[Yamauchi Lecture: Spring, 2009]
“Maurice Blondel, Social Catholicism, and Action Francaise”

	 “[T]he bitterest dispute in twentieth century Roman Catholic theology [was] over the proper way to characterize the relationship between nature and grace.”  Criticism of a certain extrinsicist understanding of the relationship between the natural and supernatural orders helped to dethrone the neo-scholasticism that largely dominated Catholic theological education until the Second Vatican Council.  Stephen Duffy’s book The Graced Horizon: Nature and Grace in Modern Catholic Thought has been described as the best introduction to this controversy.  Steve observed that “many debates which mark the history of theology are ultimately about nature and grace.”
	Twentieth century theological giants Henri de Lubac, Karl Rahner and Hans Urs von Balthasar are recognized for their role in recovering the riches of the Catholic tradition that overcame a polemicized, manualist presentation of Catholic doctrine, but it was a lay philosopher named Maurice Blondel, who is celebrated as the major catalyst for the renewal that bore fruit at Vatican II.  Henri de Lubac wrote this appreciation:

Latin theology's return to a more authentic tradition has taken place--not without some jolts, of course--in the course of the last century.  We must admit that the main impulse for this return came from a philosopher, Maurice Blondel.  His thinking was not primarily exercised in the areas proper to the professional theologians, nor did it base itself on a renewed history of tradition.  Still, he is the one who launched the decisive attack on the dualist theory which was destroying Christian thought.  Time after time he demonstrated the deficiencies of the thesis of the "extrinsicist" school, which recognized "no other link between nature and the supernatural than an ideal juxtaposition of elements which...were impenetrable to each other, and which were brought together by our intellectual obedience, so that the supernatural can subsist only if it remains extrinsic to the natural and if it is proposed from without as something important only in so far as it is a supernature...”
	In this Yamauchi lecture, I will give an overview of a dispute involving Blondel and a Jesuit philosopher named Pedro Descoqs that illustrates the practical consequences of different theological understandings.  It is an exercise in historical theology.  In the conclusion, I will suggest some contemporary controversies that can be illuminated by this analysis.

	In the early decades of the twentieth century French Catholics were sharply divided over what strategy the Church should adopt to re-Christianize society. This conflict found expression in a polemical exchange between Maurice Blondel and Pedro Descoqs, S.J.  In a series of essays published in the periodical Études, Descoqs composed a qualified defense of a Catholic alliance with the proto-fascist, monarchist movement Action Française [AF].  Born in the wake of the infamous Dreyfus Affair, Action Française, under the leadership of the agnostic Charles Maurras, promised to restore the historic union between the Roman Catholic Church and the French State that had been sundered by the Third Republic in 1905.  The anti-liberal ideology of Action Française was very appealing to a generation of Catholics who were alarmed at the anti-clerical, secularizing policies of the French government.  [Incidentally, this is the mentality that shaped Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, founder of the Society of St. Pius X--recently in the news.]
	 On the other hand, Maurice Blondel was appalled by Catholic collaboration with Action Française, a partnership he considered to be lethal to the Christian spirit.  In contrast, he came to the defense of the democratic, social Catholics who were open to collaborating with the republican government to bring about social justice for the workers.  These social Catholics had been accused of ‘social’ modernism.  Exactly one hundred years ago Maurice Blondel composed a series of articles which he published under the pseudonym “Testis,” the Latin word for “witness.”  At the height of the Modernist Crisis, whose epicenter was France, Blondel sought to ‘witness’ to the authentic Christian spirit.
	Let me introduce the protagonists.  Pedro Descoqs (1877-1946) was born in Normandy, France, in 1877, and entered the Paris Province of the Society of Jesus in 1895.  His generation of Jesuits was forced to complete their studies in exile [on the Channel isle of Jersey and in England].  Descoqs was schooled in the Baroque scholastic philosophy of Francisco Suárez, S.J., considered the normative interpreter of St. Thomas Aquinas within the Jesuit order.  Not long after his ordination in 1907, Descoqs was assigned to the Jesuit philosophate on the isle of Jersey where he remained until 1940.  During those years, he taught metaphysics and natural theology and also distinguished himself as the librarian.  In 1922, he co-founded the Archives de philosophie, a scholarly philosophical journal.  He wrote several voluminous philosophical manuals, notably the Praelectiones theologiae naturalis.  He is remembered as an indefatigable worker and an ardent polemicist, who waged an incessant battle against the new philosophical trends, including neo-Thomism, transcendental Thomism, and Blondel’s philosophy of action.  Having resided in Paris during the years of the Nazi occupation, Descoqs died of typhoid at Mongré (outside of Lyon) in 1946.
	Descoqs has been called “the last great representative of the Suarezian tradition.”  Francisco Suárez, S.J. (1548-1617), was an early Jesuit who played a central role in the revival of scholastic thought during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  Descoqs’s defense of Catholic collaboration with AF drew on certain basic Suarezian positions, that were largely shared with other scholastics.  Especially to be noted is Suárez’s epistemological realism that held, in accord with Aristotle and St.Thomas, that the mind can attain a true, speculative knowledge of being through the mental process of abstraction.  Second, Suárez maintained that the human mind can demonstrate the existence of God through an a posteriori reflection upon the fact of the dependent condition or contingency of creatures.  Dependent being, properly understood, requires a necessary being, namely God, in order to exist.  Finally, Suárez held that while the Church and State are distinct societies, the Church in the person of the Pope has indirect power over civil authority.  “There may occur a clash between the spiritual good and temporal convenience or expediency, and on such occasions the temporal sovereign must yield to the spiritual.”  The Church has this right because it serves a higher end, the human being’s eternal salvation.
The Context of Descoqs’s Articles
	Most French Jesuits of Descoqs’s generation favored a restoration of the monarchy.  They had good reason to feel alienated from the Third Republic (1875-1940) because a series of fiercely anti-clerical administrations had effectively annulled the Society of Jesus as a corporate presence in France.  Most notably, their extensive school system was suppressed.  In 1901, another flare-up of anti-clericalism resulted in a complete ban of “unapproved” religious congregations, among whom the Society of Jesus was a primary target.  Forced entries, plundering of property, and expulsions were the order of the day.  Catholic disaffection grew as the radical-republican coalitions holding sway pressed their agenda.  Laicization of education, liberalization of divorce laws, and a variety of other secularizing measures were constant reminders of the “de-Christianizing” of France.  The anti-clerical tide reached its peak in 1905 when the Law of Separation was enacted that unilaterally abrogated the Concordat between the French State and the Roman Catholic Church.  Many Catholics felt that grave harm had been inflicted on the Church and her interests.  Catholic “liberals,” however, tended to view the separation of Church and State as a progressive step.  From Rome, Pope Pius X resolutely refused all accommodation to the Law of Separation and the humiliating measures it entailed.  At this low ebb in the Church’s institutional fortunes, Charles Maurras opportunely presented himself as her staunch defender.

