The so‐called “Kierkegaard Renaissance,” which took place in Germany during the interwar period, was not merely the province of figures such as Karl Barth and Martin Heidegger. A number of Catholic thinkers were involved as well. Indeed, after the well‐known Kierkegaard scholar Theodor Haecker converted to Catholicism in 1921, Kierkegaard's thought became a popular topic among the group of Catholic intellectuals known as the Hochland Circle, which included the priest and author Romano Guardini. Such interest, in turn, prompted (...) class='Hi'>French theologian Yves Congar to explore the use of Kierkegaard for the renewal of the modern church. Moreover, a trio of notable Jesuit thinkers also entered the discussion: Erich Przywara, Henri de Lubac, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. In short, as this chapter will demonstrate, Kierkegaard inspired and provoked Catholic thinkers in a variety of areas, from theological anthropology and Christology to ecclesiology and the question of modernity. (shrink)

Since the French Revolution the relationship between the Catholic church and modernity has always been very troublesome. First I will describe how the church saw its own position with regard to modernity and how its stance evolved. In a second stage, I will then focus on how modernity `framed' Catholicism: this I will refer to as the modernity and modernization of Catholicism. The insights obtained will be used in a third part in order to get a better (...) understanding of the present and future situation of the church. I will round off with some conclusions concerning Catholic intellectuals and Catholic intellectual traditions from 1800 onwards. (shrink)

In recent years, historians have rediscovered the religious dimensions of the Enlightenment. This volume offers a thorough reappraisal of the so-called “Catholic Enlightenment” as a transnational Enlightenment movement. This Catholic Enlightenment was at once ultramontane and conciliarist, sometimes moderate but often surprisingly radical, with participants active throughout Europe in universities, seminaries, salons, and the periodical press._ In _Enlightenment and Catholicism in Europe: A Transnational History_, the contributors, primarily European scholars, provide intellectual biographies of twenty Catholic Enlightenment figures across eighteenth-century (...) Europe, many of them little known in English-language scholarship on the Enlightenment and pre-revolutionary eras. These figures represent not only familiar French intellectuals of the Catholic Enlightenment but also Iberian, Italian, English, Polish, and German thinkers. The essays focus on the intellectual and cultural factors influencing the lives and works of their subjects, revealing the often global networks of intellectual sociability and reading that united them both to the Catholic Enlightenment and to eighteenth-century policies and projects. The volume, whose purpose is to advance the understanding of a transnational "Catholic Enlightenment," will be a reliable reference for historians, theologians, and scholars working in religious studies. "This is a compelling collection on an important subject. Its transnational and biographical approach helps one to see eighteenth-century Catholicism and the Enlightenment itself in fresh and interesting ways." — Darrin M. McMahon, Florida State University_. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:French Philosophical Thought: Present Trends of French Philosophical Thought *Alexandre Koyré*This is a rather large subject, so you will not be astonished that I shall not treat it in its entirety. French philosophy during the years of war and occupation was pretty active. Though there were some heavy losses: the death of Brunschvicg, posthumous book [...], Héritage de mots, héritage d’idées, 1 a book written when (...) Brunschvicg was in hiding, and a book as “clear and serene as that of Condorcet,” has appeared after the liberation of France; the death of Halbwachs, of Politzer, of Cavaillès, of Lautman shot by the Nazis, of others less well known...; there was the ban on publications by Jewish authors, yet, in spite of this, there has been a surprising number of interesting and even important publications, both during and after the war.It seems that for the elder generation of French philosophers—and that applies not only to philosophers, but to scholars in general—for the generation of men too old to take an active part in the underground move-ment—work, as if nothing happened, has been in the same time a means of escape and a means of resistance. They felt themselves asserting a spiritual tradition that could not be destroyed, and should not be destroyed, and should not be endangered by such contingent “accidents” as Vichy government or even the Gestapo.Thus there have been a new translation of Plato by Robin, books on Plato, on Aristotle, on the medieval (Gilson) and modern philosophy etc., books on philosophy of science, books on sociology, psychology, logic (Méray, Serrus), 2 philosophy of religion, translations of philosophy classics. At the first glance the bibliography of this period (Lavelle, Le Senne, Bachelard, Gilson, etc.) you could have the impression wander in a familiar landscape: yet this would be a completely false impression, because as a matter of fact, this familiar landscape has been completely upturned by the upsurge of existentialism and the revival of Catholic philosophy [End Page 531] (Fessard, 3 De Lubac, Blondel, Nedoncelle, G. Marcel). Under this double impact everything—even the “climate” of philosophy—has changed. Philosophy has become a socially phenomenon.Neither Catholicism nor existentialism are, of course, specifically French intellectual movements. Catholicism is universal ex definitione, and as for existentialism, though French existentialism possesses some specific fea-tures that distinguish it from and even oppose it to the German one, fea-tures that can probably be explained by different national traditions—Descartes, Pascal—it, too, is no more French than it is German. Existen-tialism as such is European by-phenomenon, a definite phase of Western philosophical thought (and European thought, European civilization, at least until the recent—perhaps successful—attempts to destroy it, has been a unity). It originates more than a hundred years ago with Maine de Biran and Kierkegaard, and only has been rediscovered by the twentieth century now. Two thinkers that have been nearly completely neglected by the 19th century—but the 19th century, at least the second part of it, has been a dark age for philosophy—and after the rediscovery or simply the discovery of Kierkegaard in the 20th, it spreads, in Kierkegaard’s wake, from country to country with the usual speed or delay with which ideas travel today. Thus existential philosophy has been, first, developed in Germany in the ‘20s and ‘30s by Heidegger and Jaspers, then—Kierkegaard having been translated into French during the long armistice between the World Wars—in France, some 15 years later. 4 I have heard, by the way, that Kierkegaard has been, or is in the process of being translated into English. So, it is possible that in some 15 or 20 years you will have an existentialism in this country.But to return to France, the rise or upsurge of existentialism has been extraordinarily rapid. It was simultaneous with Husserl’s phenomenolo-gy becoming known in France (Husserl’s last work, Meditations Car-tesiennes, being the text of the lectures he gave in the Sorbonne in 1929, which is now available only in the French translation): from Husserl to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Antihumanism of the Young Deleuze:Sartre, Catholicism, and the Perspective of the Inhuman, 1945–48Giuseppe BiancoGilles Deleuze, along with Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and to a lesser extent Jean-François Lyotard, is considered an avatar of post-structuralism, and often associated with the critique of the concepts of identity and subjectivity. In this essay, I seek to identify the early sources of Deleuze's rejection of the notions of ego and person. (...) In the decade following 1944, one buzzword linked these two notions: humanism. Inspired by the evidential paradigm,1 and by using archival documents and little-known writings, I suggest why Deleuze's position, and the context in which it developed, can illuminate his mature work, especially his use of the concepts of immanence and univocity.Deleuze's engagement with anti-humanism—or, to be precise, with "inhumanism" and "impersonalism," the expressions Deleuze and his friends [End Page 795] used during the 1940s—is rooted in his radicalization of Jean-Paul Sartre's atheistic philosophy, which he read and discussed between 1943 and 1948. During this period, Deleuze was involved in gatherings organized by Catholic historians of medieval philosophy, including his mentor Maurice de Gandillac and Marie-Madeleine Davy. Gandillac, Davy, and their circles were interested in the existentialist and phenomenological movements, which they occasionally read within a theological framework. By radicalizing the positions detailed in works such as Being and Nothingness (1943) and "Transcendence of the Ego" (1936), Deleuze and his friend Michel Tournier confronted the mutation of Sartre's philosophy that began with his lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism" (given in 1945 and published as a book the following year). They considered this turn to be incoherent with the core of his philosophy and to have conservative political consequences. This radical stance distinguished them from an older generation of scholars.Stefanos Geroulanos has shown that opposition to humanism, broadly conceived, emerged in French thought during the 1930s.2 To him, the idea that humanism had to be rejected and especially that anthropological questions had to be overcome began in the middle of that decade and reemerged in the later 1940s, with atheist and secular rejections of liberal humanism shadowing Catholic and, to a lesser degree, communist ones. However, I would argue that this ideological transformation in fact slowed somewhat in the decade following 1944. During this period, as Edward Baring has also claimed, most French intellectuals utilized "humanism" to oppose totalitarian and "anti-human" ideologies and to promote doctrines underlining the uniqueness of man as compared to other beings, the centrality of freedom, and the importance of defending human rights.3 Critiques of humanism took a final turn during the 1950s, after the publication of Martin Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" (1947).4 From the late 1950s, and even [End Page 796] more so during the 1960s, the question of Being and the analysis of unconscious structures became common among scholars born during the interwar years as ways to overcome humanism and its limitations. During the 1960s, far more than during the 1930s, opposition to humanism and to the centrality of the notion of human subjectivity became radical and explicit; in this period, the term "anti-humanism" took hold, whereas, prior to the 1960s, it was rare and used as a pejorative. Deleuze used "inhumanism" far earlier than other authors of his cohort, already in 1945–48: by comparison, in the early 1950s, both Foucault and Derrida were still relying on different forms of humanism—in the case of the former, Marxist/existentialist; in the case of the latter, existential/spiritualist.5 Their turn toward anti-humanism during the mid-1950s was the result of the influence of Heidegger, Jean Hyppolite, Jules Vuillemin, and linguistic structuralism, through Lévi-Strauss.6 Not only did Deleuze reach antihumanist positions earlier, before even some of his professors, but he got there along a different way. Sartre's works were a defining theoretical influence at the beginning of Deleuze's intellectual trajectory, and they gave it a peculiar theoretical direction. During the 1940s, authors such as Bergson, Spinoza, and Nietzsche were not yet dear to Deleuze, and they did not occupy the important role that they... (shrink)

