BALMES, JAIME. - Philosopher, apologist, sociologist and politician, b. at Vich, in Catalonia, on 28 Aug. 1810, and d. there on 9 July 1848. Having completed his studies in letters (1817-22), in philosophy (1822-25) and a course in theology (1825-26) at the seminary of his native city, he moved to the University of Cervera, the only one then in all Catalonia. After another eight years of study, during which he devoted himself almost exclusively to deepening his understanding of the thought of St. Thomas, he obtained his degree in theology in 1835. Ordained a priest at Vich on 20 Sept. 1834, he taught mathematics there, dedicating himself at the same time to literature and poetry.
His life as a Catholic publicist can be divided into two periods. In the first, begun at Vich and Pinto and at Barcelona, where he ordinarily resided from 1841 to 1844, he wrote his best-known 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), 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 (1841-42), in collaboration with Roca y Cornet and Ferrer y Subirana, and La sociedad (1843-44), founded and written by him alone.
The second period, during which B. generally resided in Madrid, runs from 1844 to '48 and comprises writings of a predominantly philosophical and political character: El criterio (Barcelona 1845); Cartas a un escéptico (1846), apologetic and philosophical in character at once; Filosofía 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; Filosofía elemental, in 3 vols. (1847), of which he personally oversaw the Latin translation for teaching in the seminaries. In Madrid he founded the political periodical El pensamiento de la nación, which aimed at a pacification and union of Spain, through the marriage of the young Queen Isabella II to don Carlos de Borbón, leader of the Carlists, which would have contributed to the consolidation of the throne and made possible a political evolution without the dangers of revolution. B. was also interested in foreign policy and principally in the events of Rome, and wrote the pamphlet Pío IX (Madrid 1847) in defense of the reforms of the new Pope. The opposition he encountered in this field on the part of Catholics and the failure of the projected royal marriage decided him to leave Madrid. He returned to Barcelona and shortly afterwards died at the age of only 38.
As an apologist, B. belongs to a Catalan school, to which belong, together with him, the two aforementioned companions of La civilización, Joaquim Rubió y Ors, and the Majorcans Tomás Aguiló and J. M. Quadrado. All of them depend, as regards their ideas, on the French apologists, with many of whom, for example Ozanam, Lacordaire, Dupanloup, B. had personal relations during the three journeys he made to Paris.
Although B.'s apologetics is dispersed in two principal works, the Letters to a Skeptic and Protestantism, and in many separate pamphlets and articles, it nevertheless constitutes an organic body of doctrine. Three points he develops at greater length: religious skepticism, the human value of the Catholic Church, and that of the clergy. Three questions that were then of lively topicality. Even before the Letters, which are rather philosophical, B. had combated in individual articles the rationalistic atheism of the eighteenth century and the two fundamental principles of the religious liberalism of the nineteenth century. The Cartas a un escéptico, rather than a systematic work, are a collection of friendly conversations around the liveliest themes of the mid-nineteenth century: the cause of the multiplicity of positive religions, hell, the philosophy of the future, the martyrs as an argument for the divinity of the Church, tolerance, French philosophical spiritualism and German idealism, the Gospel, the necessity of Baptism for salvation, the cult of the saints, the religious Orders...
Protestantism, on the other hand, 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, B. responded at length in his writings on celibacy, on the goods of the Church, on the modern education of the clergy, and on the religious Orders. As examples of popular apologetics, moreover, one must recall the very widely circulated pamphlet La religión demostrada al alcance de los niños (Barcelona 1841) and the Conversa d'un pagès de la muntanya sobre la papa (Barcelona 1842), one of his few writings in his native Catalan language, then undergoing a revival.
As a philosopher, although he has certain points of contact with the Catalan philosophical school of his time, represented above all by Martí d'Eixalà and very close to the Scottish tendency of common sense, B. is connected rather to the eclectic Scholasticism of the University of Cervera, formed there before the expulsion of the Jesuits, and transplanted into Italy above all by the two brothers Baldassarre and Giuseppe Antonio Masdeu, teachers of V. B. Buzzetti.
At the basis of all of B.'s philosophy there is, without doubt, St. Thomas, even if the interpretation of Suárez is often accepted, as, for example, in the question of the distinction between essence and existence. A decided opponent of the sensists and the idealists, he shows a certain predilection for Descartes and for Leibniz, and preserves toward the Scholastics a constant deference, even when he departs from them, as in the theory of the humors, and in the doctrine of art and power. His philosophical thought must be sought above all in the Filosofía fundamental, a work at once critical and constructive, wholly founded on the broadly human spirit of El criterio, which, if perhaps it prevents him from being a bold thinker, nevertheless makes him a solid and sure guide.
The first fundamental problem of philosophy is that of certainty, which B. intends to resolve by recourse to consciousness, to evidence and to common sense, understood as an "intellectual instinct" and not as sentimental or sensory, as in Reid or in Hamilton. Departing from Scholastic terminology, B. maintained that "the principle of evidence is not evident." This affirmation aroused a certain stir, but wrongly, since if common sense is an intellectual instinct, it falls within the broad concept of evidence proper to Scholasticism. In any case, the aforementioned thesis, together with certain ideas of Cartesian tendency regarding the souls of brutes, provoked against B. a petition, which however had no sequel, for the condemnation of the Filosofía fundamental. In the problem of the origin of ideas, B., while recognizing a "mysterious" influence on the part of sensations, abandons the Aristotelian-Thomist theory of the agent 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.
Together with the constructive part, worthy of note in B.'s philosophical work is the critical discussion, conducted always with clear acuteness, particularly of the Kantian and idealistic doctrines. V. BARCELLONA, BIBLIOTECA BALMES.