Charles Maurras and the Roman Catholic Church
	Charles Maurras (1868-1952) was a brilliant young intellectual who had come to Paris in the late 1880’s to make his career.  Though baptized Catholic, he had lost his faith (and his hearing) as a teenager.  Having adopted Auguste Comte’s positivist philosophy, Maurras decided to committed his considerable journalistic and polemical talents to the cause of the “salvation” of France.  In the late 1890’s, the infamous Dreyfus Affair divided French society over the putative guilt or innocence of a Jewish military captain accused and initially found guilty of betraying military secrets to the Germans.  In this extremely polarized climate, marked by anti-Semitism, Germanophobia, and political pessimism, the ultra-nationalist movement of Action Française took shape to champion the sovereignty and security of the French State.  Maurras emerged as its guiding, charismatic theoretician.  He convinced his associates to adopt a neo-royalist political agenda to give concrete form to their uncompromising, “integral” nationalism, given impetus and sharp focus by the Dreyfus Affair.  Maurras argued that the restoration of the monarchy was the only “scientifically” apt vehicle to save French society from the miasma of revolutionary, “liberal” individualism and to restore France to her classical greatness.
	As early as 1898, Maurras had invited Catholics to make common cause with himself and other atheistic positivists for the salvation of France.  In 1906, AF’s clamorous demonstrations at the time of the infamous “inventories” had elicited a wave of sympathetic Catholic reaction.  In the same year, Maurras published a small volume entitled Le Dilemme de Marc Sangnier in which he posed this fundamental political option: “either the monarchical positivism of Action Française or the social Christianity of the Sillon.”  It aroused passionate reaction, especially in Catholic circles.  This book was largely a compilation of Maurras’s journalistic essays that attacked the democratic notions of Marc Sangnier (1873-1950) and his recently launched national political movement known as the “the greater Sillon.”  Maurras scorned the charismatic Catholic visionary Sangnier who preached that democratic values were the evolutionary fruits of Christian civilization and that democracy was the only political structure in accord with evangelical values.  He viewed Sangnier as an unwitting propagator of the socially corrosive, egoistic individualism and liberalism that had its sources in the ideals of the French Revolution and the Protestant Reformation.  This was an assessment that was bound to appeal to the intransigent Catholics who refused all compromise with political liberalism.
	Descoqs culminated his exposition of Maurras’s system with this “most important” question: “In his blueprint [for social reconstruction] has Maurras reserved any place for Catholicism, and, if so, what is this place?”  Though recognizing that this “Catholic atheist” does not recognize the supernatural constitution of the Church, Descoqs lauded Maurras’s esteem for the Church as “the rampart of order” to which he assigned a privileged position in his reconstituted state.
	But Descoqs did not deceive himself regarding the limits of Maurras’s appreciation of the Church.  “The Church appears to him, from his relativist perspective, both as the guarantee of civilization and the guardian of nationality.”  Being a consistent positivist, Maurras justified the Church’s privileged role in his monarchist State by adducing her historical role in maintaining social order and cohesiveness.  Thus, in contrast with the anti-clerical “barbarians” who deposed the Church from its official public role, Maurras proudly calls himself “Roman” and champions the cause of the Catholic Church as the historic bulwark of social order.

Against all those who take umbrage at the Church of Rome, against all these “barbarians” who only seem born to destroy, he declares himself “Roman.”  There lies his true faith, and this faith he expresses in a “symbol,” known to all, that he intends to be above all a hymn of praise to the Church, guardian of order: “Order, tradition, discipline, hierarchy, authority, continuity, unity, work, family, corporation, decentralization, autonomy, labor organization,” she alone has known how to preserve for societies the elements, [and] for intelligence the ideas, that found their life.
But Descoqs expressed a significant caveat.  He cautioned that “in the thought of M. Maurras, the term ‘Roman’ is not to be confused with the term ‘Catholic.’”  Indeed, Maurras’s use of the term “Catholic” was not to be confused with the term “Christian.”  Maurras’s appreciation of the “true spirit” of the Church, was to say the least, peculiar.  Maurras seemed to oppose the spirit of the “Roman” Church to the spirit of her founder.  Maurras had expressed his contempt for the spirit of the biblical prophets and even Jesus in certain of his early works.  These passages were a scandal to any Christian who might contemplate an alliance with Maurras’s movement.  This was the second major impediment that Descoqs had to address if a collaboration between Catholics and Maurrassian positivists was to be deemed acceptable.
On the one hand, Descoqs extenuated the incriminating passages in which Maurras expressed his loathing for the “tumultous sentences of the prophets” and the “venom” of the Magnificat.  Maurras was simply castigating the “exegetical extravagances” of the Reformation that “revolutionaries and democrats” have employed to sanction their ruinous programs of social equality.  On the other hand, after conceding to Maurras that the gospel can give rise to “dangerous interpretations,” and benevolently inferring from Maurras’s praise of Rome an argument for the necessity of a magisterium to guard against “every fantastical interpretation,” Descoqs firmly repudiated any suggestion of a dichotomy between the Church and her founder that Maurras’s writings might suggest.
Apart from “these fundamental divergences” between Maurras’s views and the Church’s dogma, Descoqs opined that Maurras gave the impression of being “almost one of her sons.”  Descoqs found it inexplicable why this “Catholic atheist” stopped short at the threshold, refusing to enter the Temple whose lines he so much admired.  Descoqs evidently hoped that Maurras would one day cross the threshold and return to the formative institution of his childhood.  The Jesuit found no insuperable impediment in Maurras’s positions that precluded his reconciliation with the Church.
		Maurras’s System and Catholic Principles
Descoqs vigorously defended the soundness of Maurras’s conclusions apropos of the “natural” order, while lamenting his religious and philosophical “deficiencies” that prevented “any positive accord on dogmatic terrain.”  Descoqs defended Maurras’s capacity to arrive at the truths because the political and social order has its own autonomy and right reason can legitimately arrive at valid conclusions without recourse to supernatural revelation as their necessary source or sanction.  The fundamental issue, then, was the relationship between the natural and supernatural orders.
	What were the main lines of Descoqs’s case for collaboration?  First, he argued that a union for the sake of results in the natural order, viz., social prosperity, is valid even though the “ontological value of these results” is regarded differently by the collaborating parties.  Second, he stated that though the natural and supernatural orders are intimately related, nevertheless, “the end of the natural order can be pursued in a very large measure independently of the supernatural end.”  Third, though Maurras has a woefully “deficient” understanding of metaphysics and the Church, his own positivist principles lead him not to interfere with her activity; furthermore, the valid social and political truths of his system are open to and, indeed, require completion by the philosophia perennis.  Just as deficiencies in Aristotle’s philosophy had not prevented Aquinas from incorporating Aristotle’s valid insights into a Christian synthesis, so Descoqs viewed his own apologetic efforts in relation to Maurras’s system.
	Since Catholics and neo-monarchists are able to agree on the “means for realizing the temporal prosperity of the community,” expedients that “the experimental method” confirms, they are able to work together for this very determinate end.  In making his case, Descoqs employed a helpful analogy that contrasted two sorts of working collaborations to illustrate the difference between permissible and impermissible coalitions.  On the one hand, consider two groups, made up of believers and unbelievers respectively, working together to transport heavy beams to Notre Dame Cathedral to erect a scaffolding.  The believers intend to repair the sanctuary.  The unbelievers intend to construct a pyre to destroy the Cathedral.  Though the two groups agree on an immediate, “bare” (brut) end, i.e., the transport of the beams, their intentions are so contradictory that their joint venture must be unreservedly condemned as immoral.  On the other hand, imagine that these same two groups agree to transport the beams for the common goal of repairing the Church.  The believers, motivated by a spirit of faith, want to give glory to God.  The unbelievers simply want to safeguard an artistic marvel that is a legacy of French culture.  Where would be the injustice or immorality of the collaboration of these two groups in hauling the beams since both propose to cooperate on the same good work?
 	The collaboration between Catholics and unbelieving positivists is precisely akin to the second example.  It is not a case of these groups having absolutely no idea in common.  Catholics can collaborate with positivists because “these latter have very just, though incomplete and ‘deficient’ ideas on several points: order, authority, [and] tradition.”  These truths “are from God....and ascend to God.”  Both parties “pursue a genuine good, the common, temporal good, which, according to rational philosophy and Christian doctrine, is the proper end of civil society.”  Sufficient to found a legitimate collaboration, “this has nothing analogous to the immoral accord on the results considered above and the negation of a personal God; a fortiori, the sole fact of not knowing God will not necessarily render all accord illegitimate.”  There is a realm of truth equally accessible to a Catholic and an unbeliever.  If, in the order of being, God is the supreme principle and goal, in the order of logic, God is not the first object nor the first principle.  To require an explicit appeal to God to validate truths in the natural order is to embrace the errors “of the traditionalists and the ontologists.”  Catholics and neo-monarchists base their political constructions “on facts of experience that do not stem of themselves from any theory.”  The natural order has “its proper value and relative independence.”  Descoqs insisted on maintaining the “essential distinction...between purely political and economic questions and moral and religious questions.”