While contemporary readers may find what appear to be appealing streaks of liberalism in Montaigne's 'Essays', I argue that a more careful analysis suggests that Montaigne's overall stance is quietistic and conservative. To help support this claim I offer a close reading of 'Essays' III.11 ("Of Cripples"), where Montaigne offers his famous critique of the witch trials of early modern Europe. Once Montaigne's objections to the witch trials are properly understood, we see that Montaigne did not seriously or consistently dispute (...) the church's authority in political matters, though certain undeveloped seeds of liberalism do leave an unresolved tension in his writings. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Knowing the EastPatti M. MarxsenKnowing the East. By Paul Claudel. Translated by James Lawler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. 136 pp.Fifty years after his death, Paul Claudel (1868–1955) is remembered for many things. Not only was he a major twentieth-century poet and playwright, he was an astute observer of Dutch, Spanish, and Japanese art. Not only was he the brother of sculptor Camille Claudel, he was a (...) diplomat who lived for nearly twenty years in Asia, including a stint as the French ambassador to Japan (1921–1927). When he was elected as a member of the Académie Française in 1946 at nearly 80 years of age he quipped, "For an academic, that is puberty." He died at 87, having lived large in two centuries and on three continents.Following an adolescence marked with indifference toward religion, Claudel experienced a profound conversion to Catholicism during a Christmas night service at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris at the age of 18. With Christianity at the center of his universe and under the influence of Symbolist poets Rimbaud and Mallarmé, he developed a response to the world that was at once poetic and spiritual. Through his poetry, plays, and essays, he insisted on a fundamental unity between matter and spirit, a harmonious and vast universe into which the human mind could enter. And, at least for him, the point of entry was the portal of the Church. He struggled at times, but never lost sight of his faith. For all this, he is often credited with the revival of French Catholicism in the wake of WWI. After all, if Paul Claudel could take religion seriously and find meaning in it, pourquoi pas the rest of us?The facts of his extraordinary biography form a peculiar background to the recent translation by James Lawler of Claudel's collection of prose poems titled Knowing [End Page 229] the East. First published in 1946 as Connaissance de l'est, these sixty-one texts were written between 1895 and 1905 during Claudel's first visits to China and Japan as a young vice-consul stationed in Shanghai. He was twenty-six and still finding his poetic voice. And though his stance in the world is decidedly Christian, the content of this intriguing work reveals an inner dialogue with Buddhist ideas of interconnection, harmony, the ongoing quest for a higher life condition, and the overwhelming impact of nature in the lives of mere humans.In "Pagoda," Claudel describes a seven-story Chinese pagoda as it "amplifies and multiplies the roof, exaggerates the horned corners that rise with an elegant surge, and turns their curves upward to the sky." This form that "does away with walls" and concentrates on the uplifting roof creates a space where "Buddha, Prince of Peace, dwells inside with all the gods." In this architecture he reads a structuring of physical and spiritual space, a kind of never ending upward movement divided into "the seven mystical heavens." The culminating effect is the heavenly achievement of the unknowable. And so, after going as far as he can go into the world of the spirit, he ends this prose poem with an abrupt return to temporal reality. "I have no more to say of the Pagoda. I do not know its name."Elsewhere, in "The Wanderer," he turns his sense of awe toward nature. "Every tree has its personality, every small beast its role, every voice its part in the symphony," he writes. "As one understands music, so I understand nature, like a detailed narrative of proper names; as my walk and the day advance, so does the elaboration of the doctrine." The "doctrine," it seems, is the idea of dependent origination, the interrelation of all life that springs from a single source. In the last line, he states, "I understand the world's harmony. When will I grasp its melody?"In "The Temple of Consciousness" Claudel climbs "the black rock's vertical wall, and only at this late afternoon hour do I know myself to be on the right track." Below, he observes golden rice fields. Ahead there is an "old stairway overlaid with hoary moss... (shrink)

The author of these two complementary essays, neither of which he lived to see in final published form, was one of the most distinguished Jesuit scholars of his generation. Alexander Kojève, whose seminar on Hegel he attended from 1934 to 1939, once remarked that he could have been "easily and by far" France's best Marxist theorist if he had so desired. Partly because of the topical nature of his works, but perhaps even more because of his philosophic depth, he was (...) never read as widely outside of France as are his illustrious confrères, Henri de Lubac and Jean Daniélou. Of the one hundred and twenty-odd items listed in his bibliography only three articles have thus far been translated into English. Yet this impressive literary production could well become one of the landmarks of contemporary French Catholicism. (shrink)

André Naud was a French‐Canadian Catholic theologian who served as a peritus or advisor to Cardinal Leger, the Archbishop of Montreal at the Second Vatican Council between 1962 and 1965. Naud’s entire theological career was informed by the teachings of the Council. This was the reason why during the Papacy of John Paul II after 1978 he became alarmed at the expansion and the distortion of the authority of the magisterium. Over the last fifteen years of his life, he (...) wrote three remarkable books on this theme. In the last book (2002) entitled Les Dogmes et le Respect de l’Intelligence: Plaidoyer Inspiré par Simone Weil (The Dogmas and the Respect for Intelligence: An Argument Inspired by Simone Weil), he undertook an in‐depth analysis of Simone Weil, who had argued in the 1940s that Catholicism was in need of a philosophical cleaning up. This paper elaborates and explains the particular ways that Weil’s writings helped Naud to reformulate in the spirit of the Second Vatican Council the role of the magisterium with regard to dogmatic formulations, the manner of the reception of that teaching, the inspiration of scripture, the interpretation of miracles and the understanding of the Church itself. (shrink)

Reviewing the last fifty years of interaction between religion and science in Catholicism in Southern Europe, common traits are clearly evident: a late awareness of the importance of this interaction and a theological reluctance to address science or to account for its progress. Early signs of the engagement between religion and science appear as a consequence of the work of the French anthropologist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin. In Italy and Spain in the last fifteen years, we see (...) a substantive growth in the rise of research centers and academic activities devoted to exploring the common ground between science, philosophy, and theology. However, despite all these efforts and the many positive signs, there remains a long way to go for theology to consider science as a true challenge and an inspiration and to integrate it into the theological curriculum. (shrink)

Emilia Pardo Bazán challenged French naturalist writers in the 19th century who maintained that our lives are completely determined by inheritance/background, environment, and the historical moment. She maintained that naturalism as materialism misses the spiritual component of human existence, which is captured in her theory of realism. Against descriptions of her “Catholic Naturalism” as a sort of weakened compromise, I argue that she weaponized Church doctrines to forge a strong feminist philosophy firmly rooted in Spanish Roman Catholicism.

The main article is devoted to the historical and philosophical reconstruction of controversy between Vladimir Solovyov and the authors of the “Faith and Reason” - a magazine of the Kharkov Theological Seminary. This controversy took its place in the “theological and journalistic” or the “theocratic” period of Solovyov’s works. Particular attention is paid to the disputes of Solovyov and T. Stoyanov, A.P. Shost'in and the French Orthodox priest Fr. Vladimir Gette on the theory of dogmatic development in the church. (...) In the context of this controversy, the arguments for the “defense” of Solovyov's position, cited in the magazine “Orthodox Review” by a theologian and Konstantin Leontyev's follower Ivan Kristi are also analyzed. The reception of Solovyov's theocratic ideas and reaction to his ecclesiastical views in both the Catholic and Orthodox circles of Russian and Western society is shown. Especially it concerns the criticism of Solovyov’s ideas in the pages of the French magazines “L’Univers”, “L'Union Chrétienne”, “Revue d’Eglise greque-unie”, etc. The evolution of Solovyov's views on the problem of the union of Eastern and Western churches, the renewal of church communication between Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the main result of which was his fundamental but unfinished work “The History and Future of the Theocracy” was demonstrated. A conclusion about the “superficiality” of the judgments of the majority of Vladimir Solovyov's ideological opponents, as well as later interpreters of his legacy, following the French Jesuit Michel d'Erbigny, who tried to present him as a “Russian Newman” who converted from Orthodoxy into the Catholic faith is drawn. It is shown that Solovyov’s projects of the “religion of the Holy Spirit” and the “Universal Church”, created on its basis, should be considered primarily in the context of his own philosophical quest, and not in connection with the confessional and ideological divergences of his time. (shrink)

The contemporary world is witness to an intense, sometimes violent controversy about secularism. These trends have been exacerbated by the emergence of fundamentalism, which challenges the secular society and the secularization of philosophical ideas and ethical values. Paul Kurtz has been personally involved in the campaign for secularism throughout his career as a philosopher. This book reflects his participation in this battle and extends his thinking to new areas. Secularists maintain that the state should not impose a religious creed on (...) its citizens and that it should respect freedom of conscience, the right to believe or disbelieve in the prevailing orthodoxy. This right is guaranteed by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Rights of Man enunciated in the French Revolution. Many powerful religious institutions including Islam, Hinduism, Protestant Fundamentalism, conservative Roman Catholicism or Orthodox Judaism, and others do not accept this principle. And many totalitarian countries that claim to be secular nevertheless seek to impose a kind of doctrinaire ideological uniformity, often equivalent to a religious creed. Kurtz is perhaps best known for his Humanist Manifesto II. Here he takes it to a new level, arguing that secularism today needs to be allied to the emergence of democratic institutions that respect individual freedom andthe pluralistic society. He argues that a defense of secularism entails a defense of the civic virtues of democracy, which include the toleration of dissent and alternative lifestyles and the willingness to negotiate differences.Naturally how this develops is relative to the socio-cultural context in which it emerges. Consequently, secularism will take different forms in different societies, and the term multi-secularism best describes that. Many people believe that it is impossible to maintain a moral order without the support of religion. Kurtz vigorously denies that, and this volume attempts to explicate the values and principles of secular morality, which he sees as the cornerstone of the open democratic society. (shrink)

Simone Weil is a vexation. An intellectual in the French Cartesian tradition who bore witness to her experience of Christ's presence (in November 1938); a radical who called “the destruction of the past… perhaps the greatest of all crimes”; a left-winger who penned trenchant critiques of Marxist thought and state socialist practice; a social theorist who condemned human collectives as a Great Beast yet yearned for a working class movement from “below;” Weil defies the usual categories. Embracing the role (...) of outsider, she charted an almost perversely lonely course. Certain facts of her life, her mysticism, her apparent devotion to Catholicism (to which she never converted), a harsh asceticism that figured in her early death, prove stumbling blocks to many. (shrink)

