Von Hildebrand and Christian Philosophy: A Comparative Approach
a paper presented at the 2007 The Philosophical Legacy of Dietrich von Hildebrand International conference
“Christian philosophy”, like most other terms of philosophical interest and importance, conceals under an appearance of a single verbal unity a multifarious, complex, and tangledly interconnected set of realities. The term possesses a long history, one extending deep back into the Patristic era,1 one also still ongoing and in which we take part not merely as spectators. This history consist not only of attempts to generate, work out, and reappropriate Christian philosophies, or additionally of more philosophically reflexive attempts to discern and articulate precisely what Christian philosophy is and should be. It also encompasses the dialogues, discussions, debates, even polemical diatribes, in which interlocutors engaged each other’s views on Christian philosophy’s possibility, actuality, nature, and desirability.
I will not attempt here to do justice to the riches of ideas, philosophical systems, and intellectuals involved in Christian philosophy, nor to sketch more than a few of the positions on it developed over the centuries. Instead, my aim is to briefly discuss Dietrich Von Hildebrand’s views on Christian philosophy and his significance as a self-consciously Christian philosopher.
Simply in order to avoid certain misunderstandings which frequently crop up whenever Christian philosophy gets mentioned, is important to lay out several important fruits of its history ripe and ready for harvest at the later position we are fortunate enough to occupy.
The first of these is the realization that Christian philosophy does not name one single conceptual framework or philosophical approach. Although not all proponents and theorists of Christian philosophy have realized this point or articulated it well enough, it is clear that there is and must be a legitimate plurality of Christian philosophies. Beyond this, there is also a necessary complementarity to the different determinate forms, even schools, of Christian philosophy.2
The second is that it is now clear that Christian philosophy involves not only a transformation of philosophy, but deep reflection on philosophy’s very nature, scope, objects, assumptions, methods, conditions, and purposes. It does so in practice by its very nature, since the Christian thinker’s use, construal, and development of philosophy and of human reason will determinately differ from the pre-Christian, a-Christian or anti-Christian thinker’s. Faithful philosophical reflection on and debate about Christian philosophy also makes explicit the fact that any position taken on Christian philosophy involves adopting, or at the very least assuming, a reflexive philosophy, i.e. a meta-philosophical view and engagement on the nature of philosophy.
The third matter now clear is that certain philosophical methods, schools, doctrines, assumptions, and horizons will be capable of entering into the sorts of syntheses that Christian philosophies are, while certain other ones by virtue of their commitments, assumptions, or underlying ethos will not. Closely allied with this, from the perspective of any genuine Christian philosopher, i.e. a philosopher whose thought is authentically philosophical and integrally Christian, is the thesis that such compatibility or incompatibility derives in considerable part from the adequacy asphilosophy of the philosophy under discussion. Von Hildebrand was quite cognizant of this third point in noting the need for Christian philosophers to possess and develop an important capacity for discernment,“the sense of what is compatible and incompatible with the Christian faith”3
One locus classicus for any serious study of the issue of Christian philosophy is the debates that took place about its possibility and nature in 1930s Francophone philosophical and theological circles, involving numerous Roman Catholic, several Reformed Protestant, and a few non-Christian thinkers. By my count, around fifty or so authors can be said to have been involved, some of them much more centrally than others.4 Von Hildebrand, who knows the works of and who lauds several of the main philosophers involved, particularly Gabriel Marcel and Maurice Blondel, participated in several smaller discussions in 1960s America once again addressing the issue.5 His own position can be very productively located in relation to some main positions articulated during these 1930s debates.
To regard Von Hildebrand’s perspective on and practice of Christian philosophy as merely derivative, however, would be to underestimate the distinctive and in my view original contributions in Christian philosophy and to understanding Christian philosophy he makes through his phenomenological work. Before discussing those contributions, however, let us attempt to locate Von Hildebrand within the 1930s debates’ framework. Before doing that, I must stress that what I provide here are but merest outlines of the positions taken during the debates, almost just slogans, simply asserted here stripped of the surrounding historical research, nuanced analyses and distinctions, and philosophical reflection and argumentation in the works of these authors.
Some thinkers advanced positions asserting that there was and could be no Christian philosophy in any rigorous sense of the term. Etienne Gilson very helpfully divided these into three classes:
1) “theologists”6 who regarded philosophy as antithetical and harmful to Christian faith.