The remote orientation [that the political and economic order] receives from the supernatural end does not change its proper object [nor] modify its laws.  The supernatural corrects nature, extends its domain, completes it; it does not suppress it nor volatize it.
The Jesuit recalled that Popes Leo XIII and Pius X had reaffirmed the just liberty for Catholics in the political order.  Catholics do not have to renounce their principles to cooperate with Maurras on a plan of “immediately political reforms.”  Thus Descoqs.
Maurice Blondel
	From his adolescence, Maurice Blondel (1861-1949) had a keen sense of the cultural crisis and intellectual malaise that was gripping his society.  He felt called to enter into the lists as a philosophical apologist for Christian truth that was being disparaged or dismissed by the secular university intelligentsia and cultural pundits.  Receiving a very different training from Descoqs’s seminary education, Blondel earned his degree at the prestigious École Normale Supérieure.  He conceived of a strictly philosophical project that would show the illegitimacy of the reigning “separated” philosophy, which considered the “transcendent” as utterly superfluous to self-sufficient reason’s capacity to explain reality.  This project came to fruition in his doctoral dissertation L'Action [Action].  
Blondel’s seminal insight was to conceive of “action” as the link between thought and being.  The term “action” was not even an entry in the standard philosophical dictionary of the period.  Blondel’s genius was to elaborate a meticulous phenomenology that set out the “logic of action” in human life so as to disclose its ultimate insufficiency.  In studying action, Blondel confronts directly the problem which dominates all human existence: “Yes or no, does life have a meaning and does man have a destiny?”  Michael Kerlin explains:
[Blondel] wants to show that our acts themselves imply the solution.  We cannot avoid acting, and every attempt to limit the scope and interpretation of our actions will push us beyond itself until finally we are faced with the question of the supernatural, a question that we can neither properly pose nor answer without going beyond our own resources.

Blondel grounded the progressive and ineluctable expansion of action in the dialectic of human willing that futilely seeks to equate its specific and concrete expressions with its inexhaustible, aboriginal élan.  This dialectic is the expression of the inevitable disproportion between what Blondel termed the “willing will” (volonté voulante) and the “willed will” (volonté voulue).  The “willing will” is the inexhaustible aspiration to attain the infinite that is never permanently quenched by the “willed will,” which is the specific, concrete instances of willing.  James Le Grys epitomized Blondel’s primordial insight: “The life of action is marked by the constant struggle to equal ourselves caused by the presence of the infinite within us, not the serenity of an emancipation through speculation.”
	According to Blondel, fidelity to the logic of action must lead to this “doubly imperious conclusion”:

It is impossible not to recognize the insufficiency of the natural order in its totality and not to feel an ulterior need; it is impossible to find within oneself something to satisfy this religious need.  It is necessary; and it is impracticable.

The “it” refers to the supernatural that Blondel’s secular university contemporaries dismissed.

Absolutely impossible and absolutely necessary for man, that is properly the notion of the supernatural.  Man’s action goes beyond man; and all the effort of his reason is to see that he cannot, that he must not restrict himself to it.  A deeply felt expectation of an unknown messiah; a baptism of desire, which human science lacks the power to evoke, because this need itself is a gift.  Science can show its necessity, it cannot give it birth.

Having disclosed the necessity of a supernatural completion of the natural order, Blondel’s “transcendental” analysis claimed to show that only the option for what he termed the “one thing necessary” (Unique nécessaire) could give ultimate meaning and coherence to the human project.
	Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age helps to put Blondel in context.  In this magisterial work, Taylor seeks to explain why unbelief has become so prevalent in modern Western culture.  He analyzes what he terms the “immanent frame” that characterizes the modern age and the associated rise of an exclusive humanism that dismisses the reality of the supernatural order.  Blondel aimed to construct a compelling philosophical argument to show that the immanent order is not self-sufficient AND that it requires the supernatural order for its completion.
	Blondel had a rough go at his thesis defense.  And the reception of the published dissertation was mixed.  Convinced that Blondel had compromised the proper autonomy of philosophy, the philosopher Léon Brunschvicg (1869-1944) announced “a courteous but firm opposition, in the interests of reason.”  Blondel was blocked from a university position until a personal contact intervened on his behalf with the government ministry of education, securing a post at the University of Aix-en-Province where he taught until blindness forced his retirement in the 1920’s.	
Between the publication of Action and the First World War, Blondel was largely sidetracked from purely philosophical projects by a succession of controversies concerning “mixed” questions.  Blondel took advantage of these occasions to apply and clarify his philosophy of action and to refute the criticisms to which it was subject.  In his1896 “Letter on Apologetics,” Blondel’s strong endorsement of the method of immanence, though not the doctrine of immanence (i.e., modern philosophy’s rationalist pretension to self-sufficiency), succeeded in winning over many of his rationalist critics.  However, he stirred up a hornet’s nest of reaction among certain Catholic scholastic thinkers that dogged him for most of his life.  These critics objected to Blondel’s criticism of the scholastic apologetics as a “static” system which “superimposes” the supernatural order on the natural order and which ignores the genuine requirements of the modern “subject.”  Blondel was accused of blurring the distinction between the natural and supernatural orders and thus of compromising the gratuity of the order of grace.  This accusation figured prominently in his dispute with Descoqs.
In 1904, Blondel published a series of articles entitled “History and Dogma.”  After the “Letter on Apologetics,” they are the second notable application of his philosophy of action to a mixed area: the relationship of history and dogma.  The doctrinal crisis prompted by the writings of Alfred Loisy (1857-1940) afforded Blondel the opportunity both to refute Loisy’s historicism and to show the inadequacies of the scholastic “extrinsicism” that passed itself off as the epitome of orthodoxy.  Blondel elaborated an understanding of Tradition that avoided the pitfalls of the opposing extremes.  He considered that both of these positions were aberrations from the genuine tradition.  Rooted in flawed philosophy, they were at the heart of the conflict in Catholic thought:

With every day that passes, the conflict between tendencies which set Catholic against Catholic in every order--social, political, philosophical--is revealed as sharper and more general.  One could almost say that there are now two quite incompatible “Catholic mentalities,” particularly in France.  And that is manifestly abnormal, since there cannot be two Catholicisms.

Blondel sought to mediate a via tertia that distinguished itself from the historicism of Loisy, with whom his philosophy of action was linked by superficial critics, and from the “extrinsicism” of his scholastic critics.  Though his effective critique of Loisy helped rehabilitate Blondel in the eyes of some scholastics, Blondel continued to be linked with a motley movement of Catholic intellectuals that were soon to be proscribed as “modernists.”  Catholic scholastics attributed the contagion of modernism to the “infiltrations” of Kantian philosophy.  Some of his critics viewed Blondel’s philosophy of action as simply a clever sort of neo-Kantianism. 
Blondel’s Reaction to Pascendi
During the pontificates of Leo XIII (1878-1903) and Pius X (1903-1914), challenges multiplied to Catholic doctrine and practice, collectively referred to as the Modernist Crisis.  A complexity of factors was at work.  Not least was the impact of the developing biblical, historical, and social sciences.  In reaction, many Catholics felt, often with good reason, that the essentials of the faith were being compromised.  It would be inaccurate to characterize these tensions as a simple division between reactionaries who benightedly clung to the past--supported by an anti-intellectual Roman authoritarianism--and progressives who were open to change, marked by a scholarly commitment to truth.
During the pontificate of Pius X, the perception of a crisis within the Church over the understanding and living of the faith grew sharper in Blondel.  He especially deplored a certain Catholic reaction to the Law of Separation that sought to achieve “the triumph of political theocracy and the scholastic synthesis.”  Responding to a national survey in 1907, Blondel articulated his sense of the “present crisis”:

[U]nprecedented perhaps in depth and extent--for it is at the same time scientific, metaphysical, moral, social and political--[the crisis] is not a “dissolution” [for the spirit of faith does not die], nor even an “evolution” [for the spirit of faith does not change], it is a purification of the religious sense, and an integration of Catholic truth.