The texts of the ancient skeptics resurfaced in the sixteenth century. How the Reformation and the subsequent confessionalization process interacted with the revival of skepticism remains disputed. Some historians contend that skeptical methods, especially those of Sextus Empiricus, were co-opted by French Catholic polemicists in the service of “counter-reformation”; others suggest that they were suppressed on both sides of the confessional divide by the new church-state establishments that were anxious to protect certainty and impose unity. Where these scholars agree, (...) however, is on the historical trajectory of skeptical techniques: the loss of certainty in theology and the emergence of tolerance. The disputations on sacred scripture of Roberto Bellarmino and William Whitaker, the pre-eminent controversialists of late-sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism and English Calvinism, respectively, reveal the perdurance of skeptical techniques through the Reformation. They also reveal their unstable functionality. Bellarmino proposed papal supremacy as a solution to the insufficiency of reason. Whitaker then challenged the traditional foundations of ecclesiastical authority while simultaneously advancing a principle of scriptural hermeneutics that depended upon institutionally-codified dogmatic statements. Both polemicists engaged in epistemological warfare without surrendering their own claims to certainty; both established stricter ways for their churches to achieve that certainty; neither sought to promote tolerance. (shrink)

Today, “scientism“ is a concept with a negative connotation in every language. Although many definitions are circulating, they have the assessment in common that scientism implicates a blind faith in science, which is wrong, simple-minded and even dangerous. However, the question is, who actually is defending that kind of position? Is scientism not just a ghost, a projection, an intellectual scarecrow in order to use many people’s fear of science in order to bash rationalistic opinions? This article develops the argument (...) that scientism is a real historical current which can be analyzed in a concrete way. It starts by outlining the history of the French word “scientisme” and the debates around it and discovers that the word is not at all of recent invention, but goes back to the 1840s and received its negative emphasis in the late nineteenth century when “scientific spiritism” on the one hand and Catholicism on the other were struggling against the “exaggerated” claims of natural science. A polemical counter-concept was therefore needed. Soon afterward some scientists and philosophers emerge, like Félix Le Dantec, Abel Rey or Marcel Boll, who turn around the invective in order to describe their own optimistic and rationalistic conception of science. In conclusion the article argues that scientism has to be understood as an intellectual project and as an optimistic thought-style in science that does not at all correspond to the prejudices of the amoral scientist or the power-hungry technocrat, but is represented mostly by outsiders and nonconformists. (shrink)

Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the indeterminate and undecidable? In _Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint_, French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that play through the life and works of one of the greatest living philosophers. Cixous is a lifelong friend of Derrida. They both grew (...) up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging" -- not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family "one never said 'circumcision'but 'baptism,'not 'Bar Mitzvah'but 'communion.'" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint." An intellectual contemporary of Derrida, Cixous's ideas on writing have an affinity with his philosophy of deconstruction, which sought to overturn binary oppositions -- such as man/woman, or Jew/non-Jew -- and blur boundaries of exclusion inherent in Western thought. In portraying Derrida, Cixous uses metonymy, alliteration, rhyme, neologisms, and puns to keep the text in constant motion, freeing language from any rigidity of meaning. In this way she writes a portrait of "Derrida in flight," slipping from one appearance to the next, unable to be fixed in one spot, yet encompassing each point he passes. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being Jewish. (shrink)

Published in 1913 as _La Philosophie Bergsonienne_, this incisive critique of the thought of Henri Bergson was Jacques Maritain's first book. In it he shows himself already to have an authoritative grasp of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas and an uncanny ability to demonstrate its relevance to alternative philosophical systems such as that of Henri Bergson. Volume 1 in the series _The Collected Works of Jacques Maritain_, this edition faithfully reproduces the 1955 translation published by the Philosophical Library. It (...) would be difficult to overestimate Bergson’s role in extricating French philosophy from the deadening materialism that dominated the Sorbonne. It was that cultural milieu that brought Maritain and his wife Raïssa to the brink of suicide. They drew back for two major reasons. First were the lectures of Henri Bergson at the Collège de France, in which the Maritains found a defense of metaphysics, of the transcendent beyond the material, within which they could find meaning in life. The second reason was their conversion to Catholicism, a move they and many of their contemporaries made after being introduced to Bergson’s work. Soon after his conversion, Jacques Maritain immersed himself in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and was struck by the comparative weaknesses of Bergson. This book is Maritain’s relentless criticism of the philosophy of the man whose lectures had meant so much to him. Its ferocity marks it as a young man’s book, written in part to exorcize the defects of Bergson’s philosophy as they were understood by one now schooled in Thomism. Twenty-five years later, Maritain, while not retracting his criticisms, regretted their intemperance and, as a result, moderated his assessment of Bergson in a long preface to the second edition. In it, we find a philosopher who mastered his craft and a critic of rare perception and refinement. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Klossowski, Deleuze, and OrthodoxyEleanor Kaufman (bio)Among the many strange and wonderful things to be found there, Pierre Klossowski's oeuvre is a preeminent illustration of what divides univocity and equivocity and therefore serves as one of the twentieth century's most instructive models for thinking the complexity of the dialectic. Univocity and equivocity are significant both in their roots in Scholastic philosophy, as the idea that Being is expressed in either (...) one or several senses, and as belonging to a longstanding framework that helps demarcate the differences, nuanced yet significant, among members of the extraordinary generation of French intellectuals of which Klossowski was a part. Thus, these terms, apart from their theological and philosophical import, will serve as a heuristic for renarrating points of filiation and divergence among a series of prominent French thinkers, primarily Bataille, Klossowski, and Deleuze, but also extending backward to Sartre and forward to Badiou to frame the series. I will approach this in segmented fashion, first opposing Bataille's dialectic of transgression to Klossowski's more univocal method of disjunctive synthesis. When juxtaposed with Deleuze's Spinozist affirmation of univocity, however, Klossowski would seem to be more on the side of the equivocal. Whereas Deleuze criticizes the realm between the univocal and the equivocal as the lukewarm space of the analogical, my contention is that this middle realm allows for a space of movement and reversal that escapes the pitfalls Deleuze locates in the dialectic, and does so without a strict adherence to Spinozist univocity. Whereas Bataille and Deleuze remain closer to Klossowski in the tenor of their thought, I will nonetheless suggest in conclusion that Sartre and Badiou are actually closer to Klossowski on a formal level, in that each poses a similarly analogical challenge to the thought of the dialectic.For many reasons Bataille and Klossowski can be paired together. They were contemporaries, both born around the turn of the century, both writing in a variety of literary and philosophical genres, including pornographic or semi-pornographic fiction, and working outside the academy. Both wrote studies of Nietzsche, of Sade, and radical economic treatises. They were friends and fellow members in the late 1930s of the College of Sociology, which was modeled after a secret society, the members taking great interest in such topics as sacrifice and headlessness. Bataille and Klossowski wrote about each other. Both were at different points obsessed with Roman Catholicism, both at different points prepared to enter monastic orders, both in different fashions fell away. As might easily be imagined, their fiction is an outrageous mixture of the sacred and the profane, including sexual encounters and other desecrations staged at church alters and the like. Both work in that realm where pornography and theology come together. Yet while the more familiar Bataille uses pornography toward transgressive aims, the lesser-known Klossowski uses a more nuanced and interesting mechanism of boredom to elaborate an intrinsically disjunctive structure.Even boredom, for Bataille, partakes of the transgressive. In his novella The Story of the Eye, the narrator describes offhandedly how he and his companion Simone have just found their friend Marcelle's body. She has hung herself. The narrator and Simone [End Page 47] take the body down and have sex for the first time next to it. Then the narrator describes the boredom that ensues even in the face of death: "We were perfectly calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it. Any boredom in the world is linked, for me, to that moment and, above all, to an obstacle as ridiculous as death. But that won't prevent me from thinking back to that time with no revulsion and even with a sense of complicity. Basically, the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime, inasmuch as absurd existence, so I imagine, has all the prerogatives" [59–60]. This is actually an unusually meditative moment in Bataille's story of murder, priests, bullfights, and constant sex.1 Here his narrator links boredom to death, and to a reflection on the absurd boundary between life and death. But by commenting on boredom... (shrink)

This article consists of an annotated edition and translation of a previously unpublished Latin letter to G. J. Vossius from Christianus Ravius, refuting the accusation made by Johann Seyffert in his pamphlet attacking Grotius, Classicum Belli Sacri adversus Hugonem Grotium Papistam , that Grotius, while representative of the Swedish government in Paris, had advised Ravius to convert to Catholicism. The historical introduction outlines the details of and probable reasons for Seyffert's published attacks on Grotius, Grotius's attitude towards those attacks (...) , and the implications for his relationship with the Swedish government and Baron von Degenfeld, commander of the German Protestant mercenary soldiers in the service of the French crown. It also recounts what is known of Ravius's stay in Paris during which he met Grotius, and raises the question why Ravius delayed making a response to Seyffert until well after Grotius was dead. (shrink)

Let us imagine that we decided to visit cities at different places in the world. During our journey we would probably consult often one or more of these books known as “travel guides,” which, in our case, describe one or more cities for the benefit of the traveler who knows nothing about them or has only a slight idea of what they are like.Presumably we would be told not infrequently that in the cities being described something is “reflected” - that (...) the city architecture of Paris reflects the immortality - obsessed self-glorification of French kings, emperors, or national presidents; that the baroque layout of Rome reflects the triumphant Catholicism of the counter- Reformation ; that the skyscrapers of Manhattan reflect the unbridled creativity of American civilization. (shrink)

