The Apologetics of Ferdinand Brunetière and Positivism: A Generous and Welcoming Ideological Patchwork
Loué, Thomas
The Apologetics of Ferdinand Brunetière and Positivism: A Generous and Welcoming Ideological Patchwork - 2003.
7
When the theologian Edgar Janssens called Ferdinand Brunetière’s work of apologetics “welcoming and generous,” he was referring, in less depreciating words, to Charles Maurras’ idea that the theoretical constructions of the editor of the “ Revue des deux mondes” were intellectually fragile. Besides, the vast majority of philosophers and theologians who assessed Brunetière’s apologetics wondered at his attempt to defend Catholicism by calling on Auguste Comte’s philosophy. Yet Brunetière was part of a larger movement bringing some catholic intellectual trends closer to the positivism of the years 1890-1900. Between the two essential aspects of this apologetics, one epistemological and the other sociological, the catholic intellectuals had reservations about the former. In the middle of the modernist crisis, it was indeed difficult to put forward, as did Brunetière, a relativist theory of knowledge and to base the conditions of scientific possibility on Spencer’s Unknowable. Brunetière’s logic was different from that of the theologians’. His strategy of occupation of the public scene and his methods of dealing with controversies were not too far removed from those references he had in common with the very people he opposed.
The Apologetics of Ferdinand Brunetière and Positivism: A Generous and Welcoming Ideological Patchwork - 2003.
7
When the theologian Edgar Janssens called Ferdinand Brunetière’s work of apologetics “welcoming and generous,” he was referring, in less depreciating words, to Charles Maurras’ idea that the theoretical constructions of the editor of the “ Revue des deux mondes” were intellectually fragile. Besides, the vast majority of philosophers and theologians who assessed Brunetière’s apologetics wondered at his attempt to defend Catholicism by calling on Auguste Comte’s philosophy. Yet Brunetière was part of a larger movement bringing some catholic intellectual trends closer to the positivism of the years 1890-1900. Between the two essential aspects of this apologetics, one epistemological and the other sociological, the catholic intellectuals had reservations about the former. In the middle of the modernist crisis, it was indeed difficult to put forward, as did Brunetière, a relativist theory of knowledge and to base the conditions of scientific possibility on Spencer’s Unknowable. Brunetière’s logic was different from that of the theologians’. His strategy of occupation of the public scene and his methods of dealing with controversies were not too far removed from those references he had in common with the very people he opposed.
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