In 1907, Pope Pius X promulgated the encyclical Pascendi which procribed “Modernism” as “the synthesis of all heresies.”  This papal document was not the “purification” and “integration” of Catholic truth for which Blondel yearned.  His initial reaction was stupor and pain.  After overcoming his initial impression (at first, the encyclical seemed “to ruin my life and annihilate my purpose in life”), he realized that what it “condemned, and justly, is the fundamental error of emergence, the thesis of the efference of the supernatural arising from man or by human means, exclusively from below.”  Blondel thought that this condemnation in no way touched his own positions and, therefore, he had nothing to retract.  Nevertheless, given the prevailing circumstances, he felt that he should keep silent.  There were underlying reasons for the persistent incomprehension of his positions.

First, the scholastic ideology, which still exclusively dominates, includes the study neither of religious psychology nor of the subjective facts that convey to the conscience the action of the objective realities whose presence in us Revelation indicates; this ideology only considers as legitimate the examination of what objectively informs us about these realities as designated and defined.  Moreover, and especially, everything is instinctively resisted that would limit the authoritarianism born of an exclusive extrinsicism.  And, without formulating it, the conception is entertained according to which everything in religious life comes from on high and from without.  Only the priesthood is active before a purely passive and receptive flock.

In the prevailing ecclesial climate, anything “that would hinder this spirit of domination, everything that would recall the role of this interior hearing (auditus interior) of which St. Thomas did not fear to speak, would be pitilessly blasted (foudroyé).”  It was necessary to let the “‘state of seige’...produce its natural, and supernatural, effects.”  Yet, Blondel expressed a sympathy for “the founded fears, the legitimate scruples, the generous zeal of those who, seeing or believing the ‘deposit’ threatened, are ready for anything to defend it.”  “We have a double task to accomplish: work of sanctification and edification by our loyalty, if necessary to go as far as heroism; work of illumination and enlargement of scholastic minds.”  It was not surprising that the “theologians” have not understood what Blondel had intended for “the rationalists and the unbelievers.”  The challenge now is to “discreetly try...starting from St. Thomas, to open the eyes of all who want to reflect on their own positions.”  Blondel continued:
In brief, let us abandon litigious words; let us renounce the positions turned towards the “moderns”; every attempt at penetration is now suspended; but, shut up with our brothers in the besieged place, by kindness and patience let us work to illuminate them, to arm them for the future.  In conscience, I do not believe myself obliged to renounce interiorly any of my hopes.  And I even have confidence that, by mysterious ways, the present suffering will be fecund: this terrible suffering of being calumniated in face of the world by the highest authority, this infinitely more bitter suffering to ponder the anguish of so many souls and the pain of Our Lord himself.

Blondel asserted that “the fundamental question remains intact”:

Catholicism, it is true, implicitly affirms that everything comes from God and proceeds from on high.  But, although attention is directed exclusively upon the afference of the external gift, the reality of an internal afference is not denied and cannot be denied.  It is not even suspected that it is legitimate and urgent to seek how this internal afference can be legitimately considered and utilized.  That is our entire problem.  They simply have believed that we profess a doctrine of mitigated and inconsistent efference.

To eliminate any ambiguity regarding the importance of external “afference,” i.e., the necessity of external Revelation, Blondel composed and published an unsigned editorial in his journal Annales de philosophie chrétienne [APC] that expressed unmitigated adherence to the teaching of Pascendi:

No, Christianity does not emerge from nature by a subconscious and spontaneous evolution.  No, it is not an emanation of the religious conscience of humanity.  It proceeds from a positive intervention and a gratuitous and miraculous condescension of God; it is constituted by the historical fact of the Incarnation; it is essentially a supernatural gift, interior gift of grace that feeds the Christian life, exterior gift of the teaching and precepts of Christ, which, confided to the apostles, is communicated to us by the Church and her infallible head.  To the thesis of efference that draws the dogmas and the virtues of Catholicism from below and, so to speak, from the depths of nature or the guts of humanity, the thesis of afference is radically opposed that affirms the character, specifically supernatural, free and gratuitous of the entire Christian order.  And we adhere to this absolutely fundamental truth with our entire soul.

Blondel surely expressed himself in this way so as to leave no room for critics to raise doubts about his positions.  However, in the “Testis” series, Blondel returned to the “fundamental question.”  The unnuanced endorsement of “afference” in the APC editorial will be replaced by a theory of “double afference.”  Pure afference will be strongly criticized as a dangerously one-sided “monophorism,” as “inexact” as a pure immanentism.
Blondel was convinced that Pascendi did not impugn his essential positions.  But did Pascendi, in fact, target Blondel’s apologetics?  Indubitably.  The encyclical was not only condemnatory of the doctrine of immanence that Blondel had consistently repudiated, it also censured the method of immanence applied to apologetics.  Blondel recognized that he indeed was one of the “moderate” modernists accused by Pascendi.  In his defense, he was quick to point out that the encyclical distinguished three different usages of “immanence”: the doctrine that Blondel had always repudiated; an exclusive application of the method of immanence; and a supplementary, non-exclusive use of the method of immanence.  Had not his doctoral thesis Action been “banished from philosophy by the true immanentists [who viewed it] as expressing a pure doctrine of transcendence”?  However, though Pascendi acknowledged the third use of “immanence” as acceptable, Blondel decided to abandon the “litigious” vocabulary of “immanence” because of the unavoidable ambiguities connected with its usage.  The “Testis” essays dropped this terminology, though Blondel did not relinquish the “truth of the method of immanence.”
The “Testis” Essays
Approximately two years after the publication of Pascendi, Blondel decided to end his silence.  Under cover of defending the social Catholics of the Semaines sociales, he gave his “witness” against a pervasive and insidious “extrinsicist” mentality, which he labelled ‘monophorist’ [one-way street] that, boasting of its orthodoxy, threatened “the very understanding of the moral destiny and the religious conscience.”  Blondel disclaimed the intention to refute certain charges brought against the social Catholics and suggested a larger purpose for the “Testis” series.  The underlying issues “transcend the horizon of the present controversies and...concern the entire future of Catholicism itself among us.”
In the “Testis” articles, Blondel contrasted two mentalities according to three fundamental orientations.  The three orientations concerned epistemology--the relation of our thoughts to reality; ontology--the relationships among the different orders of reality; and theology--the nature-supernatural relationship.  Blondel used these articles to clarify his “philosophy of action.”  The contrasting positions that he limned, he attributed to the Maurrassian Catholics.  Both mentalities were anti-modernist; they were nevertheless on a collision course.
The first thesis concerns “the problem of knowledge and the relations of thought with action.”  This thesis is the philosophical crux of the other two.

Actions are not simply the putting into practice of logically defined ideas and of geometrically shaped theories; and everything is not decided in the domain of abstractions, as if human beings were only pure intellects, as if concepts were the adequate substitute of things and the sole motivation of the will, as if we governed ourselves by them and them alone.  In individual and social practice, there is always something more and different than in the speculative systems that appear to inspire it.  That is why the ideas that determine actions do not prevent actions from prompting new ideas that, even setting out from inexact and mutilating theses, can become liberating and healing.  The life of human beings and of peoples obeys a more complex logic than that of abstract thought; what one does is often better or worse than what one thinks.

In contrast, extrinsicist monophorists like the Catholic Maurrassians embrace an epistemological essentialism, a notional realism, that claims that our concepts grasp reality, independently of any consideration of human subjectivity and historicity.  In short, there is a tendency to separate theory and practice and to regard our clear and distinct ideas as giving an adequate grasp on reality.  Blondel maintained “that our thoughts are in intimate relation not only with the realities they represent, but also with the profound life of the soul, with our moral habits, and with our entire selves.”  Consequently, “to study and care for men and peoples, it is not sufficient to treat them as walking syllogisms, to refute errors demonstratively, by dialectical and didactic means to establish truths that impose themselves as fixed structures, like ‘an unchangeable essence.’”  The solution of human problems requires the consideration of “historical and economic evolution, to envisage the science of human perspectives, to rely on the slow maturation of problems, to aid the fumblings, to follow the work of implicit thought and carry it through to the end.”  
The second thesis formulated the particular ontology that corresponded to “this dynamic philosophy of thought and action.”  This conception of being recognizes the “solidarity and continuity” among its different orders “without failing to recognize the distinction of beings and the hierarchy of different orders.”  Reality is an interconnected whole in which no order of being is absolutely enclosed in itself.  In contrast with every “exclusive ideology” that compartmentalizes the world in accord with its mental habit of “isolating ideas like intellectual atoms and logical blocks,” reality is a continuum where “there is action from the top down and from the bottom up.”

