Amiel, Henri-Frédéric (AMIEL, HENRI-FRÉDERIC) - Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. I, p. 659

Machine translation of the 1948–1954 Italian original. The original text is authoritative.

AMIEL, HENRI-FRÉDERIC. — Thinker and poet, born in Geneva on 27 September 1821 and died there on 11 May 1881. Professor of aesthetics and later of philosophy at that University, he keenly felt the influence of German pessimistic philosophy; but, having failed to organize his speculations on a firm basis, he left us only a harvest of acute and penetrating observations. Like Heraclitus, to whom he goes back through German thought, he asserts that “every life is a struggle of opposing forces enclosed within the limits of an equilibrium”: the law of the Universe is activity, that is, struggle, and since every ideal, if realized, ends only in disappointment, life’s unhappiness is inevitable: therefore, as Bourget says, “he tried to flee into dreams, having suffered too much from life.” In him, the feeling of universal suffering and of the impenetrable mystery resolves itself at times into moments of quietist calm, at times into mystical exaltation. For A., there is a difference but no opposition between philosophy and religion; in Christianity, however, whose entire spiritual force he felt, he sees only the teaching of Jesus and not a positive religion founded by Him, to which He gave obligatory precepts and rites; his religion has the Absolute for its God and order for its moral law. Nevertheless, hindered by his intellectualistic pessimism, he never succeeded in attaining possession of God, toward whom he was impelled by an intimate need.

A mediocre author of verse, for the most part cold and halting, he wrote a great deal, from Grains de mil (1854) to Pensieroso (1858) and Jour à jour (1877). A. could often be a poet in prose: the Journal intime, to which his name is chiefly linked, is remarkable not only for the penetrating subtlety of its self-analysis but also for its many pages in which religious ardor is expressed in impassioned and poetic prose.

There are partial editions of the Journal, one from Geneva (1883–84), and another published in Paris in 1923. Recently B. Bouvier published La jeunesse de H. F. Amiel. Lettres à sa famille, ses amis, ses amies, pour servir d'introduction au « Journal intime » (1837–49), Paris 1936.

BIBL.: B. Bouvier, La religion de H.-F. A., Paris 1893; P. Bourget, H.-F. A. Nouveaux essais de psychologie contemporaine, Paris 1899, pp. 251–304; G. Salvadori, E. Fed. A. e gli effetti della critica negotica, Rome 1906; P. Arcari, Federico A., Genoa 1912; G. B. Marchesi, Il « Pensieroso », Studio su F. A., Genoa 1912; C. Pascal, Epicurei e mistici, Catania 1914, pp. 109–42; A. Severino, Il sentimento religioso di F. A., in Quaderni di Bilychinis, 3 (1921); F. Mauriac, De quelques cœurs inquiets, Paris 1925; F. Neri, Il pallido A., in Saggi di letteratura italiana, francese, inglese, Naples 1936, pp. 119–27.

Joë Scudieri Ruggieri