David G. Schultenover's edited volume, The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, illustrates with clarity and specificity the influence of William James's pragmatism on Catholic thought in France. The purpose of the book, as stated in the introduction by John Shook and Schultenover, is “to show that Roman Catholic Modernism was not the circumscribed, parochial affair it is often thought to be” (19). Instead, it was the result of an intellectual tradition that drew upon the Enlightenment and Romanticism in response to neo-Scholasticism, all with the help of William James's pragmatism. Not since Darrell Jodock's Catholicism Contending with Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) have scholars so transformed the study of the “Modernist Crisis” in the Catholic Church.

Despite the convoluted title—“Vivo ergo cogito: Modernism as Temporalization and Its Discontents: A Propaedeutic to This Collection”—Stephen Schloesser's opening chapter is a masterful analysis of how American pragmatists and Catholic Modernists responded to idealism and positivism at a time when secularization and scholasticism were on the rise. Schloesser identifies experience, realism, and determinism as the three key concerns of William James, John Dewey, and Charles Peirce. Moreover, Catholic Modernists were equally engaged in “catholic concerns—concerns shared universally with the major intellectual currents of that era” (25). John Shook, in a similar manner, describes American pragmatism and French Catholic Modernism as “reactions against both rationalism and conservatism” (59), though condemnation of “modernism” in Pascendi dominici gregis (1907) proved considerably more influential for French Catholic philosophers.

The remaining six chapters recount the intellectual and sometimes personal relationships between William James and the following Catholic Modernists: Henri Bergson, Charles Renouvier, Maurice Blondel, Édouard Le Roy, Marcel Hébert, and George Tyrrell. Frédéric Worms tracks the convergence and divergence of James and Bergson on “the deliberate and significant distortion that each imposes on the theory of the other” (77). Donald Wayne Viney convincingly demonstrates the indebtedness of James to Renouvier's conceptions of free will and pluralism, and, by extension, James's indirect reading of Jules Lequyer's rejection of determinism. In the end, “James was not a carbon copy of either Renouvier or Lequyer,” since “he seems never to have attained to the conception of a God who creates other creators” (118). Michael Kerlin provides a fascinating portrayal of James's interest in Blondel's 1893 dissertation L'Action and the Frenchman's flirtation with pragmatisme before the issuance of Pascendi, followed by “his concern with truth” that “was more metaphysical than epistemological” (139). Le Roy took a similarly metaphysical turn, according to Harvey Hill, by strictly equating pragmatism with “the living experience of Christianity” (144), in effect rejecting James's definition of pragmatism because of its inability to account for “the quest for truth” (166). C. J. T. Talar's characterization of Hébert's concept of the evolution of dogma supports the previous chapters' emphasis on the tendency of Catholic modernists to remain concerned with the reformation of the Catholic Church from within. In a somewhat different vein, Clara Ginther's essay on Tyrrell identifies the British philosopher's Christocentric conception of pragmatism that “counterbalance[d] the neo-Scholastic emphasis on reason and understanding with the Jamesian emphasis on life and sentiment” (215).

The book ends with an “Extract from a Letter of Henri Bergson to Horace M. Kallen” and a “Selected Bibliography of Pragmatism in France, 1898–1914.” Schultenover could not have chosen a more suitable conclusion, for it leaves readers with tools to continue discussion of the relationship between American pragmatism and Catholic Modernism. In the letter, Bergson writes Kallen, “it seems to me that you are forcing me too much in the direction of unity and ‘monarchy,’ and that you are forcing James too much in the direction of multiplicity of the sort that would be thoroughly ‘anarchic’ and, as a result, discontinuous” (219). Bergson's moderate position on James's philosophy mirrors the overarching sentiment of the volume's contributors, all of whom stress the intellectual liveliness of Catholic Modernists in conversation with the ideas of James.

The Reception of Pragmatism in France and the Rise of Roman Catholic Modernism is a book for specialists in the fields of French Catholic history, American religious history, continental philosophy, and Catholic theology. Most readers will learn everything they ever wanted to know about the incorporation of Jamesian pragmatism into the philosophical debates of the Catholic Church in France. Shook and Schultenover were right: “By far the most appreciative French interest in James came from Catholic Modernists in the first decade of the twentieth century,” due in large part to their parallel attention to “the close relationships among the intellect, the emotions, and the will; the empirical origin and evaluation of religious belief; and the practical function of religious faith for living (experience)” (2). What happened to James's influence among Catholic intellectuals after World War I remains unclear.