Abstract

Who isn’t familiar with Desire-Joseph Mercier, one of the major craftsmen of the neo-Thomist revival of the 19th century and founder of l’Institut superieur de philosophie at the Catholic University of Louvain? Also, who isn’t familiar with Maurice Blondel, a leader among non-scholastic Catholic philosophers who were concerned with developing a new apologetic more in tune with modern thought? A priori, the idea of a constructive dialogue between an ardent Thomist like Mercier and a pioneer of the “new Catholic philosophy‘ like Blondel - who sought to take the Konigsberg philosopher’s critiques into account seems inconceivable. And yet the correspondence between the two men between 1897 to 1925 surprisingly reveals an intellectual complicity between them! It is this complicity, which is paradoxical in more than one way, that the present contribution seeks to clarify.