Live Readings From Reason Fulfilled By Revelation

24 videorecordings of me reading the entirety of my 2011 book on the 1930s Christian philosophy debates

Feb 17, 2025

In 2004, I started work on a major project that would eventually culminate in a book, Reason Fulfilled By Revelation, which was published by Catholic University Of America Press in 2011, just as I was leaving my position at Fayetteville State University and starting the new chapter of my life up in New York.

The subtitle of the work tells you what it really is about “The 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates In France”. It’s technically a little bit inaccurate to say “in France” for two reasons. The first is that the 50 or so participants in these debates, which spanned more or less 1931-1936, were definitely not all based in France, though many of them were. The second is that although there were for the most part Francophone debates, there were also a few contributions in other languages, including German, English, Spanish, and Latin.

The original spur to work in this area, before I had any suspicion how extensive these debates actually were, and how few of the important documents had been translated into English, came when a colleague of mine sent me some photocopied documents from French journals in the 1930s. These included pieces by Emile Brehier, Maurice Blondel, and Fernand Van Steenberghen having to do with the issue of “Christian philosophy”.

I had defended my dissertation that focused on Maurice Blondel’s work just a few years earlier, and was considering translating some of his longer works, so it was natural that I might be interested in translating these shorter, more topical pieces for an English-language audience. So I read them, and noticed they made reference to a number of other books and articles.

The project grew significantly over the next several years, as I followed out references, found references to additional works in those articles or books, started digging around in journals from that time looking for any other contributions I’d missed, and photocopying anything and everything germane to what I began to realize were a set of complex and interconnected debates taking place mainly between French-speaking Catholic philosophers and theologians, with a few rationalist and Reformed Protestant philosophers involved as well.

Much of the research work took place at Notre Dame University, at the Hesburg Library, where I spent hundreds of hours combing through the stacks. Typically, I would drive there after a day teaching at Indiana State Prison, put in several hours of research, and then drive an hour-and-a-half home, grabbing some fast food along the way. In the summer of 2005, I was selected as one of the faculty fellows for Notre Dame’s Erasmus Institute summer seminar, led by Alasdair MacIntyre, and while I was housed on campus, I spent a few hours each night over in the Hesburg library.

These Christian philosophy debates in the 1930s were poorly known in English-speaking circles at the time I was working, for several main reasons. One of these was the fact that probably 90-95% of the vast literature comprising the debates remained untranslated, and unfortunately many Anglophone academics read little that’s not in their language.

The second was that of what was translated, nearly all of it was from two main participants in the debates, Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain, who unfortunately gave some seriously mistaken assessments of the value and sometimes even the positions of other participants in the debates, particularly those of Maurice Blondel.

The third was that most English-language scholarship on the debates, or better put, tangentially engaging with the debates, at that time was rather shoddy. Joseph Owens, who is often an excellent scholar, somehow got, and then gave, the impression that it was a small debate, mainly between Gilson and Maritain on one side, and the rationalist Brehier and the neo-Scholastic Van Steenberghen on the other. He makes one reference to one of Blondel’s many works in the debate, and gives the impression that he hasn’t actually read Blondel.

Interestingly, when you looked at the literature discussing the debates, referencing or even reinterpreting positions from the debates, in other main languages, it seemed pretty clear that the massively truncated picture of the breadth and scope of these debates was a uniquely Anglophone problem

My aim in translating documents from the debates was to make it possible for non-Francophone English-speaking readers to be able to find out for themselves what was going on in these debates, to be able to read far more than just what Gilson and Maritain had to say on these matters, to restore a proper perspective of an extremely interesting set of engagements by major thinkers about a whole host of interconnected topics in philosophy.

So I hunkered down, and for years kept at the work of translating documents. Once I had more than enough to fill an entire volume, I started working on two other key elements of the work. One of these is a lengthy thematic and historical introduction that would help people understand where all of these new translations fit in terms of the debates and their issues. The other is a chronological bibliography of literature either in or about the debates and their key topics.

In 2021, ten years after the publication of the work, I decided to start doing a series of live readings on YouTube of portions of Reason Fulfilled By Revelation, where I would read aloud from the text and then answer any questions or address any comments viewers had about the texts, topics, and thinkers. Those might perhaps be of interest to those who would like to know what is contained in the work, or the conversations they spurred, so I am providing links to them here for those who would like to watch or listen to them:

If there is sufficient interest in the topic, perhaps down the line, I might produce more content on this set of important debates.

David Cox

Feb 17

Thank you Dr. Sadler for sharing this audio. I had never even heard of the 1930s Christian Philosophy Debates in France. What a cool topic! It is very interesting hearing about how much goes into researching, writing, and publishing. I listened to the first part of the introduction. I will definitely listen to the rest. How long did it take you to research and write the book?

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2 replies by Gregory B. Sadler and others

Feb 18

I'll keep listening to your audio. It's interesting. All brand new stuff to me.

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