly discovered, or newly visualized, facts.”62 In part, this explains why de Maistre could ignore medieval doctrines of papal infallibility designed to limit the power of popes.63 As a consequence of de Maistre’s metaphysics of authority and his reaction to the rationalism and individualism of the Enlightenment, a fundamental truth about the rationality of traditions was unable to show itself, namely, that traditions themselves are “bearers of reason” that “require and need revolutions for their continuance.”64 In this respect, de Maistre’s idea of tradition brings into relief the post-­Tridentine transformation of tradition. The main feature of this transformation consists of the modern process of juridification the notion of tradition undergoes. Now the truth

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claims of tradition, both apostolic and ecclesial, need not necessarily be liturgically and practically embodied by the episcopate for their justification, but instead only need reference the principle of power from which they issue, namely, in the virtue of the episcopate’s authority. By the latter half of the nineteenth century the Church’s response to liberalism and the rise of Italian nationalism intensified the juridification of tradition, the transformative process tradition undergoes from a relatively fluid, diffuse, and multifaceted reality embodied in ecclesial action under the rubric of scripture to a procedural reality primarily located in the teaching authority of ecclesiastical office. The nineteenth-­century’s emphasis on ecclesiastical authority manifested itself at the First Vatican Council (1868–70). The Council’s dogmatic constitution on the C ­ atholic faith, Dei filius, repeats the Tridentine decree’s assertion that revelation is contained in both the written books of scripture and the unwritten traditions of the Church.65 It also affirms the magisterium to be the primary subject of the active tradition of the ecclesia,66 and it gives official expression to the juridification of the idea of tradition in chapter 4 of the dogmatic constitution on the Church, Pastor aeternus, by ascribing infallibility to the bishop of Rome by virtue of his supreme apostolic authority.67 Theologically, it was not uncommon for theologians to regard the faithful as dependent upon the magisterium to receive the objective contents of faith (tradition), and thus the faithful were considered to possess a “passive infallibility” in contrast to the magisterium’s “active infallibility.”68 The language and grammar for privileging the living teaching authority (magisterium) was already part of the Church’s theological discourse about tradition before it was institutionalized by promulgation through the First Vatican Council’s decrees. Johannes Baptist Franzelin, S. J. (­ 1816–86) was the first influential Roman theologian to draw a close association between the concept of tradition and the magisterium. As a papal theologian to the First Vatican Council he significantly influenced the Council’s notion of tradition, in addition to coauthoring, with Joseph Kleutgen, the Council’s dogmatic constitution on the Cathlic faith, Dei filius. After Franzelin, the association between tradition and the magisterium would be developed in the early twentieth century by reducing tradition without hesitation to the living magisterium. However, in Franzelin tradition is still a complex concept comprising both active elements, the means by which doctrines theoretical and practical are passed on, and objective

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(passive) elements, which are the doctrines, beliefs, practices, or “monuments” of tradition. In defining tradition Franzelin privileges the more formal element specific to tradition, which he argues is the active element. That is, for Franzelin the means or the way the truth of tradition is handed or passed on is the privileged formal element of tradition. Once tradition is formally distinguished from scripture and the proper distinctions between revealed, apostolic, and postapostolic traditions are made, what makes tradition distinctive is not so much the doctrine as it is the way in which tradition preserves the doctrine, its active element. Tradition is “the whole doctrine of faith in so far as it is preserved, with the assistance of the Holy Spirit, in continuous succession by the unanimous teaching of those who are guardians of the deposit and divinely instituted teachers, and appears in the profession and life of the whole Church.”69 The faithful have a role in the conservation of tradition and the apostolic deposit; however, the preservation of tradition relies on apostolic succession, without which tradition could not be conserved. The function of teaching, judging, and promulgating tradition falls to the activity of the magisterium. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Louis Billot, S.J. ­(1846–1931) adopted Franzelin’s notion of tradition in the midst of the Modernist crisis within the Catholic Church. Billot was a different type of thinker than Franzelin, and he was part of a very different generation of Roman professors who taught at the Gregorian. Franzelin had adopted the Scholastic style of writing and its approach to faith and reason. But in substance he was an eclectic theologian who did not see the speculative value of and share his fellow neo-­Thomists’ enthusiasm for Aquinas’s metaphysics.70 He was Ultramontane in his ecclesiology and politics, but also conversant with and influenced by the German theologians of the Catholic Tübingen school, especially Johannes Sebastian von Drey (1777–1853) and Johann Adam Möhler (1796–1838). It’s important ­ to remember that the German Enlightenment had a different tone to it than other European Enlightenments. For example, it lacked the hos­ tility and resentment toward Rome and institutional Catholicism that was found in some figures associated with the French Enlightenment, such as Denis Diderot, Voltaire, and Baron Paul d’Holbach. The tenor of the Romantic renaissance of German Catholicism and its response to the German Enlightenment was also different than French traditionalism’s (Maistre, Bonald, and Lamennais) reaction to the French Enlightenment.

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Of course, Drey and Möhler had been influenced by traditionalism, but they had also read and absorbed the leading German philosophers of their day (Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel) and found themselves in a very different theo-­political context than Catholic theologians in other parts of Europe. They lived, taught, and wrote under a form of Febronianism that limited the authority and influence of the papacy in local affairs and created a unique ecumenical landscape at Tübingen. This allowed Drey and Möhler to integrate the German Romantic sense of history and liberal Protestantism’s subjectivity into their theological method and understanding of the Christian Church. Although he was a Roman theologian at the Gregorian, Franzelin was German in culture and theological vision, and therefore had a keen interest in the early Church and the historical development of doctrine that derived from the influence of Drey and Möhler. The distinction between German and Roman theology in the nineteenth century was real and politically divisive.71 For the most part the difference resided in the approach each took to history and to modern philosophy. In contrast to Franzelin, Billot had “no feel for history and showed little interest in it. Scripture, exegesis, and positive theology were played down in his teaching and writing.”72 He was a neo-­Thomist of the “strict observance.” He was suspicious of integrating non-­Thomistic principles into the Thomist revival of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He was also interested in building a unified speculative system of theology to rival those of modern philosophy. Yet, despite their intellectual, theological, and circumstantial differences, Billot adopted Franzelin’s tradition-­magisterium framework and refashioned it by identifying the rule of faith as the teaching of the magisterium speaking with infallible authority about what is to be believed. This was a considerable development of the thought of Franzelin, who had still ascribed a level of independence to the rule of faith. Indeed, it was a significant shift in emphasis in Western theological thinking about the rule of faith. For perspective, the “rule of faith,” or the “canon of truth,” as Irenaeus liked to call it, was not standardized for the early Church fathers. Of course, it was a structured rule—sometimes Trinitarian—by virtue of the facts of the gospel and the Christian belief in one God, salvation in Christ, and the experience of the Holy Spirit. For early Church fathers it served an important catechetical function by summarizing the heart of the Christian message as catechesis for candidates in preparation for baptism. It

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was also employed polemically by presenting the essential facts and events of the gospel connected with Christ as the activity of God in contrast to a variety of heretical teachings.73 In terms of content and substance, the rule of faith was “not identical with the creeds, nor with Scripture, although it [did not] contradict Scripture. [It was] tradition in the original sense of that word, that is, the faith that [was] handed on from the beginning.”74 Once the New Testament was established it functioned in its postcanonical form as “the norm for its right interpretation.”75 The rule of faith derived its authority intrinsically from the truth of tradition, from what was given in the deposit of faith received from the apostles. Even as early as the writing of Paul’s letters and pastoral epistles (1 Tim. 20 and 2 Tim. 14), the succession, protection, and right interpretation of the deposit of faith was inextricably bound up with the authority of pastors and ministers: “But the rule of faith is the truth given and transmitted, which the pastors only guard, without their magisterium itself being either considered or qualified as a ‘rule of faith.’ ”76 Thus, from Paul to Irenaeus to Vincent of Lérins to the Middle Ages the rule of faith did not mean in content or form the action of the teaching authority (magisterium), nor was it a principle or measure that could be separated from the truth and value of its content.77 It was, by the time Aquinas addressed it in the thirteenth century, a form of theological wisdom prudently governing and guiding the faith of the Church.78 When Billot addressed the problem of tradition and the rule of faith in the early twentieth century, the political, intellectual, and theological landscape of Europe and the Catholic Church’s place within it had changed since Franzelin had worked on it. He published the first edition of his treatise on tradition79 at a time when the permanence and au­thority of tradition in Catholicism seemed to be threatened not externally by vari­ ous forms of nationalism, but internally by misbegotten notions of the development and evolution of doctrine.80 The rule of faith within the new landscape required Billot to develop Franzelin’s tradition-­magisterium approach to tradition. So to identify the rule of faith with the magisterium Billot distinguished between “remote” and “proximate” rules of faith. The remote rule of faith, accessed through textual and documentary evidence, is the infallible preaching and teaching magisterium belonging to the past through apostolic succession. Whereas the proximate rule

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of faith is proximate when the magisterium preaches and teaches in the present.81 In the sense of the remote rule of faith, “Church preaching essentially verifies the formal notion of tradition; that is, the transmission of the revealed doctrine from hand to hand down from the Apostles. It is, I say, tradition in essence.”82 In terms of the proximate rule of faith, Church preaching is still “tradition in so far as it hands on what it explicitly or implicitly received from the fathers, but now tradition is under the precise formality of authoritative teaching clearly proposing and explaining what is necessary to believe and according to the tradition from God’s revelation.”83 Since the rule of faith is the teaching of the infallible magisterium and its authority is derived from the activity of the magisterium, disagreements about doctrine are adjudicated not by looking to that which is believed, but to that which guides belief, the living magisterium, which is the proximate rule of faith.84 What we find in Billot’s account of tradition, then, is that the rule of faith disappears as an objective (passive) tradition distinct from the magisterium and reappears under active tradition as an activity of the magisterium. The living magisterium, which is the means (active) of transmission of tradition and its formal element, is synonymous with tradition. However, John Henry Newman, and Johann Adam Möhler85 before him, believed and argued, for the most part by exploring the thought of the early Church fathers and the practice of the early Church, that the transmission of tradition and its spirit and content was, along with the magisterium, mediated through and active in the ecclesial and liturgical life of the Church. For Möhler, tradition is an intrinsically communicative reality that encompasses the whole of Christianity, including scripture. In fact, without tradition, Möhler writes, “there would be no doctrine of the Church, and no Church, but individual Christians only; no certainty and security, but only doubt and probability.”86 He was able to locate the post-­Tridentine Catholic interpretation of tradition within the context of the Reformation and thus interpret it as the Catholic response to the Reformers’ disjunction between scripture and tradition. Constructively, he was, along with his teacher and colleague Drey, able to adopt liberal Protestant methods and ideas while remaining faithful to the Tridentine decrees and reform. Tradition is the whole consciousness of the Church unfolding and developing in history, the living vital force guided by the

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Spirit that unites the Church in time and is never detached from the gospel message, its subject matter: Tradition is the living word, perpetuated in the hearts of believers. To this sense, as the general sense, the interpretation of Holy Writ is entrusted. The declaration which it pronounces on any controverted subject, is the judgment of the Church; and therefore, the Church is judge in matters of faith (judex controversiarum). Tradition, in the objective sense, is the general faith of the Church through all ages, manifested by outward historical testimonies; in this sense, tradition is usually termed the norma—the standard of Scriptural interpretation–the rule of faith.87 Möhler’s great achievement, then, perhaps on account of his time spent at the University of Berlin attending Schleiermacher’s lectures, was to draw attention to the interior reality of tradition guided by the Spirit. The ecumenical context of Möhler’s theological thinking, especially his debate with his Protestant colleague Ferdinand Christian Bauer, also proved to be important in forming his mature notion of tradition. Late in his career, Möhler emphasized the significance of the external re­ality of tradition. The Church’s authority was not simply an interior, spiritual reality, residing in the individual’s consciousness and her encounter with scripture alone. It was a living, visible reality, an extension of Christ’s body and work that concretely carries on the work of salvation in history: We can never arrive at an external authority, like Christ, by purely spiritual means. . . . As Christ wished to be the adequate authority for all ages, he created, by virtue of his power, something homogeneous to it, and consequently something attesting and representing the same, eternally destined to bring his authority before all generations of men. He established a credible institution, in order to render the true faith in himself perpetually possible. Immediately founded by him, its existence is the de facto proof of what he really was; and in the same way as in his life he made, if I may so speak, the higher truths accessible to the senses, so doth his Church; for she hath sprung immediately out of the vivid intuition of these symbolized truths. Thus, as Christ, in his life, represented under a visible typical form the higher order of the

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world, so the Church doth in like manner; since what he designed in his representation, hath through the Church and in the Church been realized. If the Church be not the authority representing Christ, then all again relapses into darkness, uncertainty, doubt, distraction, unbelief, and superstition; revelation becomes null and void, fails of its real purpose, and must henceforth be even called in question, and finally denied.88 So along with drawing attention to the interior reality of tradition, Möhler’s other great achievement was to unite the subjective, interior (spirit) and the objective, exterior (texts) dimensions of tradition in a theology of communion that showed the Spirit’s action is united with the people’s consciousness and the magisterium’s acts.89 Along with Möhler, the question of tradition for Newman had concrete implications for the life of the Church, as Newman’s research into the Arian controversy led him to discover that in practice the laity was able to preserve the tradition of faith better than the bishops in the fourth century.90 Newman’s English Romantic view of the imagination, as the force that shapes the intellectual and spiritual existences of the human person,91 allowed him to articulate with Victorian eloquence and rhetorical splendor the personal, living, and active role the phenomenon of tradition plays in the life of the Christian.92 The personal, corporate, and dynamic realities of tradition at work in Möhler’s and Newman’s ideas of development brought to the attention of nineteenth-­century Catholic thinkers the underlying tension that had formed between human history and Christian belief.93 A little more than a decade after Newman had died, the Modernist crisis required Catholicism to address this tension, and, in so doing, to revisit its conception of tradition. Modernism confronted Catholicism with the question of how to articulate human history’s relation to tradition and how the former and the latter have shaped Christian belief. Congar notes: “Was tradition reducible to the demands and limitations of history, or does it go beyond them, and if so, how and under what conditions.”94 At a fundamental level, Modernism was the expression of the two powerful and deeply antagonistic forces, tradition (continuity) and modernity (rupture), coming to bear on the intellectual life of late nineteenth-­century Catholicism.95 For many Catholic intellectuals the pressure of these forces, especially as they manifested in the

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historical-­critical methods for reading scripture, overwhelmed the specu­ lative framework available to late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Catholicism.96 In one sense the Modernist crisis constituted an “epistemological crisis”97 in late nineteenth-­century Catholicism, but in another sense it provided the occasion for such thinkers as Blondel to refuse two inadequate accounts of tradition and liberate the spirit of tradition from the demands and limitations of the critical historians and speculative theologians of the early twentieth century.

Three

The Problem of Representation, Scripture, the Rise of Modern Thomism, and Blondel’s Response

In chapter 2 we examined the transformation the concept of tradition underwent during the late medieval period and its effect on the modern notion of tradition. We traced shifts through late medieval theological discourse, the Tridentine decree (“First Decree: Acceptance of the Sacred Books and Apostolic Traditions”), and post-­Tridentine Catholic thought to the First Vatican Council. These shifts had the effect of transforming tradition from a relatively diffuse, ecclesial, and liturgical reality ontologically embodied in various practices to primarily a juridical and bureaucratic reality centralized in institutional authority. In order to have a broader and deeper understanding of the conceptual conditions that gave rise to the modern idea of tradition in Catholicism, the Modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church, and Blondel’s notion of tradition, it is good to pause and introduce the “problem of representation.” This chapter explores the problem of representation as the 59

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category through which we can discern in modernity new forms of rationality, new questions regarding the historical reliability of scripture, and the biblical narratives’ ability to represent historical truth. The problem of representation resides within and animates the tension between history, theology, and tradition, and is intensified by the Modernist crisis in early twentieth-­century Catholicism. It is the conceptual problem Blondel’s notion of tradition will offer a resolution to.

C u lt u r a l a n d Ep i s t e m o lo g i c a l M o d e r n i s m a n d t h e P ro b l e m o f R e p r e s e n tat i o n

The term “modernism” is devilishly difficult to define. In its ecclesiastical context the term was first created and officially used as a broad abstraction in the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis (1907). There it was used to refer to a group of early twentieth-­century Catholic thinkers that had very little in common other than their efforts to avoid the conceptual rigidity of the institutionalized form of neo-­Thomism and its ahistorical epistemology and metaphysics. In the bombastic style that was common for the time, Pius X (1835–1914) and the encyclical writers vehemently condemned modernism in the encyclical as the “synthesis of all heresies.” Since its first official use in the encyclical, the term has been bedeviled by its terminological looseness and beset by its dubious history of usage as the source of much unnecessary suffering in the form of denunciations, censorship, sackings, and excommunications. Any attempt to define modernism, then, requires, in addition to Pascendi’s definition, reference to the late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century neo-­Thomism’s view of orthodoxy and its authoritarian adjudication of it. However, it would be a mistake to see modernism simply as a reaction to the authoritarianism of neo-­Thomism. Many modernists were engaged in what they saw as the necessary intellectual reform of the Church. Many had witnessed nineteenth-­century Catholicism’s tense relationship with liberalism in its different forms, and they found themselves intellectually in a minority position as Catholics. Some heeded Pope Leo XIII’s call for the renewal of the intellectual life of Catholicism, but with a very different understanding of what that renewal entailed. For many it entailed formulating in diverse ways responses to the individualism and subjectivism of

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liberal Protestantism by emphasizing the corporate character of C ­ atholic ecclesiology. Culturally, many modernists were aware of the way in which late nineteenth-­century European society was growing impatient with the early modern hope for a new, progressive, and better period of history the Enlightenment had promised. Intellectual frustration with the Enlightenment’s promises and its notion of reason were palpable in the irrational elements and unconscious dynamics of human life and society that emerged in Freudian psychoanalysis and Nietzsche’s cultural critique of European society. By the late nineteenth century, the Enlightenment project, if there can be said to have been a unified one, seemed to be ending in what George Steiner called “the great ennui.”1 The Romantic promotion of “felt life,” the inner spiritual world, and artistic imagination gave way to “bourgeois torpor,” the “nostalgia for disaster,”2 and disaffection in modernist sensibilities and aesthetics. In the arts, modernism no longer viewed artistic imagination as a vehicle or means to a better so­ciety. Rather, it viewed artistic imagination as strange, elitist, uncommercial, self-­defining, and so on, artistic ac­tivity alone demonstrates a kind of integrity and autonomy foreclosed in bourgeois life. That life, modern life, had become so routinized and blind to itself that a wholly new creative activity was “called for” now. This new form, by being outrageous or obscure, would be resistant to commercialization and mass culture, and would be the only genuine art now possible, an intensely self-­conscious, historical, even philosophical art, however purely “aesthetic” its goals, deeply motivated by an idea of what modernity had become, and by a demand for a finally modern “honesty,” a recognition of the contingency and mutability of human ideals.3 Late nineteenth-­ century European society was epistemically permeated to a depth and extent never seen before by an awareness of what Gary Lease has called the “problem of representation”; that is, the recognition that human attempts to represent reality consistently fail.4 The problem of representation signified that European culture was undergoing the process of becoming “truly” modern. As Lease puts it, “throughout the major areas of cultural activity, from literature and art to politics

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and bureaucracy, [the problem of representation] sent its thunderclap, announcing a change as fundamental as any which western society had yet seen.”5 What was traditionally considered metaphysically self-­evident was no longer presumed. The problem of representation has its roots in the Middle Ages but intensified during the sixteenth-­century Reformation. In Lease’s view, the Reformation’s accomplishment was twofold. First, it managed to contravene a premodern form of Christianity based on an “institutionally administrated revelation” that guaranteed an unobstructed view of the “representation . . . and the reality which it sought.”6 Second, the Reformation proposed an alternative account of the character of revelation as premised on “personal, individual experience, and not a proclamation based on authority,” the former acting as the guarantor of the authenticity of representation.7 Lease is right in observing that the Reformation broke with pre-­ Reformation Christianity by offering a fundamentally new approach to Christian revelation. However, one challenge to articulating the Reformation’s new approach to revelation is to avoid characterizing the pre-­ Reformation view of revelation too simplistically as centralized and bureaucratically administered. Such a view of the pre-­Reformation approach forms a useful contrast to the Reformation’s new approach, but scholars have observed that the pre-­Reformation view of revelation was more diffuse and less centralized and bureaucratically administered than is often assumed.8 The pre-­Reformation approach to revelation manifested itself through various commentaries on scripture and a complex of liturgical customs, practices, and guilds embodied by pre-­Reformation Christians.9 If a simplistic view of the pre-­Reformation approach to revelation constitutes one challenge to understanding the Reformation’s role in the problem of representation, accurately characterizing the Reformation’s new approach to revelation forms the other. The temptation to reduce the Reformation’s new approach to revelation to a monochromatic rejection of institutional authority is problematic.10 To be sure, the Reformation did reject the institutional authority over the mediation and representation of revelation the late medieval Church arrogated to itself. But the Reformation’s break with the Church’s institutional authority was not as clean and clear as it is often purported to be.11 A more decisive break is clearly identifiable in Martin Luther’s younger contemporaries, specifically John Calvin, and it is most salient in Calvin’s Institutes (1536).12

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Whereas Calvin allots no role to the institutional church in the representation and mediation of revelation and the interpretation of scripture, the early Luther does so by reading scripture in dialogue with Augustine, the Glossa interlinearis and Glossa ordinaria.13 Still, Lease’s account of the Reformation’s new approach to revelation, its decisive break with the late medieval Church’s institutionally administered and mediated form of revelation, and the modern problem of representation bring into relief an epistemic current that surfaces in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The eminent philosopher Charles Taylor has detected in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a current drifting toward self-­sufficient certainty and a reorientation of the problem of representation as a problem of radical reflexivity that is located in the subject. Taylor observes that in the premodern view, a preponderance of epistemic meaning resided in the object known, what Taylor calls its “ontic logos,” or its role in the order of being. However, in the modern view, beginning with Descartes, epistemic meaning is resituated to reside exclusively in the subject (the knower).14 What emerges from this new “locali­ zation” of meaning in the mind of the subject is a form of rationality in which the subject (the knower) is disengaged from the world (the object known), requiring the subject (the knower) to construct a representational view of the world (the object known) and impose it upon the world (the object known) to render the world intelligible. The shift in modernity initiates the process of disengagement and epistemic internalization, “Inwardness” to use Taylor’s word, which reconfigures human rationality by situating the knower over against the object known and requiring the knower to construct a representational view of the world. This shift inward and the “disengaged self ” that emerges in modernity come to expression in Taylor’s work A Secular Age through the categories “Buffered” and “Porous” selves as part of the (Weberian) cultural narrative of modern disenchantment.15 In modernity, then, knowledge is seen as the “correct representation of an independent reality.”16 Thus, the problem of representation is, in addition to being a cultural process of modernization, an epistemic process by which human rationality is reconfigured. Human rationality is reconfigured from the ancient view, which joined the subject (the knower) and the object (the object known) together in one fluid movement of understanding, to the modern view of human rationality in which the subject (the knower) stands “over against the object.”17

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Descartes brings about the transformation of reason or, better put, its instrumentalization, and, in doing so, brings the first stage of modernity to a close,18 but the problem of representation is advanced decisively in the eighteenth century with Immanuel Kant’s exploration of our knowledge of the appearance of objects in the world. In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781),19 Kant maps the workings of reason’s internal mechanisms of our knowledge concerning the appearance of these objects in the world by examining how “synthetic a priori judgments” (speculative metaphysics) are possible. The point of the First Critique is to question not whether we can have knowledge of objects in the world, but rather how it is that we have knowledge of objects in the world. For Kant, representation could be called a problem only in the sense of the question of how it is that we come to have knowledge of objects in the world. What need not be determined, Kant thinks, is whether one can have knowledge of objects in the world at all. Instead, for Kant, speculative metaphysics, though necessary for all thought as the principle of completeness that brings supreme unity to conceptual knowledge, fails to conceive of a world beyond appearances as the realm of true being, entangling itself in antinomies as it attempts to cull fragments of human experience into a totality of all appearances and make objective statements about the totality. Kant unveils the specious claims of metaphysical ideas, relegates them to a regulative function of all thought, and in so doing transforms the Western philosophical horizon by rendering dubious what much of that horizon took to be the main referent between representation and reality: God.20 Kant accomplishes this shift in Western thought by proffering a theory of truth detached from a doctrine of creation and grounded in the understanding that human reason supplies the categories for the possibility of truth, a theory, according to Heidegger, in contrast to the medieval Christian conception of truth in which the grounds for the possibility of truth reside in created beings’ participation in the Creator’s divine plan of creation.21 In his study of the cultural and intellectual climates within which Roman Catholic modernism was produced, Lease argues that Roman Catholic modernism was born in the midst of the phenomenon of European modernism by making the counterclaim that “what you can’t see is actually what you get.”22 Less than a century after the publication of the First Critique, Kant’s account of speculative metaphysics showed up on the Catholic theological radar when the First Vatican Council’s

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“Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith” (Dei filius) conceived of the act of faith by avoiding the Scylla of rationalism and Charybdis of fideism.23 Dei filius drew on the Scholastic distinction of the duplex ordo cognitionis in such a way that the basic rationality and the supernatural origin of the act of faith remained distinct yet related and intact. This distinction without disagreement between divine faith and natural reason at the First Vatican Council, however, did not fare as well in the modernist crisis. Whereas the First Vatican Council sought to preserve the unity in distinction between faith and reason, this relationship was often interpreted in the modernist period in ways that suggested these two were at odds with each other.24 This interpretation, in which the natural and the supernatural are unfolded as antithetical to each other was, according to Gabriel Daly, never the intent of the First Vatican Council.25 The problem of representation, then, is more than the cultural phenomenon of European modernism. It is the category through which one can trace the epistemological shifts Western thought underwent in modernity and the consequent reshaping of the Christian concept of reve­ lation that occurs during the transformation into the modern period. It also serves as an entrée into the modern interpretive history of scripture as a form of revelation distinct from tradition. As the problem of representation brought about new forms of rationality, new questions regarding the historical reliability of scripture and the biblical narratives’ ability to represent historical truth occupied a considerable share of modern exegetical inquiry. In fact, the rise of historical criticism as a common exegetical practice of the nineteenth century signaled that the notion of tradition no longer constituted a reliable exegetical referent in the representation and mediation of scripture. Instead, the preponderance of meaning in scripture derived from the process of representing the text in its original cultural and ideational context.

S c r i pt u r e a n d t h e P ro b l e m o f R e p r e s e n tat i o n

The problem of representation manifests itself in the transition in exegetical referents the reading of scripture undergoes from the biblical story read literally, as referring to actual historical occurrences, to reading a passage of a text of the Bible literally, as evidence that it is a reliable historical report.

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Hans Frei has claimed that this transition marks a new stage in the history of interpretation and the dawn of historical criticism.26 On the Continent, the seeds for this transition were planted in the seventeenth century with Benedict de Spinoza and Johannes Cocceius, in the eighteenth century with Johann Bengel, and in England by such figures as Thomas Hobbes, Charles Blount, and Matthew Tindal, among many others.27 At this time there is a considerable effort toward establishing the factual truth or falsity of the biblical stories and a serious effort toward determining the biblical stories’ meaning. It is at this point that the trajectory of biblical interpretation alters. Whereas prior to modernity, extrabiblical events and experience were incorporated into the biblical narrative and made accessible, in modernity the biblical events and stories themselves are called into question insofar as they can be corroborated in the “real world.” In the precritical reading of scripture, many of the biblical stories took place within history (time) but narrated different sequences and parts of history that needed to fit together in one linear and comprehensive narrative. The interpretative device to accomplish this task was figuration, or the figural reading of scripture. The figural meaning of scripture was the interpretative means by which earlier biblical stories figure or function as types of later stories. Figural interpretation establishes a connection between two events or persons, the first of which signifies not only itself but also the second, while the second encompasses or fulfills the first. The two poles of the figure are separate in time, but both, being real events or figures, are within time, within the stream of historical life. Only the understanding of the two persons or events is a spiritual act, but this spiritual act deals with concrete events whether past, present, or future, and not with concepts or abstractions; these are quite secondary, since promise and fulfillment are real historical events, which have either happened on the incarnation of the Word, or will happen in the second coming.28 There is a correlation between the figural reading of scripture and its allegorical interpretation. Since in the figural interpretation one thing stands for the other, it is “allegorical” in the broadest sense of the term. The figural reading of scripture was often mixed with allegorical and ethical interpretations, and at times in its etymology the term figura was used

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to express the allegorical interpretation of scripture. But the difference between the figural and allegorical readings is present in the precritical readings of scripture. As Erich Auerbach observes, the figural interpretation “differs from most of the allegorical forms known to us by the historicity both of the sign and what it signifies.”29 The difference manifested itself early on in early Church figures such as Tertullian and Origen, but the tension has lingered throughout the centuries: “The difference between Tertullian’s more historical and realistic interpretation and Origen’s ethical, allegorical approach reflects a current conflict, known to us from other Christian sources: one party strove to transform the events of the New and still more of the Old Testament into purely spiritual happenings, to ‘spirit away’ their historical character—the other wished to preserve the full historicity of the Scriptures along with deeper meaning.”30 The difference between the two readings was palpable in each reading’s treatment of the historical character of the figures and events in scripture. Although Origen’s method of allegorical interpretation maintained its influence in the following centuries and into the Middle Ages, the figural interpretation of scripture and its desire to preserve the historicity of the scripture was the leading form of interpretation of scripture in the Western Christian tradition. For Frei, the figural reading was “a way of turning a variety of biblical books into a single, unitary canon, one that embraced in particular the differences between Old and New Testaments.”31 But in the transition from the precritical to critical reading of scripture, the figural interpretation of scripture collapses: Figural reading, to the degree that it had been an extension of literal interpretation in the older kind of realistic, narrative reading, was now bound to look to historical-­critical eyes like a preposterous historical argument, and it rapidly lost credibility. In the past, one of its chief uses had been as a means for unifying the canon; it had not simply been an awkward historical proof-­text. Its breakdown upon being introduced into the arena of historical argument and demonstration was accompanied by a similar failure as an instrument for uniting the Bible. Historical critics were concerned with specific texts and specific historical circumstances. The unity of the Bible across millennia of differing cultural levels and conditions in any case seemed a tenuous, indeed

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a dubious hypothesis to them. But if it were to be demonstrated, it would have to be done by an argument other than a historical claim to specific miraculous fulfillment of the Old Testament sayings and events in the New Testament. The figural reading broke down not only as a means of locating oneself and one’s world vis-­à-­vis the biblical narratives; in addition, it was forced to become a historical-­factual argument in favor of the unity of the canon—and a poor one at that.32 In this transition the literal reading comes to mean the grammatical and lexical exactness in estimating the original sense of the text for its original audience and the coincidence of the description with how the facts occurred. The realistic reading becomes associated with how accurate the written description was when matched to the probable historical reconstruction. In other words, biblical commentators failed to understand a key feature of the biblical narratives: their realistic shape. Most commentators, particularly those influenced by historical criticism, confused the “realistic” element of the biblical narratives by identifying it with the historical likelihood of the stories. Frei notes: In both affirmative and negative cases, the confusion of history-­ likeness (literal meaning) and history (ostensive reference), and the hermeneutical reduction of the former to an aspect of the latter, meant that one lacked the distinctive category and the appropriate interpretive procedure for understanding what one had actually recognized: the high significance of the literal, narrative shape of the stories for their meaning. And so, one might add, it has by and large remained ever since.33 The narrative shape of the biblical stories assumes that the intelligibility and the meaning of the narratives, that is, what they are about and how they make sense, are dependent upon the narrative rendering and depiction of the events that constitute the narrative themselves. For example, “that the gospel story is about Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah means that it narrates the way his status came to be enacted.”34 That is, the realistic narrative requires that the character, the character’s subjectivity, his actions and agency, and the external circumstances of the narrative in which he is depicted, including the social setting, be read together. It need

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not refer to something else more real or more significant than the character and his social setting. The character and his circumstances are not a “carnal shadow” of some reality more significant. But during modernity this hermeneutical option is left unexplored and eventually cast aside in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the realistic narrative rendering of the biblical stories, the subject matter and narrative rendering (text) are inseparable. Even for early reformers such as Calvin and Luther the choice between subject matter and text was secondary rather than a distinction in principle. For both the literal and grammatical meaning was identical with the text’s subject matter and doctrinal content. Scripture was viewed primarily as a literal and figurative, not an allegorical, description, of reality. Second, it made re­ality accessible through its narrative. This reading of scripture was possible for Luther and Calvin, Frei suggests, because the correlation between the explicative (literal) sense and the historical reference of texts rested on the narrative and not on a linguistic theory of reference in which nouns name and stand in the conceptual place of things they refer to. The key point to Frei’s argument is that the literal and figurative reading belonged together by need of mutual supplementation in the precritical era. In the critical era the literal (explicative) sense becomes identical with the actual historical reference. When the literal (explicative) sense and historical are separated, as they are in the critical era, the literal and figurative readings of scripture separate and begin to clash. This clash is evident in Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-­politicus (1670). Here in Spinoza’s work the subject matter of scripture now becomes the religious lesson(s) it conveys and not the events it narrates. The meaning of the scriptural narratives does not lie in their historical truth. In the Spinozan distinction between the literal meaning and historical reference, and narrative form and subject matter, we see the origins of modern exegesis that will distinguish between scripture (revelation) and knowledge of God. Frei’s account brings into sharper focus how in the transition from the precritical to critical age the narrative of scripture itself no longer is able to represent the history it depicts. By the end of the nineteenth century the distinction between scripture as revelation and scripture as knowledge of God occupied a central place in modern hermeneutics as exegetes made it a common practice to seek an ostensive referent outside of the subject matter of scripture in order to render it intelligible. The

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distinction between revelation and reason that lies at the heart of modern exegesis was blurred in much modern Catholic theology in an effort to overcome the antagonistic relationship the realities of faith and reason had fallen into. In large part it is on account of Thomism’s ability to prevent the gradual elision of the former by the latter that by the late nineteenth century Thomism was able to present itself as the only form of Catholic theology able to articulate a response to modern reason’s challenge to faith. From the ecclesial, political, and intellectual events that transformed modern Europe, the Thomistic revival of the nineteenth century emerged as the speculative resolution to the problem of representation that plagued the intellectual life of modern Catholicism.

T h e R i s e o f M o d e r n T h o m i s m a n d t h e P ro b l e m o f R e p r e s e n tat i o n

In the 1960s the intellectual historian Peter Gay characterized key figures of the Enlightenment as antireligious. Under a section entitled “The Tension with Christianity,” Gay portrayed their view of Christianity this way: Some time late in the first century of our era, an insidious force began to insinuate itself into the mentality of the Roman Empire. Slyly exploiting men’s fears and anxieties and offering grandiose promises of eternal salvation, Christianity gradually subverted the self-­reliant paganism that had sustained the ruling class. . . . Christianity claimed to bring light, hope, and truth, but its central myth was incredible, its dogma a conflation of rustic superstitions, its sacred book an incoherent collection of primitive tales, its church a cohort of servile fanatics as long as they were out of power and of despotic fanatics once they had seized control.35 Gay’s depiction of the main Enlightenment figures as disaffected from Christianity and of the Enlightenment period as a unified, secular project was the master narrative that dominated accounts of modernity until recently, when historians recognized only a radical minority of Enlighteners were hostile to religion.36 This is not to suggest that Enlighteners were uncritical of Christianity, unwary of excessive piety and superstition

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within Christianity, and regularly attended church. But Enlighteners such as the Jewish philosopher and lens-­grinder Benedict de Spinoza, the Protestant philosopher Pierre Bayle, and the French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot were the principal figures of the materialist, demo­ cratic, and antitheological “radical” Enlightenment that favored absolute freedom of thought. However, in the middle of the Enlightenment “spectrum” were the conventional figures Isaac Newton, René Descartes, John Locke, Montesquieu, Gottfried Leibniz, and Christian Wolff, all of whom were in some form Christian, believed in divine providence, the immortality of the soul, the divine and absolute origin of morality, and the special role of Christ. And in addition to radical and conventional, there were religious Enlighteners on the Enlightenment spectrum.37 Religious Enlighteners, including Catholic Enlighteners other than counter-­Enlightenment traditionalists such as Joseph de Maistre and Louis Bonald,38 often drew on moderate, mainstream Enlightenment figures such as Newton, Descartes, and Locke for philosophical inspiration. At the end of the seventeenth century, Catholic Enlighteners such as Nicholas Malebranche and Thomas White were engaged with rationalists such as Spinoza. By the eighteenth century, Catholics were challenging David Hume’s skepticism, and in France they were steeped in conversation with both the deism of Voltaire and Rousseau and with the atheism of Paul d’Holbach.39 In place of faith untempered by reason (dogmatism and unthinking enthusiasm) and reason untempered by faith (skepticism and rationalism), Catholic Enlightenment thought was characterized by “reasonableness,” a balance between faith and reason. Inspired by the new discoveries in science and philosophy and motivated by the reforms of the Council of Trent, Catho­lic Enlighteners used the Enlightenment criteria of reason to explore, teach, and refine faith and belief, and at the same time revelation, tradition, and the testimony of scripture were recognized as authoritative.40 Catholic Enlighteners saw a distinction between truths known by reason and the truths known by divine revelation, but they also recognized that there were truths of revelation that were above or inaccessible to reason, but still in harmony with reason. Catholicism’s rich, diverse, and prolific engagement with the Enlightenment came to an end in 1789 when the French Revolution and the events that transpired from it disillusioned many Catholics of the prospect of reconciling the values of modernity with Christianity. In a packed

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and poignant passage explaining the impact of the French Revolution and its aftermath on Catholicism’s relationship to the Enlightenment, Ulrich Lehner writes: After all, the Revolution had mercilessly persecuted Catholics who did not succumb to the state’s new church, murdered a hundred thousand Catholic peasants in the Vendée, and attempted to replace Chris­ tianity with a cult of reason. Every crime the revolutionary government committed was attributed to “the” Enlightenment. Throughout the world, intellectuals distanced themselves from the once-­adored intellectual revolution. A conservative reaction set in. This alone would not have stopped the reform of the church, but the Revolution, because it spawned Napoleon, also meant the beginning of the end of the close alliance of church and state throughout Europe. When Napoleon occupied the Rhineland he enabled the German princes to dissolve all monasteries in 1802–1803, by then strongholds of the Enlightenment, and seized all Catholic institutions of higher learning. The church lost its intellectual bastions, its charity organizations, its religious orders, and its bishoprics. Pope Pius VI had died a prisoner of Napoleon in 1799, and in 1802 it looked as if his successor would share this same fate. But, being deprived of leadership, Catholics looked upon Napoleon’s prisoner as the new moral authority who could lead the church after the failure of local bishops and prelates. The rest is history.41 It should come as no surprise, then, that by the nineteenth century the majority of Catholic theologians considered their common intellectual enemy to be the forms of rationalism that emerged from the European Enlightenments, since each, in their own ways, now disavowed politically, intellectually, and morally the claims of Christian revelation in the minds of Catholics.42 By the nineteenth century, Catholic theologians were faced with two main philosophical problems. On the one hand, they faced the reduction of religious claims to postulates of pure practical reason, the “terms for peace” dictated by Kant to theologians, as Karl Barth once remarked.43 On the other hand, they needed to show how the act of faith remained possible in light of Kant’s critique of speculative metaphysics, which, in turn, required them to preserve the free and authentic character of that act without compromising its supernatural character.

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Also troubling for theologians was how to offer an adequate response to the various Enlightenment critiques of revelation.44 This challenge required them to attend to the historical nature of revelation without succumbing to an account of faith that dissolved into fideism or historicism. Gerald McCool observes: “Faith and Kantian reason, the tradition of positive Christian revelation and Hegelian speculative reason: these were the antitheses which the philosophers and theologians of the Catho­lic revival had to try to reconcile.”45 Three different responses to rationalism emerged in the nineteenth century: (1) strict traditionalism that sought to argue that unaided reason was unable to arrive with certainty at any conclusions about religious and moral issues; (2) post-­Kantian idealism, such as Schelling’s philosophy or Hegel’s dialectic employed theologically, as Johnann Sebastian von Drey, Johann Adam Möhler, and the Tübingen school had done; (3) the inchoate yet burgeoning neo-­Thomism movement. For neo-­Thomism, “the negative conclusions which the rationalists had reached concerning the credibility of the Christian mysteries were the logical consequence of applying modern philosophy to religion and morals.”46 That is to say, the conclusions of modern philosophies need not necessarily be true, since they are the logical outcome of the antagonism toward religion intrinsic to all modern philosophy. Indeed, no modern philosophy “could provide a sound solution for the problem of faith and reason, and any attempt to correct and adapt them in the hope that they could do so was doomed in advance to failure.”47 Although in most cases the project of reconciling Catholicism to modern philosophy may have been destined to fail, much of the intellectual impotence of Catholicism in the latter half of the nineteenth century can be attributed to Pius IX’s early affection for liberalism and later disaffection from liberal ideas, and his exile from Rome and eventual return, all of which, according to James Hennesey, set in motion a political and an ecclesiological reaction by the Vatican that proved debilitating to the intellectual life of the Church.48 Pius IX’s emphasis on authority, though not unwarranted given his predecessor’s (Gregory XVI) condemnation of the attempts of Féli­cité de Lamennais and his followers to reinvigorate French Catholicism by adopting some of the democratic principles of the Revolution, may have given some people reason to pause, particularly those who assumed he harbored some affection for liberal ideals. Whatever fondness Pius IX

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may have held for political liberalism officially ended in 1854 when the dogma of the Immaculate Conception was decreed, without a doubt as a reflection of his genuine Marian piety, but also as a “political statement of the first order,” implying “sin-­weakened man was incapable of self-­government,” according to one author.49 Ten years later Pius IX reaffirmed this view in the 1864 Syllabus of Errors, arguing political liberalism offered an attenuated account of civic life when it envisaged this life free from the Church’s authoritative voice. He reasserted the Church’s authoritative voice in the First Vatican Council’s definition of papal infallibility in the document Pastor aeternus (1870). These documents, along with their theological rhetoric and virtue, contain political gestures signaling the Vatican was becoming increasingly isolated in the latter part of the nineteenth century from the traditional centers of European power, and the preponderance of intellectual value in Catholicism seemed to be assigned to “simple certitudes guaranteed by authority.”50 Theologically, Pius IX’s emphasis on authority was expressed in an unprecedented spate of condemnations in Catholic theology that spanned eleven years, between 1855 and 1866. For the most part this Roman intervention was an expression of the Church’s reaction to political liberalism and liberalism’s anticlerical thrust.51 In its defensive reaction to anticlerical liberalism in the nineteenth century, the Church practiced an unstated policy of appointing bishops whose ecclesiological sympathies were Ultramontane rather than Febronian or Gallican.52 In so doing, Catholic theological education throughout Europe was consolidated within the walls of the Vatican, which in turn advanced the role of such Roman congregations as the Congregation of the Holy Office and the Congregation of the Index in the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century.53 It is out of the larger political events in Europe and the Church’s reaction to them that the neo-­Thomist movement and its prominent role in adjudicating orthodoxy was born, consolidated in a few leaders such as Joseph Kleutgen and Matteo Liberatore, who, as influential Roman theologians of the congregation’s tribunals, advanced Thomism as a unitary theological system for Catholicism. Thomism’s power and influence in the late nineteenth century was achieved in large part by Kleutgen’s and Liberatore’s concerted campaign through the influential German review Der Katholik and the Italian review La Civiltà Cattolica to expose

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as philosophically and theologically specious Louis Eugène Marie Bautain’s traditionalism, Antonio Rosmini-­ Serbati’s, Vincenzo Gioberti’s, and Anton Günther’s ontologism, Georg Hermes’s semirationalism, and a French form of Cartesian scholasticism.54 At the same time, they strove to present Thomism as a system capable of adequately addressing the most salient problem facing modern theology: the problem of faith and reason. However, to suggest that the neo-­Thomist movement was born of and sustained by ruthless ecclesial politics alone would be misleading. To be sure, it was.55 But the neo-­Thomist critique of rival nineteenth-­century theological systems was, to a certain degree, warranted. The “essentialism” of the neo-­Thomist’s argument was the speculative key to its account. The noun “essentialism” denoted the Aristotelian/Thomistic notion that, prescinding from the distinction between what an object is and how it is, the identity of an object can be determined through its substance-­essence. It is important to be mindful of the historical context of neo-­Thomist essentialism, however. While still drawing on Aristotelian metaphysics, it was responding to the mind/body dualism of Descartes, the empiricism of Hobbes, Locke, and Hume, and the idealism of Kant, all of which in their respective ways challenged the intellect’s direct engagement with reality and the possibility of it being receptive to the forms of external substances. This historical context shaped and formed how various neo-­ Thomist thinkers read and formulated their interpretations of Aquinas, and how they argued against the other conceptual frameworks in Catholi­ cism. The neo-­Thomist’s argument against these other systems (traditionalism, ontologism, and post-­Kantian idealism) focused on its own claim to preserve the distinction between philosophy (reason, nature) and theology (faith, grace) in its theory of knowledge, where others failed to and often obscured the ontological distinction between the two. In the case of the traditionalists and ontologists, this confusion of orders had it roots in the division of the intellect into discursive reason (Verstand) and intuitive reason (Vernuft), where the former attends to the appearance of objects in the world and the latter has access to metaphysical realities through the intuitive apprehension of the intellect.56 The Cartesian and post-­Kantian theories of knowledge espoused by the traditionalists and ontologists did precisely what the neo-­Thomists thought they ought not to have done, namely, they grounded their first principles of knowledge in the intuition of God, shattering the metaphysical unity of man and

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nature and dissolving the necessary distinction between philosophy and theology.57 Once they accepted the Cartesian cogito as their metaphysical point of origin, they committed themselves too deeply to the modern problem of representation of knowledge obtained through the senses and, consequently, they were required to turn to the category of intuition as the objective first principle of their metaphysic.58 The chief flaw of such a metaphysic and of all of modern philosophy was its individualistic account of reason inherently juxtaposed to the Church’s authoritative teaching tradition. The only remedy to the pathology of modern philosophy and its malignant influence on Catholicism was for Catholicism to excise modern philosophy from its intellectual tradition and rebuild itself on the Scholastic period’s clear distinction between the natural and the revealed knowledge of God.

