JAIME BALMES. — Philosopher, apologist, sociologist, and politician, was born at Vich in Catalonia on 28 August 1810, and died there on 18 August 1848. After completing his studies in letters (1817–22), philosophy (1822–25), and a course in theology (1825–26) at the seminary of his native city, he transferred to the University of Cervera, the only one then existing in all Catalonia. After eight more years of study, during which he devoted himself almost exclusively to deepening his understanding of the thought of St Thomas Aquinas, he obtained in 1835 the degree in theology. Ordained priest at Vich on 20 September 1834, he taught mathematics there while at the same time devoting himself to literature and poetry.
His life as a Catholic publicist can be divided into two periods. In the first, begun at Vich and concluded at Barcelona, where he ordinarily resided from 1841 to 1844, he wrote his most notable apologetic works: *Memoria o Reflexiones sobre el celibato* (Madrid 1839), *Observaciones sobre los bienes del clero* (Vich 1840, Barcelona 1840), and above all *El protestantismo comparado con el catolicismo en sus relaciones con la civilización europea* (4 vols., Barcelona 1842–44), which was simultaneously translated into French, German, and Italian. At the same time, he was publishing apologetic and social essays in the Barcelona journals *La religión*, *La civilización* (1841–43), in collaboration with Roca y Cornet and Ferrer y Subirana, and *La sociedad* (1843–44), which he founded and wrote entirely by himself.
The second period, during which Balmes generally resided in Madrid, extends from 1844 to 1848 and includes writings of a predominantly philosophical and political character: *El criterio* (Barcelona 1845); *Cartas a un escéptico* (1846), apologetic and philosophical in character; *Filosofia fundamental*, in 4 vols., in which he sets out the fundamental points of his philosophical thought, immediately translated into French and Italian and reprinted in 1848; *Filosofia elemental*, in 3 vols. (1847), for which he personally prepared a Latin translation for use in seminaries. In Madrid he founded the political periodical *El pensamiento de la nación*, which aimed at the pacification and union of Spain through the marriage of the young Queen Isabella II to Don Carlos de Borbón, leader of the Carlists, a union that would have contributed to the consolidation of the throne and made possible a political evolution without the dangers of revolution. Balmes also took an interest in foreign policy, particularly in events in Rome, and wrote the pamphlet *Pio IX* (Madrid 1847) in defence of the reforms of the new Pope. The opposition he encountered in this field from Catholics and the failure of the projected royal marriage led him to leave Madrid. He returned to Barcelona and died there shortly afterwards at the age of only 38.
As an apologist, Balmes belongs to a Catalan school, which included, alongside him, the two aforementioned collaborators of *La civilización*, Joaquim Rubió y Ors, the Majorcan Tomás Aguilar, and J. M. Quadrado. All of them, in their ideas, depend on French apologists, with many of whom—e.g., Ozanam, Lacordaire, Dupanloup—Balmes had personal relations during the three trips he made to Paris.
Although Balmes’s apologetics are scattered through two principal works, the *Letters to a Skeptic* and *The Protestantism*, as well as in many separate pamphlets and articles, they nonetheless constitute an organic body of doctrine. Three points he develops at greatest length: religious scepticism, the human value of the Catholic Church, and that of the clergy—three questions that were then of pressing contemporary concern. Even before the *Letters*, which are rather philosophical in character, he had combated in individual articles the rationalistic atheism of the eighteenth century and the two fundamental principles of nineteenth-century religious liberalism. The *Cartas a un escéptico*, rather than a systematic work, is a collection of friendly conversations on the most vital themes of the mid-nineteenth century: the cause of the multiplicity of positive religions, hell, the philosophy of the future, martyrs as an argument for the divinity of the Church, tolerance, French spiritualist philosophy and German idealism, the Gospel, the necessity of Baptism for salvation, the cult of the saints, religious orders...
*El Protestantismo*, by contrast, is a systematic book in which, in the face of the sterility of Protestantism, he proves the divinity of the Catholic Church precisely from its human values in the development of European civilization. Finally, to the usual accusations against the Catholic clergy, so widespread in nineteenth-century Europe, Balmes responded at length in his writings on celibacy, ecclesiastical property, the modern education of the clergy, and religious orders. As examples of popular apologetics, one must recall the widely circulated pamphlet *La religión demostrada al alcance de los niños* (Barcelona 1841) and *Conversa d'un pagès de la muntanya sobre lo papa* (Barcelona 1842), one of the few of his writings in his native Catalan, then in the process of revival.
As a philosopher, although he has some points of contact with the Catalan philosophical school of his time, represented above all by Martí d’Eixalà and closely aligned with the Scottish school of common sense, Balmes is rather connected to the eclectic scholasticism of the University of Cervera, which had been formed there before the expulsion of the Jesuits and transplanted to Italy especially by the two Madsen brothers, Baldassarre and Giuseppe Antonio, teachers of V. Buzzetti.
At the foundation of all Balmes’s philosophy is, without doubt, St Thomas Aquinas, even if he often accepts Suárez’s interpretation, as, for example, in the question of the distinction between essence and existence. A determined opponent of sensists and idealists, he shows a certain preference for Descartes and Leibniz and maintains a constant deference toward the scholastics, even when he departs from them, as in the ill-morphic theory and the doctrine of act and potency. His philosophical thought must be sought above all in the *Filosofia fundamental*, a work that is both critical and constructive, entirely founded on the broadly human spirit of *El criterio*, which, if it perhaps prevents him from being a bold thinker, makes him instead a solid and reliable guide.
The first fundamental problem of philosophy is that of certainty, which Balmes seeks to resolve by recourse to consciousness, evidence, and common sense, understood as an “intellectual instinct” and not as something sentimental or sensitive, as in Reid or Hamilton. Departing from scholastic terminology, Balmes maintained that “the principle of evidence is not evident.” This assertion provoked a certain stir, but unjustly, since if common sense is an intellectual instinct, it falls within the broad concept of evidence proper to scholasticism. In any case, the above thesis, together with some ideas of Cartesian tendency regarding the souls of animals, provoked a petition—though it came to nothing—for the condemnation of the *Filosofia fundamental*. In the problem of the origin of ideas, Balmes, while acknowledging a “mysterious” influence from sensations, abandons the Aristotelian-Thomist theory of the active intellect. In metaphysics he does not admit a single philosophical principle but three equally necessary ones, perceived as such by common sense: that of existence, that of evidence, and that of contradiction.
Alongside the constructive part, noteworthy in Balmes’s philosophical work is the critical discussion, always conducted with clear acuteness, particularly