The French Semaines sociales movement, which was founded in 1904 to promote social reform in the spirit of Rerum novarum, soon ran into difficulties as the Modernist crisis intensified during the pontificate of Pius X – difficulties, it might be added, that were to be overcome since the movement is alive and well today. In 1909, two years after the publication of the decree Lamentabili and the encyclical Pascendi, the Semaines sociales president, Henri Lorin, faced sharp criticisms from certain clerical quarters: he was taxed in particular with “sociological modernism” and with confusing the natural order and the Christian supernatural order. Maurice Blondel came to Lorin's defence with a series of articles entitled ‘La Semaine sociale de Bordeaux’ that were published under the pseudonym of “Testis” in 1909 and 1910 in the Annales de philosophie chrétienne, a periodical which by that time was owned by Blondel and edited by Lucien Laberthonnière. It was in the course of these articles that Blondel developed his concept of “extrinsicist monophorism” to denote and denounce the twin ideas that the natural order and supernatural orders lay separately one below the other and that faith, understood in this crude metaphysical framework, was perforce a one-way affair, something adopted by the subject, having been bestowed essentially from outside. Coincidentally, in the second half of 1909, a young Jesuit, Pedro Descoqs, published a series of articles in the periodical Études under the title ‘À travers l’œuvre de M. Ch. Maurras: essai critique’; these articles amounted to a qualified apology for the political and social ideas of the agnostic leader of the Action Française movement, who championed a royalist and ferociously anti-Republican (and anti-Semitic) brand of nationalism and who had endeared himself to many Catholics during the worst years of political anti-clericalism (1902–1906) with his defence of the Roman Church as the bastion of civilization and “order”. For the purposes of his argument in ‘La Semaine sociale de Bordeaux’, Blondel seized upon the Études articles and added Descoqs to his gallery of “monophorist” miscreants. Indeed, from early 1910, the question of Catholic support for the Action Française displaced the Semaines sociales movement as the main focus of Blondel's attention. Suffering from poor health, he was to tire of the debate by the end of 1910, but Descoqs pursued it unilaterally into 1913, publishing and republishing, eventually in the form of two separate books, his original articles and his riposte to Blondel.
Retrospectively, this debate assumed a new significance in December 1926 when Pius XI condemned Maurras and the Action Française. But Peter Bernardi's main interest has lain elsewhere. He has been primarily concerned with the intellectual substance of the differences between Blondel and Descoqs, rather than with how their debate might be seen to have had a clear winner from an ecclesiastical standpoint a decade and a half later. It was a debate of calibre inasmuch as it pitched the author of L’Action: essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique (1893) – which became a seminal work for philosopher-theologians already before the First World War (notably Pierre Rousselot and Joseph Maréchal) – against a philosopher and theologian, who, if much less well known, proved nonetheless, in the words of the late Emerich Coreth, to be “the last great representative of the Suarezian tradition”. Bernardi's book, the fruit of a doctoral thesis prepared at the Catholic University of America under the supervision of Joseph Komonchak, provides an excellent analysis of the theological issues at stake, centring on the question of the proper understanding of the nature-supernatural relationship. He has combined, moreover, theological acumen with detailed background knowledge derived from much archival research. As to his conclusions, Bernardi effectively allows Descoqs's claim that he was misrepresented by Blondel on the “neuralgic” issue of the relation between the natural order and the supernatural end (here the French Jesuit's appeal to the concept of “obediential potency”, following Suárez and Ripalda, is elucidated); and questioned by Bernardi is whether what he terms the “supernaturalized” reality in Blondel's philosophy was conceptually imbalanced. On the other hand, he argues that Blondel's philosophical approach led to a better insight of the fundamentally anti-Christian character of Maurras's ideas. If there is an overall conclusion, it is that “neither disputant can claim a total victory” and that “each had important insights that were corrective of the other's position” (p. 268). The final chapter is enriched by pages in which the debate is related to different understandings of the nature-supernatural relationship on the part of such theologians as John Courtney Murray, Gregory Baum, Charles Davis, David Schindler, and John Milbank.
Given the precise focus of Bernardi's book, the considerable role played by Laberthonnière in the debate with Descoqs over Maurras and his nationalist movement is, necessarily, largely overlooked. In 1910 and 1911, Laberthonnière backed Blondel by launching a blistering attack on both Descoqs and the Action Française, first in the Annales de philosophie chrétienne and then in the book Positivisme et catholicisme à propos de l’Action française. Like Blondel, he took Maurras to task for his predilection for the ideas of Auguste Comte. With his Suarezian concept of the (relative) autonomy of the natural order, Descoqs had been less bothered. Whether there could be some accommodation between Catholicism and a view of the world associated with Comte's positivism was, indeed, a key issue in the debate. Yet, on a point of detail, Bernardi is wrong to say that “it would be hard to overestimate [Auguste Comte's] intellectual sway in fin de siècle France” (p. 73n). The government-blessed inauguration of Comte's bust in the Place de la Sorbonne in 1902, mentioned by Bernardi, was out of phase with the direction of philosophy in academic circles; Henri Bergson's star was on the rise in the first decade of the new century and the Revue de métaphysique et de morale was already established.
The book's scholarly apparatus (footnotes, selected bibliography, and index) is of high quality. Missing, however, is any reference in the bibliography to the current Œuvres complètes editions of Maurice Blondel's philosophical writings, whose publication by Presses Universitaires de France started in 1995 and whose first two mammoth volumes cover the period up to 1913.
Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism, & Action Française represents a significant contribution to the history of French Catholic philosophy and theology in the twentieth century. It will, for instance, be of keen interest to scholars looking at the development of Henri de Lubac's thought. De Lubac and others of that brilliant generation of French Jesuits (for example, Gaston Fessard and Yves de Montcheuil) not only dissented from the Suarezianism taught to them by Descoqs in the 1920s at the French Jesuit philosophy scholasticate on the island of Jersey, but their very dissent and their related appreciation of Blondel's philosophy served as a huge spur for their own thinking (for de Lubac and Descoqs, see the second volume of Georges Chantraine's monumental biography Henri de Lubac, subtitled Les années de formation, published by Les Éditions du Cerf in 2009). More generally, Peter Bernardi has illuminated a debate whose core issues have not lost their relevance for theological reflection after the passage of a hundred years.
