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BLONDEL AND CHRISTIANITY by Henri Bouillard

BLONDEL AND CHRISTIANITY

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Pub Date: Oct. 7th, 1969
Publisher: Corpus

It was Maurice Blondel's ambition to create a philosophy that would be at once essentially Christian and truly scientific and autonomous. That one speaks of ""creating"" a philosophy already bodes ill; and Blondel; though during his lifetime he managed to create quite a stir, in fact never approached, except occasionally in his own mind, the goal that he had set. This book is the intellectual history of that quest. It is a work of analysis rather than of synthesis, and one of explication and clarification rather than one of conclusion. The author's purpose is to set forth the origins, and to explain the significance, of the three elements of Blondel's thought: the idea of the supernatural, the function of religious option in ontological affirmation, and the specific differences of a Christian philosophy. He succeeds sufficiently well to make this of some importance for the history of philosophy as well as for the intellectual history of Christianity, despite the inordinate amount of space devoted to polemics aimed at other Blondelian commentators.