Maurice Blondel and His Prodigal Children: Phenomenology,Charity,and Metaphysics

Blondel’s Paternity

Between 1893 and 1991, French philosophy shifted in a major way with regard to providing hospitality for theological themes within philosophical discourse. When Maurice Blondel defended his doctoral dissertation L’Action in 1893, he was roundly criticized and had trouble securing a teaching position due to the religious themes in the text, which were, it must be added, almost entirely implicit. ¹ Noting the massive shift in the previous century, Dominique Janicaud famously claimed that philosophy, and in particular French phenomenology, had been shipwrecked by the so-called “theological turn,” as seen in the barefaced use of religious themes in Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Ricoeur, Michel Henry, among many others. ² Although Blondel’s work was undoubtedly instrumental in that shift, from his initial thesis to his various contributions to the “Christian philosophy” debates of the 1930s, this theological turn is certainly not to be attributed solely to a Blondelian heritage. In this essay I will analyze those figures in contemporary French philosophy who do stand in a relationship of filiation with Maurice Blondel, which is to say those other “talas,” ³ the Catholic phenomenologists Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Yves Lacoste, and Emmanuel Falque. ⁴ These philosophers reinforce the opening that their intellectual father, Blondel, first punctured in the former scholastic division between the natural and the supernatural, and continue to demand that philosophy must keep itself capacious enough, catholic enough, for the supernatural, should it happen to give itself.

While some of these sons acknowledge Blondel’s paternity, the goal here is not to insist on acts of homage to Blondel, nor to even suggest that Blondel has the answers to all of our contemporary questions regarding the relative autonomy and interpenetration of philosophy and theology or the possibility of metaphysics after Heidegger. Instead, father and sons will be put into dialogue, noting various ways in which the sons have either remained at home with the father or have gone off into the far country. The essay will suggest that Blondel’s conception of Catholic philosophy, and particularly his recognition of the limits of thought, what he calls a “philosophy of insufficiency,” is the key to the wisdom that the sons have learned at the knee of their father. ⁵ Ultimately, though, Blondel’s recognition of philosophy’s inherent insufficiency points towards a certain conception of being’s relationship to desire, and thus entails what he calls a “metaphysics of charity.”

Before we track down these lost sons, we need to provide a brief note about the distinction between biological and adoptive parents. Our phenomenologists do indeed have Blondel as a father, but they were raised by several theological adoptive fathers, most notably Henri de Lubac, Henri Bouillard, and Hans Urs von Balthasar. These loving adoptive-fathers, some of whom do not share the genetics (French) and none of whom share the vocation (philosopher) of the sons, are largely the conduits for the handing on of the biological father’s inheritance. In terms of philosophy, the sons claim a different lineage. There are, of course, phenomenological tendencies in Blondel, and he is a natural precursor and ally to the phenomenological movement, despite important differences. ⁶ Nevertheless, we can simply note that what Marion, Lacoste, and Falque found in Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty is what so many theologians found in Blondel: a hospitable and unrestricted form of thought that promised a return to real knowledge as well as an expansion of what is deemed a proper object of analysis. ⁷

Philosophy, for Blondel, has the capacity to identify a need that it itself cannot meet—to diagnose an illness for which it knows of no cure. ⁸ According to Blondel, just as the will is more than itself, or more precisely the willing will (la volonté voulante) outstrips the concrete determinations of the willed will (la volonté voulue), so philosophy as a science is also more than itself: it studies a creature who incessantly demands the arrival of something that philosophy is utterly incapable of providing. Although Hegel said in The Encyclopaedia Logic that “it is thinking that both inflicts the wound and heals it again,” for Blondel thinking can only recognize and evaluate the wound, never heal it; for it is only via action—and action decided in favor of the one thing necessary (l’unique nécessaire)—that healing occurs. ⁹ For Blondel, although philosophy is far more than a mere ancilla theologiae, if philosophy does render theology any services, it is its unique ability to hold itself alert to whatever may come, to be unprejudiced with regard to phenomena, and thus to preserve a space for theology—a space that philosophy cannot fill, but only she can hold open. Even if Marion, Lacoste, and Falque generally concede the Blondelian thesis regarding the relationship between the disciplines, they have thus far not followed Blondel with regard to the philosophical grounding of that relationship: that the order of beings available to phenomenological analysis and the order of love available to the theologian are bound together and held in tension by a “metaphysics to the second power”—a metaphysics based on the simultaneity of being and charity, rather than their opposition. ¹⁰ Although Blondel does not begin with metaphysics, he knows that thought, when united to human action, ultimately ends there.

