HeyJ LIX (2018), pp.

804–816

MAURICE BLONDEL AND THE

SACRAMENTALITY OF HUMAN RATIONALITY1
ROBERT C. KOERPEL
University of St. Thomas, Saint Paul, USA

The French Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel (1861–1949) is one of the most influential,2
least well-known, and consistently misunderstood figures in contemporary Christian thought.
Perhaps the latter two can be attributed to the fact that he was not a theologian by professional
training or admission, and he spent a considerable amount of time and energy defending the
orthodoxy of his philosophy of religion to Catholic theologians of his day. In 1881, at the age of
twenty, Blondel came from the provincial French city of Dijon to Paris to study philosophy at
!
the prestigious Ecole Normale Sup! erieure. Twelve years later he defended and published his
controversial and well-known doctoral thesis on action, L’Action,3 and by the middle part of the
twentieth century the new mode of thinking he inaugurated through its publication penetrated
French theology so deeply that it was declared to be the most influential work of the first half of
the twentieth century.4 As a professionally trained philosopher he sought to expand the scope of
philosophical reflection during his day by thinking about religious and theological issues philo-
sophically. His theological legacy, if he can be said to have one, is still very much alive in a
number of theological figures associated with the mid-twentieth century nouvelle th! eologi!e and
ressourcement movements in Catholic theology, who exerted a decisive influence over the Sec-
ond Vatican Council and continue to fuel debate in contemporary theology today.5
However, Blondel’s thought and influence is missing from conventional accounts of modern
hermeneutics. It is a history written by such prominent Germanic figures as Friedrich Schleier-
macher (1768–1834), Wilhelm Dilthey (1822–1911), Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), and Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976). Blondel’s absence and its unmistakable Germanic pedigree can be
attributed to, in part, Franco-German political tensions in the aftermath of the 1870 Franco-
Prussian war, when it was common for distinguished German and French intellectuals such as
Blondel and Henri Bergson (1859–1941) to work within their own national milieus. Neverthe-
less, this lacuna in the traditional narrative of modern hermeneutics has not stopped some schol-
ars from identifying common philosophical themes6 and discovering methodological parallels
between Blondel and its leading characters.7 Still, much more work remains to be done in the
English-speaking world to determine and adequately assess Blondel’s role and contribution to
the history of modern hermeneutics.
To that end, this article traces the conceptual arc of Blondel’s account of human rationality
as orientated toward a transcendent Absolute. The first part delineates the Blondelian process by
which the ontological reality of action forms the epistemic conditions for the possibility of true
human understanding. The second part situates Blondel’s thought within the debates surround-
ing the practice of human understanding that take place during the latter half of the nineteenth
and early part of the twentieth centuries. Broadly speaking, those debates focus on questions of
epistemology, privileging the ‘order of knowing’ over the ‘order of being.’ Both Schleiermach-
er’s romantic subjectivism and Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie sought to overcome the ‘yawning

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V
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2 MAURICE BLONDEL AND THE SACRAMENTALITY OF HUMAN RATIONALITY 805

abyss’ of time between the interpreter and the text in the epistemological conditions for the pos-
sibility of human understanding. But with the appearance of Heidegger’s Being and Time
(1927), the priority of epistemology over ontology began to shift, as the practice of hermeneu-
tics, Paul Ricoeur observes, began to ‘disengage itself from the psychological problems of trans-
fer into another’s life, and come to grips with the more ontological problems involved in
comprehending “being-in-the-world”.’8 After Heidegger, then, history (time) is no longer the
obstacle to but the condition for understanding.
Blondel’s action-based account of human rationality is a philosophy of history, which disclo-
ses history’s theological significance within the expansion of human action through interior
intention, external individual realization, social action (family, country, humanity) and finally to
an act of synthetic communion9 with the ‘one thing necessary’ (unicum necessarium).10 In
Blondel’s framework the transcendent orientation of human action finds its full expression in
the faithful and liturgical action of the church. This article traces Blondel’s account of the
human will’s journey from created to uncreated truth in human action. It does not offer an
exhaustive account of Blondel’s thought; rather, it attempts to bring into relief the ‘sacramental-
ity’ of human rationality in Blondel’s dialectic, the real substantial bond (vinculum substantiale)
of presence that exists between God and humankind in the movement and structure of the
human will. Finally, the article suggests that Blondel’s ‘metaphysics of charity,’ as he once
called it,11 makes its most important contribution to the history of modern hermeneutics by
offering an alternative account of the practice of human understanding that opens the process of
human rationality to the transcendent (sacramental) dimension of human history.

I. THE BOND OF ACTION AND THOUGHT IN BEING

In his turn to the immanent order of being as the fundamental starting point for reflection upon
the practice of human rationality, Blondel defined his relationship to modern philosophy in
sharp contrast to the Catholic speculative theology of his day. Many Catholic theologians in the
nineteenth century considered their common enemy to be the rationalism of modern philosophy,
whether Humean empiricism, Kantian critical philosophy or post-Kantian idealism, since each,
in its own way, disavowed the intellectual and moral claims of Christian revelation.12 In this
respect, Catholic theologians were faced with two main philosophical problems: on the one
hand, they faced the reduction of religious claims to postulates of pure practical reason, the
‘terms for peace’ dictated by Kant to theologians, as Karl Barth once quipped.13 On the other
hand, they faced British empiricism, which dismissed all religious claims. So the task of the
Catholic theologian was to show how the act of faith remained possible in light of modern phi-
losophy which, in turn, required him to preserve the free and authentic character of that act with-
out compromising its supernatural character. At the same time, it was incumbent upon the
theologian to offer an adequate response to the empiricist’s critique of revelation. This challenge
required him to attend to the historical nature of revelation without succumbing to an account of
faith that dissolved into fideism or historicism.
What Blondel found appealing about modern philosophy,14 and what has led some scholars
to suggest his philosophy of action offers a corrective to it,15 was the centrality of the ‘ethical
problem’ in proximity to the question of human destiny and philosophy’s unique role in resolv-
ing it. Indeed, his appreciation of the role human destiny plays in such thinkers as Spinoza,
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel prompted Blondel to regard much modern philosophy to be amena-
ble to Christianity.16 Yet despite his appreciation of particular themes in modern philosophy, his
relationship to modern philosophy is a ‘curious intermixture of respect and antipathy.’17 He
806 ROBERT C. KOERPEL 3