L e o X III a n d t h e T h o m i s t i c R e v i va l

The Thomistic renewal of Catholicism during the Leonine papacy (1878–1903) saw itself as the epistemological alternative to the encroaching secularism of the modern world. Leo’s vision for the Roman renewal of Thomism at the end of the nineteenth century extended beyond the purview of seminary curricula; it imagined implementing an objective and immutable order in the modern world, for which the Church would be gatekeeper and Thomistic philosophy the key to its implementation.59 The neo-­Thomists saw the problem of modernity as one “grand system,” as Joseph Komonchak observes, to which the only suitable response was to offer an alternative “grand system”: Thomism.60 The Leonine encyclical Aeterni patris (1879) was an attempt to rehabilitate the listless intellectual life of Catholic seminaries and universities, which seemed to lend itself disproportionately to fideism, while, on the other hand, it sought to protect seminarians from the rationalism pervading secular philosophy. Aeterni patris has been described incorrectly as a “call to return to scholastic philosophy in general,” when, in fact, it was a “summons to return to the philosophy of Aquinas simpliciter.”61 That is, Leo’s call to return to Aquinas simpliciter meant a return “tout court to the thirteenth century,” embracing “the cultural and scientific limitations” this return naturally entailed in the nineteenth century.62 The form

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of Thomistic thought that the Leonine revival of Thomistic philosophy embodied through the latter half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries found it difficult to manage the tension between the elements of the past and those of the future, a tension managed so masterfully by Aquinas himself in his ability to allow “not only elements of the past but also those of the future [to] have room in his thought; either by being able to incorporate the new into [his thought] or by being fruitful enough to let [his thought] be transformed by the new.”63 That neo-­ Thomism found it difficult to navigate this tension between the past and the future is, one can argue, a consequence of its inability to understand the capacious character and the multiple traditions that Aquinas inherited and worked within—and to understand its own tradition. Neo-­Thomism’s failure to grasp the multiple traditions in which Aquinas worked is evident in the thought of Joseph Kleutgen, who by all accounts is the most brilliant, well-­reputed, and influential nineteenth-­ century interpreter of Aquinas. Following Francisco Suárez’s interpretation, Kleutgen committed himself to a reading of Aquinas that bracketed the historical context and doctrinal development of Aquinas’s thought. As Alasdair MacIntyre writes, Kleutgen “was lacking in adequate appreci­ ation both of what it meant for Aquinas that he worked within not merely one but two inherited traditions and of what in general it is to do philosophical and theological work within a tradition.”64 To be sure, Kleutgen’s thought embodies a sense of tradition. Yet his sense of tradition is the “socially transmitted and primaevally linguistic embodiment of knowledge” that fails to be mindful of the embeddedness of language and also the temporal nature of philosophical speculation.65 The virtue of Kleutgen’s reading of Aquinas comes to expression in his keen understanding of the conclusions Aquinas draws for theology and the philosophical language that guides Aquinas’s thought to these conclusions. Yet this virtue too is sullied by Kleutgen’s inadequate appreciation of the conceptual context that regulates Aquinas’s philosophical grammar, the grammar that renders Aquinas’s conclusions intelligible. Furthermore, Kleutgen fails to appreciate that the practice of philosophy for Aquinas is a process of “conceptual clarification, analysis, and description,” requiring him “to draw upon the resources of, to correct and to modify, and to integrate into [his] own account, the various relevant arguments and considerations advanced by a variety of writers within the Augustinian and Aristotelian

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traditions.”66 Instead of placing Aquinas within the traditions of inquiry he inherits, embodies in his discourse, and unpacks further for succeeding generations to engage, Kleutgen “treats Aquinas as presenting a finished system whose indebtedness to earlier writers is no more than an accidental feature of it.”67 The upshot of Kleutgen’s interpretation is to import epistemological questions into Aquinas’s thought such that Aquinas, in MacIntyre’s words, is “presented as the author of one more system confronting the questions of Cartesian and post-­Cartesian epistemology,” while still an author offering a more faithful and a more logical response to the modern problem of representation than Descartes and Kant.68 Kleutgen’s thought offers us an example of the form of Thomism the Leonine revival of Thomistic philosophy embodied at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. More importantly, it provides us the immediate theological and philosophical context for Blondel’s thought. Leo XIII’s “grand vision,” as it came to expression in the thought of thinkers such as Kleutgen, to renew the impoverished intellectual life of nineteenth-­century Catholicism constitutes the dominant form of early twentieth-­century Catholic speculative theology against which thinkers such as Loisy would react, and it was the principal form of thought whose shortcomings Blondel’s notion of tradition would attempt to correct.

Four

Tradition, History, and the Intellectual Life of Nineteenth-­Century Catholicism The Methodological Conflict between Blondel and Loisy

At the end of the nineteenth century, the force of Joseph Kleutgen’s interpretation of Aquinas and its influence upon the intellectual life of the Catholic Church came to bear most heavily on those Catholic intellectuals whose academic boundaries extended beyond the disciplines of theology and philosophy. For scripture scholars and Church historians in particular, the Thomistic renewal of philosophy, Aeterni patris, and four years later the letter on historical studies, Saepenumero considerantes (1883), made life for those immersed in the intellectual life of the Church and sympathetic to intellectual developments outside of the Church complicated and, at times, intractable. For along with the ecclesial politics that accompanied these documents, the positivistic sciences themselves were presented in a subordinate manner. In keeping with the Scholastic method of distinguishing between speculative and practical philosophy (metaphysics and natural philosophy), the positivistic sciences 79

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were regarded under the auspices of philosophy and in premodern terms (as Aquinas had considered them following Aristotle) as designating a number of disciplines whose subject matter may vary but whose formal object (human reason) is the same. Contrary to the sovereignty the positivistic sciences had enjoyed for the previous two or three hundred years, they were construed as prolegomena (preparation) for the reception of divine revelation when rightly used.1 For those Catholic scholars familiar with and sympathetic to modern critical theory, this account of the relationship between theology and philosophy provoked the question whether one could continue to be an orthodox Catholic and a practitioner of modern critical methods given the trajectory the Church’s intellectual life appeared to be on with the Thomistic renewal.2 It is in the context of these seemingly incompatible positions that Blondel’s account of tradition and his understanding of the relationship between theology and history emerged. This chapter explores how Blondel’s main interlocutor in History and Dogma, Alfred Loisy ­(1857–1940), understood the relationship between theology and history, and how Loisy understood and interpreted John Henry Newman ­(1801–90). Newman wrote and thought in a culture where the tension between Christianity and modernity was not as deeply felt as it was for Loisy, but at stake for Loisy and Newman was how to think about change and what must be determinative in adjudicating change in tradition. Here, in Newman’s emphasis on continuity and Loisy’s insistence on innovation, we encounter two competing resolutions to the problem of representation in the phenomenon of tradition.

T h e I n t e l l e c t ua l L i f e o f N i n e t e e n t h - ­C e n t u ry F r e n c h C at h o l i c i s m

By the end of the nineteenth century, the power the Church wielded over important French ideational and cultural institutions had waned as a consequence of the concerted effort by anticlerical forces throughout the tenure of the Third Republic. As the Church’s presence in French institutions decreased, it tended to react by increasingly insulating itself from the developments of the modern world as they came to expression in the intellectual life of France. While the Church was finding itself becoming

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more and more isolated from the progress of the modern world, the modern world continued to foster a laicized intellectual life designed to develop in ways that were self-­consciously secular. In France this relationship was made even more complex by the ideational, cultural, and institutional transformation France was undergoing at the end of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the Third Republic, the Church in France, in part as a result of the Napoleon Concordat of 1801, occupied an important and influential space in the French educational system and exercised a considerable amount of influence over French culture, politics, and the daily lives of French citizens.3 But the Third Republic’s “laic laws,” passed by anticlerical republicans in an attempt “to fortify and secularize the national schools so that they might successfully compete against, if not surpass, the rapidly growing Catholic educational system,”4 loosened the grip the Catholic Church had on the French higher and secondary education system. The most important provision of these laws mandated that state faculties alone were to confer degrees. Students attending “free” universities were required to choose between examinations by state faculties or by a so-­called mixed jury, made up of members of the state faculty and members from the candidate’s faculty, with the presiding officer always being a state faculty member. For Catholic institutions the “law restricted the freedom of instruction, [since] the curriculum and methods were naturally determined to some extent by the examination which concluded the course.”5 As part of the educational reforms of the Third Republic, zealous anticlerical republicans supported historians in France’s secular universities conversant with and sympathetic to critical methods.6 Such unwritten policies afforded anticlerical republicans the opportunity to tout vicariously the republican platform.7 It also advanced the anti-­Catholic policies put forward during the Third Republic and, in turn, increasingly complicated the lives of Catholic historians, many of whom found themselves in the unfortunate position of balancing the competing interests of republican policies, often stridently anti-­Catholic, with the doctrinal claims of the Church.8 Although the Catholic intellectual scene in the early and mid-­ nineteenth century was philosophically eclectic with moments of spiritual and intellectual rejuvenation (e.g., Chateaubriand’s Le Génie du Christianisme in 1802), Catholic seminaries in the nineteenth century were

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“above all schools of virtue” in which seminarians were transformed into “high-­minded, hardworking, and personally austere” clergy in preparation for life in a parish where they would say Mass and administer the sacraments.9 They were, Marvin O’Connell writes, “places of professional preparation, not research centers.” Seminaries offered little to no intellectual content. Not only were secular thinkers such as Kant, Comte, and Hume strictly avoided, but even intellectual engagements with theological sources as weighty as Aquinas, Bonaventure, and Duns Scotus were seen to be unnecessary. The natural and social sciences, literature, and Christian art were all equally ignored. The study of scripture and the early Church fathers were reduced to corroborating doctrinal propositions contained in manuals.10 In short, the seminarian’s day consisted of “liturgical and private prayer, some manual labor, some organized games, attention to minute observance of the rule as a means of harnessing the will and the passions, and a good deal of idleness.”11 As a result, “where philosophy flourished, Catholic faith was absent. [And] where the Catho­lic faith was sustained, philosophy failed to flourish.”12 That the intellectual life of seminaries in France in the nineteenth century had reached its nadir was perhaps a symptom of a broader intellectual malaise appearing in Catholicism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.13 But, often lost in this narrative of Catholicism, in large part because of the quantity of condemnations at this time, is the “Catholic renaissance” that began to take place during the middle and latter half of the nineteenth century in which the contribution of poets and essayists such as Charles Péguy (1873–1914) and Paul Claudel (1868–1955), the intellectual depth and integrity of John Henry Newman’s mind, and the speculative insights of Maurice Blondel, though all to some degree marginalized in the Church at the time, would come to have significant purchase in rejuvenating the intellectual and cultural life of Catholicism in the early part of the twentieth century. Alexander Dru has insightfully characterized this period at the end of the nineteenth century “as the renewal of Catholic life and thought, the re-­establishment of links with the culture of the time, but conditioned by the profound division within the Church on the problems this rejuvenation raised.”14 Nevertheless, early and mid-­nineteenth-­century attempts to rethink Chris­tianity in light of modern philosophy by Catholic theologians such as Georg Hermes, Anton Günther, and Antonio Rosmini-­Serbati, despite their

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creativity, revealed the simultaneously novel and ambiguous situation modern Catholicism found itself in by the time French Catholic biblical exegete Alfred Loisy experienced the larger cultural laicization Europe was undergoing in the nineteenth century and fashioned his work to reconcile the rift between Catholic orthodoxy and modern intellectual life.

A l f r e d Lo i s y a n d L a q u e s t i o n b i bl i q u e i n F r a n c e

When Alfred Loisy was sent in 1878 from the major seminary at Châlons-­ sur-­Marne to L’Institut catholique de Paris, little did he know he would come “to live in two intellectual worlds, a condition he [would have] to reckon with when he began to publish in the 1890s.”15 At the Institut catholique he encountered Louis Duchense (1843–1922), professor of ecclesiastical history, who had given his teaching a critical orientation he himself had received while studying at the École des hautes études in Paris and honed in Rome as a member of L’École française de Rome and disciple of the well-­known Italian archaeologist and epigraphist J. B. de Rossi (1822–94).16 Though relations between Loisy and Duchense would cool years after Loisy had matriculated at the Institut catholique,17 it was Duchense who introduced Loisy to textual criticism by lending Loisy a copy of Tischendorf ’s edition of the Greek New Testament during the summer of 1881 and, in so doing, unwittingly created the conditions for the possibility of the form of modernism that flourished in France.18 In Tischendorf ’s rendering of the Greek New Testament, Loisy saw clearly for the first time—much to his surprise—the distinct nature of each gospel narrative. The discrepancies between the narratives seemed irreconcilable to the notion of history he had inherited while in Paris. In 1881, as Loisy was becoming conversant in the practice of historiography as a critical discipline, he was appointed to the faculty at the Institut catholique to teach Hebrew. At the same time he was required to take a course in scripture at the major seminary in Paris, Saint-­Sulpice, where the professor of scripture, Fulcran Vigouroux (1873–1915), was engaged in an attempt to align scripture with the most recent discoveries in science. Vigouroux’s project had the twofold aim of refuting the rationalism of Ernest Renan (1823–92) and bringing about the reconciliation of the Catholic interpretation of scripture and modern science.19

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Ironically, Vigouroux’s irenic reading of scripture was, by Loisy’s own admission, more harmful to Loisy’s intellectual development than the rationalist reading he received from Renan.20 For Vigouroux’s interpretation of scripture reinforced in Loisy “the sense of the chasm separating Catholic orthodoxy from modern intellectual life” that he was beginning to recognize and experience himself.21 In the same year Loisy was appointed lecturer of Hebrew at the Institut catholique and took Vigouroux’s scripture course at Saint-­Sulpice, he began to attend the lectures of Renan. If Duchense’s mentoring initiated Loisy into the practice of historical criticism, Renan’s lectures on textual criticism of the Old Testament made him a proficient practitioner.22 Renan’s critical scholarship left an indelible mark on Loisy’s intellectual development by confirming for him the chasm between theology and history, a chasm that would resurface in his work and as the source of his disagreement with Blondel. This chasm also would function as a wellspring of inspiration for Loisy’s own project of a rapprochement between the­ ology and history.23 Loisy’s appropriation of the exegetical methods he had learned from Duchense and Renan, and his attempt to broker a tenable relationship between the modern discipline of history and Catholic doctrine, first came to expression in his 1883 nonextant thesis on the nature of biblical inspiration written for his degree of doctor in theology two years after his appointment as lecturer at the Institut catholique.24 In the thesis Loisy puts forward the notion of the “relative truth” of the Bible as the source of reconciliation between the original meaning of the biblical text and the Catholic Church’s ahistorical and outmoded theological interpretation of it. The rector of the Institut catholique, Mgr. Maurice Le Sage d’Hauteroche d’Hulst, though sympathetic to Loisy’s overarching objective of reform, expressed concern that Loisy’s thesis would compromise him, the Institut catholique, and Loisy too, and therefore Loisy did not publish his first doctoral thesis. Instead, Loisy submitted a new thesis in 1890 on the canonical formation of the Old Testament as he was appointed professor of scripture at the Institut catholique. This appointment allowed him to teach the exegetical methods he had honed in the intervening years between the two theses. Regrettably, however, controversy followed Loisy soon after he began his new appointment when the superior-­general of Saint-­Sulpice seminary, M. Icard, concerned about

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Loisy’s exegesis of the opening chapters of Genesis, prohibited the seminarians of Saint-­Sulpice from attending Loisy’s lectures. Ernest Renan’s death in 1892 prompted the editor of the Catholic periodical Le Correspondant to ask d’Hulst to write an article on Renan.25 Though reluctant at first, given the complicated relationship Renan had had with the Catholic Church, d’Hulst obliged, and in the October 25, 1892, issue of the periodical, d’Hulst published his article. The tenor of the article indirectly suggested to most readers that though the “biblical question” lay dormant in the Catholic Church, it inevitably would surface, and already had when, for example, d’Hulst remarked, that Renan’s departure from Catholicism might have been avoided had he received a better reading of scripture as a seminarian.26 The generally positive reception of the article encouraged d’Hulst to write another the following year (1893),27 this time directly addressing the biblical question in France with the hope that the article would be politically auspicious for the Institut catholique and relieve some of the ecclesiastical and the anticlerical pressure the Institut had come under.28 D’Hulst’s article also was an attempt to secure toleration for Loisy’s teaching, though it did not mention Loisy by name. Instead it mentioned three schools of thought on the relationship between modern science and the doctrine of inspiration, naming the most controversial of the three, the école large, the school of thought willing to speak the language and employ the methods of rationalist critics. Readers assumed Loisy to be the head the école large, and the article had the opposite effect of d’Hulst’s original intention, compromising Loisy’s appointment as professor of scripture at the Institut catholique and requiring him to return to teaching only Semitic languages at the Institut. To make matters worse, d’Hulst had misrepresented Loisy’s position on the relationship between the doctrine of inspiration and the scientific study of the Bible. Loisy’s last lecture as professor of scripture at the Institut catholique, published in an emended version in the journal Loisy had himself founded, L’Enseignement biblique,29 was the occasion for the clarification of his position and his response to d’Hulst. Loisy made clear his starting point for the study of scripture was not the traditional doctrine of inspiration but rather scripture as a collection of human documents to be studied, as other texts were, by the best and latest exegetical methods. In terms of content, Loisy maintained that the Bible contained scientific and historical errors, and the veracity of claims related to matters of faith

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and morals need to be considered through the notion of relative truth.30 The publication of Loisy’s lecture led to his dismissal from the Institut in November 1893, not coincidently, the same month the encyclical Providentissimus Deus, Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical indirectly condemning d’Hulst’s and Loisy’s approaches to the Bible, was published.

“A . F i r m i n ” a n d N e w m a n

A chapter in the story of the ongoing battle for Newman’s legacy and its role in the intellectual life of the Church belongs to Loisy’s relationship to Newman.31 That relationship began in 1896, only six years after Newman’s death, when Baron Friedrich von Hügel (1852–1925) sent Loisy a package containing several of Newman’s works.32 By the time Loisy received von Hügel’s package, he was into his third year of chaplaincy at the convent school run by Dominican nuns in the Paris suburb of Neuilly. Loisy’s new pastoral post in Neuilly, given to him a few months after his dismissal from the Institut catholique, afforded him the opportunity to contemplate and consider firsthand the catechetical and apologetic realities of Catholicism in the modern world. What Loisy found in von Hügel’s package of Newman’s writings drew him intellectually into the theological heart of the Modernist crisis in the Roman Catholic Church. For in Newman’s idea of the development of doctrine was an account of the relationship between Christian doctrine and history that seemed to extract the kernel of truth latent in the two competing concepts of Christian doctrine at the center of the crisis: on the one hand, Christian doctrine as “immutable and perennially valid,” and, on the other hand, as “culturally limited expressions of truths which are antecedent to their formulation.”33 Even better, Newman’s notion of development drew on the competing concepts without falling victim to the ideological extremes both concepts might lend themselves to: neo-­Scholastic essentialism34 and liberal Protestant culturalism. “What appealed to Loisy above all in Newman was the latter’s basic model of doctrinal development as a living process which presupposes a dynamic relationship between the gospel message and the church to which it was committed and within which it has to be newly understood and articulated in every age,” writes Daly.35 In Newman’s idea of

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development was a new horizon for Catholicism—albeit one in need of a little nuance, Loisy thought—from which Catholicism could begin to reconsider its understanding of revelation. Newman’s idea of development and the novelty of his non-­Scholastic language so astonished Loisy that only a couple of months after reading him, Loisy declared, in correspondence to von Hügel, that Newman was “the most open theologian to have existed in the Church since Origen.”36 Loisy’s enthusiasm for Newman need not come as a surprise, since few foreign intellectuals and very few English intellectuals had been as well received in France as Newman was in the nineteenth and early twentieth century.37 It might come as a surprise that in France Newman “may have been more eagerly used than intelligently listened to.”38 That is, in France the reception of Newman more often than not involved interpolating into Newman’s theory of development “a more or less drastic principle of evolution, so that [Newman’s French readers] tended not only to misconceive but even to reverse Newman’s meaning,”39 according to one author. Of course, the temptation for all Newman’s readers is to read the essay on development as a systematically composed treatise. But a close reading of Newman’s correspondence and diaries reveals that Newman’s theory of development “does not claim to provide a systematically elabo­ rated explanation of variations in church teaching and practice,”40 but rather it is an apologia that emerges as “the fruit of a complex, personally acquired appreciation of the concrete facts of Christian history.”41 Regrettably, Newman’s use of scientific language, a register he inherited as an undergraduate at Oxford, can belie the personal and apologetic thrust of the essay. In fact, Newman is not interested in arguing whether there is “development” between ancient and modern Christianity in their various forms. Newman argues that “though history shows none of the modern churches to be identical with the ancient Church, history also shows one of the modern churches to be more nearly identical than any other.”42 Loisy’s appreciation and exposition of Newman’s theory of development first comes to public expression in the first of a series of articles written for the Revue du clergé français under the pseudonym A. Firmin.43 In the first article, Loisy expresses his enthusiasm for Newman with a balanced, perspicacious exposition and interpretation of Newman’s essay on development. Yet, within the article Loisy’s own concern and criticism begin to surface, which seem to corroborate the observation that

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Newman’s writings “fell in with, and accelerated, the line of thought that Loisy was already pursuing.”44 That line of thought was whether Newman’s idea of development was able to resolve the so-­called question biblique. For chief among Loisy’s criticisms of Newman’s account of development is why Newman does not engage the question of revelation and how it enters the tropological stream Newman has analogically created for his theory.45 Loisy expresses his dissatisfaction with Newman on the question of revelation again toward the end of the article when he dismisses Newman’s account of inspiration as obiter dicta in scripture.46 Loisy’s evaluative remarks concerning Newman foreshadow the direction in which he intends to move Newman’s idea of development, a direction that will disclose itself fully four years later in Loisy’s 1902 brief but telling work L’Évangile et l’Église. However, the bearings for this new direction in which Loisy takes Newman’s thought are marked by the broad gap between theology and history that he claims to find Newman advocating, a gap one imagines Newman would have been uncomfortable with had he considered it. For example, in discussing the argument from “antecedent probability,” Newman suggests that when we consider particular doctrines such as the Incarnation for which scripture is the key referent, “we shall see that it is absolutely impossible for [it] to remain in the mere letter of Scripture, if [it is] to be more than mere words, and to convey a definite idea to the recipient.”47 For Newman there is a fluid movement that takes place between the scriptural, the theological, and the historical. He continues: “When it is declared that ‘the Word became flesh,’ three wide questions open upon us on the very announcement. What is meant by ‘the Word,’ what by ‘flesh,’ what by ‘became’? The answers to these involve a process of investigation, and are developments.”48 In Loisy’s interpretation of Newman on the very same point, the fluid movement between the scriptural, the theological, and the historical is lost.49 Loisy writes, “It is easy to understand that Christianity must have a development . . . because it was impossible, even for the most important points of belief, to adhere to the letter of Scripture without falling into a vain cult of formulas.”50 Loisy’s omission of “mere letter” in Newman’s text reflects his aversion to dogmatic formulas and his reluctance to grant even the prospect of a theological interpretation of scripture.51 Also missing from Loisy’s interpretation of Newman’s assertion of the necessity of an external authority as arbiter of true and false development52 is the “heuristic

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character” allotted to this external authority in Newman’s argument. 53 For Loisy, “authority and revelation are correlative terms.”54 Nicholas Lash observes that one key stylistic difference between Newman’s essay on development and Loisy’s interpretation of it in the first Firmin article is that the latter is “strikingly sparing of metaphor.”55 Newman had drawn on a repository of images and metaphors to express the idea of development in a broad sense. But the broad sense of development was never unrelated to the idea of the development of doctrine. One often forgets that the process of development is, in addition to being psychological, historical, and theological, also literary,56 and the latter need not be unrelated to the others. Since, for Newman, the process of development takes place within an account of tradition that is grounded in the possibility of analogy, the genuine possibility of real difference and continuity between theology and history exists without each referring univocally to the other.57 Loisy was interested in extending Newman’s theory of development into what has been termed an “evolutionary philosophy” beyond Chris­ tianity to the “spiritual development of humanity,” which the Church could encourage and aid were it to reform itself.58 Loisy writes: “In order to give the theory of development the entire scope it consists of, expanding its historical base without which one would be unable to have knowledge, one should extend the principle more specifically and its application in more detail than Newman himself did, to the entire history of religion since the origin of humanity.”59 This last interest of Loisy’s can be read as the logical outcome of the observation that Loisy’s project sought not to contradict Newman’s work but to continue it.60 Yet, when one considers Loisy’s early interest in Newman in light of the direction his later work did take,61 it appears less as a continuation of Newman’s work and more as “an attempt to verify by history the truth proclaimed by Feuerbach and by Comte that mankind, through all the manifold forms of creed and cult that it has invented, has always worshipped itself.”62

L’ É va n g i l e e t l’ Ég l i s e

“Inside many historians . . . there is a philosopher trying to get out; in Loisy’s case he escaped successfully,” says Daly.63 This wry yet keen observation alludes to the fact that the more Loisy claimed the realm of history

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to be the intellectual integument upon which he conducted his reflection, the more philosophical his writing became. Thus, two years after the publication of the first Firmin article, the fourth Firmin article appeared and had as its central concern the immanent (historical) and the transcendent (theological) aspects of revelation.64 In his response to the French Protestant theologian Auguste Sabatier’s (1839–1901) claim that the history of Christian dogma is the history of religious feelings symbolically expressed, and that the truth of Christian dogma is relative only to those who adhere to them,65 Loisy begins his own account of revelation with the claim that revelation objectively considers the disclosure of God to humanity, which, “while realized in man, as God is, as an immanent manifestation in man, this manifestation need not be transcendent to man by its origin, content, or destination.”66 As his argument unfolds, Loisy employs the immanent dimension of revelation not simply to critique Sabatier but also as a category through which his relativistic epistemology can challenge the dogmatic essentialism of neo-­Scholastic thought. He maintains that “particular forms of belief are indispensible to every religion, but absolute immobility of belief is excluded from every religion, being untenable and contrary to the nature of man’s expression of religious belief.”67 In the ar­ticle Loisy goes to great lengths to preserve the distinction between the infinite (transcendent) and the finite (immanent) in his notion of revelation and to express his account of revelation as something more than human reflection on religious truths.68 After the publication of Adolf von Harnack’s public lectures delivered at the University of Berlin during the winter semester of ­1899–1900,69 the immanent dimension of Loisy’s account of revelation in the fourth Firmin article came to full expression in his response to Harnack in L’Évangile et l’Église. In his lectures, Harnack had reduced the “essence of Christianity” to the individual believer’s relation to God. Prior to doing so, however, Harnack had encouraged historians to pursue and “to determine what is of permanent value” in Christianity by suggesting that “either the Gospel is in all respects identical with its earliest form, in which case it came with its time and has departed with it; or else it contains something which, under differing historical forms, is of permanent validity.”70 For Harnack the feeling of filial trust was the enduring reality of permanent validity in the gospel. It also was the reality that the apostolic tradition had obscured in the Gospels’ portrayal of Jesus. According to Harnack, by imposing the

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antiquated Jewish concept of messianic consciousness on Jesus, the apostolic tradition had succeeded in inhibiting Jesus’s expression of filial trust for the Father. Upon reading Harnack, Loisy was able to detect in Harnack’s and Sabatier’s projects very little to rehabilitate the intellectual life of Chris­ tianity and very much to advance its dissolution, as he writes in the opening pages of L’Évangile et l’Église: At bottom, M. Sabatier and Herr Harnack have wished to reconcile Christian faith with the claims of science and of the scientific spirit of our time. The claims must indeed have become great, for the faith has become very small and modest. What would Luther have thought of his doctrine of salvation by faith, had it been presented to him with the amendment, “independently of creeds,” or with this other—“faith in a merciful father, for faith in the Son is no part of the gospel of Jesus”? Religion is thus reconciled with science, because it no longer encounters it. This trust in the goodness of God either exists in a man or it does not; but it seems impossible for a sentiment to contradict any conclusion of biblical or philosophical criticism.71 Loisy’s ability to recognize the disjunction between theology and history in Harnack’s and Sabatier’s philosophies of history is expressed in his criticism of Harnack’s subordination of Jesus’s messianic consciousness to the feeling of filial trust, instead of recognizing it as a reflection of the consciousness of God’s providence.72 According to Loisy, this t­ heory of subordination is a consequence of Harnack’s misunderstanding of the relationship between theology and history and a reflection of his questionable account of truth. To Loisy, Harnack’s misguided theory of truth provides the opportunity to suggest, with the support of Newman’s idea of development, that all truth is subject to limitations of history and therefore subject to the original historical context out of which it comes to expression. Here Loisy’s appropriation of Newman provides him the latitude he needs to maintain the relativity of religious truth while at the same time remaining in what Loisy considers to be the independent and value-­free realm of historical research. Loisy’s historical account of Jesus’s ministry in L’Évangile et l’Église is rendered in such a way that Jesus’s ministry in the Gospels has been preserved by being developed

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in the Catholic Church. He believes Christianity can and must change, and this change need not necessarily contravene the truth of Christianity. But to Loisy such change in Christianity is plausible only if theology— specifically, nineteenth-­century Scholastic theology—is subordinated to critical-­historical inquiry. Where such a rearrangement between theology and history is possible, revelation can be approached without theological and metaphysical presupposition. Loisy writes in his introduction: There is no fundamental incompatibility between the professions of theologian and historian. Possibly, there have already existed theologians who could be also historians, that is, could deal with facts as they appear from evidence intelligently investigated, without introducing their own conceptions into the texts they explored, and able to take account of the change that the ideas of past times inevitably undergo when adapted to modern thought. But it must be admitted that there have been, and always will be, a far greater number, who, starting from a general system, furnished by tradition, or elaborated by themselves under the influence of tradition, unconsciously, or perhaps sometimes consciously, bend the texts and the facts to the needs of their doctrine, though often honestly believing they avoid the danger.73 Loisy was quick to acknowledge that, just as theologians, historians bring their own prejudices and presuppositions to the texts. Beyond engaging with Harnack, what Loisy had in mind here is the prospect of uniting his notion of tradition to his philosophy of history through the idea of development so as to simultaneously contest Harnack’s subjectivism and Scholastic essentialism. There is an “essence of Chris­tianity,” according to Loisy. It is found not in the primitivism of Harnack or Scholastic essentialism but in the immutable reality of Christianity’s development: To understand the essence of Christianity we must look to those vital manifestations which contain its reality, its permanent quintessence, recognizable in them, as the principal features of primitive Chris­ tianity are recognizable throughout their development. The particular and varied forms of the development, in so far as they are varied,

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are not of the essence of Christianity, but they follow one another, as it were, in a framework whose general proportions, though not absolutely constant, never cease to be balanced, so that if the figure change, its type does not vary, nor the law that governs its evolution. The essence of Christianity is constituted by the general features of this figure, the elements of this life and their characteristic properties; and this essence is unchangeable, like that of a living being, which remains the same while it lives, and to the extent to which it lives. The historian will find that the essence of Christianity has been more or less preserved in the different Christian communions.74 Loisy’s aim in expropriating theology for a positivistic understanding of history was that such a coup would yield a process of reform in the Church and allow it to translate the truths of faith into a contemporary idiom intelligible to the modern world. He was committed to the belief that such a scientific methodology when applied to scripture need not necessarily colonize faith, since science and theology explore different realities.

A f t e r L’ É va n g i l e e t l’ Ég l i s e : B lo n d e l’ s R e s p o n s e

The publication of L’Évangile et l’Église succeeded in drawing attention to the many neglected critical questions modern history posed to Chris­ tianity. In this respect, L’Évangile et l’Église can be viewed as one Catholic scholar’s attempt to confront the challenge of modernity.75 At the center of this problem stood the issue of representation and what role history plays in mediating tradition. In L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy envisions the historian as neither an apologist nor an adversary of Christianity: “The historian as such need not constitute himself either apologist or adversary. He knows [faith] simply as a conception or a force whose antecedents, central manifestation and indefinite progress, he can analyze up to a point, but whose deep meaning and secret power are not things that can be deduced from simple analysis or critical discussion of texts and facts.”76 Having read L’Évangile et l’Église after the publications of L’Action (1893) and The Letter on Apologetics, Blondel, now a full university professor at the University of Aix, discerned in Loisy’s account a closed,

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self-­sufficient view of history in which theological data are irrelevant to reality and unnecessary to the interpretation of scripture. In his correspondence with Baron Friedrich von Hügel, Blondel affirmed the kind of autonomy of the historian that Loisy advocated in L’Évangile et l’Église.77 But, to Blondel’s mind, the methodological problem with Loisy’s view of history was that it failed to consider the role metaphysical presuppositions play in the practice of history.78 At issue between Blondel and Loisy was not whether history is a science but whether history is a science unaffected by the contingent nature of human rationality.79 Loisy’s claim that historical research possesses the only suitable method for determining the historical Jesus has its source in his account of truth, which is the foundation for his doctrine of revelation. In Loisy’s Autour d’un petit livre,80 published the same year as his final exchange with Blondel, Loisy produced an account of truth similar to the one found in the Firmin articles, in which he contends truth is conditional, relative, and mutable.81 This epistemological horizon afforded Loisy the latitude to discuss dogmas as symbolic utterances, containing revealed truths existing preconceptually in the Church’s dogma, which, Loisy maintained, were closed to historical investigation. The account of truth in his doctrine of revelation conceived of a sphere of facts hovering above and separate from the linguistic horizon in which the Church’s particular doctrines came to expression. By positing a sharp distinction between form (dogmatic formula) and content (revealed truth), Loisy was able to judge the truth and falsity of particular doctrines by how well they represent the independent realm of facts established by historical research. The correspondence between Blondel and von Hügel reveals that Blondel was unwilling to accept the idea of distinct levels of truth von Hügel proposed as an interpretation of the complicated relationship between history and metaphysics in L’Évangile et l’Église and the Christology it entailed.82 At the center of L’Évangile et l’Église was the distinction between the two images of Christ in scripture, as, for example, in Paul, where the eternal Christ is represented in divine form and the historical Christ is represented in human form.83 Von Hügel’s interpretation of L’Évangile et l’Église suggested that Loisy sought to recover this neglected apostolic distinction in Christology, which, von Hügel maintained, more accurately represented the realm of reality by distinguishing the phenomenal level of truth ( Jesus of history) from the noumenal

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(Christ of faith).84 In our knowledge of Jesus, von Hügel suggests, we must pass through distinct levels of truth beginning with the historical phenomenon, the examination of the Jesus of history, and an encounter the more profound reality of the Christ of faith, which eludes us and cannot be immediately grasped. This is why the historian plays a necessary but insufficient role in elucidating the content of faith. Here von Hügel’s language could lend itself to the misunderstanding that he wishes to conceive of these two levels of truth as two separate planes.85 But von Hügel did not separate these two realms, and Blondel did not object to their distinction in the process of human reflection on faith. What Blondel did object to was the distinction in their application to Christ as a source of the limitation of Christ’s knowledge.86 The more concrete issue that comes to the surface in the correspondence between Blondel and Loisy is the way in which for each thinker the term “metaphysics” refers to a very different reality. For Loisy, the term metaphysics connotes the neo-­Scholastic essentialism that has been stifling the Church for the last twenty years. To cede the realm of history is to surrender the last territory in the intellectual life of early twentieth-­ century Catholicism that is not colonized by Scholasticism. As Loisy puts it in his letter to Blondel after the publication of L’Évangile et l’Église: I never thought that a metaphysics was unnecessary for history. However, there is metaphysics and there is metaphysics. When I claim autonomy for criticism, my point is certainly not to put everything into the criticism of texts and facts, but very simply that the preliminary work of true (real) history, the discussion of texts and facts, need not be rendered impossible from the beginning by a theology which thinks it knows everything before it examines anything. This the­ology makes it such that one is required to barricade himself against it, and also, unfortunately, confine oneself to a field where one escapes its tyrannical surveillance!87 Having himself come under theological surveillance for the past few years, Blondel sympathized and commiserated with Loisy’s concern here. But for Blondel, “metaphysics” is not something one has, in the sense of an epistemological framework, a theory, or a set of principles. To put it very simply, for Blondel metaphysics is something one does. Indeed,

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philosophy is the relentless pursuit of truth that finds its complete form embodied in communal practice. Metaphysics engages the mystery of human existence revealed through action and opens human beings to a meaningful disclosure about who they are and what they are made to be. Thus, for Blondel, human history is a rich and complex phenomenon, a reality that cannot be exhausted theoretically, empirically, or expressed in its entirety through historical research. That Blondel was unwilling to grant to critical history a relative autonomy from metaphysics stems from his deeply held conviction that the practice of history must attend to the ontology of action in everyday life. To fail to do so, as Blondel suggests Loisy does in L’Évangile et l’Église, is “to mistake the external act, the expressive trait, the concrete image, for the object [which] itself tends surreptitiously to substitute the fact for the actor, the testimony for the witness, the portrait for the person.”88 Underneath the competing frameworks of Blondel and Loisy is a serious exegetical issue that penetrates straight to the heart of the relationship between the problem of representation and tradition in modern Catholicism. By substituting the “portrait for the person,”89 to use Blondel’s phrase, Loisy’s account reduces the subject ( Jesus) of the gospel narratives to the account of Jesus attainable by historical research. Lost in this interpretive process, however, are the personal actions of the agent, those realities that constitute the agent’s personal world of historical happenings. In this way, the personal world of the subject (agent) of the narrative becomes a “carnal shadow” looming over the historical reconstruction of the exegete. In extreme forms of critical interpretation, the actions of the subject (the “personal world” of the agent) in the narrative are rendered intelligible only by how well they correspond to or “re-­ present” the historical consciousness and cultural ethos of the exegete’s reconstruction. This is the horizon within which the gospel narratives are rendered intelligible in modernity.90 For Catholicism, then, Loisy’s L’Évangile et l’Église represents the arrival of modern exegetical methods, the “symbolic start” of a fundamental change in Catholic biblical scholarship that takes place in the twentieth century.91 Loisy initiates the moment of transition in Catholicism whereby the literal reading comes to mean the grammatical and lexical exactness in estimating the original sense of the text for its original audience and the coincidence of the description with how the facts occurred. The theological upshot of this

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transitional moment is captured in Loisy’s interpretation of the kingdom of God and the following line from L’Évangile et l’Église: “Jesus foretold the kingdom, and it was the Church that came.”92 This famous aphorism would have an ecclesiological life of its own, beginning with Erik Peterson’s interpretation of it two decades after Loisy first mentioned it.93 In Loisy’s account, the Church appears to be born, not as a result of the generative power of Christ’s death on the cross, but instead as a result of the failure of the imminent parousia, “whose fulfillment [ Jesus supposedly] thought to ensure,” according to Loisy.94 To suggest that the ontological origin of the Church is the kenosis of Christ consummated in his death on the cross is, for Loisy, to cross an exegetical threshold away “from a historical point of view” and into the speculative matrix of a “gratuitous hypothesis [that] attributes to Jesus a foreknowledge of the modifications His doctrine must endure in the course of centuries after the apostolic age.”95 If, as Loisy avers, “he who wishes to decide historically the thoughts of the Saviour . . . must take the texts and interpret them according to their natural meaning and the guarantees of authen­ticity they pre­ sent,”96 then the exegetical horizon within which Loisy interprets Christ’s messianic claims and the later Christological developments within the tradition become plausible only if one can accurately match the written description in scripture to the probable historical reconstruction: The historical testimony does not allow one to affirm anything about this issue except divine filiation, in its messianic sense, other than to note, as a characteristic of this messianism, its purely religious and moral meaning, exclusive of nationalism. All the rest is conjecture and interpretation. By keeping to the texts about the issue, one finds in the Gospel notion of the Messiah, three principal elements: the idea of an eternal predestination (to which one associates the idea already ­present in Paul’s idea of preexistence); the idea of a unique role, like predestination, in relation to the kingdom: that is to say, to the salvation of humanity (out of which arises all developments in soteri­ology); the idea of a unique communication of the divine spirit, through which Jesus, because of his predestination, is capable of this unique role (and from which comes the development of Christology). From the point of view of the linkage of ideas, there is a continuity between the historical gospel and dogmatic development.97

98  Maurice Blondel

Here in Loisy’s account, tradition no longer constitutes a distinct yet related form of revelation. Instead, tradition either obstructs the written form of God’s revelation in scripture or it functions as a compensatory device when scripture fails to present the historical truth accurately. There is a relationship between the content of Jesus’s messianic claims in scripture and the dogmatic affirmation of Christ’s hypostatic union formulated in the tradition, but, for Loisy, it is impossible to articulate this relationship.98 This question had been in the background of Loisy’s thought since he encountered Tischendorf ’s edition of the Greek New Testament during the summer of 1881. While in Paris it was present in his desire to overcome the rationalism of Renan. Now it had come to expression in the publication of L’Évangile et l’Église.

T h e C o n d e m n at i o n o f Lo i s y

In 1907 when the decree Lamentabili sane exitu listed sixty-­five propositions dangerous for Catholic scholars to hold, it did not take long for most scholars to recognize the unnamed source of most of the propositions. Chief among these propositions were 22 and 60, both of which pertain to the substance of doctrine and go to the heart of the Vatican’s dispute with Loisy’s thought.99 The question of whether Lamentabili accurately portrays his thought and, perhaps more importantly, whether the unnamed condemnation of Loisy is warranted are legitimate questions for discussion. In fact, the argument could be made that Loisy’s account of doctrine in L’Évangile et l’Église, by claiming doctrine to be divine in origin and substance and human in structure and composition, does maintain the “divine-­human asymmetry” necessary for generating a theologically sound and orthodox account of dogma.100 Such a claim seems to be warranted. But the important question about Loisy’s theological thinking is not whether he makes a distinction between the finite and the infinite realities when he reflects on the nature of doctrine and revelation. Indeed, this is an important distinction and one that Loisy maintains. But, in the case of Loisy, the important question is whether he holds fast to the tension within the divine/human unity without dissolving the one into the other. This is the important and fundamental question of maintaining the

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unity-­in-­distinction between the infinite and the finite aspects of theological reasoning in all its registers. In his treatise on the relationship between history and dogma and his discussion with Loisy a few years before Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi dominici gregis, Maurice Blondel had picked up on Loisy’s in­ability to maintain the unity-­in-­distinction between theology (transcendence) and history (immanence) necessary to all theological thinking.101 Blondel’s concern was that Loisy had compartmentalized theology and history to the point at which each had become isolated from the other. Soon after Loisy published L’Évangile et l’Église, Blondel responded that Loisy had not simply insisted on the genuine use of historical research as a hermeneutic for scripture but that his particular account of the history about Jesus appeared to eliminate theology as the primary discourse through which one attempts to understand and to express Christianity.102

Five

Mapping the Soul’s Journey toward Truth Blondel’s Philosophy of Action between Faith and Reason

In chapter 4 we examined Loisy’s interpretation of Newman’s theory of development and his understanding of the relationship between theology and history in his work and correspondence with Blondel. We explored Blondel’s response to Loisy’s account of the relationship between history and theology, and the exchange between Blondel and Baron von Hügel that emerged as a consequence of Loisy’s work. This chapter examines the pervasive yet “quietly unobtrusive” influence Blondel has had over modern Catholicism.1 For good reason, his influence is associated with his “philosophy of action.” As a late nineteenth-­century French intellectual, Blondel found himself part of the “Catholic renaissance” taking place in France that would manifest itself in the theological renewal of the mid-­twentieth century. Since Blondel’s participation in this renaissance first and foremost comes to expression in his philosophy of action, which seeks to renew philosophy’s relationship with Christianity 101

102  Maurice Blondel

by appropriating modern philosophical categories, this chapter explores the dynamic reality of action in Action (1893), its engagement with modern philosophy, and the sacramental horizon that animates it. However, our perception of Blondel’s influence over modern Catholi­ cism and his participation in the late nineteenth-­century Catholic renaissance ought not to be limited to his philosophy of action or confined to one text. Indeed, as a professionally trained philosopher and a devout Catholic who devoted his life to thinking through Catholicism’s engagement with modernity in both its theological and philosophical registers, Blondel was confronted with the challenge of facilitating a salubrious exchange between the two modes of thinking. In the course of discussing the various interpretations of Blondel’s thought, this chapter argues for a new interpretation of Blondel’s philosophy of action that attends to the way in which liturgical and sacramental practice facilitates the interplay between the distinct worlds of faith and reason. For Blondel, we act in order to know, we do not act because we know. That is, action has a noetic value, but knowledge does not precede action. And since we acquire knowledge in action, and since knowledge and action are inseparable, all human action signifies, disclosing to the world the agent’s purposes, intentions, and motives in sensible and perceptible form. We primarily come to knowledge and understanding of the supernatural reality of revelation through practice, not speculation. Through liturgical and sacramental action reason enters “into a new world where no philosophical speculation can lead it or follow it.”2 Here action expresses more than a human intention. Liturgical and sacramental action “express a divine efficaciousness in the form of a precise, symbolic, human action, inviting theological interpretation to make manifest the divine intention that inheres in this practical symbolism.”3 As reason enters this new world it discovers the trace of its original desire for truth expressed in its fullest form. This interpretation of Blondel’s philosophy of action, then, emphasizes the role of the liturgical and sacramental action in mediating God’s presence in the world and forming the bond between the distinct worlds of faith and reason. But it also provides us with the conceptual context for his notion of tradition in History and Dogma, which, as this book argues, is one of his most important contributions to modern Catholicism.