2) rationalists who reversed this ordering, maintaining that Christianity is fundamentally incompatible with philosophy and reason.
3) certain Neo-Thomists whose rather abstract and rigid interpretation of the Thomistic distinction between philosophy and theology effectively transformed this distinction into a separation.7 For these Neo-Thomists, philosophy being perfectum opus rationis , “a perfected work of reason,” meant that it involved a purely natural human reason, untransformed by any involvement or collaboration with supernatural grace, no different in the Christian than in the non-Christian philosopher.
To these three groups, we can add another of interest here: 4) certain phenomenologists. Max Scheler did not live to see the debates, and Martin Heidegger was not involved in them, but both explicitly took positions against Christian philosophy.8 Several Thomists involved in the debates employed Husserlian phenomenology to argue against Christian philosophy being rigorously philosophical.9
Thomists and phenomenologists were split, however. Numbered among the many Thomists who argued for Christian philosophy were Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Attending and participating in the inaugural meeting of the Société Thomiste was Edith Stein, who elsewhere argued for Christian philosophy.10 Gabriel Marcel, among other things a phenomenologist, and Maurice Blondel, whose work both preceded and bore clear similarities to phenomenology, both took the side of Christian philosophy.
In his own time, Von Hildebrand criticized philosophical positions and tendencies analogous to those developed against Christian philosophy during the debates. Likewise, in addition to advancing positive positions, those debators for Christian philosophy also targeted their opponents with criticism.11 This makes sense, and raises a point worth momentarily stressing: Christian philosophy develops in philosophical environments that include non-, anti-, and inadequately Christian 12philosophies requiring critique, and this critical aspect is integral to Christian philosophy. Likewise, so are its positive or constructive aspects. What were then the positive positions articulated during the debates? More precisely, what key features of those positions illuminate Von Hildebrand’s own Christian philosophy?
Gilson stressed that philosophy as such does not exist, but rather concretely existing philosophizing human subjects in whom reason is never pure and entirely separate from everything non- or irrational. One of his dicta is too apt to resist citing here: “What is peculiar to the Christian is being convinced of the rational fertility of his faith and being sure that this fertility is inexhaustible.”13 He also provided several useful definitions of Christian philosophy, all emphasizing that historically Christianity provided philosophers with new notions, insights, and orientation in their philosophizing.
Maritain’s position, very close to Gilson’s, can be summarized in his distinction between the nature or essence of philosophy and the concrete state(s) of philosophy. Philosophy in its nature is an abstract essence, and is no more Christian than it is non-Christian or anti-Christian, a perfectum opus rationis, a work purely of natural human reason, extending to “a whole class of objects which are of their very nature attainable through the natural faculties of the human mind.”14 Philosophy actually exists, however, in concrete states, in individual human subjects, in broader intersubjective regimes, and as the externalized products of these two, and all three of these can be determinately Christian. Christianity then provides philosophy and the philosopher with “objective contributions,” and “subjective aids,”15 so that the activity of philosophy is done better in a Christian state.
Blondel developed a very complex position distinguishing between several mutually informing and co-ordinated Christian philosophical projects. Central to this was a “philosophy of insufficiency”, critical of philosophy’s and other human disciplines’ perennial pretensions to self-sufficiency and sufficing to grasp, evaluate, and determine all being. Specifically, he critiqued philosophical projects beginning by imposing and aiming at terminating in neat, closed conceptual schemes, and also of philosophy attempting to uncritically assimilate and evaluate (thereby rationalizing) Christian supernatural realities. He proposed that philosophy ardently investigate its own limitations, and “open in itself and before itself an empty space prepared not only for its own ulterior discoveries and on its own ground, but for illuminations and contributions whose real origin it is not and cannot become,”16 this then offering transformative philosophical engagement with Christianity.