shared nineteenth and twentieth-century Catholic theology’s concern with modern philosophy’s
presumption of self-sufficiency and its emphasis on a purely speculative resolution to the prob-
lem of human destiny. To him it was clear that modern philosophy must move beyond represen-
tational and empirical views of human rationality. Philosophy, he insisted in an article published
at the turn of the century, ‘no longer appears as a simple extract of life, as a representation, as a
spectacle: it is life itself taking account of and direction from itself, bestowing on thought its
full, and nothing but its valid role, and tending to equate knowledge with existence.’18 This
‘existential’ starting point of philosophy considers thought as it issues forth from life (action),
enriching and complementing it in a relationship of progression and elevation. The integral
movement between action and thought is the process of human understanding unfolding within
human life. What distinguishes Blondel’s thought here from the modern philosophy he both
abhorred and admired, Oliva Blanchette observes, is the open and dynamic structure of human
rationality.
Far from keeping us in a closed conception of life, action always has a new element to bring
to thought, just as thought has new lights and new obligations to bring to action. The moving
circle of the two never stops and is never closed. The task of philosophy, as Blondel under-
stood it, was to enter into this movement in order both to add to it and to receive from it
more of the truth it was concerned with.19

Within the receptive and kenotic attributes of human life reason discovers the ‘new element’ in
action is a theological (sacramental) trace of the infinite reality that grounds and facilitates the
movement between the inseparable and irreducible aspects of understanding which come to
expression in action (ontology) and thought (epistemology). Drawing on christological and trini-
tarian analogues, Blondel identifies the immanent nature of the trace in the ‘perichoretic’ rela-
tionship between action and thought, a ‘circumincession’ that allows thought ‘to develop
simultaneously the reality of our being in the middle of beings and the truth of beings in us.’20
Locating human understanding in the middle of beings gives it a sphinx-like character that ori-
entates it beyond while grounds it within the immanent order of experience, and which always
already projects itself toward an encounter with the possibility of an actual transcendent finality,
perfection, and truth.
Blondel’s thought has been characterized as the attempt to display humanity’s original ‘will
to be powerless.’21 That is, the phenomenon of action evinces humanity’s desire to will infin-
itely the gift that it can neither predict nor produce, revealing both the inadequacy of treating
action simply as an instrumental reality human beings create for their own convenience, and
affirming that action is the ‘synthesis of willing, knowing and being, that bond of the human
composite. . .the precise point where the world of thought, the moral world, and the world of sci-
ence converge.’22 The precedence of the will in the practice of human rationality comes from
the paradox that one cannot not will. ‘Action, in my life, is a fact, the most general and the most
constant of all, the expression within me of a universal determinism; it is produced even without
me.’23 The voluntary determinism of the will reflects the sacramentality of free action, how it
bears within it the time of the ‘already,’ an actual infinite and transcendent finality that always
surpasses its determinate conditions, and the ‘not yet,’ the determinant conditions from which it
always proceeds. The manifold and indefinite structure of necessities, ‘the consciousness of the
multiple reasons for acting,’24 always determine and accompany the genesis of the will’s free
act and display the infinite origin and character of the will. ‘In short, in order to act we have to
participate in an infinite power; to be conscious of acting we have to have the idea of this infinite
power. But it is in the reasonable act that there is a synthesis of the power and the idea of the
4 MAURICE BLONDEL AND THE SACRAMENTALITY OF HUMAN RATIONALITY 807

infinite; and this synthesis is what we call freedom.’25 The determinant design of the will’s free-
dom in tension with the necessity of the will, expressed through the categories of ‘la volont!e
voulue’ (willed will) and ‘la volont!e voulante’ (willing will), forces the self to embark on a
course of understanding that transgresses the facts of consciousness and sensible phenomena,
tracing a path whereby it must recognize itself as a trace of a trace and become itself by accept-
ing that it is a vestige of the infinite,26 the ‘one thing necessary.’
Blondel’s dialectic returns to the insufficiency of the natural and social sciences, as well as
the personal and social institutions of the natural order (familial, communal and national life) in
resolving the tension inscribed within the phenomenon of action. His analysis of the dialectical
tension between autonomy and necessity in the will explores the relationship between mathe-
matics and the empirical sciences, where it discovers that intrinsic to determinate knowledge
(positive sciences) is an excess or overdeterminancy which comes to expression in the empirical
sciences and reveals an ‘internal principle of unity, a center of grouping imperceptible to the
senses or to the mathematical imagination, an operation immanent to the diversity of the parts,
an organic idea, an original action that escapes positive knowledge at the moment it makes it
possible.’27
In the fourth part of Action (1893) Blondel explores action’s movement toward transcen-
dence, arriving at the necessity of God only after it has exhausted the natural, psychological,
social, mathematical/empirical, and mystical explanations for the necessity of human action.
For Blondel, God is not the conclusion of a syllogism, but rather the inexorable and necessary
source or principle of the dynamism of the will present at the beginning and the end of action.
The arrival at God’s existence emerges from the impossibility of God’s non-existence. The pro-
cess of acknowledging the impossibility of God’s non-existence has arisen through the concep-
tual interplay of revealing (presence) and concealing (absence) in the dialectic of action. For in
revealing the impossibility of ‘absolute non-being’ (nothingness), Blondel is revealing the con-
tingency of ‘relative being’. As he notes, the ‘idea of nothingness is not without the idea of
something else. And the argument that might best be termed ontological is this counterproof
that establishes the impossibility of absolute non-being, by grounding itself on the insufficiency
of relative being.’28 To be, or not to be is the question the human will always answers.
Within the purview of finite reality’s contingency the necessity of being-as-such becomes the
principle source of unity to human action and the fulfillment of finite reality. Blondel summa-
rizes it this way: ‘Without it, all is nothing and nothing cannot be. All that we will supposes that
it is; all that we are requires that it be.’29 God, then, is the source of unity of the wills who
dwells within humanity, but is not of humanity. ‘This one thing necessary is found at the begin-
ning and at the end of all the avenues man can enter; at the outcome of science and of the
mind’s curiosity, at the outcome of sincere and wounded passion, at the outcome of suffering
and disgust, at the outcome of joy and recognition, everywhere, whether we descend into our-
selves or ascend to the limits of metaphysical speculation, the same need re-appears.’30 To be
clear, this necessity derives from humanity’s inability to achieve equipoise between spontaneous
(free) and willed action.
The progressive disclosure of the simultaneously contingent and insufficient nature of finite
reality confronts humanity with the paradoxical reality that ‘[w]hat belongs to us, then, is to be
without being; and yet we are forced to will to become what we can neither attain nor possess
by ourselves. . .It is because I have the ambition of being infinitely that I feel my powerlessness:
I did not make myself, I cannot do what I will, I am constrained to surpass myself; and at the
same time, I can recognize this fundamental infirmity only by having a sense already of the
means to overcome it.’31 Here we no longer have a will-to-power but a will diminished by its
808 ROBERT C. KOERPEL 5