The Middle Son: Jean-Yves Lacoste

In Jesus’s parable of the prodigal son (Luke 15:11–32), there are only two sons. In our story here, there is a middle son between the youngest (Falque) and the eldest (Marion). However, this middle son, Jean-Yves Lacoste (b. 1953), is ironically both the most forgetful of the father and the most faithful to his inheritance. Even if there is hardly any evidence at all that Lacoste considers Blondel as worthy of attention, ¹¹ he nevertheless instinctively follows the path set out by his supposed father. To make this case, I will offer a Blondelian reading of Lacoste’s Experience and the Absolute and suggest that it repeats, in a phenomenological register, the same basic steps of Blondel’s Action, published almost exactly a century beforehand (1893 and 1994, respectively). I begin with this middle son precisely because he so faithfully, though perhaps unconsciously, brings the father into the phenomenological conversation.

Lacoste begins Experience and the Absolute with how we are confined by topology, with the ineluctability of being somewhere, of the incessant requirement to be placed and locatable within the world. Yet, concomitant with being in a place (in-der-Welt-sein) is the experience of not-being-at-home (Unzuhause). That tension, which forms the basis for Lacoste’s notion of liturgy, esse coram deo, repeats the dialectic Blondel explores in Action—the dialectic between determinism and freedom. Being in a place leads, as if by some ironic necessity, towards angst and the feeling of abandonment, just as the prior determinism of all our actions leads to a freedom that initially seems only to be a cruel sense of a freedom to be so determined. ¹² Both Lacoste and Blondel can be summarized as making appeals to abide within this tension and not to settle for compromises that alleviate the crushing weight of the anxiety of determinism. Lacoste accuses the later Heidegger of making precisely this move: to soften the atheistic world of Sein und Zeit by filling it in with deities, with a mythos that transforms banality into bacchanalia. ¹³ For Lacoste, Heidegger’s Greek temple is emphatically not a church, and standing amidst the Geviert is not standing before the Absolute, but rather an impatient ersatz replacement thereof. To put the issues in terms native to Action, the late Heidegger succumbed to superstition, which for Blondel is defined as “a supreme effort to fill in the immense interval that separates the will from what it wants, and to bring together, as if to join them in prayer and adoration, the arms of complete action opened out to immensity.” ¹⁴ Lacoste and Blondel then present themselves as advocates for an initial atheism, for an atheistic world that does not divinize itself out of simple impatience for an Absolute that never seems to arrive. Prayer, for both father and son, is done not with the clasped hands of possession, but with the more ancient posture of expectation, the orans.

Lacoste, like Blondel, is quite content to note the limits of philosophical reflection, and in fact locates the limit at precisely the same point: action. Experience and the Absolute does not offer a philosophical proof for the possibility of liturgy, but rather offers the examples of concrete actions that place people before God: the vision of St. Benedict, the pilgrim, the recluse, the all-night vigil, the self-depriving ascetic, as well as the holy fool. These actions and actors are Lacoste’s riposte to both Heidegger and Hegel, which suggests that human action, not subjective experience (which is often boredom, yes, even before God), is the proof “that the world is not intranscendable.” ¹⁵ It is a minimal claim, a claim that amounts to no more than the possibility of the divine presence. Prayer is simply that possibility, one that makes no claims upon God to be available in the finite sphere, but refuses any earthly consolation prizes and waits, quite literally, ad infinitum. These actions, specified as particularly religious actions as opposed to Blondel’s more generic conception of action, arrive at a characteristically Blondelian conclusion: the absolute is necessary—at least for the ascetic, the pilgrim, the fool—but simultaneously impossible. ¹⁶ What Lacoste only describes with regard to exemplary actors is for Blondel true of the very dynamic of all human action, which is the basis for Blondel’s distinction between a “practical science” and a “science of practice.” ¹⁷ At least these particular actions (Lacoste), if not the movement of all action (Blondel), are such that they exceed what is natively possible: they result not from the willed will but from a willing will held open to the infinite, not from the empirical ego but from the eschatological ego. ¹⁸

Lacoste’s “answer” to atheism does not then occur at the conceptual level, but on the level of action and what he calls the “distinctive logic of spiritual experience.” ¹⁹ Thus, concerning the question of God, Lacoste acknowledges that philosophy is largely impotent with regard to proof. Yes, arguments can be proffered, but concerning phenomena of supreme importance to human desire, there can be no coercion and no evidence that overrides the necessity of willing to believe, of loving the object of faith. Because of the “co-originary status of faith and love,” ²⁰ along with the right of the believer to know and love God beyond the confines of the world, the unbeliever likewise can refuse to stand coram deo for the simple reason of having decided against such a possibility. If we were so inclined, we could see in that distinction Blondel’s “one thing necessary,” the “yes or no” that is decided not solely via the intellect, but through what both describe as the abnegation of the finite will in favor of the divine will. ²¹ For both, this is a decision between a will to power and a will to powerlessness. For Blondel in 1893, the answer to the “yes or no” with which he begins Action is decided in terms of “mortification,” “asceticism,” a capacity for sacrifice, and the renunciation of willing for oneself in order to will the will of the infinite. ²² Although every son suffers embarrassment from the utterance “you sound just like your father,” we are forced to say as much upon hearing Lacoste say the following: “Thus abnegation wills more than the will to power wills. It does not bring into being; it lets be. But in letting be, it puts itself at the mercy of a God to whom it relates through promises, and who promises more than the immanent reality of ‘life.’” ²³ As of yet, Lacoste himself has not provided a philosophically dense description of the world, of being, from the perspective of a will that has chosen mortification, which was Blondel’s suggestion in the final chapter of Action. That is to say, according to Blondel it is not only the will to power that makes metaphysical claims, but equally the will to abnegation. There is nothing to prevent Lacoste from following his father in this regard as well.

