<i>Beyond the Contingent: Epistemological Authority, A Pascalian Revival, and the Religious Imagination in Third Republic France</i> (review)
2012; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 98; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/cat.2012.0122
ISSN1534-0708
Autores Tópico(s)Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis
ResumoReviewed by: Beyond the Contingent: Epistemological Authority, A Pascalian Revival, and the Religious Imagination in Third Republic France Paul Misner Beyond the Contingent: Epistemological Authority, A Pascalian Revival, and the Religious Imagination in Third Republic France. By Kathleen A. Mulhern. (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, an imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. 2011. Pp. xvii, 212. $25.00 paperback. ISBN 978-1-608-99370-3.) A lacuna in French Catholic modernism studies is filled. The subject of this study is the inspiration that several moderate Catholic modernists, especially Maurice Blondel, found in the writings of Blaise Pascal. Researchers in the field, at least in their English-language productions, have in fact paid next to no attention to this significant connection. An at least partial exception is Oliva Blanchette in his recent Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life (reviewed ante, XCVII [2011], 836-38), arriving too late for Kathleen A. Mulhern to note. Blondel's philosophical undertaking to ground human knowledge in a rigorous, philosophically valid way displays certain parallels with Pascal's own reflections on his scientific and religious experience. Beyond that, as Mulhern shows with adequate documentation, Blondel delved into the thought of Pascal to come up with an alternative to the dominant theological as well as secular approaches to religious knowledge. In the process he was pitched into the modernist controversies as he came up against the fears of Catholic critics, who were not receptive to any such modernizing paradigm shift. The author examines two other figures in addition to Blondel, namely the Oratorian Lucien Laberthonnière (1860-1932) and the physicist Pierre Duhem (1861-1916), both friends of Blondel (1861-1949). Duhem also makes his first appearance in Catholic modernist studies in these pages. Two centuries after Pascal (1623-62), but spurred by the reading of that religious scientist, Duhem concluded to the inevitable probability (not certainty) of all findings of experimental science. Hence Duhem, in a sort of physicist's commentary on Pascal's Pensées, challenged his scientistic colleagues who in effect claimed a monopoly on knowledge, with no room left for religious belief. Mulhern labors to make clear Laberthonnière's positions in religious epistemology and why they raised such opposition in church circles (chapters 6 and 7, regarding respectively the Scholastics' defective authoritarian epistemology and skeptics' rejection of tradition). His polemical style and clerical status made him a target for Rome. Oddly, Mulhern fails to mention (pp. 152, [End Page 389] 180, 192) that two of his recent works were placed on the Index in 1906, more than a year before the broader Vatican condemnations of Lamentabili and Pascendi came out. Instead of distinguishing "left, right, and center" modernists as Emile Poulat and others have done, Mulhern tends to wall her subjects off from the modernist camp proper. She situates them broadly in the progressive ("liberal") wing of nineteenth-century French Catholic intellectual life and then highlights the distinctive methodology that sets them apart from "modernists." A framework acknowledging a broader spectrum of modernists laid low by Pope Pius X's 1907 encyclical, Pascendi dominici gregis, would be preferable. A bit of delving into the drafting of this encyclical also would be helpful to the nonspecialist reader. For the specialist, the main profit of Mulhern's work will in many cases be the light she casts on Pascal's influence in a hostile laicist academic setting and the relevance of Pascalian thought for some champions of intellectual renewal within the Catholic Church. [End Page 390] Paul Misner Marquette University (Emeritus) Copyright © 2012 The Catholic University of America Press
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