power, a will that embodies the contradictory character of willing infinitely without willing the
infinite.
The will resolves this conflict inscribed within it through the ‘life of action.’32 The life of
action is the ontological affirmation of being, the option for the infinite instead of the idol. In the
life of action the liturgical and ecclesial practices of Christianity most clearly disclose to the
will a vestige of the infinite as the gift of love. At this stage human rationality resigns itself vol-
untarily to the eminent reason of action by embodying in action what it cannot fully comprehend
by reason alone. The being of action, its source and principle, and the sequence of necessities
that follow from it, including the life of action sustained by the ecclesial and liturgical practices
of Christianity, depend upon the one thing necessary (God). To avoid or reject the lit! urgia or
‘original practice’ which gives life and completes action, is to refuse to enter into the fullness of
human life. Here we encounter the apex of the life of action, the point at which human under-
standing discovers, as the apostle Paul did, that ‘[Christ] is before all things, and in him all
things hold together’ (Col. 1:17). The hypostatic union of the person of Christ provides the ana-
logue to the reconciliation and perfection of the human wills, as well as the bond that truly and
fully unites knowledge and action. Reason recognizes the ‘new element’ action brings to
thought when it encounters action in its concrete ecclesial and liturgical form, an encounter
which allows reason to discern not only a trace of the infinite reality that facilitates the ‘move-
ment of return,’ but also the ‘source of movement,’ the synthetic living reality that grounds and
mediates, the interplay between the ontological and the epistemological polarities of human
rationality.
The role of ecclesial and liturgical action in the consummation of the life of action, and as
the synthetic and true bond between knowledge (epistemology) and action (ontology), finds a
more explicitly theological formulation in the role Blondel assigns tradition in shaping and
forming human rationality. The relationship between action and tradition is treated toward the
end of the dialectic of action when, in the final stage of the ‘life of action,’ Blondel suggests,
‘dogmas are not only facts and ideas in acts, but also they are principles of action.’33 That is,
dogma contains speculative truth, but through dogma’s concrete embodiment in practice its full
value and meaning is disclosed. In this way, ‘a tradition and a discipline represent a constant
interpretation of thought through acts, offering each individual, in the sanctified experience,
something like an anticipated control, an authorized commentary, an impersonal verification of
the truth.’34
In History and Dogma,35 published over a decade after Action (1893), the interplay between
action and tradition unfolds within an ecclesial horizon that envisions the disclosure of the spec-
ulative truths of Christian doctrine as a process sustained by ecclesial and liturgical practice.
The ecclesial and liturgical practices of prayer, almsgiving and fasting, that is to say, concrete
‘faithful action,’ dispose the community (the church) toward discerning the truth revealed both
in Scripture and doctrine. Through faithful and liturgical action tradition offers a constant inter-
pretation of Scripture and doctrine by penetrating its content and implications, and in so doing,
illuminating the speculative truths contained in each.
Blondel’s account of tradition is not an epiphenomenon that appears in the absence of the
canonical scriptures (texts). Instead, tradition is a metaphysical principle with an ontological
value distinct from history and dogma, Scripture and the church, fundamental ontology and
epistemological method, and yet a principle that functions as the source of unity between each
without the one eliding the other. It unites these and other fundamental tensions in Christianity,
while still maintaining the conceptual integrity of each. Tradition relies on texts and, at the
same time, it relies on something else Blondel calls ‘an experience always in act which enables
it to remain in some respects master of the texts instead of being strictly subservient to them.’36
6 MAURICE BLONDEL AND THE SACRAMENTALITY OF HUMAN RATIONALITY 809

This account of tradition allows it to be more than a force preserving the intellectual aspect of
the past in texts; it is also the living reality of Christ’s presence. Tradition ‘frees us from the
very Scriptures on which it never ceases to rely with devout respect,’37 to reach the real Christ
who escapes scientific examination without rejecting the practice of critical exegesis. In this
way ‘[o]ne realizes through the practice of Christianity that its dogmas are rooted in reality. One
has no right to set the facts on one side and the theological data on the other without going back
to the sources of life and of action, finding the indivisible synthesis.’38 The synthesis is a ‘Chris-
tian knowledge’ which attends to modern historiography, as well as the ‘collective experience
of Christ verified and realized in us.’39 Tradition, then, is a form of knowledge which situates
itself between ‘those who offer us a Christianity so divine that there is nothing human, living or
moving about it, and those who involve it so deeply in historical contingencies and make it so
dependent upon natural factors that it retains nothing but a diffused sort of divinity.’40 For
Blondel, tradition is the synthetic living reality, the sacramental bond, between history and
dogma, Scripture and the church, the finite and infinite dimensions of human rationality,
and fundamental ontology and epistemological method.

