BAADER, FRANZ XAVER BENEDICT von. — Philosopher and theosophist, born in Munich on 27 March 1765, died 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 brought him into contact with the spiritual currents prevalent there. While from the English sociologists, especially Burke, he drew some of the fundamental ideas of his theory of society, empiricism and deism helped direct him toward the theosophy of St. Martin and Böhme, who subsequently remained the masters of his thought. On returning to his homeland, he entered into a friendship with Schelling and, partly under his influence, conceived the programme of “positive philosophy” and drew closer to realism and theism. In 1826 he was appointed to the chair of speculative theology at the University of Munich. The deviations of his doctrine, however, and his anti-papal and episcopalist attitude, which made him 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 the Restoration. His literary production comprises numerous articles, reviews, memoirs, and also more extensive, though not properly systematic, expositions, to which he devoted himself during the last two decades of his life. B. aimed above all to be the herald of a religious philosophy through which the Catholic faith might become 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 the right use of reason and its full development. True physics, too, is a Christian science and must be constructed on the basis of theological amartiology and soteriology. The philosophy of society must be founded on the principle that individuals can unite only through faith, because mutual trust presupposes a common trust in God.
In theology B. follows the ideas of Böhme, developing them in relation to the problems and themes of contemporary idealism, especially that of Schelling and Hegel. God gathers within his essence the dualism of nature and spirit. The relation between these two original moments is raised, 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,” one must distinguish the real and emanative process through which He substantiates Himself in Three Persons. B. nevertheless connects this second process with the moments of the first, thereby endangering the consubstantiality of the Divine Persons. Creation is distinct from the processes named above and is conceived as a kind of extension ad extra of the inner 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 through themselves or outside the Creator. Ethics is entirely based on his theory of original sin and the Incarnation; its central concept is not that of law or moral duty, but the reconciliation of the discordant forces of fallen nature and the recovery of the state of harmonious integrity proper to the first man. In Christ man has reappeared as he ought to be, that is, as one in whom freedom and law coincide. Although B. does not neglect the moral aspect of participation in the grace of the Redeemer, he nevertheless considers it rather under a cosmophysical aspect and consequently inclines toward a certain ethical naturalism.
B.’s posthumous influence has been relatively limited. V. S. Soloviev and N. Berdiaev regarded him as one of the masters of Christian wisdom.