The relations of Frederic Bastiat with Faith are complex. He often speaks of God in his works, but his conversion, or rather his return, to the Catholicism was progressive and ended at the time of his death in 1850 in Rome. According to Bastiat, there is no opposition between science and Faith and, above all, economic and social harmonies express and reflect the wisdom of God.Moreover, Bastiat was to join the Catholics of his time, especially in the struggles for (...) the freedom of eductaion, and he was to propose some reforms that the French Catholics adopted only later, such as the separation of the Church and the State; in this way, when he disagreed with the nineteenth century’s Catholics, he anticipated in fact the positions of the twentieth century’s Catholics, being in this instance, as in economic thought, ahead of his time.Les rapports de Frédéric Bastiat et de la foi sont complexes. Il parle souvent de Dieu dans ses oeuvres, mais sa conversion, ou plutôt son retour, au catholicisme a été lente et ne s’est achevée qu’au moment de sa mort à Rome en 1850. Pour Bastiat, il n’y a pas d’opposition entre science et Foi et, surtout, les harmonies sociales expriment et reflètent la sagesse de Dieu.Par ailleurs, Bastiat rejoindra les catholiques de son époque, en particulier dans les combats en faveur de la liberté de l’enseignement, et il proposera des réformes que les catholiques français n’accepteront que plus tard, comme la séparation de l’Eglise et de l’Etat ; en ce sens, lorsqu’il est en désaccord avec les catholiques du XIXème siècle, il anticipe en fait sur les positions des catholiques du XXème siècle, étant là aussi, comme en économie, en avance sur son temps. (shrink)

This article explores how the intellectual and spiritual sensibilities of the French Catholic literary critic, Charles Du Bos (1882-1939), provide an insight into the construction of a particular "third-way" Catholic intellectual form of engagement during the interwar period. It is argued that the intellectual disposition underpinning Du Bos's third way rests fundamentally upon an accommodation of the "tragic." The evolving concept of tragedy in Du Bos's life and thought, before his conversion to Catholicism and beyond, facilitates his embrace (...) of an "ethic of responsibility," which is deployed in his third-way politico-ethical position on the Munich crisis of 1938. (shrink)

Pierre Gassend, or, as he is widely known, Gassendi, was a French materialist philosopher, physicist, astronomer, theologian and Catholic priest. He was the son of Antoine Gassend2 and Françoise Fabry, and was born on January 22nd in 1592 in Champtercier, a village of Provence, and died on October 24th in 1655 in Paris. He received his first education in the cities Digne and Riez and by the age of twelve he began his initiation to Catholicism. He belonged to (...) the Franciscan Order.3 The continuation of his formal education was supported by the Catholic Church as an aspect of his preparation for priesthood.4 He studied Aristotelian philosophy and Catholic theology for the next eight years at the College of Aix in Provence. Pierre Gassendi is typically remembered for introducing the ancient atomic philosophy of Epicurus in 17th century European thought. Gassendi aspired to articulate a new philosophy of nature, in order to replace Aristotelianism, which had been prominent in the context of scholastic thought for centuries, and had constituted the foundation of physics as well as moral philosophy. Gassendi was a priest and an ardent follower of the new scientific methodology of empiricism and of experimental trial. He devoted his life’s work to bringing together the Christian doctrines with the principles of the new science. Gassendi, along with Francis Bacon and Descartes, was one of the most significant figures who exerted influence on the development of science and mechanistic philosophy in the second half of the 17th century, especially in England. His views can be seen throughout the summary of Francois Bernier, a work that emphasizes the atomic views, and materialistic tendencies, of philosophical thought. Gassendi’s adapted Epicurean philosophy spread to Britain with Opera Omnia and the Abregé of Bernier, and also due to Walter Charleton, who published a modified English translation of parts of Animadversiones in 1648. There was also a group of enthusiastic empiricists, who belonged to the circle of Newcastle, as well as a small Epicurean club whose members were among others Kenelm Digby and Nathaniel Highmore. All of the above saw a deep and pervasive influence of Gassendi’s views on British thought. His influence is seen in the writings of major thinkers, such as Boyle, Locke, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, Reid, and in the early works of Leibniz. The multi-dimensional personality of Gassendi, as a pastor, humanist and physical philosopher, accords with a moral and the physical universe in which the Creator God of the Christian faith holds a prominent role. He has been characterized by many researchers as the founder of mechanical philosophy, and as the successor of humanistic historiography. He was a defender of atomic theory, which was flourishing in the second half of 17th century, and also inspired Locke, one of the major proponents of moral theory. Gassendi’s contribution in moral philosophy is unexceptionable; his notions of freedom and pleasure formed the basis of the liberal tradition of late 17th and 18th centuries. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:"Building the Earth":Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Science, and the Spirituality of the United NationsSarah ShortallDuring a 1982 trip to Paris, Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar raised a glass to toast France's many contributions to the mission of the United Nations. But the Frenchman who received the most fulsome praise from Pérez de Cuéllar was neither an Enlightenment philosopher nor an eminent politician; he was a Jesuit priest and paleontologist (...) by the name of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard had recognized, the Secretary-General explained, that "humanity is undergoing a metamorphosis, a transformation toward a planetary society that is united in its roots and more and more diversified in its component parts and individual lives."1 And this insight made him "the French philosopher who has had the greatest influence on the metaphysical and planetary evolution of the United Nations."2 Pérez de Cuéllar was by no means alone in his thinking. No less than five [End Page 827] Secretaries-General have invoked Teilhard de Chardin as a key influence on their own thought and on the mission of the UN.Why were so many leaders of this ostensibly secular international organization taken with the work of an idiosyncratic Catholic priest-scientist, and what can his story tell us about the role religion has played in postwar projects of global governance more broadly? As its charter makes clear, the United Nations is a secular institution. But in recent years, historians have begun to probe the crucial contributions that religious actors made to the drafting of the Universal Declaration on Human Rights in 1948.3 Others have shown how American ecumenical Protestants such as John Foster Dulles contributed to shaping the creation of the UN by means of a highly successful domestic lobbying campaign.4 In both cases, the scholarship has tended to focus on the way religious actors shaped human rights discourse at the UN. For its part, the social-scientific literature on the UN's engagement with religion has tended to emphasize the role of faith-based organizations (religious NGOs), which have proliferated since the 1990s.5 Among the most important of these is the Catholic Church, which holds a unique status; as the only religious institution that is also a state, it has been recognized as a permanent observer state since 1964.6 What is missing from both the historical and social-scientific literature, however, is an account of the distinctive spirituality of the UN itself. Quite apart from the organization's relationship to religious institutions or the influence of religious actors on human rights activism, how have religious ideas informed the way leading UN diplomats have imagined the institution's mission of global governance?This article explores this question by examining the reception of Teilhard de Chardin's Catholic cosmology, and especially his account of globalization—or [End Page 828] "planetization," as he called it—at the UN. Trained as both a Jesuit priest and a professional geologist and paleontologist, Teilhard elaborated a controversial theory of evolution that encompassed everything from inorganic matter to human life to religious salvation. Teilhard's theory that human life on Earth was converging at both a biological and spiritual level earned him the suspicion of Vatican authorities, but it also found an enthusiastic reception at the highest echelons of the UN Secretariat and at UNESCO. What attracted UN bureaucrats to the Jesuit's worldview was precisely its synthetic ambition—the way it promised to reconcile science and religion—and its account of a pan-human convergence capable of preserving the distinct value of local cultures and individual persons. The fascination with Teilhard at the UN was by no means confined to Catholics, however. If the Jesuit's ideas appealed to both Catholics and non-Catholics, it was precisely because they seemed to transcend their author's Catholicism and point toward a universal spirituality that merged the insights of the great "world religions." This sort of spirituality was exactly what many UN diplomats thought the organization needed to support and animate its mission of global governance. Material forces such as technological innovation and economic markets could only ever yield an "external" form... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:A Latin American Existentialist Ethos: Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy by Stephanie MerrimTadd RuetenikA Latin American Existentialist Ethos: Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy Stephanie Merrim. SUNY Series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture. State U of New York P, 2023.If it seems like there is more turmoil in the world than usual, then existentialism seems more relevant than usual. Wars and rumors of wars threaten to (...) shift political boundaries and unsettle moral attitudes. Perhaps this is an opportunity for new philosophical investment in places not previously considered to be philosophically relevant. In the Western Hemisphere, this would mean directing attention south of the US border. [End Page 86]Stephanie Merrim's A Latin American Existentialist Ethos: Modern Mexican Literature and Philosophy encourages us to make this kind of redirection. I think the most valuable part of the book is Merrim's explanation of how Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus influenced Mexican philosophy, creating along with Catholicism a new philosophical situation. This signals an opportunity for those of us becoming productively bored with a traditional American philosophy centered on US philosophers. Merrim's work describes the birth, ascendance, and recession of the Grupo Hiperión, a creative friendship that led to the development of Mexico's philosophical and literary signature. "Hiperión's capacious existentialism sees no disjunction between freedom and advocating particular values" (58), Merrim concludes, adding later that its Latin American context produces a "theologically informed communitarianism" (59). This involves considering Sartre rather than, say, Peirce, James, and Dewey. It involves filling in "the gaps in ethics that eventuate from the French philosopher's commitment to ontology as well as from the aporias in his ethical thinking." In short, she says, "Hiperión supplements Sartre" (58).This is inspiring. The more standard view of American philosophy is that it has origins in European empiricism. Jonathan Edwards, for example, can be interpreted as one who adapts John Locke to a Puritan theological context. After this, there is a gradual dropping of the theological context. The focus remains on the United States, its development as a world power, and its leadership in advanced technology. The correlative philosophical development is thought to culminate in pragmatism, and then there seems to be an attempt to preserve it for a while by adding a "neo-" prefix.It's not that pragmatism and neo-pragmatism are bad. But their development correlates with the US domination of Latin America. As Merrim implies early in the work, existentialism is used to "shake us out of a mechanical existence, to destabilize us, awaken and prime us for happiness" (3). It is not that existentialism is used to destabilize; it's just that it appears on the scene whenever instability is present. Essence is always in creation, and all that can be said at this point is that the United States should not prescribe itself as the model for the creation of a Latin American ethos.It is on this point that I begin a small criticism of a book that is otherwise valuable in pointing many of us toward new scholarship and new interests. The problem is first evident in the translation notes, which indicate that "in order to engage a host of constituencies, this book translates into English all non-English material." This attempt by the author "to reach a broad readership" (ix) is an unnecessary accommodation. People in the United States [End Page 87] should have no less of an obligation to learn Spanish as the rest of the Hemisphere has had to learn English.When we move from language to philosophy, we see a similar over-accommodation. The author tries, but seems to have difficulty incorporating pragmatism into this new philosophical and literary movement. One example of this is the author's use of pragmatism in reference to a part of Rosario Castellanos's novel Rito de iniciación (Aguilar, 1997). One of the characters proposes a marriage of convenience that Merrim says would provide "a net pragmatism but not pragmatic authenticity" (175). If one has to contrast an authentic from a non-authentic version of a philosophy, it seems better to say that authenticity itself is... (shrink)