II. RECONSIDERING THE DEVELOPMENT OF MODERN HERMENEUTICS: A BLONDELIAN

READING

What is the proper relationship between the order of being (ontology) and the order of
knowing (epistemology) and how it ought to be delineated are key questions that have ani-
mated the development of modern hermeneutics. At the beginning of the nineteenth century
the Prussian reformed theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher put forth a notion of interpreta-
tion, whereby the interpreter represents the historical context of the text through the inter-
preter’s analysis and research of its cultural and ideational context. For Schleiermacher, the
interpreter participates psychologically in the author’s horizon in order to become conversant
not only with the language and grammar of the author but with ‘the spirit of the author as
well,’41 raising the prospect that the interpreter might understand the text ‘at first as well as
and then even better than its author.’42 Here one sees the practice of hermeneutics in transi-
tion ‘from determination of the rules and principles of interpreting texts to inquiry into the
nature of understanding discourse and what is manifest in it.’43 The framework for under-
standing the nature of textual discourse in Schleiermacher’s thought is the interplay between
the objective representation of the text in its historical context and the interpreter’s intuitive
encounter with the text. The tension inscribed between the text and the interpreter in
Schleiermacher’s work bears the ‘double mark’ of ‘Romantic and critical,’ the former ‘by its
appeal to a living relation with the process of creation, critical by its wish to elaborate the
universally valid rules of understanding.’44
Although Wilhelm Dilthey voiced concern with Schleiermacher’s treatment of history, he
nonetheless developed Schleiermacher’s romantic subjectivism by retaining its deference to
human consciousness as the apex of Verstehen.45 Dilthey’s decisive contribution to hermeneu-
tics was to subordinate the philological and exegetical questions of interpretation to the science
of history which, by the end of the nineteenth century, had attained the status of a science of
‘the first order.’ As prolegomenon to understanding a particular historical text, Dilthey was
required to give an account of the fundamental intelligibility of the science of history itself (his-
torical reality).46 Writing within the milieu of philosophical positivism, Dilthey employed a dis-
tinction between the mental world (psychology) and the physical world that, in turn, allowed
him to construct the epistemological conditions for the possibility of understanding. For from
810 ROBERT C. KOERPEL 7

the mental life of man he was able to draw on the phenomenon of interconnection (Zusammen-
hang), which permits one to explore and to understand the forms and the expressions of the lives
of others. Yet the pliable reality of human experience required a logical structure within which
the phenomenon of interconnection in the mental life could show itself, hook on to the world
and provide meaning. Despite the difference in thought between Dilthey and Edmund Husserl,
Dilthey was able to evaluate critically the notion of subjectivity and its inner relation to objec-
tivity with the help of Husserl’s idea of intentionality and the latter’s account of consciousness
as a synthetic process of consistent repetition in which objects are given. The connection
between Dilthey and Husserl is important because it is through Husserl’s ‘concept of life,’ and
the way in which this concept relieves subjectivity of its opposition to objectivity, that Dilthey
was able to endow human experience with coherence. Husserl contributed the important episte-
mological insight into the structure of science in which Dilthey sought to anchor his account of
the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences).47
Dilthey’s method of exploring and understanding the mental states of others by analogy to
one’s own experience is akin to Blondel’s effort to confer meaning on the moral experience of
others by analogy to one’s own action. Just as in Dilthey, there is in Blondel’s thought a meth-
odological sensitivity to the status of the human sciences and to the immanent order of reality as
the primary and privileged location of philosophical meaning, which first comes to expression
in the form of the distinction between a ‘science of practice’ (epistemology) and a ‘practical sci-
ence’ (ontology) in his philosophy of action.48 The distinction tempers the temptation in
Blondel’s phenomenology to lose itself in individual experience, and it provides a provisional
structure, similar to Dilthey’s use of Husserl’s concept of life, within which the moral experi-
ence of the other can be encountered and provide meaning. ‘We must,’ Blondel insists at the
outset of his analysis of human action, enter ‘into all philosophical systems, as if each one held
in its grip the infinite truth it thinks it has cornered. . .[and] taking within ourselves all conscious-
nesses, become the intimate accomplice of all, in order to see if they bear within themselves
their own justification or condemnation.’49 The distinction allows Blondel to move his analysis
of human action beyond action’s instrumental feature and toward an encounter with the truth of
action. Unlike the theoretical demand of Dilthey’s phenomenon of life, which is ‘still orientated
to the interiority of self-consciousness and fails to orient itself toward the functional circle of
life,’50 Blondel’s distinction between a science of practice and a practical science provides theo-
retical neutrality to his phenomenology that momentarily suspends the concrete act of thinking
in action for the sake of exploring the act of consciousness,51 only later to return to action (prac-
tical science) in the dialectic of human understanding, ‘elevating it to a higher order of spiritual
achievement.’52
It is tempting to read Blondel as simply offering a different account of the same psychologi-
cal horizon Dilthey employs to represent the condition for the possibility of understanding. In
his early work on the logic of action Blondel turned to the psychological intuitionism of Henri
Bergson, where he found human understanding orientated toward the will’s rediscovery of the
real and concrete self lost in the colloquial language and grammar of modernity.53 Bergson’s
desire to reestablish reason’s contact with the world and to reinvest human understanding in the
immanent order of experience54 appealed to Blondel’s effort to overcome the ‘idealist illu-
sion,’55 which Blondel claimed reified thought in action. Bergson appeared to be charting a new
course for modern philosophy that avoided its penchant for instrumentalizing action as a cate-
gory of thought in order to remain tethered to human life and existence. Yet Blondel sensed an
intellectualism in Bergson’s thought, ‘a desire to arrive at the solution to the ontological prob-
lem by an effort of the mind alone.’56 It was a form of intellectualism that encouraged Blondel
to resist thinking about the act of human understanding as a process turned in upon itself, a
8 MAURICE BLONDEL AND THE SACRAMENTALITY OF HUMAN RATIONALITY 811