Marcel on his part developed a very useful distinction between problem and mystery, the latter being something not entirely reducible, engaging the one investigating it, exceeding any technique brought to bear on it. Mystery in this sense, particularly but not limited to that of the Incarnation, always remains an essential object and focus of Christian philosophy, and Marcel recommended elucidation of specifically spiritual phenomena, e.g. “fidelity, hope, love”, as “concrete approaches to the ontological mystery.”17
Von Hildebrand’s position on and practice of Christian philosophy bears strongest affinities with Blondel’s and Marcel’s, but also shares some features with Gilson’s and Maritain’s. This is not surprising, since as commentators during and after the debates realized, Blondel’s and Marcel’s positions both go beyond and provide important and needed complements to Gilson’s and Maritain’s.18 Still, the latter two positions partly illuminate Von Hildenbrand’s, whose phenomenological work represents one example of the philosophy in a Christian state of which Maritain writes. To see how appropriate a designation this is, it is worthwhile here to briefly range over several examples.
The Art of Living ’s phenomenological analyses of virtues and affective conditions, as well as the more comprehensive and systematic work of the Ethics , become possible precisely because of the existence of Christian revelation, doctrine, and community (and of course, the Triune God behind and within all these), and because Von Hildebrand was himself a Christian as well as philosopher reflecting on these. In both of these works, the numerous insights afforded by Christianity and explored philosophically are placed in relation to each other; their resources are progressively drawn out and relied upon in development of further insights, and for orientation, deepening, and structuring of each portion of the study as a whole.
The beautiful insights in Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love , determinately exploring how “conjugal love constitutes a relationship in which the regard of each of the two parties is turned exclusively on the other,”19 derive from Von Hildebrand’s observation of and reflection on not only good and bad marriages, but also of sacramental marriages (including of course his first-hand experience of his own), and from meditation on Christian teachings not only about marriage but a host of subjects. Likewise, The Heart ’s critique of the reductive treatments of affectivity in Greek and Modern philosophy and reconstruction of a proper understanding of the interrelations between affectivity, volition, intellect, and spirituality similarly represents philosophy developed in a Christian state.
It is important not to leave out that his phenomenological analyses possess and move within truth precisely because they access and accept a genuine and real supernatural order. Writing specifically about the contribution Christian virtues made to philosophical ethics, Von Hildebrand makes an important distinction, criticizing:
a confusion of two completely different facts. One fact is that these virtues are fruits of the Holy Ghost and presuppose sanctifying grace. Now this certainly belongs to theology and not to philosophy, for it can be known only through revelation and is not accessible to a natural experience. But a completely different fact is the appearing reality of the Christian virtues themselves.20
He provides examples of how these virtues offer themselves to study, how they provide this appearing reality: “The extraordinary quality of Christian morality, the new ethics witnessed to in the saints, their likeness to Christ, their humility, their charity, all these are data which can be grasped in experience and which are definitely not something which are possessed only in faith.”21
Von Hildebrand thus points out in ethics the same dynamic as do Gilson and Maritain in philosophy more broadly, employing phenomenological language of “experience” and “grasping” where they frame matters in Thomistic terms of reason’s activity.22 The Christian virtues, as he writes “presuppose the Judeo-Christian revelation as object in order to come to pass. . . But once those virtues have become a reality, the philosopher does not need faith in order to grasp the extraordinary quality and moral value”23 of Christian virtues. In this way Christianity contributes to philosophy new objects, concepts, and experiences, from one point of view expanding philosophy’s range and capacities by offering it matters which philosophy can then appropriate, from another revealing to philosophy what in theory it could have studied and attained but which in practice, concretely, historically, it either did not suspect or was in confusion about, things, to use Maritain’s expression “implicit. . . in humanity’s philosophical treasury.”24
Like Blondel, Von Hildebrand stressed a serious “danger to philosophy in being more eager to attain a closed system than to do justice to reality in all its dimensions.”25 This reduction to closed concepts and system was as rampant in the philosophical milieu of his time, even under seemingly open guises, as it remains in ours. In What is Philosophy? he contrasted “philosophers in the true and full sense,” among whom he included Blondel and Marcel as “representatives of a Christian philosophy and of all those in whom lives the spirit of the philosophia perennis . . . those who deal with classical problems and enrich the philosophical conquest of being with rich and valuable insights,”26 against those who while retaining the name and the disciplinary space of philosophy “have abandoned the very method of philosophical research.”27
His recurrent critique, targeting “positivism in its various guises,” 28 is equally applicable to the 1930s debates’ rationalist, Neo-Scholastic, and Phenomenological opponents of Christian philosophy, and remains highly relevant today. It consists in noting that philosophies fail as philosophies by rendering themselves inadequate to the full range, complexity, and depth of reality, approaching “the data of morality, beauty in art and nature, the spiritual life of the human person, free will, love, and knowledge in a way which bars any contact from these data from the start and necessarily leads to overlooking them and replacing them by something else.”29
What may seem at first only negative critique is intimately connected with a positive philosophical perspective and project, for adequately criticizing another philosophy’s inadequacy to ranges of realities it ignores, rejects, misconstrues, or reduces is only possible from a philosophical perspective that does grasp and recognize these realities , albeit imperfectly. As mentioned earlier, philosophy in a Christian state, drawing on conceptual resources (at first perhaps only implicit) and reflecting on experiences Christianity provides, fortified in the philosophizing subject him- or herself by different modalities of grace perfecting nature, permits more of reality’s plentitude to be encountered and grasped by philosophies that do not render themselves incapable of doing so. This is one key aspect of the Christian faith’s inexhaustible rational fertility of which Gilson spoke. Christian philosophy also involves and requires respect for the integrity of the realities it engages,30 attempts to understand, and is expanded and transformed by in the process, both as philosophy and in the philosopher.
