Maurice Blondel's fatal definition of truth

discussed by Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange OP in Chapter 57 of Thomistic Synthesis. 

 The traditional definition The intellect's conformity with reality Blondel's definition The adequation of intellect and life. Both highlighted in bold below. The Church has been living for the last forty years the nightmare of a world dependent on Blondel's definition of truth. Father Garrigou-Lagrange wrote to Blondel that he would spend a long time in purgatory if he did not retract. Also important to read is Fr Garrigou-Lagrange's article "Where is the "New Theology" leading?" 

On Blondel's definition, Judas is innocent! Difficult but important; here is the opening of Chapter 57.

The eternal notion of truth, conformity of thought with reality, impels us to say: This displeases me and annoys me, but it is none the less true. Still, human interests are so strong that Pilate's question often reappears: What is truth? One answer which we must here examine is that of pragmatism.

I. Pragmatism and Its Variations

There are two kinds of pragmatism, one historical, the other theoretical. In England, at the end of the last century, Charles S. Peirce, aiming at unburdening philosophy of parrotism and logomachy, sought for a precise criterion whereby to distinguish empty formulas from formulas that have meaning. He proposed to take as criterion "the practical effects we can imagine as resulting from opposed views." A starting-point is found in a remark of Descartes: "We find much more truth in a man's individual reasoning on his own personal affairs, where loss follows error, than in those of the literary man in his study, where no practical result is anticipated." Equivalent remarks were often made by the ancients.

This form of pragmatism, which still grants much objectivity to knowledge, is also that of Vailati and Calderoni. Subsequently, however, with William James, pragmatism becomes a form of subjectivism, thus defined in the work cited: "A doctrine according to which truth is a relation, entirely immanent to human experience, whereby knowledge is subordinated to activity, and the truth of a proposition consists in its utility and satisfactoriness." That is true which succeeds.

Hence arise many variations.  We find a pragmatic skepticism, similar to that of the ancient sophists, where success means pleasure to him who defends the proposition. Truth and virtue give way to individual interest.  A profitable lie becomes truth. What is an error for one man is truth for his neighbour.  "Justice limited by a river," says Pascal. "How convenient! Truth here is error beyond the Pyrenees!".

An opposite extreme understands success to mean spontaneous harmony among minds engaged in verifying facts held in common.  At the end of his life, James approached this view, which endeavours to uphold the eternal and objective notion of truth.

Between these two extremes we find many nuances, reasons of state, for example, or of family, where interests, national or private, defy objective truth and even common sense. Or again, opportunism, for which truth means merely the best way to profit by the present situation.  Seeing these inferior connotations of pragmatism, as in course of acceptance by public usage, Maurice Blondel resolved to renounce the word which he had previously employed.

Edouard Le Roy writes as follows: "When I use the word 'pragmatism, I give it a meaning quite different from that of the Anglo-Americans who have made the word fashionable. My employment of the word does not at all mean to sacrifice truth to utility, nor to allow, in the search for particular truths, even the least intervention of considerations extraneous to the love of truth itself. But I do hold that, in the search for truth, both scientific and moral, one of the signs of a true idea is the fecundity of that idea, its aptitude for practical results. Verification, I hold, should be a work, not merely a discourse."

Yet Le Roy proceeded to this pragmatist conception of dogma: In your relations to God, act as you do in your relations with men. Dogma, accordingly, is before all else a practical prescription.  Dogma, speaking precisely, would not be true by its conformity with divine reality, but by its relation to the religious act to be performed, and the practical truth of the act would appear in the superior success of that religious experience in surmounting life's difficulties.  Hence the following proposition was condemned by the Church: "The dogmas of faith are to be retained only in the practical sense, i.e., as preceptive norms of action, but not as norms of belief." Thus the dogma of the Incarnation would not affirm that Jesus is God, but that we must act towards Jesus as we do towards God.  The dogma of the Eucharist would not affirm, precisely, His Real Presence, but that practically we ought to act as if that Presence were objectively certain. Thus we see that the elevated variations of pragmatism are not without danger, both in maintaining truth in general, and in particular dogmatic truths, defined by the Church as immutable and as conformed to the extra-mental reality which they express.

In opposition to all forms of pragmatism, let us recall the traditional notion of truth, in all its manifestations, from highest to lowest, including the truth in prudential arguments, which are always practically true, even when at times they involve a speculative error absolutely involuntary.

II. The Two Notions Compared

Adequation of intellect and object: that is the definition of truth given by Saint Thomas. He quotes that of Saint Augustine: Truth is that by which reality is manifested, and that of Saint Hilary: Truth declares and manifests reality. The first relation of reality to intellect, Saint Thomas continues, is that reality correspond to intellect. This correspondence is called adequation of object and intellect, wherein the conception of truth is formally completed, and this conformity, this adequation, of intellect to reality, to being, is what the idea of truth adds to the idea of being.

Truth, then, is the intellect's conformity with reality.  Change in this universal notion of truth brings with it total change in the domain of knowledge.  The modernists, says Pius X, overturn the eternal notion of truth. 

Without going to this extreme, Maurice Blondel, in 1906, one year before the encyclical Pascendi, wrote a sentence that would lead to unmeasured consequences in science, in philosophy, and in faith and religion.  In place of the abstract and chimerical definition of truth as the adequation of intellect and reality, thus he wrote, we must substitute methodical research, and define truth as  follows: the adequation of intellect and life. How well this sentence expressed the opposition between the two definitions, ancient and modern!  But what great responsibility does he assume who brands as chimerical a definition maintained in the Church for centuries.

Life, as employed in the new definition, means human life.  How, then, does the definition escape the condemnation inflicted on the following modernist proposition: Truth is not more unchangeable than is man himself, since it evolves with, in, and through man.

Change in definition entails immense consequences.  He who dares it should be sure beforehand that he clearly understands the traditional definition, particularly in its analogous quality, which, without becoming metaphorical, is still proportional. Ontological truth, for example, is the conformity of creatures with the intellect of the Creator. Logical truth is the conformity of man's intellect to the world around him, which he has not made but only discovered.  Logical truth is found both in existential judgments, e.g.: Mont Blanc exists, this horse is blind, I am thinking, and in essential judgments, e.g.: man is a rational animal, blindness is a privation, the laws of the syllogism are valid.

Truth, then, like being, unity, the good, and the beautiful, is not a univocal notion, but an analogical notion.  Thus truth in God is adequation in the form of identity, God's intellect being identified with God's being eternally known. Truth in possible creatures is their correspondence with God's intellect.  Truth in actual creatures is their conformity with the decrees of God's will.  Nothing that is not God, not even created free acts, can exist except as causally dependent on God.

Truth, then, is co-extensive with all reality.  A change in defining truth, then, brings corresponding changes, not only in the domain of knowledge, but in that of willing and acting, since as we know, so do we will.