LABERTHONNIÈRE, LUCIEN. — Oratorian, writer on the philosophy of religion, b. at Chazalet (Indre) on 5 October 1860, d. in Paris on 6 October 1932. Having entered the Oratory in 1886, he was professor of philosophy at Juilly (1887–96), director of the Massillon School (1897–1900), superior at Juilly (1900–1903), and director of the Annales de philosophie chrétienne (1905–13). When this periodical was condemned by the Holy Office (decree of 5 May 1913), and his submission did not appear acceptable to the ecclesiastical authorities, he withdrew into private life and shortly thereafter was also forbidden to publish further writings. He continued to give an example of dignified priestly life and of profoundly supernatural piety; but, while inculcating submission to the directives of the Church upon others, during that period of forced silence he prepared other works, unfortunately still imbued with the same errors already condemned. Before dying, he asked for and received the Sacraments with profound piety.
Endowed with speculative penetration and polemical vigor, with a limpid and agile style and an aristocratic tone, he wished to contribute to the project of M. Blondel, who proclaimed the need for a new apologetics that would bring together in a higher synthesis the demands of the contemporary mentality and the Christian idea.
The new system he adopted and called “moral dogmatism” was intended to break the union between Christianity and Thomistic Aristotelianism, to liberate “Christian realism” from the old and oppressive accretions of “Greek idealism,” and to abolish a purely abstract faith, a tangle of formulas imposed upon the spirit from “outside,” such as that taught and practiced by the faithful until then, replacing it with a faith proceeding from “within us,” according to which the spirit proclaims its autonomy and “gives itself the truth that it accepts.” It was an immanentist theory, declaring the impotence of speculative reason through the acceptance of Kantian criticism, considered a conquest of the modern spirit; yet it sought to surpass it by relying upon the demands of practical life and our highest aspirations, in order to deduce from them the fundamental truths of philosophy and the confirmation of those same truths of Christianity.
The system was set forth and vigorously defended by L. in a substantial series of articles published in the Annales de philosophie chrétienne and in separate works: a) Essai de philosophie religieuse (Paris 1903; Italian trans., Palermo 1907; placed on the Index, decree of 5 April 1906), in which, while declaring that he did not wish to maintain that human nature postulates the supernatural, he nevertheless confuses the limits clearly established between the two orders of nature and the supernatural by the doctrine of the Church, thinking that one should be able to discover in man a demand for Grace that carries him as far as faith, provided that he responds faithfully to its appeals, that is, to his intimate aspirations. Faith, moreover, is neither imposed nor undergone, because that would do violence to the intellect; rather, every certainty of a religious order is acquired only by “making the truth live within oneself.” b) Le réalisme chrétien et l'idéalisme grec (Paris 1904; Italian trans., Florence 1922; placed on the Index, decree of 5 April 1906) seeks to demonstrate that Christian doctrine is not, like Greek philosophy, a system of concepts (“thinking is everything”), but a living interpretation of history, which is a reality in continual development, an immeasurable wealth and complexity, in which, and especially in the life of Jesus, “we must find the active presence of God in humanity.” c) The same ideas are reaffirmed in Le témoignage des martyrs (Paris 1912; placed on the Index, decree of 16 June 1913) and in Sur le chemin du catholicisme (ibid. 1913; placed on the Index, decree of 16 June 1913); but with greater vehemence and acrimony in the posthumous works: Etudes sur Descartes (2 vols., ibid. 1935; placed on the Index, decree of 2 December 1936) and Etudes de philosophie chrétienne et premiers écrits philosophiques (ibid. 1937; placed on the Index, decree of 26 March 1941), where the usual immanentist doctrines and the consequences of the autonomy of the spirit that follow from them are joined by the most virulent and audacious invectives against the Church’s magisterium, against the theologians who, through their extrinsicist teaching on Grace and Revelation, lower us from the state of persons to the state of things; and especially against the principal author responsible for these ruins, s. Tommaso d'Aquino, oppressor of souls, the man “who is not even a heretic, because he remained completely outside Christianity.”
L. also wrote: Positivisme et catholicisme, à propos de l'Action française (ibid. 1911), in which, even before the condemnations, he noted with force and acute prescience the movement’s agnostic and anti-Christian character.
In the field of education as well, L. wished to apply his conceptions in order to demonstrate their value and fruitfulness, and composed a brief treatise: Théorie de l'éducation, rapport de l'autorité et de la liberté (in Essai, cited, pp. 233–89; in the Italian trans., pp. 227–89; new Italian trans. of the treatise alone, Florence 1921); in which he clearly inculcates the mission and duty of the Christian educator, which must not consist in imposing upon the pupil, by methods more or less coercive, the habit of acting passively; but in serving and helping the child’s personality to rise above its instincts and master its inner anarchy. Apart from the immanentist explanations concerning the religious truths that must be taught, the treatise is rich in useful observations and advice.
In conclusion: L. must not be denied the very considerable merit of having entered the field of historical and concrete reality, the field of lived life, with the aim of permeating it ever more intimately with Jesus Christ: this also explains the benefit and consolation that many derived from reading his books; but it must also be said that the attempt to construct an apologetics of Christianity no longer based on the metaphysics and theology employed by the Church, but on immanentist and therefore subjective and relative demands, has completely failed.