This is where I would claim, without supporting this by argument here, Blondel’s notions of philosophy of insufficiency and the empty space, and Marcel’s notion of mystery more than parallel Von Hildebrand’s view and practice of Christian phenomenology. All of them stress in different ways that the philosophizing subject cannot force, master or exhaust the phenomena, that room must be made for the supernatural, that philosophy and the philosophizing subject must stand and render themselves ready to respond to its advances and answer its call not by reducing or rationalizing the supernatural, nor by simply abandoning the role of philosophical thought and activity in the face of the supernatural (the error of theologism or fideism), but by engaging it and allowing oneself to be engaged by it. Or, speaking more properly, by such engagement with the triune God, and the economy of personal relations and beings through which we encounter and come to know Him.
As Blondel writes, the empty space “is not a chimerical fiction, projection of restlessness, sickness of the soul. It has, if one may say it, contours to discern, a reason for being to meditate on and to render rationally admissible.”31 Another way to express this is such empty spaces opened by philosophy aware of its own insufficiency are then discoverable as already occupied by something hitherto unexpected, transcendent, but not incomprehensible, which then offers itself to the attentive and respectful philosopher as objects for phenomenological exploration and description. Blondel, Marcel, and Von Hildebrand each realized and taught that such engagement is inherently personal, going beyond a detachedly objective attitude, and data putatively observable by all,32 instead involving the philosophizing subject themselves as inextricably bound up with their objects of experience and reflection, and in all dimensions of their being, particularly moral, religious, aesthetic, and affective ones, axiological dimensions of value which inform and structure cognition and rationality.
Here a few of Von Hildebrand’s specific contributions to Christian philosophy as phenomenology deserve emphasis. The very breadth phenomenology assumes in his hands is significant. As noted earlier, philosophy remaining true to itself as philosophy, the philosopher responding truthfully to his or her calling, cannot dismiss any of the orders or dimensions of being, nor disregard important distinctions and relationships between and within beings. Christian phenomenology thus labors under a requirement of receptivity and engagement with the fullness of being, created and uncreated. Phenomenology is of course not strictly identifiable with philosophy totaliter , but it is, according to Von Hildebrand “the method used by all great philosophies of the past in their discoveries and insights,”33 so that phenomenology should be regarded not as “a kind of modern system, but as a consequence and conscious application of something which has always existed.”34 Accordingly, he argues “the true Christian philosopher should confront every traditional position with reality in all its plentitude, ready to make new differentiations, to add, to complete, to correct when necessary, and to make his own all the great and true insights of philosophers of all times.”35
Von Hildebrand’s most important contribution to Christian philosophy is arguably his richly described, complexly nuanced, and highly reflexive phenomenology of values and disvalues, moral virtues and vices, and affectivity. In addition to providing these phenomenological analyses, he stresses a pressing contemporary need for such work by Christian philosophers and he indicates where past philosophers carried it out, and what in their works should be reappropriated. Without attempting to do justice to Von Hildebrand’s thought, a task for more competent and better informed scholars at this conference, let me close by pointing out three key achievements. First, he demonstrated the “intelligible, meaningful character of . . . affective value-responses,”36 that being, thought, and spirituality are permeated by affectivity. Second, he exhibited determinate essential structures, relationships, and differentiations involved and experienced in value-apprehension and response, many of these informed by and forming parts of Christian faith, practice, and life.
