ABAUZIT, FIRMIN. - Protestant theologian, b. at Uzès in 1679, d. in 1767 at Geneva, where he lived and worked for a great part of his life. Cultured and scholarly, he wrote on many subjects; but in the theological field he received the highest praise from the opponents of religion and is regarded as the precursor of today's liberal criticism and of modernism.
In fact, according to A., religion that contains incomprehensible mysteries is only ignorance and schoolroom pride; the mystery, once its existence has been revealed, ceases to be such and becomes accessible and comprehensible to human reason. The Trinity, or the Incarnation, once Holy Scripture is properly understood, become fully natural truths. Jesus Christ is a man like any other; having received a special mission from God, he may be said to have "incarnated" divine wisdom. Voltaire (in the Dictionnaire philosophique) plunders his theories; Rousseau in the Nouvelle Éloïse (p. v. let. 1) extols him to the skies and reproduces his thoughts in the figure of the Vicaire Savoyard.
The Index of Forbidden Books condemns (29 Aug. 1774) the Réflexions impartiales sur les Évangiles, suivies d'un essai sur l'Apocalypse (published posthumously by J. B. de Mirabaud [v.]), precisely for the rationalist theories that would consider "Christianity a reasonable religion" without mysteries and truly worthy of fraternizing with "philosophy" (Y. de la Brière, s. v. in DHG, I, col. 18).
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