Edward Baring opens his brilliantly conceived Converts to the Real with an observation that will appear self-evident for students of modern European thought only in retrospect. “Continental” philosophy is frequently invoked as a foil to its supposedly more rigorous “analytic” counterpart, but rarely do we consider this geographic modifier on its own terms. As Baring points out, the mélange of thinkers, texts, and traditions commonly grouped under the “Continental” rubric have their common ancestor in early twentieth-century phenomenology, the philosophical movement that sought out a new account of perception to overcome the Kantian dualism of appearances and “things-in-themselves.” Overlooked in most scholarship on phenomenology, Baring argues, the movement's continental scope and influence owed to Europe's one truly continental institution: the Catholic Church. From the bona fide Catholics Gabriel Marcel, Jacques Maritain, and Edith Stein to the apostates Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Max Scheler, philosophers with deep connections to Catholicism shaped, debated, and transformed the language of phenomenology across the first half of the twentieth century.
Over ten erudite chapters, Baring elucidates the central question that stood behind these interactions: How could the Catholic Church draw on the resources of modern philosophy to speak to pressing concerns of the contemporary world without sacrificing its own identity in the process? The Catholic reception of phenomenology was bound up with the revival of the Scholastic philosophy of Thomas Aquinas in Pope Leo XIII's Aeterni Patris (1879). For church leaders and philosophers, whom Baring characterizes as “orthodox Thomists,” the thirteenth-century friar demonstrated how nature itself manifested the existence of a transcendent God, countering the subject-oriented idealism of post-Kantian philosophy. Yet debates about the new Scholasticism took on a life of their own. Far-flung intellectual networks, linked through centers of Catholic learning from Rome to Munich to Louvain, gave rise to views on God, subjectivity, and metaphysics that extended well beyond the remit of Thomist orthodoxy. Phenomenological pioneers were themselves frequently converts to Catholicism, a point on which, notwithstanding the title, Baring comments surprisingly little. One comes away with the impression that only outsiders to Catholic traditions could negotiate the church's rapprochement with modern philosophy, even as their work frequently sparked new conversions.
At the heart of Baring's study is the Catholic reception of three giants of German phenomenology: Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Max Scheler. By incorporating a pan-European perspective that includes Iberia, Italy, and Poland, and reaching deep into the wellsprings of Catholic thought, Baring moves beyond the well-trodden ground of Heidegger's (mis)appropriation by post-1945 French existentialism. Catholic interest in phenomenology peaked after the appearance of Husserl's Ideas for a Pure Phenomenology in 1913. Orthodox Thomists charged that Husserl's “epoché,” which bracketed out the everyday perception of reality in order to capture the appearance of objects to a pure consciousness, inflated the capacity of the human subject. But a cohort that Baring defines as “progressive Thomists,” led by the president of the Louvain Institut Supérieur de Philosophie Léon Noël, reinterpreted Husserl's phenomenology to forge a “critical realism” that could mediate between world-creating idealism and the Scholastic emphasis on objective order (202–203). This synthesis would come to influence new strands of Christian existentialism in the 1930s and ultimately the work of the postwar French phenomenologists Marcel Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur.
Baring's attention to thinkers beyond the narrow philosophical canon enables illuminating readings even of well-studied texts. Addressing Heidegger's Being and Time (M. Niemeyer, 1927), Baring excavates little-known debates between Protestant interpreters, who foregrounded Heidegger's analysis of human subjectivity, and Catholics, who privileged Heidegger's reflections on the permanence of Being. For both groups, Heidegger's avowed atheism posed a decisive challenge, opening a path for secular existentialists such as Alexandre Kojève who would define the reception of Heidegger for the postwar era.
Baring's methodology, focused on close reconstructions of philosophical texts, nevertheless has limitations for an account of twentieth-century Catholicism more broadly. Heidegger's embrace of Nazism as rector of the University of Freiburg is mentioned only briefly (240, 254) and remains nearly absent from the chapter on confessional readings of Being and Time. Granted, the “Heidegger affair” has become an academic cottage industry in its own right, and Baring remains laudably focused on the debates of the time rather than contemporary concerns. Still, the fact that Christian commentators in the 1930s were apparently more troubled by Heidegger's atheism than his Nazism is worth reflecting upon. Baring provides greater detail on the intersections of Catholic philosophy with the corporatist-authoritarian regimes of interwar Portugal, Austria, and especially Italy. Even among “critical realists,” who sought to balance political order with human freedom, fascism frequently seemed an appealing solution to the crises of the liberal parliamentary state. Yet the links between philosophy and politics were ambiguous, with philosophical rivals emerging as political allies and vice versa (260, 272). Baring recognizes the importance of “local political conditions” in shaping Catholic allegiances (252), but he might have drawn greater attention to the blinders of Catholic political thought during this period as a whole—in particular its truncated understanding of racism and antisemitism. In light of the study's wide scope, the relative absence of several major Catholic thinkers who engaged with phenomenology and existentialism—whether the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the French philosopher Simone Weil, or the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz—is also striking.
If a comprehensive account of the politics of twentieth-century phenomenology still awaits, Baring's exemplary work is an important step in this direction. With a focus on complex texts, Baring centers the structures of ideas and the drama of intellectual debate. At the same time, Converts to the Real complements recent politically oriented studies of twentieth-century Catholicism such as Giuliana Chamedes's A Twentieth-Century Crusade (Harvard University Press, 2019), James Chappel's Catholic Modern (Harvard University Press, 2018), and Piotr Kosicki's Catholics on the Barricades (Yale University Press, 2018). By showing how Catholicism nourished the roots of modern European philosophy, Baring sheds invaluable light on ongoing discussions of the persistence of Christianity in a not-so-secular age.