The Youngest Son: Emmanuel Falque

As, according to Luke 15, the youngest son remembers the father and his house while wasting away in the far country, so too does Emmanuel Falque (b. 1963) self-consciously situate himself, far more than Lacoste or Marion, by his proximity to and distance from Blondel. ²⁴ Falque does dutifully acknowledge Blondel’s paternity and concedes the essential Blondelian thesis: the supernatural is necessary but impossible, and philosophy must make a space for fruitful interchange with theology. Yet, Falque’s departure into the far country can be seen when he makes two essential, and at first blush contradictory, adjustments to Blondel: first, Falque entertains the value of the notion of pure nature (indeed, this is where the adoptive fathers, de Lubac and Balthasar, mourn the prodigal son’s attempts to eat the pods of the swine [Luke 15:16]); and second, with finitude thus blocked off from any intervention from above, Falque then suggests a far more dynamic cross-fertilization between philosophy and theology.

The first point, the violation of the prohibition against pure nature, sounds far more scandalous than it is in reality. ²⁵ Far from signaling Falque’s disavowal of Blondel, de Lubac, and Balthasar, in favor of putting himself under the loving protection of Garrigou-Lagrange, his proposal to rehabilitate “pure nature” is, as he states explicitly, entirely heuristic and subservient to the goal of engaging in a fraternal dialogue with atheistic philosophers. ²⁶ There is every reason, I would suggest, to read Falque as simply placing all his weight on the second term of Blondel’s formula: the necessity and impossibility of the supernatural. As Blondel had to insist that in his method of immanence he was not “using what he believes for the benefit of what he knows,” ²⁷ so Falque too repeatedly notes his desire to abide within the finite frame recognized by his contemporaries. The unexpected resurgence of “pure nature” in Falque’s philosophy then has nothing at all to do with a hypothetical state invented by scholastics for the purpose of securing the gratuity of grace, and everything to do with an admission that philosophy first encounters a world in which God is most obviously not manifest—a Blondelian thesis if ever there was one.

The second point is the far more consequential and signals Falque’s attempt to go much further than the father. Although never disavowing him, Falque attempts to push Blondel’s method of immanence “to its limits,” which is to say, to break open the boundary separating theology and philosophy, and also to pass through the opening. ²⁸ Upon first glance, this is a major departure from Blondel: while Falque proposes an indiscriminate crossing between the philosophical and theological, almost to the point of erasing the difference altogether, ²⁹ Blondel insisted, it seems, that theological themes had no place in his method of immanence. Yet, this is not obviously the case. In the previous section we provided a Blondelian reading of Lacoste, but here it would be fruitful to provide the opposite: a brief Falqueian reading of Blondel.

A superficial reading of Blondel would make it very hard to distinguish his position from the separated philosophy of both the anti-religious philosophes and the neo-scholastic method. Yet, in reality, Blondel did not disallow theological themes from strengthening his philosophical labors. At least in his early writings, Blondel did not, as Falque is doing now, explicitly use the Eucharist for a philosophical analysis of the flesh, or the cruciform Christ to deepen our grasp of the weight of finitude. ³⁰ And although the traditional objects of theological reflection do not appear in full view as they do in Falque, it is not hard to see that Action is indeed animated by a subterranean reflection on Christ, the Eucharist, and the church. But these oblique theological themes are not subterfuge—Blondel’s sleight of hand that reveals an a priori theological vehemence. For both the early and the late Blondel, although it is performed with greater insistence later rather than earlier, there is the recognition that, without crossing over into theology, the philosopher has access to all available phenomena, including the actions and aspirations of the Christian spirit.