Third and lastly, he correlates these to traditionally recognized virtues and affective states, many of them distinctively Judeo-Christian, some of them better understood, practiced, and perfected under Christianity’s illumination, among which are: joy,37 reverence, fidelity, responsibility, truthfulness, gratitude,38 intellectual courage,39 and humility.40 These are, as Marcel pointed out, modes of access to the mystery of being, and as Blondel, Marcel and Von Hildebrand each recognized, they require what the latter calls “a formation of our affective responses ‘from within’, an explicit, free identification of ourselves with them, by which these responses become ‘ours’ in a new sense.”41 The Christian philosopher may not only adopt these as objects of study, but as Von Hildebrand noted in his analyses, also requires some degree of possession of them and orientation by them in order to philosophize well. By clarifying the natures of these affective, moral, and religious structures of human existence and of being, Von Hildebrand does inestimable service to Christian philosophers and thus to contemporary Christian philosophy.
NOTES
1: A few early examples of Christian philosophers self-consciously developing their philosophies as such and employing either the term Christian philosophy or analogous terminology are: Justin Martyr (110-165 AD); Athenagoras the Athenian (late 2 nd century); Clement of Alexandria (153-217 AD); Lactantius (260-330 AD);Gregory of Nyssa (335- 395?); Hilary of Poitiers (300?-367?); Augustine (354-430).
Two other related matters are worth brief mention as well. First, some of the very literature of Scripture has legitimate claims (depending on what one chooses to restrict the term to) to be called and regarded as philosophy, most particularly the Wisdom literature and Wisdom passages in other books. Second,there were numerous confluxes between Greek philosophical thought of various schools and religious thought, practice, and life, producing not only the canonical book the Wisdom of Solomon , but also spurring the work of Philo of Alexandria, as well as the writer of the non-canonical book of 4 Maccabees . For scholarly discussion of the Wisdom Literature in relation to philosophy, cf. Gerhard Von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (New York: Abingdon.1972) and Ben Witherington III, Jesus the Sage: The Pilgrimage of Wisdom (Minneapolis: Fortress. 1994). Two recent Papal documents have added additional reflection to these matters: John Paul II’s Fides et Ratio, and Benedict XVI’s “Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections” (i.e. the” Regensburg Address”).
2: The possible complementarity of a plurality of Christian philosophies was realized by several contemporary commentators on the 1930s Francophone Christian philosophy debates, among them Gabriel Marcel, Regis Jolivet, Aimé Forest, Antonin Sertillanges, Bruno de Solages, Henri Gouhier, and Henri de Lubac. Cf. in particular Sertillanges, “De la philosophie chrétienne”, La Vie Intellectuelle , v. 24, n. 1, p. 9-20; De Lubac, “Sur la philosophie chretienne, reflexions a la suite d’un debat”, Nouvelle Revue Théologique , v. 63, n. 3, English translation: “Retrieving the Tradition: On Christian Philosophy”, Communio , v. 19; and André Hayen, “Philosophy of the Converted – Philosophy of Conversion: Blondel and Maritain”, Philosophy Today v.6, n. 2.
In Fides et Ratio, both the plurality and complementarity of Christian philosophies are clearly recognized . On this, cf. in particular: Avery Dulles, “Can Philosophy Be Christian? The New State of the Question.” in The Two Wings of Catholic Thought: Essays on Fides et Ratio, David Ruel Foster and Joseph Koterski, S.J. eds. (Washington D.C.: CUA Press. 2003) and Francesca Murphy, “ Credo Ut Intelligam : The Relationship Between Philosophy and Theology in the Catholic Tradition”, in The Challenge of Truth: Reflections on Fides et Ratio(Dublin: Veritas. 2002).