...the lower degrees, without ceasing to be lower and powerless to provoke any ascent by themselves, are nevertheless steps, that is to say, stepping stones (points d’appui) and as it were springboards (tremplins).  The higher degrees [or levels] are really the final cause of this world, which is not a simple patchwork of juxtaposed episodes, but an order in which the unity of the divine design circulates.  “Reality is a continuum,” like the circulatory system in which the heart would not be able to send out the life-giving blood if it did not call for and receive the blood to which it gives life.  There is no level that does not include a place for a staircase or the movement of an elevator.  By the condescension and action of the higher level, the lower level is as it were giving birth to a higher cooperation.  Material things become the support of economic phenomena; economic facts, even those that appear to relate to entirely physical needs, are already pregnant with moral and social relationships.  One cannot legitimately and with impunity enclose oneself in any one order; there is action from the top down and from the bottom up.

This philosophy of the interconnectedness of the various levels of reality counters classical economics and philosophical rationalism that effect a “murderous vivisection” on the unity of the human being and the world.  In a negative allusion to the influential social doctrine of Auguste Comte, which Charles Maurras adopted, Blondel declared “deceptive and myopic, that social physics that desires to suffice for scientifically regulating public and private interests from a positivist point of view.”   Reality is not a series of  "water-tight" compartments that are totally self-contained.
The third fundamental orientation concerned the understanding of the nature-supernatural relationship.  Blondel declared this thesis to be “the most delicate of the disputed points, that which dominates the entire debate.”  While insisting that the supernatural order is “entirely gratuitous and absolutely transcendent,” Blondel contended that this order is not only “superimposed,” but it is also “supposed and presupposed” by the natural order.  Carefully stating that the supernatural order “is never able to be naturalized,” he continued:

[The supernatural order] is destined to penetrate and to assume [the natural order] in itself without becoming confused with it.  And at the same time that it is proposed from on high by Revelation, the Incarnation and the Redemption, which substantially constitute it and which are not simply facts to observe and mysteries to believe, but reach souls invisibly by the effulgence of the grace of which they are the source, act upon all human beings so to speak from below to enable them to break out of all the enclosures in which they would like to confine themselves, to raise them above themselves, to burst every merely natural equilibrium, to put them on a level, and require them to be in accord, with the plan of providence.

Blondel maintained that the human person must be considered in his actual, concrete historical conditions and not some hypothetical state of “pure nature.”

...they never forget that one cannot think or act anywhere as if we do not all have a supernatural destiny.  Because, since it concerns the human being such as he is, in concreto, in his living and total reality, not in a simple state of hypothetical nature, nothing is truly complete (boucle), even in the sheerly natural order.

This open-ended anthropology recognizes that human striving can never be satisfactorily explained or fulfilled in sheerly positivist terms.  The social Catholics look to specifically “Christian solutions” to socio-economic problems because, contrary to the prevalent economic liberalism and sociological positivism, they recognize that a self-contained socio-economic order is an abstraction that falsifies the actual supernatural destiny of the concrete person.  In contrast, the Catholic Maurrassians separate natural and supernatural orders, so that the supernatural is treated as an external overlay.  The supernatural order is a gratuitous superimposition by purely extrinsic command that relates to a purely passive obediential potency, without the external gift being able or having to entail the help of an interior contribution...[specifically supernatural truths] are only supernatural in the measure that they are defined, named, and expressly imposed by way of authority.
	Blondel termed the ensemble of philosophical and theological positions to which he subscribed  “integral realism.”  “Monophorism” was Blondel's term for a reigning clerical authoritarianism which on principle refused to recognize that grace can be at work from below.  Extrinsicist monophorism, claiming that nature is sufficient unto itself or, at most, possesses a “suitability” with respect to the supernatural, unavoidably presents the supernatural as a “sort of counter-nature” and presents Christianity as “a law of fear and constraint, as an instrument of domination.”  Blondel blamed the “manualist theology” for this perversion of the tradition.
	The social Catholics and the philosophers of action have done the most to show “the essential heterogeneity and real continuity of the two orders” of the natural and the supernatural.  Monophorists juxtapose “an exclusively extrinsicist and authoritarian supernaturalism” to an all-sufficient nature.  In contrast to the social Catholics who are attentive to “[the] stammerings, the complaints, [the] griefs” that arise from the people, the monophorists treat the people as a “perpetual child,” demanding “a passive docility” and presenting Christianity not “as a liberation and a expansion for our being” but “as a new subjection, as an oppression weighing upon a nature already full, solid, and sufficient, and crushing it under the mystery and under the divine power...”  In the face of this radical “denaturing” of the “Good News,” Blondel poignantly asked: “Apart from the Catholic truth, is not the very meaning of the moral destiny and the human religious conscience misconstrued?”
Poisonous Fruits of Monophorism	
Blondel judged Catholic collaboration with Maurras to be the most scandalous fruit of extrinsicist monophorism.  Exposing the nature of the alliance between Catholics and the Maurrassian positivists was the decisive point to make his case that this mentality killed the Christian spirit.  He indicated a sinister explanation for the attraction of intransigent Catholics to a political alliance with pagans:

It is their a-Christianity and even anti-Christianity that you love and assist in them, and, dare I say, that which is systematically irreligious.  That is the terrible observation that we are going to make.

Blondel maintained that Catholic monophorists and Maurrassian positivists shared a common conception of authority that suppressed “interiority” (le fait intérieur).  For both types of authoritarians, “the enemy is the liberty of souls and the initiative of spirit.”  Blondel viewed Descoqs’s apology for Maurras as a logically consistent but fatally flawed approach to the fundamental problem of the Christian renewal of society.  Furthermore, Maurras’s philosophy was patently anti-Christian and efforts to extenuate its true character were hardly worthy of refutation.  Blondel did not engage in a meticulous, point by point refutation of the Jesuit’s qualified case on behalf of Maurras.  Rather, he addressed certain axial assertions and criticized them in the light of the flawed monophorist positions that he had already expounded.
The monophorist system followed a logic of three stages: first, the confiscation of civic liberty, and the domestication and mobilization of the Catholic faithful for a crusade under the banner of religion; second, the organization not only of an exclusively religious politics, but of a political religion; and third, the pursuit of the dream of a temporal Empire, spiritually elevated, against the secular power.  Blondel viewed this state of affairs with great alarm: “[I]t is a matter of interests so serious that we will be pardoned for expressing here our fears...whether one likes it or not, whether it is known or not, this is the theological enormity and political insanity to which certain minds are headed in the present crisis.”
The monophorist philosophy of nature at work here separates the different levels of reality, denying to the lower levels “any spontaneity, any suppleness, any solidarity” in their subjection to the higher levels; “legality and formal literalness reign.”  The monophorist system depends on linking the supernatural to a “solid” natural order by means of “logical principles and external data.”  “Reason only exists to obey and to proclaim reasonable the agnosticism that is imposed on it.”  Though reason is championed, it remains captive within its enclosure.
Disclaiming an attack on persons or motives, Blondel strongly reproached the collaboration between Catholics and Maurrassians for which Descoqs had offered a qualified, “theoretical” endorsement.  He asserted that this “demoralizing and de-Christianizing” solution proved worse than the harmful liberal alternative.  It turns Catholicism into a “war machine, an instrument of earthly reign” under cover of admiring a notion of “order” that suppresses “the spontaneous movement of souls.” 
Blondel repeatedly and emphatically stressed the “fundamental error” that poisoned both the Maurrassians and their monophorist apologists: “the failure to recognize the inner working of the divine gift, the doubly religious spontaneity of souls that are under the action of both grace and liberty.”  His analysis has received high praise from two of the twentieth century’s most distinguished theologians.  Balthasar considered Blondel’s "Testis" essays to be "the most penetrating analysis of [what is called] Catholic integralism [intégrisme] that . . . represents an ever recurrent temptation for militant Catholics."  Blondel’s analysis of the integralist mentality was also evoked by Yves Congar, O.P., one of the Second Vatican Council’s most influential theologians: "If one had to characterize in a word the Council's approach, I would appeal to the ideal of knowledge that Maurice Blondel proposed and that he defended against what he termed rather strangely 'monophorism', that is a reified conception of knowing."