Mapping the Soul’s Journey toward Truth   103 Imm a n e n c e a n d T r a n s c e n d e n c e

The point of departure for Blondel’s philosophy of action is the quest for the meaning of human life. In part this derives from his encounter with modern philosophy through the work of his friend Victor Delbos.4 Delbos was instrumental in introducing Blondel to the thought of Spinoza, where Blondel discovered the question of human destiny examined by a method of immanence. What Blondel found particularly appealing about Spinoza is the centrality of the “ethical problem” in Spinoza’s thought, principally his treatise on ethics,5 and its proximity to the question of human destiny and philosophy’s unique role in resolving it.6 The role of human destiny in such thinkers as Spinoza, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel led Blondel to regard much modern philosophy to be amenable to Christianity. He rightly saw in Spinoza’s rational reconfiguration of the Christian concept of beatitude in the second part of his Ethics the veiled presence of the “Christian idea.”7 Unfortunately Blondel never clearly articulated what the Christian idea was.8 What is more, to grasp the “ethical problem” in Spinoza’s thought requires understanding Spinoza’s political theory, his treatment of scripture, and the relation of both to his account of reason.9 A full account of Spinoza’s notion of reason is beyond the scope of this chapter, but we can say that Spinoza considered the life of reason a luxury few can pursue. For the general population there is the Bible, which appeals to the imagination instead of the intellect and makes morality more intelligible for the pedestrian members of the polis. In Spinoza’s view, scripture does not contain any speculative, spiritual, or theological truth, but it provides a popular religion that plays an important role in society. For Blondel not to attend to the ethical problem as it is inferred from Spinoza’s work outside of his treatise on ethics is to simplify a complex issue in Spinoza’s thought.10 Blondel’s relationship to modern philosophy has given many of his readers reason to complain that he cedes too much ground to modern philosophy and fails to preserve the gratuity of grace. At the end of the nineteenth century many of his interlocutors criticized his thought as “naturalism” or “Kantianism.”11 Admittedly, these charges were exasperated by Blondel’s prose, which is cumbersome and obscure, and does not lend itself to clarity. The “Kantianism” in Action (1893) is a “curious

104  Maurice Blondel

intermixture of respect and antipathy” Blondel had for Kant.12 His complex relationship to Kant renders dubious any superficial interpretation of the relationship between the two thinkers.13 Insofar as Blondel envisioned his early work, Action (1893), as a continuation of Kant’s project it was to carry forth Kant’s legacy of establishing the limits of pure and practical reason. Both Blondel and Kant faced the problem of explaining synthetic a priori propositions (speculative metaphysics).14 In the case of Kant no adequate or compelling rationale or empirical explanation could be given, and therefore, in the First Critique, Kant ascribes such propositions to intuition. Blondel, however, ascribes synthetic a priori propositions to action and the internal structure of the will. The difference between the two thinkers facing the same problem is evident in the distinct points of origin both offer in their fundamental moral philosophies. Whereas Kant seeks to adduce normative principles of morality (categori­cal imperatives) and apply them to humanity, Blondel “searches within man’s consciousness of his own moral experiences and activity” for the formal principles of morality.15 For Blondel, human action is a synthetic a priori reality (metaphysical): synthetic because it is the bond between thought and being, and a priori because it has an immanent structure governed by principles not given in empirical reality.16 Blondel’s “Copernican revolution,” so to speak, is to discover speculative reason’s conformity to human action.17 Such a discovery involves the usurpation of Kant’s own insight into the internal structure of pure reason by proffering an account which contends that even more immanent than the “thought of action” is “the act of thinking.” The action that “produces thought and accomplishes it has its own proper a priori structure from which the whole of thought, both in its objective and subjective correlates, derives its meaning.”18 In Blondel’s eyes, Kant’s failure is to limit the method of immanence by excluding its access to the transcendent. Pure reason and practical reason are distinct, but they need not be in opposition to each other. Here one can detect Blondel’s desire to overcome Kant’s division of the intellect by reworking Kant’s division itself, rather than dismissing it. Blondel’s reconfiguration of the division of the intellect was at the center of his philosophy of action, a philosophy he sought to situate “between the Aristotelianism that depreciates and subordinates practice to thought and the Kantianism which detaches both orders from each other and exalts the practical order to the detriment of the other [thought].”19

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In this way Blondel’s philosophical pedigree is affiliated closely with post-­Kantian idealism and, more specifically, Hegel’s attempt to resolve Kant’s antinomy between autonomy and transcendence.20 Blondel himself once remarked how much he enjoyed the “Trinitarian rhythm” of Hegel’s thought.21 There is a methodological rhythm to both Blondel’s Action (1893) and Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807),22 which gives the impression of a synchronism of thought between the two philosophers. Hegel’s understanding of the role of philosophy in relieving the conceptual tensions that arise from oppositional thinking (necessity and freedom) resonates in the speculative thrust of Action (1893) toward resolving the heteronomy that characterizes the human will. And the various stages through which the regressive analysis of Action (1893) explores the will’s necessity clearly resounds with the transitions in consciousness from one form to the next in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Yet these methodological parallels between Blondel and Hegel, though helpful in reaffirming Blondel’s own philosophical self-­understanding as an ongoing engagement with such modern thinkers as Hegel, belie the fundamental difference between their respective visions of transcendence. In attempting to resolve Kant’s antinomy between autonomy and transcendence, Hegel does not deny Kantian self-­determination, but instead attempts to give a more holistic form to it by absolutizing it in absolute spirit’s (Geist) movement through history. In Hegel this process of transcendence involves the self ’s acquisition of a higher identity by assimilating the other.23 Although both Hegel and Blondel conceive of a scientific knowledge as a form of Wissenschaft that “gives itself over, without reservation, to life and the dialectic movement of human reality, and which thus assists in its own genesis and evolution,”24 Hegel’s horizon for the transcendence of the self from the self to the other and back to the self again implies no genuine possibility of ultimate transcendence as other. However, Blondel understands that the movement of the self toward the other is not a moment in the process of the self ’s own becoming as the absolute source of self-­determining being. Rather, the logic of action brings the self to the cusp of genuine transcendence as “other” through the religious option. For Blondel self-­transcendence is a gift given in which the agent freely chooses to be receptive to the gift, and in choosing to be receptive to the gift is open to the genuine possibility of self-­ transcendence as other.

106  Maurice Blondel

What is unsettling to some of Blondel’s readers is not so much the theological rhetoric at work in the philosophy of action, but what role it plays and where it appears.25 For example, Peter Henrici thinks that the introduction of explicit theological presuppositions in the fourth and the fifth parts of Action (1893) signals the logic of action has reached its contemplative limit, and therefore has moved beyond philosophical reason into the distinct realm of theology.26 The new theological language and grammar constitute a distinct plane of reflection, instead of the theological coming to explicit expression from its prior latent role.27 Blondel’s discourse in the fourth and fifth parts of Action (1893) is guided by a theological grammar distinct from preceding parts, presenting the problem of retaining the inner tension in his thought between the necessity and the inaccessibility of the supernatural. The natural and justified desire is to resolve dialectically the heteronomy between the philosophical (natu­ ral) and the theological (supernatural) in Blondel’s philosophy of action, leaving the conceptual impression that it is either “naturalism,” “subjectivism,” or, more keenly, as Henrici suggests, in the tradition of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit with a return to the theological.28 However, here the conceptual challenge is to remain within the inner tension or polarity between philosophy (reason) and theology (faith), resisting the temptation to return to either the strictly philosophical or the strictly theological. One way of remaining within the interplay between these two distinct realms is to see the logic of action as situated at the intersection of the truth of the univocal, the equivocal, and the dialectical senses of being.29 That is, Blondel’s philosophy of action gets beyond traditional notions of dialectic and “keeps open the spaces of otherness . . . it does not domesticate the ruptures that shake the complacencies of our mediations of being. Moreover, it tries to deal with the limitations of dialectic determination.”30 Interpreting the philosophy of action as “between” such categories permits the protean, interdependent, and complementary character of the distinct discourses of theology and of philosophy to emerge without the grammar of each discourse becoming agonistic toward the other. From this perspective, one can begin to read the role of philosophy as it is expressed in the pages of Action (1893) as attending to the Christological rupture that takes place in the mediation of being. Philosophy’s recourse to the Incarnate Word, as both fully human (reason) and fully divine (faith) is the direction in which Blondel seeks the solution to the

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problem of immanence and transcendence:31 “Beings are, but not without the being who sees them and makes them, no more than they can see themselves without his light and his presence.”32 Reason (philosophy), having arrived at the juncture where it realizes it lacks the power required to attain the “one thing necessary” (God), discovers that the one thing necessary exists not as a conceptual reality but as an existential and ontological “option,” encompassing a particular form of life in community.33 Indeed, as Blondel notes, “in order that what is known should be, it is not enough that a real being should know[;] this being has to be what is to be known, so that this known may have being.”34

B lo n d e l’ s Ac t i o n (1893 )

In the course of a candid and revealing letter written to a priest three months and two days after he defended his thesis L’Action at École normale supérieure for the degree of docteur ès lettres, Maurice Blondel noted that the source of his thought and the reason for his life is the “ardent desire to show that Catholic thought is not sterile and to make for it a place in the clash of modern doctrines where, for the most part, it seems to be excluded.”35 Less than a year later, in a moment of introspection captured in his personal diary, he gave voice to what he considered his vocation as a philosopher to be: “to open up the present paths of reason toward God incarnated and crucified.”36 Blondel’s willingness to follow a different path, as it were, than the various forms of secular philosophy he encountered as a student at École normale in the late nineteenth century accounts for a large part of his original contribution to modern philosophy and, regrettably, the tense relationship he experienced with some neo-­Thomists within the Catholic theological community throughout much of his life. Blondel’s originality is found in his rehabilitation of philosophy’s relationship to Chris­tianity at the end of the nineteenth century. That approach is to construct a philosophy that confronts the philosopher with the Christian faith without imposing it upon her. This bold project was envisioned in contrast to much of the epistemological skepticism and ontological nihilism appearing in late modern philosophical discourse.37 As one commentator put it, Blondel’s philosophy of action seeks to display not humanity’s original

108  Maurice Blondel

“will to power,” but rather humanity’s “will to be powerless.”38 That is, humanity’s desire to will infinitely through the gift that the human will can neither predict nor produce. The mettle to pave this new philosophical path was engendered in the devout Catholic environment of the idyllic French countryside, where Blondel developed a rich spiritual life as a young man.39 He wrote formally as a philosopher about mysticism and its relationship to the process of human cognition, and references to the mystical are scattered throughout his work.40 But it was his commitment to the sacramental practices of Christianity that allowed him to enter freely, genuinely, and confidently into the secular spirit of thought animating the intellectual life of France at the end of the nineteenth century. The centrality of the Eucharist in his life, which he calls the “whole of the Christian spirit”41 as a young man in his personal diary, and “the sacrament of sacraments”42 toward the end of his life, was a practice that cannot be separated easily from his philoso­ phy of action.43 Indeed, sacramental practices were not simply a matter of personal piety and devotion to Blondel. Late in his career he would write about the practice of the sacramental life in the Church as an essential part of living in the Christian Spirit.44 The concrete sacramental life of the Church, however, was there at the beginning. It was the source of inspiration behind the philosophy of action. In his introductory and concluding affirmations of the priority of practical science over a science of practice in Action (1893), “it was already this Christian view of practical science in the concrete he had in mind, a science conscious of the mystery in the theandric symbiosis it is living and of the unanimity of spirits to which it aspires in an integral Catholicism.”45 The literal and sacramental practices of Christianity provided Blondel with a deep sense of the spiritual nature of the world and of human existence in all its multiplicity and diversity, a spiritual nature that was veiled within the unfolding drama of humanity’s struggle to achieve an end equal to its spiritual longings. The spiritual and cultural context within which Blondel’s thought comes to expression makes the relationship between his spiritual life and his intellectual life one of the more remarkable features of his work as a philosopher. He believes the persuasive character of Christianity need not necessarily reside in the speculative arguments in favor of the truths of faith, despite spending his whole career unfolding the logical and philosophical character of faith. Instead, Blondel believes that the truth, the

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goodness, and the beauty of Christianity are evident in the “agreement of the practice of faith with the essence of faith fathomed by reason.”46 The best argument or apologia for Christianity, then, that which most clearly reflects the splendor of its truth, is “the social power of lived Catholicism [founded] on the goodness and the truth of Christ perpetuated in and manifested through the faithful.”47 Here one should note the difference in tenor between Blondel’s spiritual life as it comes to expression in the Carnets intimes and his personal correspondence and that of Loisy, as Loisy recounts it in Choses passées.48 That Blondel’s practice of Catholicism shaped and formed his thought is even more evident in his capacity as a philosopher. Here his originality discloses itself through the breadth and the depth of his specu­ lative insights, which, in turn, reflect the catholicity (catholicitas) of his mind. The catholicity of Blondel’s thought, “his capacity for the universal that defines his philosophical ‘genius,’ ”49 is, at the same time, precisely what “nourished in him the sense of the singular.”50 The universality and singularity that characterize his thought bring into relief the creative way in which he attends to the competing claims of reason, as they have been transformed by modernity, and revelation, in the unwavering and particular claims it makes upon humanity. Through this polarity, the fundamental intention at work in his philosophy of action emerges, namely, “to develop a philosophy which, in its autonomous movement, opens spontaneously to Christianity.”51 It has been suggested that the character of Blondel’s philosophy is captured well by the twin terms “greatness” and “weakness.”52 That is, greatness in the sense that philosophy seeks a comprehensive understanding of reality, and weakness insofar as, through this process, philosophy (reason) discovers its own contingency. The question of contingency is never far from Blondel’s immediate thoughts, and in the case of the published version of his doctoral thesis, Action (1893), it lies dormant in the immediate question posed to the reader: “Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?”53 This proto-­eschatological question is the leitmotif throughout the development of the text that finds its answer in the free reception of God’s self-­gift given to the world in the person of Christ, the “Amen of the universe.”54 Methodologically, however, Blondel brackets faith and allows reason to explore this question through the phenomenon of action.

110  Maurice Blondel

The term “action” connotes a metaphysical reality akin to the traditional philosophical use of the term “existence” as the most fundamental and originating principle moving the essence to act.55 Action also represents a shift in the understanding of God’s power as the original dynamism of spiritual beings, which resides beyond the intellect and the will, but at the same time it functions as the source of power for the intellect and the will. In Blondel’s horizon, the will plays “less the role of a faculty among others than that of a vestigium. Such a vestige must first recognize itself as such—as a trace—follow its own path, and then traverse itself to find that of which it is the imprint.”56 It is an imprint of the vinculum substantiale (substantial bond), the actus purus (pure act) from which all reality has its origin and the end toward which all creation moves.57 The objective of the dialectic at work in Action (1893) is to discover what is necessary in action, the “determinism of action.” The determinism of action will reveal the necessity of the supernatural within all willing. Action, Blondel will say toward the end of his work, “is a synthesis of man and God.”58 The most immediate philosophical portal through which reason enters into the mystery of action belongs to the question of autonomy and heteronomy. The focus of action is the relationship between autonomy and necessity in the human will, and the speculative trajectory of Action (1893) delineates heteronomy as the condition for authentic autonomy.59 Blondel’s “regressive analysis” of the will’s necessary development yields a polarity (heteronomy) between the freedom of the will and the necessity of the will, which Blondel expresses through the categories of “la volonté voulue” (willed will) and “la volonté voulante” (willing will). The polarity of the wills simultaneously reveals humanity’s desire for transcendence and its inability to achieve symmetry between the two wills. Before Blondel’s analysis of action can arrive at the ontology of action and the completion of action in the “one thing necessary,” the analysis of action must examine the methodological assumptions of the positive sciences.60 Here he explores the relationship between mathematics and the empirical sciences, discovering that intrinsic to determinate knowledge (positive sciences) is an excess or overdeterminancy that is the action of the spirit.61 Put another way, there is an interiority, un dedans, to use Blondel’s term, that comes to expression in the empirical sciences and reveals “an internal principle of unity, a center of grouping imperceptible

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to the senses or to the mathematical imagination, an operation immanent to the diversity of the parts, an organic idea, an original action that escapes positive knowledge at the moment it makes it possible, and, to say it all in one word which needs to be defined better, a subjectivity.”62 As Blondel’s dialectic unfolds the heteronomy of the will at various stages in the natu­ ral order, it returns again and again to the natural and social sciences, and to the personal and social institutions of the natural order (communal life, nation-­state, and superstition).63 Even though action cannot find its completion in the natural order, philosophy remains unrelieved of the task of demonstrating the impossibility and insufficiency of action in that order. Briefly put, philosophy leads to the idea of the supernatural without affirming the reality of the supernatural. In the Blondelian horizon, then, the “fullness of philosophy consists, not in a presumptuous self-­ sufficiency, but in the study of its own powerlessness.”64 The fourth part of Action (1893) takes up the metaphysics of action (ontology). The “Third Moment,” as Blondel describes it, explores action’s movement toward transcendence. It arrives at the one thing necessary, God, only after it has exhausted the natural, psychological, social, mathe­ matical/empirical, and mystical explanations of the necessity of the phenomenon of human action.65 However, we must be careful not to interpret Blondel’s arrival at the one thing necessary as the logical outcome of a deductive argument. For Blondel, “God is not the conclusion of a syllogism.”66 Rather, God is the inexorable and the necessary source or principle of the dynamism of the will, present at the beginning and the end of action. Blondel’s arrival at God’s existence emerges from the impossibility of God’s nonexistence. The process of acknowledging the impossibility of God’s nonexistence has arisen through the conceptual interplay of revealing (presence) and concealing (absence) in the dialectic of action. For in revealing the impossibility of “absolute non-­being,” Blondel is revealing the contingency of “relative being.” As he notes, the “idea of nothingness is not without the idea of something else. And the argument that might best be termed ontological is this counterproof that establishes the impossibility of absolute non-­being, by grounding itself on the insufficiency of relative being.”67 Here the reader arrives at the key metaphysical theme that forms the overarching horizon within which the dynamism of action comes to expression: the distinction between finite and infinite being, whereby the

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former is understood as possibly not having existed and the latter understood as possibly being all that there is, with no decrease of goodness or greatness.68 It is helpful in this connection to note the unusual way in which Blondel approaches the distinction. Unlike the traditional approach,69 in which God’s formal features distinguish God’s infinite being from finite being, Blondel observes the formal feature of hu­manity, the heteronomy of its will. In doing so, he establishes the otherness of finite being to i­nfinite being, bringing into sharper focus that the condition for the possibility of humanity’s participation in God’s life does not reside in finite reality. Within the purview of finite reality’s contingency, the necessity of being-­ as-­such for the fulfillment of finite reality becomes the principal source of unity to human action. Blondel summarizes it this way: “Without [God], all is nothing and nothing cannot be. All that we will supposes that it is; all that we are requires that it be.”70 God, then, is the source of unity of the wills that dwells within humanity, but is not of humanity. This distinction, according to Blondel, derives from hu­manity’s inability to achieve equipoise between spontaneous (free) and willed action. The argument for the insufficiency of all finite reality through human action is, in turn, an argument for the contingency of finite reality with greater force coming through the immanent aspect of finite reality. The progressive disclosure of the simultaneously contingent and insufficient nature of finite reality confronts humanity with an “alternative.”71 Despite the unrelenting need for God inscribed in the human will, one is necessarily confronted with the alternative and freely chooses the “supreme option.” The supreme option consists of one of two possible choices, the first belonging to the “Death of Action,” the genuine exclusion of the infinite in favor of the idol.72 Having demonstrated the impossibility of humanity rectifying the disparity between its wills, the reconciliation must be brought about by a will totally other to finite re­ality. Yet, it is possible for humanity to refuse to reconcile the two wills by making the particular good itself the ultimate end of its action. As a consequence of masking the eschatological reality present in each particular good it seeks, there is a living death to action. The living death ensues as a result of action’s inability to see the infinite horizon of the good it pursues. In order to see the infinite horizon of finite goods, one must be able to “see the form” of God’s glory with the “eyes of faith.”73 In other words, the light of faith is necessary to see the veiled infinite-­eschatological

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feature residing within the concrete acts of humanity. Blondel eloquently puts it this way: No doubt, through a secret and subtle logic, we often seem to succeed in pacifying the restlessness of the heart, in drying up the flow of divine desires, and excluding from consciousness the most natural aspirations. But effort and study are required to do so, as in fixing our eyes carefully on a windowpane covered with light drawings, we half fail to see the distant prospect. And yet it is always this confused field of vision which serves as backdrop, which lights up these transparent trifles we try to see by themselves, and which we would not see if there were not beyond some depth and some brightness.74 What lies veiled and undisclosed throughout the unfolding of the logic of action is as important as what is disclosed. The ontological affirmation of being comes to the fore at the end of Blondel’s philosophical speculation and with this affirmation the reader discovers its mysterious presence from the beginning. The ontological affirmation of being has as its true source the religious option for action (the supernatural) and in this form serves as the concrete way in which humanity comes to participate in the divine life of Christ.75 Once the affirmation of being is understood in relation to the religious option, one can return to the onto-­eschatological question concerning human destiny posed at the beginning of the text: “Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?”76 The problem of human destiny as it appears in its generic form at the beginning of Action (1893) is, in fact, “not in general terms, but in the Christian context.”77 In the context of the dialectic of action, Blondel is interested in the necessary structural role the dogmatic and sacramental practices of Christianity play in completing the life of action.78 The transition from the natural to the supernatural life of action is sustained not merely by the effort of natural reason but also by ritual practice expressed through the dogmatic and sacramental life of Christianity. It is the theme of necessity that holds together the transition through the initial stages of the dialectic of action, to the supreme option and now the transition from the supreme option to the life of action, should one freely chose the latter. At this stage of the dialectic, the necessity of the philosophical task

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presents the philosopher with the prospect that the completion of action resides beyond her philosophical ken. Thus, she must resign herself to the eminent reason of action by embodying in practice what she cannot fully comprehend by reason.79 The chapter on dogma in the fourth part of Action (1893) is important for establishing the theme that dogmas are not only speculative in nature but also practical.80 As Blondel notes toward the end of this chapter, “dogmas are not only facts and ideas in act, but also they are principles of action.”81 That is, the full value and meaning of dogma is not understood until it is embodied in practice, and practice becomes the unifying source of action and belief.82 The problem of practice, however, is that it is often understood as an incidental outcome of an intention and is allotted no intrinsic value itself. In modernity, ritual practices are seen as epiphenomena coming to expression in the absence of texts.83 But Blondel suggests such an understanding of practice implies that practices are l­ittle more than magic or superstition.84 The value of ritual and sacramental practices (literal practice), their unique reality, and their purpose is to give form and expression to the interior reality of faith. The sacramental practices of Christianity are the horizon within which action most clearly discloses to the will that it is a vestige of the infinite. However, if practice is necessary for faith, but always an inadequate expression of it, and if faith always is necessary for practice, how is one to avoid making a fictive idol of practice, and avoid reducing practice to a necessary accessory of faith? To avoid these twin dangers, Blondel maintains practices must be the “expression of positive precepts and the original imitation of dogma divinely transcribed into distinct commandments . . . they have to contain [God’s] real presence and be [God’s] immanent truth. Caro verbum facta (the Word made flesh).”85 Hence, the command to celebrate the Eucharist: “Do this in memory of me.” Blondel is not suggesting that every liturgical act needs to be founded on God’s explicit command. Rather, the idea here is that liturgical action should issue forth from the divine life of the Spirit and embody and express the divine will.86 In the life of action, liturgical practice draws humanity into the divine life of God. The paradigm of humanity’s transformative participation in God’s life is the theological person most closely associated with the life of Christ, Mary, who as Theotokos (θεοτóκoς) shows us that “we must all give ourselves birth by giving God birth in us.”87

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Ultimately, Blondel grounds his metaphysics of action in God as the source and principle of action. The being of action and the sequence of necessities that follow from it depend upon the one thing necessary. This includes the life of action sustained by the dogmatic and sacramental practices of Christianity. To avoid or reject the litúrgia, or “literal practice,” which gives life and completes action, in Blondel’s view, would be to refuse to enter into the fullness of being. The role of literal practice in the consummation of the life of action leads finally to the role of being itself (God) as the synthetic and true bond between knowledge and action.88 Here we encounter the apex of the life of action. It is the point at which philosophy must resign itself, acknowledging, as the Apostle Paul does, that “[Christ] is before all things, and in him all things hold together.”89 In the hypostatic union of the person of Jesus Christ resides the perfection of the human wills and the bond that truly and fully unites knowledge and action. As the true image of the invisible and universal bond of all reality, Christ invites us to enter into his perfection through the life of action made whole through liturgical practice of the Church.

T h e S y n t h e s i s o f Fa i t h a n d R e a s o n

Within the framework of Blondel’s philosophy of action, the existential option for the life of action is the decision for faith expressed through the affirmation: “It is.”90 To affirm it is, even after postulating the supernatural order as a necessary hypothesis of the philosophy of action, is not to prove its real truth through reason alone. This qualification is important in the theo-­political context of post–Vatican I Catholic theology, for which the gratuity of grace and the preservation of the distinction between the natural and supernatural realms were of the utmost importance. Blondel’s affirmation of faith was, he declares, “an avowal which never comes from us alone.”91 “It is,” then, is Blondel’s personal testimony of faith that intentionally goes beyond philosophy’s ken. To the French philosophical community suspicious of the religious conclusions of Blondel’s thought, the emphasis on philosophy alone preserved philosophy’s autonomy and independence. Alone, philosophy (reason) shows the necessity of posing the alternative: “Is it or is it not?”

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Alone, philosophy discloses how this great question imposes itself on all of humanity. Alone, philosophy proves that we cannot pronounce for or against the supernatural. “But philosophy can go no further, nor can it say, in its own name alone, whether it be or not.”92 The task of affirming whether it be or not falls to the living person, where the intellect (reason) does not reside in abstraction or methodological bracket from the will, but rather where it arises from within the synthesis of faith and reason that takes place in the “intimacy of totally personal action.”93 At this point we could lose sight of all that has come before the final confession of faith in Action (1893) and miss its renewed significance in light of it. We might have lost sight of the powerful and personal, existential question about human existence that preceded the impersonal phenomenological analysis that unfolds throughout the majority of the work: “Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny? I act, but without even knowing what action is, without having wished to live, without knowing exactly either who I am or even if I am.”94 And we might have forgotten that at the beginning of Action (1893) we were told that the problem of action, despite its universality, ineluctability, and inexorability, is raised by and presented to the living person, and that “each [living person], in his own way, inevitably resolves it.”95 With this in mind, then, it seems fitting that Blondel ends his work with a personal confession of faith. But to make matters more complex, Blondel’s personal confession of faith, his resolution to the problem of action, is formulated as “It is” and not “I believe.” “It is” also is to formulate the act of faith in a way that “makes clear that the faith is not determined by my subjective act, but by reality, by the ‘being’ of its object.”96 Formulating the act of faith this way assigns a preponderance of value to the objective dimension of the act of faith. Yet this does not mean that the interior dispositions and motives of the human person are simply a preliminary step in a piecemeal process that can be abandoned upon the act of faith. Instead, the dispositions and motives of the will form an integral part of the act of faith. Since an act of faith is “not simply an object to be believed. Neither is it the act of believing an object proposed. It is not even the simple encounter of the subjective act of a person and the objective gift of God. It consists essentially in the synthesis, divinely formed within the person and humanly referred to God, of a supernatural gift and of an intellectual and moral process.”97

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This aspect of the act of faith in Blondel’s thought has the tendency to perplex his most charitable interpreters as they try to think through the relationship between philosophy (nature) and theology (grace). One response to the ambiguous character of Blondel’s thought in this regard is to overcompensate for him, reading his theological discourse as a “vi­ola­ tion of his purely philosophical methodology.”98 The “theological turn” in the fourth part of Action (1893) means Blondel’s “argument has been hijacked by the appearance of the divine. The entrance of God onto the scene paralyzes thought, bringing it to a ‘full stop.’ ”99 Such a hyperbolic reading of Blondel is appealing in light of the effort to herald him as the champion of Christian ontology over the epistemological skepticism and ontological nihilism of late modern intellectual discourse,100 but it is of little help in distilling the subtle interplay between the theological (supernatural) and the philosophical (natural) at work in Blondel’s thought. On the other hand, Blondel’s interpreters also have tended to obfuscate his thought on the relationship between theology and philosophy. In defending Blondel against the criticisms of Henry Duméry,101 Henri Bouillard posits the distinction between the “explicit” act of willing expressed in the realm of faith and the “implicit” act of willing found in the free/spontaneous activity of all humanity.102 In Bouillard’s reading the latter is the supernatural “undetermined” by revelation, which the philosopher can recognize through the use of reason. In turn, this raises the question of whether Blondel’s phenomenology of action considers humanity to be in a state of “pure nature.” In contrast to Duméry, Bouillard maintains that Blondel is concerned not with theological categories such as nature/grace and pure nature, but with the “philosophical problem of the meeting of philosophy and Christianity.”103 Certainly Bouillard is correct in holding that Blondel, though not denying the possibility of a state of pure nature, is not employing the formal categories of the­ ology in either Action (1893) or Letter on Apologetics.104 Bouillard, it seems, not without reason, would like to preserve the philosophical purity of Blondel’s “method of immanence.”105 Yet, it seems difficult to determine where the boundaries between philosophy and theology begin and end in Action (1893). The two interpretations above bring into relief a key Christian ­reality that animates Blondel’s thought, namely, the question of human freedom and the problem of eternal damnation.106 “Blondel’s dilemma”

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is not without precedent in the Christian tradition. More than one of Blondel’s commentators have remarked how strikingly similar Anselm’s and Blondel’s methodologies are.107 In the case of Anselm, it becomes clear that his argument for the existence of God and the Incarnation in the Proslogion and Cur Deus homo, despite an interpretative history to the contrary,108 “could not be detached from the Christian setting in which it occurs, because the understanding of God that it implies has arisen and is sustained in Christian faith.”109 As we have seen in our reading of Action (1893), the same can be said for Blondel’s thought and his argument for the existence of God, despite interpretations to the contrary.110 Blondel’s diary and personal correspondence reveal that his thought has arisen within and is sustained by Christian faith. It is a “philosophical thesis [conceived] from the very start in Christian prayer,”111 whose philo­sophical and theological realms interpenetrate each other. That is, it seeks to lay bare the inextricable truth of the human condition as being between itself and God. It displays the inner tension between finite and infinite freedom that must be maintained in order to give finite freedom “the opportunity to lay hold of its own freedom, a freedom that both is its own and comes from an external source.”112 In this respect, Blondel’s thought “listens” to theology. His philosophical apologetic need not set out to discover the content of God’s reve­ lation to humanity, but rather it uncovers how the latter forms humanity by virtue of its created status. The polarity between presence and absence, similarity and difference within the interplay of “la volonté voulue” (willed will) and “la volonté voulante” (willing will) allows the Christian notion of the supernatural to disclose itself in its exterior (philosophical) form, inviting one to pass through the exterior form presented at philosophy’s threshold and into the interior content of the mystery of the supernatural.113 But, can reason bear the weight of this task? What makes it competent and capable of such a task? For Blondel, reason can genuinely claim to practice philosophy unadulterated by the first principles of Chris­tianity and, at the same time, find its completion beyond reason’s competence, because it is conceived within an implicitly normative theological horizon. The practice of philosophy as he understands it is sustained by a doctrine of creation that argues not simply for the contingency and dignity of human rationality, but allows for a speculative trust: “to act is in a way

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to entrust oneself to the universe.”114 The practice of philosophy attends to the role of reason in discerning God’s call to communion in the person of Jesus Christ. Put another way, there is a “metaphysical moment” in Blondel’s thought that the reader must grasp: “I act, but without even knowing what action is, without having wished to live, without knowing exactly either who I am or even if I am. This appearance of being which flutters about within me, these light and evanescent actions of a shadow, bear in them, I am told, an eternally weighty responsibility, and that, even at the price of blood, I cannot buy nothingness because for me it is no longer.”115 This crucial moment in which the living person grasps its created nature liberates reason to plumb the depths of the human will in all its heteronomy without constant recourse to an explicit theological discourse. Yet Blondel’s thought does make a theological turn, but not in the abrupt manner that disavows the phenomenology that has come before. Instead, all that comes before now takes on a renewed significance. Indeed, as reason draws ever nearer to “the sensible sign that obscurely contains the light whose invisible center thought seeks to discover little by little,”116 it realizes that the “perfect food . . . which alone is capable of vivifying a thought and a will animated by faith, resides in the formal command, the ritual act, the sacramental material.”117 Put another way, reason encounters in the ecclesiastical and liturgical life of the Church, albeit imperfectly, that the full nature of the life of action is its life spent in communion sustained by the one thing necessary, God. For in the liturgical life of the Church reason (philosophy) discovers the highest expression of its original inclination toward truth and the delight it enjoys when it participates through faith in God’s truth.

Six

Tradition in History and Dogma Blondel and the Problem of Theology and History in Modern Catholicism

When Alfred Loisy matriculated at L’Institut catholique de Paris in 1878, he did not foresee how his thought would come to embody the tension between the Romantic revaluation of the past and the rise of nineteenth-­ century historicism, as it now does in retrospect. Indeed, this tension is in many respects what makes Loisy such a complex figure. His thought reflects the anxiety between the tradition of nineteenth-­century historicism, with its sense of detached historical consciousness, and, paradoxically, nineteenth-­century Roman Catholic traditionalism, with its high and triumphalistic ecclesiology. Thus, on the one hand, Loisy offers a vigorous defense of the Catholic tradition and its integral role in human (and theological) understanding to his liberal Protestant interlocutors, Auguste Sabatier and Adolf von Harnack:

121

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Whatever we think, theologically, of tradition, whether we trust it or regard it with suspicion, we know Christ only by the tradition, across the tradition, and in the tradition of the primitive Christians. This is as much as to say that Christ is inseparable from His work, and that the attempt to define the essence of Christianity according to the pure gospel of Jesus, apart from the tradition, cannot succeed, for the mere idea of the gospel without tradition is in flagrant contradiction with the facts submitted to criticism.1 And on the other hand, Loisy insists on the independence and objec­ tivity of the historian when, for example, he discusses the methodological horizon the historian employs in his investigation of scripture: “He who wishes to decide historically the thoughts of the Saviour . . . must take the texts and interpret them according to their natural meaning and the guarantees of authenticity they present.”2 For Loisy, the conceptual resolution of these two dynamics at work in his thought, and that which could mediate between a conception of tradition as the antithesis of the freedom of reason and as the necessary element of human understanding, was the visible reality that issued forth from the failure of Christ’s imminent return, that is, the Church. For in Loisy’s ecclesiology, the concept of tradition is hypostatized in such a way that it can be easily contrasted to history, scripture, faith, and the many other categories from which it has come to be distinguished. Here we arrive at the principal methodological problem Blondel observed in Loisy’s Christology and the central metaphysical presupposition animating his exegesis. This chapter exposits Blondel’s History and Dogma, which in its immediate context offers a critique of Loisy’s attempt to appropriate the modern practice of historiography to resolve the tension between the immanent (historical) and transcendent (theological) aspects of scripture. As the following exposition and discussion of Blondel’s notion of tradition make clear, the question of tradition does not reside in isolation from such fundamental polarities of Christianity as immanence and transcendence, theology and history, nature and grace, and ontology and epistemology. Indeed, in Blondel’s idea of tradition we are drawn into the intricate web of the fundamental tensions that shape and form how the eternal truth of God’s self-­gift comes

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to be known and embodied both personally and communally in the life of the Church.

T h e D i a l e c t i c s o f R e a l H i s to ry: “ M e ta p h y s i c s i n Ac t ”

The first section of History and Dogma is devoted to laying out the “problem” of tradition and, in particular, what Blondel calls the “primordial question”—the question pertaining to the relationship between the modern practice of history and Christian dogma and the transition that takes place between these two realities in the act of faith. Both are central to faith, but alone neither is sufficient to corroborate much less to sustain genuine Christian faith. Blondel writes: “For while it is true that historical facts are the foundations of Christian faith, they do not of themselves engender it, nor do they suffice to justify it entirely.”3 Thus, the objective of Blondel’s project is to find the “explanatory principle” or “source of movement” that facilitates the transition between history and faith. In other words, he is interested in achieving a “synthesis of history and dogma while respecting their independence and solidarity” that will discover the “authority proper to each” and how both “will continue to verify and vivify [each other].”4 Before unfolding the conditions for achieving the synthesis, however, Blondel examines and critiques the two schools of thought, historicism and extrinsicism. The one he calls extrinsicism tends to emphasize the juridical, abstract, or conceptual nature of dogmatic statements with little or no reference to the concrete and historical circumstances in which they were formulated. Facts are “merely a vehicle for apologetics.”5 The problem with extrinsicism, according to Blondel, is that it offers an account of the relation between facts (history) and theology (faith) that superimposes the former onto the latter. In this process the miraculous will be furnished by sensual perception; the divine disengaged by the work of reason, the supernatural defined by the facts of revelation authenticated by the divinely miraculous. But these elements remain external to one another and are only related, where we are concerned, by an argument, a purely intellectual structure, based solely on an empirical conclusion: as a result of which it is easy to see

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that the least weakness in the theory of perception, and in reasoning required, as a foundation, menaces its fragility.6 The Scholastic horizon permits an “intransigent absolutism,” as Blondel puts it, that has no rules of interpretation.7 Blondel’s critique of historicism begins by demonstrating the philo­ sophical lacunae that exist in this position. Historicism reduces dogmatic statements and texts to the individual, unique, and ascertainable facts of the historical situation from which they arise. The principal problem with Loisy’s historicism is the relation of history to the other sciences. Is history a self-­sufficient science? Or does history depend on other sciences (metaphysics)?8 Blondel engages the Aristotelian account of the sciences9 that distinguishes each science according to its subject matter. In the modern horizon of science, the practice of history represents all phenomena “under which humanity allows its inward in­visible work to be grasped in observable manifestations—manifestations which modify one another mutually, continually undergoing the repercussion of facts upon man, even of those most remote from him, and forming no doubt a coherent whole, though without supplying a total and satisfying explanation of the smallest detail.”10 That is, the historian sees distinct empirical realities that do in fact form a coherent narrative but without the narrative itself providing the framework within which the realities can be rendered intelligible. The historian, unlike the philoso­ pher who practices speculative metaphysics, refuses to do what Kant saw as preventing speculative metaphysics from becoming a true science, namely, untangling the antinomies reason becomes entangled in when it attempts to cull fragments of human experience into a to­tality of all appearances and make objective statements about the totality of human experience. Put another way, the subordination of history to higher disciplines in Blondel’s account is premised on the understanding that the practice of history has as its primary referent the appearance of phenomena in the world and not their interior reality. Here it is important to note that Blondel and Loisy are in agreement as to the subject matter of the modern practice of historiography. Where they differ is whether one can engage in the practice of history adequately without taking into consideration the metaphysical limitations of this discipline. Blondel writes:

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What the historian does not see, and what he must recognize as escaping him, is the spiritual reality, the activity of which is not wholly represented or exhausted by the historical phenomena (although the latter can be determined like a complete picture subsisting apart from the original). It remains true that the historian has to make the determinist explanation as intelligible and complete as possible—but it remains equally true that it is his duty to leave the issue open or even to open it as widely as possible to the realist explanation which lies always beneath.11 What the historian does not see need not be the subject matter of his investigation, but he needs to remain open to it methodologically, in the sense that he must admit it as a fundamental reality at work in the coming to be of historical phenomena in the world, which exacts limitations on his ability to interpret phenomena. To refuse to remain open in method to this fundamental reality, as Blondel accuses Loisy of doing, is to fail to understand that “real history is composed of human lives; and human life is metaphysics in act.”12 The historian need not necessarily insert the empirical realities of phenomena into a metanarrative, but he does need to acknowledge, according to Blondel, the metaphysical reality in them as historical phenomena: “What is, in fact, the object or rather the aspect which belongs to history, in the technical and contemporary sense of the word? Everything in the social life of mankind which can be verified or testified to, and everything which, with these facts as the basis of induction, is an explanation of the fieri of mankind, and a definition of the laws of its continuous and continual movement.”13 For Blondel the modern practice of historical research is a necessary but insufficient framework for understanding the totality of human existence. For human existence, as Blondel understands it, cannot be imagined outside the purview of the dynamic interplay between the infinite and finite realities that constitute human action. It is not the case that Blondel is unconcerned with history and historical facts. Rather, he is concerned with whether Loisy can interpret Christianity adequately without attending to the infinite realities that show themselves through the finite. Loisy’s historicism is, according to Blondel, both unwilling and unable to penetrate this deeper reality of human history. It was in this context that Blondel maintained that the practice of historical research must be engaged with the disciplines of metaphysics and theology. Blondel was faced with the task of

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articulating a response to Loisy that, on the one hand, could integrate modern exegetical practices without excluding the theological from the realm of consideration, while, on the other hand, avoiding the ahistoricism of extrinsicism that inadequately distinguished history from theology (dogma). Thus, from Blondel’s perspective the historian offers an interpretation of reality that is necessary and legitimate insofar as he does not consider his account self-­sufficient. If he does, Blondel argues, he “becomes guilty of fraudulently converting a simple method of work into a negative and tyrannical doctrine.”14 He assumes that the division of the sciences that exists in the modern mind necessarily exists in reality. It is not enough for the historian to remain entrenched within his epistemological horizon and only rhetorically acknowledge the horizons of the other sciences.15 When history is practiced this way, historical analysis reduces events and happenings to critical history and substitutes analysis for real and genuine phenomena. The phenomenological reduction of Christianity is most acute in historicism because it tends to view Christianity as simply a religion based on texts and ignores the “other strands linking us to Christ.”16 Historicism’s exclusion of these other strands and the Christological question (Christ’s divinity) from the realm of legitimate inquiry prevents the ontological and moral reality of Christ’s character and actions from being considered. In refusing to acknowledge the spiritual and metaphysical import of Christ’s existence upon history, Blondel notes that historicism fails to embody its own methodological ideal, which purports “to look for the whole subject-­ matter of history.”17 The methodological presumptions of historicism are brought into relief through the rhetorical question Blondel poses to Loisy: If it is true that the apostolic generation lived in the desire and the certitude of the proximate return of Jesus, if that is what the immediate echo of the Master’s preaching repeated as the essence of the primitive message, if the source of devotion to the Saviour and of submission to trials was the hope of a beatifying triumph, how did faith survive so immense a disillusionment? How was it purified, fortified and propagated with such rapidity and on such a disconcerting scale at the very moment when it appeared to have failed to fulfill the promises which appear to be the human cause of its early successes?18 In L’Évangile et l’Église, Loisy’s answer to the question of the apostolic expectation of the parousia was that the apostles expected the parousia, but

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what came was the Church.19 Undoubtedly there is something compelling about Loisy’s answer.20 However, Blondel suggests that any worthwhile answer will be much more complex and much less circumscribed in its interpretation of this apostolic phenomenon. For Loisy to achieve a broader interpretation here requires that he methodologically reconfigure his exegetical practices such that the Christological referent of the phenomenon of apocalyptic expectation in first-­century Christianity can disclose the eschatological element already present in the early Church’s thinking. The apocalyptic expectation of the early Church was, Blondel writes, the “first imaginative synthesis” of the early Christians, influenced by Jewish messianism and intended to signify that such practices as martyrdom disclose the eschatological meaning of Christ’s self-­gift in the present: Was it not the concrete realization of the truth, like that which the expressive feasts of the liturgy teach us year by year, that the world is always on the point of ending for each one of us, and that what the goodness of God promises us is not some vague idealization but a fully and realist satisfaction, the material and spiritual transformation of the whole man and of the whole order of the universe? . . . And if the expectation of Christ’s glorious Coming never flagged, perhaps it was because . . . he was more truly present in the persecuted Church than if he had come suddenly on the clouds.21 Here Blondel is suggesting, as he did in Action (1893), that through the interplay between the speculative (metaphysics/theology) and the concrete (liturgical action) the truth discloses itself. The dialectics of real history, “metaphysics in act,” sets in motion the interplay between the interior and exterior realities to which the disciplines of history and philosophy accordingly refer, but real history also allows the bond that exists between the two disciplines to emerge in the concrete.