3: “Dangers in Constructing a Contemporary Christian Philosophy” in Christian Philosophy in the College and Seminary , George McLean, O.M.I., ed. (Washington D.C.: CUA Press. 1966), p. 14
4: Unfortunately, the full scope of the debates has been rather truncated in Anglophone literature to a “Gilson-Bréhier” or a “Gilson-Van Steenberghen debate”, i.e. a debate between Thomist proponents (Maritain coming to Gilson’s aid) of Christian philosophy and either rationalist or neo-Scholastic opponents. There are several complex and interconnecting historical reasons, which cannot be gone into here, for these lacunae. This situation should be remedied relatively soon by a forthcoming volume of translations of a number of the debates’ key documents.
5: His main important interlocutors in these discussions were the phenomenologist Benedict M. Ashley, O.P. , and the Thomist Germain Grisez, the latter of whom developed a position indebted to but rather more rigid than Gilson’s and Maritian’s positions. For a fuller exposition of Grisez’ position, cf. his earlier “The ‘Four Meanings’ of ‘Christian Philosophy’”, The Journal of Religion , v. 42, n. 2 (1962)
6: The term is of Gilson’s coining, and corresponds to the more commonly and widely employed “fideists.” For the most part fideists did not take part in the 1930s debates on Christian philosophy. Karl Barth’s fideist position did draw some attention from Gilson in the later part of the debates (cf. his 1936 Christianity and Philosophy ) and was very influential on the Francophone Reformed Protestant discussions about Christian philosophy from the 1940s to the 1960s, as well as on the very few Reformed philosophers who staked out positions in the 1930s debates.
One very interesting and unabashedly theologist assessment of the issue came too late to effectively partake in the debate, the Jewish philosopher Léon Chestov’s 1935 article “Athènes et Jérusalem ( Concupiscentia irresistibilis )”, Revue Philosophique , v. 120, which later becomes part 3 of Athènes et Jérusalem (Paris. 1937).
7: Cf. Gilson, “La notion de philosophie chrétienne”, Session of 21 March 1931, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie , v. 31, p. 37-8, 41-3, also The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy (Gifford Lectures 1931-1932) by A.H.C. Downes (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons. 1936), chap 1-2.
8: Scheler, in some respects rather paradoxically, dismisses the notion of a Christian philosophy in his essay “Love and Knowledge”, where, however, what he is rejecting is “an essentially Greek philosophy with Christian ornamentation”, and what he is stressing, in many respects quite similarly to Blondel is the difficulty neatly bringing philosophy and Christian experience and life together, and the danger of attempting to close up Christian experience and thought within concepts and systems insufficient to these objects (and insufficient as philosophy). cf. Max Scheler, On Feeling, Valuing and Knowing , Harold J. Bershady, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1992), p. 155-9. Scheler’s orientation in practice towards Christian philosophy is a complex question which cannot be further discussed here.
Heidegger, for his part, clearly sets up his basic assumptions and method in such a way as to render Christian philosophy impossible. He makes his rejection explicit, famously arguing “A ‘Christian philosophy’ is a round square [ in other translations, “wooden iron”] and a misunderstanding,” Introduction to Metaphysics , trans. Gregory Fried, Richard Polt (Yale University Press. 2000), p. 8.
9: Most notably Msgr. Léon Noël and Dom Feuling, O.S.B. Cf. Noël, “La notion de philosophie chrétienne”, Revue néoscholastique de Philosophie , vol. 37, May-Aug 1934; Feuling, in La philosophie chétienne: Juvisy, 11 Septembre 1933 (Account of the 2 nd Day of Studies of the Société Thomiste). (Paris: Cerf. 1933), p. 125-134.
10: Cf. Stein, Finite and Eternal Being , trans.(Washington D.C., ICS Publications. 2002). During the 1932 Société Thomiste session, one presenter, R. Kremer, C. SS. R., explicitly raised the issue of Christian philosophy in relation to phenomenology. Cf. La phénoménologie: Juvisy, 12 Septembre 1932 (Account of the1st Day of Studies of the Société Thomiste). (Paris: Cerf. 1933), p. 63. For fuller discussion of Stein and Christian philosophy, cf. Chantal Beauvais, “Edith Stein et la modernité”, Laval Théologique et Philosophique , vol. 58, no. 1 (2002)
11: The debates were also marked by criticisms levied by the main Catholic participants against each other’s positions. Specifically, among the Catholic interlocutors for Christian philosophy, Gilson and Maritain, on one side, Blondel on the other, engaged in mutual criticism, mainly based on unnecessary misunderstandings and misrepresentations of each other’s views. The neo-Scholastics against Christian philosophy likewise criticized Catholic proponents of Christian philosophy, but generally misrepresented their positions. What is clear in the aftermath of the debates is that no one single interlocutor decisively enunciated the one single right view on Christian philosophy, and that where the various positions are onesided, they require completion by other positions.