ASSESSING THE FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES
The exchange between Blondel and Descoqs was messy.  It was marked by misunderstandings, accusations, and what the French term a “procès de tendances” (conflict of mentalities).  At a certain point, each admitted that his adversary’s positions could be given an acceptable interpretation.  Nevertheless, even after the condemnation of Action Française in 1926, Descoqs continued to insist that Blondel’s approach to the problem betrayed a dangerous confusion of the natural and supernatural orders.  In my assessment, I will focus on the central theological isse: the understanding of the nature-supernatural relationship.  Then I will compare their differing visions of the Christian renewal of society.  Finally, some recent disputes over the Church’s role in society will be indicated that can be instructively illuminated by this history.
Three Images of the Nature-Supernatural Relationship
The complexity and interconnectedness of their epistemological, ontological, and theological positions can be illuminated by three different images that give concrete expression to three contrasting ways of understanding the relationship between nature and the supernatural that figured in the dispute between Blondel and Descoqs.
First, Blondel’s own position that emphasized that reality is a “continuum” in which there are no perfectly self-contained “airtight compartments,” and in which there is an exigence for the supernatural, could be imaged by the structure of the Pantheon.  In the architectural design of this ancient Roman building, the lines of force of the circular walls converge on the open space above, the primary source of light.  Standing within the windowless building, one notices that no part of the cavernous interior is “compartmentalized,” but the eye is directed upwards to the incoming light.  Though the lower part of the structure has solidity, it has no self-contained status.  There are no “walls of separation” that divide one section from another.  Furthermore, without the light that descends from above, it would be impossible to take adequate account of the lower levels.
No analogy is problem free, but I think this image wonderfully captures Blondel’s view of the nature-supernatural relationship, both in its positive and defective aspects.  On the positive side, it does translate Blondel’s sense of the élan of the human spirit (and the whole created order) that is nowhere chez lui [‘at home’], but whose dialectical movement requires the supernatural to make ultimate sense.  There is movement from below upward, and from on high downward.  It also conveys the ambiguity of Blondel’s understanding of an “exigence” for the supernatural, i.e., the necessity that the supernatural be given in order for the lower levels to make sense.  Indeed, the architectural design of the Pantheon translates Descoqs’s accusation that Blondel’s defective view of conceptual knowledge results in an undermining of the proper autonomy of the natural order.  Imagining that the soul source of light in the Pantheon is from the opening above--the oculus--at which the structural lines from below converge, is this not analogous to Descoqs’s charge that Blondel seemed to imply that humans can only attain certitude in their knowing by means of the experience of the supernatural?  And that “without this light pouring in from up above,” human understanding cannot attain a certain grasp of the truth?  It seems that for Blondel the experience of grace was a sine qua non for arriving at truth.
The second image illuminates the understanding of the nature-supernatural relationship that Blondel ascribed to “extrinsicist monophorism,” and thus to Descoqs.  Imagine a two-story house with a ground floor that is partitioned into several rooms.  This floor is completely furnished and fully livable.  The windows provide sufficient light to carry on the tasks of daily life.  The family residing on the ground floor has no real need of an upper floor.  However, there does exist a second floor to which access is gained when trapdoors are opened from above and portable staircases let down.  Only then does the family come to know of the existence of this upper level of which they had no previous inkling.  Furthermore, they are told that a superior life awaits them above and that they must choose to ascend to the second floor under threat of being thrown out of the house altogether.
The ground floor is comparable to a supposed “pure nature” that has its own, self-contained consistency and fulfillment.  The partitioning of the rooms corresponds to the divisions among the various sciences that are only externally connected with each other.  By God’s gift, a supernatural destiny (the second floor) has been added and staircases have been let down from above (God’s salvific plan actualized in the sacramental ministry of the Church) by which the ground floor inhabitants gain access to supernatural life.  However, there seems to be nothing in their native experience that would make such a move to a higher, supernatural life a compelling necessity except for the fact that a summons, a revelation “from above,” has been issued.
Such an image of “extrinsicist monophorism” in which the supernatural is regarded as a superimposition on a self-sufficient nature, characterized by a mere non-repugnancy for the supernatural, corresponds to the notion that Blondel derided.  He ascribed this understanding to those whom he labeled as “monophorists.”  For Blondel, this conception of an  adventitious, extrinsic relationship of the supernatural to nature explained why these monophorists accused  him  of undermining the claims of the natural order.  Such monophorists would never admit of an  “exigence” that would connect the two orders.  However, Descoqs rejected Blondel’s imputation that he denied any exchange between the natural and supernatural orders and that he viewed grace as only a veneer, imposed by intellectual dialectic and authority.  Descoqs rejected both of these understandings of the nature-supernatural relationship that have been pictured by the Pantheon and the two-story house.
A third image presents a significant variation on the second image and seems to correspond to Descoqs’s understanding of the nature-supernatural relationship.  This image also consists of a two-story house, but the inhabitants are no longer fully content to live on the ground floor, but feel a longing (“attractions”) for a possible second floor, the existence and nature of which they are incapable of ascertaining by reason alone.  Once they have received the revelation by “external word” of the existence of and summons to an upper floor promising supernatural life, they experience an efficacious, positive desire (“grace”) to dwell there.  However, this positive desire does not utterly cancel out the legitimate functions of the first floor.  The first floor is inhabitable and is not dependent on the upper floor for its purpose and meaning.  Even though, in the light of an explicit revelation, life on the second floor is shown to be infinitely superior to life on the first floor, the first floor continues to serve as a necessary support to life on the second floor and does not lose that function even after the occupants gain access to the upper level.
Contrasting Conceptions of the Christian Renewal of the Socio-Political Order
These contrasting positions have practical consequences for how Christians relate to the socio-political order.  The differing types of Catholic socio-political engagement defended by Descoqs and Blondel were expressive of two fundamentally different conceptions of the Christian renewal of society.  The methods and goals of Action Française, on the one hand, and of Blondel and the social Catholics, on the other, exemplified contrasting strategies for combatting the secular liberalism, individualism, and naturalism that had been steadily gaining ground in the modern era.  In effect, the fundamental question that Descoqs and Blondel disagreed on was how best to realize the public mission of the Church in society.  Their dispute can be viewed as “the watershed which divided the world of Pio Nono, Veuillot and the Temporal Power from the present” era that commenced with Vatican II.
Despite their different responses to this fundamental question about how society should be renewed in Christ, Descoqs and Blondel implicitly agreed on their rejection of a liberal “privatization” of religion.  To state this in positive terms, both Descoqs and Blondel were committed to a public role for Christian faith.  Furthermore, each realized the importance of some sort of collaboration between Catholics and non-Catholics, indeed non-Christians, to achieve certain goals in the public sphere, though they had different estimations regarding the nature, methods, and goals of such collaboration.  Each attached apologetic significance to the collaborations they deemed acceptable, i.e., they saw Christianity as serving to confirm and complete sentiments and notions that anticipated, indeed required, a Christian metaphysical foundation.  These similarities are to be noted before the differences are highlighted.