Instead of subterfuge or a rationalistic reduction of revelation, what happens in Action, particularly in the final two parts, is an analysis of the impossibility of the Christian claim. That is to say, after leaving the reader in the inevitable tragedy of falling into superstition in the third part, the fourth and fifth parts of Action allow the Christian claims to be heard as possibilities enacted by Christian practice but impossible to verify philosophically. Blondel makes no claims that a God-man has come to suffer the weight of determinism voluntarily, providing the world with a concrete religious cult that satisfies the dynamism of the human will by being a universale concretum. ³¹ Instead, what Blondel is suggesting is that the Christian, who can be seen to act as if this were the case, would, in fact, be avoiding superstition and retaining the capaciousness of the will, if any of this were true. Verification only occurs via action, and is thus beyond the competence of philosophy. But regarding the boundary between philosophy and theology, Blondel, too, crosses the Rubicon. Yet when he allows Christ into philosophy, admittedly in an oblique fashion, it is not in a manner such that philosophy asks questions to which theology dutifully supplies answers. Rather, the theological motifs serve to strengthen decisions already made philosophically according to his method of immanence. Later, Blondel will clarify his particular means of traversing the Rubicon by calling it a “cycloidal movement,” a rotation by which the philosophical is not only elevated up to the theological, but also returned to the immanent frame for properly philosophical analysis, albeit now strengthened by its attention to the Christian phenomena. This cycloid can be discovered already in Action (he coined the term later), although Blondel does not fully demonstrate its potential until the two volumes of La Philosophie et l’esprit chrétien (1944/46), texts which explicitly deal with Christology, sacramental theology, and ecclesiology in a philosophical register. This incomplete trilogy (Blondel died before finishing the final volume) anticipates Falque’s own “philosophical triduum” with regard to method if not theme, and shows that Blondel did not need Falque to push his method of immanence “to its limits,” ³² for he himself had already attempted this immanent analysis of what belongs to the transcendent. Not only in La Philosophie et l’esprit chrétien, but even throughout Action, Blondel insisted that if a revelation were to come, it would have to be an immanent transcendent, one that confirms humanity’s finitude, stuck as it is in the dialectic between necessity and freedom: “We must have the infinite as finite; and it is not for us to limit it; otherwise, we would be lowering it to our size. It is up to this infinite alone to bring itself within our comprehension and to condescend to our littleness in order to exalt us and broaden us to its immensity.” ³³ For Blondel, finitude is not then surpassed by revelation, but rather undergoes the very metamorphosis that Falque claims to be his act of departure from the father’s house.

The youngest son thinks that he has left the father’s house and gone into the far country. Indeed, there is no question that Falque is far more indiscriminate in his use of theological vocabulary, for example, than the father, who spoke elliptically and perhaps with some fear of reprisal for undue mixing. Nevertheless, I want to suggest that when this youngest son comes home, perhaps he will see that his father too knows a great deal about the far country beyond the Rubicon. Is not Falque’s philosophical trilogy, particularly when he is using “data” of revelation in his philosophy, operating with the same goal as Blondel, if not even with the same cycloidal movement (granting, of course, that contemporary French phenomenology—even atheistic—allows a far greater openness to even “revealed phenomena” than was common in the late nineteenth century, which partially accounts for Falque’s unconcealed and Blondel’s inconspicuous theological references)? Yet for both, the theological themes are not asserted as logically necessary, nor do they provide answers to philosophical questions, nor is there even a simple convergence between the disciplines (as in Léon Ollé-Laprune). Instead, much as Blondel, for Falque Christ takes on the tragedy of determinism (finitude, anxiety, death) just as the Eucharist says something about human depths and the animality of the body. That is to say, for both Blondel and Falque, though with far more texture in the latter, philosophy must analyze those traces of insufficiency and impotence that are endemic to humanity, and possibly even endured by divinity. ³⁴ Yet, although Falque has demonstrated an openness to push the post-Heideggerian phenomenological method past its own limits, such as his analysis of “chaos” or most recently of the Freudian id, ³⁵ and he has even signaled his openness to the question of metaphysics, ³⁶ he has yet to go as far into the far country as did Blondel, which is to say not only to the lower limits of the primordial chaos and passions of the body, but also the upper limits of the question of being qua being.

The Eldest Son: Jean-Luc Marion

Finally, we meet the eldest son, who has remained with the father all along. Marion (b. 1946) is indeed closer to Blondel than the younger sons on many fronts: experientially Marion’s formational itinerary has remarkable similarities to Blondel; though he also wants to trouble the tidy philosophy/theology distinction like the younger brothers, he is more insistent on not confusing the two disciplines; ³⁷ and finally, like Blondel, he fights incessantly to keep the philosophical field of investigation as wide as possible. ³⁸ The Blondel–Marion comparison could be examined from a host of perspectives, but here I will focus on only one issue: charity.

