BABDER, Franz Xavier 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 Freiberg Academy. A stay of several years (1792–95) in England brought him into contact with the spiritual currents then prevalent there. While he drew some of the fundamental ideas of his theory of society from English sociologists, especially Burke, empiricism and deism helped to steer him toward the theosophy of Saint-Martin and Böhme, who remained the masters of his thought. On his return to his homeland, he formed a friendship with Schelling and, partly under his influence, conceived the programme of “positive philosophy” and moved toward realism and theism. In 1826 he was appointed to the chair of speculative theology at the University of Munich. However, the deviations of his doctrine and his anti-papal and episcopalist stance, which made him a precursor of “Old Catholicism,” led to a rupture with his Catholic friends. He died in isolation, reconciled to the Church on his deathbed.
B. was one of the most important thinkers of Romanticism and the Restoration. His literary output includes numerous articles, reviews, memoirs, and even more extensive expositions, though not strictly systematic, which he produced in the last two decades of his life. B. aimed above all to be the herald of a religious philosophy through which Catholic faith might become speculative knowledge. Every form of knowledge is “con-scientia,” that is, participation in divine knowledge. Only by accepting faith and following its inspirations does man attain right use of reason and its full development. Even true physics is a Christian science and must be constructed on the basis of theological amatology and soteriology. The philosophy of society must be founded on the principle that individuals can unite only through faith, since mutual trust presupposes common trust in God.
In theology, B. followed the ideas of Böhme, developing them in relation to the problems and motifs of contemporary idealism, especially Schelling and Hegel. God sums up in his essence the dualism of nature and spirit. The relationship 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, by which God realizes himself as perfect spiritual “subjectivity,” a real and emanative process must be distinguished, by which He subsists 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 distinct from the processes mentioned and is conceived as a kind of outward extension of inferior productions. The divine idea, which in the Logos has become a living and announcing idea, in creation reaches 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 the Incarnation; the central concept is not that of law or moral duty, but of the reconciliation of the discordant forces of fallen nature and the recovery of the state of harmony and integrity proper to the first man. In Christ, man has reappeared as he ought to be, in whom freedom and law coincide. Although B. does not neglect the moral aspect of participation in the grace of the Redeemer, he considers it rather from a cosmo-physical standpoint and thus 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.