Jürgen Habermas’s recent work is defined by two trends: an engagement with the realm of the sacred and a concern for the future of the European Union. Despite the apparent lack of connection between these themes, I argue that the early history of European integration has important implications for Habermas’s conclusions about the place of faith in public life. Although Habermas’s work on religion suggests that the sacred contains important normative resources for postsecular democracies, he continues to bar explicitly religious (...) justifications from discourse within state institutions. I question this exclusion of faith by reconstructing the role that political Catholicism played in the foundation of the European project. By focusing on two of the most important actors involved in the creation of the first European Community, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman and German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, I show how explicitly religious reasons can broaden political perspectives, resulting in the creation of new, inclusive, postnational forms of communal life. Pushing Habermas to accept the implications of his theological turn, I argue that pluralistic, nondogmatic and nonauthoritarian religious claims should be allowed to enter into the formal public sphere through a discursively determined interpretation of secular translation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Michelet and Social Romanticism: Religion, Revolution, NatureArthur MitzmanIn 1851, shortly before his second and definitive suspension from his teaching at the Collège de France, Jules Michelet told a young friend of his dissatisfaction with the meager political impact of the Republican professors of the time: “Our present propaganda... has resembled strongly that which might be made by a man enclosed in a crystal glass. He finds his voice to (...) be resounding and very strong: that’s because it breaks against the inner surface. But those who are outside, the men of the people, hear nothing.” 1Michelet had become painfully aware of how little his voice had been heard outside the crystal in June 1848, when barricade-builders outside his house on the Rue des Postes responded to his son-in-law’s appeal not to expose the dwelling of the great historian to artillery fire by asking, “Who is Michelet?” 2 This occurred two years after the publication of Le Peuple and only months after the appearance of his celebration of the commoners’ festivals of federation in 1790, both texts being landmarks in the social romantic anticipation of 1848. In fact it was the 1848 Revolution itself that had diminished the resonance of Michelet’s ideas, by polarizing the country in a way that made it impervious to his message of social harmony.Before 1848, Michelet was a central figure in the intellectual disaffection that delegitimized the July Monarchy. His work in the 1840s had shifted from the historical erudition of his many-volumed Histoire de France to contemporary polemics against the clergy and the government: attacks on the Jesuits and the Church 3 swiftly broadened to a conflict with the intellectual and political establishment of the period. In Le Peuple (1846), Michelet combined an analysis of the profound social divisions within the French nation with a remarkable sketch of the relation between civilization and nature, a Rousseauian appeal to the natural qualities of the common people and an [End Page 659] invocation of the genius of the future, who would be gifted with “the two sexes of the spirit.”Le Peuple was the first of a series of works on nature, women, and the common people, those three “others” of nineteenth-century high culture, that have throughout this century fascinated cultural historians. In the historiographical tradition, its author has been celebrated by those who viewed him as their predecessor in the broadening of history-writing to include culture and mentalities, such as Lucien Febvre and Jacques Le Goff, and denigrated by those, like Pieter Geyl, who have been outraged by his nationalistic pathos and his blatant subjectivity. 4 I shall suggest in this essay that all of these aspects of Michelet’s work are rooted in his significance in the 1840s as a social romantic, the contemporary and friend of George Sand, Lamennais, Pierre Leroux, and others.For apart from what Michelet has come to mean, as totem or as scarecrow, to the scholarship of the twentieth century, he was enmeshed in the ideological conflicts of his own time. Without an understanding of those conflicts, an important perspective on his place in the history of ideas will be missing, a perspective which, moreover, may shed some light on the broader historical significance of the social romanticism he represented. For example, the “ideological” Michelet was best known in his own time as an anti-clerical. 5 Indeed, his version of the Romantic évangile éternel, which he developed in the 1840s, takes a privileged place among the efforts of intellectuals in the first half of the nineteenth century to work out new religious conceptions to replace a moribund Catholicism. 6 Yet the principal framework of his polemical activity was not the Church but the liberal academic establishment, with which he was at war from his 1843 lectures on the Jesuits to his dismissal from his official functions at the beginning of the Second Empire.Michelet and the July Monarchy: From Liberalism to Social RomanticismSeen from the standpoint of the early years of his career, roughly 1825 to 1835, Michelet would seem an improbable candidate for any kind of romanticism. Given his impoverished, artisan background as well... (shrink)

This original translation, by Edward H. Flannery, brings you one of Maritain s most eye-opening studies of Christianity. Although not his most famous work, Maritain s An Essay on Christian Philosophy provides readers with an in-depth analysis and careful philosophical approach to the study of theology and, at the time of original publication, was considered to be the definitive statement of the Thomistic position. Discover his theses for yourself as Maritain considers the nature of philosophy, morality, and their relations to (...) Christianity with clarity and a scholarly attention to detail. Flannery provides English readers with a glossary of terms to bring further understanding to Maritain s original words. Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and political thinker. He was born in Paris in 1882, where he spent most of his life. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother the daughter of a statesman. He attended the Sorbonne to study philosophy and natural science, and after marrying, he and his wife converted to Catholicism. It was after this he became a well-known scholar of St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomistic philosophy. He published widely on philosophical and political thought, and by the 1930s, he was an established thinker in the Catholic community. After the outbreak of WWII, Maritain relocated to the United States, where he taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. Later in life, he and his wife returned to France, where he continued to write and study Catholic scholarship until his death in 1973. (shrink)

It is hard to over-estimate the challenge that feminism poses to Roman Catholicism. Pope John Paul II's call for a 'new feminism' has led to the development of a Catholic theological response to the so-called 'old feminism'. _The New Catholic Feminism _sets up a dramatic encounter between the orthodox Catholic establishment and contemporary critical theory, including feminist theology and philosophy, queer theory, and French psycholinguistics, in order to explore fundamental questions about human identity, personhood and gender. From the (...) naked bodies of Eden to the 'gay nuptials' of liturgy, it argues that the strange and volatile world of Catholic sexual symbolism cannot be 'tamed' to meet the ideological agendas of either feminist theology or conservative Catholicism. Only through a radical re-evaluation of the sacramental significance of the sexed human body might the Catholic Church provide a redemptive response to the sexual politics of contemporary society. (shrink)

Originally titled Frontières de la poésie (1935), This book by Jacques Maritain, whose philosophical writings read as interestingly as a novel, will be welcomed by all who are seeking a better understanding of the art of our time. The book delves into Maritain's thoughts on the nature and subjectivity of art and poetry. As a philosopher, Maritain attempts to define the two concepts, describing art and poetry as "virtues," and as primarily concerned with beauty. Rather than focus on aesthetic theory, (...) Maritain examines the concepts at a more tangible level, including a discussion of how they are made. The principles established with such precision and brilliance in his earlier work "Art and Scholasticism," which has had such a deep influence on contemporary artists, are successfully put to the test in illuminating the creative works of such diverse artists as Rouault, Marc Chagall, Gino Sevirini, and Arthur Lourie. Jacques Maritain was a French Catholic philosopher and political thinker. He was born in Paris in 1882, where he spent most of his life. His father was a prominent lawyer and his mother the daughter of a statesman. He attended the Sorbonne to study philosophy and natural science, and after marrying, he and his wife converted to Catholicism. It was after this he became a well-known scholar of St. Thomas Aquinas and Thomistic philosophy. He published widely on philosophical and political thought, and by the 1930s, he was an established thinker in the Catholic community. After the outbreak of WWII, Maritain relocated to the United States, where he taught at Princeton University and Columbia University. Later in life, he and his wife returned to France, where he continued to write and study Catholic scholarship until his death in 1973. (shrink)

_Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial_ delivers what no other book on Weil has—a comprehensive study of her political thought. In this examination of the development of her thought, Athanasios Moulakis offers a philosophical understanding of politics that reaches beyond current affairs and ideological advocacy. Simone Weil—philosopher, activist, mystic—unites a profound reflection on the human condition with a consistent and courageous existential and intellectual honesty manifest in the moving testimony of her life and her death. Moulakis examines Weil's political (...) thought as an integral part of a lived philosophy, in which analysis and doctrine are inseparable from the articulation of an intensely personal, ultimately religious experience. Because it is impossible to distinguish Weil's life from her thought, her writings cannot be understood properly without linking them to her life and character. By situating Weil's political thought within the context of the intellectual climate of her time, Moulakis connects it also to her epistemology, her cosmology, and her personal experience. _Simone Weil and the Politics of Self-Denial_ presents the unfolding of Weil's philosophical life against the backdrop of the political and social conditions of the last days of the Third French Republic, the Spanish Civil War, and the rise and clash of totalitarian ideologies. The ideological climate of the age—of which Weil herself was not quite free—was indeed the major "obstacle" in the struggle against which she fashioned her critical, intellectual, and moral tools. Weil has been categorized a number of ways: as a saint and a near convert to Roman Catholicism, as a social critic, or as an analytic philosopher. Moulakis examines _all_ aspects of Weil's thought in the indissoluble unity in which she lived them. This thorough investigation pursues the particular intellectual affiliations and the social and political experiential stimuli of Weil's work while simultaneously teasing out the timeless themes that her own timely analysis was intended to reveal. (shrink)