It is, in fact, Marion himself who provides the argument for reading Action as a text concerned above all with the question of love. In Marion’s reading, which is not the obvious one, Action is concerned not merely with the dynamism of the will, but ultimately with the conversion of the will. Conversion for Blondel, which Marion contrasts with Nietzsche’s will to power, is “vouloir sans pouvoir,” or “une volonté d’impuissance,” a will to not will its own will, but to will the infinite. ³⁹ Marion, finding those few references to love in the text, says that “the will, when it wills infinitely, is transvaluated into love.” ⁴⁰ In addition to bringing out the instrumental influence of Augustine and Bernard of Clairvaux, ⁴¹ Marion’s association of Blondel’s will with charity serves also to prohibit a reading of Blondel as a voluntarist or even as a modernist, as if the object of the willing will were ultimately its own act of willing. Instead, Marion has located the moment of conversion, of grace, that occurs in Action, when the dialectic of the wills is resolved by divine charity. This appearance of love is given equally for phenomenological analysis, for a method of immanence, but also points beyond the immanent sphere—that is to say, although Blondel does not share Marion’s allergy to metaphysics, to which we will return, it is clear that a harmony between the willing and the willed will that occurs only in and through God takes place “beyond being,” beyond the horizon of what philosophy is competent to comment upon. An analysis of action, therefore, can show the postulate of a love for that which is not—for the impossible.

Granting Marion’s clarification of Blondel, we can now allow the father to interpret the son. Although no stranger to controversy, Marion’s proposal for a univocal interpretation of love in The Erotic Phenomenon has resulted in accusations of pernicious proximity to Nygren, an utterly loveless view of creation, and many other things besides. By reading Marion as a Blondelian, we can provide a framework in which Marion is not a monothelite, but a dyothelite, whose notion of a univocal form of love can be retained along with genuinely human love. First, however, consider a monothelite reading of The Erotic Phenomenon: one could read this text as an argument that hatred is prior to love, the lie is prior to truth, and the only form of love is God’s, rendering the entire saga of the text into a humiliating admission that, due to the univocity of a perfectly divine love, there is, in the end, no erotic phenomenon whatsoever. Theology is assumed as an a priori, rendering the text suspicious on philosophical grounds, and the absence of creaturely love renders the text heterodox if not gnostic on theological grounds. ⁴²

Instead, however, we can provide an alternate reading of the text that is theologically dyothelite and philosophically Blondelian. First, at the level of method, although Blondel speaks in more generic terms and Marion in the first person singular, both proceed phenomenologically by tracing the various paths that human desire follows. ⁴³ Both are noting above all the failures of love: the foreclosure of the spirit’s dynamism due to egoism, self-love, fear, or any other failures to go on loving, willing, without remainder. Thus, inscribed at the beginning of the search is a desiderium that arises due to a lack, an unavailability: “I am, therefore I am lacking.” ⁴⁴ When, finally, Marion brings us to the point of loving and being loved, a warning immediately arises regarding the necessary conditions for the perdurance of that love: if the love is to continue as love, it must be open to more than itself. That is, the oath is required, an oath that reaches out to eternity and thus makes impossible promises, as well as the interruption by a third, the child, to ratify and solidify that oath. ⁴⁵ In a section of Action that we could label as le petit phénomène érotique, Blondel speaks rather precisely of this arrival of the third: “Two beings are now only one, and it is when they are one that they become three.” ⁴⁶ As soon as love has chosen an object, if that relationship is to remain loving, it must always acknowledge its own subordination to a broader horizon towards which it aims and under which it is protected. Ultimately, the Augustinian impetus of both projects makes itself known: if a thing is to be enjoyed (frui) and not used (uti), it must be enjoyed in something infinite. ⁴⁷ The lovers must finally make their oaths in the adieu, towards God. ⁴⁸

The arrival of God at the end of The Erotic Phenomenon does not erase human loving or, transferred into Christological terms, does not evacuate Christ’s human will in favor of a monothelitic Christ. The beloved is indeed still loved, or even better, loved for the first time, when love follows its own native logic that is heedless with regard to limitation. The logic of love, ⁴⁹ when followed down its tortuous path to the very end, makes the divine love necessary and impossible. This necessity is not based on a logical a priori, but rather as a necessary precondition to being a true lover. A lover cannot rest content with imposing the burden of an infinite power of loving on a finite lover, resulting in a fetishization, an objectification of the other, or what Blondel would call superstition. A Blondelian reading of Marion’s supposed univocity of love implies then the following: first, that there is something native to humanity for the desire for God, a desiderium naturale rather than a supernatural existential. Finite loving is propelled naturally to abnegate itself in favor of the divine love, not to erase itself, but to love and will infinitely in loving and willing according to the divine pattern. Second, this univocity implies that if God were to be given in love, it would be within the same logic of love: “God practices the logic of the erotic reduction as we do, with us, according to the same rite and following the same rhythm as us.” ⁵⁰ That is, just as in Blondel, the particular objects of love (objects of the willed will) do not dissipate in favor of an amorphous and unthematic act of willing infinitely. But if God would, per impossibile, be revealed, it would be concretely, finitely: “God has to offer Himself to us as if annihilated.” ⁵¹ The Erotic Phenomenon, read in light of Blondel’s paternity, suggests that what is the case among human lovers, namely that “what is most inwardly my own comes upon me from elsewhere and refers back there,” ⁵² is also true regarding a divine lover who is impossible to verify but necessary to postulate. That is to say, despite Marion’s rhetorical fervor, there must be an analogia caritatis (even if only an analogy of proper proportionality), based on an even more fundamental analogia entis. ⁵³