T h e B o n d b e t w e e n H i s to ry a n d D o g m a : B lo n d e l’ s N ot i o n o f T r a d i t i o n

In the context of the positions put forward by extrinsicism and historicism, Blondel argues for the “need for an intermediary between history and dogma, the necessity for a link between them which would bring

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about the synthesis and maintain solidarity without compromising [history’s and dogma’s] relative independence.”22 The synthetic principle of tradition “must have an original force, and a foundation of its own; for neither facts nor ideas nor reasoning have really succeeded in extricating us from the circle in which were enclosed by the initial question: “How is it that the Bible legitimately supports and guarantees the Church, and the Church legitimately supports and interprets the Bible?”23 The notion of tradition must be a metaphysical principle with an ontological value distinct from history and dogma, scripture and the Church, and fundamental ontology and epistemological method. Yet it must be a principle able to function as the source of unity between the two without eliding the one for the other. In other words, the objective of Blondel’s notion of tradition is to understand how tradition can unite such fundamental tensions in Christianity as history and dogma, the Church and scripture, and ontology and epistemology while maintaining the distinct integrity of each. To do so requires identifying the space between them, a space that constitutes their unity-­in-­distinction and that is interwoven into the fabric of the exegetical methods and the speculative doctrines of the Church in such a way that it presupposes the ordinary language and grammar spoken in the Church. As Blondel notes, “This vivifying power is known to everyone. It is a commonplace to say that the Church rests on ‘Scripture and Tradition.’ But what is it precisely? What is its function? What rational justification can be offered for it? How is it that it is linked, on the one hand, to historical facts without being absorbed into history, and that it is bound up, on the other hand, with speculative doctrines though it is not completely absorbed in them.”24 The task at hand is to liberate tradition from the assumptions that conceal it by describing its role and discovering “the source of its strength, and by virtue of what right it knows history in some respects otherwise and better than the critical historian, and dogma otherwise and better than the speculative theologian.”25 To begin, Blondel notes that the conventional idea of tradition is that of “transmission, principally by word of mouth, of historical facts, received truths, accepted teachings, hallowed practices and ancient customs. Is that, however, the whole content, is it even, where Catholicism is concerned, the essential content of the notion?”26 In other words, conventional tradition is an epiphenomenon that emerges in the absence

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of texts, “supplementing the lacunae,” as Blondel puts it. In this manner tradition is invoked in distinction to scripture as revealing a “state of mind” or “ancient custom” prior to the text or even implied in the text, and becomes subject to a double presupposition: Tradition only reports things explicitly said, expressly prescribed or deliberately performed by men in whom we are interested only for their conscious ideas, and in the form in which they themselves expressed them; it furnishes nothing which cannot or could not be translated into written language, nothing which is not directly and integrally convertible into intellectual expression; so that as we complete our collection of all that former centuries, even without noticing it, confided to memory—rather like students of folklore noting down folk-­songs—Tradition, it would seem, becomes superfluous, and recedes before the progress of reflective analysis, written codification and scientific co-­ordination.27 Conceiving tradition in terms of a reality that emerges in the absence of texts neglects its dynamism and, as Blondel would note in a later comment on tradition, that “element in tradition which is irreducible and always escapes when we formulate tradition in writing . . . [and which] makes it possible for some part of the truth to pass from the level of what is implicit in life (l’implicite vécu) to the level of the expressly known (l’explicite connu).”28 As a metaphysical principle whose ontological value comes to expression in its communicative and unitive functions, tradition is a phenomenon whose origins are prior to self-­reflection: “As a prin­ ciple of unity, continuity, and fecundity, tradition is both initial, anticipatory and final, precedes all reconstructive synthesis and likewise survives all reflexive analysis.”29 It is the absence of this metaphysical principle of tradition in Loisy’s account of history, according to Blondel, that prevents it from encountering the fullness of truth in Christianity. Loisy is right to insist that the truth claims of Christianity depend on historical evidence, but he is wrong to consider the historical evidence to be the full measure of their value. There is an inner reality to the truth claims made by Christianity that, though attuned to the historical realities and to the results of the historical-­critical method, still transcends the heuristic gaze of that method, inviting one to

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enter into the ultimate truth and become a participant in it.30 This is the living reality of tradition, which comes to expression through the charism of discernment embodied in concrete practice, animates the entire life of the Church, and draws into itself a living synthesis of the speculative, historical, and moral truths of the Church, manifesting and corroborating these truths through the concrete reality of “faithful action.”31 Now that Blondel has resituated the question of truth in tradition through the category of “faithful action,” the question of the truth of tradition becomes less an epistemological problem and more an ontological problem. Here we encounter the central reality of the synthetic relationship between action, truth, and tradition in Blondel’s account. In Action (1893) this relationship was adumbrated when, in the final stage of the drama of the “life of action,” Blondel suggests that “a tradition and a discipline represent a constant interpretation of thought through acts, offering each individual, in the sanctified experience, something like an anticipated control, an authorized commentary, an impersonal verification of the truth.”32 In History and Dogma, the interplay between action, truth, and tradition unfolds within a more explicitly ecclesial horizon that envisions the disclosure of speculative truths of Christian doctrine as a process sustained by practice: “To keep” the word of God means in the first place to do it, to put it into practice; and the deposit of Tradition, which the infidelities of the memory and the narrow limits of the intelligence would inevitably deform if it were handed to us in a purely intellectual form, cannot be transmitted in its entirety, indeed, cannot be used and developed, unless it is confided to the practical obedience of love. Faithful action is the Ark of the Covenant where the confidences of God are found, the Tabernacle where he perpetuates his presence and his teaching. If the essential truth of Catholicism is the incarnation of dogmatic ideas in historical facts, one must add reciprocally that the miracle of the Christian life is that from acts at first perhaps difficult, obscure and enforced, one rises to the light through a practical verification of speculative truths: Lex voluntatis, lux veritatis.33 What Blondel is suggesting here is that to discern the full content and meaning of God’s truth in revelation requires the proper disposition of

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receptivity. Liturgical and sacramental practices, prayer, almsgiving, and fasting, that is to say, concrete practices, dispose the community (the Church) toward discerning the truth revealed both in scripture and doctrine.34 In this respect, tradition always transcends the text of scripture by penetrating its content and implications and embodying the drama of salvation throughout human history. In doing so, it participates in the unveiling of the pattern of redemption in the world. This ecclesial space of tradition always transcends the material reality of scripture while remaining grounded in the historical details of scripture, and it prepares the Church to discern God’s presence in a new interpretation and further explication of revelation. “Faced by intellectual novelties, or exegetical hypotheses,” the Church discovers that “there is an autonomous principle of discernment in the total experience of the Church: in taking account of ideas and of facts, traditional faith also takes account of proven ways, of practice confirmed by the fruits of sanctity, of enlightenment gained through piety, prayer and mortification. That testimony is not the only one, no doubt, but it has its own inalienable value because it is based at the same time on the collective age-­old action of the most human of men and on God’s action in them.”35 Here the attenuated nature of historicism’s and extrinsicism’s resolutions to the problem of representation as it pertains to tradition is most acute. Loisy’s exegesis fails to recognize, and neo-­Scholasticism’s apologetic fails to furnish, a sense of tradition that adequately imagines and anticipates the future by attending to the way in which the past makes the future available to the present. Despite its desire to renew Catholicism, Loisy’s historicism inhibits the development of new and conceptually enriched schemes of thought by maintaining that “nothing can modify Tradition which does not, when put to the test, reveal itself as compatible with it and favorable to its progress; so that, though fundamentally stimu­ lating, it shows itself in the main as a moderating, curbing influence in regard to the diverse intellectual elements of the Christian faith.”36 For its part, extrinsicism is unable or unwilling to embrace the idea that “a truly supernatural teaching is only viable and conceivable if the initial gift is a seed capable of progressive and continual growth. The divine and human Word of Christ did not fix itself in immobility.”37 Blondel’s account of tradition, then, is not of an epiphenomenon that appears in the absence of the canonical scriptures only to become

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identified with them. Tradition relies on texts, and, at the same time, it relies on something else he calls “an experience always in act which enables it to remain in some respects master of the texts instead of being strictly subservient to them.”38 This enables tradition to be more than a force preserving the intellectual aspect of the past, but also a living re­ality of Christ’s presence. In its authentic manifestations, tradition “anticipates and illuminates the future and is disposed to do so by the effort it makes to remain faithful to the past.”39 Likewise, tradition “frees us from the very scriptures on which it never ceases to rely with devout respect” to reach the real Christ who escapes scientific examination without rejecting the practices of exegesis and history.40 Within this notion of tradition doctrines can be called not only specu­lative but also practical.41 That is, the full value and meaning of doctrine cannot not be understood apart from the community’s embodiment of those very doctrines in their practice, since “dogmas are not only facts and ideas in act, but also they are principles of action.”42 As we saw in Blondel’s philosophy of action, practice is the unifying source between action and belief that gives form and expression to the interior reality of faith. When, therefore, he states that the “truth of Catholicism is not demonstrated simply by the miracle of an institution’s surviving so many disasters, nor by the beauty of its achievement . . . it supplies the verification of what it believes and teaches in its age-­old experience and its continuous practice,”43 he is pointing toward the fundamental truth concerning the nature of tradition as embodied in, sustained by, and mani­ fested through concrete practices. It is these practices that render the Christian narrative intelligible, because their intelligibility presupposes they be embedded in the particular Christian history (or histories) from which they originate. Blondel writes: Furthermore, it is clear that, in order that we may pass from facts to dogma, even the most exact analysis of the texts and the effort of individual thought are not sufficient. The mediation of collective life, and the slow progressive labour of the Christian tradition, are essential . . . “faith in dogma presupposes a living faith,” an altogether false expression if taken to mean that the personal belief of each believer is not justified by explicit reasons, but profoundly true

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if it reminds us that the intellectual expression of Christian dogma was worked out in the matrix of a believing society, that it cannot be brought to life and further developed except by a living faith, and that in order to understand a dogma fully one must bear within one the fullness of the Tradition which has brought it to light. In this way the difficulty which held us up at the outset seems to be resolved: the active principle of the synthesis lies neither in the facts alone, nor in the ideas alone, but in the Tradition which embraces within it the facts of history, the effort of reason and the accumulated experiences of the faithful.44 History, reason, and the accumulated wisdom and collective experiences of the faithful are important for establishing that tradition, though mysterious, is not arbitrary and capricious. It has a “rational process whose laws can be made clear and whose organon can be established.”45 The organon of tradition, its body of principles, though it has the supernatu­ ral as its “object and mode of action,” has a natural basis upon which it comes to expression.46 It does not proceed by way of “research” or scientific investigation, nor dialectically as a resolution to conceptual tensions, in the tradition of Hegel. Nor does it proceed as some sort of “empirical mysticism.” Rather, tradition “adapts herself to the diverse forms of intellectual culture; she borrows the language she needs from philosophical systems so as to confer upon her doctrine the degree of precision required by a given state of civilization; but she is the slave of no system; even the most fully worked-­out formulae, those most clearly bound up with a philosophical terminology, Aristotle’s for example, the Church considers only as provisional in their scientific form.”47 The objective in employing diverse human means in tradition is to represent and “to discover in men the point of contact prepared for action.”48 This desire or objective brings into relief—albeit in an awkward and undeveloped way—the ideal role and intention of the interpretive au­thority of the magisterium as the rule of faith in Blondel’s philosophy of tradition.49 The idea of tradition in the Blondelian framework, then, is not literally dependent upon the scriptural texts, though it perpetually renews and provides an interpretive horizon for them. Blondel’s horizon allows

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tradition a relative latitude in appropriating other means for expressing the central truths of Christianity, without these other means, whether in their social, cultural, or philosophical forms, usurping the theological expression of the principal truths of faith.50 Of course, it is possible that the forms by which the tradition does clarify and express its normative truth claims could become subject to ideological tendencies, threatening the intelligibility of those truth claims. Yet, in Blondel’s account of tradition, the openness to other means of understanding in a living tradition will, when embodied well in the practice of the community which represents that living tradition, render the central and enduring truths of that tradition intelligible to the community—and, when embodied poorly, imperspicuous to the community. There obtains, therefore, in the Blondelian framework, a symbiosis between truth and freedom in tradition, where tradition simultaneously preserves and develops through the ongoing interplay between history and faith. As the Church becomes more receptive to God’s self-­gift in the person of Christ as the preeminent expression of truth in the Christian tradition, that Truth discloses, through the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the multiple and diverse expressions to which it gives rise. The right questions to ask are not whether history must or can corroborate Christian beliefs or whether exegesis and history ought to be divorced from speculative theology. Instead, Blondel suggests, tradition “is a question of accepting them in their real interdependence so as to discover their several contributions, their relative autonomy and their compensating action on one another: so that their legitimate interdependence, which is the condition of their co-­operation, derives from their very solidarity, and that to isolate the study of facts or of Christian theology from the science of Christian life would be to tear out the heart of the bride and to expect her to go on living, and living for the bridegroom?”51 Here one discovers the heart of Blondel’s understanding of tradition as the embodied reality of those fundamental beliefs from which it derives its existence and that renders those very beliefs intelligible in the concrete. Blondel writes, “One realizes through the practice of Chris­tianity that its dogmas are rooted in reality. One has no right to set the facts on one side and the theological data on the other without going back to the sources of life and of action, finding the indivisible synthesis.”52 The objective of this

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synthesis is to tease out a “Christian knowledge” that attends to the history as well as to the “collective experience of Christ verified and realized in us.”53 For Blondel, tradition is a form of knowledge that intends to situ­ate itself between “those who offer us a Christianity so divine that there is nothing human, living or moving about it, and those who involve it so deeply in historical contingencies and make it so dependent upon natural factors that it retains nothing but a diffused sort of divinity.”54

Seven

After History and Dogma Tradition as Participation in God’s Truth

In the immediate aftermath of the publication of History and Dogma, Baron Friedrich von Hügel stated that Blondel’s account of tradition lacked historical sense.1 Von Hügel maintained that Blondel inadequately distinguished between the historian’s task of describing phenomena and historical events and the theological horizon from which the Christian’s spiritual interpretation proceeds.2 In a slightly different form some years later, the eminent historical theologian Yves Congar appropriated von Hügel’s criticism of Blondel in his monumental work Tradition and Traditions. Congar observed that Blondel’s account of tradition in History and Dogma insufficiently attended to the historical nature of dogma and the way dogma itself is conceived within the horizon of history. Blondel’s account of tradition belonged to the process of transformation tradition undergoes in modern Catholicism by which “Catholics learnt how to make a clearer distinction between a purely historical and a dogmatic 137

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tradition, or rather between tradition as it appears to the historian and as it exists for the Church.”3 Undoubtedly there is truth to both von Hügel’s and Congar’s criticisms. Blondel’s training as a philosopher and lack of formal training as a historical theologian and biblical exegete is on display in History and Dogma. His account of tradition offers a much-­needed epistemological framework for understanding the nontextual nature, develop­ ment, and transformation of tradition as it comes to expression in the concrete life of the Church, but it lacks historical sense insofar as it fails to be tethered to the history of doctrine and its development. For Congar, Blondel perhaps minimized “the part played by the [historical] evidence and by the [apologetic/theological] arguments which render the evidence of value to discursive reason.”4 Blondel’s interest in maintaining the distinction between a historical tradition and a dogmatic tradition is well attested to by his correspondence with von Hügel, Loisy, and his criticism of extrinsicism.5 The historical and theological deficiencies in Blondel’s account can be explained to some degree, according to Congar, by context. That is, writing at the height of the Modernist crisis as a suspect of modernism himself, and in response to a truncated and narrow view of the history and an ahistorical rationalist apologetics, his account failed to articulate the relationship between epistemic process of understanding tradition in relation to tradition’s history, the history of dogma, and the theological nature of history and dogma. That Blondel’s account of tradition emerged in the context of Loisy’s nineteenth-­century historicism is, for Congar, important to recognizing its limitations. Nineteenth-­century historicism reduced religious phenomena such as dogma, doctrine, practice, and ritual to their historical genesis and development. In principle, Blondel was not opposed to Loisy’s use of historical and critical methodologies to examine and justify the relationship between religious beliefs and facts. In fact, this was an important part of the process by which Christianity learned to clarify, justify, and better understand what it believes. Blondel’s criticism of Loisy, clarified a year after the publication of History and Dogma, was aimed at his methodology. Loisy’s methodology was beholden to a form of historicism that was unwilling to acknowledge that there are “multiple ways of access and return between beliefs and facts, ways that must be taken into account scientifically to explain a dogmatic interpretation of documents as well as to justify the historical truth of dogmas.”6 Put differently,

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it viewed history as a perpetual collection of facts used to categorize past events of human experience without reference to the present and the historian’s own subjectivity. It offered a monolithic representation of past reality that Nietzsche pilloried for attempting to impose objective stability between representation and reality at the expense of the human subjectivity.7 In addition to Blondel’s inadequate account of history, Congar sees in Blondel’s account of tradition an overemphasis on the “implicitly lived” (implicite vécu) in the life of the members of the faithful at the expense of neglecting the apostolic deposit.8 There was precedent for discussing the “implicitly lived” in Augustine, Aquinas, Maine de Biran, and Leibniz, and also in Johann Adam Möhler, Johann Baptist Franzelin, and Newman. But “[Blondel] paid too little attention to the apostolic witness considered not only as narrative and history but also as containing and communicating a theological interpretation of the facts,” Congar notes. “The treasure entrusted to the Church is not just a reality but a deposit of revelation which already possesses a dogmatic character.”9 This chapter engages Congar’s criticisms by exploring Blondel’s religious phenomenology, epistemology, and how his theory of tradition understands the relationship between the historical and dogmatic traditions of Catholicism. It examines the synthetic movement in tradition from the implicitly lived to the expressly known. Further, Blondel’s theory of tradition rehabilitates an important feature of the economy of tradition in the form of an “analogy of tradition” (analogia traditionis).10 The transmission of tradition from the apostles to later generations of the Church facilitates the Church’s communal participation in and with Christ. As the synthetic living reality that mediates between history and dogma, tradition (vinculum) is a participation in the vinculum substantiale (substantial bond) that exists between Creator and creature established by Christ’s hypostatic encounter with the world. The concrete process by which tradition unfolds God’s truth in history is through the faithful and liturgical action of the Church. In Blondel’s scheme, “faithful action is the Ark of the Covenant” where God’s truth represented in doctrine becomes a living reality in the Church. Here the interconnectedness between action, the problem of representation, and tradition comes to the fore as one of Blondel’s keenest observations. By drawing on the thought of contemporary authors who have dealt with the question of tradition, this chapter

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develops Blondel’s key insight into the interconnection between tradition, representation, and faithful and liturgical action while maintaining continuity with and bringing more coherence to his idea of tradition. In discussing the connections between action, representation, and tradition, this chapter provides readers with a better window into the Blondelian insight that through the faithful and liturgical action of the Church tradition is a participation in and a representation of revealed truth in human history. Further, it will demonstrate to readers who are sympathetic to the criticisms of Blondel the good reasons to reconsider Blondel’s contribution to a participationist and representational understanding of the faith revealed to the early Church and carried through faithful and liturgical action in tradition.

T h e Imp l i c i t a n d Exp l i c i t i n T r a d i t i o n

Blondel’s notion of tradition in History and Dogma is, among many other things, an attempt to develop Catholicism in the aftermath of the French Revolution. The Revolution had destroyed the French education system, and when Napoleon reorganized it he decreed in 1808 that all schools of the university take the precepts of Catholicism as the basis of their teaching. At the same time, he created a state monopoly on all levels of education in France by placing the education system under the auspices of the minister of public instruction, setting the stage for future conflict between the Catholic Church and the public education system. Throughout the various regimes and governments of the nineteenth century, French higher education continued to deteriorate, and the conflict between public (secular) and Catholic education escalated. By the end of the nineteenth century, the power the Catholic Church had wielded over important French cultural and educational institutions waned, as a consequence of the concerted effort by anticlerical forces within the French Third Republic (1870–1940). Anticlerical French politicians of the Third Republic viewed Catholic education as divisive, fostering distrust of the republican government, and promoting divided loyalties between church and state among French citizens that was toxic to national unity. During the 1880s, tension between the Catholic Church and the Third Republic intensified when the government of Jules Ferry forcibly closed religious houses, expelled

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religious orders from the country, and abolished by law faculties of Catholic theology in the Université de France. As part of the educational reforms of the Third Republic, zealous anticlerical republicans supported scholars in France’s secular universities conversant with and sympathetic to critical methods of scholarship. Such unwritten policies afforded anticlerical republicans the opportunity to tout vicariously the republican platform, while simultaneously advancing the anti-­Catholic policies put forward during the Third Republic. At the end of the nineteenth century, many Catholics saw the French university system as a demonic means employed to de-­Christianize French society. This situation in France increasingly complicated the lives of Catholic intellectuals, many of whom found themselves in the unfortunate position of having to balance the competing interests of republican policies, often stridently anti-­Catholic, with the doctrinal claims of and loyalty to the Church. In an effort to come to terms with Catholicism’s new political status within French culture, society, and the Republic, tradition took on a new significance in the life of modern French Catholicism. It was objectified as the means to conserving a threatened heritage. Tradition was, Alexander Dru notes, focused on conserving the clearly defined object: the “deposit of faith.”11 From this perspective of tradition, the transmission of tradition was viewed in impersonal and highly mechanized terms that were less concerned with the process by which tradition was passed on and more focused on what was handed down. The theo-­political setting for French Catholicism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries provides an important historical and social context for Blondel’s notion of tradition, radical at the time, as a nontextual “living synthesis.”12 The nontextual nature of tradition as a living synthesis meant that it relied on texts but at the same time it relied on something else, on an “experience always in act” that “presents the conscious mind with elements previously held back in the depths of faith and practiced, rather than expressed, systematized or reflected upon.”13 What is more, it always has “to teach something new because it transforms what is implicit and ‘enjoyed’ into something explicit and known.”14 What is the something new that tradition has to teach us? And how does it transform what is implicit and enjoyed into something explicit? To begin, the notion of the implicit belongs to the fundamental principle at work in Blondel’s philosophy that the life of action is the

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privileged site of human understanding. Blondel would develop and ­modify this principle over time. “Lived experience” (“living experience,” or la réalité réelle) and the life of action are the framework within which we find Blondel throughout his work distinguishing human agency, action, experience, ontology, prospective knowledge, practical science, the pneumatic, the “implicitly lived,” and real knowledge from reflection, logic, reflective knowledge, retrospection, science of practice, the noetic, the “expressly known,” and notional knowledge during the cognitive act and unifying them later in the process of human understanding. Within the life of action, then, the distinction between “implicitly lived” and “expressly known” is homologous with and falls under the formal, primary distinction between real and notional knowledge.15 The distinction between real and notional knowledge is not new. It had been around for a long time before Newman used it to great effect in his university sermons, his essay on the development of doctrine,16 and in distinguishing the different forms of assent the intellect makes and in formulating the “illative sense” in the Grammar of Assent.17 In Oxford University Sermon 13, Newman describes the native and free-­flowing movement from implicit to explicit reasoning in eloquent and intimate terms: The mind ranges to and fro, and spreads out, and advances forward with a quickness which has become a proverb, and a subtlety and versatility which baffle investigation. It passes on from point to point, gaining one by some indication; another on a probability; then availing itself of an association; then falling back on some received law; next seizing on testimony; then committing itself to some popular impression, or some inward instinct, or some obscure memory; and thus it makes progress not unlike a clamberer on a steep cliff, who, by quick eye, prompt hand, and firm foot, ascends how he knows not himself, by personal endowments and by practice, rather than by rule, leaving no track behind him, and unable to teach another. It is not too much to say that the stepping by which great geniuses scale the mountains of truth is as unsafe and precarious to men in general, as the ascent of a skilful mountaineer up a literal crag. It is a way which they alone can take; and its justification lies in their success. And such mainly is the way in which all men, gifted or not gifted, commonly reason,—not by rule, but by an inward faculty.18

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By the fifteenth sermon, “On the Theory of Developments in Religious Discourse,” Newman extended the notion of implicit reasoning beyond the dialectic process of thought to the origins of the idea of doctrinal development. Here a two-­stage developmental process begins from implicit reasoning and moves to explicit formulation in doctrine,19 which Newman articulated in less theoretical and in more historical and apolo­ getic terms in his well-­known essay on the development of doctrine.20 In the context of early twentieth-­century Catholic theology’s impersonal, mechanized, and objectified account of tradition, Blondel recognized the originality of Newman’s description of the process of doctrinal development and the “tests” (“notes”) he used to substantiate its authenticity. Newman was prescient in grasping and describing doctrinal development as nobody had done before him, with the possible exception of Möhler from the Catholic Tübingen school. He realized that the Church was not a hermetically sealed institution sailing unaffected through history, as it was often portrayed by many of the Roman Catholic theologians he would encounter during his time spent in Rome after his conversion. In a letter after the publication of the Essay on Development, and a few months before he arrived in Rome, he remarked in passing that “Roman divines are generally nothing beyond accurate dogmatic teachers—and know little of history or scholarship—hence they make great mistakes.”21 The Church was in history. And a “Church in history, with a message partly about a piece of history, must explain itself to new generations, in a world of new knowledge, and new phrases, and new ways of enquiry. To be a Church in history was to develop.”22 So part of the argument of Newman’s Essay on Development was to use historical illustrations to show that none of the modern churches were identical to the ancient Church, but that history shows the Roman Church preserves the identity of the ancient Church better than the rest. Yet the development of doctrine involved the problem of change and continuity in an institution that believed in the immutability and validity of the gospel message it received from the past and was commissioned to proclaim in the present. Newman recognized both personally and intellectually that the Church’s belief and tradition cannot be understood fully through an awareness of its past by means of textual and historical evidence. There was something else to the process of development that, upon his conversion to Catholicism, became more pronounced in his writing.

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It was—forgive the cliché—the idea of the “living tradition” active in the Church’s sense of faith, witness, and judgment. The day came, Congar writes, when Newman discovered that the “early Church never defined its faith in the early councils only on criterion of antiquity, but on that of the sense of the faith ever living in its preaching. She never merely witnessed, but judged, using an authority ever active in her.”23 This insight set Newman’s theory of development apart in Congar’s eyes, in that it shifted the focus of the idea of development to the inner theological dimension of that of tradition.24 Still, it is one thing to acknowledge and document historical change in the Church, it’s another to provide criteria through which change in the Church can be determined to be legitimate and appropriate, and still another to make valid arguments with which it can be justified. To use Newman’s own words, “all men reason . . . but all men do not reflect upon their own reasoning, much less reflect truly and accurately, so as to do justice to their own meaning.”25 Although Blondel was exposed to Newman’s thought through his teacher and mentor Léon Ollé-­Laprune, there is little evidence to suggest Blondel studied Newman formally and closely.26 However, Blondel seemed confident in what he knew of Newman to claim that Newman’s insistence on the development of dogma followed in a long line of thought extending back to at least Aquinas.27 Blondel held Newman in the highest esteem, and he was inspired by the “acuity of his spiritual insight” into real and notional knowledge.28 But despite the esteem and inspiration, Newman’s distinction between real and notional knowledge seemed to privilege the difference between the two, over emphasizing the fruitfulness of their unity.29 In the Grammar of Assent, Newman adopted the distinction between real and notional knowledge within the framework of the subject–object relationship, a relationship Blondel was loath to adopt for the philosophical fear of falling into either a critical dualism or an idealism.30 How the implicitly lived passes to the explicitly known was for Blondel the philosophical problem at the epistemic center of the question of doctrinal development.31 In Aquinas he found the relationship between the implicit and explicit discussed in a way that lent itself to both historical development and genuine progress in understanding revelation.32 What was new in Blondel’s adoption of the distinction between real and notional knowledge was how he made it a part of his philosophy of action.

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For Blondel, real knowledge, “knowledge by action,” the “implicitly lived” is a part of a rigorous rational dialectic in the intuitive encounter with the intrinsic life of being.33 It is our encounter with being itself or, as Oliva Blanchette observes, a “recognition of a higher order of being given in a world that contains it only in a finite way.”34 In notional knowledge, the “explicitly known,” we exercise abstraction and employ concepts, images, and linguistic expressions to represent the objects we apprehend in our concrete experience of the real. Notional knowledge is necessary to create the distinction between the knowing subject and the object known and make explicit thought possible. Notional knowledge, Blondel argues, “is not in vain; it has its own truth and function; it is attached to another which is its secret condition and of which it makes possible its subsequent expression.”35 The difference between notional and real knowledge comes into sharper focus when we understand the simple difference between the photo album containing pictures of our vacation, which prompts our memories of the vacation, and the living (lived), real experience of the vacation, which cannot be replaced by photo album. Our photo album, as glossy, fun, and enjoyable as it might be to look at, and as useful as it might be in calling to mind our memories of the vacation, is incapable of replacing the living (lived) experience of the vacation.36 Here what distinguishes real and notional knowledge is presence. In real knowledge we encounter the presence of the real in a way our representations created through notional knowledge fail to. Blondel’s account of the real and notional knowledge was criticized by Jacques Maritain, who thought notional knowledge deserved greater emphasis.37 In contrast to Mari­ tain, real knowledge is not “realism” in the sense of a real correspondence between our notions, concepts, and representations of objects in the world. It is an encounter, a discovery, or, as Blondel would call it in his later work,38 an “implication” with the “intelligence of higher truths and principles [that] alerts us to a certain disorientation between ourselves and the world of phenomena; it gives rise to a metaphysical wonder and moral consciousness that cuts us loose for speculation and action in a broader sense that somehow sets phenomena aside.”39 In his work Le procès de l’intelligence published more than a decade after History and Dogma, Blondel suggests that real knowledge is a conscious awareness of God’s presence and is characterized through stages of perfection, depth, and unity. In this work, Blondel follows Augustine,

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Pascal, and Newman to a point; then, perhaps under the influence of Pierre Rousselot’s (1878–1915) interpretation of Aquinas’s episte­mology,40 he moves beyond these three figures and offers a modified version of Aquinas’s account of judgment by connaturality,41 which Rousselot observed was missing in Newman’s Grammar of Assent.42 The objective of the five-­ stage dialectical process is to discern real knowledge’s perfection, depth, and unity in its awareness of God’s eternal presence in reference to being as other. Individuals encounter real knowledge through compassion and sympathy, what Blondel calls “cognitio per passionem.” Here real knowledge is receptive and open to the being of all things, including the divine within the individual being of all things. However, “this is not an abstraction from the real, but rather a universalization of our sympathetic openness to share and receive from all.”43 The culminating moment of real knowledge is knowledge by action and synergy, knowledge by “connaturality,” as Aquinas put it. It is the progressive recognition of God’s presence in the union of love that comes to expression in “faithful action.” Blondel’s point in distinguishing real and notional knowledge in the cognitive act is not to denigrate or usurp notional knowledge. It is the occasion by which we recognize that conceptual knowledge does not exhaust reality, but rather enters into the dialectic of action in a synthetic process that opens philosophy to all that is real. The distinction and its synthetic unity were the goal of the dialectic in Action (1893). It took a more technical form in an article published two years after History and Dogma. In search of philosophy’s starting point, and using the language of “prospection” for real knowledge and “reflection” for notional knowledge, Blondel described it this way: Far from tending either to reduce prospection to reflection, as if the concrete were made by the abstract, far from sacrificing discursive knowledge to intuition, as if the work of science were only a provisional trick, philosophy consolidates these two equally prime and essential movements of living thought: they are necessary for the progress of each other. And from their mutual dependence results a conception of reality quite different from that given to it by realism and idealism. Reality to the extent that it is intelligible, acces­ sible and healthy to us is not made up of so-­called objective elements, or of entirely subjective constructions either; but like a chemical

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combination where the elements, although indispensible, are transformed into a qualitatively new body, it is made up of the synthesis of multiple relations which a permanently discursive reflection analy­ ses, and which an intuition which is its final cause and raison d’etre expresses in its higher truth.44 The sense of finitude that emerges through the awareness that our knowledge is imperfect and incomplete, especially in our efforts to organize and grasp the world more clearly through conceptual (notional) knowledge, impels us toward real knowledge and ultimately toward a synthetic union without confusion of notional and real knowledge. Distinguishing real and notional knowledge and locating their synthesis and unity in the concrete ontology of action prevents notional knowledge from the gnostic temptation toward “rationalizing the spiritual life, or canonizing the temporal carnal order, as if the metaphysics of the sensible were moving on the same plain and were in composition with the sense of the in­visible and with the kingdom of incarnate Wisdom.”45 The dialectical movement between real and notional knowledge devolves into ideology when it stalls within the purely conceptual moment of the process and fails to continue the movement toward synthetic unity with real knowledge in action. In other words, it impedes the gift of divine wisdom from coming to expression in its fullest form within the whole process of cognition and the entire movement of intelligence. This last comment illuminates the conceptual context of History and Dogma’s account of tradition and puts us in a better position to understand Congar’s criticism of Blondel’s emphasis on the “implicitly lived” (real knowledge) in tradition. In an interview given soon after the publication of History and Dogma, Blondel, writing under the pseudonym François Mallet, discussed the role of the “implicitly lived” (implicite vécu) in relation to tradition. His interview helps us to see how the dialectical movement between real and notional knowledge orchestrates and synthetically unites without confusion the distinction between the “implicit” and the “explicit” in tradition through the concrete ontology of action. After reaffirming the “implicitly lived” in relation to the category of “faithful action” and distinguishing it from “confused sentiment” (sentiment confus), he says the following: “Action has this privilege of being clear and complete even within the implicit; while thought, with its analytic character only

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takes the form of knowledge (‘science’) by a slow and groping reflection. That is why it seems to me essential to unite dogmatic knowledge (‘connaissance’), which is always perfectible, to the Christian life which has no need of an explicit knowledge (‘science’) in order to be perfect.”46 Here the implicitly lived is a form of real knowledge in the life of the faithful that is united in distinction to dogmatic knowledge (notional knowledge). The synthetic nature of tradition, its vital reality, is a Christian knowledge (or wisdom) in faithful action acquired by the collective experience of Christ verified and realized in us. It is a knowledge that cannot be subordinated to notional knowledge as it comes to expression in neo-­Thomism’s epistemic concentration on the “logically implicit” (notional knowledge) and divorced from the practice of historiography in historicism’s challenge to the “expressly known” (l’explicite connu). In the conceptual context of the dialectical movement from real to notional knowledge, tradition is a progressive and synthetic movement that makes what is implicit explicit, tracing “all the rays of light in the Christian consciousness over the centuries to their source, and through its unending progress imitate the infinite riches of God, revealed and always hidden, hidden and always revealed.”47 Inspired by his reading of Aquinas, Blondel sees tradition’s role in the synthetic and progressive movement from the implicit to the explicit as one that does more than simply conserve the primitive deposit of revelation. Tradition conserves but also makes explicit what was implicit, and operates as a hermeneutical prin­ ciple, displaying, explicating, interpreting, clarifying, and rediscovering “the richness of the initial gift whose complete possession it always has.”48 The truth of tradition is not only vested in the teaching authority of the Church (magisterium) and fixed to the expressions of Christian dogma, teaching, and life. The truth of tradition is also found in a primary and privileged way in tradition’s living synthesis, in the movement from the implicitly lived to the expressly known.

Tr adition, Truth, and Trinit y

In the context of his engagement with Loisy, Blondel discusses historical research only in the negative sense, as a critique of Loisy’s historicism. He says very little about what his understanding of history is and very

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much about what Loisy’s understanding of history neglects. From this perspective Congar’s criticism seemingly identifies the attenuated horizon of history within which Blondel conceives of his idea of tradition. But, for Blondel, tradition is not the antinomy of history, a static, isolated reality untouched by deeds and facts. Nor is it simply synonymous with the facts established though critical research. The object of the study of tradition is not to establish mere causal links between phenomena, since tradition is not bound to historical attestation in the same manner as the modern practice of historiography. In order to avoid making “category mistakes” when one attempts to speak about religious events and their relation to dogmatic claims to truth, Blondel thought one needs to attend to the etymological origins and various linguistic uses of the term “fact.”49 The cate­ gorization of the different kinds of facts suggests that to comprehend the full dimension of religious facts, to discover their internal connections, hierarchical interdependence, and spiritual substance, requires that they be seen through their various and appropriate categories: “The issue is to bring together simultaneously all kinds of proof, to understand why all facts are not on the same level; how for instance the adoration of the magi, although its ‘historicity’ is less impossible than the virgin birth, is, from the doctrinal view, of infinitely lesser importance and could be considered without guilt, the parabolic illustration of an infinitesimal point.”50 Here Blondel’s categorization of the various kinds of facts constitutes the first step in the process of synthesizing history and dogma, and displays how the practice of tradition does not simply preserve historical facts and speculative aspects of the past, nor does it ignore the way in which the past influences historical and conceptual details. Rather, tradition attests to history by drawing the “living (vital) reality” out of the historical features of the past and into a living synthesis that applies to the present and illuminates the future.51 In this sense, tradition relies on history to “re-­present” the vital reality of truth present in the past in order for that reality to form the living synthesis of truth in the present. The Blondelian notion of tradition is not simply an exercise in marshaling evidence from the past in support of religious belief, despite the importance of that task. Instead, tradition does retrieve and conserve evidence of the past, but its principal task is to facilitate the interplay between the living reality (deposit) of truth received from the past, embodied (action) in the present life of the Church, and oriented toward the future (development).

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Here we see Blondel’s notion of tradition as a synthetic form of Christian knowledge rediscovering a more profound role for tradition that “could not but inspire a generation of young philosophers and theologians who were increasingly unhappy with the more classical scholastic system in which they were being formed.”52 What Blondel discovers is the vital role tradition plays in Christian self-­understanding. In this respect, Congar’s critical observation of Blondel’s account of tradition throws into relief not so much its lack of critical history, though it does do that, as its concern that in pressing the historical/dogmatic tradition distinction the science of historiography comes perilously close to functioning as a substitute category for tradition, as it did for Loisy, in the representation of the vital (living) reality of truth. The interplay between deposit (preservation) and development (interpretation) in Blondel’s account of tradition can be found as a theological axiom in Congar’s understanding of tradition. Congar explains the fundamental tension tradition facilitates in a highly personalistic way: Saving faith is received by minds which must consider it not merely as something absolute, but as a deposit given once and for all by the apostles, and consequently to be referred to them “without adding or taking away anything.” But, at the same time, these minds must “receive” faith in an active way, in a manner which befits their nature. They are human minds, discursive intellects which perceive successively and only partially; hence, also, minds fulfilling themselves only when in contact with other minds; lastly, minds living in a cosmic biological and temporal continuum. Historicity is an essential characteristic of the human mind.53 Congar struggled to substantiate the enduring tension between deposit and development in tradition.54 Indeed, he knew well that it was essential to faith prior to precise theological formulation, even while the latter was necessary and important but insufficient and secondary. In the concrete, Congar saw that the reason for the primacy of the inner-­reality (implicitly lived) of tradition over theological formula (expressly known) was that a “correct understanding of the truth may still exist even behind inadequate expressions of it,” and without apostolic certainty and biblical evidence.55 It is the truth in tradition that gives primacy to the “implicitly

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lived” of tradition over its expressly known doctrinal formulation, though the two are inseparably united without confusion or conflation in such a way that each cannot exist without the other. Blondel’s account of tradition as a form of discernment and participation in revealed truth resonates deeply with Congar’s own treatment of the Pauline idea of tradition and the early patristic notion of tradition. For Paul and the early Church, the revelation of God in Jesus Christ is both the origin and the content of tradition, that is, the paradosis, the “linking process in time which is of the historical order, and a non-­temporal or supra-­temporal reality, fully present here and now.”56 The knowledge of tradition given in the liturgical action of baptism and the faithful action of the Church and learned through catechetical training was the principal reality through which one participated in the truth that is genuinely present while at the same time always already beyond one’s full comprehension. That is, for Paul and the early Church, “tradition initially referred primarily to practices; only in the fourth century did it come into primary use in a doctrinal context, but even then practices were used as a basis for the doctrinal affirmations (as in Basil).”57 To be a witness to the tradition of the twelve apostles meant not only to see, to hear, and to practice, but also to deliver and to transmit (tradere) the knowledge that comes from the deposit of faith through tradition.58 Within the Pauline corpus, the concept of “deposit” signifies the essence of God’s plan to redeem the world through the death and the resurrection of Christ, and this event remains the ultimate referent of tradition (2 Tim. 1:13–14; 1 Cor. 3:11). Yet, although this truth remains the ever-­present and ultimate referent of tradition, interpreting, discerning, and embodying its presence as the pattern of redemption in the world remains open to development and change. The pattern discloses itself in every facet of faith: “The social, and even juridical, structure of the transmission and acceptance of faith is like the sacrament of the most mystical and spiritual reality.”59 In Congar’s view, the apostolic idea of tradition involves not only memory “but also a deepening of insight; it is preserved, not merely in the mind, but also on the ‘heart,’ which meditates lovingly on what it holds fast.”60 In the early Church, tradition was a hermeneutical principle and method, providing the living context of scripture, its pattern, and its intention. For early Church thinkers such as Irenaeus, tradition was more than

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the transmission or handing over of doctrine. It was true gnosis (knowledge).61 Tradition was not an abstract, intellectual exercise of mechanistically handing on formulas, quotations from scripture, or precedent from the Church fathers, though they marshaled extensive lists and quotations; rather, tradition was a lived experience, the continuation in history of the Incarnation through the gift of the Spirit. To live tradition was to live in the truth, in the gnosis made known through the liturgical and faithful action of the Church.62 It is Irenaeus who solidifies tradition’s relation to true gnosis by accusing his gnostic interlocutors of interpreting scripture apart from the Church, arbitrarily without regard to the tradition of practice, doctrine, communion, succession to which it belongs.63 Thus, the true gnosis of tradition cannot be interpreted or understood apart from the lived experience of the Church. What we see in the apostolic and patristic economy of tradition, then, is an ecclesial space in which the content of revelation can be given further interpretation and formulation. Although the historical Christ, the living Word of scripture, is the origin of tradition, the ecclesial space of tradition always transcends the material reality of scripture by the “pneumatic surplus” dwelling at its center.64 Readers of Blondel and Congar alike will note that whenever the phenomenon of tradition opens up a new interpretation and a further explication of revelation, it will always transcend the purely historical, as, for example, when the Christological interpretation of the Old Testament prescinds from the chronological pattern of the Old Testament.65 The new interpretation need not be considered completely foreign; rather, it can be seen as a new understanding of the same revelation disclosed in a different situation. Here, through the gift of the Holy Spirit, tradition functions as the hypostatic bond between God’s concrete and continual action in human history and the historical and literary character of God’s revelation in human history expressed in the canonical scriptures. For readers who worry about Blondel’s so-­called immanentism, this hypostatic bond is understood precisely in Trinitarian terms. For St. Paul and Blondel alike, the transmission (tradere) of tradition in the Church is a participation in the communion of eternal love found in the Trini­ tarian life of God, which the Holy Spirit initiates, sustains, aids, and guides through persons in communion.66 The transmission of tradition that takes place from person to person in the Church is an analogical

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reflection of the kenotic self-­giving and the spontaneous receptivity that occurs between the life of the divine persons of the Trinity. In this way the Church participates in the perfect transmission (tradere) of Christ that flows from the Incarnation and its finality. For Blondel, the life of action is the category of relation through which humanity participates in God’s life. God’s act of self-­disclosure in human history through the person of Christ, according to Blondel, makes time in the world for the Church more than simply a natural phenomenon. Through the perfect action of the logos, time for the Church becomes the horizon within which finite reality encounters God:67 Called to see all things in the unity of the divine plan, through the eyes of the Mediator, called to see himself in the permanent act of liberality and to love himself in loving the perpetual charity from which he has his being, he is the very act of his author. . . . He has had a beginning; and it is this limit which forever remains his distinctive mark; but once appearances open up, without vanishing, to reveal all things in their universal reason to him, he participates in the truth of creative love.68 In this respect Blondel considers the possibility of history to depend on the creative activity of God as manifested through the genuine freedom with which God endows finite reality to embody its freedom in creation. That is to say, Blondel arrives at the place where the temporal reality of human freedom can exercise its autonomy upon tradition as an integral form of participation in God’s truth and not merely a “purely” historical tradition that musters evidence for religious belief. Blondel understands tradition as “an experience always in act” that is “turned lovingly towards the past where its treasure lies.”69 Yet, in his account, tradition does more than turn to the past. Tradition, he con­ tinues, always anticipates and illuminates the future by remaining faithful to the past.70 For the Church to participate in the receptive and kenotic movements of the economy of tradition, as Blondel’s account implies it does, it must remain open to the divine disclosure of truth in tradition. In order to discern the truth of tradition and the possibility of genuine change and development in tradition, those actions that represent the truth of persons in communion with God must be directed toward the

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one who gives the gift of tradition. Thus, discerning the divine disclosure of truth in tradition is an exercise in hope that in faith the Church will dispose itself to the gifts of the Spirit and the prospect of embodying a mode of charity that, Blondel declares, “insinuates a new order into the normal order.”71 Here Blondel’s own diary captures well the movement of receptivity and kenosis through which human existence enters into the Triune Life itself through the divine Mediator and in doing so participates in the new order of charity: Being is love; we cannot know if we do not love. The Spirit of God is charity; without the charity that is poured out into our hearts, we cannot rise either to the Son or the Father; We cannot understand anything in the world of the Spirit’s operations. By the Incarnation, the world was created anew; but in a transcendent and ideal manner. In order for there to be real unity, an immanent life, vinculum substantiale, the Spirit of unity and of love must secretly penetrate the interiority of beings and therein complete reality, being; and being is always a presence of God; more than a knowledge, more than a production, it is love. The action of substances upon one another is at one and the same time a subordination of power, an influence of ideal persuasion, and an attraction of love.72 Through the death and resurrection of Christ, the Church participates in the Trinitarian life of eternal love that flows into the world and the “new order” of love that enters into the historical order of creation. The synthesis of the facts of history and dogmas of faith reflects the effect of this new order. As Blondel puts it, “the synthesis of dogma and facts is scientifically effected because there is a synthesis of thought and grace in the life of the believer, a union of man and God, reproducing in the individual consciousness the history of Christianity itself.”73 In the Blondelian horizon, then, one can do more than simply detect a Trinitarian structure to history that can be discerned through the mystery of action. There is an observable analogy between all human liturgical action and revelation of God’s Triune life in history. It is through the mysterious dynamic of action that humanity is given a genuine space (analogia libertatis) to make history happen:74 “In created beings, the mystery of the Trinity is always represented, and the action of each of the

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eternal persons can be sensed there. The relation of these operations, this bond of the intimate constitution of beings is always synthetic and contingent. We always have need of experience to acquire the science of the real, the work of the freedom of choice; and in the human world, in the rule of the moral will, experience is action.”75 For Blondel, this space is by no means void, awaiting, as with Kant, the categories of understanding imposed upon it in order to render it intelligible to consciousness. It contains an immanent intelligibility, but the content is mediated between the subject and the world. This mediation takes place not by “Observing Reason”76 in the sense Hegel envisions, where “[Reason] involves the Harmony of Being in its purest essence, challenging the external world to exhibit the same Reason which the Subject (the Ego) possesses.”77 Instead, the content of creation is rendered intelligible by virtue of its created status, which makes it receptive to its full realization through the Incarnate Word. Put another way, the hypostatic bond, which is the site of redemption in creation, mediates redemption in human history in such a way that the natural order need not abandon that which makes it distinctively other to its source of fulfillment, the supernatural. Blondel writes: “The whole natural order comes between God and man as a bond and as an obstacle, as a necessary means of union and as a necessary means of distinction.”78 Should the genuine space to make history happen be shaped, structured, and conditioned by the perichorésis of finite and infinite being dwelling in human history in the person of Christ, then the categories through which one considers Christ’s earthly existence must remain open to the disclosure of the infinite dimension of his existence and attuned to his lasting presence in the world. The failure to do so, as historicism and extrinsicism each do in their distinct ways, reflects an impoverished theological horizon, one that fails to consider that Christ, as the hypostatic bond of history in whom the natural (reason) and the supernatural (faith) are perfectly united, is the deepest reality of time in the world: Does the supernatural consist, as the extrinsicist thesis implies, in a notional relationship determined and imposed by God, there being no link between natural and supernatural but only an ideal juxtaposition of heterogeneous and even impenetrable elements which only

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the obedience of our minds can bring together? In that case the supernatural subsists only if it remains extrinsic to the natural, and if it is proposed to us from outside, its whole value residing in the fact that it is above nature. Or can it be reduced, as the historicist thesis implies, to being no more than another name for the divine or for a sort of concentration of it in nature itself, so that, if it is not entirely confused with nature, that is because after all one must have a word for the phase at present reached by our religious aristocracy? In short, should it be regarded more or less as an intellectual privilege which only exists as such, in opposition to, and as external to, the common state? . . . For the “state of pure nature” is a pure abstraction which does not exist and never has existed; in studying the nature of man as it actually is, we do not get to know the “state of nature” any more than we can abstract, in our lives, the radical and universal penetration of something which will always prevent us from finding our equilibrium in the merely human order.79 Here the Trinitarian structure of tradition raises two distinct but interrelated questions: How does the hypostatic bond of the person of Christ furnish the idea of tradition with a concrete form? And, How can one discern this form as the pattern of redemption in the world? In its multiplicity and diversity, the Church (the body) forms together with Christ (the Head) the living subject of tradition by virtue of its relationship of similarity and difference to Christ. As the living subject of tradition, the Church is given the content of tradition through its participation in the mission (missio) the Father gives to the Son for the salvation of the world, which is disclosed in history at various levels through the prophets, the Incarnation, the apostles, and the Church. Yet, though the Church is one with Christ (the Head) as Christ’s body, and therefore, the living subject of tradition, the Church is at the same time other to Christ. The Church is the expressed form of the Incarnate Word, which cannot articulate itself unequivocally apart from Christ. This unity-­in-­distinction provides the horizon from which the interplay or polarity between the acts of the Church as both body (human) and head (divine) are rendered theologically intelligible, and they provide the framework within which one can begin to represent the relation between deposit (preservation) and development (interpretation) in tradition.

