Abstract: Working backwards in a debate which has preoccupied historians of phenomenology for about thirty years, this article aims to show that the theological evolution of phenomenology in recent decades was in fact preceded and anticipated by a conversion of theology to phenomenology, at the very moment when, in the aftermath of World War I, this theology was looking for a frame of reference which it found neither in (neo-)Kantianism in Germany nor in Bergsonian spiritualism in France.