Descoqs’s “Restorationist” Approach
Though labeling is never an impartial enterprise, it seems fitting to term Pedro Desocqs’s conception of the Christian renewal of society, or, more precisely, “Catholic” renewal, as “restorationist.”  Counter-revolutionary traditionalism influenced this mentality.  Descoqs favored paternal authority, corporatist hierarchy, and political monarchy to secure social order and stability.  Theologically, the linchpin of the restorationist conception was the “thesis” of the confessional State which held that the Roman Catholic Church should be the constitutionally recognized, official religion of the nation.  While this classic view maintained the necessary and legitimate distinction between the two “powers,” the spiritual and the temporal, i.e., between the Church and the State, it maintained that a constitutionally anchored religious unity was necessary to secure respect for the civil authority, to promote social order, and to enable the Church to most effectively carry out her supernatural mission.  A confessional State relied on the Church for the religious instruction of the youth, for the promotion of family life by protecting the sacramentality and indissolubility of marriage, and for the corroboration of the civil order in countless ways through a legal concordat between Church and State.  This orthodox conception of the Church’s relationship to the State, which had its origins in the “two swords” doctrine of Pope Gelasius (492-496), had undergone certain modifications during the early modern period.  At the height of medieval Christendom, Pope Boniface VIII (1294-1303) had asserted papal supremacy over princes and kingdoms.  This absolutist claim was significantly hedged by Bellarmine and Suárez through the development of the notion of the “indirect” power that the Church exercises over civil society.  Until Vatican II, this doctrine remained the Church’s official position.
Throughout the nineteenth century, in response to the progressive de-Christianization of society, the Church continued to cling to the medieval ideal known as “Christendom.”  Integrally Catholic structures were promoted to withstand the expanding, corrosive influence of secularism and liberalism.  The proper relationship between Church and State was the subject of repeated Vatican pronouncements throughout this period.  The Church reaffirmed the theological ideal of the “thesis” against any liberalism that, on principle, adhered to the definitive separation of Church and State.  However, though Pope Pius IX had resolutely repudiated “liberalism,” he accepted Bishop Dupanloup’s interpretation of the Syllabus of Errors.  This French bishop distinguished between the “thesis” and the “hypothesis.”  While continuing to affirm the “thesis” as the ideal, he allowed for situations where the common good might require that the Church accommodate herself to a less than ideal situation (dubbed the “hypothesis”).  Though Blondel derided and dismissed this distinction, it was the theological tradition which undergirded Descoqs’s approach to the renewal of society.  However, Descoqs’s understanding of a confessional State did not in principle entail theocracy as Blondel charged, but rather sanctioned the theory of “indirect” power whereby the Church had the right to intervene in the so-called mixed areas like education and the institution of marriage which impinge on basic moral values.  Following the teachings of Bellarmine and Suárez, it denied the right of the Church to directly control the State.  Descoqs had set out this doctrine in his original series dealing with the possibility of Catholic collaboration with Maurras and Action Française.
When the Law of Separation was enacted, Pope Pius X intransigently opposed any compromise with its provisions.  French Catholics were painfully divided.  Liberal Catholics urged some type of accommodation, not overly upset that a definitive split between Church and State had finally occurred; traditionalist Catholics supported the papal position.  Charles Maurras’s invitation to Catholics to engage in a concrete political program of restoration received theological legitimation from the Church’s traditional teaching on Church and State.  Furthermore, Maurras gained ecclesiastical favor by clamorously supporting the Church’s anti-liberal and anti-modernist crusades, especially as articulated by Popes Pius IX and Pius X.  Then, too, the Maurrassian positivist program found legitimation in some of the same counter-revolutionary, social scientific authorities that served as intellectual masters for Catholic traditionalists.  This school of thought rejected the anti-authority revolutionism, rationalism, and individualism propagated by the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
Catholic traditionalists held that the only way to stem the tide of secularism, individualism, and rationalism and to effectively re-Christianize society was to reinstate the organic, paternal and hierarchically structured institutions of family, monarchy, and Church.  They taught the social necessity of hierarchical authority, corporatism, and state sanctioned, official religion, which, in a positivist way, they identified with the requirements of natural law.  Therefore, especially after the Law of Separation, it is not surprising that many French Catholics, including Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Jacques Maritain,  and Descoqs, were attracted to Charles Maurras’s pro-Catholic Church ideology and his stress on “order, authority, and hierarchy.
Blondel’s “Transformationist” Approach
Whereas Descoqs primarily viewed the problem of renewing society through the optic of the “thesis,” i.e., a confessional State, and was willing to countenance an alliance with atheists to achieve this objective, Blondel and like-minded “social Catholics” sought “a cure of contemporary society by way of education, of penetration, and of methodic reconstitution.”  Such an approach to Christian renewal was not based on paternal, hierarchical organization, but the “transformation” of society by the penetration of Christian values, especially through the process of identifying, promoting, and purifying movements dedicated to social justice.  The keyword was not “order,” but “justice.”  The Church was not so much conceived as the institutional “Spiritual Power” alongside the “Temporal Power” of the State, but rather in terms of an evangelical presence, a “leaven,” that nurtures efforts in society ordered to the coming of God’s Kingdom.  These social Catholics adopted the strategy of orienting themselves to the “social collectivity” rather than continuing to embrace a posture of purely “religious defense” within the “Catholic collectivity.”  Blondel approved of the openness of these Catholics to secular movements for justice.  These movements were evidence of “silent causes [at] work on the world in its depths” in search of “equity.”  Efforts “from below” to establish a just society would lead persons of good will to respect Christianity and “to find only in the spirit of the gospel the supreme and decisive guarantee of justice and of the moral conditions of peace, stability, and social prosperity.”  The nature of the collaboration consisted of combined efforts to enact legislation to remedy injustices.  In the case of the Sillon, it also took the form of a clearly partisan political movement which claimed that the practice of “democracy” was a necessary consequence of living the Gospel.
The recovery of a social-historical eschatology and a sacramental ecclesiology were especially significant for giving theological legitimacy to this conception of Christian renewal.  Blondel and fellow social Catholics were harbingers of a shift in attitude to the modern world that would be endorsed by the Second Vatican Council.  While the restorationist vision was shaped by the writings of the Catholic traditionalists who rejected the revolutionary legacy “root and branch,” Blondel’s transformationist vision reflected the minority current of pioneering Catholics who manifested a selective openness to some values of modernity.  Blondel was a ground breaker among Catholic philosophers because he engaged in dialogue with modern thought.  What Blondel’s philosophy of action and the methods of the social Catholics shared in common was an openness to engage with modern secular philosophical and social movements instead of rejecting them outright as the Catholic traditionalists did.  Blondel and social Catholics of this stripe perceived in these movements a tentative groping towards Christian truth.  These movements needed purification, but they were not inherently diabolic.  The philosopher of Aix scored the monophorists for criticizing the social Catholics while they simultaneously showed a scandalous sympathy for the atheistic positivists of Action Française.  For Blondel, the co-existence of these attitudes in those claiming the high ground of orthodoxy betrayed the monophorists’ secret attraction to the anti-Christian authoritarianism that animated Maurras and his associates.
Blondel claimed the he and the social Catholics were engaged in a work of purification and penetration in their efforts to transform society from within.  But, of course, this is what Descoqs claimed about his own apologetic efforts on behalf of Maurras’s positivism.  The Jesuit hoped to guide Maurras to the fullness of Catholic truth by pointing out how his positivist conceptions of Church and society were open to completion by the philosophia perennis.  Blondel charged that Descoqs woefully misjudged the anti-metaphysical, anti-Christian nature of Maurras’s positivism.  Maurras’s ideas were not merely “deficient,” but they positively excluded “the entire supernatural order and even...the metaphysical order.”  Under the impact of Blondel’s criticism, Descoqs played down his proposal, speaking of simple “rencontres” between “some” Catholics and “some” agnostic positivists.  What could be objectionable about “encounters”?  This was tantamount to saying that a collaboration was nothing more than Catholics and positivists coinciding to a great degree in their voting patterns.  Viewed in these limited terms, it seems that Descoqs hoped to circumvent the brunt of Blondel’s criticism of the nature of the collaboration.  Was Descoqs being disingenuous in characterizing the collaboration with Maurras as only a series of “encounters”?  Blondel had insisted that a working relationship with Maurras would necessarily corrupt the Christian spirit that animated Catholicism.  “Bare results” could not be separated from the spirit that animated them.
	Having compared these two different views of Christian renewal, it is hard to deny that, at least in part, the dispute between Blondel and Descoqs was fueled by their different political sympathies.  These different sympathies mirrored larger tensions in the Church between those who favored more democratization and those who favored the strengthening of paternal hierarchy.  In fact, at different moments, each disputant indicated that differing political allegiances were driving their dispute.  Descoqs and many other French Catholics were convinced that the restoration of constitutional monarchy was the only viable political option given the truculent anti-clericalism of the Third Republic.  Many, though not all, of these Catholic monarchists were drawn to Action Française.  On the other hand, Blondel and the Sillonistes were strongly committed to constitutional democracy.  However, the tensions between Catholic monarchists and Catholic democrats indicated something more than competing political allegiances.  At a deeper level, their different stances implied very different assessments of modernity and, at bottom, different conceptions of the dynamics of salvation. 