purely reflective and analytic form of knowledge which substitutes the idea of action for action
itself. Philosophy cannot discover its proper object merely through the reflective categories of
the mind. It must turn outward toward action and practice to discover an answer to its original
question: ‘Yes or no, does human life make sense, and does man have a destiny?’57 To explore
this question Blondel considered action in terms of an original dynamism (power) of human
beings which resides beyond the intellect and the will while at the same time functions as the
source of power for the intellect and the will. Action connotes a metaphysical reality akin to tra-
ditional metaphysics’ use of the term ‘existence’ as the most fundamental and originating princi-
ple moving the essence to act. In this sense of action the will is less of a faculty and more of an
imprint of the vinculum substantiale (substantial bond), the actus purus (pure act) from which
all reality has its origin and toward which all creation moves.58 In a matter of time, then,
Blondel discovered in Bergson’s model of pure intuition a form of thought capable of tracing
the primordial unity of human understanding within the immanent order of experience, but one
which fractures into an ever-greater plurality incapable of orientating itself toward a transcend-
ent Absolute. For all its speculative heat, the spiritual energy of Bergson’s e!lan vital lacked the
light of the ‘true sun’59 that transfigures human rationality.60
Blondel’s break with Bergson’s intuitionism set his thought on an anti-Cartesian trajectory
analogous to Heidegger’s critique of the Husserl’s phenomenological reduction and the latter’s
inclination to prioritize ‘intentional being’ over all forms of cognition. Heidegger’s account of
Dasein, though indebted to Dilthey’s Lebensphilosophie, made Schleiermacher’s, Dilthey’s, and
Husserl’s understanding of hermeneutics appear to be enthralled by the Cartesian thinking sub-
ject who escapes the temporal distance between the interpreter and the text. Achieving any
understanding at all, according to Heidegger, is a matter not of Husserl’s transcendental subjec-
tivity, but of the facticity of Dasein as it comes to terms with being-in-the-world through its var-
ious modes of ‘attunement,’ ‘discourse,’ ‘falling,’ and ‘care.’61 Thematizing human
understanding requires clarifying the Being of time, matter, space, and history presupposed by
the sciences.62 Starting from the facticity of Dasein is ‘inquiry into being, but in a direction that
necessarily remained unconsidered in all previous inquiry into the being of beings – that was
indeed concealed by metaphysical inquiry into being.’63
Heidegger’s account of Dasein resituates the practice of human understanding from an epis-
temological context to that of fundamental ontology. When the question of the ‘world’ takes
precedence over the question of the ‘other,’ analysis of the practice of human understanding
goes beyond the theory of knowledge. Heidegger shows that understanding ‘is never a presup-
positionless apprehending of something presented to us,’64 by demonstrating that Dasein’s par-
ticular way of Being presupposes an anticipatory grasp of Being in general. He defended his
analysis of human understanding against the charge of circular reasoning by disclosing that there
is no neutral site from which one can engage understanding. Verstehen is Dasein’s basic way of
being so that the ’fore-structure’ of Being is the horizon that enables the practice of human
understanding: ‘to deny the circle, to make a secret of it, or even to want to overcome it, means
finally to reinforce this failure. Instead, we must rather endeavor to leap into the “circle,” pri-
mordially and wholly, so that even at the start of the analysis of Dasein we make sure that we
have a full view of Dasein’s circular Being.’65
In contrast to Heidegger’s thought, where time (finitude) provides the overarching structure
within which the activity of Dasein shows the self to be hermetically sealed by a self-referential
discourse of immanence, the immanent dimension of subjective action in Blondel’s thought is
an exercise in receptivity in which the self is open to the disclosure that ‘there is no effective
synthesis, no internal act, no state of consciousness, however obscure it may be, that is not tran-
scendent regarding its conditions, and where the infinite is not present.’66 To be sure, the self in
812 ROBERT C. KOERPEL 9

Heidegger’s thought is engaged in an act of understanding that involves receptivity. Still, the
difference between Blondel’s and Heidegger’s hermeneutical horizons is brought into sharper
focus through Ricoeur’s observation that with Heidegger’s thought we are always engaged in
returning to the foundations, ‘but we are left incapable of beginning the movement of return
which would lead from the fundamental ontology to the properly epistemological question of
the status of the human sciences.’67 Put differently, the self is subsumed within the temporal,
existential structure of human understanding.68 The incessant return to the foundations in
Heidegger’s philosophy is the product of a phenomenology that lacks a transcendent end (telos)
signifying a continuing state of finality and perfection. The ‘care’ structure of Dasein in
Heidegger’s thought has replaced the transcendental categories of truth, goodness, and beauty
with ‘authenticity’ (Eigentlichkeit) and ‘resoluteness’ (Entschlossenheit). Without an end (telos),
the existential structure of human rationality in Heidegger’s account considers what is essential
to thought ‘not to lie in its actuality as a philosophical “movement” [“Richtung”],’69 but rather
in possibility as essential and higher than actuality. But privileging possibility over actuality
only furnishes the self with purposes or, as Heidegger calls them, ‘projects’ (Entwurf) to which
it must resolve to commit itself in order to arrive at that ‘truth of Dasein which is most primor-
dial because it is authentic.’70 Heidegger’s self enters the circle of human understanding with
only the prospect of obtaining the ‘self-constancy’71 that being-in-the-world demands of it. In
the absence of a transcendent end (telos) signifying the self’s continuing state of finality and per-
fection and in the perpetual presence of projects directed toward self-constancy, Heidegger’s
philosophy appears to be ‘no longer addressed to anything but itself.’72 As Ricoeur’s comment
implies, Heidegger has just collapsed the order of knowing into the order of being rather than
delineating their proper relationship.