After History and Dogma  157 T r a d i t i o n , Fa i t h f u l a n d L i t u rg i c a l Ac t i o n , a n d S ac r a m e n ta l T i m e

The distinct but interrelated nature of truth in tradition brings into sharper focus how and why, for Blondel and Congar, the liturgy is the paramount expression of tradition. The liturgy, as a repository of tradition and its privi­ leged means of communication, brings to full expression the mystery of salvation residing within the content of tradition, and forms each generation in the mystery of salvation, drawing each generation into the drama of eternal love played out in the world. The Eucharist is the concrete re­ality through which we participate in the eternal union of love of the Father for the Son through the Spirit. It is the visible representation in time of the perfect communion to which we are called and, therefore, it constitutes the preeminent place where the Church encounters God. In the polarity between deposit and development, tradition is distinguished most clearly from scripture, the latter a written form of God’s self-­disclosure, by the way in which it is attuned to the apostolic deposit and the ongoing encounter with Christ’s presence in the faithful and liturgical action of the Church. To be sure, scripture forms an integral and an essential feature: indeed, it is the foundation of faithful and liturgical action, and without it the liturgy would be theologically unintelligible. Yet, it is the enduring character of the Christian reality of tradition as distinct from, though shaped by, oral tradition and, more specifically, the inner reality of tradition and not its material form that is the key— albeit undeveloped—feature of Blondel’s understanding of tradition and requires further articulation. The insight into the relationship of time in tradition and its connection to liturgical action remains one of the most profound yet undeveloped insights Blondel intuits in his account of tradition and Congar brings to theological expression. For Congar, the transmission of tradition that takes place in the “sacramental order” requires a unique understanding of temporality. Indeed, Congar observed that the sacraments have a peculiar temporal duration, in which past, present and future are not mutually exclusive, as in our chronological time. Sacramental time, the time of the Church, allows the sharing by men

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who follow each other through the centuries in an event which is historically unique and which took place at a distant time; this sharing is achieved not merely on the intellectual level, as I could commune with Plato’s thought, or with the death of Socrates, but in the presence and action of the mystery of salvation.80 Congar’s assertion about the a priori form of time within which the sacraments are practiced contains the elements of time Blondel envisioned for the phenomena of tradition, elements that allowed tradition to anticipate and to illuminate the future by remaining faithful to the past.81 After the publication of History and Dogma, Blondel continued to consider the way in which the time of tradition disrupts ordinary signification, as, for example, when he suggests in his article on the historical value of dogma published a year after History and Dogma: “Among the statements of faith that surpass the reach of historical proofs, there are some that aim so expressly at positive realities, I daresay brute facts, that one could not turn them into a starting point, a mere abstract expression or a metaphorical realization of a superior truth.”82 Although in the context of discussing the dialectical tension between history (facts) and faith (dogma), Blondel’s comment here intimates at the need to be mindful of the misguided tendency to think of presences and absences as spatial and temporal attributes, a tendency Augustine acknowledged well before Blondel in his meditation on the practice of memory in book 10 of the Confessions: People are moved to wonder by mountain peaks, by vast waves of the sea, by broad waterfalls on rivers, by the all-­embracing extent of the ocean, by the revolution of the stars. But in themselves they are uninterested. They experience no surprise that when I was speaking of all these things, I was not seeing them with my eyes. . . . Yet when I was seeing them, I was not absorbing them in the act of seeing with my eyes. Nor are the actual objects present to me, but only their images. . . . But these are not the only things carried by the vast capacity of my memory. Here also are all the skills acquired through the liberal arts which have not been forgotten. They are pushed into the background in some interior place—which is not a place. In their case I carry not the images but the very skills themselves.83

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Both Blondel’s comment on the power of presence and absence in the articles of faith and Augustine’s remark on the power of memory point to the need to attend to the distinction between pictorial representation (pictures) and symbolic representation (symbols), particularly in the di­alectic between now and then that obtains in liturgical action. Liturgical action facilitates the bond uniting the activities of remembering, imagining, and anticipating, and distinguishes the time of tradition from calendar time and clock time84 by not merely referring to an event in the past, but by making the past context present again, albeit as absent.85 Robert Sokolowski observes that the unique character of pictorial representation is that “pictures do not merely refer to something, but make something present.”86 As this distinction comes to expression in the practice of memory, Sokolowski maintains, “I appreciate that what I am remembering is not in the present of my life; I present earlier motions and events as having been lived through, but as not being lived through now, except as absent and ‘there again.’ Yesterday’s dinner is not being eaten now, but I am now remembering and reidentifying not an image of the dinner, but the dinner itself again, as absent.”87 In the time of tradition, the past, present, and future are encountered in a manner distinct from chronological time. This form of time requires that a living subject (community) reenact the displacements of time, which are remembered and imagined not in abeyance but in the action of the event of historical happening. It is in this sense of time that the Church’s Eucharistic action in the liturgy participates in the sacrificial action of Christ’s death and resurrection as the gift given to the Church by Christ from the Father. That the Church’s liturgical action takes place in time, but is not fully dependent upon the temporal reality of time, is reflected in the level of invariance that obtains in the liturgical act itself. That is to say, the liturgical act contains a level of invariance that stems from the reality that a preponderance of meaning resides in the form of the liturgical act itself and not simply in its function as a symbolic representation of a deeper reality that remains hidden.88 Here the form of liturgical act is inextricably bound to its content such that the latter is unintelligible apart from the former. In this way the sacramental efficacy of the Church’s liturgical action need not depend on the community’s rational comprehension of the liturgical utterances or the emotional quality it invests in the liturgical

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practice. Rather, the efficacy of the liturgical act is disclosed through faith as a gift given by the Spirit in the form of the community’s desire to receive the spiritual effect of the liturgical act. The linguistic shifts in the representation of the liturgical act further reflect the multiple contexts and the temporal forms of the present, past, and future the community engages in while celebrating the Eucharist. For example, Sokolowski observes that Jesus “celebrated the first Eucharist against the background of the Jewish Passover and its recollection of the past, and he anticipated the death he was about to undergo in the immediate future.”89 The Church’s Eucharistic celebration, however, establishes a form of the present, past, and future that is chronologically later than the present and the past of Jesus’s celebration of the Eucharist. But the Church’s celebration “takes place within them and blends with them temporally” through the reenactment of Christ’s sacrificial action. Simply put, When [the church] reenacts the death and Resurrection of Jesus, it also reenacts the action God performed in the Exodus. The Last Supper invoked the Passover, so when we invoke the Last Supper we also invoke the Passover that preceded and was drawn into it. Our Eucharist thus has a double revival of the past, with one of its reenacted pasts, the Last Supper, enclosed within the context set by the other, the Passover. The past of our Eucharist is the present of the Last Supper and the sacrifice of Calvary; in a deeper dimension, the past of the our Eucharist is the present of the Passover and the Exodus.90 Here the problem of the multiple contexts of liturgical action and its relationship to time cannot be ignored, since the act of situating a practice (action) in its original context not only provides the historical background from which the practice is rendered intelligible, but it also initiates the interpretive process of that practice. For example, as David Cannadine’s observation about ceremonial coronations in the British monarchy suggests, “under certain circumstances, a coronation might be seen by participants and contemporaries as a symbolic reaffirmation of national greatness. But in a different context, the same ceremony might assume the characteristics of collective longing for past glories.”91 In Cannadine’s and Eric Hobsbawm’s view, ritual practices (customs) are the interior reality of a tradition, which at some point is invented in an effort to

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maintain the intelligibility of the practices of a tradition that are continually susceptible to change.92 In order to discover the real meaning of contemporary practices, they must be resituated within their original historical context. Hobsbawm’s view of tradition raises the often neglected original historical context of a practice to the level of importance that makes it essential to understanding the meaning of a practice. However, the intention of the creator of the practice is by no means the sole condition of its intelligibility, as Cannadine’s and Hobsbawm’s account imply it to be. Their account stands to benefit from a corrective similar to that which Blondel sought to offer to Loisy. Blondel includes an ontological element in his account of tradition, which allows the practice (action) of a tradition to possess a considerable share of meaning itself, and to represent an ongoing interpretation of the tradition it represents.93 As Blondel’s regressive analysis of the dialectic of the wills suggests, practices (action) always disclose a trace of both the insufficiency of human willing and the absolute necessity of it in the natural order. The heteronomy of the wills alludes to the important yet incomplete account of action (practice) the positive sciences offer.94 Should there be an internal principle of unity to action that always escapes positive knowledge, as Blondel’s account of action suggests there to be,95 then the original historical context of a practice will always be an important yet inadequate tool for understanding any practice. Lost in Cannadine’s and Hobsbawm’s horizon for understanding the practices of a tradition is the ontological value of action (practice). Were Cannadine and Hobsbawm to attend to the ontology of action Blondel’s dialectic discloses, their account of tradition would be open not merely to the past as the privileged horizon of meaning in tradition, but to the present and the future and the way in which both form a significant share of the meaning of tradition. In many traditions the present and the future constitute the condition for the possibility of rendering the past intelligible. For example, the past in the Eucharistic action (memoriale passionis Domini) is only intelligible as the Church’s present petition and anticipation of Christ’s return (epektasis). In this way the “present of the Eucharistic gift is not at all temporalized starting from the here and now but as memorial (temporalization starting from the past), then as eschatological announcement (temporalization starting from the future), and finally, and only finally, as

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dailyness and viaticum (temporalization starting from the present).”96 As the most visible action of God’s encounter with the world, the celebration of the Eucharist is the site wherein the transmission and the historicity of the truth in tradition is on display as a diachronic living reality.97 Within the framework of sacramental time the ontological value of tradition discloses itself through the interplay (or tension) between the past, present, and the future; that is, the anamnesis, allowing tradition, as in Blondel’s account, to anticipate and to illuminate the future through its fidelity to the past.98 “We are and we act always ‘now,’ but our now is always the recapitulation of a past and the anticipation of a future.”99 Despite the normative interplay between the past, the present, and the future in tradition, one cannot ignore the ideological obstacles the phenomena of tradition confront in modernity. In the culture of late global capitalism, whose logic is premised on the inexhaustible process of introducing and forgetting, the “ceaseless transformation of the innovative into the obsolescent,” liturgical action, as a repeated practice that celebrates memory, is envisioned as a “compensatory device” that offers a fictive structure of recurrence and reassurance.100 This logic of the global market is sustained by a form of temporality that constructs time as successive quantity situated chronologically in terms of the polarities of “old and new, earlier and later.”101 Within this horizon “time is compressed into an ever more narrowly defined present”102 in which the modern self is unable to imagine the distinct and the deeper form of time as a “structure of exemplary recurrence.”103 Were it not for the inherent practice of forgetting, it would be tempting to see the logic of innovation and dissolution in global capitalism as a form of rupture characteristic and essential to the development of a tradition. Yet, the internal logic of consumption in global capitalism continually elides the past as a referent. Put another way, when “what matters is the choice and the performance now—past choices matter only as a guide to present behavior, future choices matter only as the objects of present calculation,”104 the mode of continuity (concept of truth) by which a tradition might survive a genuine rupture of development either to flourish or to perish either exists in an attenuated form or is nonexistent and, in turn, renders the process through which the self discerns and sustains its identity irrelevant.105 The notion of the time of tradition we are discussing here, that is, sacramental time, represents time precisely in the way that the logic of the

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market contends it cannot, namely, as the “celebration of recurrence” of the life, the death, and the resurrection of Christ.106 As the inner nature of tradition, sacramental time displays that the action involved in ­memory has the unique capacity to be the same action we once perceived, yet not the same action in perpetuity, since actions are bound to their present and cannot be in another action in the same present.107 For the same action to appear again in memory requires “ ‘another temporal context’ . . . originally given to us when we memorially or imaginatively [represent] ourselves at a time, at a then, different from the one we are in now.”108 Sacramental time discloses a mode of representation in which the self enacts displacements creating for it an interplay or polarity between the present, past, and future that is central to its identity. Indeed, such displacements are the central feature of what it means to be a human being. For through the process of enacting the liturgical displacements of the Church, the self discovers an anthropology that discloses the radical nonnecessity of the self ’s being109 and affirms finite reality (creation) to be the location and matter (bread and wine) through which God encounters the world: “To reach man, God must go through all of nature and offer Himself to [man] under the most brute of material species. To reach God, man must go through all of nature and find him under the veil where He hides Himself only to be accessible. Thus the whole natural order comes between God and man as a bond and as an obstacle, as a necessary means of union and as a necessary means of distinction.”110 As God’s concrete encounter with the world, liturgical action is the deepest sense of tradition for the Church as a living reality that simultaneously relives (past), embodies (present), and transmits (future) tradition and realizes its present identity through the interplay between “deposit” (past) and development (future). In practicing the liturgical displacements of the Church, the self is reconfigured by being unable to imagine itself as the source of its own existence. In this manner, liturgical action becomes the true source of being and the concrete way in which humanity comes to participate in the eternal life of God. It is the reason Blondel maintained the Eucharistic action of the Church to be the “act par excellence” that seals the synthesis between God and man in a “true communion.”111 It is this reality of liturgical action and its relationship to the phenomenon of tradition that Blondel’s remarks intimate. Tradition, he writes, “is indeed like an umbilical cord that prevents the Church from

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being stillborn. Through it, divine blood really flows; and this divine blood feeds the Church and allows the spiritual birth of souls who are called to grow into divine maturity.”112 Here, in the encounter with Christ in tradition, Blondel sees an irreducible element that continually eludes literal (and textual) formulation. It is the index that points to the way in which the communal life of action becomes the vessel through which the truths of tradition transform “what is implicit and ‘enjoyed’ into something explicit and known.”113 And, as Blondel says in another place: The essence of Tradition should not be considered under the material aspect of Scripture or that which can be expressed with words. For what it transmits is precisely what cannot adequately be named or mummified under sensible or intellectual aspects; we are dealing here with a living transmission, not only through words but also through actions, signs, contacts between living persons, gestures that exclude all doubts and hesitations for they surpass mental deliberations.114 Tradition is this inner and deeper understanding of the reality of tradition in the life of each individual Christian within the mystical body of Christ. To Blondel, the fullness of truth contained in God’s revelation is represented in human history through liturgical action.

Eight

Blondel and the Sacramentality of Human Rationality

Thus far we have examined the conceptual history of the idea of tradition, its capacity to represent God’s presence in human history, and its relationship to the problem of representation. We have suggested that the late medieval shifts in the notions of God’s power, ecclesial power, and political power created the conceptual climate within which the modern notion of tradition became less an expression or representation of God’s presence embodied in the Church and more a procedural requirement in Catholic culture. As a result, tradition has often been reflected through the teaching authority of ecclesiastical office, having the unintended effect of reducing the sacramental character of the Church and obscuring its vocation to invite humanity into the faithful and liturgical action of God’s body. Blondel’s notion of tradition offered a corrective to the juridification of modern Catholicism’s idea of tradition by attending to the way 165

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in which tradition, mediated through faithful and liturgical action, is the bond uniting history and dogma through the interplay between the past, present, and future. Through the interplay of time between the past, present, and future that comes to expression in the faithful and liturgical action of the Church, the practice of tradition relies on history not to conserve or retrieve the past, in a manner akin to the modern practice of historiography, but instead to draw out of it the living reality of the past into a living synthesis of the present that illumines the future. Blondel’s approach through action and communal practice, especially when seen against the more juridical concept of tradition, enables a recovery of an older view of tradition but also of one that is fitted for the future. His work sets new parameters for thinking about the faithful and liturgical action of the Church as the privileged site where tradition represents the vital reality of truth present in the past as a living reality for the present and guide for the future. In displaying tradition’s synthesis of the past with the present, history with dogma, of actualizing what is “implicit and ‘enjoyed’ into something explicit and known,”1 and in discerning the relationship of action to representation, Blondel discloses the unique role tradition plays in the relationship between ontology and epistemology.2 This chapter traces the conceptual arc of Blondel’s account of human rationality as oriented toward a transcendent Absolute. It delineates the Blondelian process by which the ontological reality of action forms the epistemic conditions for the possibility of true human understanding. Further, it situates Blondel’s thought within the debates surrounding the practice of human understanding that took place during the latter half of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth centuries. Regrettably, Blondel’s thought and influence is missing from the conventional accounts of these debates. It is a history written by such prominent Germanic figures as Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), Wilhelm Dilthey (1822–1911), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). Blondel’s absence from this account and its unmistakable Germanic tenor can be attributed, in part, to France–Germany political tensions in the aftermath of the 1870 Franco-­Prussian War, when it was common for distinguished French intellectuals such as Blondel and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) to work within their own national milieus. Nevertheless, the debates in modern hermeneutics, broadly speaking, tend

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to focus on questions of epistemology, privileging the “order of knowing” over the “order of being.” Both Schleiermacher’s Romantic subjectivism and Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie sought to overcome the “yawning abyss” of time between the interpreter and the text in the epistemological conditions for the possibility of human understanding. But with the appearance of Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), the priority of epistemology over ontology began to shift, as the practice of hermeneutics, Paul Ricoeur observes, began to “disengage itself from the psychological problems of transfer into another’s life, and come to grips with the more ontological problems involved in comprehending ‘being-­in-­the-­ world.’ ”3 After Heidegger, then, history, including time, is no longer the obstacle to but the condition for understanding. In the process of examining Blondel’s account of human ratio­ nality, this chapter argues that Blondel’s idea of tradition (philosophy of action) opens up and clarifies questions posed in the shift in emphasis in twentieth-­century hermeneutics from epistemological method to fundamental ontology. Blondel’s account of tradition suggests that the resolution to the modern problem of representation in human understanding resides not in the shift to epistemological method at the expense of fundamental ontology, as with Schleiermacher, nor with the exclusive shift to fundamental ontology, as with Heidegger. He put it this way in an article published a little over a decade after Action (1893): “Indeed, for man, life is not life without thought, no more than thought is thought without life. We must therefore use what we are and what we have in order to know, and use what we know in order to be and to have greater depth, without the cycloid in this alternative [movement], like that of a wheel turning as it advances, being able to complete itself as a circle, that is, without speculative reflection or practical prospection overlapping and coinciding already in the present.”4 What is required is the mediation of these two distinct yet interrelated categories of human understanding. In Blondel, tradition facilitates a cycloidal movement, whereby the ontology of liturgical action5 enriches human understanding through its transcendent referent that is never divorced from the contingent nature of human rationality (epistemology). Just as tradition is the bond that unites history and faith, here it functions as the point between ontology and epistemology in the practice of human understanding.

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Finally, this chapter examines how Blondel’s action-­based account of human rationality is a philosophy of history, which discloses history’s theological significance within the expansion of human action through interior intention, external individual realization, social action (family, country, humanity), and lastly to an act of synthetic communion6 with the “one thing necessary” (unicum necessarium).7 In Blondel’s framework, the transcendent orientation of human action finds its full expression in the faithful and liturgical action of the Church. In addition to exploring Blondel’s relationship to modern hermeneutics, this chapter brings into relief the “sacramentality” of human rationality in Blondel’s dialectic, the real substantial bond (vinculum substantiale) of presence that exists between God and humankind in the movement and structure of the human will. Blondel’s “metaphysics of charity,” as he once called it,8 makes its most important contribution to the history of modern hermeneutics and contemporary theology by offering an alternative account of the practice of human understanding that opens the process of human rationality and interpretation to the transcendent (sacramental) dimension of human history.

T r a d i t i o n , Ac t i o n , a n d T h o u g h t in the Bond of Being

In his turn to the immanent order of being as the fundamental starting point for reflection upon the practice of human rationality, Blondel defined his philosophical and theological relationship to modern philosophy and the Catholic speculative theology of his day.9 Despite his appreciation and appropriation of particular themes in modern philosophy, it was clear to him that modern philosophy must move beyond representational and empirical views of human rationality. Philosophy, he insisted in an article published at the turn of the century, “no longer appears as a simple extract of life, as a representation, as a spectacle: it is life itself taking account of and direction from itself, bestowing on thought its full, and nothing but its valid role, and tending to equate knowledge with existence.”10 This “existential” starting point of philosophy considers thought as it issues forth from life (action), enriching and complementing it in a relationship of progression and elevation. The integral movement between action and thought is the process of human understanding unfolding within human

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life. What distinguishes Blondel’s thought here from the modern philosophy he both abhorred and admired, Oliva Blanchette observes, is the open and dynamic structure of human rationality: “Far from keeping us in a closed conception of life, action always has a new element to bring to thought, just as thought has new lights and new obligations to bring to action. The moving circle of the two never stops and is never closed. The task of philosophy, as Blondel understood it, was to enter into this movement in order both to add to it and to receive from it more of the truth it was concerned with.”11 Within the receptive and kenotic attributes of human life, reason discovers that the “new element” in action is a theological (sacramental) trace of the infinite reality that grounds and facilitates the movement between the inseparable and irreducible aspects of understanding which come to expression in action (ontology) and thought (epistemology). Drawing on Christological and Trinitarian analogues, Blondel identifies the immanent nature of the trace in the “perichoretic” relationship between action and thought, a “circumincession” that allows thought “to develop simultaneously the reality of our being in the middle of beings and the truth of beings in us.”12 Locating human understanding in the middle of beings gives it a sphinx-­like character that orientates it beyond, while also grounding it within, the immanent order of experience. Moreover, human understanding grounded within the immanent order always already pro­ jects itself toward an encounter with the possibility of an actual transcendent finality, perfection, and truth. Blondel’s thought has been characterized as an attempt to display humanity’s original “will to be powerless.”13 That is, the phenomenon of action evinces humanity’s desire to will infinitely the gift that it can neither predict nor produce, both revealing the inadequacy of treating action simply as an instrumental reality human beings create for their own convenience and affirming that action is the “synthesis of willing, knowing and being, that bond of the human composite . . . the precise point where the world of thought, the moral world, and the world of science converge.”14 The precedence of the will in the practice of human ratio­nality comes from the paradox that one cannot not will. As Blondel puts it: “Action, in my life, is a fact, the most general and the most constant of all, the expression within me of a universal determinism; it is produced even without me.”15 The voluntary determinism of the will reflects the

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sacramentality of free action; that is, how it bears within it both the time of the “already,” an actual infinite and transcendent finality that always surpasses its determinate conditions, and the “not yet,” the determinant conditions from which it always proceeds. The manifold and indefinite structure of necessities, “the consciousness of the multiple reasons for acting,”16 always determines and accompanies the genesis of the will’s free act and displays the infinite origin and character of the will. “In short, in order to act we have to participate in an infinite power; to be conscious of acting we have to have the idea of this infinite power. But it is in the reasonable act that there is a synthesis of the power and the idea of the infinite; and this synthesis is what we call freedom.”17 The determinant design of the will’s freedom in tension with the necessity of the will, expressed through the categories of “la volonté voulue” (willed will) and “la volonté voulante” (willing will), forces the self to embark on a course of understanding that transgresses the facts of consciousness and sensible phenomena, tracing a path whereby it must recognize itself as a trace of a trace and become itself by accepting that it is a vestige of the infinite,18 the “one thing necessary.” “This one thing necessary is found at the beginning and at the end of all the avenues man can enter; at the outcome of science and of the mind’s curiosity, at the outcome of sincere and wounded passion, at the outcome of suffering and disgust, at the outcome of joy and recognition, everywhere, whether we descend into ourselves or ascend to the limits of metaphysical speculation, the same need re-­appears.”19 To be clear, this necessity derives from humanity’s inability to achieve equipoise between spontaneous (free) and willed action. The disclosure of the simultaneously contingent and insufficient nature of finite reality confronts humanity with the paradoxical reality that “what belongs to us, then, is to be without being; and yet we are forced to will to become what we can neither attain nor possess by ourselves. . . . It is because I have the ambition of being infinitely that I feel my powerlessness: I did not make myself, I cannot do what I will, I am constrained to surpass myself; and at the same time, I can recognize this fundamental infirmity only by having a sense already of the means to overcome it.”20 Here we no longer have a will to power but a will diminished by its power, a will that embodies the contradictory character of willing infinitely without willing the infinite. The will resolves this conflict inscribed within it through the “life of action.”21 The life of action is the affirmation of being, the option

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for the infinite instead of the idol. In the life of action the liturgical and faithful practices of Christianity most clearly disclose to the will a vestige of the infinite as the gift of love. At this stage human rationality resigns itself voluntarily to the eminent reason of action by embodying in action what it cannot fully comprehend by reason alone. The being of action, its source and principle, and the sequence of necessities that follow from it, including the life of action sustained by the faithful and liturgical practices of Christianity, depend upon the one thing necessary (God). To avoid or reject the “original practice” that gives life and completes action is to refuse to enter into the fullness of human life and encounter the life of action in its most intense form. The hypostatic union of the person of Christ provides the analogue to the reconciliation and perfection of the human wills, and the bond that truly and fully unites knowledge and action. Reason recognizes the “new element” action brings to thought when it encounters action in its concrete ecclesial and liturgical form, an encounter that allows reason to discern not only a trace of the infinite reality that facilitates the “movement of return” but also the “source of movement,” the synthetic living reality that grounds and mediates, the interplay between the ontological and the epistemological polarities of human rationality. The role of faithful and liturgical action in the consummation of the life of action, and as the synthetic and true bond between knowledge (epistemology) and action (ontology), finds a more explicitly theological formulation in the role Blondel assigns to tradition in shaping and forming human rationality. The relationship between action and tradition is treated toward the end of the dialectic of action when, in the final stage of the “life of action,” Blondel suggests, “dogmas are not only facts and ideas in acts, but also they are principles of action.”22 That is, dogma contains speculative truth, but through dogma’s concrete embodiment in practice its full value and meaning is disclosed. In this way, “a tradition and a discipline represent a constant interpretation of thought through acts, offering each individual, in the sanctified experience, something like an anticipated control, an authorized commentary, an impersonal verification of the truth.”23 As we saw in chapter 6, the interplay between action and tradition unfolds within a theological horizon that envisions the disclosure of the speculative truths of Christian doctrine as a process sustained by faithful and liturgical practice. The faithful and liturgical practices of prayer, almsgiving, and fasting, that is to say, concrete “faithful action,” disposes

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the community (the Church) toward discerning the truth revealed both in scripture and doctrine. Through faithful and liturgical action tradition offers a constant interpretation of scripture and doctrine by penetrating its content and implications, and in so doing it illuminates the speculative truths contained in each. Blondel’s account of tradition is not an epiphenomenon that appears in the absence of the canonical scriptures (texts). Instead, tradition is a metaphysical principle with an ontological value distinct from history and dogma, scripture and the Church, fundamental ontology, and epistemological method, and yet it is a principle that functions as the source of unity between each without the one eliding the other. It unites these and other fundamental tensions in Christianity while still maintaining the conceptual integrity of each. Tradition relies on texts and, at the same time, it relies on something else Blondel calls “an experience always in act which enables it to remain in some respects master of the texts instead of being strictly subservient to them.”24 This account of tradition allows it to be more than a force preserving the intellectual aspect of the past in texts; it is also the living reality of Christ’s presence. Tradition “frees us from the very Scriptures on which it never ceases to rely with devout respect”25 to reach the real Christ, who escapes scientific examination without rejecting the practice of critical exegesis. In this way “one realizes through the practice of Christianity that its dogmas are rooted in reality. One has no right to set the facts on one side and the theological data on the other without going back to the sources of life and of action, finding the indivisible synthesis.”26 The synthesis is a “Christian knowledge” that attends to modern historiography and to the “collective experience of Christ verified and realized in us.”27 Tradition, then, is a form of knowledge that situates itself between the various discourses that Christianity engages. “A separate dogmatic the­ ology, a separate exegesis, a separate history, necessarily remains incomplete: a conception which isolates the sciences without making them autonomous must be replaced by a view which grants them their autonomy all the more readily because it never allows them to be isolated.”28 For Blondel, tradition is the synthetic living reality, the sacramental bond, between history and dogma, scripture and the Church, the finite and infinite dimensions of human rationality, and fundamental ontology and epistemological method. Beyond its immediate context, Blondel’s account of tradition contains more than simply the attempt to show the methodological flaws

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of both early twentieth-­century scholasticism (extrinsicism) and historicism (Loisy). It endeavors to delineate the process by which tradition, as it is mediated through the ontological reality of action, sets the epistemic conditions for the possibility of true human understanding. For in his account of tradition is a philosophy of history that displays how the historical, as a reality mediated through the dynamism of action, contributes to the salvation of the world. In the Blondelian horizon, faith, which in modernity had become separated from historical truth, is rehistoricized, but not simply in a way that privileges practice as divorced from the theoretical. For Blondel, such a divorce would render action fundamentally unintelligible. As he notes in Action (1893): It is thanks to this practical union that men, causing their certitudes and their affections to rise from a depth they know not, become attached to one another through a bond so powerful and so gentle that they form only one spirit and one body. Yes, only practice works this wonder of forming, with the diversity of spirits, a single body, because it uses and fashions that by which they are tied to one another. That is why there is unity of doctrine only as a result of a common discipline and a conformity of life. And that is why the dogmas and beliefs are teachings for thought only in view of becoming principles of action. This is the point we must come to in order to understand that intellectual union remains impossible among men, who nevertheless need it and need that it be free and total, impossible as long as it claims to remain independent of a discipline and a tradition.29 Blondel’s philosophy of action witnesses to the historical character of the content of tradition and grounds that content in the hypostatic bond of God’s Perfect Action in the Christ realized in the faithful and liturgical action of the Church.

R e c o n s i d e r i n g t h e D e v e lo pm e n t o f M o d e r n H e r m e n e u t i c s : A B lo n d e l i a n R e a d i n g

What is the proper relationship between the order of being (ontology) and the order of knowing (epistemology) and how it ought to be delineated

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are key questions that have animated the development of modern hermeneutics. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Prussian reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher put forth a notion of interpretation whereby the interpreter represents the historical context of the text through the interpreter’s analysis and research of its cultural and ideational context. For Schleiermacher, the interpreter participates psychologically in the author’s horizon in order to become conversant not only with the language and grammar of the author but also with “the spirit of the author,”30 raising the prospect that the interpreter might understand the text “at first as well as and then even better than its author.”31 Here one sees the practice of hermeneutics in transition “from determination of the rules and principles of interpreting texts to inquiry into the nature of understanding discourse and what is manifest in it.”32 The framework for understanding the nature of textual discourse in Schleiermacher’s thought is the interplay between the objective representation of the text in its historical context and the interpreter’s intuitive encounter with the text. The tension inscribed between the text and the interpreter in Schleiermacher’s work bears the “double mark” of “Romantic and critical,” the former “by its appeal to a living relation with the process of creation, critical by its wish to elaborate the universally valid rules of understanding.”33 Although Wilhelm Dilthey voiced concern with Schleiermacher’s treatment of history, he nonetheless developed Schleiermacher’s Romantic subjectivism by retaining its deference to human consciousness as the apex of understanding, or Verstehen.34 Dilthey’s decisive contribution to hermeneutics was to subordinate the philological and exegetical questions of interpretation to the science of history, which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had attained the status of a science of “the first order.” As prolegomenon to understanding a particular historical text, Dilthey felt required to give an account of the fundamental intelligibility of the science of history itself (historical reality).35 Writing within the milieu of philosophical positivism, Dilthey employed a distinction between the mental world (psychology) and the physical world that, in turn, allowed him to construct the epistemological conditions for the possibility of understanding. For from the mental life of man he was able to draw on the phenomenon of interconnection (Zusammenhang), which permits one to explore and to understand the forms and the expressions of the lives of others. Yet the pliable reality of human experience required a logical

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structure within which the phenomenon of interconnection in the mental life could show itself, hook on to the world, and provide meaning. Despite the difference in thought between Dilthey and Edmund Husserl, Dilthey was able to evaluate critically the notion of subjectivity and its inner relation to objectivity with the help of Husserl’s idea of intentionality and the latter’s account of consciousness as a synthetic process of consistent repetition in which objects are given. The connection between Dilthey and Husserl is important because it is through Husserl’s “concept of life,” and the way in which this concept relieves subjectivity of its opposition to objectivity, that Dilthey was able to endow human experience with coherence. Husserl contributed the important epistemological insight into the structure of science in which Dilthey sought to anchor his account of the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences).36 Dilthey’s method of exploring and understanding the mental states of others by analogy to one’s own experience is akin to Blondel’s effort to confer meaning on the moral experience of others by analogy to one’s own action. Just as in Dilthey, there is in Blondel’s thought a methodological sensitivity to the status of the human sciences and to the immanent order of reality as the primary and privileged location of philosophical meaning, which first comes to expression in the form of the distinction between a “science of practice” (epistemology) and a “practical science” (on­tology) in his philosophy of action,37 and in his later work as the distinction between real and notional knowledge38 and the pneumatic and noetic.39 The distinction tempers the temptation in Blondel’s phenomenology to lose itself in individual experience, and it provides a provisional structure, simi­lar to Dilthey’s use of Husserl’s concept of life, within which the moral experience of the other can be encountered and provide meaning. “We must,” Blondel insists at the outset of his analysis of human action, enter “into all philosophical systems, as if each one held in its grip the infinite truth it thinks it has cornered . . . [and] taking within ourselves all consciousnesses, become the intimate accomplice of all, in order to see if they bear within themselves their own justification or condemnation.”40 The distinction allows Blondel to move his analysis of human action beyond action’s instrumental feature and toward an encounter with the truth of action. Unlike the theoretical demand of Dilthey’s phenomenon of life, which is “still orientated to the interiority of self-­consciousness and fails to orient itself toward the functional circle of life,”41 Blondel’s

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distinction between a science of practice and a practical science provides theoretical neutrality to his phenomenology that momentarily suspends the concrete act of thinking in action for the sake of exploring the act of consciousness,42 only later to return to action (practical science) in the dialectics of human understanding, “elevating it to a higher order of spiritual achievement.”43 It is tempting to read Blondel as simply offering a different account of the same psychological horizon Dilthey employs to represent the condition for the possibility of understanding. In his early work on the logic of action, Blondel turned to the psychological intuitionism of Henri Bergson, where he found human understanding orientated toward the will’s rediscovery of the real and concrete self lost in the colloquial language and grammar of modernity.44 Bergson’s desire to reestablish reason’s contact with the world and to reinvest human understanding in the immanent order of experience45 appealed to Blondel’s effort to overcome the “idealist illusion,”46 which Blondel claimed reified thought in action. Bergson appeared to be charting a new course for modern philosophy that avoided its penchant for instrumentalizing action as a cate­ gory of thought in order to remain tethered to human life and existence. Yet Blondel sensed an intellectualism in Bergson’s thought, “a desire to arrive at the solution to the ontological problem by an effort of the mind alone.”47 It was a form of intellectualism that encouraged Blondel to resist thinking about the act of human understanding as a process turned in upon itself, a purely reflective and analytic form of knowledge that substitutes the idea of action for action itself. Philosophy cannot discover its proper object merely through the reflective categories of the mind. It must turn outward toward action and practice to discover an answer to its original question: “Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?”48 To explore this question Blondel phenomenologically considered action in terms of an original dynamism or power of human beings that resides beyond the intellect and the will. His noninstrumental notion of action resides beyond the intellect and the will and at the same time functions as the source of power for the intellect and the will. In a matter of time, then, Blondel discovered in Bergson’s model of pure intuition a form of thought capable of tracing the primordial unity of human understanding within the immanent order of experience, but one that fractures into an ever-­greater plurality incapable of orienting itself toward

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a transcendent Absolute. For all its speculative heat, the spiritual energy of Bergson’s élan vital lacked the light of the “true sun”49 that transfigures the élan spirituel of human rationality.50 Blondel’s break with Bergson’s intuitionism set his thought on an anti-­ Cartesian trajectory analogous to Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and the latter’s inclination to prioritize “intentional being” over all forms of cognition. Heidegger’s account of Dasein, though indebted to Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie, made Schleier­ macher’s, Dilthey’s, and Husserl’s understanding of hermeneutics appear to be enthralled by the Cartesian thinking subject who escapes the temporal distance between the interpreter and the text. Achieving any understanding at all, according to Heidegger, is a matter not of Husserl’s trans­ cendental subjectivity, but of the facticity of Dasein as it comes to terms with being-­in-­the-­world through its various modes of “attunement,” “discourse,” “falling,” and “care.”51 Thematizing human understanding requires clarifying the Being of time, matter, space, and history presupposed by the sciences.52 Starting from the facticity of Dasein is “inquiry into being, but in a direction that necessarily remained unconsidered in all previous inquiry into the being of beings—that was indeed concealed by meta­ physical inquiry into being.”53 Heidegger’s account of Dasein resituates the practice of human understanding from an epistemological context to that of fundamental ontology. When the question of the “world” takes precedence over the question of the “other,” analysis of the practice of human understanding goes beyond the theory of knowledge. Heidegger shows that understanding “is never a presuppositionless apprehending of something presented to us”54 by demonstrating that Dasein’s particular way of Being presupposes an anticipatory representation of Being in general. He defended his analysis of human understanding against the charge of circular reasoning by disclosing that there is no neutral site from which one can engage understanding. Verstehen is Dasein’s basic way of being so that the “fore-­ structure” of Being is the horizon that enables the practice of human understanding: “To deny the circle, to make a secret of it, or even to want to overcome it, means finally to reinforce this failure. Instead, we must rather endeavor to leap into the ‘circle,’ primordially and wholly, so that even at the start of the analysis of Dasein we make sure that we have a full view of Dasein’s circular Being.”55

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In contrast to Heidegger’s thought, where time (finitude) provides the overarching structure within which the activity of Dasein shows the self to be hermetically sealed by a self-­referential discourse of immanence, the immanent dimension of subjective action in Blondel’s thought is an exercise in receptivity in which the self is open to the disclosure that “there is no effective synthesis, no internal act, no state of consciousness, however obscure it may be, that is not transcendent regarding its conditions, and where the infinite is not present.”56 To be sure, the self in Heidegger’s thought is engaged in an act of understanding that involves recep­tivity. Still, the difference between Blondel’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutical horizons is brought into sharper focus through Ricoeur’s observation that with Heidegger’s thought we are always engaged in returning to the foundations, “but we are left incapable of beginning the movement of return which would lead from the fundamental ontology to the properly epistemological question of the status of the human sciences.”57 Put differently, the self is subsumed within the temporal, existential structure of human understanding.58 The incessant return to the foundations in Heidegger’s philosophy is the product of a phenomenology that lacks a transcendent end (telos) signifying a continuing state of finality and perfection. The “care” structure of Dasein in Heidegger’s thought has replaced the transcendental categories of truth, goodness, and beauty with “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit) and “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit). Without an end (telos), the existential structure of human rationality in Heidegger’s account considers what is essential to thought “not to lie in its actuality as a philosophical ‘movement’ [‘Richtung’],”59 but rather in possibility as essential and higher than actuality. But privileging possibility over actuality only furnishes the self with purposes or, as Heidegger calls them, “projects” (Entwurf) to which it must resolve to commit itself in order to arrive at that “truth of Dasein which is most primordial because it is authentic.”60 Heidegger’s self enters the circle of human under­standing with only the prospect of obtaining the “self-­constancy”61 that being-­in-­ the-­world demands of it. In the absence of a transcendent end (telos) signifying the self ’s continuing state of finality and perfection and in the perpetual presence of projects directed toward self-­constancy, Heidegger’s philosophy appears to be, according to Ricoeur, “no l­onger addressed to anything but itself.”62 As Ricoeur’s comment implies, Heidegger has just

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collapsed the order of knowing into the order of being rather than delineating their proper relationship.

Towa r d a n Ac t i o n - ­B a s e d H e r m e n e u t i c of Tr adition

The important role of subjectivity in Blondel’s account of the historicity of human rationality resonates deeply with the phenomenon of time after Heidegger, where time, Gadamer notes, is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the naïve assumption of historicism, namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the important thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradition, in light of which everything handed down presents itself to us.63 But where thinkers like Dilthey, Heidegger, and Bergson fail to come to terms with the transcendent dimension of time or human history, or avoid engaging with it, Blondel’s thought moves toward a more sacramental hermeneutic, one capable of attending to the theological dimension of time (history) without abandoning the epistemological insights of modern historiography. Indeed, Blondel’s thought attends to both history and theology in an effort to bring about a synthesis of these two realms as the true horizon for understanding. Being attuned to the insights of modern history while reading scripture from within the Church opens up a space where the sacramental realities of human rationality can disclose themselves as eternal truth continually present in human history. It is the synthetic space where the Church encounters the content of reve­ lation, and where tradition is the relationship between the revelation of

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truth and the Church’s participation in truth that occurs through liturgical and faithful action. Blondel was interested in moving exegesis beyond the ideological narrowness that it had fallen into at the beginning of the twentieth century. In his correspondence with Loisy prior to the publication of History and Dogma, he hints at this intention: It is just not enough to discard distasteful dogmatism and a priori theology in an effort to barricade oneself, even if legitimately, within the methodological skepticism of the historian. The question is more complex: what we need is a “prolegomena to all future exegesis,” that is, critical reflection on the very conditions of the science of revelation and of all sacred literature; lacking such a systematic investigation we run the risk of rudely absolving what is in question or of excluding implicitly and a priori what we think we are reserving for an a posteriori investigation (and, it seems to me that the latter case is yours).64 The prolegomena to all future exegesis65 is, for Blondel, constituted by the polarity between critical exegesis (history) and dogmatic theology, a polarity that attends to both history and theology in an effort to bring about a synthesis of these two realms as the true horizon of exegesis. The synthetic reality of tradition means that the interpretation of scripture gives rise to a surplus of meaning that exceeds the literal and the historical character of revelation, yet still requires them, is never opposed to them, and does not abolish them.66 The practice of interpretation is an exercise in discerning how certain facts refer substantially to real events and, at the same time, disclose divine realities within the historical event. Far from deducing facts from faith or historical events from Christian doctrine, the task of an action-­based hermeneutic of tradition is to give an account of how Christians “justify dogmatically historical beliefs which can neither be founded on mystical inspiration, nor be reduced to simple subjective and symbolic statements, nor be satisfied with objective data which criticism justly finds insufficient.”67 The practice of interpretation within the ecclesial space of tradition encourages the interpreter to remain open to the possibility that God truly continues to reveal himself through the Spirit in the action of the Church. But here “possibility” is openness to the possibility of the “one

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thing necessary,” that is, faith in God. In the Blondelian horizon, reve­ lation is conceived within the foreground of the conceptual interplay of revealing (presence) and concealing (absence) in the dialectic of action. The dialectic of action discloses the simultaneously contingent and insufficient nature of human rationality to God’s revelation and, in so doing, adduces the eschatological horizon of the biblical text and the surplus of meaning that resides within it. Within this framework, an action-­based hermeneutic of tradition need not preclude philological and literary methods of interpretation. Indeed, these methods are essential to the correct interpretation of a text. It does preclude, however, the synchronic and detached manner of historical consciousness with which these methods are often applied to the text. That is, interpretation cannot be performed in isolation from the synthetic living reality of tradition, which displays, unfolds, and critiques, through the concrete reality of “faithful action,” the truths disclosed in the texts of scripture.68 To fail to be mindful of the philosophical presuppositions and to be attentive to the historical situatedness within the living tradition in the encounter with the biblical text is to fail to recognize a fundamental truth about finite reality. It is this fundamental truth of finite reality revealed through the life of action that is the occasion of the dialectical movement in tradition from fundamental ontology to epistemology. Toward the end of Action (1893), the bond of knowledge and action, the true infinite, is not an abstract universal but rather a concrete singular. Through this concrete singular, Blondel writes, “is made manifest in all its greatness the role of what has been called the letter and matter, of all that constitutes the sensible of operation, of what composes, properly speaking, action, the body of action. For it is through this matter that the truth of the overwhelming infinite is intimately communicated to each individual; and it is through it that each one is protected against being overwhelmed by the infinite truth.”69 Human understanding discovers its complete and final form to the degree that it allows itself to be drawn deeper into the mystery of God’s encounter with the world through the liturgical and faithful action of the Church dwelling in its tradition. In Blondel’s action-­based hermeneutic of tradition, the transmission of tradition is a genuine participation in the kenotic self-­giving and the spontaneous receptivity revealed in the life of the divine persons of the Trinity. What is more, the movement of human understanding is open to genuine

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transcendence through its concrete encounter with the Incarnate Word present in the faithful and liturgical action of the Church. In the liturgical mediation of being, reason encounters the soteriological effects of the Incarnation on human action, drawing it beyond the finite circle of human rationality and into a redemptive hermeneutical experience, a new way of life lived in the economy of self-­giving and spontaneous receptivity of the life of the divine persons of the Trinity, the true source of human understanding. Here, in the ecclesial space of tradition, the practice of interpretation enters into the economy of tradition (the true movement of return), the transit between history and faith, and, in doing so, remains open and receptive to the continual disclosure of God’s presence in history.70

B lo n d e l , t h e S e c o n d Vat i c a n C o u n c i l , a n d T r a d i t i o n i n P o s tc o n c i l i a r T h o u g h t

In disclosing the role the phenomenon of tradition plays in mediating the movement from ontology to epistemology, Blondel’s notion of tradition opens up and clarifies the philosophical debates surrounding the problem of representation in modern hermeneutics. His theory of tradition as a “sacramental” representation of God’s presence also sheds light on debates within contemporary Catholicism about the vital role and nature of tradition and its relationship to scriptural interpretation.71 There was a “Blondelian shift”72 in twentieth-­century Catholic theology that was most salient between the years of 1942 and 1950, when Blondel became popular within nouvelle théologie theological circles.73 During these transitional years, Blondel’s thought was, in Henri de Lubac’s words, the inspiration and impulse for the theological renewal leading up to its official expression at the Second Vatican Council.74 Indeed, Blondel has been called the “Philosopher of Vatican II” by thinkers who have traced his theological influence from the beginning of the twentieth century through the Second Vatican Council.75 The landscape of Catholic biblical interpretation underwent a significant transformation from the Blondelian shift to the publication of the Second Vatican Council’s constitution on scripture and tradition, Dei verbum. The signpost on this landscape was the 1943 encyclical Divino

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afflante spiritu, in which Pius XII gave Catholic biblical scholars his consent to attend to the virtues of the historical-­critical reading of scripture: text-­criticism, the study of the original languages, and the search for the intended and the expressed meanings of the original author, to name just a few. For many Catholic biblical scholars and historians it was a writ of manumission and the first tangible sign the Church had arrived at the threshold of modernity. More importantly, it signaled to Catholic biblical scholars and historians that the suffering and the repression many of them had endured in the name of theological orthodoxy before 1943 had ended. However, in the wake of this newly found freedom remained the problem concerning the direction of biblical interpretation in the Church, broached during the Modernist crisis at the turn of the century and still unresolved in the Church’s reaction to it at mid-­century. The problem was how to articulate the relationship between theology and history now that Catholic biblical scholars and historians had been liberated from the ahistorical approach of the manualist tradition and permitted to employ critical methods.76 Dei verbum tried to redress the unforeseen complications Catholic biblical exegesis would fall into in the first half of the twentieth century by renewing the relationship between inspiration and truth. Dei verbum did not see the revealed truth in scripture exclusively within the domain of critical history but as a reality disclosed in the Bible as a source of divine revelation. This is most clearly articulated in paragraphs 11 and 12, where Dei verbum attempts to move beyond the literal sense intended by the human authors and distinguish the finite and the infinite realities of truth dwelling in scripture.77 The distinction between the finite (historical) and infinite (theological) realities of scripture is key to drawing into fruitful tension paragraph 11 and paragraph 12, which, in turn, discloses the theological and the eschatological vision of scripture. Here the unity of the Bible expresses itself as the deepest reality of the temporal form of time, bringing into sharper focus how scripture reflects the hypostatic bond mediating God’s encounter with the world in the person of Christ. In Dei verbum the practice of the interpretation of scripture always is orientated toward the discovery of the mystery of salvation dwelling in scripture, the sensus divinus, not by abandoning the sensus humanus, that is, the historical, the philological, and the literary realities of the Bible, but by attending to the various and diverse ways in which

