ABAUZIT, FIRMIN. - Protestant theologian, born at Uzès in 1679, died in 1767 at Geneva, where he spent and worked much of his life. Learned and studious, he wrote on many subjects; but in the theological field he earned the highest praise from the adversaries of religion and is regarded as the precursor of modern liberal criticism and of modernism.
Indeed, according to him, religion, which contains incomprehensible mysteries, is merely the ignorance and pride of schools; once the mystery is revealed in its existence, it ceases to be such and becomes accessible and comprehensible to human reason. The Trinity, or the Incarnation, once the Holy Scriptures are properly understood, become fully natural truths. Jesus Christ is a man like any other; having received a special mission from God, one may say that he “incarnated” divine wisdom. Voltaire (in the Dictionnaire philosophique) plundered his theories; Rousseau, in the Nouvelle Héloïse (cf. p. V. let. 1), extols him to the skies and reproduces his thoughts in the figure of the Savoyard Vicar.
The Index of Forbidden Books condemned (29 Aug. 1774) the Réflexions impartiales sur les Evangiles, suivies d'un essai sur l'Apocalypse (published posthumously by J. B. de Mirabaud [V. l]), precisely on account of the rationalist theories, which would seek to present “Christianity as a reasonable religion” without mysteries and truly worthy of fraternizing with “philosophy” (Y. de la Brière, s. V. in DHG, I, col. 18).