The Inheritance: Insufficiency and Theological Charity

With all three sons gathered back in the home of the father, perhaps we can begin to see even stronger family resemblances among the sons, particularly resulting from their reception of a common inheritance. Whether that inheritance has been demanded as a right and taken into the far country or enjoyed at home with the father, it nonetheless constitutes a bond among the sons and acts as a reminder of the father. That inheritance is Blondel’s paradoxical notion of a “philosophy of insufficiency.” It is paradoxical because although Blondel attempted to expand philosophy, to enlarge its scope of competence beyond the artificial modern prohibitions, one result of philosophy’s expansion is that it can then also analyze its own limits, its own insufficiencies. These insufficiencies have, according to Blondel, very little to do with conceptual matters. Blondel conceived of philosophy as a plastic system, always open to new discoveries and methods, not a method that subjects all incoming data to the procrustean bed of an a priori system. ⁵⁴ This alone is enough to establish Blondel’s paternity: Lacoste, following and modifying Heidegger, has called for a move beyond philosophy to simply “thinking”; Falque has never been reticent to note the limits of phenomenology; and Marion attempts both to expand phenomenology and to point beyond it. ⁵⁵ That is to say, the father and the sons are all in agreement with Thomas on this point: “no philosopher could perfectly investigate the nature of even one little fly.” ⁵⁶

Beyond an insufficiency with regard to exhausting any given object, the most essential meaning of Blondel’s “philosophy of insufficiency” is that thought is able to reach its own boundaries, and even when it arrives there, it still has territory to explore. Blondel’s conception of “Catholic philosophy” makes more expansive claims than what is found in Etienne Gilson, for whom a philosophy is Christian because of an obvious historical fructifying of philosophy by theology. Gilson’s argument may indeed be the case historically, but for Blondel the task of a Catholic philosophy is not subservience to the magisterium, nor preparation for specifically theological concepts, but instead a boundless analysis of everything in the immanent sphere, including its own bounds. This, finally, is how the sons have honored their father: Lacoste by admitting that esse coram deo happens entirely within the world even as the liturgist is taken beyond it; Falque by allowing theological data to push at and extend limits native to philosophy; and Marion by noting that holiness, a saint in the world, requires connaturality to be seen at all. ⁵⁷

These philosophical limit-cases, where phenomena within the world demand something beyond the world, are only ever seen by those who grant that personal knowledge (connaissance) extends the data available for analysis. Stated better, this is to say that Pascal was indeed correct regarding the region available only to charity. All of the sons are in agreement with their theological adoptive father’s (Balthasar’s) insistence on the necessity to rejoin theology and sanctity, given how the latter extends, solidifies, and humanizes the former. Yet, we should remember that it was their biological father, Blondel, who earlier made that same link between philosophy and love: “The man of desire is rare; and he is the only one to be the measure of the truth given, the only one competent to discern its origin. To recognize it we must expect it to be, not as we would like it, but as it is.” ⁵⁸ It is the youngest son who insists that “the more we theologize, the better we philosophize.” ⁵⁹ Understood aright, the father would make no objections to this. But even before the arrival of theology, Blondel says to his sons: non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem, one does not enter into truth except by way of charity. ⁶⁰ For Blondel, philosophy can only be nominated as insufficient based on charity, a charity discovered first immanently. And charity, pace Marion, does not only give access to “radically new” phenomena, such as those that come from revelation, ⁶¹ but also to the most “radically old” phenomenon, that of being.

Metaphysics of Charity

With Augustine’s non intratur, which has been repeated and turned over by Pascal, Heidegger, Blondel, Marion, and Lacoste, ⁶² we can reach the point at which a crucial difference between father and sons can be located. Father and sons, all of whom are distant relatives of Augustine, acknowledge that access to the phenomena of revelation is done only by charity, by first loving what one comes to know. But Blondel does not rest content to allow charity a field of play that is any way partial or limited strictly to the theological task. Marion does allow so-called Christian philosophy to function as a “heuristic,” but his rejection of its role as a “hermeneutic” (which he rightly associates with Blondel) is a signal that the realm of charity in philosophical discourse is regional, personal, and no matter how helpful, never ubiquitous. ⁶³ Consonant with The Erotic Phenomenon, the charity that fructifies reason “comes from revelation,” and although not native to finitude, can find its place there as an aid to the philosophical task, particularly insofar as it calls it to widen its scope. Charity “does not belong to the world,” ⁶⁴ and though we should avoid any facile accusations that Marion’s position is fundamentally fideist or Barthian because of this (and he is insistent that theology also must necessarily reason), it is true to say that for Marion charity has its own rationality of which reason knows not. Reason, according to Marion, does not prohibit the rationality of charity, but it also does not demand it either. Lacoste likewise, particularly in an excellent study of the lack of consideration of “love” or “God” in Being and Time, uses Heidegger to grant that, while the contours of Dasein’s existential or ontological comportment has no space for God or love, it is simply a matter of empirical observation that humanity is quite often religious, even to the point of loving God. Thus, a relationship to God will not fall under ontological consideration, but it can indeed belong to an ontic or existentiel, that is to say “idiomorphic,” analysis of particular experiences. ⁶⁵

