Georges Bernanos delivered a lecture entitled “A Catholic Vision of the Real” in Brussels in March 1927. The lecture was part of the “conférences Cardinal Mercier” series, named after Désiré-Joseph Mercier, the recently deceased Cardinal Archbishop of Malines-Bruxelles. Mercier had achieved international renown in Catholic philosophical circles for his 1889 founding of the Institut Supérieur de Philosophie (ISP) at the Université catholique de Louvain. The ISP played a crucial international role in the reestablishment of neoscholasticism in Catholic institutions across the globe. This retrieval, mandated by Pope Leo XIII in 1879, was an effort to meet various modern philosophical challenges with a recovery of the critical realism embodied in the work of the medieval scholastic Thomas Aquinas. Beyond the implicit homage to Mercier's leading role, Bernanos's “Catholic Vision of the Real” also met the aspirations of a postwar generation. In late 1926, a group of students at Louvain had founded the review La Nouvelle Équipe, exclaiming that their generation had a “crazy need for synthesis!” of mystic realism, singling out as models the “work of Thomas Aquinas,” Mercier's ISP, and Maritain. Maritain sent a congratulatory note: “You have taken account of the gravity of the hour, you are directing yourselves, under the sign of Saint Thomas, toward the immense work of restoring spiritual unity.” Neoscholasticism's pursuit of the “real” was the renouveau catholique's vital contribution to postwar reconstruction. Edward Baring argues that Continental philosophy's making depended precisely upon this Catholic milieu—a transnational infrastructure of schools, scholars, conferences, and publications—of which Louvain was one small but outstanding member. The Catholic reception of phenomenology was a subterranean but massive structure, linking many of the most important developments in the history of twentieth-century philosophy. Indeed, “the first continental philosophy of the twentieth century was Catholic” (p. 20). As a result, “Continental philosophy today is haunted by religion” (p. 343). Baring prioritizes “a factor that, though apparently marginal in each country, was nonetheless common to all and thus emerges through a process of accumulation as the single most important explanation for the international success of phenomenology in the twentieth century: Catholicism” (p. 5, emphasis added). Catholic institutions provided the links holding together developments across Europe, introducing phenomenology to many better-known thinkers, serving as important interlocutors, and providing a receptive audience for phenomenological and existential texts. Asymmetrical social and cultural status plays an essential role throughout this story. Marginal (low status) Catholics on national cultural peripheries sought connections with central (high status) intellectual figures for legitimation beyond confessional boundaries. Conversely, high status figures depended upon a low status confessional (yet cosmopolitan) network for their scholarship's transnational diffusion. Iconic figures like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir illustrate the point: philosophers interested in phenomenology in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, whether Catholic or not, “could not ignore Catholic readings, to which they felt compelled to respond” (p. 9). Baring argues that we can speak of “continental philosophy” because phenomenology could tap into the networks of a Church that already operated on a continental scale. The geography of phenomenology is best described, not to the contours of mainland Europe but rather “by the reach of the universal Church” (p. 11). Closely connected is Baring's key concept of “conversion”—i.e., Converts to the Real. Where “continent” evokes a settled static landmass, “conversion” implies motion. Insofar as conversion is a process of movement, migration, border crossings (and possible transgressions), eventual resettlement and reconstitution, it focuses our attention on time as well as space. The words “convert” and “conversion” play multiple roles in Baring's method. At a basic level, the “project of conversion” assumes that ideas, rather than being limited or static, speak across intellectual and cultural boundaries. Authors “appeal to those with different sets of beliefs” (p. 17). At another level, a rhetorical level, authors write precisely “in order to change their readers' minds—which is to say, to convert them.” The very possibility of change presumes that context is never completely determinative. Drawing on Jacques Derrida, Baring notes that contextualization is not “a form of containment.” Rather, texts “detach themselves from their context; they can be read and understood in new and interesting ways by people in other times and other places” (p. 16). Ideas mutate as they migrate. As a result, at a final level, those seeking to convert others can end up themselves being converted: “arguments can be just as effective on the author who wields them.” Since “intellectuals bind themselves more or less tightly” to the consequences of a particular line of reasoning, the “consequences that they do not always see clearly in advance” may well be unintended (p. 17). Baring's story is thus filled with authors' shape-shifting “conversions” across borders and boundaries of various kinds: to and from religious convictions and confessions; to and from various forms of unbelief; to and from opposing philosophical positions. Critical and passionate engagement produces many “converts to the real,” even as the precise meaning of the “real” always eludes them. Indeed, the endless indeterminacy of, and unsett