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the latter realities have been inseparably fused with the deeper realities of God’s plan to redeem the world in scripture. In this way, Dei verbum’s intention, following Blondel’s impulse and inspiration, among others, was to envision revelation in more sacramental and less juridical terms than the First Vatican Council’s Dei filius.78 Also, Blondel’s influence is refracted through Dei verbum’s intent to situate scripture within the living tradition in order to integrate the historical and linear realities of scripture obtained by means of critical methodologies into the theological horizon that forms the interpretive framework for scripture.79 If, as the document suggests, the “economy of Revelation is realized in deeds and words, which are intrinsically bound up with each other,”80 situating the practice of interpretation within the living tradition, as Dei verbum does, opens the exegesis of scripture to the true movement of return between fundamental ontology and episte­ mology where the active presence of the Holy Spirit discloses God’s truth in history through the liturgical action of the Church.81 Yet, in the postconciliar practice of the interpretation of scripture, the synthetic form of exegesis Dei verbum calls for has been hard to find. Perhaps some of the fault lies with the Council’s treatise itself, which underwent numerous redactions before appearing in its final form. Despite the central role the living tradition plays in the text, there is an undeveloped account of the relationship between inspiration and interpretation, which unwittingly imposes historical-­critical exegesis as the necessary condition for obtaining the genuine meaning of the text. Commenting on this problem, Denis Farkasfalvy observes that “whatever the author does not intend consciously cannot be truly in any form or shape a part of the authentic meaning of the text.”82 This undeveloped relationship has left many scholars with the impression that human consciousness is the sole determinate factor in unfolding the process of divine inspiration. The Council’s in­ability to foresee and to work out an account of the idea of the “double authorship” of scripture83 has led to a considerable degree of debate about the interpretation of the document. For example, in an essay on the role of the Bible in the Second Vatican Council, Joseph Fitzmyer argues that inspiration is not a charism that makes the writing a revelation. The Constitution [Dei verbum] had already defined revelation in chap. 1 as the self-­manifestation of a personal God and the making known

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of the mystery of his will for the salvation of humanity. Inspiration is rather the charism by which human beings were moved by God (or by the Spirit of God) to record aspects or details of that divine revelation. The two ideas are not the same, or even coterminous. It is conceivable that a whole biblical book is inspired, from the first word to the last, and yet not contain revelation.84 The absence of a clear and persuasive account of the relation between the two authors of scripture (human and divine) often muddles the important Christologic (Christological analogy) that forms the interpretive horizon of scripture. And although the Christological analogy of scripture has been employed since the time of the early Church, in modern Catholicism, Farkasfalvy notes, “it has been regularly applied to the structure of the inspired biblical word, not to the way the inspired author’s intellect and will are linked with the Holy Spirit.”85 What seems lost in much of the contemporary discussion and use of the Christological analogy in its relation to biblical inspiration is a theological vision that renders the Christological analogy intelligible to revelation in scripture.86 Without an adequate theological account of God’s active presence in history, Farkasfalvy reminds us, it is unclear “how enlightening a Christological scheme can be for subjective inspiration, for it is rather questionable how much analogy can be established between the inspired author’s ‘instrumental causality’ and the role of Jesus’ humanity in the hypostatic union.”87 For the Christological analogy to work when applied to scripture, then, it must be understood within a theological horizon open to God’s continual presence in human history. In other words, the Christological analogy is represented as logically coherent and theologically intelligible only within an account of how God’s presence can be discerned in human action as the genuine wellspring and final end of that action. Should it be able to represent the inspiration of scripture in any meaningful sense other than the juridical or the theologically axiomatic, it needs to be conceived within an account of tradition where the Spirit is actively present in the humanly and the divinely inspired action and practice of the community called and formed by God’s revelation. That is, it must be understood within an account of tradition that allots a “vital role” to tradition in representing God’s truth in human history. Tradition’s vital role is “to preserve not so much the intellectual aspect of the past as its living reality” 88

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through the “practice and life of the Church, in her belief and prayer.”89 In this way, tradition remains “master of the texts,”90 as Blondel puts it, and is the means by which “the full canon of the sacred books is known to the Church and the holy scriptures themselves are more thoroughly understood and constantly actualized in the Church.”91 For some scholars, the more recent employment of the Christological analogy in Catholic biblical theology has not been understood in light of the vital role of tradition, and therefore appears confused and logically incoherent in its application to the interpretation of scripture. Lewis Ayres and Stephen Fowl have argued92 that the 1993 Pontifical Biblical Commission statement The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church (IBC)93 constitutes a significant departure from the arguments advanced in late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century documents that form a part of the ordinary magisterium. Unlike Dei verbum, Providentissimus Deus, and Divino afflante spiritu, IBC employs the analogy of Christ’s two natures as fully human and fully divine as the logic behind the human and divine character of the scriptures, but then argues for the necessary priority of the historical-­critical reading of scripture. Ayres and Fowl object not to the defense of the historical-­critical reading of scripture, but to the IBC ’s use of the Christological analogy to argue for the necessity and foundational nature of the historical-­critical reading for all other readings of scripture.94 The IBC argues that the literal sense of scripture is determined by reference to the intention of the human authors, before claiming this particular form of the literal sense is the fruit of inspiration: The literal sense of Scripture is that which has been expressed directly by the inspired human authors. Since it is the fruit of inspiration, this sense is also intended by God, as principal author. One arrives at this sense by means of a careful analysis of the text, within its literary and historical context. The principal task of exegesis is to carry out this analysis, making use of all the resources of literary and historical research, with a view to defining the literal sense of the biblical texts with the greatest possible accuracy. To this end, the study of ancient literary genres is particularly necessary.95 Ayres and Fowl claim that the IBC ignores the preponderance of evidence by historians of biblical interpretation that has shown the premodern

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tradition of interpretation to subscribe to a quite different definition of the literal sense, and a notion of the literal sense that does not invest the meaning of the text so emphatically in the human author’s expression.96 As a result of founding the literal sense of scripture in the expression of the original human authors, the IBC presents a theologically narrow and awkward description of the Holy Spirit as the principal author of the Bible, according to Ayres and Fowl. Throughout the IBC there is a clear acknowledgment and recognition that “historical-­critical exegesis has too often tended to limit the meaning of texts by tying it too rigidly to precise historical circumstances.”97 The challenge IBC is faced with, as Peter Williamson sees it, is to stay faithful to the original message of the biblical text, without limiting the text’s meaning to its historical setting. Thus, when Williamson reads the IBC claim that “one must reject as unauthentic every interpretation alien to the meaning expressed by the human authors in their written text,”98 he interprets it against the backdrop of early modern uses of the historical-­ critical method that focused on the author’s intention to discover the literal sense and tended to historicize the author’s intention.99 In its discussion of the distinction between the literal sense and the “fuller sense” (sensus plenior), the IBC document suggests that the fuller sense has its foundation in the fact that the Holy Spirit, principal author of the Bible, can guide human authors in the choice of expressions in such a way that the latter will express a truth the fullest depths of which the authors themselves do not perceive. This deeper truth will be more fully revealed in the course of time—on the one hand, through further divine interventions that clarify the meaning of texts and, on the other hand, through the insertion of texts into the canon of Scripture. In these ways there is created a new context, which brings out fresh possibilities of meaning that had lain hidden in the original context.100 The IBC is right to note the fundamental role the literal sense plays in the interpretation of the deeper, “fuller” sense of scripture. Without the spiritual and fuller senses anchored in the literal sense both are open to abuse. But, having shifted the interpretative value to the literal sense

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conceived as that meaning expressed by the human authors, the spiritual and fuller senses of scripture appear as addenda or an ornate accessories to the meaning of scripture. The IBC’s insistence on the priority and foundational nature of the literal sense functions not only as a control mechanism to prevent arbitrary and capricious spiritual interpretations of scripture, but it also allows for the fulfillment of the literal sense in some situations. As Williamson puts it, “the insistence of continuity between the literal and spiritual senses recalls what was said in the discussion of the literal sense about the ‘dynamic aspect’ of certain texts. The IBC is saying that in many, if not all, cases, the spiritual sense is the dynamic aspect of the literal sense now understood in light of subsequent events, i.e., the Paschal event, to have been ‘fulfilled’ at a higher level than was originally apparent.”101 But Williamson’s thoughtful and balanced account recognizes that in exegetical practice many of the IBC’s authors have neglected, distanced themselves, or openly expressed hostility to the spiritual sense of scripture.102 It is interesting to read IBC, it critics, and defenders at the end of the twentieth century in tandem with the debate between Blondel and Loisy at the beginning of the century. Blondel observed in Loisy’s historicism an attempt “simply to retrace the course of historical determinism and to squeeze out the sense of the primitive texts . . . is to look for the last word in the first echo, to decide a priori the whole question of the supernatural character of that initial testimony and to decide it in an irremediably negative manner.”103 In this criticism of Loisy’s method, Blondel was suggesting not that historical scholarship constitutes an illegitimate and unnecessary tool for exploring scripture. To be sure, he insisted the Church needed to be attentive to the results of criticism and to borrow “the language [it] needs from philosophical systems so as to confer upon [its] doctrine [a] degree of precision.”104 What Blondel objected to in Loisy’s exegesis, and what one hears an echo of in Ayres’s and Fowl’s critique of the IBC, is methodologically presupposing that other readings of scripture must derive from the literal sense obtained through the historical-­critical method. In contrast to the IBC’s desire to locate the literal sense of scripture in the meaning expressed by the human authors, the eminent North American theologian John Thiel brilliantly argues with acuity, grace, and c­ larity that the literal sense of tradition, “like the literal senses of experience and

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scripture, conveys a valued and communally held meaning.”105 In a late modern world that delights in the “play” and the “relativity” to which the meaning of texts lend themselves, committing to the literal sense is as important now as ever, Thiel maintains. He begins his discussion of the literal sense of tradition by distinguishing “that which can be grasped by its constancy of value and not by a constancy of fact.” He terms “liter­ality,” which constitutes the “physicality” of scripture, such as its pagination or marks, the “ ‘lettered’ qualities” of an object.106 Thiel’s understanding of the role and function of the category of literality is remarkably similar to the nature and use of the category of “textuality” in poststructural thought or the “hermeneutics of erasure,” to use Thiel’s phrase.107 Where for postmodern thought the text has become an aesthetic and ideal object, and textuality provides an interpretive category in the absence of any metaphysical foundation, for Thiel, literality is the category capable of enduring the pliable and messy history of meaning that accompanies the interpretation of tradition. Thiel’s distinction between literality and literal sense, however, appears as the renaming of the dialectic between event (literality) and meaning (literal sense), which, as Ricoeur observes, comes to full expression in the practice of writing as distinct from the practice of speaking.108 The detachment of meaning from event in the practice of writing explains why Thiel’s distinction operates much more smoothly when applied to the canonical texts of scripture, though by no means is its application to scripture free from serious objections by significant figures in twentieth-­century Continental philosophy. After discussing how the “hermeneutics of sublation” (Gadamer and Ricoeur) and the “hermeneutics of erasure” (Derrida) arise within particular communal contexts and reflect the communal beliefs of those particular communities, Thiel continues: Claims for the sublation or erasure of the literal sense are examples of such communal belief, as is the belief in the literal sense of scripture that Christians have affirmed throughout the centuries. . . . The believing Church is the community in which the plain sense of scripture is valued as a literal footing for Christian insight and understanding. The literal sense is a point of departure for ecclesial appreciation of the inspired Word of God that the Church believes scripture to be. If the literal sense presents scripture’s ostensible meaning, then

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its ostensibility requires believers’ eyes and a vision already shaped by faithful commitment. Within the panoply of interpretations, the literal sense remains a touchstone for adjudicating the nuanced readings that have always been advanced in believing communities throughout the Christian tradition.109 Thiel’s ascription of literality to unwritten traditions raises questions about the category of “literality.” He acknowledges that “unwritten traditions, by definition, do not possess a literality,” and he attempts to discuss the literality of unwritten traditions as appearing in objects, words, and behaviors around which they are centered.110 In doing so, he seems to call into question the plausibility of the distinction between literality and the literal sense in its application to the idea of tradition. For if unwritten traditions do not necessarily possess literality in the mode by which the canonical texts of scripture must, but instead appear in the various forms through which tradition comes to expression, how would one adequately articulate the literality (physicality) of unwritten traditions? Simply put, how would one ascribe enduring literality to an unwritten tradition or its appearance in some physical reality when, in fact, presence in an unwritten tradition or its appearance in some physical form is not a spatial feature or temporal attribute, but rather a mode of representation? It seems Thiel is most keen on the distinction between literality (event) and the literal sense (meaning) in order to found the latter on the firm empirical footing of the former as the occasion for the possibility of interpretation. But can the reality of written and unwritten traditions and the way each shapes and forms ecclesial identity and endures through time be reduced to their material appearance? Regardless, what is truly important in Thiel’s account in not the distinction between literality and the literal sense, but the “retrospective” account of tradition that inverts premodern and modern notions of continuity in tradition, both of which envision continuity in tradition from the past to the present “prospectively”; that is, they both view conti­nuity in tradition from the divine perspective of an idealized observer who imagines seeing the same tradition (or the possibility of the same tradition) in each period of history as a series of successive present moments, from the apostolic period to the present and into the future.111 In contrast, a

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retrospective account of tradition views continuity in tradition from the present to the past, relieving tradition of its false divine perspective and locating it in its properly human and creaturely perspective within the present moment in ecclesial life.112 As Thiel puts it, “This retrospective understanding of tradition, then, understands continuity to be thoroughly temporal, as all things traditional are, and measures the time in which continuity is claimed in faith from present to past. So understood, the continuity of tradition develops at once repetitively and dynamically, as old configurations of continuity are reaffirmed alongside new affirmations of continuity for addition and loss that are often mutually related.”113 The central claim of his argument here is that what we call development is the same thing as continuity. Continuity in tradition is always a claim made in faith by contemporary believers who share a sensus fidei, a communal sensibility and a shared awareness. In the retrospective understanding of tradition, the community’s sensibility is also the community’s plain (literal) sense formed by the Spirit’s guidance of the community toward truth, and the plain sense functions as the authoritative measure for belief, doctrine, and practice. Thiel is concerned with Kathryn Tanner’s critique of idealized and ahistorical traditional views of continuity,114 while he is at the same time critical of the way Tanner’s account assumes chronological history is the measure of continuity in tradition. He notes that “the retrospective model addresses the problem of continuity and change by regarding congruence as a claim made in faith by present-­day believers about how they stand in a line of truth that extends back to the apostolic age.”115 To account for continuity and change in tradition, the retrospective account of tradition is conceived through an analogy of tradition that is capable of addressing similarity and difference in tradition in a meaningful way that allows for the Spirit’s presence in the historical community of believers. Thiel’s analogy of tradition also views the literal sense of tradition in terms of the “plain sense” of scripture as a community-­forming bond witnessed to by the community in its belief and practice.116 As he writes: Understanding the literal sense of tradition as tradition’s plain sense, then, allows one to conceive the constancy of Catholic belief, doctrine, and practice not as a static inscription on page, object, or body

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but as the interpretive vitality of the faith preserved in the ecclesial sensi­bility of all the faithful by the Holy Spirit and manifested clearly in the historical life of the Church. . . . The literal sense of tradition, understood as its plain sense, serves as a constant reminder to the Church that the abiding stability of faith associated with the text of a conciliar decree, the recited words of the Nicene Creed, or the pattern of liturgy lies as much in the ongoing testimony of the community whose sense for the literal raises the “letter” of writing and behavior to the universality of ecclesial meaning.117 This is Thiel’s account of tradition at its best. It is conceptually rich, attuned to the epistemic problems of theological discourse and history in modernity, and yet attentive to the way in which both the ontology of tradition forms the community of believers as the body of Christ and the community reflects and represents this participation in its practice of tradition. There seems to be a productive, nonvicious hermeneutical circularity, for lack of a better phrase, that manifests itself in Thiel’s account of the literal sense of tradition. His retrospective conception of tradition prevents the objectification of tradition by grounding it in the actual present moment of the Christian community. In this sense he offers a substantive theological account of tradition that overcomes the objectification of tradition at the heart of modern Catholicism’s intellectual and theological inability to engage with chronological history in a meaningful sense. But his account of tradition seems unable to recognize something “finished,” a finality, or even a fleeting eschatological dimension within the present moment. Perhaps what is missing from Thiel’s account, as brilliant and rich as it is, is the hypostatic bond of the Incarnation and its influence on Western thought. For Thiel, the Incarnation elides the notion of event as merely value-­free or as an event that stands “at the threshold of meaning but is not yet meaning.”118 But it is the absence of the indivisible synthesis that exists between event (history) and meaning (dogma), a synthesis that the hypostatic bond of tradition structures, which in developing a hermeneutics of tradition leads Thiel to underemphasize the way that tradition is a resource itself for tradition, as Blondel understood tradition.119 When the phenomenon of tradition is understood in light of the vital role Blondel envisioned for it and the Second Vatican Council intimated at, interpretation opens itself to the reality that God’s presence in

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tradition is encountered not simply through the manner in which the community is formed and bonded by the narrative of scripture. Tradition opens interpreters and the community to these realities, but it also opens the Church to the pluriform sign of God’s action disclosed in tradition through the faithful and liturgical action of the Church. It is through the faithful and liturgical action of the Church that the internal connections and fruitful tension within which the ungraspable truth of God’s revelation manifested through scripture and tradition comes to full expression.

Conclusion

Establishing the nature and propriety of the relationship between the infinite (the supernatural) and the finite (the natural) in modernity is the recurring theme in Blondel’s work and thought. Commenting on this point, Michael Conway writes, “From an early age, Blondel was sensitive not just to responding to what we would now call secularizing influences in society, but also to do so from within the frameworks of contemporary reflection. It is this that made his endeavour so different (and effective), in comparison with the reigning neo-­scholasticism of Catholic theology, sorely ill-­equipped to meet the challenge.”1 As a philosopher concerned with preserving the methodological autonomy of philosophical reasoning in the process of engaging theological problems, Blondel’s life, thought, and work reflect the anxiety and creativity of a thinker whose mind negotiates the sharp disciplinary fault line between theology and philosophy within modernity. But as Conway’s comment stresses, the location 195

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and place from which Blondel reasons and writes, the way he critically ensconces his approach within modern philosophical discourse, is the reason that his thought and work have become the foundational source of the nouvelle théologie and ressourcement movements in mid-­twentieth-­ century Catholic theology and the more recent interest in his thought as a resource for theological renewal in the late modern period. This book has argued that Blondel’s notion of tradition arose from within the particular modern philosophical sources he absorbed at the end of the nineteenth century and the theological and ecclesial milieu of early twentieth-­century Catholicism. He inherited the deep epistemological problem of representing divine revelation in modernity and his philosophy of action is, among many other things, an innovative response to this problem. In such works as History and Dogma he philosophically developed a theological response by arguing that tradition mediates and represents God’s presence in human history through faithful and liturgical action. We have seen that his notion of tradition as a synthetic form of Christian knowledge that embraces the modern practice of historiography and the doctrinal claims of Christianity, and forms the bond between history and dogma, creatively vivifies Christ’s sacramental presence by discerning and drawing the spiritual dimension of history into the concrete life of the Church. As a “sacramental” representation of God’s presence, tradition shows human understanding how God’s revelation is represented in history through the faithful and liturgical action of the Church, and it opens up and clarifies the philosophical and theological debates surrounding the problem of representation, by facilitating the “movement of return” from fundamental ontology to epistemology. As the synthetic living bond that mediates history and faith through the faithful and liturgical action of the Church, tradition concretely participates in the substantial bond that exists between the Creator and creature. But what can we today in the twenty-­ first century learn from Blondel? What can he offer to us? I’d like to suggest that the import of Blondel’s account of tradition for future theological debates—whether those debates continue to be about the role of modern historiography in the development of Christian doctrine, the nature and development of tradition and its relationship to scripture, the significance of philosophical and theological hermeneutics, or the necessity of critical theory and ideology critique for the future of Catholic theology—is found in

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the dialectical tension his account discloses at the heart of tradition and refuses to resolve. It is a tension that abides within the central themes of theology and history, receptivity and kenosis, deposit and development, critical theory and fundamental theology, and ontology and epistemology. And here we arrive at the central theme in the development of the notion of tradition in modern Catholicism, its relationship to the problem of representation, Blondel’s role and contribution to this history, and the role his thought ought to play in the future. Tradition, far from being an ersatz form of historiography, the isolated counterpart of scriptural truth, or merely a sociological reality or new form of critical theory is the synthetic bond that provides a new horizon from which the Church is able to move beyond the limitations of history, theory, and ideology in modernity and attend to the demands of revelation. Tradition’s “vital role” is, as both Blondel and Dei verbum saw, manifested in its capacity to illuminate the divine truth of God’s constant presence in human history through the action, practice, doctrine, life, and worship of the Church.2 It is in its vital role as the dynamic reality that attends to the spiritual and incarnational dimensions of history that tradition calls the Church to discover how scripture contains the history of the world, not merely as facts and linear phenomena or as a social and cultural reality, but as the event of salvation. It is this vital role of discerning the spiritual dimension of history that tradition evokes for modern and contemporary theology a kind of “second naïveté” in and through tradition.3 Indeed, tradition, which always is bound to the historical reality of God’s concrete action in human history through Christ and the Church, is the “mirror” which “re-­presents” the vital and eschatological truth present in scripture. In this way tradition is the bond that intimately solidifies “the letter” and “the spirit” and facilitates their perpetual exchange: “If the spirit demands and evokes the letter, the true letter inspires and vivifies the spirit.”4 In their “perpetual exchange” and “intimate solidarity,” “sacred Tradition and sacred Scripture . . . are bound closely together, and communicate [each to the other] . . . flowing out from the same divine well-­ spring.”5 But, what is more, in the faithful and liturgical action of the Church the “living reality” of tradition is on display. For in the faithful and liturgical action of the Church the “living reality” of tradition becomes both a “mirror, in which the Church, during its pilgrim journey here on earth, contemplates God,”6 and its encounter with the visible

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form of God’s truth that makes “the People of God live their lives in holiness.”7 That is to say, tradition, in its faithful action and liturgical medi­ ation, represents the full breadth of the economy of revelation realized by deeds and words, and draws us deeper into the perfect communion of love to which we are called.

N ot e s

I n t ro d u c t i o n   1.  “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation” (Dei verbum), §10, in Vatican Council II: The Conciliar and Post Conciliar Documents, new rev. ed., ed. Austin Flannery, O.P. (Dublin: Dominican Publications, 1998), 1:755.  2. Yves Congar, Tradition and Traditions: An Historical and a Theological Essay, trans. Michael Naseby and Thomas Rainborough (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 425–58.  3. Dei verbum §7, 1:754.   4.  See William L. Portier, “Twentieth-­Century Catholic Theology and the Triumph of Maurice Blondel,” Communio 38 (2011): 103–37.  5. In 1944, on the occasion of the publication of his first volume of the ­trilogy, La Philosophie et l’esprit chrétien, Blondel received a letter from the Vatican Secretariat of State on behalf of Pope Pius XII congratulating him on this work and praising him for his contribution to the ongoing discussion surrounding faith and reason. Scholars have suggested the letter vindicates Blondel’s orthodoxy. See Peter Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism, and Action Français: The Clash over the Church’s Role in Society during the Modernist Era (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009), 267n115.  6. Maurice Blondel, Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). There are at least two versions of Action published by Blondel. The first version, published in 1893 after his doctoral defense at the Sorbonne, is published as L’Action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (Paris: Alcan, 1893). The second version was published as two volumes in 1936 and 1937 as part of Blondel’s trilogy on thought, being, and action. All references in this book are to the English translation and title.   7.  Cf. Henri Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, trans. James M. Somerville (Washington, DC: Corpus, 1969), 4.  8. For example, see Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Théologie and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Jürgen 199

200   Notes to Pages 3–11 Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (London: T&T Clark, 2010); and Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray, eds., Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-­Century Catholic Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).  9. Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Brother Richard Arnandez (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984), 37. 10.  Cf. Yves Congar, True and False Reform in the Church, trans. Paul Philibert (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2011). 11.  Cf. Yves Congar, La Foi et la Théologie (Tournai: Desclée, 1962), 271. 12.  L’Osservatore Romano, April 13, 1993, 14. 13.  Originally published under the title “Histoire et dogme: Les lacunes philo­ sophiques de l’exégèse moderne,” La Quinzaine 56 ( January 16, February 1, February 16, 1904): 145–67, 349–73, 433–58. These three articles and a fourth article in 1905, entitled “De la valeur historique de dogme,” are reprinted in Les premiers écrits de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956). All references in this book are to the English translation and title of “Histoire et dogme” in Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. and eds. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994). Cited as History and Dogma. 14.  See Henry Duméry, Blondel et la religion: Essai critique sur la “Lettre” de 1896 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), and Duméry, Raison et religion dans la philosophie de l’action (Paris: Seuil, 1963), in contrast to Henri Bouillard, Blondel et le christianisme (Paris: Seuil, 1961). C h a pt e r O n e   1.  See Jean Lacroix, Maurice Blondel: An Introduction to the Man and His Philosophy, trans. John Guinness (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1968), 11–12.   2.  See the influential 1802 essay, Maine de Biran, “L’influence de habitude sur la faculté de penser,” in Oeuvres de Maine de Biran, 14 vols., ed. Pierre Tisserand and Henri Gouhier (Paris: Alcan, 1920–29).  3. Bernard Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition: Aspects of Catholic Thought in Nineteenth-­Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 141. Reardon cautions reading too much into the association between Kant and de Biran. It is unlikely de Biran engaged Kant’s thought and work directly, so the affinities between the two are superficial.   4.  Cf. ibid., 139.   5.  Cf. Michael A. Conway, The Science of Life: Maurice Blondel’s Philosophy of Action and the Scientific Method (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 59–187.   6.  See Auguste Comte, Cours de philosophie positive (Paris: Bachelier, 1830).   7.  Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley (Cleveland: Meridian, 1963), 83.  8. Leszek Kolakowski, The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, trans. Norbert Guterman (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 3.

Notes to Pages 11–14   201  9. Ibid., 10. 10.  For example, see Daniel C. Dennett, From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 2017). 11. Conway, Science of Life, 29. 12.  See Blondel, Action (1893), 54–108. 13.  Boutroux was a prolific writer, but his most influential work for Blondel is his doctoral thesis, De la contingence des lois de la nature (Paris: Germer Baillière, 1874). The English translation is The Contingency of the Laws of Nature, trans. Fred Rothwell (Chicago: Open Court, 1916). 14.  For Boutroux’s influence on Blondel, see Conway, Science of Life, 123–87. 15.  For a discussion of Boutroux’s role, see Oliva Blanchette, Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010), 3–7. 16. Cf. Blondel, L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Spes, 1928), 56. 17.  Cf. Blondel, Action (1893), 145–94. 18.  Cf. Blondel, L’Action, Tome 1, Le problème des causes secondes et le pur agir (Paris: Alcan, 1936). 19.  Quoted in Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 142. 20. See Maria Rosa Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 21.  For example, see René Descartes, “Meditation Six: Concerning the Existence of Material Things, and the Real Distinction between Mind and Body,” in Discourse on Method and Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 93–105. 22.  See Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Monadology, in Discourse on Metaphysics/ Correspondence with Arnauld/Monadology, trans. George R. Montgomery (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1979), 249–72. 23.  See Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Lawson-­Tancred (New York: Penguin, 2004), “Book Zeta,” 165–230. 24. Cf. Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics, in Discourse on Metaphysics/Correspondence with Arnauld/Monadology, 18–19; Monadology, 254–55. 25. Blondel, La pensée, Tome 1, La genèse de la pensée et les paliers de son ascension spontantée (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 3–24. 26. Blondel, De Vinculo substantiali et de substantia composita apud Leibnitium (Paris: Alcan, 1893); reedited and translated from Latin to French with an introduction by Claude Troisfontaines, Le lien substantiel et la substance composée (1893) (Louvain/Paris: Nauwelaerts, 1972). I cite from Troisfontaines’s edition and translation. 27.  For the impact of Leibniz’s vinculum substantiale on Blondel’s thought, and his criticism of Leibniz’s account, see Blondel, Carnets intimes (1883–1894) (Paris, Cerf, 1961), 1:47–48; Carnets intimes (1894–1949) (Paris: Cerf, 1966), 2:122–23; and Blondel, Lettres philosophiques (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 11–13. 28. Cf. Yves de Montecheuil, S.J., “Le problème du vinculum leibnizien d’aprés M. Blondel,” Revue apologétique 52 (1931): 142–49.

202   Notes to Pages 14–17 29.  For an account of the genesis and development of the vinculum in Blondel’s thought, an exposition of Blondel’s Latin thesis, and an analysis of its significance for his thought, see Troisfontaines’s introduction to the French edition and translation of Blondel’s Latin thesis Le lien substantiel et la substance composée (1893), 1–141; Marc Leclerc, L’union substantielle: Blondel and Leibniz (Namur: Culture et Vérité, 1991); and Troisfontaines, “Blondel et le ‘lien substantiel’ chez Leibniz: Une pierre d’attente pour médiation christique,” in Le Christ de Maurice Blondel, ed. Pierre de Cointet and René Virgoulay (Paris: Desclée, 2003), 115–46. 30.  For a philosophical introduction to the Leibniz and des Bosses correspondence, a detailed analysis of the vinculum and its relation to the problem of transubstantiation, and the English translation of the correspondence, see Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford, introduction to G. W. Leibniz: The Leibniz–Des Bosses Correspondence, trans. and ed. Brandon C. Look and Donald Rutherford (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), xix–lxxix. 31. Maurice Blondel and Auguste Valensin, Correspondence (1899–1912), Tome 1 (Paris: Aubier, 1957), 45. 32.  Cf. Blondel’s letter to P. Valensin in the introduction to Le lien substantiel et la substance composée (1893), 10. For a discussion concerning the difference between Joly’s and Emile Boutroux’s interpretations of Leibniz’s vinculum, see Trois­fontaines, “Blondel et le ‘lien substantiel’ chez Leibniz,” 116–20. 33.  Cf. Blondel, Le lien substantiel et la substance composée (1893), 158–85. 34.  Ibid., 187–211. 35.  David Grummet keenly observes that the antecedents of the vinculum can be found in a discussion about angelic bodies that takes place in three earlier letters. In addition to unwittingly setting precedent for the vinculum, this seems to reaffirm the broader Scholastic nature of the discussion about the vinculum that the correspondence is a part of. See his excellent article, David Grummet, “Blondel, Modern Catholic Theology and the Leibnizian Eucharistic Bond,” Modern Theology 23, no. 4 (2007): 563. 36. Blondel, Le lien substantiel et la substance composée (1893), 177. 37.  Cf. Grummet, “Blondel, Modern Catholic Theology and the Leibnizian Eucharistic Bond,” 562–63. 38. Ibid. 39.  See Look and Rutherford, introduction to G. W. Leibniz, lvii–lxxii. 40. Grummet, “Blondel, Modern Catholic Theology and the Leibnizian Eucharistic Bond,” 563. 41. Blondel, Le lien substantiel et la substance composée d’après Leibniz (1893), 177. 42.  Ibid., 213–29. 43. Leibniz, G. W. Leibniz: The Leibniz–Des Bosses Correspondence, 233. 44.  Cf. Blondel, Action (1893), 314–29. 45.  Ibid., 389–424. 46.  Ibid., 363–88.

Notes to Pages 17–22   203 47. Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 695. 48. Blondel, Une énigme historique: Le “vinculum substantiale” d’après Leibniz et l’ébauche d’un réalisme supérieur (Paris: Beauchesne, 1930), 82. 49. Blondel, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin–Maurice Blondel: Correspondence, trans. William Whitman (New York: Herder and Herder, 1967), 23. 50.  For a discussion and description of the term “Romanticism” and a historical survey of the Romantic movement, see Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999); Louis Dupré, The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013). 51.  For an account of the development of the will in Western thought and Christianity’s role in the development of its history, see Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind (New York: Harvest, 1977), 1–272 (Part Two: Willing). 52.  Cf. Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 1–19; Aidan Nichols, O.P., Catholic Thought since the Enlightenment: A Survey (Leominster, UK: Gracewing, 1998), 23–30; and Avery Dulles, A History of Apologetics (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005), 209–69. 53.  François-René de Chateaubriand, Le génie du christianisme; ou, beautés de la religion chrétienne, 5 vols. (Paris, 1802); English translation: The Genius of Chris­ tianity; or, Beauties of the Christian Religion, trans. Charles I. White (Baltimore: J. Murphy Company, 1856). 54. Chateaubriand, The Genius of Christianity, 48–49. 55. Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. and ed. Alexander Dru and Illtyd Trethowan (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1994), 137. Originally published in French under the title “Lettre sur les exigences de la pensée contemporaine en matière d’apologétique et sur la méthode de la philosophie dans l’étude du problème religieux,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 131 (1896): 337–47, 467–82, 599–612; 132 (1896): 225–67, 337–50. I cite from the 1994 English translation; hereafter cited as Letter on Apologetics in the main text and notes. 56. See Léon Ollé-­Laprune, De la Certitude morale, 8 vols. (Paris: Eugene Belin, 1880). 57.  Cf. ibid., 2:53. 58.  See Léon Ollé-­Laprune, Le Prix de la vie (Paris: Eugene Belin, 1918). 59.  Cf. Blondel, Letter on Apologetics, 136–41. 60.  Ibid., 138. 61. Cf. Blondel, Blondel–Wehrlé: Correspondance (Paris: Aubier-­ Montaigne, 1969), 1:44–45. 62. Blondel, Léon Ollé-­Laprune: L’Achèvement et l’avenir de son oeuvre (Paris: Blound & Gay, 1923). 63.  Cf. ibid., 239. 64. Blondel, L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Spes, 1928), 65–66.

204   Notes to Pages 22–28 65.  See Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). 66.  See Blondel, Action (1893), 16–42. 67. Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 45. 68.  Cf. ibid., 68. 69.  Cf. Blondel, Action (1893), 332–44. 70.  Cf. ibid., 345–57. 71. For a discussion of Blondel’s relationship to Charles Maurras, Action française, and French Catholics who supported Maurras and Action française, see Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism, and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics, 1890–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). For a theological analysis of Blondel’s exchange with the Jesuit Pedro Descoqs, a supporter of Maurras, and Action française, see Peter Bernardi, Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism and Action Française (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2009). 72.  For example, Aeterni patris (1879) speaks to Christian society’s need to share a common philosophy. Aquinas’s “hylomorphic metaphysics” and “realistic epistemology” offers not only a healthy alternative to Kantian subjectivism but substantiates a communitarian social and political philosophy. Church–state relations and the role of authority are addressed in Immortale Dei (1885) and Libertas praestantissimum (1888), while Rerum novarum (1891) attends to the new economic realities forged by free-­market capitalism and industrialization. See Paul Misner, “Catholic Anti-­Modernism: The Ecclesial Setting,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-­Modernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock Darrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79–80. 73.  See Maurice Larkin, Religion, Politics and Preferment in France Since 1890: La Belle Époque and Its Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 74. See Joseph Komonchak, “Theology and Culture at Mid-­Century: The Example of Henri de Lubac,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 579–602. 75. Blondel, Letter on Apologetics, 130. 76.  See Gerald A. McCool, The Neo-­Thomists (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2009), 41-­42 77.  For example, see Giovanni Perrone, Praelectiones theologicae (A. Roger et F. Chernoviz, 1879). 78.  It is worth noting the phrase “method of immanence” is neither found nor used by Blondel in Action (1893) but appears later in Letter on Apologetics. 79. See the anonymous review “L’Action,” later discovered to be written by Léon Brunschvicg, in the Supplément to Revue de Métaphysique et Morale 1 (November 1893). 80. Cf. Henry Duméry, Blondel et la religion: Essai critique sur la “Lettre” de 1896 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1954), 1.

Notes to Pages 28–34   205  81. See Blondel, Le problème de la philosophie catholique (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932), which corrects and modifies the position of Letter on Apologetics.  82. Blondel, Letter on Apologetics, 152.  83. Ibid.  84. Ibid., 158.  85. Ibid., 162–63.  86. Ibid., 135.  87. Ibid., 137–38.   88.  Ibid., 163 (emphasis in original).  89. Ibid., 200.  90. Marie-­Benôit Schwalm, “Les illusions de l’idéalisme et leurs dangers pour la foi,” Revue Thomiste 4 (1896): 413–41.  91. Ibid., 413  92. Ibid., 433.   93.  Cf. Maurice Blondel and Auguste Valensin, Correspondance (1899–1912) (Paris: Aubier, 1957), 1:60–65.  94. See Letter on Apologetics, 161–68.   95.  See François Mallet, “L’oeuvre du Cardinal Dechamps et la méthode de l’apologétique,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 151 (1905): 68–91; Mallet, “Les controverses sur la méthode de l’apologétique,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 151 (1906): 449–72, 625–46; Mallet, “L’oeuvre du Cardinal Dechamps et les progrès récents de l’apologétique,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 153 (1907): 561–91.   96.  See Hippolyte Gayraud, “Une nouvelle apologétique chrétienne,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 133 (1896): 257–73.  97. Ibid., 268.   98.  Lucien Laberthonnière, “Le probléme religieux,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 132 (1897): 497–511, 615–32.  99. Blondel and Valensin, Correspondance (1899–1912), 1:110. 100.  For an excellent and detailed analysis of this shift in French thought at the end of the nineteenth century, see Roger Aubert, Le probléme de l’acte de foi: Données traditionelles et résultats des controverses récentes, 3rd ed. (Louvain: E. Warny, 1958), 265–77. 101. Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013), 3. 102.  For Pfau’s analysis of this process, see part III, “Progressive Amnesia: Will and the Crisis of Reason,” in Minding the Modern, 185–413. 103.  For Blondel’s critique of “extrincism,” see History and Dogma, 226–31. For his critique of “historicism,” see History and Dogma, 231–64. 104. Blondel, Carnets intimes (1883–1894), 1:223. 105.  For Pfau’s analysis of Blondel’s account of action, see Pfau, Minding the Modern, 315–18.

206   Notes to Pages 34–40 106.  Alfred Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église (Paris: Alphonse Picard et fils, 1902). 107. Translated into English as What Is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957). 108.  Cf. Gary Lease, “Modernism and ‘Modernism’: Christianity as Product of Its Culture,” Journal for the Study of Religion 1 (1988): 3–23. 109.  Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60 (1977): 453–72; and also MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 362. 110.  Ibid., 362. 111.  Ibid., 362–63. 112. On Blondel’s relation to Spinoza and Hegel, see his article published under the pseudonym Bernard Aimant, “Une des sources de la pensée moderne: L’évolution du Spinozisme,” Annales de philosophie chrétienne 128 (1894): 260–75 and 324–41. C h a pt e r T wo  1. John E. Thiel, Sense of Tradition: Continuity and Development in Catholic Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 3.   2.  See Session IV, April 8, 1546, “First Decree: Acceptance of the Sacred Books and Apostolic Traditions,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, Vol. 2, Trent to Vatican II, ed. Norman Tanner (London: Sheed & Ward, 1990), 663.   3.  See chapter 3 of the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith,” and chapter 4 of “The First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:807–16.  4. Magisterium here refers to the teaching authority of ecclesiastical office. Francis Sullivan has observed that in its more recent development, the term magisterium has come to mean both the teaching authority of the hierarchy and the hierarchy as the bearer of the office. See Francis A. Sullivan, Magisterium: Teaching Authority in the Catholic Church (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1983), 24–34.   5.  For an analysis of the office of the episcopate and its relation to tradition, see Karl Rahner and Joseph Ratzinger, The Episcopate and the Primacy, trans. Kenneth Barker, Patrick Kerans, Robert Ochs, and Richard Strachan (New York: Herder and Herder, 1962).   6.  See Yves Congar, “Aspects ecclésiologiques de la querelle entre mendiants et séculiers dans la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle et le début du XIVe,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge 36 (1961), 35–151.   7.  For the latter, see Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 1150–1350: A Study on the Concepts of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 132–44.

Notes to Pages 40–42   207   8.  For a concise account of the various themes under which Bonaventure and Aquinas consider the notion of revelation, see René Latourelle, Theology of Revelation (New York: Alba House, 1966), 155–79.  9. For an introduction to the discussion concerning Aquinas’s relation to the Condemnation of 1277, see John F. Wippel, “Thomas Aquinas and the Condemnation of 1277,” The Modern Schoolman 72 (1995): 233–72; and Roland Hissette, “Thomas d’Aquin directement visé par la censure du 7 mars 1277? Réponse à John F. Wippel,” in Roma, Magistra Mundi: Itineraria Culturae Medievalis: Mélanges offerts au Père L. E. Boyle à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire, ed. Jacqueline Hamesse (Louvain-­la-­Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1998), 425–37. 10. Cf. Pierre Félix Mandonnet, Siger de Brabant et l’averroïsme latin au XIIIme siècle (Louvain: Institut Supérieur de Philosophie de L’Université, 1908–11), 2:175–91; Etienne Gilson, Reason and Revelation in the Middle Ages (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1938), and Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages (New York: Random House, 1955), 402–10; and Fernand van Steenberghen, Thomas Aquinas and Radical Aristotelianism (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1980). 11.  For a summary of the similarities and differences between Aquinas and Bonaventure, and twentieth-­century interpretations of the two thinkers, see David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 2nd ed., ed. D. E. Luscombe and C. N. L. Brooke (London: Longman, 1988), 213–25. 12.  On the relationship between reason and revelation in Aquinas’s thought, see Etienne Gilson, The Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. L. K. Shook (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1994), 3–25; and Per Eric Persson, Sacra Doctrina: Reason and Revelation in Aquinas, trans. J. A. R. Mackenzie (Oxford: Blackwell, 1970). For Bonaventure, see Joseph Ratzinger, The Theology of History in St. Bonaventure (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1971). 13.  For an analysis of Aquinas’s and Bonaventure’s use of this distinction, see Lawrence Moonan, Divine Power: The Medieval Power Distinction up to Its Adoption by Albert, Bonaventure, and Aquinas (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 193–295. 14. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 300. 15.  For well-­reputed works engaging the theological, philosophical, and ecclesiological complexity of premodern Christianity, see Etienne Gilson, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1943); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952); and Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961). 16.  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord, Vol. 5, The Realm of Metaphysics in the Modern Age, trans. Oliver Davies, Andrew Louth, Brian McNeil, C.R.V., John Saward, and Rowan Williams; ed. Brian McNeil, C.R.V., and John Riches (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991), 20.

208   Notes to Pages 42–44 17.  See Heiko Oberman, “Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism: With Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance,” Harvard Theological Review 53 (1960): 47–76. 18. See Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 15–41. 19. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 299. Also see Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages, 488–99. 20.  Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981), 41. 21. Knowles, Evolution of Medieval Thought, 302. 22.  To be clear, the office of the episcopate always has been a representation of God’s presence embodied in the Church. The argument here is concerned with the process by which one form of tradition as the teaching authority of the magisterium, not the office of episcopate, is privileged in relation to others. 23.  Cf. Pierre d’Ailly, Questiones super primum, tertium et quartum librum Sententiarum (Paris, 1513), and Francis Oakley, Omnipotence and Promise: The Legacy of the Scholastic Distinction of Powers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2002). 24.  Cf. George Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church: The Crisis of the Protestant Reformation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1959), 56. 25.  Cf. Oakley, Omnipotence, Covenant, and Order: An Excursion in the History of Ideas from Abelard to Leibniz (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 64. See also Heiko Oberman, “Pierre d’Ailly and the Absolute Power of God: Another Note on the Theology of Nominalism,” Harvard Theological Review 56 ( January 1963): 59–73. 26.  John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1990), 14. 27.  See Oakley, The Political Thought of Pierre d’Ailly: The Voluntarist Tradition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 14–33. A detailed analysis of the complex of distinctions that accompany the potentia absoluta/ordinata distinction in d’Ailly’s thought is beyond the scope of this book. Here we have offered a rudimentary sketch of the distinction in relation to d’Ailly’s understanding of the notion of tradition. It is worth noting that this distinction, as it is worked out in d’Ailly’s account, allots an important role to human reason, as is evidenced by the further distinction between “absolute evidence” and “conditioned evidence” (cf. 29). Oakley contends the potentia absoluta/ordinata distinction and evidentia absoluta/conditionata vel secundum quid absolve d’Ailly’s thought from fideism or occasionalism (cf. 26–33). For an excellent discussion of this distinction in d’Ailly and nominalism, see George Lindbeck, “Nominalism and the Problem of Meaning as Illustrated by Pierre d’Ailly on Predestination and Justification,” Harvard Theological Review 52 ( January 1959): 43–60; Heiko Oberman, “Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism: With Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance,” Harvard Theological

Notes to Pages 45–48   209 Review 53 ( January 1960): 47–76; and Francis Oakley, “Pierre d’Ailly and the Absolute Power of God: Another Note on the Theology of Nominalism,” Harvard Theological Review 56 ( January 1963): 59–73. 28.  Cf. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 9–26. 29.  Cf. Francis Oakley, The Conciliarist Tradition: Constitutionalism in the Catho­ lic Church, 1300–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 22–25. 30.  Cf. Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, trans. Gemma Simmonds, Richard Price, and Christopher Stevens (London: SCM Press, 2006), 75–119. 31.  Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957), 197. 32.  Ibid., 198. 33.  Cf. ibid., 193–272. 34.  Cf. de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum, 101–19. 35. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 203. 36. Paul McPartlan, Sacrament of Salvation: An Introduction to Eucharistic Ecclesiology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 38. 37.  For a history of Trent, see John W. O’Malley, Trent: What Happened at the Council (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2013). On the Tridentine decree on scripture and tradition, see Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:663–65. 38.  Much of the interpretive history of the Council of Trent takes place in the twentieth century as a result of the work of Josef Geiselmann. On this issue, see Geiselmann, “Das Konzil von Trient über das Verhältnis der heiligen Schrift und der nicht­ geschriebenen Traditionen,” in Die mündliche Überlieferung, ed. M. Schmaus (Munich: Hueber, 1957), 123–206. For responses to Geiselmann, see Heinrich Lennerz, “Scriptura Sola,” Gregorianum 40 ( January 1959): 38–53, and Joseph Ratzinger, “Offenbarung, Schrift, Überlieferung,” Trierer theologische Zeitschrift 67 (1958): 13–27. 39.  Cf. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 182. It is worth noting that there was considerable debate during the Council as to what does and does not constitute an apostolic tradition. For a concise summary of this discussion, see Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church, 196–209. 40.  For a detailed summary of the history of the decree, see Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, Vol. 2, The First Sessions at Trent, 1545–47, trans. Dom Ernest Graf, O.S.B. (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1961), 52–98. For a history of the Council, see O’Malley, Trent. 41. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 160. 42.  The history of these deliberations also is captured well in Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church, 195–209. 43.  Session IV, April 8, 1546, “First Decree: Acceptance of the Sacred Books and Apostolic Traditions,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:663. 44.  Cf. Maurice Bévenot, “Traditiones in the Council of Trent,” Heythrop Journal 4 (1963): 340.