III. TOWARD A BLONDELIAN ACTION-BASED HERMENEUTIC

The important role of subjectivity in Blondel’s account of the historicity of human rationality
resonates deeply with the phenomenon of time in Heidegger’s thought, where time, Hans-Georg
Gadamer observes,
is no longer primarily a gulf to be bridged because it separates; it is actually the supportive
ground of the course of events in which the present is rooted. Hence temporal distance is not
something that must be overcome. This was, rather, the na€ıve assumption of historicism,
namely that we must transpose ourselves into the spirit of the age, think with its ideas and its
thoughts, not with our own, and thus advance toward historical objectivity. In fact the impor-
tant thing is to recognize temporal distance as a positive and productive condition enabling
understanding. It is not a yawning abyss but is filled with the continuity of custom and tradi-
tion, in light of which everything handed down presents itself to us.73

But where thinkers like Heidegger, Dilthey, and Bergson fail to come to terms with the tran-
scendent dimension of time (human history), or avoid engaging with it, Blondel’s thought
moves toward a more sacramental hermeneutic, one capable of attending to the theological
dimension of time (history) without abandoning the epistemological insights of modern his-
toriography. Indeed, Blondel’s thought attends to both history and theology in an effort to
bring about a synthesis of these two realms as the true horizon for understanding. Attending
to the insights of modern history while reading Scripture from within the church opens up a
space where the sacramental realities of human rationality can disclose themselves as eternal
truth continually present in human history. It is the synthetic space where the church
10 MAURICE BLONDEL AND THE SACRAMENTALITY OF HUMAN RATIONALITY 813

encounters the content of revelation, and where tradition is the relationship between the reve-
lation of truth and the church’s participation in truth that occurs through liturgical and faith-
ful action.
In Blondel’s account, the synthetic reality of human rationality means that the interpretation
of Scripture gives rise to what Ricoeur calls a ‘surplus of meaning’ that exceeds the literal and
the historical character of revelation, while still requiring it, yet never opposing or omitting it.74
Here the practice of understanding and interpretation is an exercise in discerning how certain
facts refer substantially to real events and, at the same time, disclose divine realities from within
historical events. Far from deducing facts from faith or historical events from Christian doctrine,
the task of a Blondelian action-based hermeneutic is to give an account of how Christians ‘jus-
tify dogmatically historical beliefs which can neither be founded on mystical inspiration, nor be
reduced to simple subjective and symbolic statements, nor be satisfied with objective data which
criticism justly finds insufficient.’75
In the Blondelian horizon, then, revelation is conceived within the foreground of the con-
ceptual interplay of revealing (presence) and concealing (absence) in the dialectic of action.
The dialectic of action discloses the simultaneously contingent and insufficient nature of
human rationality to God’s revelation and, in so doing, adduces the eschatological horizon
and the surplus of meaning that resides within it. A Blondelian action-based hermeneutic
requires philological, literary, and historical methods for the correct understanding of the
text, but precludes the detached manner of historical consciousness with which historical
methods are often applied to the text. That is, interpretation cannot be performed in isolation
from the synthetic living reality of tradition which, through the concrete reality of faithful
and liturgical action, displays, unfolds, and critiques the truths disclosed in the texts of Scrip-
ture.76 In the encounter with the biblical text, to fail to be mindful of the philosophical pre-
suppositions and attentive to the historical situatedness within the living tradition is to fail to
recognize a fundamental truth about human rationality. It is the fundamental truth of finite
reality revealed through the life of action that is the occasion of the ‘movement of return’
from fundamental ontology to epistemology.
Toward the end of Action (1893) the bond of knowledge and action, the true infinite, is not
an abstract universal but rather a concrete singular. Through this concrete singular, Blondel
writes,
is made manifest in all its greatness the role of what has been called the letter and matter, of
all that constitutes the sensible of operation, of what composes, properly speaking, action, the
body of action. For it is through this matter that the truth of the overwhelming infinite is inti-
mately communicated to each individual; and it is through it that each one is protected
against being overwhelmed by the infinite truth.77

Human understanding discovers its complete and final form only to the degree that it allows
itself to be drawn deeper into the mystery of God’s encounter with the world through the liturgi-
cal and faithful action of the church. In Blondel’s action-based account of hermeneutics the
movement of human understanding is open to genuine transcendence through its concrete
encounter with the Incarnate Word present in the faithful and liturgical action of the church.78
In the liturgical mediation of being reason encounters the soteriological effects of the Incarna-
tion on human action, drawing it beyond the finite circle of human rationality and into a redemp-
tive hermeneutical experience, a new way of life lived in the economy of self-giving and
spontaneous receptivity of the life of the divine persons of the Trinity, the true source of human
understanding.79
814 ROBERT C. KOERPEL 11