Le projet d’une apologétique que Blondel concrétise en 1913 dans Comment réaliser l’apologétique intégrale ? s’inscrit dans un contexte culturel français particulièrement riche et, de ce fait, complexe. Il est aussi marqué par un événement particulièrement grave, le décret romain du 5 mai 1913 suspendant les Annales de philosophie chrétienne dirigées par le P. Laberthonnière avec la collaboration de Blondel. L’auteur explicite d’abord le contexte de l’intervention de Blondel en 1913, contexte où les événements littéraires ont une grande part, mais (...) où les incidences politiques marquées d’anticléricalisme, ne sont pas négligeables. C’est dans ce contexte que paraît l’ouvrage de Blondel qui veut montrer que le Catholicisme est un fait qui s’impose inévitablement, le point de vue de l’interlocuteur étant primordial dans ses exigences de raison et la variété de ses objections. Fondamentalement, la tâche de l’apologiste est de répondre aux questions difficiles que se pose l’homme qui pense. L’importance de l’ouvrage de Blondel, qui tient aux prolégomènes qu’il expose, provoquera paradoxalement de nombreux malentendus dont l’auteur expose les principaux, permettant de rétablir l’originalité et la force du projet blondélien.The project of an apologetics that Blondel put together in 1913 in How to realise the integral apologetics ? fits into a French cultural context especially rich and, for this reason, complex. It is also marked by a particularly serious event, the Roman decree of May 5, 1913, suspending the Annales de philosophie chrétienne directed by Father Laberthonnière with Blondel’s collaboration. The author first describes the context of Blondel’s intervention in 1913, a context where literary events play a big part, but where political incidents, marked by anticlericalism, are not negligible. It is in this context that the work of Blondel appears. He wants to show that Catholicism is a fact that imposes itself inevitably, the point of view of the interlocutor being primordial in his demands of reason and the variety of his objections. Fundamentally, the work of the apologist is to answer the difficult questions that arise to the person who reflects. The importance of Blondel’s work, which is based on the prolegomena that he expounds, will paradoxically provoke many misunderstandings, of which the author exposes the principle ones, but allows the originality and power of Blondel’s project to be restored. (shrink)

Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the indeterminate and undecidable? In _Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint_, French feminist philosopher Hélène Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that play through the life and works of one of the greatest living philosophers. Cixous is a lifelong friend of Derrida. They both grew (...) up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of exclusion and nonbelonging"--not Algerian, rejected by France, their Jewishness concealed or acculturated. In Derrida's family "one never said 'circumcision'but 'baptism,'not 'Bar Mitzvah'but 'communion.'" Judaism cloaked in Catholicism is one example of the undecidability of identity that influenced the thinker whom Cixous calls a "Jewish Saint." An intellectual contemporary of Derrida, Cixous's ideas on writing have an affinity with his philosophy of deconstruction, which sought to overturn binary oppositions--such as man/woman, or Jew/non-Jew--and blur boundaries of exclusion inherent in Western thought. In portraying Derrida, Cixous uses metonymy, alliteration, rhyme, neologisms, and puns to keep the text in constant motion, freeing language from any rigidity of meaning. In this way she writes a portrait of "Derrida in flight," slipping from one appearance to the next, unable to be fixed in one spot, yet encompassing each point he passes. From the circumcision act to family relationships, through Derrida's works to those of Celan, Rousseau, and Beaumarchais, Cixous effortlessly merges biography and textual commentary in this playful portrait of the man, his works, and being (or not being) Jewish. (shrink)

The first publication of seminal early writing by Louis Althusser. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser enjoyed virtually unrivalled status as the foremost living Marxist philosopher. Today, he is remembered as the scourge and severest critic of "humanist" or Hegelian Marxism, as the proponent of rigorously scientific socialism, and as the theorist who posited a sharp rupture—an epistemological break—between the early and the late Marx. This collection of texts from the period 1945-1953 turns these interpretations of Althusser on their (...) head: we discover that there was a "young Althusser" as well as the "mature Althusser" we are already familiar with. In his fascinating Master's thesis, "On Content in the Thought of G.W.F. Hegel" (1947), Althusser developed a position which he was later to attack ferociously: namely, that the revolutionary potential of the Hegelian dialectic could be defended against Hegel's own political conservatism. We see Althusser still wrestling with the spectres of Hegel and of Catholicism in another long text, his letter to Jean Lacroix, and, finally, we see his own "epistemological break" in the piece "On Marxism" from 1953. Other texts included are his critique of Alexander KojÅve (whose interpretation Francis Fukoyama has recently revived) and his attack on the French Church's teachings on women, sex and the family. Widely recognized as an intellectual giant of the late twentieth century, Althusser has left a towering legacy. This collection not only gives a unique insight into the formation of such a personality, but will also restore the "unknown Althusser" to the centre of the history of Marxism and of philosophy since the Second World War. (shrink)

The academic community in the West tends to be suspicious of Russian philosophy, often relegating it to another category, such as “ideology” or “social thought.” But what is philosophy? There is no simple universal definition, and many thinkers consider it impossible to formulate one. The most credible attempt is nominalistic: philosophy is the practice in which Plato and Aristotle were involved. As Alfred North Whitehead wrote, “The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a (...) series of footnotes to Plato.”If so, then Russian thought needs to be understood as an important part of the Western philosophical heritage, given that it offers perhaps the most elaborate set of footnotes to Plato's most mature and comprehensive dialogues: the Republic and the Laws. The status of ideas in Russian philosophy mirrors Plato's vision of them as ontological and political entities, “laws,” or ideal principles—as distinct from mere epistemic units or tools of cognition. The Platonic tendency to integrate and implement religious, philosophical, and political teachings culminated in twentieth-century Russia. In the Soviet state, perhaps more than anywhere else in history, philosophy became a supreme legal and political institution, acquiring the power of a suprapersonal, universal reason. Hence thought itself, in the moment of its triumph, became a prisoner in the social structures that Soviet ideocracy erected on a philosophical foundation. In discussing Russian philosophy, we inevitably consider the practical application of Platonic conceptions by the Soviet ideocracy to a state in which philosophy was called upon to rule.According to Sergei Averintsev, the emphasis on Platonism in the Russian intellectual tradition is nothing to be proud of; it should rather be lamented and repented. Despite the obvious Platonic preferences of Russian thinkers (from Ivan Kireyevsky to Aleksei Losev), Averintsev asks whether even now we might be able to reorient the tradition toward Aristotle instead—toward a more secular, tolerant, and analytic philosophy of human nature. “If Plato is the first utopian,” Averintsev writes, “Aristotle is the first thinker to look the spirit of utopia right in the eye and overcome it.... Aristotle's technique of thought is more neutral toward religion than is Plato's ecstasy.” Characteristically, the name index to the Palgrave Handbook of Russian Thought contains almost twice as many mentions of Plato as of Aristotle.Each national tradition has its own “strange attractor,” as they say now in complexity theory. English empiricism, French rationalism, German Idealism, American pragmatism... However stereotypical these generalizations are, they help to clarify the nations’ distinctive contributions to philosophy. Where does Russia stand in this row? I think that Caryl Emerson is correct to pinpoint, among the most distinctive features of the Russian intellectual tradition, the striving for “wholeness” (tselostnost’). Many Russian thinkers seem to evade definitive and particular “isms,” preferring to find ways of complementing (and thus diluting) those that are on offer. Faced with the claims for rationalism, for example, the Russian response tends to be that true rationality is or should be coupled with fullness of feeling. The characteristic Russian “ism” is at best “holism,” at worst “totalitarianism,” and is usually directed against Western thought. Kireyevsky declares: There [in the West] is a bifurcation [razdvoenie] of the spirit, a bifurcation of thoughts, a bifurcation of the sciences, a bifurcation of the state, a bifurcation of estates, a bifurcation of society, a bifurcation of family rights and duties, a bifurcation of morality and the heart.... In Russia, on the contrary, there is a predominant tendency toward the wholeness of the inner and the outer, of public and moral being.Vladimir Solovyov held that the goal of all knowledge was to comprehend “total unity” and to overcome all kinds of unilateralism, which he referred to as “abstract elements” (otvlechennye nachala). These one-sided elements included Realism, rationalism, empiricism, and positivism, all of which had been advanced by Western philosophical movements.Reading the Handbook, I was struck by how steadily, from one thinker to another, the concept of “unity” is reiterated in various synonyms and contexts: “all-unity,” “wholeness,” “totality,” “integrity,” “edinstvo,” “tsel'nost,’” “tselostnost,” “sobornost,” and so forth. Russian thinkers endeavor not to create something original and special but to unify everything that has already been done and known. Consider opponents, like the Slavophiles and Westernizers; take Petr Chaadaev and Vissarion Belinsky, Kireyevsky and Alexander Herzen, Dostoevsky and Solovyov—all are united by this “super-idea,” proclaiming its embodiment to be the all-embracing vocation of the Russian people. At the same time, they sharply reject all “private principles” and “trashy certainty” (Belinsky's driannaia opredelennost’)—anything that restricts and divides individuals or nations. All these forms of privacy and particularity must be overcome on the way to a universal whole that is even greater in scale than Western Catholicism. According to this logic of totality, we would be better off left with nothing than to be content with the particular and the limited. The first original Russian thinker, Chaadaev (1794–1856), makes the salto mortale of declaring Russia a country that has given nothing to the world, then proclaiming that Russia's destiny is to rise above the rest of the world and resolve all its contradictions. From nothing to everything: such are the philosophical foundations for the totalitarian aspiration of Russian thought, which eventually expressed itself in the revolutionary movements and communist experiments of the twentieth century.As is well known, Russian literature is considered in the West a far more powerful and original expression of philosophical ideas than Russian philosophy as such. Characteristically, then, almost half of the Handbook, its entire second part, is devoted to the dialogue of Russian philosophy with literature and art. As M. N. Forster remarks in the Handbook's concluding essay: “It is natural to wonder why this striking asymmetry between relatively modest achievements in pure philosophy and spectacularly high achievements in literature came about.” To the literary focus of Russian philosophy, we can add a political focus. At least a third of part one of the Handbook is devoted to Russian political and revolutionary philosophy, to Lenin and other Marxists, to Ivan Ilyin, and so on. In this context, both literature and politics assumed philosophical dimensions, often overshadowing philosophy itself.Bertrand Russell lamented that the system of philosophical categories in the West featured mostly nouns (being, consciousness, idea, matter, substance, and so forth), omitting adjectives, verbs, prefixes, and other parts of speech. This criticism should be applied to the category philosophy itself. Why the noun philosophy rather than the adjective philosophical, which can be applied to many areas of activity and creativity, including literature and politics?In Russian intellectual history, the philosophical, rather than philosophy, is the predominant category. The state, ideology, economics, politics and geopolitics, literature, art, warfare, space exploration—all these spheres in Russia and the USSR have been and remain abundantly philosophical, subordinated to certain philosophical tasks, though philosophy as such has never been as developed and sophisticated as in the West. As a discipline, Western philosophy “outsourced” itself to Russian disciples, leaving it to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Lenin and Trotsky, to test in literary and political practices a host of Western philosophical ideas, from those of Plato, Rousseau, and Hegel to those of Feuerbach, Marx, and Nietzsche.Likewise, the verb to philosophize is used in ways unusual and awkward in the West. “It is characteristic of the Russian people to philosophize [filosofstvovat'],” as Nikolai Berdyaev observed: “An illiterate Russian peasant likes to pose questions of a philosophical nature—about the meaning of life, about God, about eternal life, about evil and untruth, about how to realize the Kingdom of God.” The philosophical and philosophizing, as attributes and actions of the state and society, overpowered philosophy as a noun—as an academic discipline, if you will. Russian philosophy has had a very modest impact on the West, but the impact of the philosophical has been immense. Nineteenth-century Russian literature influenced Western culture with its philosophical interrogations and existential dilemmas, just as, in the twentieth century, the USSR influenced the West with the philosophical ideas (Marxism, materialism, dialectics, collectivism, socialism, communism) that determined Soviet ideology, politics, and economics.In the USSR of the 1920 and 1930s, for instance, philosophy as an independent academic subject was in a subdued position, as a servant of party ideology. But, meanwhile, the sphere of the philosophical spread to such distant domains as theater (Stanislavsky), physiology (Pavlov), and agriculture (Michurin), with all such activities glorified and sponsored by the state as “philosophically correct”—as faithful to “materialism” and “Realism.” Paradoxically, in the quintessentially philosophical state that was the USSR, the state of philosophy, with the repression of all independent thought and thinkers, was miserable. The fateful and often disastrous originality of Russian philosophy consisted precisely in its dissemination to other areas, in an act of kenosis or self-transcendence that can be viewed both as an aggressive philosophical appropriation of politics, economics, ideology, and literature—and as philosophy's sacrificial devotion to the world beyond its professional boundaries.So there are three features that make Russian thought relevant and dangerous: its Platonic utopian aspiration; its spirit of totality; and its tendency to transcend the boundaries of academic philosophy and to philosophize society, politics, and life in general. Russian philosophy has not been as good at explaining the world as at changing it, sometimes ethically and poetically, sometimes violently and aggressively. Teachers and students of Russian culture should be deeply motivated to draw more attention to the philosophical in Russia and to raise its status in the Western academy. In my view, we would do better service to Russian philosophy if we are frank enough to qualify it as dangerous, sometimes very toxic and addictive, fraught with totalistic tendencies. This philosophy is the voice of the “underground,” both in the Dostoevskian and Leninist senses.At the same time, however, the antidotes concocted in the Russian metaphysical laboratory are of enormous value: the Russian versions of personalism, existentialism, secular and religious liberalism, neorationalism, culturology, conceptualism, and postmodernism. These movements, which counteract totalization, need to be studied precisely because they were cooked up and tested under the same extreme conditions in which the most dangerous intellectual poisons have been produced. (shrink)

