BAADER, Franz Xaver Benedict von. - Philosopher and theosophist b. in Munich on 27 March 1765, d. there on 23 May 1841. He studied medicine at the Universities of Ingolstadt and Vienna, then mineralogy and geology at the academy of Freiberg. A stay of several years (1792-95) in England put him in contact with the spiritual currents prevailing there. While from the English sociologists, especially from Burke, he drew some of the fundamental ideas of his theory on society, empiricism and deism contributed to orienting him toward the theosophy of St. Martin and of Böhme, who thereafter remained the masters of his thought. Having returned to his homeland, he entered into a friendship with Schelling and, partly under his influence, conceived the program of "positive philosophy" and drew closer to realism and theism. In 1826 he was called to the chair of speculative theology at the University of Munich. The deviations, however, of his doctrine and his anti-papal and episcopalist attitude, through which he became a precursor of "Old Catholicism," led to a break with his Catholic friends. He died in isolation, reconciled with the Church on his deathbed.
B. was one of the most important thinkers of Romanticism and of the Restoration. His literary output comprises numerous articles, reviews, memoirs, and also broader expositions, though not properly systematic, which he worked on in the last two decades of his life. B. aims to be above all the herald of a religious philosophy through which the Catholic faith becomes speculative knowledge. Every form of knowledge is "con-scientia," that is, participation in divine knowledge. Only by accepting the faith and following its inspirations does man attain a right use of reason and its full development. Even true physics is a Christian science and is to be constructed on the basis of theological hamartiology and soteriology. The philosophy of society must be founded on the principle that individuals can be united only through faith, because a mutual trust presupposes a common trust in God.
In theology B. follows the ideas of Böhme, developing them in relation to the problems and motifs of contemporary idealism, especially of Schelling and of Hegel. God sums up in his essence the dualism of nature and of spirit. The relationship between these two original moments is elevated, through an immanent and eternal process, from primitive indifference to a state of complete subordination of nature to spirit. From this first "logical" process, through which God realizes himself as perfect spiritual "subjectivity," is to be distinguished the real and emanative process, through which He substantiates himself in Three Persons. B., however, connects this second process with the moments of the first to the point of endangering the consubstantiality of the Divine Persons. Creation is different from the processes named, and is conceived as a kind of prolongation ad extra of the interior productions. The divine idea, which in the Logos has become a living and announcing idea, reaches in creation the state of an enunciated and particularized idea. B.'s conception of finite being is theopanistic: creatures do not exist for themselves and outside the Creator. Ethics is entirely based on his theory of original sin and of the Incarnation; the central concept is not that of law or of moral duty, but of the reconciliation of the discordant forces of fallen nature, and of the reconquest of the state of harmonious integrity proper to the first man. In Christ man has reappeared as he was meant to be, that is, in whom freedom and law coincide. Although B. does not neglect the moral side of participation in the grace of the Redeemer, he nevertheless considers it rather under a cosmo-physical aspect, and therefore inclines toward a certain ethical naturalism.
B.'s posthumous influence has been relatively limited. V. S. Soloviev and N. Berdyaev considered him one of the masters of Christian wisdom.
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