Notes

1 My many thanks to the anonymous reader of this article and my colleagues Mark McInroy and Phil
Rolnick for their thoughtful comments and suggestions.
2 On the importance of Blondel’s thought for contemporary Christian thought, see John Milbank, Theology
and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 210–219; Peter Henrici, ‘The One
Who Went Unnamed: Maurice Blondel in the Encyclical Fides et ratio,’ Communio 26 (1999), pp. 609–621;
Ren!e Virgoulay, Philosophie et th!eologie chez Maurice Blondel (Paris: Cerf, 2002); Adam English, The Possi-
bility of Christian Philosophy: Maurice Blondel at the Intersection of Theology and Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 2007); David Grumett, ‘Blondel, Modern Catholic Theology and the Leibnizian Eucharistic Bond,’
Modern Theology 23 (2007), pp. 561–577 and ‘Blondel, the Philosophy of Action and Liberation Theology,’
Political Theology 11 (2010), pp. 502–24; Oliva Blanchette, Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010); and Michael Conway, ‘Maurice Blondel and Ressourcement’ in Ressourcement: A
Movement for Renewal in Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, eds. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 65–82. On the significance of Blondel’s recovery of a non-
instrumental account of action for modern thought, see Thomas Pfau, Minding the Modern: Human Agency,
Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2013),
pp. 315–318.
3 L’Action: Essai d’une critique de la vie et d’une science de la pratique, (Paris: Alcan, 1893). The English
translation is Action (1893): Essay on a Critique of Life and a Science of Practice, trans. Oliva Blanchette
(Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Blondel published two versions of L’Action. The first
!
version, cited above, was published in 1893 after his doctoral defense at the Ecole Normale Sup! erieure. The
second version was published as two volumes in 1936 and 1937 as part of the trilogy on thought, being, and
action. All references are to the English translation.
4 Cf. Henri Bouillard, Blondel and Christianity, trans. James M. Somerville (Washington, D.C.: Corpus
Books, 1969), p. 4.
5 For example, see Hans Boersma, Nouvelle Th! eologi!
e and Sacramental Ontology: A Return to Mystery
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); J€urgen Mettepenningen, Nouvelle Th! eologi!
e - Inheritor of Modern-
ism, Precursor of Vatican II (London: T & T Clark, 2010); and Ressourcement: A Movement for Renewal in
Twentieth-Century Catholic Theology, eds. Gabriel Flynn and Paul D. Murray (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
6 For example, see John J. McNeil, The Blondelian Synthesis: A Study of the Influence of German Philo-
sophical Sources on the Formation of Blondel’s Method and Thought (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1966).
7 For example, see Peter Henrici, Hegel und Blondel: eine Untersuchung u€ber Form und Sinn der Dialektik
in der Ph€ anomenologie des Geistes und der ersten Action (Pullach bei M€unchen: Berchmanskolleg, 1958);
Ren!e Marl!e, Introduction to Hermeneutics, trans. E. Froment and R. Albrecht (New York: Herder & Herder,
1967); and Alain L!etourneau, L’herm! eneutique de Maurice Blondel: Son emergence pendant la crise modern-
iste (Qu!ebec: Bellarmin, 1998).
8 Paul Ricoeur, Main Trends in Philosophy (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), p. 266.
9 Blondel, Action (1893), p. 378.
10 Ibid., pp. 314–329.
11 Blondel, L’Itin!
eraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel: Propos receuillis par Fr! ed!eric Lefevre (Paris:
Spes, 1928), p. 153.
12 Gerald A. McCool, S.J., Nineteenth-Century Scholasticism: The Search for a Unitary Method (New
York: Fordham University, 1989), pp. 32–5.
13 Karl Barth, Protestant Theology in the Nineteenth Century: Its Background and History, trans. Brian
Cozens and John Bowden (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), p. 264.
14 Blondel’s personal diaries provide an intimate view of the tension between his philosophy of action, mod-
ern philosophy, and Christian faith. For example, see Maurice Blondel, Carnets Intimes, Tome I (1883–1894)
(Paris: Cerf, 1961), p. 526 and 547. For a discussion of Blondel’s lay vocation as a philosopher, see Peter
Henrici, ‘Une vocation de laic,’ in Dominique Folscheid (ed.), Maurice Blondel, une dramatique de la modern-
it! !
e: Actes du colloque d’Aix-en-Provence, mars 1989 (Paris, Editions Universitaires, 1990), pp. 210–214.
15 James Le Grys, ’The Christianization of Modern Philosophy According to Maurice Blondel,’ Theological
Studies 54 (1993), pp. 455–484.
16 For example, see Maurice Blondel, Dialogues avec les philosophes: Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche,
Pascal, Saint Augustin (Paris: Aubier, 1966).
17 McNeill, Blondelian Synthesis, p. 46.
12 MAURICE BLONDEL AND THE SACRAMENTALITY OF HUMAN RATIONALITY 815