12: In certain respects, by the very nature involved in and signified by the adjective, the Christianphilosopher needs always remain on guard in a variety of manners against certain complacencies and other deviations from the Christian spirit and its demands: in the subject, the person of the philosopher, in the course of the complex activity of philosophizing, and in the philosophy’s products and embodiments in texts, intellects, relationships, consistent ways of valuation and perception, and institutions. Needless to say, it is to his or her own practice, self, and philosophy that the Christian philosopher must look to see whether they are as transformed and illuminated (without compromising the autonomy philosophy realizes and advocates as normative and necessary for its activity and even existence) by Christ as they ought to be. Among Hildebrand’s many works which would provide fruitful guidance in these matters, Transformation in Christ: On the Christian Attitude stands out in particular.
13: “La notion de philosophie chrétienne”, Session of 21 March 1931, Bulletin de la Société française de Philosophie , v. 31. Henceforth abbreviated as BsfP , p. 48. Note: unless otherwise noted, all translations from the French are the author’s.
14: Maritain, An Essay on Christian Philosophy , trans . Edward Flannery (New York: Philosophical Library. 1955), p. 14. cf. BsfP , p. 61.
15: Essay , p. 18-29. cf. BsfP , p. 63-7.
16: BsfP , p. 88. For fuller discussion, cf. also his Le problème de la philosophie catholique(Paris: Bloud & Gay. 1932), and his amplifications and responses to critics in “Le problème de la philosophie catholique: Seance of 26 Nov 1932”, Les Etudes Philosophiques vol. 7, no. 1. As Blondel makes clear in these work, his position on Christian philosophy developed from and demanded a “philosophy of action,” first presented in his Action (1893) , developed also in the Letter on Apologetics , and reworked in the yet untranslated Trilogy : La Pensée (2 vols), L’Être et les êtres , and L’action (2 vols).
17: “Position du mystère ontologique et ses approches concrètes”, Les Etudes Philosophiques , vol. 7, no. 3, p. 98-9. For further specific discussion of these distinctions, cf. The Mystery of Being ( Gifford Lectures: 1949-50 ) London: Harvill. 1950-1). Cf. also Alice Von Hildebrand’s illuminating discussion of Marcel’s notion of mystery in chap. 6 of The Art of Living .
18: Cf. in particular, Antonin D Sertillanges, “De la philosophie chrétienne”, La Vie Intellectuelle, v 24. n.; Bruno de Solages, “Le problème de la philosophie chrétienne”, La Vie Intellectuelle, v 25, n. 3; and Henri De Lubac, “Sur la philosophie chretienne, reflexions a la suite d’un debat”, Nouvelle Revue Théologique , v. 63, n. 3, later translated as “Retrieving the Tradition: On Christian Philosophy”, Communio , v. 19 (1992).
19: Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love (Manchester: Sophia Institute Press. 1984), p. 6. That slim volume is rich in other insights, but here I would like merely to note two following on the one just noted. 1) the I-though relationship is one not of “side to side but face to face,” p. 6. It involves not simply recognition and love of the individual , but their individuality, p. 9. I would argue that in the field of phenomenology of the human person, these insights compare with and would provide needed critical complement to, e.g. Emmanuel Levinas’ analyses of the relationship to the Other, in terms of height, the face, and God.
20: “Phenomenology of Values in a Christian Philosophy” in Christian Philosophy and Religious Renewal . George McLean, O.M.I., ed. (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 1966), p. 10.
21: “Phenomenology of Values in a Christian Philosophy”, p. 10.
22: While drawing from the wells of St. Thomas Aquinas insights, Von Hildebrand consistently criticized “Thomism” presented as a closed and self-sufficient philosophical system, precisely because it “not only frustrates any philosophical exploration but also does injustice to the great philosophical achievement of St. Thomas.” The New Tower of Babel (New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons. 1953), p. 93. His discussions bear fruitful similarities with Blondel’s reassessment and appropriation of Thomas later works, as well as with the positions developed by “Blondelian Thomists”, such as Rousselot, de Broglie, Forest, De Lubac, and De Finance.