210   Notes to Pages 48–49 45. Ibid., 341–42. It is important to note that in these pages Bévenot too quickly dismisses the use of tradition in both the singular and the plural in discerning the Council’s intention. See Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, 2:58–60. 46.  See Session IV, April 8, 1546, “First Decree: Acceptance of the Sacred Books and Apostolic Traditions,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:663. 47. Ibid. 48.  See for example, John L. Murphy, The Notion of Tradition in John Driedo (Milwaukee: Seraphic, 1959). It is important to note the polemical context of the two-­source theory. Although scripture and tradition are growing apart by the thirteenth century, the understanding of scripture and tradition as two distinct sources of revelation was formulated in its partim . . . partim form by the Dutch theologian Albert Pigge (1490–1542) immediately before Trent and principally in response to the Reformers. See George Tavard, “Tradition in Early Post-­Tridentine Theology,” Theological Studies 23 (1962): 377–405. 49.  Cf. Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, 73–75; Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church, 131–50 and 195–209; Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 156–76; Joseph Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” in Revelation and Tradition, trans. W. J. O’Hara (London: Burns & Oates, 1966), 26–35. Having suggested that the preponderance of post-­Tridentine theology expressed itself in terms of the partim . . . partim distinction, the reader needs to be aware that these expressions vary according to each particular thinker. Some, for example, Melchior Cano, Martin Perez de Ayala, Johannes Cochlaeus, and Augustinian Aurelius Sanutus, do not quote from the Tridentine decree, but instead formulate the distinction within complex and sophisticated accounts of revelation that offer subtle distinctions between different types of tradition. For an excellent analysis of post-­Tridentine thinking that attends to the nuances of these thinkers’ ideas of tradition, see Tavard, “Tradition in Early Post-­Tridentine Theology,” 377–405. 50.  Cf. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 173. 51.  Cf. Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” 26–28, and Ratzinger, “On the Tridentine Decree on Tradition,” in Revelation and Tradition, 59–60. Ratzinger narrates a more complex account of the connection between traditiones and abusus at Trent in which he suggests procedural complications at the Council partly are to blame for the link between the two. 52. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 176. 53.  For a summary of post-­Tridentine Catholic thought, see Tavard, Holy Writ or Holy Church, 225–47. 54.  Cf. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 176 and 182. 55. Cf. Klaus Schatz, Papal Primacy: From Its Origins to the Present, trans. John A. Otto and Linda M. Maloney (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996). 56.  Richard Costigan, “Tradition and the Beginning of the Ultramontane Movement,” Irish Theological Quarterly 48 (1981): 41. See also Roger Aubert, Johannes Beckmann, Patrick J. Corish, and Rudolf Lill, The Church between

Notes to Pages 49–54   211 Revolution and Restoration, trans. Peter Becker (New York: Crossroad, 1981), 104–15. 57. For example, see Hermann Josef Pottmeyer, Die Rolle des Papsttums im dritten Jahrtausend (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1999). 58.  See Joseph de Maistre, Du Pape, 2 vols. (Lyons, 1819). 59.  See Joseph de Maistre, “Étude sur la Souveraineté,” in Oeuvres complètes, 14 vols. (Lyons, 1884–1887). 60.  Paul Misner, “Catholic Anti-­Modernism: The Ecclesial Setting,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-­modernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 59. 61.  Cf. Reardon, Liberalism and Tradition, 29–38. 62.  Isaiah Berlin, The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 162–63. 63.  Cf. Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility, 122–30. 64.  MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” 461. See also MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 349–69. 65.  See chapter 2 of the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:806. 66.  See chapter 3 of the “Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:807. 67. See chapter 4 of “The First Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2:815–16. This brief characterization of the First Vatican Council’s documents is intended to show one line of thinking that continues into the Council and finds official expression in its decrees. This line of thought should not be mistaken for the many other important tendencies present at the Council. 68.  For example, see Giovanni Perrone, Praelectiones theologicae, Vol. 1 (Rome: Collegio Urbano de Propaganda Fide, 1835–42), and Carlo Passaglia, Commentarius de praerogativis beati Petri, apostolorum principis: Auctoritate divinatum litterarum comprobatis (Ratisbonae: Manz, 1850). 69. Johannes Baptist Franzelin, Tractatus De Divina et Scriptura, 3rd ed. (Rome: Typographia Polyglotta, 1882), 96. 70.  Cf. Gerald A. McCool, S.J., Nineteenth-­Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 236–40. 71.  Cf. ibid., 83. 72. Ibid., 239. 73.  For more on the rule of faith in the early Church, see Ronnie J. Rombs and Alexander Y. Hwang, eds., Tradition and the Rule of Faith in the Early Church (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2010). 74.  Joseph T. Lienhard, The Bible, the Church, and Authority: The Canon of the Christian Bible in History and Theology (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1995), 100.

212   Notes to Pages 54–57 75. Ibid. 76. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 28. 77.  Cf. ibid, 177–83. 78. See Summa theologiae II-­II, q. 2, a. 6, ad. 3. 79. Louis Billot, De Sacra Traditione contra novam haeresim Evolutionismi (Rome: Typographia Iuvenum Opificum A S. Iosepho, 1904). 80.  With this in mind, it is worth noting that the second edition of Billot’s work on tradition published in 1907 bears the new title De immutabilitate Traditionis contra modernam haeresim Evolutionismi. 81. Cf. De immutabilitate Traditionis contra modernam haeresim Evolutionismi, 3rd ed. (Rome: Typographia Iuvenum Opificum A S. Iosepho, 1922), 29. 82. Billot, De Sacra Traditione contra novam haeresim Evolutionismi, 8. 83.  Ibid., 9. 84. Cf. De immutabilitate Traditionis contra modernam haeresim Evolutionismi, 29. 85.  For a brief summary of the idea of the “living tradition” in the Tübingen school, Möhler on tradition, and the sensus fidelium in Newman, see Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 189–213. 86. Johann Adam Möhler, Symbolism: Exposition of the Doctrinal Differences between Catholics and Protestants as Evidenced by Their Symbolic Writings, trans. James Burton Robertson (New York: Crossroad, 1997), 284. 87.  Ibid., 279. 88.  Ibid., 266–67 (emphasis in original). 89. For commentary on Möhler’s theology of tradition, see Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 193–96; Jean-­Georges Boeglin, La question de la tradition dans la théologie catholique contemporaine (Paris: Cerf, 1998), 68–72; and Josef Rupert Geiselmann, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. W. J. O’Hara (New York: Herder and Herder, 1966), 19–23. 90.  See John Henry Newman, The Arians of the Fourth Century: Their Doctrine, Temper, and Conduct, Chiefly as Exhibited in the Councils of the Church Between A.D. 325 and A.D. 381 (London: Rivington, 1833). 91.  Cf. Stephen Prickett, Modernity and the Reinvention of Tradition: Backing into the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 169–88. 92. Cf. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. David J. Delaura (New York: Norton & Company, 1968). 93. For example, see Newman, “Milman’s View of Christianity,” in Essays: Critical and Historical (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1907), 2:186–248. Newman himself was already aware of this tension and was attempting to address it before he became Catholic. 94. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 189. 95.  Cf. René Virgoulay, Les courants de pensée du catholicisme français: L’épreuve de la modernité (Paris: Cerf, 1985), 45.

Notes to Pages 58–62   213 96. Cf. Roger D. Haight, S.J., “The Unfolding of Modernism in France: Blondel, Laberthonniere, Le Roy,” Theological Studies 35 (1974): 632–66. 97.  Cf. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” 453–72. See also MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 349–69. C h a pt e r T h r e e  1. See George Steiner, “The Great Ennui,” in In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1971), 1–25.  2. Ibid., 20–22.   3.  Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1991), 32.   4.  Gary Lease, “Modernism and ‘Modernism’: Christianity as Product of Its Culture,” Journal for the Study of Religion 1 (1988): 4.  5. Ibid.  6. Ibid., 5.   7.  Cf. ibid. (emphasis in original). For an account of the relationship between the Reformation and the rise of historical-­critical readings of scripture, and how the practice of historical-­critical readings of scripture in nineteenth-­century Protestantism preserve the ideals of the Reformers of the sixteenth century, see Gerhard Ebeling, Word and Faith (London: SCM, 1963), 17–61.   8.  Cf. Lease, “Modernism,” 5–6.   9.  For example, see Etienne Gilson, Histoire de la philosophie médiévale, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1943); David Knowles, The Evolution of Medieval Thought, 2nd ed., ed. D. E. Luscombe and C. N. L. Brooke (London: Longman, 1988); Jean Leclercq, O.S.B., The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture, trans. Catharine Misrahi (New York: Fordham University Press, 1961); Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiévale: Les quatre sens de l’écriture, 2 vols. (Paris: Aubier, 1959– 1961); Beryl Smalley, The Study of the Bible in the Middle Ages, 2nd ed. (New York: Philosophical Library, 1952). 10.  Cf. Lease, “Modernism,” 5–6. 11.  For an excellent and sophisticated account of how Protestant reformers sought to advance medieval Christianity’s institutionalized worldview, not reject it, see Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). Although ­Gregory stresses the self-­marginalization of theological discourse in the early modern period as a consequence of nominalism, nominalism and its consequences for modern religious thought are not the focus of Gregory’s work. 12.  See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 2 vols., trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1953).

214   Notes to Pages 63–65 13. See James Samuel Preus, From Shadow to Promise: Old Testament Interpretation from Augustine to the Young Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), 153–271. 14.  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 160–61. It should be noted that though Taylor locates the decisive shift in Descartes, the antecedents of this “internalization” or turn inward toward radical reflexivity can be found in Augustine— though how this internalization is formulated and what philosophical implications follow from this formulation is quite different in Descartes than in Augustine. See also Jean-­Luc Marion, Au lieu de soi: L’approche de Saint Augustin (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2008). 15.  Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 16.  Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology,” in After Philosophy: End or Transformation?, ed. Kenneth Baynes, James Bohman, and Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), 466. 17. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 188. In proposing that the problem of representation is an epistemic and cultural shift in Western thought and in discussing how that shift has affected tradition’s and scripture’s ability to represent God’s revelation in human history, I am following a line of thought found in Taylor, Martin Heidegger, and Michel Foucault. See Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper Perennial, 2013), 115–54; and Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). 18. Cf. Louis Dupré, The Enlightenment and the Intellectual Foundations of Modern Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 3. Importantly, Dupré observes the distinct influence of late medieval nominalist theology on Descartes and its role in shaping Cartesian and post-­Cartesian thought. Dupré’s contribution is an important supplement to Taylor’s account of the transformation of modern reason. 19.  See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. and ed. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 20.  Cf. Lease, “Modernism,” 6. 21.  See Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in Wegmarken (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1967), 73–97. 22.  Lease, “Modernism,” 4. 23.  Kant’s critique of speculative metaphysics and his turn to the postulates of practical reason were the alleged source of the so-­called subjectivism of the modernists by the integralists (neo-­Thomists), and later was to become the main target at which late nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century Catholic apologists would aim their apologia. Cf. Gerald McCool, The Neo-­Thomists (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1994).

Notes to Pages 65–71   215 24.  Here we have in mind such thinkers as George Tyrell, Édouard Le Roy, and Ernesto Buonaiuti. 25.  Cf. Gabriel Daly, Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), 8. 26. Cf. Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: A Study in ­Eighteenth-­ and Nineteenth-­Century Hermeneutics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), 2. I am interested here more in the history of transition in the reading of scripture that Frei recounts than in the “realistic narrative” form of reading scripture he advocates. To the latter, Nicholas Boyle has criticized Frei’s account for its “bibliolatry.” Boyle contends Frei is unable to appropriate Auerbach fully, since Frei, like Schleiermacher, allots no role to the Church in his account of the interpretation of scripture. In Boyle’s words, “this is bibliolatry in a new guise: a uniqueness and transcendence is given to the biblical text that belongs properly only to God. Frei’s conception of the Bible is far too narrow”; see Nicholas Boyle, Sacred and Secular Scriptures: A Catholic Approach to Literature (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 62. Though Boyle’s exposition of Frei is insightful, his criticisms of Frei mistakenly imply Frei’s thought is contained fully in his 1974 publication The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, with no reference to Frei’s later works. In his later work, Frei clearly designates a role for the community of believers in the interpretation of scripture. Whether he offers an adequate account of this community and its role in the interpretative process is an important yet different question. See Hans Frei, Theology and Narrative: Selected Essays, ed. George Hunsinger and William C. Placher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 27.  For an overview of the transformation the Bible underwent in England at this time, see Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-­Century Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1993). 28.  Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scenes from the Drama of European Literature (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 53. 29.  Ibid., 54. 30.  Ibid., 36. 31. Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, 2. 32.  Ibid., 7–8. 33.  Ibid., 12. 34.  Ibid., 13. 35.  Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation: The Rise of Modern Paganism (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 207. 36.  Cf. Jonathon Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 37. Cf. David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catho­lics from London to Vienna (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008). 38. Cf. Darrin McMahon, Enemies of the Enlightenment: The French Counter-­ Enlightenment and the Making of Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

216   Notes to Pages 71–76 39.  Cf. R. R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-­Century France, 2nd ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970). 40. For an overview of the Catholic Enlightenment, see Ulrich L. Lehner, The Catholic Enlightenment: The Forgotten History of a Global Movement (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). 41.  Ibid., 11. 42 Cf. Gerard A. McCool, S.J., Nineteenth-­Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (New York: Fordham University Press, 1989), 32–35. 43.  Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. Brian Cozens and John Bowden (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 264. 44. For a discussion of Friedrich Schelling’s, Johannes von Kuhn’s, and the Catholic Tübingen School’s Romantic responses to Enlightenment critiques of Christian revelation, see Grant Kaplan, Answering the Enlightenment: The Catholic Recovery of Historical Revelation (New York: Crossroad, 2006). 45. McCool, Nineteenth-­Century Scholasticism, 34–35. 46.  Ibid., 18. 47.  Ibid., 19. 48.  James Hennesey, S.J., “Leo XIII’s Thomistic Revival: A Political and Philosophical Event,” The Journal of Religion 58 (1978): S185–S197. 49.  Ibid., S187. 50.  Ibid., S188. 51.  The Church’s reaction to liberalism ought not to be read merely as a political event. Instead, one ought to read it as a part of Catholicism’s broader attempt to work out the relationship between faith (grace) and reason (nature) in modernity. For an account of how this distinction continued to plague much twentieth-­century European theology and the implications it had, see Joseph Komonchak, “Theology and Culture at Mid-­Century: The Example of Henri de Lubac,” Theological Studies 51 (1990): 579–602. For an interesting example of how this distinction paralyzed ecclesial life in the twentieth century outside of Europe, see William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist: Theology, Politics and the Body of Christ (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 121–202. 52.  Cf. McCool, Nineteenth-­Century Scholasticism, 129–34. 53.  Cf. ibid., 134. 54.  See P. J. Fitzpatrick, “Neoscholasticism,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, Jan Pinborg, and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 838–52. 55.  See Pierre Thibault, Savoir et pouvoir: Philosophie thomiste et politique cléricale au XIXe siècle (Quebec: Presses de l’Université Laval, 1972). 56.  Cf. McCool, Nineteenth-­Century Scholasticism, 138–39. 57.  Cf. Ibid., 139–41.

Notes to Pages 76–77   217 58.  In retrospect there is a certain irony to the neo-­Thomist charge of Cartesianism against its interlocutors, for more than one scholar has observed how neo-­ Thomism itself seems to resemble more a form of Cartesianism than a development of Aquinas’s thought. See Wayne Hankey, “Making Theology Practical: Thomas Aquinas and the Nineteenth Century Religious Revival,” Dionysius 9 (December 1985): 91–92. 59.  Cf. Hennesey, “Leo XIII’s Thomistic Revival: A Political and Philosophical Event,” S189–S190. For Leo’s “grand design,” as it has been called, see Paul Misner, “Catholic Anti-­Modernism: The Ecclesial Setting,” in Catholicism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-­Modernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 79–80. 60. See Joseph Komonchak, “Modernity and the Construction of Roman Catholicism,” in Modernism as a Social Construct, ed. George Gilmore (Mobile, AL: Spring Hill College Press, 1991), 11–41. See also Maurice Larkin, Religion, Politics and Preferment in France since 1890: La Belle Époque and Its Legacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 6–7. Politically, the papacy was eager to express its independence from Italy and did so by rejecting Italian attempts at conciliation and forbidding Italian Catholics to participate in national elections. Rome’s chief concern “was that other governments might use the Pope’s alleged dependence on Italy as an excuse to ignore him when it came to dealing with the Church in their own territories” (ibid., 54–55). Larkin also suggests that Leo XIII and his papal secretary of state, Cardinal Rampolla, were so committed to the “Roman Question,” the maintenance of formal relations with France through the Napoleon Concordat to maintain diplomatic leverage with Italy, that although it made many protests against the expulsion of religious orders from France in 1902, it did not cut off diplomatic relations with France, as one might expect given the drastic nature of the situation (cf. ibid., 54–58). French/Vatican diplomatic relations changed with the election of Leo’s successor, Pius X, in 1903. Pius’s secretary of state, Merry del Val, considered Leo’s and Rampolla’s policy of ralliement not only impolitic, “he regarded the current predicament of the French Church [the modernist crisis] as its direct result” (ibid., 59). 61. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, 9–10. 62.  Ibid., 11. 63.  Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Theology of Karl Barth: Exposition and Interpretation, trans. Edward T. Oakes, S.J. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992), 252 (emphasis original). 64. Alasdair MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopedia, Genealogy, and Tradition (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1990), 73–74. As an example, MacIntyre uses Kluetgen’s interpretation of Aquinas’s account of truth in the first question of the De veritate. For example, see Joseph Kluet­gen, Die Philosophie der Vorzeit, 2 vols. (Innsbruck: Rauch Verlag, 1878). 65.  Fitzpatrick, “Neoscholasticism,” 842.

218   Notes to Pages 78–81 66. MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry, 74. 67. Ibid. 68.  Ibid., 75. C h a pt e r F o u r  1. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947), I, q. 1. For a useful account of Aquinas’s account of scientia, see Scott MacDonald, “Theory of Knowledge,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas, ed. Norman Kretzmann and Eleonore Stump (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 163–68. For a brief overview and history of the reception of Aristotle’s understanding of scientia demonstrative in the Posterior Analytics among his medieval commentators, including Aquinas, see Eileen Serene, “Demonstrative Science,” in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 496–517.   2.  Undoubtedly this is the tension raised by Maurice Le Sage d’Hauteroche d’Hulst in his controversial essay “La question biblique,” Le Correspondent 134 (1893): 201–51, and later in scripture scholars such as Marie-­Joseph Lagrange. For the latter, see, for example, Lagrange, La méthode historique (Paris: Lecroffre, 1903).   3.  See Adrien Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, Vol. 1, From Revo­ lution to the Third Republic, trans. John Dingle (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961), 247–363.   4.  Evelyn Martha Acomb, The French Laic Laws, 1879–1889: The First Anticlerical Campaign of the Third French Republic (New York: Octagon, 1967), 130.   5.  Ibid., 143. Along with the secularization of the education system in France during the Third Republic, anticlerical republicans found other legislative ways to limit the Church’s cultural influence. As Acomb notes, “anti-­clericals attempted to curtail the privileges of the Church in another sphere which had long been regarded as peculiarly its won: death. They found a precedent for this in a decree of the Convention in 1793 which provided that members of all faiths should be buried in one cemetery” (202). The Third Republic’s funeral legislation was a reflection of the anticlerical attempt to transfer the practice of charity from the Church to local and central government (cf. 207).  6. Cf. Acomb, The French Laic Laws, and Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, Vol. 2, Under the Third Republic, trans. John Dingle (New York: Herder and Herder, 1961).   7.  See Jules Ferry, Discours et opinions de Jules Ferry, Vol. 3, ed. Paul Robiquet (Paris: Armand Colin et Cie, 1895), and Ernest Renan, Oeuvres complètes de Ernest Renan, ed. Henriette Psichari (Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1948).  8. See William R. Keylor, Academy and Community: The Foundation of the French Historical Profession (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975), 32–33.

Notes to Pages 82–85   219   9.  Marvin R. O’Connell, Critics on Trial: An Introduction to the Catholic Modernist Crisis (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 13. 10.  See Dansette, Religious History of Modern France, 2:5–8. 11. O’Connell, Critics on Trial, 13. 12.  Alasdair MacIntyre, God, Philosophy, Universities: A Selective History of the Catholic Philosophical Tradition (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2009), 133. 13.  Ibid., 131–43. 14.  Dru, introduction to Maurice Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, 18–19. 15.  Talar, “Innovation and Biblical Interpretation,” 199. 16.  Alec R. Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church: Its Origins and Outcome (New York: Gordon Press, 1976), 70–71. It should be noted that Duchense’s doctorate on papal history from the Sorbonne was delated to the Congregation of the Index. This event along with his criticisms of the conventional narratives concerning the origins of some French dioceses may have contributed to his reluctance to publicly champion Loisy’s reform of scripture studies in the Catholic Church at the time. 17. According to Loisy, Duchense failed to follow through on his alleged promise to recommend Loisy for the chair of Assyriology at the École pratique des hautes études. See Alfred Loisy, Choses passées (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1913), 98–100; and Loisy, Mémoires pour server à l’histoire de notre temps (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1930–31), 1:165–72. Loisy also expressed his frustration at what he characterized as Duchense’s aversion to discussing contemporary biblical questions. See Loisy, Mémoires, 1:96, 164. 18.  Cf. Émile Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste (Paris: Casterman, 1962), 19–20. 19.  Cf. Harvey Hill, The Politics of Modernism: Alfred Loisy and the Scientific Study of Religion (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002), 27–28. 20.  Cf. Loisy, Mémoires,1:189, and Loisy, Choses passées, 58. 21. Hill, The Politics of Modernism, 27. 22.  On Loisy’s debt to Renan, see Mémoires, 1:99 and 3:437. 23.  Cf. ibid., 1:118. 24.  For a brief summary and discussion of this thesis, see Loisy, Choses passées, 70–73, and Mémoires, 1:131. 25.  For a detailed exposition and discussion of both Mgr. d’Hulst’s letter on Renan and his 1893 article on the biblical question in France, the political circumstances surrounding both articles, and the controversy that ensued as a consequence of the 1893 article, see Alfred Baudrillart, Vie de Mgr. D’ Hulst (Paris: Poussielgue, 1914), 1:130–80. 26.  Cf. Maurice Le Sage d’Hauteroche d’Hulst, “M. Renan,” Le Correspondent 133 (1892): 193–227.

220   Notes to Pages 85–87 27.  Maurice Le Sage d’Hauteroche d’Hulst, “La question biblique,” Le Correspondent 134 (1893): 201–51. 28. For what d’Hulst sought to achieve through this article, see the brief reprinted note from d’Hulst to Loisy in Loisy, Mémoires, 1:235. For Loisy’s interpretation of d’Hulst’s article and the events that followed, see Loisy, Mémoires, 1:224–57. 29.  Alfred Loisy, “La question biblique et l’inspiration des Éscritures,” L’Enseignement biblique (November–December 1893): 1–16, and reprinted in Alfred Loisy, Études bibliques, 3rd ed. (Paris: Alphonse Picard et Fils, 1903), 139–69. 30.  But when one reads Loisy, “one has the impression that the principle of relative truth is in fact of universal application,” as James Tunstead Burtchaell has aptly observed. See Burtchaell, Catholic Theories of Biblical Inspiration since 1810: A Review and Critique (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 224. 31.  An extended discussion of the role Newman’s thought plays in modernism is outside the purview of this work. For recent and detailed analysis of Newman’s relationship to modernism, see Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Keith Beaumont, “The Reception of Newman in France at the Time of the Modernist Crisis,” in Receptions of Newman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 156–76; Michael E. Allsopp and Ronald R. Burke, eds., John Henry Newman: Theology and Reform (New York: Garland, 1992); Arthur Hilary Jenkins, ed., John Henry Newman and Modernism, Vol. 14 of Internationale Cardinal-­Newman-­Studien (Sigmaringendorf: Regio Verlag Glock und Lutz, 1990); Mary Jo Weaver, ed., Newman and the Modernists (Lanham, MD: University Press of A ­ merica, 1985); and Nicholas Lash, Newman on Development: The Search for an Explanation in History (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1975), 146–56. 32.  For a list of Newman’s work von Hügel sent to Loisy, see Loisy, Mémoires, 1:415. 33.  Daly, “Theological and Philosophical Modernism,” 88. 34. On the neo-­ Scholastic interpretation of Aquinas’s epistemology and ontology, see Alasdair MacIntyre, “Essence and Existence,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 3:59–61; John Haldane, “Thomism,” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward Craig (London: Routledge, 1998), 380–88; and Fitzpatrick, “Neoscholasticism,” 838–52. 35.  Daly, “Theological and Philosophical Modernism,” 105. 36. Loisy, Mémoires, 1:426. 37.  Louis Bouyer, “Newman’s Influence in France,” The Dublin Review 117 (1945): 182–88. 38.  Ibid., 184. 39.  Ibid. It should be noted that the context of Bouyer’s comment refers to Henri Bremond’s reading of Newman and its influence on Newman’s French readers, a reading that Bouyer seems to hold in high esteem, except for its tendency to

Notes to Pages 87–89   221 romanticize Newman’s personality. Unfortunately, Bouyer ignores Loisy’s interpretation of Newman in this article. 40. Lash, Newman on Development, 19. 41.  Ibid., 17. 42.  Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman: The Idea of Doctrinal Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), 143. 43.  Alfred Loisy [A. Firmin], “Le développment Chrétien d’après le Cardinal Newman,” Revue du clergé français 17 (1898): 5–20. 44.  Baron Friedrich von Hügel, Selected Letters: 1896–1924, ed. Bernard Holland (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1927), 16. 45.  Cf. Loisy [A. Firmin], “Le développment,” 13. 46.  Ibid., 20. 47.  John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1968), 59. 48. Ibid. 49.  Here one might recall Yves Congar’s observation that one of the unfortunate intellectual errors of the modernists was that they were unable to distinguish between theology and dogma. See Congar, A History of Theology, trans. Hunter Guthrie (New York: Doubleday, 1968), 191. 50.  Loisy [A. Firmin], “Le développment,” 8. 51.  Cf. Francesco Turvasi, “The Development of Doctrine in John Cardinal Newman and Alfred Loisy,” in Allsopp and Burke, John Henry Newman: Theology and Reform, 164–65. Loisy’s reluctance to grant a theological interpretation of scripture is not entirely unwarranted. At the time, a theological interpretation would have involved little more than using scripture as a proof-­text for doctrine. 52.  Loisy [A. Firmin], “Le développment,” 8. 53. Lash, “Newman and ‘A. Firmin,’ ” in Jenkins, John Henry Newman and Modernism, 61 (emphasis in original). 54.  Loisy [A. Firmin], “Le développment,” 8. 55.  Lash, “Newman and ‘A. Firmin,’ ” 60. 56.  Cf. John Coulson, “Was Newman a Modernist?,” in Jenkins, John Henry Newman and Modernism, 79. 57.  Cf. ibid., 79–80. 58. Guglielmo Forni Rosa, The “Essence of Christianity”: The Hermeneutical Question in the Protestant and Modernist Debate (1897–1904), trans. Marisa Luciani and Jane Stevenson (Atlanta: Scholars, 1995), 61. 59.  Loisy [A. Firmin], “Le développment,” 12–13. 60.  Cf. Ronald Burke, “Was Loisy Newman’s Modern Disciple?,” in Allsopp and Burke, John Henry Newman: Theology and Reform, 147. The reader needs be aware that Burke’s essay contains Burke’s own reservation about whether Loisy’s project was, in Burke’s terms, “still Catholic?” Burke rightly claims that Loisy altered his theological horizon as a result of reading Newman. As Burke puts it, Loisy

222   Notes to Pages 89–94 “moved away from Renan’s type of ‘evolutionary pantheism’ and toward an ‘incarnational theism’ more like Newman’s” (ibid., 144–45). What Newman’s “incarnational theism” is exactly is not clearly articulated by Burke. 61.  For example, see Alfred Loisy, La Religion (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1917), and Loisy, Religion et Humanité (Paris: Émile Nourry, 1926). 62.  Henri de Lubac, The Drama of Atheist Humanism, trans. Edith M. Riley (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1963), 102. 63. Daly, Transcendence and Immanence, 53. 64. Loisy [A. Firmin], “L’Idée de la revelation,” Revue du clergé français 21 (1900): 250–71. I am indebted to Gabriel Daly’s exegesis of this Firmin article. See Daly, Transcendence, 64–66. 65.  See Auguste Sabatier, Esquisse d’une philosophie de la religion d’après la psychologie et l’histoire (Paris: Fischbacher, 1897). 66.  Loisy [A. Firmin], “L’Idée de la revelation,” 251. 67. Ibid. 68.  Cf. ibid., 268. 69.  Adolf von Harnack, Das Wesen des Christentums (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1900). Translated and published in English as What Is Christianity?, trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1957). 70.  Ibid., 13–14. 71. Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, xii. 72. Ibid., 56–57. The tension between faith (theology) and reason (history) and how this polarity discloses itself within the speculative (doctrinal) and practical (sacramental) life of the Church is the underlying current at work in L’Évangile et l’Église—and, as some scholars have suggested, the tension embodied in Loisy’s own life as both “priest and savant.” See Lester R. Kurtz, The Politics of Heresy: The Modernist Crisis in Roman Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 57. 73. Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, x–xii. 74.  Ibid., xxviii–xxix. 75.  Cf. Daly, “Theological and Philosophical Modernism,” 90. 76. Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 32. 77. René Marlé, ed., Au Coeur de la crise moderniste: Le dossier inédit d’une controverse (Paris: Aubier, 1960), 64. It is worth noting that the problem with Loisy’s Christology in L’Évangile et l’Église appears to be suggested to Blondel in passing by Laberthonnière in the latter’s letter to Blondel dated November 20, 1902. See Maurice Blondel and Lucien Laberthonnière, Correspondance philosophique, trans. Claude Tresmontant (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961), 155. To what extent Blondel’s criticism of Loisy’s Christology in L’Évangile et l’Église is appropriated from Laberthonnière is beyond the scope and interest of this book. See Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste, 514–20, and Jean-­Jacques D’Aoust, “The Significance of Maurice Blondel’s Treatise History and Dogma in the French Modernist Crisis” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1968), 96–98.

Notes to Pages 94–98   223 78. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 137. 79.  Cf. René Virgoulay, Blondel et le modernisme: La philosophie de l’action et les sciences religieuses (1896–1913) (Paris, Cerf, 1980), 377–81. 80.  See Alfred Loisy, “Lettre à un jeune savant, sur l’origine et l’autorité des dogmes,” in Autour d’un petit livre (Paris: A. Picard, 1903), 187–219. 81.  Ibid., 191. 82.  See, for example, von Hügel’s distinction between the “Jesus of history” and “Christ of faith” in Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 139–47. 83.  Cf. Philippians 2:5–8. 84.  See Friedrich von Hügel, “Du Christ eternal et de nos christologies successives,” La Quinzaine 58 (1904): 285–312. 85.  If this were the case, one could readily understand why Blondel was unwilling to grant to von Hügel that the historian can arrive at any level of truth without acknowledging the metaphysical presuppositions endemic to the practice of critical history, since the central thrust of Blondel’s philosophy of action, as it comes to expression in Action (1893), is to draw these two distinct realms (the noumenal and the phenomenal) into a deeper unity with each other. 86. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 147–48. For scholarly commentary on Blondel’s exchange with von Hügel, see René Virgoulay, Blondel et le modernisme, 398–407. 87. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 81. 88. Blondel, History and Dogma, 240–41. See also Blondel’s letter to Laberthonnière dated February 28, 1903, in Blondel, Correspondance philosophique, ed. Claude Tresmontant (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961), 159. 89. Blondel, History and Dogma, 241. 90.  Cf. Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, 10–13. 91.  Luke Timothy Johnson and William S. Kurz, S.J., The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns, 2002), 3. 92. Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 111. 93.  See Erik Peterson, “The Church,” in Theological Tractates, ed. and trans. Michael J. Hollerich (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 30–39. See also Joseph Ratzinger’s interpretation of Loisy’s aphorism and Peterson’s interpretation of it in Ratzinger, Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, trans. Adrian Walker (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1996), 21n6. I am grateful to Mike Hollerich for drawing my attention to both Peterson’s and Ratzinger’s interpretations. 94. Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 119. 95.  Ibid., 62. 96.  Ibid., 62–63. 97. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 82–83. 98.  Ibid., 83. 99.  Cf. Poulat, Histoire, dogme et critique dans la crise moderniste, 103–12.

224   Notes to Pages 98–104 100.  Cf. Aidan Nichols, From Newman to Congar: The Idea of Doctrinal Development from the Victorians to the Second Vatican Council (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1990), 106. 101.  Cf. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 54–63. 102.  Cf. Loisy, Autour d’un petit livre, 215. C h a pt e r F i v e  1. Phyllis Kaminski, “Seeking Transcendence in the Modern World,” in Catholi­ cism Contending with Modernity: Roman Catholic Modernism and Anti-­ Modernism in Historical Context, ed. Darrell Jodock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 115.  2. Blondel, Action (1893), 371.   3.  Cathal Doherty, S.J., Maurice Blondel on the Supernatural in Human Action: Sacrament and Superstition (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 289.   4.  For Delbos’s role in Blondel’s reading of Spinoza and Kant, see James Le Grys, “The Christianization of Modern Philosophy according to Maurice Blondel,” Theological Studies 54 (1993): 461–62, and John J. McNeill, The Blondelian Synthesis: A Study of the Influence of German Philosophical Sources on the Formation of Blondel’s Method and Thought (Leiden: Brill, 1966), 7–10.   5.  Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, ed. Thomas Deegan, trans. George Eliot (Salz­ burg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1981); originally published in 1677 as Ethica ordine geometrico demonstrata.   6.  Le Grys, “Christianization of Modern Philosophy according to Maurice Blondel,” 466. For an extended account of the influence of Kant and post-­Kantian idealism on Blondel’s thought, see McNeill, Blondelian Synthesis.   7.  Le Grys, “Christianization of Modern Philosophy according to Maurice Blondel,” 455.   8.  It should be noted that Le Grys acknowledges the exaggerated nature of Blondel’s claim, along with the problems that accompany Blondel’s generic understanding of the “Christian idea.” Le Grys rightly suggests that Blondel’s philosophy of action offers a corrective to modern philosophy by arguing that the problem of human destiny is not merely speculative.   9.  See Benedict de Spinoza, Theological-­Political Treatise, ed. Jonathan Israel, trans. Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10. Cf. Maurice Blondel, Dialogues avec les philosophes: Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Pascal, saint Augustin (Paris: Aubier, 1966), 271–80. 11.  For Blondel’s reactions to these charges, see Maurice Blondel, Lettres philosophiques (Paris: Éditions Montaigne, 1961), 87–89. 12. McNeill, Blondelian Synthesis, 46.

Notes to Pages 104–105   225 13. For example, see Adam English, The Possibility of Christian Philosophy: Maurice Blondel at the Intersection of Theology and Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2007). English argues that Blondel’s early work Action (1893) is “against” Kant because Kantian critical phenomenology cannot “factor the ‘beyond’ satisfactorily, nor is that [its] intention” (12). My sense is that English is right that Kantian critical phenomenology, most likely by its own admission, would agree it cannot factor the “beyond” satisfactorily, but I would disagree that factoring the “beyond” satisfactorily was its intention. It’s unclear what the designation “Kantian critical phenomenology” entails here. Is it Kant’s thought or interpretations of Kant’s thought? The overarching question in the First Critique is whether there can be what Kant calls first philosophy (speculative metaphysics) as a science at all. He presupposes in human cognition and action aspects or features that are valid independent of experience and empirical evidence, which cannot be known by the empirical sciences but only by philosophy. The question of how “synthetic a priori judgments” are possible is integral to understanding the project of the First Critique. For if synthetic a priori judgments are possible, then metaphysics is possible. What is at stake is whether philosophy has its own object of investigation different from the empirical sciences. Thus, it seems difficult to suggest, as English does, that Kant’s intention is not to factor the beyond when the First Critique is built around demonstrating the possibility of metaphysics as a transcendental theory of experience in contrast to rationalism and in distinction to empiricism. Whether, in fact, Kant factors the beyond satisfactorily is a different question from whether he intended to do so. For an interesting critique of the beyond in Kant’s thought as it has been taken up and developed by Fichte and Schelling in the notion of “Force,” see Section A, Chapter III, “Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World,” in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. 14.  Cf. McNeill, Blondelian Synthesis, 79–82. 15.  Cf. ibid., 84. 16.  Cf. ibid., 103. 17.  Cf. ibid., 62–64. 18.  Ibid., 63. 19. Blondel, Lettres philosophiques (Paris: Aubier, 1961), 10. 20. For parallels between Blondel and Hegel, see Peter Henrici, Hegel und Blondel: Eine Untersuchung über Form und Sinn der Dialektik in der Phänomenologie des Geistes und der ersten Action (Pullach bei München: Verlag Berchmanskolleg, 1958). 21. Blondel, Lettres, 18. 22. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 23. Cf. William Desmond, Hegel’s God: A Counterfeit Double? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 3.

226   Notes to Pages 105–107 24.  Henri Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, trans. James M. Somerville (Washington, DC: Corpus, 1969), 183. 25.  Cf. Xavier Tilliette, “Le panchristisme dans L’Action et les premiers écrits,” 35–57, and René Virgoulay, “La christologie blondélienne dans la crise moderniste,” both in Le Christ de Maurice Blondel, 59–84. 26.  Cf. Henrici, Hegel und Blondel, 158, and Bouillard, Blondel and Chris­tianity, 212–15. Bouillard notes that Henrici no longer holds the interpretation of Blondel he expresses in his early work on Hegel and Blondel. Bouillard does not specify how Henrici has modified his interpretation of Blondel. Henrici, “Ontologie et religion: De S. Anselme à Blondel,” Archivo di filosifia 58 (1990): 421–34, though published thirty years later seems to follow the same distinctive line of thought in interpreting Blondel’s thought in relation to the theological and philosophical. That is, Henrici interprets Blondel’s thought to reside continually within the philosophical realm, in this particular case, in Blondel’s formulation of the ontological argument. This is the key aspect that distinguishes Blondel’s ontological argument from Anselm’s, whose argument becomes decidedly confessional (theological). Nine years later, however, there is a noticeable shift in Henrici’s interpretation of Blondel from strictly practicing either theology or philosophy to what appears to the possibility that Blondel’s thought might operate within both theology and philosophy. For example, see Henrici, “The One Who Went Unnamed: Maurice Blondel in the Encyclical Fides et ratio,” Communio 26 (1999): 609–21. 27.  Cf. Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, 212–13. 28. Henrici, Blondel und Hegel, 180–88. 29. For example, see William Desmond, Being and the Between (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995). 30.  Desmond, “Being, Determination and Dialectic: On the Sources of Metaphysical Thinking,” in Being and Dialectic: Metaphysics and Culture, ed. William Desmond and Joseph Grange (Albany: SUNY Press, 2000), 28. 31. See Blondel, Lettres, 19. See also Henrici, “The One Who Went Unnamed,” 614–20. 32. Blondel, Action (1893), 419–20. 33.  Cf. Henrici, “The One Who Went Unnamed,” 619. 34. Blondel, Action (1893), 419. 35.  Maurice Blondel, Carnets intimes, Tome 1, (1883–1894) (Paris: Editions du Cerf, 1961), 547. 36.  Ibid., 526. For a discussion of Blondel’s secular vocation as it is reflected in his work, see Peter Henrici, “Une vocation de laic,” in Maurice Blondel, une dramatique de la modernité. Actes du colloque d’Aix-­en-­Provence, mars 1989, ed. Dominique Folscheid (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1990), 210–14. 37.  A skepticism and a nihilism Nietzsche himself prophetically observed during the latter half of the nineteenth century. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968). For an

Notes to Pages 108–109   227 overview of the speculative roots of ontological nihilism in late modern philosophy, see Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). 38. Cf. Jean-­Luc Marion, “La conversion de la volonté selon l’Action,” in Maurice Blondel, une dramatique de la modernité, 154–64. 39. Cf. Jean Lacroix, Maurice Blondel: An Introduction to the Man and His Philosophy, 11–24; James M. Somerville, “Maurice Blondel, 1861–1949,” Thought (1961): 382–84; and Emile Poulat, “La pensee Blondelienne,” in Maurice Blondel, une dramatique de la modernité, 22–27. 40.  See Maurice Blondel, “Le problème de la mystique,” in Qu’est–ce que la mystique? Quelques aspects historiques et philosophiques du problème, Cahiers de la nouvelle journée 3 (1925): 1–63. 41. Blondel, Carnets intimes, 1:41. 42.  Maurice Blondel, La philosophie et l’Espirit chrétien, Tome 2, Conditions de la symbiose seule normale et salutaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), 126. 43.  Blondel’s Eucharistic devotion is scattered throughout the two published volumes of his personal diaries, Carnets intimes. See also Mario Antonelli, ­“ Trinity and Eucharist in Blondel,” Communio 27 (2000): 284–99; Oliva Blanchette, “Blondel’s Philosophical Probe into the Mystery of the Trinitarian Life as Mystery of Mysteries,” Science et Esprit 59 (2007): 181–91; David Grumett, “Blondel, Modern Catholic Theology and the Leibnizian Eucharistic Bond,” Modern Theology 23 (2007): 561–77; René Virgoulay, Philosophie et théologie chez Maurice Blondel (Paris: Cerf, 2002), 95–100; and John Sullivan, “Matter for Heaven: Blondel, Christ and Creation,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 64 (1998): 60–83. 44. See La philosophie et l’Espirit chrétien, Tome 2. 45. Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 754. 46.  Peter Henrici, “Blondel and Loisy in the Modernist Crisis,” Communio 14 (Winter 1987): 363. See also diary entries in Blondel, Carnets intimes, 2:282, 290. 47. Maurice Blondel and Johannès Wehrlé, Correspondance I (Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1969), 73. 48.  See Loisy, Choses passées, 3–46. I am indebted to Peter Henrici for this observation. See Henrici, “Blondel and Loisy in the Modernist Crisis,” 361–64. I agree with Henrici that one way of understanding how Loisy fell prey to “modernism” is by comparing his spiritual life to Blondel’s, but this is a limited—albeit, insightful—way to approach a complex issue. Clearly, Henrici is aware of the limits of this approach and in no way attempts to portray this approach as exhausting the issue. Nevertheless, along with considering the spiritual life of Loisy, one needs to attend to a whole host of aspects in determining why he succumbed to what is termed “modernism.” One important, yet seemingly unexamined issue in the Modernist crisis is the way in which the practice of excommunication changed from the premodern to modern Church and how that change affected the excommunication of Loisy and other so-­called modernists.

228   Notes to Pages 109–112 49.  Jean Guitton, “Maurice Blondel, Chrétien parce que philosophe,” 3. 50.  Ibid., 4. 51.  Henri Bouillard, “L’Intention fondamentale de Maurice Blondel et la théologie,” Recherches de science réligieuse 36 (1949): 321. Bouillard’s article was later revised, expanded, and published as Blondel et le Christianisme (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961). 52.  Cf. Lacroix, Maurice Blondel, 22. 53. Blondel, Action (1893), 3. 54.  Ibid., 420. 55.  The reader needs be aware that the metaphysical tradition has never been unanimous in its interpretation and usage of the term “existence.” For a historical overview of the pre-­Socratic, Platonic, and Aristotelian interpretations of the term, see Leo Sweeney, S.J., A Metaphysics of Authentic Existentialism (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-­Hall, 1965), 3–63. For an excellent survey of the Aristotelian-­ Thomist tradition of interpretation, see Etienne Gilson, Being and Some Philosophers (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1949). 56.  Marion, “La conversion de la volonté selon l’Action,” 160. 57.  Cf. Blondel, De Vinculo substantiali et de substantia composita apud Leibnitium (Paris: Alcan, 1893), his Latin dissertation. The revised edition of this dissertation is Une énigme historique: Le “Vinculum substantiale” d’après Leibniz et l’ébauche d’un réalisme supérieur (Paris, 1930). 58. Blondel, Action (1893), 343. 59.  Cf. Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, 6. 60.  Cf. Blondel, Action (1893), 54–108. For an analysis of this section of Action (1893), see Michael A. Conway, The Science of Life: Maurice Blondel’s Philosophy of Action and the Scientific Method (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2000), 189–250. 61.  Cf. James M. Somerville, Total Commitment: Blondel’s “L’Action” (Washington, DC: Corpus, 1968), 83–85. 62. Blondel, Action (1893), 94. 63.  Cf. ibid., 109–299. 64.  Ibid., 361–62. 65.  See stages one through five of part III of Blondel, Action (1893), 54–299. 66. Somerville, Total Commitment, 213. 67. Blondel, Action (1893), 316. 68.  Cf. Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 21–30. 69.  Here we have in mind Aquinas’s important distinction in I, qq. 3 and 7 of the Summa theologiae, where he distinguishes between God’s “formal features” (simplicity and infinity) and God’s “attributes” (goodness, beauty, justice, and mercy), the former establishing God’s otherness so the latter can be analogically predicated. For an excellent account of Aquinas’s distinction, see David Burrell, “Distinguishing God from the World,” in Language, Meaning and God, Essays in Honour of Herbert McCabe OP, ed. Brian Davies (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1987), 75–91. 70. Blondel, Action (1893), 317.

