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Maurice Blondel e Luigi Stefanini: corrispondenza inedita intorno alla possibilià di una “Filosofia Cristiana”

Summary: Around the fourth decade of the last century there is a discernible climate of lively interest in a “Christian philosophy” and in new apologetic methods capable of re-expressing sensibilities and thematics that, while faithful to the dogmatic contents established by “Pascendi”, would not necessarily reproduce the selfsame speculative and apologetic enterprise of the Thomism of the Neo-Scholastics. This is the wider context of a significant correspondence between Maurice Blondel and Luigi Stefanini, at the time a young lecturer at the University of Padua. This epistolary exchange – four letters by Blondel and one by Stefanini, which remained completely unpublished until some months ago – bears witness to the great philosophical undertaking of both. Both, being believers, aimed to carry out a speculative effort, which – not sacrificing any of the “technical” exigencies of philosophy as such – was not to obligate the Christian believer to renounce engaging in reflection that is explicitly “philosophical,” i.e. based on the force of reason. This correspondence has its specific context in the Italian cultural environment, dominated by the almost hegemonic tendencies of Idealism, but also by the concerns of ecclesiastical authorities inevitably bound to official Thomism. In relation to this relatively closed and monothematic Italian landscape, Blondel stands out with the great refinement of his philosophical reflections, his passionate and conscious attempt to relate reason and faith, to respond with a philosophy capable of making human beings open to truth, or to the search for truth, capable of pointing to life, able to penetrate life itself in all its dimensions, including the dimension of the supernatural. To all of these thematics the Italian thinker relates “in sympathy”. Indeed, having become close to it since his doctoral thesis, Stefanini will remain faithful to the spirit of “Blondelism” throughout his vast philosophical experience, from “imaginism” to “personalism”, from the study of Plato to that of the existentialists.