BLONDEL, MAURICE

BLONDEL, MAURICE (1861–1949), French Roman Catholic philosopher. Blondel was born at Dijon and educated at the École Normale Supérieure, where he was a pupil of Léon Ollé Laprune, to whom he dedicated his thesis, published as L'action, which he presented at the Sorbonne in 1893. He was professor of philosophy at Aix-en-Provence from 1897 to 1927. L'action aroused much interest and controversy because of its originality. Blondel claimed that from purely philosophical premises he had reached theological conclusions. Unlike the positivists, who were dominant in the university, and the scholastics, who controlled the theological schools, Blondel worked from a subtle analysis of what was involved in human experience, and maintained that it pointed to, and in the end required, the supernatural. Thus by what was known as "the method of immanence" he arrived at the transcendent. By "action" he did not mean only activity but all that is involved in the human response to reality, including affection, willing, and knowing.

Blondel was not a lucid writer, and his teaching was regarded as complicated and obscure. He spent the rest of his life in trying to clarify his meaning and seeking to distinguish his ideas from those of others with which they were liable to be confused. He waited for many years before publishing a revised edition of L'action, which, with other works, won for his thought a widespread influence in France. Most important among these other works were Le problème de la philosophie catholique (The problem of Catholic philosophy; 1932), La pensée (Thought; 1934), L'être et les êtres (Being and beings; 1935), and La philosophie et l'esprit chrétien (Philosophy and the spirit of Christianity; 1944–1949). One of his closest collaborators was Lucien Laberthonnière, but eventually Blondel fell out with him, as he did with most of his contemporaries. He was involved in the modernist movement and obviously desired a renewal of the church's teaching, but he insisted that he did not share the views of modernists such as Alfred Loisy, Édouard Le Roy, and Friedrich von Hügel. Though sometimes threatened with ecclesiastical censure, he avoided it, and indeed received a certificate of orthodoxy from Pope Pius X.

Bibliography

In addition to L'action (1893; reprinted in 2 vols., Paris, 1936), The Letter on Apologetics, and History and Dogma (New York, 1964), and the other works mentioned above, several volumes of Blondel's correspondence have been published. In English there is the Correspondence of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Maurice Blondel, translated by William Whitman (New York, 1967), and Maurice Blondel and Auguste Valensin, 1899–1912, 2 vols. (Paris, 1957). None of Blondel's major works has been translated into English.

A comprehensive 240-page Blondel bibliography was produced by René Virgoulay and Claude Troisfontaines, Maurice Blondel; Bibliographie analytique et critique (Louvain, 1975). The following works about Blondel can be recommended: Frédéric Lefèvre's L'itinéraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel (Paris, 1928); Paul Archambault's Vers un réalism intégral: L'œuvre philosophique de Maurice Blondel (Paris, 1928); Henri Bouillard's Blondel and Christianity (Washington, D.C., 1970); and René Virgoulay's Blondel et le modernisme: La philosophie de l'action et les sciences religieuses (Paris, 1980). Blondel's work is also discussed in Bernard M. G. Reardon's Roman Catholic Modernism (Stanford, Calif., 1970) and in Gabriel Daly's Transcendence and Immanence: A Study in Catholic Modernism and Integralism (Oxford, 1980).

Alec Vidler (1987)