Notes to Pages 112–115   229 71.  Cf. ibid., 330–31. 72.  Cf. ibid., 332–44. 73.  For two examples of how Blondel’s thought here comes to expression in twentieth-­century Catholic theology, see Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, Vol. 1, Seeing the Form, ed. Joseph Fessio, S.J. and John Riches, and trans. Erasmo Leiva-­Merikakis (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1982), and Pierre Rousselot, The Eyes of Faith: With Rousselot’s Answer to Two Attacks, trans. Joseph Donceel, S.J. (New York: Fordham University Press, 1990). 74. Blondel, Action (1893), 337. 75.  Cf. Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, 12. 76. Blondel, Action (1893), 3. 77. Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, 15. 78.  Blondel does not discuss the ontological purchase such practices may have; however, the ontological value of these practices becomes apparent in his discussion. 79. Blondel, Action (1893), 376. 80.  Cf. ibid., 363–72. 81.  Ibid., 372. 82.  It is worth noting that here we see in its infancy Blondel’s main criticism in his 1904 work History and Dogma of the two schools of thought in Catholicism he terms “extrinsicism” and “historicism.” The one, extrinsicism, tends to emphasize the juridical, abstract, or conceptual nature of dogmatic statements with little or no reference to the concrete and historical circumstances in which they were formulated, while the other, historicism, tends to reduce dogmatic statements and texts to the individual, unique, and ascertainable facts of the historical situation from which they arise. 83.  For example, see Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Carol Cosman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 84.  Again, it is worth noting here that Blondel’s account of religious practice articulates in an adumbrated manner his notion of tradition in History and Dogma. Tradition, as described in History and Dogma, is adduced not merely from scripture and subsequently identified with it; nor is it an epiphenomenon that comes to expression in the absence of written texts. Rather, tradition relies on texts and, at the same time, on something else, something Blondel names as une expérience toujours en acte (“an experience always in act”) that is dependent on texts without becoming subservient to them. See History and Dogma, 267. 85. Blondel, Action (1893), 382. 86.  Determining whether a practice has its origin in the divine life of the Spirit requires a discernment process that takes place through prayer within the life of the community gathered in the name of Christ. Blondel’s discussion of the value of literal and liturgical practice is limited to the role it plays in the life of action. As such, it precludes a much-­needed discussion of the ecclesiastical, the sacramental, and the juridical considerations that must be taken into account during this process. 87. Blondel, Action (1893), 386. 88.  Cf. ibid., 389–424.

230   Notes to Pages 115–118   89.  Colossians 1:17 (NRSV).  90. Blondel, Action (1893), 446.  91. Ibid.  92. Ibid.  93. Ibid.  94. Blondel, Action (1893), 3.  95. Ibid., 5.   96.  Henrici, “The One Who Went Unnamed,” 619.   97.  Blondel, “What Is Faith?,” Communio 2 (1987): 190–91.  98. English, The Possibility of Christian Philosophy, 15. It should be noted that English’s work is not intended to be a comprehensive account of Blondel’s corpus, but deals primarily with Blondel’s later work in the trilogy. Nevertheless, he does treat the early work of Blondel: Action (1893) and The Letter on Apologetics.  99. Ibid., 14. 100. Cf. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 210–19. 101.  Henry Duméry, Blondel et la religion: Essai critique sur la “Lettre” de 1896 (Paris: Cerf, 1954). 102. Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, 50. 103.  Ibid., 53. 104.  Cf. ibid., 231. 105.  Cf. ibid., 52–54. 106. Cf. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Dare We Hope “That All Men Be Saved”? With a Short Discourse on Hell, trans. David Kipp and Lothar Krauth (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1988), 114–24. 107.  See Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, 196–202, and Henrici, “Ontologie et religion: De S. Anselme à Blondel.” 108. For an overview and analysis of this interpretative history, see Jasper Hopkins, A Companion to the Study of Saint Anselm (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972), and R. W. Southern, Saint Anselm: A Portrait in a Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 109. Sokolowski, God of Faith and Reason, 10. 110.  Cf. Henrici, “Ontologie et religion.” 111. Balthasar, Dare We Hope, 117. 112. Balthasar, Theo-­Drama, Vol. 4, The Action, trans. Graham Harrison (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1994), 185. 113.  How the dialectic of the wills in Blondel’s philosophy of action might illuminate developments in twentieth-­century phenomenology is an important question far beyond the scope of this chapter. Nevertheless, one imagines Blondel would have been critical of the way in which Husserl prioritizes “intentional being” over all forms of cognition and being, and also Heidegger’s critique of Husserl’s understanding of intentional being, and the latter’s account of Dasein as the more original

Notes to Pages 119–128   231 phenomena underlying intentional being. Christian Yves Dupont suggests a number of parallels exist between the Blondel and Husserl. They are united by a common aim to overcome positivism and both share a general vision of philosophy as representing a mode of being. Yet, despite these commonalities, Dupont notes, that Blondel’s philosophy of action derives its inspiration largely from Aristotle, whereas Husserl’s phenomenology of consciousness is an extension of Cartesianism—though Husserl’s notion of intentionality has its roots in Brentano’s rehabilitation of this concept in medieval Scholasticism. See Christian Yves Dupont, “Receptions of Phenomenology in French Philosophy and Religious Thought, 1889–1939” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1997), 97–117. 114. Blondel, Action (1893), 263. 115.  Ibid., 3. 116.  Ibid., 385. 117. Ibid. C h a pt e r S i x  1. Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 13.  2. Ibid., 62–63.  3. Blondel, History and Dogma, 223.  4. Ibid., 224.  5. Ibid., 227.  6. Ibid., 228n1.   7.  Cf. ibid., 229–230.   8.  Cf. ibid., 234.   9.  Cf. ibid., 234–35. 10.  Ibid., 237. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13.  Ibid., 236. 14.  Ibid., 238. 15.  Cf. ibid., 238–39. 16.  Ibid., 248. 17.  Ibid., 241. 18.  Ibid., 248. 19.  Cf. Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 111. 20.  One needs to keep in mind the apologetic context of Loisy’s account of the failure of the imminent parousia in the early Church, namely, Harnack’s lectures on the essence of Christianity. 21. Blondel, History and Dogma, 250. 22.  Ibid., 264. 23. Ibid.

232   Notes to Pages 128–138 24.  Ibid., 264–65. 25.  Ibid., 265. 26. Ibid. 27.  Ibid., 266. 28.  Maurice Blondel, “Tradition,” in Vocabulaire technique et critique de la philosophie, 3 vols., ed. André Lalande (Paris: Bulletin de la Société français de philosophie, 1902–23; reprint, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1951), 1­ 140–41 (page citations are to the 6th reprint edition). 29.  Ibid., 1141. 30.  Cf. Blondel, History and Dogma, 268. 31.  Cf. ibid., 274. 32.  Ibid., Blondel, Action (1893), 380. 33. Ibid., History and Dogma, 274. 34.  Cf. ibid. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid. For example, see Loisy [A. Firmin], “Le développment Chrétien d’après le Cardinal Newman,” Revue du clergé français 17 (1898): 5–20, and Loisy, L’Évangile et l’Église, 127–279. 37. Blondel, History and Dogma, 275. 38. Ibid. 39.  Ibid., 268. 40.  Ibid., 268. 41.  Cf. Blondel, Action (1893), 363–72. 42.  Ibid., 372. 43.  Ibid., 269. 44. Ibid. 45.  Ibid., 270. 46. Ibid. 47.  Ibid., 271. 48.  Ibid., 271–72. 49.  Ibid., 272. 50.  Cf. ibid., 280. 51.  Ibid., 282–83. 52.  Ibid., 286. 53.  Ibid., 287. 54.  Ibid., 286. C h a pt e r S e v e n  1. Cf. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 205–6.   2.  Cf. von Hügel, “Du Christ éternel et de nos christologies successives,” 305.  3. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 366 (emphasis added).

Notes to Pages 138–142   233  4. Ibid., 367.  5. Cf. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste.   6.  Blondel, “De la valeur historique du dogme,” in Les premiers écrits de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), 233. Originally published as “De la valeur historique du dogme,” in Bulletin de littérature ecclésiatique de Toulouse 10–11 (1905): 61–77. Reprinted in Maurice Blondel, Les premiers écrits de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1956), 229–45. All references are to the reprinted version.   7.  See Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” in Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale and trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 57–123.  8. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 367. Congar also criticizes Blondel for failing to develop the magisterium’s role in the synthesis of tradition. See Tradition and Traditions, 366–67.  9. Ibid., 367. 10.  For the sake of clarity, here analogy is employed as a conceptual device for exploring how finite reality participates in the fullness of being opened up in the event of Christ. This is in keeping with the concrete and historical aspects of Blondel’s ontology, which seeks to lay bare how finite reality bears the image of and participates in—albeit imperfectly—the Being of beings. Cf. Blondel, L’itinéraire philosophique de M. Blondel. Propos receuillis par Frédéric Lefevre (Paris: Aubier, 1966), 153–55. 11.  Cf. Dru, “Prefatory Note to History and Dogma,” 214. 12.  Cf. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 201. 13. Blondel, History and Dogma, 267. 14.  Ibid., 268. 15.  Blondel modifies and develops the distinction in his later work La pensée as the distinction between the “noetic” and “pneumatic.” For an exposition of the noetic/pneumatic distinction in La pensée, see Conway, The Science of Life, 432–45. 16.  For the Roman Catholic reception history of Newman’s essay on development, see Kenneth L. Parker and C. Michael Shea, “The Roman Catholic Reception of the Essay on Development,” in Receptions of Newman, ed. Frederick D. Aquino and Benjamin J. King (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 30–49. 17. For the philosophical and theological reception history of Newman’s Grammar of Assent, see Frederick D. Aquino, “Philosophical Receptions of the Grammar of Assent, 1960–2012,” in Aquino and King, Receptions of Newman, 53–72; and Mark McInroy, “Roman Catholic Theological Receptions of the Grammar of Assent,” in Receptions of Newman, 73–92. 18. Newman, “Sermon 13: Implicit and Explicit Reason,” in Fifteen Sermons Preached before the University of Oxford between A.D. 1826 and 1843 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 257. For a discussion comparing the relationship between the implicit and explicit in Blondel and Newman

234   Notes to Pages 143–145 in the context of each thinker’s approach to tradition and development, see Keith Beaumont, Pierre de Cointet, and Marie-­ Jeanne Coutagne, eds., Newman et Blondel: Conscience et intelligence (Paris: Parole et Silence, 2012); J. H. Walgrave, O.P., “ ‘Real’ and ‘Notional’ Knowledge in Blondel and Newman,” in John Henry Newman and Modernism, ed. Arthur Hilary Jenkins (Sigmaringendorf: Glock und Lutz, 1990), 1­ 42–56; and Pierre Gauthier, Newman et Blondel: Tradition et développement du dogme (Paris: Cerf, 1988), 369–85. On the relationship between the thinkers in broader context, see Maurice Nédoncelle, “Newman et Blondel: La théologie des développments doctrinaux,” Newman Studien 6 (Nuremberg: Glock und Lutz, 1964): 105–22; Peter Reifenberg and Anton van Hooff, eds., Tradition– Dynamik von Bewegtheit und stäandiger Bewegung: 100 Jahre Maurice Blondels “Histoire et Dogme” (1904–2004) (Würzburg: Echter, 2005); Charles Talar, “Newman and the ‘New Apologetics,’ ” Newman Studies Journal 6 (2009): 49–56; Keith Beaumont, “The Reception of Newman in France at the Time of the Modernist Crisis,” in Aquino and King, Receptions of Newman, 156–76; and Andrew Meszaros, The Prophetic Church: History and Doctrinal Development in John Henry Newman and Yves Congar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 28–34. 19. See Newman, “Sermon 15: The Theory of Developments in Religious Discourse,” in Fifteen Sermons, 312–51. 20.  See Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1989). 21. Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, ed. Charles Stephen Dessain (Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1961), 11:240. 22.  Owen Chadwick, From Bossuet to Newman, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), xv. 23. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 210–11. 24.  Cf. ibid., 211. 25.  Newman, “Sermon 13: Implicit and Explicit Reason,” 258–59. 26.  Cf. Beaumont, “Reception of Newman in France at the Time of the Modernist Crisis,” 158. 27. Cf. Maurice Blondel [François Mallet], “Un nouvel entretien avec M. Blondel,” Revue du clergé français 38 (1904): 513. 28. Blondel, La pensée, Tome 2, La responsabilité de la pensée et la possibilité de son achèvement (Paris: Alcan, 1934), 25. 29. Ibid. 30.  Cf. Conway, The Science of Life, 436. 31. Cf. Blondel [François Mallet], “Un nouvel entretien avec M. Blondel,” 414–15. 32.  Cf. ibid., 416. For Aquinas on the relation of the implicit to the explicit, see the Summa theologiae II-­II, q. 1, a. 7. 33.  Cf. Blondel, Le procès de l’intelligence (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1922), 238–39. 34. Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 294.

Notes to Pages 145–150   235 35. Blondel, Le procès de l’intelligence, 242. 36. In Le procès de l’intelligence, Blondel uses the example of the distinction between the explorer’s notebooks and maps, which offer him tools to analyze, organize, remember, and understand the inexhaustible reality (la réalité inépuisée), and the explorer’s “lived experience” of the exploration. See Le procès de l’intelligence, 245–46. 37.  See Jacques Maritain, “L’intelligence d’après M. Maurice Blondel,” Revue de Philosophie 30 (1923): 333–64, 484–511. 38.  See Blondel, Exigences philosophiques du christianisme (Alcan: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950). 39. Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 294. 40.  Cf. René Virgoulay, Blondel et le modernisme: La Philosophie de l’action et les sciences religieuses (1896–1913) (Paris: Cerf, 1980), 293–94; Maurice Blondel and Auguste Valensin, Correspondence (Paris: Aubier, 1957), 2:309–11 and 315–19. 41.  See I, q. 19, a. 4; qq. 79, 84, and 87, in Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theo­logica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Brothers, 1947). 42. Cf. Mark McInroy, “Catholic Theological Receptions of the Grammar of Assent,” in Aquino and King, Receptions of Newman, 86. For a brief summary of Rousselot’s influence on Blondel, see Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 267–72. For Blondel’s engagement with Rousselot’s thought, Blondel’s “Thomistic Turn,” and Blondel’s engagement with Aquinas, see Michael A. Conway, “From Neo-­Thomism to St. Thomas: Maurice Blondel’s Early Encounter with Scholastic Thought,” Ephe­ merides Theologicae Lovanienses 83 (2007): 1–22; and Conway, “A Thomistic Turn? Maurice Blondel’s Reading of St. Thomas,” Ephemerides Theologicae Lovanienses 84 (2008): 87–122. 43.  George S. Worgul Jr., “M. Blondel and the Problem of Mysticism,” Ephe­ merides Theologicae Lovanienses 61, no. 1 (1985): 109. 44.  Blondel, “The Starting Point of Philosophical Research I,” 142. 45. Blondel, Le procès de l’intelligence, 275. 46.  Blondel [François Mallet], “Un nouvel entretien avec M. Blondel,” 522. 47. Blondel, History and Dogma, 275. 48.  Blondel [François Mallet], “Un nouvel entretien avec M. Blondel,” 513. 49.  Cf. Blondel, “De la valeur historique du dogme,” 229–45. 50.  Ibid., 241–42. 51. Blondel, History and Dogma, 267. 52.  Conway, “Maurice Blondel and Ressourcement,” in Ressourcement, 81. 53. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 256. 54.  For a brief summary and analysis of Congar’s theology of tradition, see Gabriel Flynn, Yves Congar’s Vision of the Church in a World of Unbelief (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), 198–211. 55. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 353. Here Congar cites the complicated arguments that attempted and always failed to find textual (biblical) evidence for the

236   Notes to Pages 151–155 bodily assumption of Mary. On the other hand, as Henri de Lubac’s work on the early Church fathers shows, the use of premodern exegetical practices often misinterpreted the text on one level, but at times also led to a very profound understanding of revelation. This profound understanding comes out of reading the text within the living community, which attempts to embody the Christian reality (tradition) itself. Congar also cites the case of the second-­century Church fathers’ theology of baptism that develops out of the lived reality of baptism. 56. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 12–13. 57.  Ferguson, “Paradosis and Traditio: A Word Study,” 29. 58.  On the relations between tradition, apostolic succession, and scripture, see Ratzinger, “Primacy, Episcopate, and Apostolic Succession,” 46–54. 59. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 14–15. 60.  Ibid., 15. 61.  Cf. George Florovsky, “The Function of Tradition in the Ancient Church,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 9 (1963): 187. 62. Cf. George S. Bebis, “The Concept of Tradition in the Fathers of the Church,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 15 (1970): 28–29. 63.  Cf. Louis Bouyer, “Holy Scripture and Tradition as Seen by the Fathers,” The Eastern Churches Quarterly 7 (1947): 2–16; and E. Flesseman-­Van Leer, Tradition and Scripture in the Early Church (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1954), 100–144. 64.  Cf. Ratzinger, “Revelation and Tradition,” 18–19. 65.  Cf. ibid., 47. 66. Cf. Maurice Blondel, La philosophie et l’esprit Chrétien: Conditions de la symbiose seule normale et salutaire (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1946), 2:77–88. 67.  Cf. ibid., 422–23. 68. Blondel, Action (1893), 423. 69. Blondel, History and Dogma, 267. 70.  Cf. ibid., 268. 71.  Ibid., 283. 72. Blondel, Carnets intimes, 1:222. 73.  Ibid., 287. 74.  Blondel examines the Trinitarian structure of history in more detail in the trilogy on thought, being, and action in Blondel, La pensée, 2 vols. (Paris: Alcan, 1934); Blondel, L’Etre et les êtres (Paris: Alcan, 1935); Blondel, L’Action I: Le problème des causes secondes et le pur agir (Paris: Alcan, 1936), and Blondel, L’Action II: L’Action humaine et les conditions de son aboutissement (Paris: Alcan, 1937). 75. Blondel, Carnets intimes, 1:125–26. 76.  Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 139–262. 77. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 439.

Notes to Pages 155–161   237 78. Blondel, Action (1893), 410. 79. Blondel, History and Dogma, 283–84. 80. Congar, Tradition and Traditions, 259–60. See also Congar, The Meaning of Tradition, trans. A. N. Woodrow (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2004), 134–43. 81. Cf. History and Dogma, 267–68. 82.  Blondel, “De la valeur historique du dogme,” 232. 83.  Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 187–88. 84.  Here we have in mind Husserl’s distinction between world time, the time of clock and calendar, and internal time, as the “Objective temporality that appears (for example: the temporality of this die) from the ‘internal’ temporality of the appearing (for example: that of the die-­perceiving)”; see Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1960), 41. 85.  Here it is important to keep in mind that “we tend to takes presences and absences as further features of the thing, and often interpret them as the object’s being ‘here’ or ‘there,’ or ‘going on now’ or ‘all finished’; that is, we take them as spatial or temporal attributes. But presence and absence are not features of things, they are modes of presentation and require an appropriate articulation”; see Robert Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions: Fourteen Essays in Phenomenology (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1992), 24. 86.  Ibid., 21. 87.  Ibid., 124. 88.  For an example of an interpretive method that ignores the form of an action or ritual practice in its effort to discover how an action or practice symbolically represents the cultural ethos and shared value of a community, see Emile Durk­heim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. J. W. Swain (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968). 89. Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 102. 90.  Ibid., 103. 91. David Cannadine, “The Context, Performance and Meaning of ­Ritual: The British Monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition,’ c. 1820–1977,” in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 104–5. 92.  Cf. Eric Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Traditions,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Tradition, 1–14. For an appropriation of this idea as it relates to Catholicism, see Terrence W. Tilley, Inventing Catholic Tradition (New York: Orbis, 2000). 93.  Cf. Blondel, La philosophie et l’esprit Chrétien, 2:107–77, and Action (1893), 373–88. 94.  Cf. Blondel, Action (1893), 62–93.

238   Notes to Pages 161–163   95.  Cf. ibid., 94–108.  96. Jean-­Luc Marion, God without Being: Hors-­texte, trans. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 172. It is important to note that Marion’s comments here about the Eucharistic presence are made in light of Heidegger’s critique of the ordinary conception of time in the final section of division 2 of Being and Time, where Heidegger argues that traditional metaphysics imposes the present, as here and now, as the only basis through which being discloses itself. In this horizon, Heidegger further argues, “time shows itself as a sequence of ‘nows’ which are constantly ‘present-­at-­hand,’ simultaneously passing away and coming along. Time is understood as a succession, as a ‘flowing stream’ of ‘nows,’ as the ‘course of time’ ”; see Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 474. For Marion, the primacy of the present in the ordinary conception of time imposes itself on modern interpretation of the theology of transubstantiation, creating and facilitating the conditions for the possibility of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharistic action.   97.  For a discussion of the liturgy as the “site” of the encounter between the finite and infinite its relationship to the Church and how this encounter and relationship has been spatially construed in modern Eucharistic theology, see Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consumption of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 158–66. Also see Lawrence Paul Hemming’s critique of Pickstock’s interpretation in Hemming, Worship as Revelation: The Past, Present and Future of Catholic Liturgy (London: Burns & Oates, 2008), 77–79.  98. Cf. Blondel, History and Dogma, 268.  99. Sokolowski, Eucharistic Presence, 105. 100.  Paul Connerton, How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 64. 101.  Cf. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 ( July-­August): 59–62. 102.  Nicholas Boyle, Who Are We Now? Christian Humanism and the Global Market from Hegel to Heaney (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998), 79. 103.  Cf. Connerton, How Societies Remember, 65. 104. Boyle, Who Are We Now?, 79. 105.  Cf. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1988), 354–65. 106.  This is most evident in the way in which the liturgical calendar interrelates the temporal and the sanctoral cycles and in doing so celebrates the recurrence of the saints, martyrs, and prophets, who now participate in the sacrificial death and the new life of Christ. For an account of how the liturgical calendar has changed, see Alcuin Reid, The Organic Development of the Liturgy (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2005). 107.  Cf. Sokolowski, Pictures, Quotations, and Distinctions, 126. 108. Ibid.

Notes to Pages 163–171   239 109.  For Blondel’s reflections on the contingency of self, see Action (1893), 314–29. 110.  Ibid., 410. 111. Blondel, Action (1893), 387. 112. Blondel, La philosophie et l’esprit Chrétien, 2:82. 113. Blondel, History and Dogma, 268. 114. Blondel, La philosophie et l’esprit Chrétien, 2:80. C h a pt e r E i g h t  1. Blondel, History and Dogma, 268.   2.  Cf. René Virgoulay, “Une contribution de la philosophie a la theologie: Étude sur la tradition d’après Histoire et dogme de Maurice Blondel,” Revue des sciences religieuses 39 (1965): 62–63.  3. Paul Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), 266.   4.  Blondel, “The Starting Point of Philosophical Research II,” 139.   5.  Here the term “ontology of liturgical action” is used to suggest not that Blondel’s idea of tradition foreshadows the foundational ontology of Heidegger, but rather that Blondel’s account of action, as it comes to expression in the sacramental life of the Church, links the past with the present and the historically contingent with the transcendent.  6. Blondel, Action (1893), 378.  7. Ibid., 314–29.  8. Blondel, L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel, 153.   9.  On the relationship between nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Catholic theology and modern philosophy, see McCool, Nineteenth-­Century Scholasticism, 32–35. For Blondel’s relationship to nineteenth-­and twentieth-­century Catholic theology, see chapter 4 herein. 10.  Blondel, “The Starting Point of Philosophical Research II,” 130. 11. Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 170. 12.  Blondel, “The Starting Point of Philosophical Research II,” 130. 13.  Marion, “La conversion de la volonté selon l’Action,” 154–64. 14. Blondel, Action (1893), 40. 15.  Ibid., 3. 16.  Ibid., 122. 17.  Ibid., 125. 18.  Marion, “La conversion de la volonté selon l’Action,” 160. 19. Blondel, Action (1893), 317. 20.  Ibid., 327. 21.  Ibid., 345–57. 22. Ibid., 372.

240   Notes to Pages 171–176 23.  Ibid., 380. 24.  History and Dogma, 267. 25.  Ibid., 268. 26.  Ibid., 286. 27.  Ibid., 287. 28.  Ibid., 286. 29. Blondel, Action (1893), 379–80. 30.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans. James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1977), 212. 31.  Ibid., 112. 32. Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative, 282. 33.  Paul Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1981), 46. 34.  Cf. Michael Ermarth, “The Transformation of Hermeneutics: 19th Century Ancients and 20th Century Moderns,” The Monist 64 (1981): 182–83. 35. Theodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (New York: Edwin Mellen, 1992); and Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1969), 98–123. 36.  For example, see Dilthey, “Fragments for a Poetics (1907–1908),” trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel; “Goethe and the Poetic Imagination (1910),” trans. Christopher Rodie; and “Friedrich Hölderlin (1910),” trans. Joseph Ross, in Poetry and Experience, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1985), 223–383. 37. Blondel, Action (1893), 6–12. Here an interesting parallel also can be drawn to Maurice Merleau-­Ponty’s distinction between “the lived body” (le corps vécu) involved in our everyday action and “the human body” as the object of scientific and metaphysical inquiry. See “Part One: The Body,” in Maurice Merleau-­ Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities, 1962), 67–199. 38. Cf. Le procès de l’intelligence, (Paris: Bloud & Gay, 1922). 39. Cf. La pensée, Tome I & II (Paris: Alcan, 1934). 40. Blondel, Action (1893), 12. 41.  Hans-­Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), 250. 42. Létourneau, L’herméneutique de Maurice Blondel, 47–51. 43. Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, 218. 44.  See Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Macmillan, 1910).

Notes to Pages 176–181   241 45.  See Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, 1911); and Bergson, Matter and Memory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Macmillan, 1911). 46.  Blondel, “The Idealist Illusion,” 75–94. 47.  Blondel, “The Starting Point of Philosophical Research I,” 125. 48. Blondel, Action (1893), 3. 49. Blondel, Une énigme historique: Le “Vinculum Substantial” d’après Leibniz et l’ébauche d’un réalisme supérieur (Paris: Beauchesne, 1930), 108. 50. Blondel, L’Itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel, 46–51. 51. Heidegger, Being and Time, 7th ed., trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1962), 172–82 and 203–24. The following discussion of Heidegger’s thought is limited to Being and Time. It is beyond the scope of this book to engage the work of the so-­called later Heidegger and the new formulations of Dasein and new phenomena that come to expression in such works as The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic (1928), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929–30), and the “Letter on Humanism” (1947). 52. Heidegger, Being and Time, 28–35. 53. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 257. 54. Heidegger, Being and Time, 191–92. 55.  Ibid., 362. 56. Blondel, Action (1893), 123. 57.  Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 59. 58. Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 274–302. 59. Heidegger, Being and Time, 62–63. 60.  Ibid., 343. 61.  Ibid., 364–70. 62.  Ricoeur, “The Task of Hermeneutics,” 59. 63. Gadamer, Truth and Method, 297. 64. Marlé, Au Coeur de la crise moderniste, 90. 65.  Cf. Blondel, History and Dogma, 223. 66. Cf. Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), 45–69, and Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny with Kathleen McLaughlin and John Costello (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 216–56. 67.  Blondel, “De la valeur historique du dogme,” 232. 68.  It is worth noting that the Church too must guard against its own temptation to obstruct the transmission of truth in tradition by “temerity” and “pusilla­ nimity.” As Blondel puts it, “that of temerity properly speaking, and that of pusillanimity, which favors silence or silent conformism over the difficult witness to

242   Notes to Pages 181–184 truths and duties that are not yet clearly discerned” (La philosophie et l’esprit Chrétien, 94). 69. Blondel, Action (1893), 410. 70.  Cf. Blondel, La philosophie et l’esprit Chrétien, 77–80, where the theological etymology of the term “tradition” discloses its Trinitarian origins and accounts for it distinct use, sense, and reference in Christianity. 71.  Cf. Pierre Gibert, “Blondel et l’intelligence de l’exégèse biblique,” in Maurice Blondel: Une dramatique de la modernité: Actes du colloque d’Aix-­en-­Provence, mars 1989, ed. Dominique Folscheid (Paris: Éditions Universitaires, 1990), 58–66. 72.  See Gregory Baum, Man Becoming: God in Secular Experience (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 1–36. 73.  Cf. Mettenpenningen, Nouvelle Théologie, 35. 74.  See Henri de Lubac, A Brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace, trans. Brother Richard Arnandez (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1984), 37–41. 75. Peter Henrici, S.J., “Maurice Blondel, ‘filosofo del Vatican II’?: Ricordi e riflessioni filosofiche sull’evento del Concilio,” Gregorianum 95 (2014): 23–38. Myles B. Hannan, “Maurice Blondel—The Philosopher of Vatican II,” The Hey­ throp Journal (2015): 907–18. 76.  For evidence that this question remains both as important and unresolved today as it was in the early and mid part of the century, see Luke Timothy Johnson and William S. Kurz, The Future of Catholic Biblical Scholarship: A Constructive Conversation (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002). 77.  “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” Vatican Council II, 756–58. 78. For an overview of the Dei verbum’s theology of tradition, see David Braithwaite, S.J., “Vatican II on Tradition,” The Heythrop Journal 53 (2012): 915– 28. See also Joseph Ratzinger, “Revelation Itself,” Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, ed. Herbert Vorgrimler (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), 3:171. For Ratzinger, Dei verbum follows in the “footsteps” of Trent and the First Vatican Council and, as Ratzinger suggests, is a “perfect example of dogmatic development, of the inner relecture of dogma in dogmatic history” (ibid., 169). For a history of the reception of the Second Vatican Council, see Giuseppe Alberigo, Jean-­Pierre Jossua, and Joseph A. Komonchak, eds., The Reception of Vatican II (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1987); and, more recently, Massimo Faggioli, Vatican II: The Battle for Meaning (New York: Paulist, 2012). 79.  For a survey of Blondel’s influence on the Second Vatican Council, see Peter J. Bernardi, S.J., “Maurice Blondel: Precursor of the Second Vatican Council,” Josephinum Journal of Theology 22 (2015): 59–77. 80.  Ibid., 751. 81.  For the relations between the living tradition, the liturgy, and the active presence of the Holy Spirit as the interpretive horizon of scripture in Dei verbum, see Thomas J. McGovern, “The Interpretation of Scripture ‘in the Spirit’: The Edelby Intervention at Vatican II,” Irish Theological Quarterly 65 (1999): 245–59.

Notes to Pages 184–187   243 82. Denis Farkasfalvy, O. Cist., “How to Renew the Theology of Biblical Inspiration?,” Nova et Vetera 4 (2006): 239. 83.  Cf. Alois Grillmeier, “The Divine Inspiration and the Interpretation of Sacred Scripture,” in Vorgrimler, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, 3:230. 84.  Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., The Interpretation of Scripture: In Defense of the Historical-­Critical Method (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist, 2008), 8. 85. Farkasfalvy, “How to Renew the Theology of Biblical Inspiration?,” ­242–43. Farkasfalvy suggests Dei verbum also suffers the absence of the distinction between “subjective” and “objective” inspiration, the former refers to the inspired authors, the latter to the inspired texts. 86.  It should be noted that chapter 1 of Dei verbum provides a framework within which a theological anthropology of inspiration might be worked out. See Ratzinger, “Revelation Itself,” in Vorgrimler, Commentary on the Documents of Vatican II, 3:171. 87. Ibid. 88. Blondel, History and Dogma, 267. 89.  “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” 754. 90. Blondel, History and Dogma, 267. 91.  “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” 754–55. 92. Lewis Ayres and Stephen Fowl, “(Mis)Reading the Face of God: The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church,” Theological Studies 60 (1999): 513–28. 93. All references to this document are from The Scripture Documents: An Anthology of Official Catholic Teaching, ed. Dean P. Béchard (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2002), 244–315. Hereafter abbreviated IBC. 94.  IBC, 273–75. Ayres and Fowl note that “fundamentalism” in this document, as it does in many interpretations of the necessary reading of the historical-­ critical method (Cf. Fitzmyer, The Interpretation of Scripture, 1–16), provides a generic, “dangerous,” and constructed interpretive horizon of scripture against which the refusal of the historical-­critical reading of scripture can be easily categorized and dismissed. This strategy, according to Ayres and Fowl, is akin to Ernst Käsemann’s insistence on the historical-­critical reading of scripture in order to avoid the heresy of Docetism. For a critique of Käsemann’s account, see Andrew K. M. Adam, “Docetism, Käsemann and Christology: Why Historical Criticism Can’t Protect Christological Orthodoxy,” Scottish Journal of Theology 49 (1996): 391–410. 95.  IBC, 280. 96.  As Fowl and Ayres note, the IBC’s defense of its notion of the literal sense by alluding to Aquinas’s account of the literal sense in the Summa theologiae is not supported by recent scholarship on Aquinas’s understanding of the literal sense, most notably Henri de Lubac, Exégèse médiéval: Les quatres sens de l’ec riture, a Vol. 2, Part 2 (Paris: Aubier, 1964), 285–302. 97.  IBC, 281. 98. Ibid.

244   Notes to Pages 187–197  99. Cf. Peter S. Williamson, Catholic Principles for Interpreting Scripture: A Study of the Pontifical Biblical Commissions “The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church” (Roma: Editrice Pontificio Istituto Biblico, 2001), 185–88. 100.  IBC, 283. 101. Williamson, Catholic Principles for Interpreting Scripture, 194. 102.  Cf. ibid., 201–3. 103. Blondel, History and Dogma, 275. 104.  Ibid., 271. 105.  John Thiel, Senses of Tradition: Continuity and Development in Catholic Faith (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 12. 106.  Ibid., 31–34. 107.  For example, see Jacque Derrida’s claim that there is nothing outside the text in Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 158. 108.  Cf. Ricouer, Interpretation Theory, 25–44. 109. Thiel, Senses of Tradition, 9. 110.  Cf. ibid., 32. 111.  Cf. ibid., 56–83. 112.  Cf. ibid., 84–99. 113.  John Thiel, “The Analogy of Tradition: Method and Theological Judgment,” Theological Studies (2005): 369–70. 114.  See Tanner, Theories of Culture: A New Agenda for Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997). 115.  Thiel, “The Analogy of Tradition,” 370–71. 116.  Cf. Thiel, Senses of Tradition, 34–39. 117.  Ibid., 39. 118.  Ibid., 32. 119.  I am grateful to John Thiel for taking time to discuss his work with me, and for helping me understand and articulate his thought. I am indebted to him for this particular formulation of my critique of his work. C o n c lu s i o n   1.  Conway, “Maurice Blondel and Ressourcement,” 66.   2.  Cf. “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” in Vatican Council II, 754.   3.  See Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1969), 347–57. Ricoeur proposed the phrase in the mid-­twentieth century to contrast it with a “primitive naïveté,” a return to a “pre-­critical form of immediate belief ” that was no longer possible in modernity, and to suggest the paradoxical possibility that modern hermeneutics could help us to “hear again,” and lead us “beyond the desert of criticism [in modernity]” (349). Recently, Anthony J. Godzieba and Bradford E. Hinze have edited a collection of essays by Catholic theologians that they

Notes to Pages 197–198   245 suggest can be characterized as a “third naïveté” in the history of Catholic theology. All authors engage Continental philosophy in their theological approaches and blend “deeply contextual interpretations with a critical theological analysis of the roles of history, culture, power, and grace in church and society” (x). What the second naïveté of Catholic theology was and when it ended, and how the third naïveté of Catholic theology is different from second naïveté of Catholic theology remain unclear. See Anthony J. Godzieba and Bradford E. Hinze, introduction to Beyond Dogmatism and Innocence: Hermeneutics, Critique, and Catholic Theology, ed. Anthony J. Godzieba and Bradford E. Hinze (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017).  4. Blondel, Action (1893), 373.   5.  “Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation,” in Vatican Council II, 755.  6. Ibid., 754.  7. Ibid.

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Index

action death of, 24, 112 dialectic of, 13, 29, 113, 146, 171, 181 ecclesial, 51 Eucharistic, 14, 159, 161, 163 faithful, 130, 139, 146–48, 151, 171, 180–81, 198 life of, 24, 113–15, 119, 130, 141–42, 153, 164, 170–71, 181 liturgical, 114, 127, 140, 151, 157, 159–60, 162–67, 171–73, 182, 184, 193, 196–97 logic of, 29, 105–6, 176 philosophy of, 4, 12, 14, 16, 36, 101–3, 106–9, 115, 132, 144, 167, 173, 175 sacramental, 102 Action (1893), 3–4, 11–14, 17, 22–23, 26–28, 31–32, 102–6, 108–11, 113–14, 116–18, 127, 130, 146, 167, 173, 181 analogy analogy of tradition, 139, 191 Christological analogy, 185–86 Anselm of Canterbury, 42, 118 apologetics, 17–21, 28–32 apostolic deposit, 6, 48, 52, 139, 157 Aquinas, Thomas, 40–41, 75–80, 139, 146

Aristotle, 13, 41, 80 Aristotelianism, 34 Auerbach, Erich, 67 Augustine of Hippo, 63, 139, 158–59 autonomy, 94–96 and heteronomy, 110 Ayres, Lewis, 186–88 Balthasar, Han Urs von, 229n73 Bergson, Henri, 10, 12, 19, 176–77, 179 Bernardi, Peter, 199n5 Billot, Louis, 52–55 Biran, François-Pierre Maine de, 10, 12–13, 139 Blanchette, Oliva, 17, 145, 169 Bosses, Bartholomew des, 14–17 Boutroux, Émile, 12 Bouillard, Henri, 6, 117 Boyle, Nicholas, 215n26 Burke, Edmund, 50 Cannadine, David, 160–61 Chateaubriand, François-René de, 18–19 Comte, Auguste, 82, 89 Conciliarism, 44–45 Congar, Yves, 2–3, 47, 57, 137–39, 144, 149–52, 157–58 contingency, 109, 111–12

261

262  Index Conway, Michael, 207 Council of Trent, 71 “First Decree: Acceptance of the Sacred Books and Apostolic Traditions,” 38, 59 post-Tridentine theological thinking, 2, 37–40, 49–50, 55, 59 Tridentine decree, 38, 46–47, 51, 55, 59 d’Ailly, Pierre, 44–45 Daly, Gabriel, 65, 86, 89 de Lubac, Henri, 3, 32–33, 46, 182 Descartes, René, 4, 63–64 Cartesian cogito, 10, 76 development of doctrine, 6, 89, 142–43 d’Hulst, Maurice Le Sage d’Hauteroche, 84–86 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 166–67, 174–77 Drey, Johannes Sebastian von, 52–53, 55, 73 Dru, Alexander, 82, 141 Duchense, Louis, 83–84 Duméry, Henry, 6, 117 Enlightenment, the, 12, 18, 50, 61, 70, 72 Catholic Enlightenment, 71 French Enlightenment, 10, 52 German Enlightenment, 52 epistemological crisis, 25–27, 33–36, 57–58 epistemology, 32, 42, 60, 78, 139, 181– 82, 196–97 epistemological method, 128, 167, 172 eschatological, 112–13, 127, 161, 181, 183, 192, 197 Eucharist, 14–17, 108, 114, 157, 160–62 experience, always in act, 132, 141, 153, 172

expressly known, 129, 139, 142, 148, 150–51 extrinsicism, 123, 127, 131, 155 Farkasfalvy, Denis, 184–85 fideism, 12, 25, 27, 33, 36, 65, 73, 76 figural reading of scripture, 65–70 First Vatican Council, 25, 28, 32, 49, 59, 64–65, 184 Dei filius (Dogmatic Constitution on the Catholic Faith), 39, 65 Pastor aeternus (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 51, 74 Fitzmyer, Joseph, 184 Fowl, Stephen, 186–88 Franzelin, Johannes Baptist, 51–54, 139 Frei, Hans, 66–69 French Revolution, 17, 49, 71–72, 140 fuller sense of scripture, 187–88 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 179, 189 Gallican tradition, 49 Gayraud, Hippolyte, 32–33 gnosis, 152 Harnack, Adolf von, 34, 90–92, 121 Heidegger, Martin, 64, 166–67, 177–79 Henrici, Peter, 106, 226n26, 227n48 hermeneutics, 69, 166–68, 174, 177, 182, 189, 196 action-based hermeneutic of tradition, 179–82 history historical-critical exegesis, 184, 187 historicism, 34, 36, 121, 123–24, 126, 131, 138, 148, 155, 188 real history, 125, 127 history and dogma, 14, 33, 99, 127–28, 138–39, 149, 166, 172 the bond between, 2, 17, 196 synthesis of, 123

Index  263 History and Dogma (Blondel), 4, 6–7, 17, 27, 34, 80, 102, 122–23, 130, 137–38, 140, 145–47, 158, 171, 180, 196 Hobsbawm, Eric, 160–61 Hügel, Baron Friedrich von, 86–87, 94–95, 101, 137–38 human nature, 21, 30 Husserl, Edmund, 166, 175, 177 hypostatic union, 16, 98, 115, 171, 185 idealism, 22, 28, 32, 73, 75, 105 immanence, 14, 28–29, 99, 178 doctrine of, 11, 27, 36 method of, 20, 26, 31–33, 36, 103–4, 117 implicitly lived, 139, 142, 144–45, 147–48, 150–51 infallibility, 39 active, 51 papal, 49–50 passive, 51 intellectualism, 27, 33, 176 intention, 23–25, 85, 102, 168, 186–87 Irenaeus, 53, 151–52 Joly, Henri, 14–15, 17 Kant, Immanuel, 5, 28, 64, 72, 75, 78, 82, 105, 124, 155 Kantianism, 21, 32, 34, 103–4 kenosis, 97, 154, 197 kenotic movement within the ­economy of tradition, 153 Kleutgen, Joseph, 51, 74, 77–79 Komonchak, Joseph, 76 Laberthonnière, Lucien, 33 Lamennais, Félicité Robert de, 12, 18, 50, 52, 73 Lamentabili sane exitu, 98 Lease, Gary, 61–64

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 13–17, 71 vinculum substantiale (substantial bond), 14, 110, 139 Leo XIII, 60, 78, 86 Thomistic revival and Aeterni patris, 25–26, 53, 70–78 Lérins, Vincent of, 54 Letter on Apologetics, 20–21, 28–32, 93, 117 liberal Protestantism, 25, 53, 61 literality, 189–90 literal sense, 183, 190 of scripture, 186–88 of tradition, 188–89, 191–92 lived experience, 142–45, 152, 235n36 living synthesis, 130, 141, 148–49 of the present, 166 living (vital) reality, 148–50, 162–63, 166, 171, 185, 197 of the past, 166 synthetic living reality, 139, 171–72, 181 of truth, 149–50, 166 Loisy, Alfred, 34–35, 39, 78, 80, 83–99, 101, 109, 121–22, 124–27, 129, 131, 138, 148–50, 161, 173, 180, 188 Autour d’un petit livre, 94 L’Évangile et l’Église, 34, 88, 90–91, 93–99, 126 A. Firmin, 87 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 35–36, 77–78 magisterium, 39–40, 49, 51–55, 57, 133, 148, 186 Maistre, Joseph de, 50, 52, 71 Marion, Jean-Luc, 238n96 McCool, Gerald, 73 metaphysics, 50, 52, 60, 64, 75, 94–96, 111, 115, 124–25, 147 in act, 125, 127 of charity, 168

264  Index Milbank, John, 44 modernism, 5, 57, 60–61, 64–65, 83, 138 Modernist crisis, 5, 30, 35, 39, 52, 58– 60, 86, 138, 183 modernity, 4–5, 25, 33–34, 57, 60–61, 63–66, 69–71, 76, 80, 93, 96, 102, 109, 114, 162, 173, 176, 183, 192, 195–96 Möhler, Johann Adam, 52–53, 55–57, 73, 139, 143 Napoleon Concordat of 1801, 49, 81 neo-Thomism, 60, 73, 77, 148 neo-Thomists, 33, 52, 75–76, 107 Newman, John Henry, 35, 55, 57, 80, 82, 86–89, 91, 101, 139, 142–44, 146 nominalism, 43 notional knowledge, 142, 144–48, 175 nouvelle théologie movement, 3, 182, 196 objectivity, 175, 179 Ollé-Laprune, Léon, 12, 19–21, 23, 36, 144 one thing necessary, 17, 107, 110–11, 115, 119, 168, 170–71, 180–81 ontology, 6, 96, 110–11, 117, 122, 128, 142, 147, 161, 166–67, 169, ­171–73, 177–78, 181–82, 184, 192, 196–97 fundamental ontology, 128, 167, 172, 177–78, 181, 184, 196 ontological affirmation of being, 113 as the order of being, 173 Origen of Alexandria, 67, 87 Pascendi dominici gregis, 60, 99 Pfau, Thomas, 33 physicality, 189–90 Pius IX, 73–74 Pontifical Biblical Commission The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, 186

positivism, 10–11, 22 power God’s absolute and ordained power (potentia Dei absoluta et ordinata), 41–44 juridical, 45 sacramental, 45 practical science, 108, 142, 175–76 practice concrete, 130–32 literal, 114–15 ritual, 113–14, 160 sacramental, 22, 102, 108, 113–15, 131 prospection, 146, 167 rationalism, 17–18, 20, 25, 27, 30, 50, 65, 71–73, 76, 83, 98 realism, 16, 22, 42, 145 real knowledge, 142, 145–48 receptivity, 27, 49, 131, 153–54, 178, 181, 197 Reformation, 37–38, 46, 48, 55, 62–63 religious option, 105, 113 Renan, Ernest, 10–11, 83–85, 98 representation pictorial representation, 159 problem of representation, 59–65, 70, 76, 78, 80, 96, 131, 139, 165, 167, 196–97 symbolic representation, 159 ressourcement movement, 196 Ricoeur, Paul, 167, 178, 189 Romanticism, 18–19 Rousselot, Pierre, 146 rule of faith, 53–56, 133 Sabatier, Auguste, 90–91, 121 sacramentality, 170 of human rationality, 168 sacramental dimension of human history, 168

Index  265 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 56, 166–67, 174 Schwalm, Marie-Benôit, 32–33 Science of Practice, 17, 35–36, 108, 142, 175–76 Second Vatican Council, 2–3, 7, 25, 192 Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei verbum), 1, 37, 182–84, 197 secular, 45–46, 81 secularization, 49 sensus fidei, 191 Sokolowski, Robert, 159–60 Spinoza, Benedict de, 36, 66, 69, 71, 103 spiritual sense of scripture, 188 Steiner, George, 61 subjectivity, 53, 68, 111, 139, 175, 177, 179 supreme option, 112–13 synthesis as Christian knowledge, 135, 172 between finite and infinite, 13–17 between history and dogma, 123–35 between nature and grace, 26–33 Tanner, Kathryn, 191 Taylor, Charles, 63 Tertullian, 30, 67 Thiel, John, 37, 188–92

Third Republic, 19, 25, 80–81, 140–41 time chronological time, 157, 159 displacements of time, 159 sacramental time, 157, 162–63 time of tradition, 158–59, 162 tradition active, 39, 51, 55 bureaucratic conception of, 34, 38, 44–45 juridical notion of, 38–40, 45–46, 50–51, 59, 165–66 living, 38, 134, 144, 181, 184 passive, 55 retrospective account of, 190–91 transcendence, 13–14, 27–29, 103–11, 122, 181–82 Trinity, 14, 35, 154, 156 Trinitarian life of God, 152 Ultramontanism, 49–50 will autonomy of, 94–96 heteronomy of, 105–6, 110–12, 119, 161 willed will (volonté voulue) and willing will (volonté voulante) , 23–24, 31, 110–18, 170 Williamson, Peter, 187–88

Robert C. Koerpel is adjunct professor of theology at the University of St. Thomas. He is co-editor of Contemplating the Future of Moral Theology.