‘CATHOLIC PHILOSOPHY’?

The words ‘Catholic’ and ‘philosophy’ form an uneasy combination which arguably should not exist at all, since it seems to carry the misleading implication that all the authors to whom it refers had an allegiance to Rome, and reduces to a questionable common denominator a number of thinkers whose views were sometimes conflicting. It is therefore preferable to speak of ‘Catholic philosophers’ in the plural, or, if we still insist on using the expression, to put the epithet between cautious quotation marks: ‘Catholic philosophy’.

One thinker to whom the term ‘Catholic philosophy’ could, in a sense, be applied was Maurice Blondel (1861–1949), despite the fact that, in his anxiety to avoid the accusation that his philosophy was an apologetics, he was careful to point out in a revealingly entitled book Le problème de la Philosophie Catholique (1932) that he had not used this problematical expression ‘one single time’ in his earlier classic work L'Action (1893). Even so he wanted to restore it to its original, etymological, meaning of universality, the full significance of which was indissociable from the ecclesiastical dimension. Thus, in the third part of the work, he endeavoured in twenty pages to demonstrate ‘in what sense, with what reservations, and at what price “Catholic” … philosophy is conceivable and achievable’. This was logically in keeping with his Pan-Christianism, which was stated with supreme self-assurance in La philosophie et l'Esprit chrétien (1944), the fourth part of a ‘tetralogy’ of works written with a common purpose, the other parts being La Pensée (1934), L'Etre et les Etres (1935), and a new volume again entitled L'Action (1936–7).