23: “Phenomenology of Values in a Christian Philosophy”, p. 10.
24: BsfP , p. 64.
25: “Dangers in Constructing a Contemporary Christian Philosophy” in Christian Philosophy in the College and Seminary. George McLean,,O.M.I., ed. (Washington D.C.: Catholic University of America Press. 1966), p.14. He also discusses Blondel specifically in reference to this issue in The New Tower of Babel (New York: P.J. Kennedy and Sons. 1953), p. 92-3.
26: What is Philosophy? (Milwaukee: Bruce), p. 8.
27: What is Philosophy? , p. 2.
28: What is Philosophy? , p. 2.
29: What is Philosophy?, p. 3. Cf. also the sustained discussion of all of these critical points in the Prolegomena to Von Hildebrand’s Ethics (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press. 1953), points made again at places to numerous to single out through the rest of that volume.
30: This is a point not only made by Von Hildebrand at numerous points in his Ethics , but also exemplified by the very content and developing structure of that work.
31: BsfP , p. 90
32: Von Hildebrand makes these points at numerous places in his works. In the introduction to What is Philosophy?, he distinguishes between “[c]ertain facts and data [that are] readily accessible and may be grasped by anyone if he is not absent-minded or slipshod in his approach” (p. 3) and other more difficult matters which require a greater degree and capacities of attentiveness on the philosopher’s part, requiring development and possession of certain virtues and affective conditions. The manners and matters in which virtues and conditions determinately affect value-perception and response is made clear in Von Hildebrand’s specific studies in, e.g. The Art of Living , in Humility: Wellspring of Virtue , and in Ethics.
33: “Phenomenology of Values in a Christian Philosophy” , p. 17
34: “Approaches to Christian Philosophy: a Panel Discussion”, in Christian Philosophy in the College and Seminary, p. 31. In the Prolegomena to his Ethics, without once using the term “phenomenology,” Von Hildebrand nevertheless outlines its central tasks and features, among which are 1) that it start from the immediately given and “suspend all explanations which have been offered in former theories, reductions, or interpretations”, p. 3; 2) that it remain with, penetrate and analyze the given, in the process purifying the consciousness of the given and producing intellectual insight into the essence of the given; 3) that it grasp the relations which present themselves between the given and other givens, even if these take forms resistant to systematization. As Von Hildebrand puts it, bringing to light the continuous and progressive condition of philosophizing: “Instead of escaping from these problems by violating or denying the true nature of a being, the problems which arise should inspire a new effort to dig deeper, a readiness to accept the difficult and tiresome task of grappling further with them,” p 17.
35: “Dangers in Constructing a Contemporary Christian Philosophy”, p. 18
36: “The Role of Affectivity in Morality” ACPA Proceedings , vol. 32, p. 88. Cf. also The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity (South Bend: Saint Augustine’s Press. 2007), ch. 1.
37: “The Role of Affectivity in Morality”, p. 85-7
38: Each of these are provided substantive discussion in The Art of Living , 2 nd ed.
39: What is Philosophy , p. 3-4.
40: “Phenomenology of Values in a Christian Philosophy” p. 17-9, and Humility: Wellspring of Virtue . All of these virtues and affective states are also, of course, discussed in his Ethics . The analyses in The Heart and especially in Transformation in Christ systematically distinguish and examine even wider ranges of affective dispositions
41: “The Role of Affectivity in Morality”, p. 94. Cf. also, Ethics , part 2, sec 2 “Freedom”, where he focuses most specifically on the role of the will. It must be noted that Von Hildebrand self-consciously employs a more restricted conception of “will” than does Blondel, for whom the will is fundamentally determinative of and permeates the person’s entire being. This represents a difference in the range of terminology, however, rather than a substantive disagreement between these two.
I’ve got “Transformation in Christ: On the Christian Attitude”on my to-read list now. Very much enjoyed reading the article and working through (preliminarily) the footnote references. I had not previously read or even heard of Von Hildebrand. This paper was very illuminating in more than one way. I can tell I’m going to enjoy the discussion (or perhaps disagreement) on whether you can be a Christian and a philosopher or not.
Interesting article with many threads to follow up and consider.