The Dynamics of Salvation
What was at stake in the dispute was the very understanding of the dynamics of salvation and the understanding of grace integral to the process of salvation.  On the one hand, the practioners of each approach to the Christian renewal of society viewed themselves as “integral” Catholics.  Both approaches were anti-liberal, that is, they refused the privatization of Christian faith.  On the other hand, they attached different meanings to their differing conceptions of what ought to be done in the socio-political order.  These different meanings correlate with the way salvation is envisioned and grace is understood.
Descoqs affirmed the principles of tradition, authority, hierarchy, order, and discipline.  He held that these principles were essential to the health of the temporal order and that they secured the necessary conditions for the Church’s saving work.  Thus the Jesuit asserted that, “in theory, it may be permissible for Catholics to ally themselves with a man who has nothing more at heart than to bring about the triumph of the Church, if not in souls, at least in society.”  Yet, the distinct impression is given that the temporal order is important only as a locus for the evangelization of souls.  Descoqs wrote: “A prevailing social order and, consequently, the facility assured to individuals to accomplish their essential duties as human beings and as members of society, has always seemed to the true apostle a sovereignly efficacious condition to hasten the establishment of the Kingdom of Christ in souls.”  God’s saving grace “only begins to appear, in any event only develops and only fully manifests its effects, where the cultural terrain has been prepared, where the natural obstacles have been set aside.”  Descoqs envisioned the Church fulfilling its supernatural mission after Maurras had implemented his positivist agenda for society.  The preparation of the “cultural terrain” seems to have been valued in purely extrinsic terms vis-à-vis the Church’s mission.  But is that all that the Church asks from society, namely, a context of order and discipline in which she can minister to “souls”?  Was not Descoqs a “monophorist” for viewing the work of salvation in these narrow terms?  Though perhaps not a monophorist in the caricatured fashion presented by Blondel, Descoqs evidently viewed the task of bringing order to society as an important arranging of the “stage” for the work of salvation rather than as an intrinsic dimension of the task of evangelization.
Blondel also granted the importance of social structures for Christian life, but he favored the approach of those social Catholics who sought “to infuse a Christian sap in the legislation and institutions.”  These Catholic “integralists” viewed the work of building a just society as something more than securing the peaceful conditions in which the Church could carry out its mission.  In Blondel’s conception of the dynamic interconnectedness of reality, efforts to establish justice were closely connected with God’s saving grace.  Christian salvation was about more than “mastering souls.”  However, this view of the matter was very controversial because it shifted attention to the efforts to enact “social justice” legislation.  During the pontificate of Pius X, the Vatican regarded these efforts with a wary eye, convinced that only acts of charity had true salvific import.  In this view, efforts to pass legislation to secure justice for the workers might actually be a hindrance to salvation because it would impose as an obligation what could only be meritorious if done voluntarily, from a spirit of charity!
If Descoqs’s conception of the mediation of salvation was vulnerable to criticism, Blondel’s position was also vulnerable.  The philosopher of Aix claimed the label of “integrally Christian” for the social Catholics of the Semaines sociales and of the Sillon.  By this he meant that these Catholics sought a closer relationship between their faith and their socio-political stances in contrast with the extrinsic monophorists that he criticized.  However, there was a pattern of criticism aimed at Blondel that alleged a confusing of the natural and supernatural orders, a subsuming of “natural” ends into the supernatural end known from Revelation.  Descoqs and their other critics accused them of an “integralism” that removed from the temporal order its proper teleology.  The “exigence” for the supernatural that Blondel’s philosophy of action claimed to establish had the result, whether intended by Blondel or not, of suggesting that solutions to the problems of the socio-political and economic orders can be “deduced” from the truths of Christian revelation per se.  In such a view, it appears that natural law reasoning no longer has validity.  Indeed, there is no “nature” per se to reflect upon.  In the strong sense of the expression, there would exist only Christian economics, Christian politics, and Christian sociology.  In this understanding, only Christian faith guarantees the validity and certainty of conceptions pertaining even to the temporal order.  Early on, Descoqs sounded the warning bell about this tendency to a new sort of integralism.  In 1946, de Broglie sounded the same alarm when de Lubac’s Surnaturel appeared.  De Lubac, of course, claimed Blondel as his “master.”
Lessons for Christian Engagement in Political Society 
There are contemporary parallels that mirror central facets of the exchange between these two French philosophers that has largely slipped from memory.  Most Christians accept that their faith requires involvement in the socio-political order.  However, rarely, if ever, does unanimity exist about the precise fashion in which that faith should be expressed.  Sincere people will come to different prudential judgments about the best course of action to take in a given set of circumstances.  There will never be total agreement among Christians over what political course of action will best realize gospel values.  This being said, the investigation of the dispute between Blondel and Descoqs highlights the pitfalls of theological ideology, namely, the tempting connubium of a particular time-bound theology with a specific socio-political approach that imperiously claims “scientific” validity for its conclusions.  The particular sort of integralism expressed by the inter-marriage of the nationalist ideology of Action Française with the anti-liberal, French Catholic traditionalism is a prominent example of theological ideology on the political “right.”  After Vatican II, the Church witnessed a virulent example of theological ideology on the “left” that has parallels with the experience of Action Française.  Some Christians, like the Catholics of Action Française before them, have viewed the coupling of their faith with the imperious claims of social science, in this case Marxist theory, as an unassailable marriage.  However, the dynamism of the faith challenges both its inadequate theological expressions and any regnant social scientific theory.  The gospel resists being harnessed to and, as a result, being distorted or compromised by any particular social theory.  Here Blondel’s critique of Maurrassian positivism remains instructive.  There is a difference between collaborating with Maurrassian positivists or Marxists, on the one hand, and being open to learning from a system of thought, on the other.  Blondel never denied that there might be useful elements in Maurras’s socio-political positions, but he emphatically reproached any collaboration in which Maurras’s anti-metaphysical and anti-Christian ideology would take the leading role.  The “facts” cannot be separated from the “spirit” that prepares them.  So, too, the Vatican has signaled the dangers of enthralling Christianity to Marxist ideology.  “Marxist” Christians resemble those Maurrassian Catholics who, mindful of the atheism of their political allies, trust them to make a place for religion when their new order is instituted.  Descoqs seems to have implicitly acknowledged the force of Blondel’s criticism in redefining the collaboration between Catholics and Maurrassian positivists as being only a series of “encounters” and not the close working partnership with Maurras that so provoked Blondel’s censure.
A second contemporary instance of a questionable coupling of Christian faith with a specific socio-economic arrangement might be indicated at the other end of the spectrum.  Michael Novak’s effusive praise of liberal capitalism suggests that this particular set of political and economic arrangements accords with the requirements of the gospel.  In the wake of the collapse of Russian communism, which many have hailed as a victory for free market capitalism, the tendency to view the structures of liberal capitalism as theologically sanctioned especially needs to be called into question.  Social sciences like economics and politics contribute to the persuasiveness of such an ideology by co-opting theological notions, thus creating the impression of unassailable legitimacy.  These contemporary instances show that the issues identified by Blondel and Descoqs have lost none of their relevance.
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