Blondel, however, is unsatisfied with charity as a possibility without universal validity, and locates his own discontent in his Augustinian genetic code (which, it must be noted, was discovered after the writing of Action). Instead, what may indeed be a rarity in actual performance, namely genuine charity, is, in fact, the heart of being itself, and thus instead of an overcoming of metaphysics, Blondel called for a metaphysics of charity: “It has been alleged that the fruitfulness of Christian metaphysics has been exhausted or, as it were, destroyed by the lofty speculation of modern metaphysicians; we see that, on the contrary, St. Augustine opens hitherto untrodden paths to this metaphysic which unites the intellect with charity.” ⁶⁶ In Blondel’s estimation, to grant that a methodological atheism, such as Heidegger’s description of Dasein, could have exclusive say over the range and extent of the world, thus banishing charity to the category of the exceptional, is to allow one particular experience of superstition, one refusal to persevere in the dialectic of action, to determine the scope of philosophy. Granting that the mind can indeed make idols even out of God, charity, and being, Blondel notes that idolatry occurs not only when the absolute is made relative, but also when flux and variability are made into a self-satisfied absolute.

For Blondel, a lack of consciousness of desire does not mean a lack of desire. ⁶⁷ Instead, when the movement (rather than the conscious experience) of the human will is traced to the very end, not only is a theological opening revealed, but the entire range of being takes on new contours, and does so even within the strictly delimited field of philosophy: “Being is love; hence we know nothing if we do not love. And that is why charity is the organ of perfect knowledge.” For Blondel, charity is the organ of all knowledge, not simply the theological: “Only charity, by placing itself at the heart of all, lives above appearances, communicates itself even to the interior of substances and completely resolves the problem of knowledge and being. . . . Love and the science of men are all one.” ⁶⁸ That is to say, non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem, not in the Pascalian sense whereby this agapeic order is “of another and supernatural order,” ⁶⁹ nor even in the original context of Augustine speaking of the Holy Spirit’s indwelling, but even primarily at the level of ontology. According to Blondel, Augustine did not intend to reserve charity to only one of three orders, as in Pascal, but understood charity in a much more radical fashion to apply to “all kinds of knowledge,” for “la vérité sans la charité n’est pas la vérité.” ⁷⁰

Innumerable questions remain, such as what exactly the contours of Blondel’s own “metaphysics of charity” look like, both in Action and in the later trilogy, and whether this metaphysics can take place before or after a decision in favor of the fundamental option. ⁷¹ Nor, at least on Blondelian principles, should we hope to find one definitive articulation of a metaphysics of charity that would put philosophical speculation to an end. Whether and to what extent Blondel himself should be honored for a successful attempt to render creaturely finite being as not only tending towards and open to the Absolute, but positively mirroring eternal love in a manner available to an immanent method of patient phenomenological attention, it is at least clear that he knew that this was his task, not simply because of his baptismal commitments but also to be true to the dynamics of human action analyzed with the method of immanence. The question remains whether the sons will not only accept the father’s dynamic conception of the relationship between philosophy and theology, which they all most certainly do, but whether they too can see that the inheritance from not only Blondel, but also from de Lubac and Balthasar, can only be ultimately maintained if there is a concomitant ability to claim being as a witness to charity.

To insist here on metaphysics is not a facile attempt at a conciliation between disparate camps of Catholic philosophers and theologians. Nor is it to dispense with the legitimate critique of a certain type of metaphysics, the defects of which have been exploited in detail by Marion in particular. Blondel is not disposed to think primarily in terms of metaphysics, and he even confessed to being inclined to forget the centrality of the metaphysical question on occasion. ⁷² Blondel distinguishes between an a priori rationalistic metaphysics that believes its conception of being is in fact a real possession thereof (which he explicitly calls a form of idolatry), and a metaphysics that is reached at the end of what we can broadly call the phenomenological path. ⁷³ Yet, Blondel recognized, along with Spinoza, that the problem of human life, of ethics, is ultimately a problem of metaphysics, ⁷⁴ and that it belongs inherently to what can be called the “natural attitude.” Thus, even if this provisional metaphysics, this “metaphysics to the first power” prior to a metaphysics attuned to charity, must initially be suspended in a science of practice, the metaphysical question must ultimately be answered, not only for the satisfaction of the intellect, but for the completion of action. The metaphysical question is not answered by capturing being within the confines of thought, but rather by synthesizing life with being, thus recognizing that “we are beings in Being.” ⁷⁵

