Maurice Blondel is considered one of the foremost French Catholic philosophers of the twentieth century. Blondel was born at Dijon. He studied at the local lycée, and in 1881 entered the École Normale Supérieure, where he was taught by Léon Ollé-Laprune. Because of pragmatic tendencies in his thought, Blondel's name was associated for a time with the modernist movement. He was, however, essentially orthodox, and his work has been increasingly influential among those Catholic thinkers who look for an alternative to Thomism.

Through Ollé-Laprune, Blondel was influenced by John Henry Newman's theory that belief is a matter of will as well as of logical demonstration. Blondel was far from being a thoroughgoing pragmatist or vitalist and showed none of the naturalism of thinkers like Henri Bergson and James, yet he held that truth is to be reached not only through...