Maurice Blondel

Maurice Blondel 1861-1949, French Catholic philosopher, b. Dijon. He was a professor at the universities of Montauban, Lille, and Aix-Marseille during his influential career. Like his contemporary Henri Bergson he was antirationalist and scorned science. In his first work, L'Action (1893, rev. ed. 1950), he laid the groundwork for his later thought. Blondel held that action alone could never satisfy the human yearning for the transfinite, which could only be fulfilled by God, whom he described as the "first principle and last term." In his positive affirmation of God he was close to St. Augustine, Plato, and Leibniz; he later also accorded legitimacy to the rational proofs of God's existence. His other chief works were La Pensée (2 vol., 1934-35) and Le Problème de la philosophie catholique (1932).

Bibliography: See study by H. Bouillard (1969).

Blondel, Maurice (1861–1949). French Roman Catholic philosopher. His Letter on Apologetics (1896; Eng. tr. 1964) and History and Dogma (1904; Eng. tr. 1964) concern issues raised by the Modernist crisis, though their importance transcends this context.

Blondel, Maurice (1861–1949), French RC philosopher. In L'Action (1893; Eng. tr., 1984), his analysis of action led him to conclude that the human will which produces action cannot satisfy itself, because its fundamental desire is never fulfilled by any finite good. From this point of departure he developed an argument for the being of God resting on volition, in the light of which he modified the Scholastic proofs. God imposes Himself on the will as the first principle and the last term; we must therefore ‘opt’ either for Him or against Him. In his later works Blondel accords a greater place to abstract conceptions and affirms the legitimacy of methodical argumentation, e.g. in the rational proofs of the existence of God. For him, however, it is not that knowledge of creatures precedes knowledge of God, but rather it is the existence of an obscure yet positive affirmation of God that is the very condition that makes the Aristotelian and Thomist proofs possible. For several years he was closely associated with the leaders of the Modernist Movement.