To insist on metaphysics here is then to call attention to an intuition that drives Blondel’s thought: the forgetfulness of being, Heidegger’s Seinsvergessenheit, is simultaneously a Liebesvergessenheit and a Gottesvergessenheit, a forgetfulness of love and of God, and that the only way to reclaim being is likewise to reclaim the notion that creaturely eros is not wholly discontinuous from divine agape; and that the former, in all its vagaries and failings, already anticipates the latter. ⁷⁶ This is precisely why Balthasar, at the end of his survey of ancient and modern metaphysics in The Glory of the Lord, concludes with a call for Christians to not repeat the philosophical verities of the past, but to think anew, even of being:

This age cannot be purified by fire if Christians are not ready to allow themselves to be tested in the same fire. . . . This is the ultimate truth: that Christians, as guardians of a metaphysics of the whole person in an age which has forgotten both Being and God, are entrusted with the weighty responsibility of leading this metaphysics of wholeness through that same fire. But metaphysics is not a ware which can be bought and sold ready-made: we must ourselves think. And if the Christian is brought by Christ to a place of ultimate and profound decision (‘Whoever is not for me, is against me’), then as a serious thinker he is brought to the same point of decision, for there is no ‘neutral’ metaphysics. Either one sees the mystery of the ultimate oscillation or one does not, and becomes blind. ⁷⁷

Maurice Blondel, particularly, though not exclusively, in his Action of 1893, leads philosophy to “the supernatural order as a scientific postulate,” again not as an actuality but as a necessity that may or may not be the case, leading to a decision either for or against. It is beyond the competence of philosophy to decide, but the philosopher has the duty to lay out the two possibilities: either God is desired necessarily and tragically nonexistent, or God is and has been revealed concretely and particularly in a material cult. The former would still be a metaphysics of love, of creaturely eros, or perhaps best described as a metaphysics of the insufficiency of finite love to secure an object proper to itself. The latter, however, is a converted, crucified eros that has received a gift proportionate to its desire.

Conclusion

Blondel cannot be accused of advocating for an a priori schematic whereby beings are regulated, restricted, and ultimately flattened out by the necessary God of that mythical bête noire, “onto-theology.” The “metaphysics” constantly derided by Marion is equally rejected by Blondel. Nevertheless, in both the Action of 1893 ⁷⁸ and throughout his later trilogy, especially L’Être et les êtres of 1935, Blondel insists on calling God the actus purus, Ens a se, and even causa sui, as postulates not of abstract notional reason, but as a product of the interplay between real and notional forms of knowing. That is to say, the real knowing that is a product of action is an accurate assimilation of being as it is in itself: “[Being] is the ambassador and the pedagogue that helps us to know [connaitre] it, to wait for it, to reach it, to ‘realize’ it in ourselves as it is in itself, or even better, to receive it and to welcome it, and I repeat, in realizing ourselves in it, by an active and total conformity to its order.” ⁷⁹ And even as a product of the method of immanence, Blondel believes that reason can know that the full flowering of being is a unifying relation, which is to say that it “identifies the Ens a se and perfect Charity.” ⁸⁰ Pascal’s “third order of charity,” at least in the hands of Blondel, is not an extrinsicist appeal to another order beyond or in contradiction to the realm of being, but is an illumination of the inner depths of being itself. ⁸¹ Blondel’s particular genius was to reject facile oppositions, whether between philosophy and theology, nature and grace, or even being and charity, for he knew that either pole in opposition to the other is a pure abstraction devoid of verification in human life as it is actually lived. For Blondel, neither a self-divinizing finitude nor a purely disruptive love that is wholly discontinuous from finite being are options for the exigencies of the intellect as it is put into action: “Abstracted from all else, the naked intelligible is, in a sense, perfectly unintelligible, just as pure Being is non-sense, non-existence, and as ‘pure Love’ is false charity, a chimera destitute of solid foundations and moral character without which there can be neither goodness nor true subsistence.” ⁸²

And the final word of Action, which will be the father’s final word to his sons, is the famously ambiguous c’est. The claim of “it is”, which he admits to be a philosophical indiscretion, simultaneously answers the opening question of the text (“Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?”), affirms the supernatural end of humanity, and is a claim concerning being. These three questions, for Blondel at least, cannot be separated without returning to some version of the “separated philosophy” that Blondel renounced and purportedly the sons likewise abhor. ⁸³ The three sons have honored their father, even as some scarcely acknowledge his paternity, in innumerable ways, particularly in their various ways of transgressing the neat boundary between philosophy and theology and in insisting on some version of a method of immanence. It remains to be seen whether any will take the further step of describing not only the world that has decided against willing infinitely, a world in which love is philosophically uninteresting and in which a supernatural finality is deemed an impossibility, but also that possible world that is both phenomenologically available and metaphysically insistent—a world that concedes the impossibility of a supernatural end as well as its erotic necessity. ⁸⁴