This topical collection of eleven commissioned essays by well-established contributors from sociology, religious studies and theology, is one of the first treatments of the relationship between postmodernity and religion from a sociological perspective. The essays cover a diversity of interests, but treat postmodernity in terms of its implications for the self, the New Age and theology, particularly Catholicism and Judaism. Two of the essays are original appraisals of two important French writers on religion: Jean-Luc Marion and Daniele Hervieu-Leger.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Traité des premières véritésby Claude G. BuffierJeffrey D. BursonClaude G. Buffier. Traité des premières vérités. Édition, présentation et notes par Louis Rouquayrol. Textes cartésiens en langue française. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 2020. Pp. 379. Paperback, €32.00.Born in Poland to French parents, Claude G. Buffier, SJ (1661–1737) emerged as one of the most influential of the Parisian scriptores librorumin the first decades of the eighteenth century. Buffier (...) is perhaps best known as one of the founding editors of, and contributors to, the influential French Jesuit periodical Mémoires de Trévoux, but his works on general grammar, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and logic earned him widespread renown. His Grammaire françaiseachieved translation into Spanish, German, Italian, and English, and his Cours de sciences sur des principes nouveaux et simples pour former le langage, l'esprit, et le cœur dans l'usage ordinaire de la vie(1715) was widely adopted in France and Spain throughout the eighteenth century. Buffier's eclectic approach to philosophy, science, moral philosophy, and practical theology developed across several significant works: Principes du raisonnement(1714), Traité des premières vérités(1724), Éléments de métaphysique(1725), and Exposition des preuves les plus sensibles de la véritable religion(1732). In these works, Buffier was prescient in selectively adopting perspectives from Descartes, Malebranche, and Locke, evincing thereby his avid interest and participation in early Enlightenment discussions. Many of Buffier's texts proved to be influential on contributors to the Encyclopédie, on Voltaire, and perhaps later, as harbingers of Scottish Common Sense philosophy. Given the growing recognition of Buffier's importance thanks to the work of Kathleen Wilkins, Catherine Northeast, Jeffrey Burson, Katharine Hammerton, and others, Louis Rouquayrol's new critical edition of Buffier's most influential work, Traité des premières vérités( Treatise of First Truths) is most welcome. Rouquayrol's critical edition of the Traitéis replete with helpful [End Page 156]intertextual explanatory notes to the texts and debates that Buffier addressed, and it includes an insightful synthetic introduction, which summarizes the Traitéand addresses aspects of its philosophical and historical significance. The editor also helpfully includes a detailed chronology of Buffier's life and works, a note about the textual bases for the edition, several instructive appendices to later editions and related works by Buffier, and a profoundly helpful bibliography that includes existing editions, copies, and translations of the Traité, in addition to scholarly studies of Buffier's life and work. Rouquayrol's critical edition is, in short, the best one currently available, and it is likely to remain the standard published edition for some time.In the editor's view, Buffier's primary significance is as the inaugural eighteenth-century figure who attempted to redress the weaknesses at the heart of Cartesian "innate ideas" in ways that might have avoided Berkeley's or Malebranche's immaterialism or Hume's skepticism: "pour lutter contre les 'conséquences idéalistes du cartésianisme,'" Buffier "avait eu plutôt recours au sens commun comme à un 'complément nécessaire du sense intime, qui garantit l'existence du monde extérieur'" (13n2, quoting Étienne Gilson). This "solution mitigée" allowed for a certain reconciliation between Descartes and the "empirisme tempéré" of Locke, and more broadly, a way of moderating "les principes des Modernes" with "les poncifs des Anciens" (13). This conciliation of Lockean empiricism and certain strands of Cartesianism found in Buffier was in fact a central point made by my earlier work on Buffier's contribution to eighteenth-century Enlightenment Catholicism (see Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment[South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010]; also "Claude G. Buffier and the Maturation of the Jesuit Synthesis in the Age of Enlightenment," Intellectual History Review21 [2011]: 449–72). Rouquayrol's effort to revisit the complexities of this conciliation in his introduction is a welcome development. He explicitly reminds us that while Jesuits such as Buffier were prohibited from teaching particular theses associated with Descartes after 1706, they were nevertheless increasingly influenced by aspects of Cartesianism (15–17). In many... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:706 BOOK REVIEWS struments of redemption for others. Mary is the primary exemplar of receiving her Son's redeeming love in freedom and of wholeheartedly mediating his graces to all he has redeemed. The final essay, "Mary and Modernity," is most timely for American Christians and ecumenists. It is a very worthwhile attempt to compare and contrast the secular triad of virtues, liberty, equality, and fraternity with the Christian triad (...) of theological virtues, faith, hope, and love, especially as they are exemplified in Mary. Although this approach perceives Mary more as a " sign of contradiction " to our secularistic culture, she will help us to avoid the extremes of confusing true freedom with licence, genuine equality with egalitarianism, and authentic fraternity with collectivism by helping inspire in us the really liberating values of her Son's Gospel. Everyone can benefit immensely from the intelligent reading of this book. Mt. St. Mary's Seminary Emmitsburg, Maryland FREDERICK M. JELLY, O.P. Dieu et l'etre d'apres Thomas d'Aquin et Hegel. By EMILIO BRITO. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1991. Pp. 422. 245 francs. Sprung from premature fears of post-modernity or from an ignorant nostalgia for a monoform Catholicism which never existed, universal dismissals of " modernity " still appear occasionally in Catholic j ournals. They recall,the neo-scholastic te:xitbooks prior to Vatican II in whose pages the " moderni " (among whom were numbered not only "Kantiani" but "Hegeliani ") were dismissed by authors who, having read a few pages, were incapable of grasping the basic directions of philosophy from Herder to Heidegger. Emilio Brito, S.J., however, follows in the line of the French and German Jesuits: through this century they have sustained a varied dialogue, in philosophy and theology, between Thomas Aquinas and the important figures of modern philosophy. His two works on Hegel's Christology, and a third large study of God and creation in Schelling are now followed by this comparative work. The theology of Aquinas and the philosophy of Hegel are like two galaxies. Do they move past each other at a distance, or do they move through each other guarding a proper identity with similar forces and shared motifs? Brito has chosen one theme within these two vast realms of thought: his topic (and the book's title can mislead) is God; 'being' BOOK REVIEWS 707 is present as a stimulus to our reflection about God. After an introduction on recent interpretations of Hegel, particularly by Catholics, pages which should be read by all interested in contemporary theology, there are three sections: " the knowledge and naming of God," " the divine substance and the cycle of its attributes," and " the operations of absolute spirit." The chapters in each of the three areas present Aquinas's and then Hegel's thought, and sometimes a section of further comparison. At the end of the work Brito offers a conclusion ("God's Goodness") and a postlude ("God's Beauty"). Finally there is a "Resume." According to Brito, Aquinas's thought is clear (his Aristotelian logic is readily understandable), and his emphasis lies with the divine transcendence. Despite the process-format of the Summa theologiae and the traces of history in the headship of Christ, the diversity of sacraments, and the theologies of faith and natural law, his modest description of movement in God and in God's world of beings stands in contrast to the unleashed and unresolved development penetrating Hegel's Geist. The concluding " Resume " of nine pages is particularly valuable as it brings together the author's synthetic insights into Aquinas and Hegel (one might hope that at least it would appear in translation). The following excerpt displays its balance and clarity. The God of the Summa tends to stay back from mediation, letting itself exist in a certain exteriority, while the Hegelian absolute " raises out" the determinations it posits only by also absorbing them negatively. In the same vein, the Hegelian parousia of the negative abolishes absolutely the distance maintained by the inexpressible in language. In an opposite direction, the originating positivity of the God of Thomas grounds the irreducible presence of a reality represented in discourse. If he is a stranger to this approach and more... (shrink)