18 ’The Starting Point of Philosophical Research II (June 1906),’ in The Idealist Illusion and Other Essays,
trans. Fiachra Long (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Kluwer, 2000), p. 130.
19 Oliva Blanchette, Maurice Blondel: A Philosophical Life, p. 170.
20 Blondel, ‘The Starting Point of Philosophical Research II (June 1906),’ p. 130.
21 Marion, ‘La conversion de la volont!e selon l’Action,’ in Dominique Folscheid (ed), Maurice Blondel:
une dramatique de la modernit! e (Paris: Editions Universitaires, 1990), pp. 154–164.
22 Blondel, Action (1893), p. 40.
23 Ibid., p. 3.
24 Ibid., p. 122.
25 Ibid. p. 125.
26 Marion, ‘La conversion de la volont!e selon l’Action,’ p. 160.
27 Blondel, Action (1893), p. 94.
28 Ibid. p. 316.
29 Ibid., p. 317.
30 Ibid.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid., pp. 345–357
33 Ibid., p. 372.
34 Ibid., p. 380.
35 Blondel, The Letter on Apologetics and History and Dogma, trans. and eds. Alexander Dru and Illtyd
Trethowan (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994).
36 Ibid., p. 267.
37 Ibid., p. 268.
38 Ibid., p. 286.
39 Ibid., p. 287.
40 Ibid., p. 286.
41 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics: The Handwritten Manuscripts, ed. Heinz Kimmerle, trans.
James Duke and Jack Forstman (Missoula: Scholars, 1977), p. 212.
42 Ibid., p. 112.
43 Hans W. Frei, The Eclipse of the Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Her-
meneutics (New Haven and London: Yale University, 1974), p. 282.
44 Ricoeur, ’The Task of Hermeneutics,’ in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language,
Action, and Interpretation, trans. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1981), p. 46.
45 Cf., Michael Ermath, ’The Transformation of Hermeneutics: 19th Century Ancients and 20th Century
Moderns,’ The Monist, 64 (1981), pp. 182–3.
46 Theodore Plantinga, Historical Understanding in the Thought of Wilhelm Dilthey (Lewiston, New York:
Edwin Mellen, 1992); and Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey,
Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, IL.: Northwestern University, 1969), pp. 98–123.
47 For example, see Dilthey,’Fragments for a Poetics (1907–1908),’ trans. Rudolf A. Makkreel; ‘Goethe and
the Poetic Imagination (1910),’ trans. Christopher Rodie; and ‘Friedrich H€olderlin (1910),’ trans. Joseph Ross,
in Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (eds), in Poetry and Experience (Princeton: Princeton University,
1985), pp. 223–383.
48 Action (1893), pp. 6–12. Here an interesting parallel also can be drawn to Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s dis-
tinction between ‘the lived body’ (le corps v! ecu) involved in our everyday action and ‘the human body’ as the
object of scientific and metaphysical inquiry. See ‘Part One: The Body,’ in Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phe-
nomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities, 1962), pp. 67–199.
49 Action (1893), p. 12.
50 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd Revised Edition, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G.
Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), p. 250.
51 L!etourneau, L’herm!eneutique de Maurice Blondel, pp. 47–51.
52 Blanchette, Maurice Blondel, p. 218.
53 See Bergson, Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, trans. F.L. Pogson
(New York, Macmillan, 1910).
54 See Bergson, Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Holt, 1911); and Matter and Mem-
ory, trans. Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer (New York: Macmillan, 1911).
55 Blondel. ’The Idealist Illusion,’ in The Idealist Illusion and Other Essays, pp. 75–94.
816 ROBERT C. KOERPEL 13

56 Blondel, ’The Starting Point of Philosophical Research I (June 1906),’ in The Idealist Illusion and Other
Essays, p. 125.
57 Blondel, Action (1893), p. 3.
58 See Blondel, De Vinculo substantiali et de substantia composita apud Leibnitium, hanc theism Facultati
Litterarum Parisiensi proponebat Mauritius Blondel (Paris: Alcan, 1893).
59 Blondel, Une e!nigme historique: Le ‘Vinculum Substantiale’ d’après Leibniz et l’! ebauche d’un r! ealisme
sup!erieur (Paris: Beauchesne, 1930), p. 108.
60 Blondel, L’Itin!eraire philosophique de Maurice Blondel, pp. 46–51.
61 Heidegger, Being and Time, 7th edition, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco:
Harper & Row, 1962), pp. 172–182 and 203–224. The following discussion of Heidegger’s thought is limited
to Being and Time. It is beyond the scope of this article to engage the work of the so-called ‘later Heidegger’
and the new formulations of Dasein and new phenomena that come to expression in such works as The Meta-
physical Foundations of Logic (1928), The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics (1929–30) and the “Letter
on Humanism” (1947).
62 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 28–35.
63 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 257.
64 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 191–192.
65 Ibid., p. 362.
66 Blondel, Action (1893), p. 123.
67 ’The Task of Hermeneutics,’ p. 59.
68 Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Bloomington: Indiana Uni-
versity, 1982), pp. 274–302.
69 Heidegger, Being and Time, pp. 62–3.
70 Ibid., p. 343.
71 Ibid., pp. 364–370.
72 Ricoeur, ‘The Task of Hermeneutics, p. 59.
73 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 297.
74 Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texan Christian Uni-
versity, 1976), pp. 45–69; and The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (London: Rout-
ledge, 2003), pp. 216–256.
75 Blondel, ’De la valeur historique du dogme,’ in Les premiers e!crits de Maurice Blondel (Paris: Universi-
taires de France, 1956), p. 232.
76 It is worth noting that the church too must guard against its own temptation to obstruct the transmission
of truth in tradition by ‘temerity’ and ‘pusillanimity.’ As Blondel puts it, ‘that of temerity properly speaking,
and that of pusillanimity, which favors silence or silent conformism over the difficult witness to truths and
duties that are not yet clearly discerned.’ La philosophie et l’esprit Chr!
etien: Conditions de la symbiose seule
normale et salutaire (Paris: Universitaires de France, 1946), p. 2: 94.
77 Blondel, Action (1893), p. 410.
78 Blondel’s personal diaries are an important point of reference for understanding the liturgical (Eucharis-
tic) mediation of his thinking. See Blondel, Carnets Intimes I (1883–1894) (Paris: Cerf, 1961) and Carnets
Intimes II (1894–1949) (Paris: Cerf, 1966). For scholarly commentary on the role of the Eucharist in Blondel’s
thinking, see Mario Antonelli, ‘Trinity and Eucharist in Blondel,’ Communio 27 (2000), pp. 284–299; Oliva
Blanchette, ‘Blondel’s Philosophical Probe into the Mystery of the Trinitarian Life as Mystery of Mysteries,’
Science et Esprit 59 (2007), pp. 181–191; Grumett, ‘Blondel, Modern Catholic Theology and the Leibnizian
Eucharistic Bond,’ pp. 561–577; John Sullivan, ‘Matter for Heaven: Blondel, Christ and Creation,’ Ephemer-
ides Theologicae Lovaienses 64 (1998), pp. 60–83; and Ren!e Virgoulay, Philosophie et th! eologie chez Maurice
Blondel (Paris: Cerf, 2002), pp. 95–100.
79 Blondel, Action (1893), pp. 389–446.