Despite the existence of distinctive female personalities and individual interventions on behalf of women, feminism – understood as a mass movement – remained a rarity in Spain until April 14, 1931; that is, until the proclamation of the Second Republic. For feminism to triumph, two things were necessary: first, the popularization of the ideas represented by the French Revolution, and second, the Industrial Revolution. Neither of these two prerequisites existed in Spain until the Second Republic and the country remained (...) in the grip of conservative Catholicism, without anything resembling the Industrial Revolution that was happening in the rest of Europe. (shrink)

Was Joseph de Maistre a conservative thinker?; an actor who might at any time switch roles with his alleged British counterpart Edmund Burke in a show called “Reactions to the French Revolution”? Or was de Maistre (as Sir Isaiah Berlin saw him) a milestone on mankind’s rush to the “Age of Unreason” in general, and to the Nazi folly in particular? To answer this controversy, Professor Michael Shafir called on the witness’ stand an unexpected expert in conservatism and the (...) folly of revolutions: Romanian playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Using as evidence before the court Caragiale’s famous farce “Master Leonida Facing Reaction”, this exercise in literary counterfactualism demonstrates, according to Shafir, the fig of reason and faith is too small to cover the wastelands of unreason and Social-Darwinist-like psychopathology. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Baudelaire’s Satanic VersesJonathan Culler (bio)Paul Verlaine was perhaps the first to declare the centrality of Baudelaire to what we may now call modern French studies: Baudelaire’s profound originality is to “représenter puissament et essentiellement l’homme moderne” [599–600]. Whether Baudelaire embodies or portrays modern man, Les Fleurs du mal is seen as exemplary of modern experience, of the possibility of experiencing or dealing with what, taking Paris as the (...) exemplary modern city, we have come to call the modern world. T. S. Eliot wrote, “Baudelaire is indeed the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language, for his verse and language is the nearest thing to a complete renovation that we have experienced. But his renovation of an attitude towards life is no less radical and no less important” [426]. And outside the field of literature we find such affirmations as Harold Rosenberg’s dating of “the tradition of the New” to Baudelaire, “who exactly one hundred years ago invited fugitives from the too-narrow world of memory to come aboard with him in search of the new” [11]. Baudelaire, writes another critic, “did more than anyone else in the nineteenth century to make the men and women of his century aware of themselves as moderns.... If we had to nominate a first modernist, Baudelaire would surely be the man” [Berman 132–33].There seems to be considerable agreement on this point, but, surprisingly, there is great difference of opinion about what it is that makes Baudelaire modern and worthy of special attention. Is it, as Albert Thibaudet and Walter Benjamin argue, that he was the first true poet of the city, the first to take the alienated experience of life in the modern city as the norm? Or is it, as Leo Bersani claims, that Baudelaire discovered and displayed the mobility of fantasy and of the desiring imagination? Or is it, as Paul de Man maintains, that Baudelaire invents modern self-consciousness about poetry itself, producing poems that allegorically expose the operations of the lyric?There are many competing accounts of what is most particularly modern and important about Baudelaire, but the one thing on which contentious critics seem to agree is that there is a side of Baudelaire that is of no interest today, that belongs to a bas romantisme and is the very antithesis of Baudelaire’s modernity, of Baudelaire the founder of modern poetry: this is the Baudelaire who invokes demons and the Devil. Most critics today pass over this in silence, but even those who explicitly address this Baudelaire seem to find him an embarrassment. Even the author of a book entitled The Demonic Imagination: Style and Theme in French Romantic Poetry begins his chapter on Baudelaire: “Baudelaire has, by now, ceased to interest us for the reasons which once appeared important: his diabolical Catholicism is a familiar, historical mode of sensibility which neither shocks nor has morbid appeal...” [Houston 85]. And Fredric Jameson distinguishes the modernist and the postmodernist Baudelaires—both worthy of our attention—from what he calls the “second-rate post-Romantic Baudelaire, the Baudelaire [End Page 86] of diabolism and of cheap frisson, the poet of blasphemy and of a creaking and musty religious machinery that was no more interesting in the mid-nineteenth century than it is today” [427].But Baudelaire called his collection “Les Fleurs du mal” and opens it with a poem that declares, “C’est le Diable qui tient le fils qui nous remuent [it’s the Devil who holds the strings that move us]” [OC 1: 5; FE 5]. Can this be dismissed as an irrelevancy—something mistakenly appended to this quintessentially modern poetry? That critics of such different orientations should agree in shunting aside the Satanic Baudelaire suggests that there is something worth investigating here, something disquieting and embarrassing, which may not in fact be merely trivial—which may complicate the story of modernity that has come to depend on Baudelaire as its originator. Perhaps the Satanic Baudelaire would tell us things about modernity we don’t want to know.Certainly the idea of the Devil seems fundamentally at odds with accounts of modernity. Even Christianity itself seems to... (shrink)

This article examines the reputation of John Henry Newman in France between the end of the First World War and the end of the Second. One effect of the controversy over Modernism was that Newman, despite his great popularity in France in the late nineteenth century as a convert to Catholicism, was not widely appreciated between the wars as an original thinker, either in the French Catholic Church or in the philosophical community. Henri Bremond's popular pre-war psychological biography (...) of Newman had been rather misleading. Jean Guitton's 1933 thesis was a rare attempt to show the importance of Newman's ideas about time and development, which offered a robust theology of history as a challenge to the increasing dominance of Hegelian views. Debates about Christian philosophy largely ignored Newman, as did the emerging disciplines of phenomenology and existentialism, at least in their French forms. No one really championed Newman consistently in France until Maurice Nédoncelle embarked on his long-term project of translating, editing and explaining the full range of his work for a new generation . People then began to discover, to their surprise, that these movements in philosophy, as well as the ‘nouvelle théologie’ movement in the Church, were all to some extent indebted to Newman, through some of his early French admirers such as Laberthonnière and Ollé-Laprune; and the relevance of his thought to the post-war world at last began to be acknowledged. (shrink)

Book review in this Article The Ethos of the Bible. By Birger Gerhardsson. The Prophets, Vol. 1: The Assyrian Period. By Klaus Koch. The Gospel according to Saint John, Vol. 3. By Rudolf Schnackenburg. The Social Setting of Pauline Christianity. By Gerd Theissen. Jewish and Christian Self‐Definition, Vol. 3: Self‐Definition in the Craeco‐Roman World. Edited by Ben F. Meyer and E.P. Sanders. The Church and Healing. Edited by W.J. Sheils. Miracles and the Medieval Mind: Theory, Record and Event, 1000 to (...) 1215. By Benedicta Ward. The Luminous Vision; Six Medieval Mystics and their Teaching. By Anne Bancroft. Astrology in the Renaissance: The Zodiac of Life. By Eugenio Garin. Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg 1480–1599. By M.U. Umgang mil Luther. By Gerhard Ebeling. The Reformation and the English People. By J.J. Scarisbrick. Between Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: Jean‐Robert Chouet and the Introduction of Cartesian Science in the Academy of Geneva. By Michael Heyd. Richard Crashaw and the Spanish Golden Age. By R.V. Young. The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century: The Religion of Rabelais. By Lucien Febvre, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb. History of Christianity in India, Vol. II: From the Middle of the 16th to the End of the 17th Century. By Joseph Thekkedath. The Vatican and the American Hierarchy from 1870 to 1965. By Gerald P. Fogarty. Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism: The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914. By Michael Sutton. George Tyrrell and the Catholic Tradition. By Ellen Leonard. The Testing of the Churches 1932–1982: A Symposium. Edited by Rupert Davies. The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage. By B.A. Gerrish. An Introduction to Protestant Theology. By Helmut Gollwitzer. Dialogues on Morality and Religion. By Jakob Friedrich Fries. American Catholic Social Ethics: Twentieth‐Century Approaches. By Charles E. Curran. Ethical Issues in Reproductive Medicine. Edited by Maurice Reidy. Michel Foucault: Social Theory as Transgression. By Charles C. Lemert and Garth Gillan. Last Writingson the Philosophy of Psychology. Vol. I. By Ludwig Wittgenstein. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. By Michael J. Sandel. Free Speech: A Philosophical Enquiry. By Frederick Schauer. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. By Walter J. Ong. Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa. By James W. Fernandez. Selfless Persons. By Steven Collins. Understanding Jewish Mysticism: A Source Reader Edited by David R. Blumenthal. The Epistle on the Possibility of Conjunction with the Active Intellect, by Ibn Rushd, with the Commentary of Moses Narboni. Edited and translated by Kalman P. Bland. (shrink)